The Subscription Trap: How AI Can Set Your Business Free

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ℹ ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Tired of paying for countless software subscriptions that don't talk to each other? Wade and Stephen explore how AI can finally solve the "Frankenstein Stack" problem plaguing construction businesses. 

Discover why your CRM, accounting, and bidding software aren't working together, and learn how contractors can start building their own AI-powered tools to control their data, cut subscription costs, and boost productivity. 

This episode reveals the subscription trap holding your business back and shows the path to AI freedom.

⌚️ Key moments in this episode:

• 00:00 Why AI Hasn’t Clicked
• 00:21 Meet the Hosts
• 01:00 AI Tools in 2026
• 01:35 Security and Privacy Basics
• 02:37 Subscription Creep Reality
• 04:29 Frankenstein Stack Problem
• 06:00 AI Can Replace Tools
• 07:43 Integration Pain Points
• 10:36 Control Your Data
• 12:55 Build Your Own Stack
• 14:34 Customer Experience Example
• 16:43 Next Episode Preview

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Head to profitfirstconstruction.com/blueprint to download your free copy. 

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Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Wade Carpenter: For the last three years, we've all been told the same thing: AI is going to change your business. And it has, kinda, but you got one automation that worked great maybe two, and then everything else still depends on you.

So the question is, why hasn't it actually connected yet?

Today we are gonna talk about ways AI can finally start really moving your business forward.

This is the Contractor Success Forum. I'm Wade Carpenter with Carpenter & Company CPAs alongside Stephen Brown with McDaniel Whitley Bonding and Insurance. And Stephen, AI has changed the game in many ways. It hasn't really taken that leap they promised in business for the last three years, but it's starting to, what do you think?

Stephen Brown: Yeah it just seems to be moving so fast that normal folks that aren't techie are just having a hard time grasping what it can do. They know they should be using it, but they don't know how they should be using it.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah.

Stephen Brown: I think it was Rob that got me into Open AI subscription two years ago. And when I need it, I really need it. It's [00:01:00] fantastic.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. There's been a lot of developments in 2026. Early 2026 kicked off with things like Open Claw that really started a lot of whole movement of trying to do AI agents and some of the latest models are really amazing.

The things they had always predicted was like, okay, there's not gonna be software in three years. I was like, okay, well I don't know about that. But it really is true, and I'll talk about some of the stuff we've been doing, allowing us to actually be a lot more efficient.

You know, there's still some leaps that have to happen, but it's really moving my business forward and I thought our contractors might wanna hear some of that.

Stephen Brown: I think it's great. Lemme ask you a question, Wade, before we start. If you subscribe to an AI service, isn't it better to subscribe than use an Open AI for business applications? That's the prevailing, you know, paranoia I hear.

Wade Carpenter: Well, if you're talking about infrastructure and putting personal information in, yes. I mean you have to watch which plans you're on and those kind of things. The security has gotten a lot [00:02:00] better. And when you said Open AI, I assume you're meaning like API.

Some of the plans still are not, the security's not there where like I would use it in my business. But if you're responsible about it and you know things like using it through an API, it is actually a lot more secure than you would think.

But you do have to, especially in my industry, probably your industry too, we have personally identifiable information that we've got a safeguard.

That's not the angle I was going at today. I was wanting to talk more about the infrastructure of business, some of the stuff that I think we're gonna be seeing in a few years, what do you think?

Stephen Brown: Okay.

Wade Carpenter: So anyway, in my business I know we've had some people try to get started, are trying to figure out you know, my overhead's too high once we actually do the Profit First analysis and they figure out how much that overhead's actually costing them.

And one of exercises I always do with that is get out your credit card statement or your bank statement, if you've got a bunch of ACHs, all these [00:03:00] subscriptions that are going through your bank account or your credit card, you know, 20 bucks here, 30 bucks there.

We think about all these things: your accounting software, your CRM that you're paying for every month, maybe you got a scheduling program like Calendly or something like that. You got Zoom subscriptions. You got something that does proposals, email marketing, i'm just throwing stuff out here.

The thing is we spend a ton of money on the software, and if it makes us more productive, that's great. But where I'm going with this is when we can put all these things together. And I'm gonna get there, but you don't realize how much money we're actually spending on this infrastructure, number one.

But number two, will we actually get to the point where we don't need some of this stuff because we can, I guess AI is promoting like, okay, this is gonna do everything for you. But it's still cobbling together your own skills and all those kind of things through Claude.

So I want to do a reality check on some of this stuff and just maybe make [00:04:00] our listeners think about what's possible. Any thoughts on that?

Stephen Brown: Yeah. No it's so true. This stuff just creeps up on you. You find something exciting, someone tells you, this really changed my life. This is fantastic. You need to do this. Not to mention all the operating software that you have for your computers and for your phone. And then talk about television subscriptions. Talk about all the monthly fees you have, it almost gets too much.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. Let me give you some practical examples. I call it like Frankenstein Stack. Well, I can probably use a very recent contractor example, but they have a CRM program that doesn't talk to the accounting software, that doesn't talk to their bidding software that--

Stephen Brown: CRM program. Explain that.

