Welcome And Friday Momentum

Dave 0:02

Welcome to CryptoPat. We're here to give real life insights, practical strategies, and kind of functions that we afford from our own state. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, any formalities, details, maybe just getting your mindset right. We are here and it's at the right spot for no fluff conversation. So grab your favorite cup of show. Let's jump into the show. Let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another live episode of the Business Unscripted Podcast, which means it's it's Friday morning and it's about 8:30. Well, it's actually about 8:40, because we're enthralled into a conversation pre-show, which is typically what happens. But if you're an aspiring business owner, as that fine voice said, or you're an existing business owner and you're looking for a place to learn, uh, maybe get some inspiration, some excitement, some motivation, you're in the right spot. This is a good show for you. And so with that, as I always say, grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show this week. So, Darren, man, thanks for joining me. I know you had some things come up last week, so it was a solo show, but uh, it's always, you know, I always will say this. I get a little more energized when I know that it's gonna be you and I on the show than a solo show. I can always every time I tell you, like, unfortunately, I'm gonna be out of my message most of the time, I can feel it in your message of like oh yeah, I'm like, yeah, or or boo, or you know, or it's one of those things, oh, go have fun with the family. And really, you're like, I know, I know Dave saying F you dwarfing up bastard, bastard, yeah. Damn you, man. But no, it's it's it's really because you know, just even thinking back, like if you think about it, man, we've known each other for what three and a half years, and our Friday conversations is what turned into to this. We realized that we are we were having Friday conversations about business and strategy, and then we turned it into right this live show. And man, it's it is a good energy energizing experience, right? Towards the end of the week to just like have these conversations, you know, even our Wednesday check-in sometimes when we have those, like man, it just keeps you going. And and so I do yeah, I just wanted to say that to start the show. Like, when when you're here, I I get I get a little more energized for the show than when I know I'm doing it by myself. So thank you for saying it.

Duarne 2:29

I'll I'll like that I know that all and why it feels like you I'll uh feel a bit more guilty next time I call in and I'm an ID.

Dave 2:38

It's it's it's crazy, and and I do appreciate you because like on your end, right? Like you're 12 hours ahead, right? So it's it's almost 9 p.m. your time. So you know you giving up and and also paige, love you, page, thank you, to be able to like you know give up the oh oh she's right there. Thanks. I love you too. Love it, and and and you know, giving up Friday evening and whatever it is to kind of hang out. I appreciate it, man. And one of these days, brother, one of these days, I am going to travel over to the Philippines, experience it all, you know, meet you guys in real person, you know, and I love it. It's crazy how you can get close to somebody, just you know, the world we live in right now.

Duarne 3:18

It is, man. And it's interesting because like I during the week I do a lot of communication back to Australia, right? And I was just talking to someone the other day who's like, geez, we talk about probably eight years ago. We were I was working for a company that was using video calling, video conferencing through Cisco WebEx, and it was pretty average back then, but at the time we were doing a lot of voice communication through selling SIP services to businesses, and it's kind of in the middle of the a lot of them willing to accept it was normal, and a lot that uh like traditional phone still. Yeah, nowadays that it's completely flipped on its head. You can jump on a video call with somebody. I I had someone just recently ask me, Hey, what's your mobile? So I can call you. And I'm like, Well, I'm in a different country, so I don't know if calling me on a mobile is gonna be the most affordable solution for you. Right. How about uh we set up a video call? Oh, wow, okay, cool. Yeah, let's do that. So, you know, that's what we ended up doing. But we're in that position now where video calling is just so convenient, you can have so many video calls and it's very low cost, which is incredible. Back when I first started doing it, internet was not where it should be. You couldn't do it. You try to have video calls with more than two or three people in them, the whole network would collapse. It just wouldn't handle it. So it's incredible we can

Home Distractions Versus Office Focus

Duarne 4:48

do this now and have so many people in these calls, and yeah, just do it on a whim. Like, oh hey, I'll I'll bring in old mate and get him on the call as well. And it just happens on the fly during a regular workday.

