Speed is the winning competitive axis against large industrial incumbents, and AI-powered on-the-fly quote generation delivers it
Nick's company competes against Caterpillar and Cummins purely on speed — their AI system ingests all company documents so technicians can deliver quotes while on-site rather than waiting weeks. ✦ AI generated
Nick · My First Million · 2026-08-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:05
“What axis do you need to compete on? Is it price? What how do you win the pitch?”
100% speed. They are slow. They're good at what they do, but they're very slow. ... I need to be able to deliver a quote while my guy's there. These are complex machines with a very difficult part supply chain. It can take weeks to turn around a quote from a hey your generator's broken to hey here's what it's going to cost me to fix it and when we can do it. ... we've done all the backend work of every document that we have ever produced as a company has been ingested and studied by AI. We've built it retrieval augmented system so that we can do research on the fly and produce answers on the fly.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:05
5:48the question will be it's really revenue throughput. Do we have the technicians to pull off the work? I've got the work contracted. It's pure it's purely an execution game at this point. >> And so describe you said you go up against Caterpillar and these other larger players. What what axis do you need to compete on? Is it price? Is it what what how do you win the pitch?
6:05>> 100% speed. They are slow. They're good at what they do, but they're very slow. >> What's the speed difference? uh how long how long >> for us in and AI has been an absolutely like central part of our strategy of speeding up every single process in that business. I need to be able to deliver a quote while my guy's there. These are complex machines with a very difficult
6:24part supply chain. It can take weeks to turn around a quote from a hey your generator's broken to hey here's what it's going to cost me to fix it and when we can do it. It's very very slow business and it's very very difficult because of all the research and tribal knowledge and it's you know spread across >> use to speed up that quote. If let's say
6:41the guy standing there >> y >> understanding what's the issue >> y >> is he inputting something on his phone and he's getting what >> and we've done all the backend work of every document that we have ever produced as a company has been ingested and studied by AI. We've built it reg uh retrieval augmented system so that we can do research on the fly and produce
7:02answers on the fly. >> This is great. So there's companies I've got a friend that owns a HVAC company and it does close to 200 million in revenue. And he was complaining and lamenting over all my business sucks for this reason. His you know yours suck for that reason. And he was and he was telling me like he was like well we just have to get better at buying Google
7:19Adwords. And he was like the demand's there. Like I just have to like operate. And I was like so envious of that because that's not what I have. I've got to like teach people what it is and whatever. Are you in the weeds of training people or is your personal job just finding who else you're going to buy? >> Um so we've kind of put a pause on M&A
- ·Competes against Caterpillar and Cummins purely on speed
- ·Industrial incumbents are good but very slow
- ·Traditional quote turnaround takes weeks from diagnosis to cost estimate
- ·AI ingests every document company has ever produced
- ·Retrieval-augmented system enables real-time research
- ·Technicians deliver quotes while still on-site