984 Aimee Rickabus:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP984 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Aimee Rickabus

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Aimee Rickabus:

And to be able to bring those skills with me into these newer businesses has been an absolute gift. My first book is all about how this invisible work of motherhood is so important and this is technical hard work. This is project management; this is organizational management. This is inventory management. The things we’re doing in our homes are all the same types of things that we have to do in our companies. But at home there’s a lot more at risk. There are people’s lives at risk and in, in the company, you know, not as many lives at risk. We really need to put more value on the work that women are doing at home. And we really need to call it leadership. Because you look at the mama duck with all of her ducklings following behind her. She’s a leader. And nature shows us that, you know, mothers, all mothers are leaders.

Melinda Wittstock:

If you’re both a mom and an entrepreneur, you know the truth. Being a mom makes you a better entrepreneur; being an entrepreneur makes you gradually fade music here a better mom. It’s a simple unseen truth that you only come to truly internalize once you’ve lived it. Aimee Rickabus has six kids, two businesses, a podcast and a second book coming out, and she says motherhood has been a “masterclass” in leadership. She says the level of management that goes into a household is the level of management that goes into a small company. Today we talk human potential, and why the age of AI can also be the dawn of what she calls Feminism 2.0.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who believes what she calls the “fourth industrial revolution”, the AI age, is going to be Feminism 2.0. Aimee Rickabus is a serial entrepreneur, mother of 6, homeschooler, podcaster, and co-founder of two successful tech companies – and she says women are about to discover what it means to step into their full power. Today we talk about why women’s voices are needed more than ever in the way AI is shaped and applied, and how AI can assist us in reaching our true human potential. Specifically, freeing up more time for authentic human creativity, relationships and true belonging. Aimee thinks women can reshape business, if we remember that we’re stronger together and we dare to redefine success beyond how the patriarchy has long defined it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Aimee is on a mission to redefine women’s leadership and how we build companies. Author of The Manage Her and host of the Manage Her podcast, Aimee says the invisible labor women perform every day translates into systems thinking, problem solving, and leadership skills that transform business and community. Aimee is also CEO of Tomahawk Information Solutions, a woman- and minority-owned technology company and value-added reseller of hardware, software and services for Fortune 500s. She also co-founded Mohawk Network Solutions with her husband. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Listen on to get practical advice on how to balance business growth with family life, the art of setting boundaries and building supportive relationships, plus how to leverage AI not just as a tech tool, but as a means of unlocking greater human potential.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Aimee Rickabus.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Aimee, welcome to Wings.

Aimee Rickabus:

So glad to be here, Melinda. Thanks for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I always like talking to other podcasters and also tech entrepreneurs. We have both of those things in common. And you’re working on a second book, so let’s just talk about that. That’s going to be launching later in the year. What’s that about?

Aimee Rickabus:

So, I’m raising all these children, and I homeschool. So, I wanted to kind of create a curriculum around human potential. So, I asked AI, ‘tell me everything you know about human potential’.

Aimee Rickabus:

And what I realized was, AI knows nothing about human potential.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s not human.

Aimee Rickabus:

No.

Melinda Wittstock:

And it’s learning from us currently.

Aimee Rickabus:

Yes. And AI was coming from this patriarchal kind of… Everything it swept on the Internet must have been around, you know, human potential as it pertains to how much money you have in the bank. And I’m thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I’m talking about the ability to. To be on your deathbed and be like, I lived my life well.

Aimee Rickabus:

I did it right. I have love. I have the love of my children. I have my love of my spouse. I feel accomplished. I feel like I’ve changed the world for the better. To me, that is what human potential is about. So, this book is an exploitation exploration into how we can all tap into our human potential

Aimee Rickabus:

It really starts with the wounds that we all carry as people, you know?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes. A good way to unearth those is to become an entrepreneur, because it confronts you.

Aimee Rickabus:

Definitely. Yeah. There’s no hiding from your pitfalls. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to face them because you are your biggest obstacle in life. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to come up against it. I feel like owning a company or having children, it’s going to expose your shadow.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Aimee Rickabus:

And then when you have both, like…

Melinda Wittstock:

You told me before we started recording that you have six kids. That’s a lot of kids. What are their age range?

Aimee Rickabus:

So, my baby is 3, and my oldest is 27.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow. That is a range.

Aimee Rickabus:

Yeah. 