Dave 4:59

And you and you literally just send a link and now everybody can can chat. Now, now don't get me wrong. You know, I was a big proponent of virtual and and like working from home, like when that, you know, going through COVID. But there is something about being in the office now, like since going back and being in an office five days a week has been to me way I I see that I'm more productive. Like, I think initially I'm like, oh, I'm more productive when I'm at home. You know, I don't have travel time, I don't have all this stuff. But like when you when you really think about it, you you have a lot more distractions, right? Like if you have dogs, you're letting them out. You know, it's easier to get up and and and go to your fridge and and make some food, you know, home cook, take more time away. You know, if your spouse is there or your partner's there, you know, it's easier for them to like walk in and and and kind of say, you know, what's you know, what's going on, distract you. And for me, you know, when you're when you're a small business owner, right? They, you know, it's like they, oh, you can just make that time up later, right? You know, come have lunch with me or go do this.

Duarne 6:01

Russman, take a break. Yeah.

Dave 6:03

And and don't get me wrong, like if you are in a spot in your business where you have that flexibility because you have teams and things are running without you, that's awesome. But when you're growing something, you don't have that flexibility. And and I gave I and I gave myself initially going through at the start of you know, this third round of business, right? I gave myself that false image of, you know, oh, well, you can just flex it, you'll just do it later. And then you know, that time comes, and now it's later on, it's like, oh, let's watch a movie or let's do this, and then you never make up the time. And so I find it to be way more productive of office. Plus, what I love about being small business, and we have this conversation, a couple of the business owners, because I'm in a co-work space for a small networking group in our area, and me and the main guy who's here all the time, like we just have conversations in terms of like what's going on, you know, sharing, sharing ideas, sharing thoughts. And so you're able to like get this mind map, think right conversations going. And it just greatly can impact what you're doing in your business. So we're looking to expand and actually like potentially like get a bigger space to have more people. One, I'm a little selfish in that because I want an actual office. Like right now, I'm I'm in an office that's you know, it there's two other people that are sharing it, but you know, the one's only here maybe once a week, if that, and the other one's here like maybe twice a month if that. But it's still like not my office, you know what I mean? And I think I want to actually have an office for that and be able to grow it, and I want more people involved. And so it's really like, how do we how do we have more impactful conversations? And I think putting yourself as a business owner in those situations, you know, like you may be like, oh, I have to, I have to work from home because I'm saving money. Well, you know, this is in $250 a month for for a desk in an office space, right? And it's not a lot of money. Now, granted, you know, maybe it's different for everybody depending on where you're at. But I would highly suggest looking and and trying to get that out of like and put yourself in those situations to actually have better conversations in person. Now, the virtual thing has really help opened up you know the ability for you know you to work with anybody, and that's what I love. Like you and I, if we didn't have Zoom or we didn't have like alignable, you know, with the the networking events, like you and I wouldn't we wouldn't be here, right? Because obviously you're in the Philippines, I'm in I'm in the US. But it so it's opened up capabilities there, but I do think that there's still a benefit of in-person meetups and conversations.

Duarne 9:05

Definitely, I totally agree. We've got uh one of our regular clients who comes over two, three times a year back here in September. He's bringing in another client along with him, so we're having in-person catch-ups for a week while they're here. So that's awesome. We don't get to do that that often, so it's really cool. We catch up with website clients locally and marketing clients locally, but it's always different when you've got a client comes in international and visits, um, which is really cool. But you know, like I've got my I've done the whole having my office in the house, and it's I've also done the working on a laptop at the in the main section of the house and laying in bed, and I have to admit, dedicated space for your work, like this office out the back of the house is like legit. I have to come all the way out of the house, across the yard, come into my office, and I'm here. If I need something, I have to get up and walk out or cross the yard, back into the house to get something. And I can get distracted sometimes if I'm going into the house to get something, but it's always great to have your own space in the back where you can go.

Dave 10:18

When you're there, dad's at work.

