Artificial intelligence is transforming how boutique firms operate, and Darren Horwitz, founder of Tenten Group, is leading the way. By leveraging AI to process years of business data, Darren has identified high-value opportunities and optimized his firm’s service offerings. He’s also using AI to analyze patterns in client interactions, refine messaging, and develop a targeted content strategy that resonates with ideal clients. Additionally, Darren is integrating AI into client workflows, streamlining brand management tasks to enhance efficiency and free up time for strategic initiatives. Join this session to discover how AI can help you unlock growth by improving decision-making, refining client deliverables, and scaling operations with greater precision.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Proserv podcast brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to us, we are a community dedicated to founders of boutique professional services firms that are trying to grow, scale, and maybe someday exit their firms. On this show, we try to talk about things that are relevant to the challenges of scaling a boutique professional services firm, which are nuanced in and of themselves. Today, we’re going to talk about artificial intelligence, but with a twist—not necessarily AI, what is it, how do I use it, but specifically, how do I use it to pick up the pace of the development of my firm, to accelerate things that I’m already doing, and do them faster. We have a wonderful member of Collective 54, Darren Horwitz. Darren, it’s nice to see you. Thanks for being here, and please introduce yourself to the audience.
Darren Horwitz: Oh, thank you, Greg. Thanks for having me. Sure, I am the founder of a company called 1010 Group. We’re a brand implementation firm, and we give global marketing leaders confidence when they’re going through a complex rebrand with our ready-to-use tools and plans. Through our proven methodology, we’re bridging the gap between a brand being defined and putting it out in the world everywhere it goes, saving clients time and money along the way.
Greg Alexander: Okay, perfect, very good. The genesis of having you come on the show was the amazing amount of progress you’ve made in a very short amount of time. You attended our annual conference, which was in the fall of 2024, just 60 days ago in beautiful Fort Worth, Texas. Since then, it’s actually kind of mind-blowing what you’ve done. From what I understand, the pace at which you’ve gotten all this work done was impacted greatly by AI. That is what I know up to this point, and that’s what I would like to hear about. I hear you’ve got four things that you’ve used AI to assist you with, so why don’t I turn it over to you and have you explain all that to us?
Darren Horwitz: Sure. Thank you. I really feel like I’ve been in business for 10 years, and I finally found the corner on a round ball. I’ve been able to grab onto something and go quickly. I’ll make it brief, but a couple of years ago, a friend of mine in Hollywood was saying with AI, I was a little afraid of it, afraid of it replacing me and what I do. But he said, “Listen, there are two types of businesses: those that learn how to leverage AI in what they do, and those that will die on the vine.” It just made me pause. When we were in Fort Worth, seeing how it was being used was so eye-opening. The moment I got out of the presentation and went back to the hotel, I started messing around with it. In the last 30 to 60 days, where I’m really focusing is around: one, processing data and being able to look at things in a broader way and go through it a lot quicker than I ever could; two, finding patterns in what I do; three, focusing our messaging—based on who we are, who we’re trying to reach, our ICP (ideal client profile), making sure that what we’re trying to say is really going to stand out, be unique, and resonate; and four, ultimately, on behalf of our clients, looking to integrate AI into what they do to make life easier for them, knowing that’s where they need to go. Within there, there are all different ways of doing it, a few different examples, but that’s the gist of it. I just feel like I’ve gone from being in the weeds, having ideas, not being able to really think through all the different nuances, execute, and find patterns in the way I want to. My life has been transformed to where I can now focus on how to grow the business at a quicker pace and make sure that things are getting done.
Greg Alexander: A fantastic overview and acceleration pace—getting things done faster. We’re small business owners in our community, which means we’re resource-constrained, right? There’s only so many dollars in the bank account, only so many heads on the org chart, and only so many hours in the day. How do I get everything I want to get done when I have limited resources? I think AI can really help there. It’s like having an army of MBAs at your fingertips to get stuff done. To bring these four things to life, why don’t we go over them one at a time again, and maybe share one example for each to bring it to life? Start with number one.