Melinda Wittstock:

And you homeschooled all of them or…

Aimee Rickabus:

I homeschooled. I started homeschooling in 2020, so I am homeschooling currently. 4. I have a kindergarten that is 5, and then my oldest homeschooler is a sophomore.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. So, so you’re exhibiting a lot of human potential, Amy, I have to say, because you have all these kids, you have like two technology businesses, you’ve got a book out, you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got another book coming. So, like, I think what’s on everyone’s mind right now listening to this is how do you balance all of this?

Aimee Rickabus:

You know, I am very good at doing what I’m doing while I’m doing it. I think being compartmental, being really intentional about what you’re doing while you’re doing it… You can do a lot more if you’re not distracted. So, when I’m podcasting, I’m podcasting, I come to my office, I put my phone on, do not disturb, and this is what I’m doing. And you have 100% of my focus. And I’m the same way when I’m with my kids, I’m not around my phone; I’m going to focus 100% on them. I think that, you know, in the world we live in today, attention is the biggest commodity, and our phones are a constant pull away from what we’re actually doing.

Aimee Rickabus:

So, you know, having some real boundaries with what we’re doing and not allowing ourselves to be distracted while we’re doing it. Your brain, you can get a lot more done if you’re focused.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that, and non-negotiable boundaries thing is a big issue for women because I think we’ve been socialized to ‘people please’. Because we think in a more matrixy way than men who tend to be a little more linear. Just because we can handle a lot of things all at once doesn’t mean that we should be. So, tell me a little bit about that in terms of that kind of like focus. How did you discover or create or learn to create those boundaries in your own life? Because I think this is so vital for women to master.

Aimee Rickabus:

You know, I have always been the kind. My mother is, was an entrepreneur. She was the entrepreneur of the year in 1988. So, I learned a lot of my skills from her. Although she kind of has a little bit of add, so I’ve been able to also see what, how she was failing in things. And focus was one of those things where, you know, she had her spiral bound notebook and she would write down her to do list, which I think was something that served me very well in my life. I started doing that right out of, I mean, through college. I have all of my spiral bound notebooks going all the way back to the 90s.

Aimee Rickabus:

But the amount of things that you can actually get done when you hold yourself accountable to the things that you need to do that day. That’s a really important skill. But then I think I watched her also have a hard time accomplishing tasks because of her energy was a little less grounded. I think being grounded and being really honest with yourself about what you want to do in that moment, making sure that you are giving yourself your full presence, your full attention, and your full intention in that moment. I get into this in my second book, a about human potential. 

Aimee Rickabus:

I actually created a recipe for human potential in that book. Since it’s a woman’s book about potential. It was going to be an equation, and it just felt too masculine and turned into a recipe. But that’s one of the things is making sure that we, our attention, our presence, that we’re giving those things. And then the first book, I really talk about boundaries. How when you have no boundaries at work, it creates, you know, bad situations with employees and coworkers. And the same thing at home. If you don’t have boundaries with your partner or your kids, you’re going to get bad outcome.

Aimee Rickabus:

And I feel like in our lives we only have a certain amount of time, so we want to optimize the outcome. And having boundaries, setting boundaries is one of the most important and easiest ways that we can improve outcomes in our lives in our companies and in our homes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s so true. Well, especially, okay, so you’ve got the kids, you got the businesses, but then your businesses you co-founded with your husband. So, talk a little bit about that too, because, you know, when are you being kind of the wife and the partner and when are you being the co-founder? Right. And how you work the boundaries around that, because it’s easier said than done because as an entrepreneur, I don’t know, you have this constant macro in your head, like people are always thinking about their business, you know, right? And so how do you balance that?

Aimee Rickabus:

I have to tell you, it’s not always easy. You know, having your husband as a business partner is a blessing and a curse. But he is, he is the ying to my yang in a lot of ways. Like, I have been a serial entrepreneur since I was 22 years old. We got married when I was 32 years old. I had a good decade of being a solo entrepreneur. I did real estate. I had a film and television production company. I. Right at the beginning of our marriage, I was doing a nutritional. I got funded for a nutritional product that I had called Mamalicious by Bliss Nutritional Sciences. And then right around the same time, about a year later, I looked at him, he was working for another company, and he had built out this big operation for them and wasn’t being adequately compensated. And I looked at him and I said, we, we should start our own company doing this. And I had an extra car at the time, so I said, I’ll sell my BMW. Let’s do this.