Duarne 10:20

Exactly. I'm at work, right? Little man comes in, says, Hey, how you doing? Visit. No, I'm good, man. I'm just on a meeting. I'm about to have a meeting. All right, dad, I'll leave it to it. See ya. And it's right, you set that precedent. But if you the other problem is like if you're trying to work in the middle of a house or something, all right, it's that constant looking, hey guys, guys, about to have a meeting, keep it down, all right? And everyone else is on edge, and you're putting the and the whole house feels like they're you know at work with you sometimes, and they don't want to distract you, or they're always looking for that gap when you're not working, so they can come and ask you something. It's just yeah, it's different. Going to a physical office, yeah, it's not for me anymore. Like, not so I like my home office setup. It's interesting because I've had two fit outs that I've done in the last five years for office space. And the first one set myself up a beautiful big office in there for Paige and I, so we'd have this great space to work in. We never used it. So instead, we decided when we set up the second office for the team, we didn't put a space in there for ourselves. Instead, we built a space at the back of the house for ourselves, so much more productive, so much better for us. So you've just got to find what works for you. One of the guys I know back in Melbourne, he actually uses his bed, one of his um four-bedroom homes. One of the bedrooms is his office. He's got a tech who comes in, spends, you know, maybe twice a month, twice a week. He has another room in the house, which is his office when he goes there and works. And then he's got his bedroom and his guest room, right? Yet another group, another friend in that group, he has two apartments on the 69th floor in the city. And one of them's his house, and the other one is his office. He works in it, and they are literally right next to each other. So he uh his plan is he'll sell it when he retires from the business and it's an investment, but in the meantime, he's got an entire office set up, which is actually a unit up on the 69th floor in the middle of the city. So the truth the truth is you know, he thinks his view's incredible, right? When everyone in meetings hey shows the window, walks over, shows me the window, it's just like just blows my mind. You can see the MCG and everything from there, you know, all the sporting arenas. But the the key is I think whatever works for you is what you need to do. If you can work productively at home because you've got the space, or no one's at home while you're working, that's cool. Do it. If you need a space to go to and do work, do that. I know people who have just hired done with exactly what you said, where they've got co-working space, but they're not there every day, they're there a couple of days a week because they just need that couple of days a week break from being where they are at home or something.

Dave 13:17

So yeah, like I said, like I think I think it's it's you find what works, but I but I think like you have to be real with yourself. Yeah, yeah, put yourself out there, right? And also like look at your look at your time, you know. And we talked about it, you know, we've talked about time studies and and and be able to, you know, kind of really give yourself that exterior analytical view of your actual day and or week and say, am I as productive as I need to be? Because I'm at work, not I'm at work at home, so I can do other things throughout the day. There's a big difference.

Duarne 13:53

Absolutely. Procrastination is so much easier when you're at home because

Building A Workspace That Works

Duarne 13:58

people don't see you, they don't, you know, or if you're in the office and you look around, you can always see the procrastinators or the guys pretending to work in an office space versus the ones who are actually there doing the work. And some people just need to look in the mirror and realize which one are you. If you're always procrastinating, try and get to the root cause of it and then see if it's your environment. Some people I know who can't do homework from home, they procrastinate, they get sidetracked, they start gaming, they start watching TV, they start going and you know, playing with the kids, lay down, take a nap. It's just it's just is what it is. It's you know, so you've got to find what works for you, and you've got to be able to be real with yourself. But I do like the idea of being in a shared office space where you get to have conversations with multiple people. I think that's kind of cool, and I think that's a lot rarely underrated. Like we just started off this conversation, they can video calls, and you can communicate with all around the world, but sometimes that interaction just in person, it's nothing quite like it.