Wade Carpenter: Well, Customer Relationship Management. One of them dealing with the customers and maybe they got Builder Trend or Procore and QuickBooks and, you know, they've got three of these tools [00:05:00] together and they're doing all these other things in Excel. They've got other disjointed programs like Smartsheet and some of those things. And they're not talking to each other.

Their bidding is this massive Excel spreadsheet and then it never gets into the system. There's so many things that are disjointed, that's what I call the Frankenstein Stack Problem.

We got all these different tools that never talk to each other. That's been the promise all these years: we want everything to do this and we want automations to do it for us, right?

We have the Zapier thing and then came along to Make and n8n and those kind of things. That's where I see a lot of this stuff is Is sort of like, okay, linear. And yes, to be sure, I've done the same thing. There are automations that save me a ton of time, but they don't all talk to each other.

Some of the things we've been doing, I think is the future of, okay, can we build our own tools that can all work even better together?

So, first I really wanted to talk about this subscription creep. It [00:06:00] seems like we have all these different tools like Loom for recording short videos for my team, and then DocuSign and then Zoom. There probably does need to be some kind of infrastructure applications, but a lot of these infrastructure applications, we can actually reproduce now with AI.

I was showing some people some of the stuff we had built, and they're like, okay I haven't figured any of this stuff out with AI. I'm still struggling with Chat GPT. And believe it or not, AI has gotten the point where they can walk you through how to fix this stuff. " This is what I want to do", and we don't necessarily need all this backend infrastructure.

And the average person is not gonna jump straight into this, but it really has gotten to the point in 2026 where a lot of this stuff can be, you just tell it what you want to do and it'll figure out how to do it. Things like Claude and Open AI's Codex, I mean, these have really moved the ball forward lately.

But, this subscription creep, again I'm trying to sort of [00:07:00] ease into this, but I've heard this from different contractors and business owners. Same thing with me and you, it's like we've got this frustration with AI. We can rewrite our emails or something like that. But it's really a frustration, like, okay, It works but it's like one step at a time. They had those custom GPTs and I'm just thinking through all the last three years or so of the development of AI. It's just one step in the process.

But then we have to go into this one program and pay for another program, and then we take that and plug it into other things.

Yes, it's productivity gains, but I would say the productivity is really inconsistent. Basically you still need a human to glue it all together. Does that make sense?

Stephen Brown: Yeah, it does.

I understand about the subscriptions. I understand about all the software that you have to have, to communicate, to operate, and also how to communicate with your clients the most effective way. And what software is that?

Then how do you get all the software to talk to [00:08:00] each other, especially accounting and estimating software?

It seems to me like absolutely the most frustrating thing my customers have is trying to integrate the accounting and estimating software part of things.

 But you've had these dashboard tools that you've created, and that has to draw information from different parts of a company's information base in order to give you what you want to know, help you make decisions.

I don't know how you keep up with all that. To me, it just seems easier to let AI tell you everything because you can ask it everything.

And if it answers a question in a way you don't understand, then you can ask it to be more specific. You can ask it to clarify, you can ask it to give you one thing to get started that would help you move in the right direction. And then when that becomes difficult or you're struggling with how to do it, you can say I'm struggling. Any practical [00:09:00] suggestions?

It's just absolutely amazing to me. I just have a hard time keeping up with all the AI providers, Wade. There's Open AI, there's Grok, there's the AI that's now with your Google search engines and your Microsoft search engines. When you ask a question it's AI answering that. So you're able to search and ask questions a lot faster and get answers a lot faster.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, and I guess to push back on that, yes, it definitely makes you a lot more productive. But the fact that you got a Chat GPT or a Claude or whatever that's sitting over here in your browser, on your desktop. But then you got this other system and then we got data from QuickBooks and then here's our Excel spreadsheet that we created and here's our payroll software that isn't job costing. Those kind of things.

Getting them to not only talk to each other, and I'm gonna give some practical examples. There's gonna be a second part of this episode because I think there's too much to kick around in this one.

The thought behind this one is, [00:10:00] being able to control the workflow and data because AI agents, that's what they've been promising. And yes, they can do tasks. Open Claw and those kind of things can do these things. And then Claude is building these skills, but chaining them all together has been the problem.

So what I wanna talk about in the next episode is more like, can we control the workflow if we have the data in one place, and then really work on putting all these automations together so that it's not so much.

Right now we're not to the point where humans can completely step out of it. And I don't think you want them to.

The point of this episode, we're spending a lot of money on software. A lot of times we don't even realize that. If it makes us more productive, it is probably worth it.