Aimee Rickabus:

And we just decided we were going to do it. We were already working on Bliss Nutritional Sciences, so I already had the guy to help us do the logo. And, you know, we were in, you know, builder mode, that quick start mode of. All right, let’s form the companies, let’s get the logos going, get some business cards, we’ll hire some employees, let’s build out the SOPs and figure out how we’re going to run this thing. Was, that was a fun, fun time in our lives. We, our kids were quite little at the time, and it was, it was a wild, wild time that we decided to jump into this. But, you know, as things grow and progress. And then there was a period of time where my husband was very sick.

Aimee Rickabus:

In 2020, I became the CEO of Tomahawk. And then by 2021, my husband was really struggling with his health. He needed a hip replacement, had the hip replacement in 2021, struggled with 2022. So, I kind of found myself in a position where I was fully leading the house and the company for a couple of years there. And it was fun. But when it was time to make the transition back into being copilots, it was a bit of a rough transition for us. I almost felt like a military wife whose husband had been deployed, and we had to come back to how, how do we do this together? But we figured it out.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. I mean, it’s so interesting, with the need for a supportive partner as an entrepreneur and the fact that you were already an entrepreneur before you met. You know, my partner is also an entrepreneur, and we do different things together and some things apart and whatnot. But it’s almost like a civilian isn’t going to understand you.

Aimee Rickabus:

I married a civilian when I was 25 and it was, was a bad mistake for me. I realized right away that that wasn’t going to work. I really needed another entrepreneur who understood, like It’s a whole different lifestyle. You know, either there are the people that work for companies and they’re the people that build companies and. Yeah, I’m just, I was so happy when I found my second husband. We’ve known each other since I was 14 and he was 17. But when we ran into each other again, it was like the universe had hooked me up with a partner for life. And he wanted a lot of children, and I wanted a lot of children.

Aimee Rickabus:

We could grow companies and a family and all the things that I wanted together. And we have done that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, same thing. I married a non-entrepreneur. It was disastrous. It wasn’t disastrous in the sense that I have two amazing kids and one of whom is 19 years old and is really busy building and scaling his business. 

Aimee Rickabus:

Nice.

Melinda Wittstock:

And, and I didn’t quite do the homeschooling thing with them. But you know, I had a lot of the same experiences of my first business launched when my daughter Sydney, only six weeks old. And so, you had to figure it out. And it really resonated with me when you were saying like, when I’m with my kids, I’m 100% with my kids. When I’m in my business, I’m 100% in my business. And that was the only way I could survive. And I found that entrepreneurship made me a better mom and being a mom made me a better entrepreneur. Did you find that as well?

Aimee Rickabus:

100%. The things in, that I lacked skills in, in my early pre mommy years of my life, I became a mother when I was 30. I got Hannah, my 27-year-old when she was 15. At 30 I gave birth to my first child. And at that point I became a mom for the first time. So, I had about eight years pre motherhood and the things that I, the pitfalls in myself that I couldn’t quite learn, I absolutely mastered in motherhood. And a lot of that was like learning to say no, having boundaries, you know, silly little things. But you really get to practice that in motherhood.

[PROMO CREDIT]

Wings of Inspired Business is brought to you by the podcast, Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets where Steve Little – serial entrepreneur, investor and mergers & acquisitions maestro – shares the little-known 24 value drivers that spell the difference between a $5m business, and a $50mm even $500 mm business. It always pays to understand what’s driving the underlying enterprise value of your business. So, check out Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets at zerolimitsradio.com – that’s zerolimitsradio.com and available wherever you get your podcasts. More information about valuation growth at Zero Limits Ventures.com

Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Aimee Rickabus, serial entrepreneur, mom of 6, host of the Manage Her podcast, and the CEO and co-founder of Tomahawk Information Solutions.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Aimee Rickabus:

Of course, you’re not going to let your kid touch the stove. Of course you’re, you know, that, you know, you can’t, you know, get near the pool. So, you get really used to saying no. Where I had been raised a little bit of an, in a nice girl way, where nice girls don’t say no. So, I had a little bit of a difficulty in my younger years as an entrepreneur setting boundaries with employees, saying no to things that weren’t working for the company. And as I’ve gotten through the boot camp called motherhood, you know, it’s, it’s been, it’s such a master class in leadership. How to be a good leader, how to stay calm, how to be assertive, but also how to be loving and nurturing.