Dave 15:02

And you do got to find, and I'll give you because I've looked at a lot of them over the years, but you so you have to find the one like that fits your personality because there are there are bigger, more corporate-like shared co-working spaces that like everybody is just in their office, closed door, working, like and and nobody's interacting. So when you go to look for a co-working space, if that's something that you're doing, you know, my advice to you is like one try to ask for like a free day where like you can go there and work. And and I did this at a couple different places over the last year or so. And again, I realize like throughout the day, like nobody's nobody comes out, nobody introduces, nobody walks by and says, Oh, hey, what what do you do? Like, or introduce they're they're literally in their offices and that's it. Whereas, you know, this space, it's open, right? We're all here, we're talking, we're saying hi when we're walking by, you know, and so find something that feels right. Like you have to, you know, just like anywhere, you know, you want to find something that feels like you want to be there, that's energizing you, that you know, I've I've been doing some work with with one of my clients as well, like on just like emotional understanding of your body. And for me, I never realized it or never paid attention to it as much. But it's like when something is like a yes, like from my subconscious mind, my I feel lighter, you know, like and I'm I'm I automatically start feeling the energy and all of that. Whereas if something's a negative or it's my subconscious saying, hey, like you you shouldn't move forward with that, I'm heavy in my seat, or you know, I feel weight on my shoulders that now I pay more attention to, you know, and I can realize it because it's like I get a call from a client, you know, and it's like, oh, you know, I'm energized. You know, it's either I'm I'm energized because I know like the client is moving, you know, there's something that's going on or an opportunity that I'm excited about, or it's a you know, it could be a client that is one that's time suck, you know, that that just has stuff that doesn't really make sense, and you can feel the weight. And so it's really like, and we talked about or I talked about 8020 last week, right? Because we were gonna talk about it. So I talked about that 8020, and so you have to realize, you know, if you if you pay attention to that, and and you're gonna be different. Like your yes may feel different than my yes, right? And your no is gonna feel different than my no. But once you kind of figure out what that what that is, you're able to kind of stay attuned to it, you can actually start thinking through your clientele and realize and start cutting them off, right? And start, you know, get trimming you know the 80% that are are is draining your energy, right? It's only you know, so and then really pay attention to the 20% that's contributing to 80% of your your gross profit and your net profit.

Duarne 17:48

So environment's the same though, isn't it? I mean, yeah, like for me, like a huge thing there. I I cannot work in a coffee shop. I hate working in coffee shops. I see everybody else working in a coffee shop and then loving it and enjoying it. And I've had you know friends of mine say, I just love working in a coffee shop, it's it's my favorite part um of work, being able to work in a coffee shop. For me, it's too noisy, I feel uncomfortable, I feel like you've got no privacy there. For you got to be cautious what you can do, you can't just have every conversation you need to have, so you got to be cautious on that sense. And I realized that a lot of it came down to I use coffee shops as a place to relax. So I enjoy coffee shops for the purpose of going and having a coffee and relaxing, therefore, working there doesn't feel relaxing for me.

Dave 18:43

So I'll do it shops, yeah. I would literally change that entire entire environment for you, even if you and that and that was my reality, and I can't my environment.

Duarne 18:55

I can't work in that type of environment. I don't like working with headphones on during, you know, either. I like having free-flowing music in the background, I don't like having headphones. So, you know, for those who say, I just put headphones on, you can don't like working with headphones. I like ambient noise and I like some music playing. You have to know your environment and you have to be prepared to set up your environment for maximum productivity, and I think that's the key. I think once you figure that out, everything else falls into place. And the same goes with your customers. If your customers are creating a negative environment around you, you've probably got the wrong customers, or you've got the wrong method of communication, or the wrong processes in place if they're able to make that sort of reaction with you. So all of this comes into play to give you

Using AI Agents With Human Approval

Duarne 20:23

a positive experience. And, you know, we one of the things that held us up and joining this morning was we're actually talking about AI again, surprise, surprise, and agents and adding them into our environment and just the difference that they can make to productivity and how we're actually getting more out of our days just because of the way we're utilizing it now. And again, it just comes down to learning how your environment can help you rather than letting it hinder you, right?