Darren Horwitz: Sure. The processing data was the first thing I started with. Basically, I took 10 years of information and started running it through AI, starting to think about what’s happening here so that I could really see the trends and make informed decisions. The first thing was year-over-year revenue. It was really eye-opening to understand what type of work was generating revenue and what type of work really wasn’t. It allowed me to think about where we focus our offerings, should we get rid of some offerings, and who we focus on as clients within their industries—which industries were really good for us.
Darren Horwitz: And which industries really weren’t. They were good. I mean, I like working with people in all industries, but some of them just don’t go anywhere. I knew it anecdotally, but to see the numbers in there and be able to point to it and say, “Yeah, we should rethink how we approach this segment because it’s just not worth it. It’s a lot of effort to get not a lot of work.”
Greg Alexander: So that’s a great example. I mean, one of the things we struggle with as boutique pro-serve firms is where to play. Strategy comes down to this: where to play and how to win. Because of our limited resources, if we spread ourselves too thin, we really don’t get anywhere, and we can’t live the motto, “The riches are in the niches.” So that data analysis that you just did, in my mind, is you segmented your markets and tried to figure out where to play. That’s just a wonderful example. Okay, let’s go to number 2.
Darren Horwitz: Sure. So finding patterns, this one was really cool. I’ve been doing podcasts over the last year, about 12, and the topics are pretty consistent. Maybe I use different examples, but I fed the transcripts of all 12 podcasts into AI and asked it, “What are the common trends that you’re seeing? What are the unique trends that you’re seeing? And why would this be relevant to our ICP?” From there, I was able to create a content calendar where I could take that information and focus my blog posts, my articles, and really think about how to organize the information. I also pulled examples from things I’d already been saying. So it’s already out there; I just needed to organize it for a different medium.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, just incredible, right? So pattern analysis turned into a content calendar, which turned into consistent messaging, probably with higher conversion rates. In the past, before AI, you’d have to hire somebody to come up with a content calendar. It was a manual process, might not have been right, and it would have taken forever.
Darren Horwitz: Listen, I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. I never would have gotten there. I would have had individual things. It would have been repetitive. It would have been, “Am I saying the same thing?” This really allowed me to almost speak into a microphone and then decide, “Okay, what pieces do we want to use?” It was cool. It was really cool. The next thing along those lines was to really focus on messaging.
Greg Alexander: So this is number 3.
Darren Horwitz: Oh, yeah, sorry. Number 3. Once I had my content calendar set and I could see, “Okay, these are the themes I speak about,” I started to think about a competitive analysis of the landscape that’s out there. I started to work with AI to audit competitors, find competitors not just that I knew about, but also how it thought there might be other competition out there. From there, I really started to think about where I could tailor our messaging to focus on what makes us special and resonates with our clients. How do we stand out against the competition? Once I started to see that, I could go back to our capabilities decks and really focus and hone what we’re saying, make it much more succinct, make it resonate more, and make it stand out more. Again, all this goes back to, “Here’s who we’re trying to reach. Here’s what we’re trying to say. We want to be different. I don’t want to sound like everybody else.” I just want to make sure that what I’m doing is actually what I’m trying to do. It was really wild to pull that together and then strengthen our presentations. I also cut down about 10 slides in the process and really just got to the point.
Greg Alexander: I just want to add something to this because I just remarkably did something very similar, Darren. So you and I are thinking along the same lines. I just had AI do a SWOT analysis for me. SWOT analysis, for those that aren’t familiar, stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s one of the methods to do competitive analysis. I literally got the answers back in 10 minutes. Then I prompted this and prompted that, but by 30 minutes, I had a fully fleshed-out SWOT! In my previous life, when I was in your shoes, I had a company called SBI. This was back from 2006 to 2017. We would do that every year, and it was a 90-day project that consumed internal resources, non-billable resources to do it. It was highly frustrating. That’s been compressed to 30 minutes. It’s astounding, isn’t it?
Darren Horwitz: It is. We did something very similar. We asked AI to say, “Here is our ICP. I want to make sure. Tell me where this is matching up and where it’s not.” It’s a similar concept, and it’s great. I feel a lot more confident now, just being able to speak to people, get meetings with people, talk to them, and offer them things in a much more specific way and not waste their time. It’s pretty wild.
Greg Alexander: All right, let’s go to number 4.