Aimee Rickabus:

And to be able to bring those skills with me into these newer businesses has been an absolute gift. And that’s what the manage her. My first book is all about how this invisible work of motherhood is so important and this is technical hard work. This is project management; this is organizational management. This is inventory management. The things we’re doing in our homes are all the same types of things that we have to do in our companies. But at home there’s a lot more at risk. There are people’s lives at risk and in, in the company, you know, not as many lives at risk.

Aimee Rickabus:

So, I think we really need to put more value on the work that women are doing at home. And we need to call this motherhood, really need to call it leadership. Because you look at the mama duck with all of her ducklings following behind her. She’s a leader. And nature shows us that, you know, mothers, all mothers are leaders.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. I love how you frame that You know, hearing you speak about this, I think I was the same way. When I look back at the mistakes I made in businesses before I had my kids or intrapreneuring, you know, entrepreneuring within large organizations, all of that compared to post kids. And it’s like night and day. You talk about the invisible labor women perform every day translates into systems thinking. And I want you to really break down what you mean by systems thinking, because there’s not a lot of people out there who are systems thinkers or the people who are don’t necessarily understand how they’re different.

Melinda Wittstock:

They don’t necessarily have the awareness of that. But I think women are natural systems thinkers. 

Aimee Rickabus:

So, your home, you as the mother, are the CEO of your home. And it’s really our jobs as mom to make sure that we’ve created systems around just about everything. You know, we have created standard operating procedures around where everything goes. In our kitchen, where does the food go, where does the bread. Bread go, where does the milk go, where do the spoons go? These are SOPs, these are standard operating procedures. Nobody calls it a standard operating procedure, but it is. Then we have per standard operating procedures around tutors, around, around our people, around our children. So, the things around our children would be like dentist appointments, tutors, babysitters, you know, when are these people coming? Management of all of these different activities, calendar activities, sports activities.

Aimee Rickabus:

We have inventory management of our household as far as buying and restocking inventory. You know the thing; the level of management that goes into a household is the level of management that goes into a small company. And you’re looking at, you know, most households on average maybe $80,000 a year income wise. So, you’re looking at basically a small company. You’re going that little company that manages that $80,000 a year. All of those things have to be allocated to school tuitions, to groceries, to gasoline and to mortgage payments or rent, to insurance payments. All of these things are managed in the exact same way that a corporation gets managed. And we’ve completely swept the skill that it takes to adequately manage a household under the rug.

Aimee Rickabus:

And we have taken away something beautiful from women that is just a natural born skill that we have to run these homes smoothly. And a lot of these women are doing this while they’re working a 40 hour a week job. It’s impressive.

Melinda Wittstock:

Or while they’re building and scaling businesses. This is the interesting thing that’s come up in, you know, for me as a tech entrepreneur who’s raised venture money and you know, that when you look at these stats that women only get less than 2% of the available venture capital money. And this is for women have inherently, you know, billion dollar plus potential companies that even qualify for VC. So that number, that 2% hasn’t changed in 30 years. And a lot of the gating factor is a lot of the men who are evaluating those deals. How could you possibly succeed? Like you’ve got your mom, you’ve got all these other things. And now just because they can’t doesn’t mean that you can’t. And there’s this profound disconnect.

Melinda Wittstock:

But then you look at the other data that says that women founders of tech companies return between 62 and 70 cents more on every dollar invested than exclusively male founded teams, right? So, so all these guys, all these VCs are leaving kind of money on the table. Take some cash out and just light a match and burn it, right? Because there’s so many great companies that don’t get funded or get underfunded or whatever as a result of them either not understanding this or just being really intimidated by it, maybe. And, like, you know, not wanting to let it bloom because it might show their shortcomings. What’s your take on that?

Aimee Rickabus:

You know, I still think that women are trying to sit at a man’s table, and I really think it’s time for us as women, especially in the tech space, to build our own tables, build our own VCs, build our own. I. I think that it’s time that we take the reins over and stop being a victim to the patriarchy and just do our own thing. You know, we know what we can do. Highly capable. We live in this amazing technology. I mean, the world we live in today with AI and how much we’re able to accomplish in the same amount. You know, everybody gets 24/7.