Dave 20:55

And it so it was funny, you must have been reading my mind because I was literally just thinking, man, we are now 15 minutes into the show, 20 minutes into the show, and we're completely off topic from anything that we said we were gonna talk about in today's show. But yeah, I love it, and then and then you turn it back to what we were gonna talk about. So I love it, which brings me so we talk about agent, and and we were talking about pre-show. And so I saw this question, I responded to it, but it was like it was a jet, I don't remember, I think it was on face, it was on Facebook, and the person was talking about like if you use any automation in your your messaging that you should be banned from the platform because you're violating their terms of service. And I guess for me, like I don't agree with that aspect, and because there's a complete big difference between fully autonomous, right? Like reads, responds, creates messages, do all that, versus kind of what we're doing with our system where we've trained it. It's basically monitoring our mailbox and our DM inbox, bringing the uh the history of that message thread to me, and then presenting an initial draft for me to approve. And then if I approve it, it then goes back out and pastes it into the chat and sends and hits post. There's a completely big difference between those two. I think the way that we're doing it is not in violation, like in the in the in the way the terms of service was was written for. Because of the fact that there's a human approval requirement in order for a message to be sent. And what's the difference of me as a business owner or having somebody in you know Africa or the Philippines sending my messages for me versus me saving money and having a system that just can post for me just because I don't have time to click through every single thread and every single individual in my message box to write a message? Like, what why would that violate the terms of service? And I don't think it does. I think eventually, like these platforms. are going to catch up and realize like we have the ability to like maximize people's use of our platform and be here if they're having these conversations. So I don't know what was what's the what's kind of your initial thoughts on that?

Duarne 23:21

Like well I think I've got two I've got two thoughts on this. One I get I don't like those posts that go up going DM this and we'll send you this. Like those sort of automations I totally get it. I'm kind of also over every second post going up looking the same because they're all using chat GPT's post generator. So I totally get that but then I look at the other side of the coordinates well if you set up a Facebook ad one of the first things it does is it asks you do you have want to set up three automated questions and answers? That's automated. I tell you makes a huge difference when you're hiring we had a recent hiring for a role and we had like 400 plus inquiries come through can you imagine an individual and managing all of those personally one on one by one so what we use is we use those three questions it allows us to ask to pre-qualify. And one of them is how do I apply click here goes off to the video interviewing system. Is this a work from home job or no this is an office-based job what's the salary we only disclose that during the to the final interviewees that pass the testing and assessment stages. Now are we is that a suitable use of the platform and the way it works it is for us. Right. And I think that's the difference. I mean if you're using these fully autonomous systems and I and I guess that there's a lot of video manipulation AOI tools out there now where we can sit here and say one thing and then it can make us look like a completely different person saying it right yeah or we can type a script and have someone completely random saying it for us. And if you you want to see how many of those are go and look at one you think is one then go look at everything else they posted and your chances are it's a fairly new account and they're just doing it for likes and stuff. Yeah that sort of automation I think is probably the problem. Maybe that sort of stuff needs to be a bit better regulated because that starts it's a bit like in the coding what we call slop code with a lot of the vibe coding it's a lot of really bad coding it's much the same with a lot of the stuff that goes on socials. It's just crap. But anyone who spends any more than five minutes on TikTok knows that 90% of that is crap as well.

Dave 26:01

You know it's a lot of dancing it's a lot of all sorts of crazy partying going on always you and the algorithms just seem to throw it at you I guess unless you start training with the right yeah you got you got to clean up your algorithm you know it's pretty it's and and it's and here's the thing like it doesn't take a lot to clean up your algorithm on any social media it's it's literally either one you find something you don't want to see anymore you just click the three dots and click don't want to see this or two start watching some other thing like like search out things that you want in your algorithm and watch a few of those videos and watch it just completely fill up your thread. So it literally probably takes 15 20 minutes of your time to clean up your algorithm you just have to be proactive about it and stop being reactive too though. Right. And well that's also like stop stop being you know just reactive when you get into your social media go there with a purpose like absolutely yeah treat them more like Tinder.

Duarne 26:53

No yes no maybe that's actually social media reels that have a Tinder store swipe system.