Darren Horwitz: Yeah, number 4 is really with client integration. Thinking back to what we do, which is helping people go through rebrands but also protect their investment on the back-end side of managing their brand. There are a lot of inefficiencies out there. We’re really thinking through how we help our clients leverage AI to enhance their brand management bandwidth. The simplest way would be just brand reviews. If you’re a complex organization with a lot of people putting materials out there, you use your brand guidelines and your assets, but everybody’s going to interpret that slightly differently. Then you have to review it. If you think about leveraging AI, you can start to think about how AI can do a first-round analysis of how things are being used. Are you using basic-level stuff? Are you using the right color, the right logo, the right language, and things like that? It obviously can get much more sophisticated, which is what we’re looking at. But it’s really taking our clients through this concept of
Darren Horwitz: How much are you doing today and spending on managing your brand from the tactical side versus the strategic thinking that you should be doing? And we’re getting a lot of positive feedback on that, to figure out ways to enhance their abilities again, not replace them, but make their lives easier and give them more bandwidth to focus on the higher value items.
Greg Alexander: So the way that I interpret that, now it’s completely acceptable for you to disagree with me on this, but this is where I think the biggest opportunity sits for Collective 54 members. What you just did is you had the machine do work for a client where previously you would have had a person do that work. When you have a person do that work, that costs a lot of money. You have to pay that person. These people are experts, branding experts. I mean, they’re not cheap. So therefore, you have to charge the client a lot of money, and the client might say, “I’d love to hire you, Darren, but I just don’t have that kind of budget.” All of a sudden, if you were doing that work with a machine, you could do it more cost-effectively, which, if you chose, you could lower the price to the client. And now that project that didn’t happen, happens because it’s at a more acceptable price point. I think the machine producing deliverables for boutique professional services firms is going to expand the market opportunity for boutiques unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. What do you think?
Darren Horwitz: Yeah, I agree with that. I would even go back to your point of just simply reviewing branded materials. You said it takes a person to do it, or nobody’s doing it, which is even scarier, right? Because things are going. And if you think about consumer-facing brands that have legal content and pricing content, if no one’s reviewing, you could have a real problem out there. Here’s the bottom line with how I’m looking at this, because I think, again, going back to where I was a few years ago, which was afraid that I’m going to be out of a job in a couple of years, to now, this is still me. So I’m using this like a calculator or a computer to really accelerate my ability to do things with confidence. You have to know what you’re looking at. I know what I’m trying to do. I know the inputs I’m giving it. I know what to look for in the outputs. And I think, most importantly, you kind of have to know when to call BS on it because it will tend to make things up. But if you really think about what you’re trying to do, and again, I think to your point, every task takes time, and there’s only so much time that we have. As the markets and the needs of our clients get more sophisticated and more complicated, we need more time to focus on those complicated things. How do we delegate the tasks that are really just that—they’re just tasks? I don’t think it’s at the expense of an individual. I think it actually enhances an individual’s ability to deliver more value to their job, their client, the consumer, whatever. Even personal stuff—I use them all the time for personal things, saving me time. The analysis, the data crunching, and all of that. Just as I said in the beginning, I’ve taken 10 years of launching and building a business, and the last quarter is the first time I really felt free and invigorated to focus less on doing the job, the day-to-day deliverables, which I still do. But now I have more time to also think about where I bring this business, how we help people, how we grow it, and ultimately, to your point, how we exit way down the road.
Greg Alexander: All right. Well, listen, we’re out of time here, but this was a great session. I can’t thank you enough for coming on the call and talking about practically how you’re using this thing called AI, which has got so many definitions, to accelerate the pace upon which you’re developing your firm. That’s the key thing I want everybody to take away from this session. So, Darren, thanks a bunch for being here today.
Darren Horwitz: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Greg Alexander: All right. So for everybody that’s listening, a couple of calls to action. If you’re a member and you want to ask Darren questions—I got like 25 of them rattling around in my head right now—attend the private member Q&A session, which is coming up on an upcoming Friday. Look for that meeting invitation. If you’re not a member and you want to become one, go to collective54.com, fill out an application, and someone will get in contact with you. Until then, I wish all of you the best of luck until the next episode as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.