Aimee Rickabus:

But now if you’re using AI to help you, you can accomplish. For me, I can accomplish, like, a week’s worth of work in a couple of hours because I’m leveraging the tools that are available to me. And I think it’s time for women to build our own table when it comes to VC.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I think that’s true. That’s actually why I started this podcast, because I thought, oh, my God, women have to stand for each other. We’ve got to invest in each other’s businesses, buy each other’s products, promote each other, mentor each other, do all these things. And often I found, certainly in my career, the women all sort of say they want to do that, but then don’t have time. They’ve got so many things going on that one of the things that falls down is that will support or. Women who are really high net worth write big checks to charity, but they don’t necessarily invest. You know, my husband does that.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, what has to change to make that more of a reality? I think we’re getting there, but we’ve got some ways to go.

Aimee Rickabus:

Well, Melinda, I think it’s conversations like this, honestly, it’s one of the reasons why I started my podcast, the Manage Her podcast, was that I wanted to have conversations that women don’t usually have together. I wanted to talk about these kinds of things. Things I wanted to talk about money. I wanted to talk about tax strategies. I wanted to talk about how we scale businesses. 

Aimee Rickabus:

I feel like a lot of women are talking about silly things like the weather and clothes and celebrities and all of these, you know, kind of stuff that really isn’t going to move the needle for you in your life. While the men are standing on the golf course and they’re have, talking about what funds they’re investing in and they’re talking about how they’re going to invest in a, in a real estate investment trust or a real estate syndicate. You know, so we’re missing out on the opportunities because we’re not having the conversations we should be having as women. The more women we get together, having powerful conversations like this, the quicker we can change the world.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I, I think so. And it’s shifting to, from a kind of scarcity mindset to an abundant mindset where I think women were sort of, you know, going back to the days of the, you know, so called cat, right, where women were literally, there were only a few seats at the table and so women were competing with each other for those scarce places. And that’s where it was in like the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And I’ve seen this change gradually. Right, but when one woman succeeds, it opens the door for everybody else. But the, but the mindset that isn’t necessarily there to truly support that. 

Melinda Wittstock:

How do you see that changing what has to happen internally within women to really allow that at its full scale?

Aimee Rickabus:

Well, we have to heal the wound. You know, I feel like women as a whole are still wounded by what the patriarchy did to women. I mean, 2,000 years of systematic oppression will turn women against one another. And I feel like I talk about it a little bit in my first book, but I really get into it in my second book. We have to heal been wounded. You know, these only having a couple seats at the table and making us fight each other to get to those seats was not nice. You know, that was, that was not good behavior from the men who were in control at that time. And I think that it’s very sad that women have been turned against one another.

Aimee Rickabus:

I think it’s very sad that we’re living in a culture of isolation. I think that women as a whole are much happier when we can work together. We are very cooperative animals in nature. And I think that, that we’ve kind of lost, we’ve kind of forgotten who we are a little bit. And I just think once the female awakening happens, I keep telling my husband, I always wondered, you know, what the fourth Industrial revolution is going to be for women because Each Industrial revolution has had some profound impact on women. And, you know, first in Industrial Revolution, women get children out of factories. We advocate for safe food. Second Industrial Revolution, women get the right to vote.

Aimee Rickabus:

Third Industrial Revolution, it’s the ‘Me Too’ movement and the Women in Business movement. And now we’re in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I really think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be feminism 2.0. I think that women are going to rediscover what it means to be a woman. And I think in that healing, in that remembering, I think that women will remember that we’re stronger together and we’ll remember how to work together again and build something really beautiful. When it comes to our families, our children, our companies. I think that I. I’m such an optimist, but I really am hopeful that there’s something beautiful, beautiful is going to come out of this Fourth Industrial revolution.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I think so. I’ve been playing around with AI and my company since when did I really start? Probably like 2012 with natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning and probabilistic modeling and all these things and, you know, to really advance, in technology and with the application of that in various media tech ventures. And when you look at what’s possible in AI right now, like how you can really leverage it to make your life so much more efficient. as long as you don’t become a slave to the AI, which I see some people doing, right, where they’re, like, addicted. As long as you don’t fall into that trap, which is, like, easy to do. And I think they’re designed that way to some degree.

Melinda Wittstock:

But if you’re really using it to allow yourself to be more of you and to, like, create more of that quality time for actual relationship, belonging, mothering, leadership, you know, you’re writing a book about human potential. All of that. So curious what you think in the context of your new book about AI and our potential.