Dave 27:04

Yes no yes no there is there is a a social media app that I've I've seen some apps for and I'm interested to kind of see it it but I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head but it's supposed to be for like professional where if you find yourself scrolling and and you you're getting into that sort of like I don't know what action or whatever yeah that doom scrolling but it's made for productivity so like the the it's like motivational things it's book it's book lessons that yeah so I want to I want to actually check that out I haven't had the time to do it yet but I do want to check that out to see you know if it could replace you know like when I'm taking a poop you know like you know yeah it's the it's that dopamine hit right like you all you gotta do is watch your kid and look at them when they sit there to swipe swipe swipe. It's kind of like when we were kids with the remote switching channels on the telly yeah trying to find something that you like yeah for sure except now their attention is like 10 seconds and not like 10 minutes like we were right when we were growing up well that's yeah we only had seven channels so we had to be a little bit more accepting selected we would like oh there's a there's a there's an ad click I'm gonna watch something else for five minutes all right click back i'm not still on click yep no I remember that for sure but so so kind of going back to like the automation piece so I I agree on the social media side especially like the post like it's it's crazy because you can see these these people that like they pick or they had ChatGPT create one good flyer and then that's the same visual format that they post every time and it's just like guys you got to come up with some variation like I can tell you used AI to create this and it's gonna continue to be and so I don't have a problem with AI but you also like use case yeah

Social Algorithms Templates And Consistency

Dave 29:03

like use like change it up like find different inspiration you know that's what I love about ours is like you can find an inspirational version of a post of an image and then you can integrate it into your social media and your design right and and not copy it like directly but you can create something similar everything is imitation like nothing is nobody has a brand new idea 99% of the time I've said this before. So like stop being like I have to come up with the the only way to create something it's like it's never gonna happen you know right now when you're trying to grow like you don't need to be a hundred percent individually unique you just have to get people to trust you like you and know that you know what you're doing to help them solve their problem and you can't do that by trying to be perfect on your social media account.

Duarne 29:58

No and look you got to have and you look at these trends that people do at the moment there's one getting around a lot of businesses are doing it where one person walks up to somebody at the start of the video and says hey so I just asked everyone in the office what would they do if an orphan came and knocked on their door hey hey no that's not what you asked me that is definitely not what you asked me someone in the background says and then they go yes that's definitely what I asked and then they went back and they cut to okay so I would uh definitely slam the door or I'd I'd go and dig a hole and bury it in the backyard and all these crazy things and you like you realize yes somebody's asked a completely different question and they got and manipulated it. And you know that sort of thing makes for interesting content it's not unique. It's just following someone else's original trend but can you imagine if every single one of your posts showed up as somebody else's version of that eventually you're gonna get bored with it. You're gonna get sick of it. You're yeah yeah okay it's a trend I've seen it once or twice it's funny but it's not funny anymore. Right. It's the same thing and I think that's the problem it's a bit like when we watch you watch the news and you see the same news on every single channel and you're like okay I'm done with news I'm gonna go do something else now you've got to be unique but you've got to be willing to adapt and change with these things as well because what's you can't just keep copying things and this is the problem with a lot of these automations and these posts on these platforms everyone's trying to basically do the same thing over and over again because they had good results on one post or they're being told by somebody this is what you need to do. It's very different to four years ago when we used to create templates because it was affordable to have a design team create a template system and post two three times a week for you on the same style of template with a different message. Then we'd switch templates and to do something else for the next quarter.