This is a sore spot for one of my contractors because their vendor was actually going away , and had another one where their software crashed, and they've been using the same software for 20 years. And they couldn't recover the data, and they were lost.

It was a [00:11:00] mindset shift for me. If you don't control your data, if that AI provider goes away tomorrow, and you don't have control of your data, that's where you could be hurt really quickly.

I mean, I don't want to play doom and gloom. OpenAI has been running at a loss for years. I think they're coming back a little bit against Claude. They've been running at a loss and at some point they've gotta figure out how to monetize some of this stuff.

Just hypothetical, what if Open AI stopped working tomorrow? What happens? I'm not saying that's gonna happen, but whatever your vendor is, I mean, what if they went bankrupt and you are relying on that data?

Where I'm going with this is, number one, instead of renting the software that you don't own, can you have your own software?

That's where I've started building from this thought. Just a little preview for the next episode, I've canceled about $25,000 worth of subscriptions. That's, that's big, and I'm adding on to it, and making the team a lot more productive by building [00:12:00] onto this stuff.

I guess the idea is how can we shift our mindset? And I know I might be a little ahead of the curve on some of this stuff.

Stephen Brown: No I can't wait to hear more about what you've done there because that's where everybody wants to be, right? They want to control their data. They want to control their estimating. They want to control their personnel. They want to control how they communicate with clients, and they don't want it to be dependent on someone else.

I can't tell you how many contractors I know that have spent $30,000 on a miracle software that's gonna do all these things for you and be so productive it'll pay for itself a hundred times over, but it never got started because it was just too hard. It was too difficult to use.

When I think about all the data that you and I have control over in our businesses, we've gotta be the leaders in helping people do this. I love the fact that you're doing this, Wade.

Wade Carpenter: Well, number one, there's people all over YouTube saying, okay, we're gonna have a one [00:13:00] person AI business. And you know, it's like, we don't need employees. I think we're a long way-- but construction is even longer way off from that. Obviously you still gotta have some manual-- and I don't know that it will ever get there.

But the idea is, does your infrastructure have to be reliant on somebody else, as well as can we get some productivity? And this is where I wanna focus somewhat on not just saving money on subscriptions, but the productivity gains.

And I'll just tell you right now that some of the stuff we're seeing by building this stuff out, by specializing in construction, we built tools that nobody else has. That's why I always throw that out there, we can be your construction back office 30 to 50% cheaper than hiring somebody in-house.

That doesn't happen with any little bookkeeper that does construction, but they also do retail shops and restaurants and those kind of things.

So, I do think it really provides a strategic [00:14:00] advantage if you can number one, control your data. Things like all these CRM softwares, the Customer Relationship Management software.

You want it to do something that isn't baked in. The source spot with that one particular contractor is, it was supposed to do all this stuff but the technology is so closed.

Believe it or not, it was a major software that's running on a database that was spun up in 1985, which is not so bad, but the fact is it's closed in and nobody can get to the data, and if they ever left they're screwed.

Stephen Brown: Yeah. I get it. Well, let me ask you this. Going back to CRM, Customer Relationship Management issues. There's nothing that makes you lose a customer faster than when you just piss them off, make them mad, don't respond, are not consistent.

My HVAC folks are humongous, and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing as far as scheduling, auto calls, setting [00:15:00] up appointments. I mean, it just drives you crazy. And it won't stop. You can complain about it, but it's almost like they're too big to stop it.

And then you take like, engaging electrical contractor to come to your house to do some work. They have different people. They have someone that comes out to give you an estimate and look things over. Then they send their crew out to do the work, and then you pay. Then that crew leaves and then you're asked to rate the crew based on your overall experience with that particular company.

Well, recently I did that with electrical contractor because everything from how I contacted them to how they responded to how fast they met my needs, my perception of their ability to be good electricians, and also closing everything out, paying them. There were still some things they needed to do to be great that they missed out on, but is that kinda what you're talking about too?

Wade Carpenter: Well, that's precisely where I'm going [00:16:00] in the second episode, because my workflow is not the same as a contractor. In a contractor's world, yes we've gotta take care of our customers. But it's also how can we make sure our projects are managed faster and better? And how do we get our estimates out the door faster, cheaper, those kind of things?

All the systems working together and sharing data is one of the biggest mindset shifts I think people are gonna start seeing in the next few years. My point is that's where I've sort of tried to get ahead of this curve, but those that realize that in business, and the fact that AI can actually start helping you build this infrastructure and put them all together, that's the game changer, in my mind. 

Stephen Brown: Okay.

Wade Carpenter: So if you're still with us, we appreciate it. Next episode we are gonna talk about what this actually looks like when we put all this in practice, and hopefully get you some ideas of things that maybe are really gonna be able to move your business forward because I think it really is [00:17:00] there.

We appreciate you being with us. We hope you found this episode helpful and if so if you would like, share or subscribe and share it with another contractor, and we will see you on the next show.