Aimee Rickabus:

In my Recipe for Human Potential, the secret ingredient is AI. 

Aimee Rickabus:

I’ve seen how digital transformation has changed the Fortune 500 how they do business, how it’s affected their employees. And there was one employee in particular at a very large company who was still hand inputting purchase orders. And when we came in, we had a solution for that. So, we implemented that solution for her, and it came back a couple years later to we were getting an award there and she said it freed up her time and her mind share. And I was in the middle of writing my first book and I went, whoa, that’s what women need. We are managing all of these in this invisible labor in our minds. And once we’re able to offload and automate some of the mundane tasks, we’re going to have more mind share. What are we going to do with this mind share? And AI is this massive tool for giving us more time and more mindshare and then it frees us up to be more human.

Aimee Rickabus:

Yes, more, more time to be with our kids. Exactly. To go on dates more times, to hang out with our girlfriends. That’s what I want to do. I want to hang out with my girlfriends. I want to, I want to go for walks on the beach. I want to, I want to get back to painting and watercolors again. You know, I’m writing my books, I’m doing my podcast.

Aimee Rickabus:

I love having a creative outlet and using AI has given me the time to do that. And I’m very grateful.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I think that’s a hundred percent. I was at, you know, my AI meetup, you know, the other week and, and we were talking about this and, and one of the people said, ‘Oh my God, I, I was between flights, my flight was delayed, I had like five minutes and I had to send a proposal like this 10 grand proposal. And there was no way I was going to do it. I was going to lose the job. And I asked, you know, my agent, like I asked, he was using Open Claw with Claude and it was going in his email and all that. And I said, Go into my email, write the proposal, send the proposal. I don’t have time to review it. What other choice do I have? Because I’m gonna lose a job anyway, so why the hell, why not? And it worked. I got the thing right.’

Aimee Rickabus:

I leverage AI like you wouldn’t believe it. Well, it’s the way I could do my side projects because Dream Life Media is a company, but it’s my little side project. It’s my passion project. And so, I will interview my guests on Google Meet. I take notes with Gemini, but I take those notes and I input them into a chat bot that I created that has read all of my books, that has all of my podcasts, and it helps me come up with an intro. I’ll put in the people’s. You know, if there’s a domain or a social media, I can get input those. But within a moment, within a few moments, I can have a really good draft with an intro and questions and an outro. That’s something that I can work from so that I can have a really great podcast with someone and it doesn’t take me eight hours to do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly that. Exactly right. I mean, there’s so many of these things that you can. And so if, if you know, just for people listening, if you’re not experimenting with all of this, I found like Claude and Claude Code and all these things like transformational and just the ways that you can teach it with your own previous work and your writing style and all of that stuff that you don’t have to kind of keep prompting it over and over and over again. It just starts to know you. But you don’t really know unless you really experiment with it, right?

Aimee Rickabus:

Oh, it’s amazing. It really is so, so much fun. And I do love Claude. I’m making my way over there. I have Grok, I have Claude, I have Chat and I play with all of the have.

Melinda Wittstock:

I have all of them. Gemini is good for certain things because Google has the deal with Reddit. So, if you want to know what your customers are saying or understand a pain point. I have some of these prompts that are 300, 400 words long, to do like competitive research or like market research or this or that. And you know, the thing that really, really kickstarted me into this is my son’s business because he’s 19 years old. He doesn’t really have any capital to go build a very sophisticated mobile app. So, the constraint has really taught him just about coding all the different things you can do, and then me helping him out. It’s amazing how quickly a business can come together. So just starting something new now as opposed to something new a couple of years ago is like night and day.

Aimee Rickabus:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, then I found like the stuff that I’ve been learning helping him can now be applied and like my other things can now be rearchitected from what I’m learning. And it’s like a constant learning though too, right? You’re never not learning because all of the functionality is changing so quickly.

Aimee Rickabus:

It’s amazing. In fact, I was sitting down with my 16-year-old and I was, we were talking and I said, you know what you should really be learning right now is we need to get you in an AI training course. You and your little brother, the 14-year-old and the 11-year-old. Let’s get all of you guys training in prompt engineering. Let’s go, let’s get you guys so that you’re completely fluent in whatever’s the new of AI for the moment. Because you guys can literally build a business where you create bots that are your employees that do your work for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly.

Aimee Rickabus:

And this is the new model. This is it. My best friend’s daughter is 30 and we were talking yesterday and she’s just actually ridiculously brilliant. But she had created a very complicated prompt where she’s like Auntie, can I look at all of your websites and see what’s right with them and what’s wrong with them? And so, she created reports for all of them using this prompt and I’m like, wow kid. She found that somebody was like, someone like some of spam thing had latched onto one of my websites and I’m like, oh wow, I can so I can address this problem that I wouldn’t have even seen had she not run her analytics on it.

Aimee Rickabus:

But these kids are amazing and the potential for them to build companies with AI and not even have to worry about payroll or you know, all of the things that come along with having employees. Especially when you’re young and you’re just getting started. 

Melinda Wittstock:

My son closed his first investment for like $5,000, but that can be spent on all the swag, all the marketing, instead of on the coding. As it does all these kind of chore type tasks, it does free you up to have the type of business that, that creates. I mean, because business is still about people, right? And relationships. So, if it frees time for you to really cultivate those relationships, really think about serving your clients, your customers or like really developing. Yeah, really developing better relationships even with your employees.

Melinda Wittstock:

Having your employees do the things that are really like value add. So, you have the best customer service of anybody. I mean there’s a whole bunch of different ways, you know, to really think about this.

Aimee Rickabus:

This definitely it’s one of the conversations we have on the show a lot is how AI is going to free us up to have better and higher quality relationships and how high-quality relationships are actually where you get most of your business deals anyway. I mean we wouldn’t be where we, where we are with our companies had we not built amazing relationships along the way. It was 100% relationship based all the way through. All the way through, all the way. From the relationships with your employees to the relationships with your clients. It’s you. You have to know that no matter even if you have AI, the one thing AI can’t do is build real authentic relationships with other human beings. You’re going to need to be able to do that.

Aimee Rickabus:

So, if you know how to code AI and you know how to talk to people and build relationships, you are going to master the future

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. This is so important. So, tell me a little bit about your two technology companies. You’ve got Tomahawk Information Systems, and you’ve got another company called Mohawk Network Solutions and tell me a little bit about what they do.

Aimee Rickabus:

So, Tomahawk Information Solutions is a value-added reseller of IT hardware, software and services and we sell to the Fortune 500. We’ve been heavily working with the Fortune 500 since about 2021 and we’ve been very focused on digital transformation. So, implementing a lot of SaaS over Covid time and doing a lot of services projects now building out projects that are related to integration of tech new technologies into the companies. It’s really, really fun to be on the cutting edge of technology with these big guys. And then Mohawk was a lot of fun during COVID Well we were able to. Mohawk Network Solutions can provide any kind of hardware that you need that in a. For data centers. We have used gear, we have refurbished gear, we have new in box gear that was over purchased.

Aimee Rickabus:

We have warehouses full of gear. And so, during COVID when there was this supply shortage of hardware, networking hardware gear, we actually coined the phrase we’re actually trading trademarked supply chain heroes because we were able to come in and help some of the largest companies in America keep their data centers running with mission critical gear during a very important time in our country. So that felt really good to be able to be contributing in some positive way.

Melinda Wittstock:

I just love your whole multipreneur experience, your whole outlook on everything. What is the best way for people to, you know, find you on social media or listen to your podcast or if they’re, you know, they need some good SaaS solutions or whatever and they’re in the Fortune 500 and they want to know more about Tomahawk and Mohawk and what are the best ways.

Aimee Rickabus:

Yeah. Okay, so Tomahawk is t o m-I s.com that is Tomahawk’s website and Mohawk is Mohawk N s like network solutions@or.com mohawk ns.com that’s Mohawk’s website. And then I am on social media at the manage her on Instagram and TikTok. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Amy Hin Rick and I’m on Instagram amyricabus A I M e e r I c k a b u s and I have a website called the manageher.com where you can keep up with all of the things that are Aimee related.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. Well, yeah, don’t drive, drive off the road everybody I know trying to write this down or whatever, but it’ll all be in the show notes. Aimee, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Aimee Rickabus:

Thank you so much for having me. Melinda. That was so fun.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Aimee Rickabus is a serial entrepreneur, mom of 6, host of the Manage Her podcast, author, and the CEO and co-founder of Tomahawk Information Solutions.

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

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