Dave 32:00

Yeah you can't do anymore you can't do that anymore and you and you gotta switch like you got to switch from like sometimes text base sometimes video sometimes copy with image sometimes carousel like on LinkedIn like you have to continually kind of change it up and then I had this conversation with the gentleman in the office again it was yesterday where it's you know you you are the only one who sees 100% of your content that's it and I've I've had the conversation with people what I can't post four or five times a day I don't know what to say or I can't say that kind of stuff. It's like then just keep reusing topics or stories in different ways because LinkedIn for example you know I've never and and again I've I've never gotten anything go viral right however you you could get maybe a hundred to two hundred impressions typical right and my network I think is anywhere between I think three and four thousand people right in my network first connections but I could so that would mean I would have to share something 20 times for my network to see it to like really be like oh okay every I 4000 people and even then probably not everybody saw it. Exactly and you can have diminishing analytics it's really hard to get that algorithm right and it's really yeah it's it's really hard motion they're gonna say it yeah and and so you could say the same story topic teaching moment you know once a week for a year and the only people that are probably going to see that significantly more are the people who are actually interested in you which is good because then they're learning that and they're like oh I learned that from Darn right and then if on Tuesday or later that day you're continuing to share the same another topic and another lesson they're gonna engage more with you. So it's it's the consistency piece around it.

Duarne 34:45

And so don't think like once you say something today you can't say it for another three months like that's not look at all the way to say it in a different way a different story a different impact statement something that is still the same topic just written in a different way look at look at this right Tony Robins he's been saying pretty much the same thing the same style of messaging for what 30 plus years I mean at the end of the day you ask some what's Tony Robinson all about and they'll tell you they know that you know it's all about motivation helping you become a better version of yourself etc etc most people if you label them if they're an influencer of sorts in business or leadership or something with their posting people are going to know what they represent it's like oh they he plays a bit of this and a bit about that no he's an expert on all things marketing he's an expert on all things sales he's an expert on all things pyramid schemes I don't know whatever right these guys like you know people say people I people I think throw around the word expert a lot but really the expert is the person in in in a room the expert would be in the room who has the most knowledge about a particular topic.

Dave 36:00

Exactly you know like so you know I could say in one room people could say well you're an AI expert and I'm like eh I really like in this room yeah sure I know more probably about a lot of people in AI but am I an expert in terms of like the top of the top probably not no um sure like it's it's choosing your room like go into a nursing home and you're probably gonna be you know the youngest person there.

Duarne 36:26

But you could be 80. Exactly yeah you know it's just if you go into I mean if you go to a like a car convention and you're the IT guy you're the most knowledgeable in all things IT because everyone else there's a mechanic right or in the industry. This is the difference it's about positioning and this is it's actually interesting because when you start thinking about this you it it goes into that conversation we touched on earlier about knowing who your customers are because if you're gonna turn up and you're gonna be the person turning up where all your competitors are all the time it's going to be a lot harder to find the customer and stand out. But if you're the guy turning up who's the expert in the room or the expert in that moment that's your opportunity to shine and get new customers so I mean if you're going if you're going to an agricultural sector conference and you're the only IT person that turns up or you're the only marketing person or the only leadership person or the only person they're turning up to talk about you know

Become The Expert By Choosing Rooms

Duarne 37:32

profit loss solutions you're the expert on that topic right there.

Dave 37:37

The other they're all there to learn something you might have something you you think about it and and it's a great point you just made right in that and so it's like who's your ICP find like trade conferences specific to your ICP and just attend and just like go there as a research like oh what do you do? Well you know I actually work with a lot of clients you're right that that are at this conference so I wanted to just have some conversations and and understand what's actually going on right and see if there was a better way that we could support people. Right and it's not I'm coming here because I want new clients it's coming here because I want to learn right I want to learn what you guys are learning so that I can serve this industry better. That you know something that you could totally do.

Duarne 38:21

And it's I've done it yeah right we've done it paired and I have done that many times with B Savvy we throw on the B Savvy shirts we go out we bring some cards with us as well and we just sit there in the crowd and enjoy the presentations and go and approach the stands and talk to them. Yep and it's amazing the sort of interaction you got we walked away with stacks of business cards and business opportunities from that because at the at the time like we went to franchise shows same thing because everyone there's trying to sign up for a franchise at the end of the day I'm just there talking checking what you're doing finding it interesting giving you some comments giving you a couple of suggestions on how you could you know probably step up your game in a couple of areas exchange some business details and then shoot you an email after the show you know give you a call these things that it's such an easy way to get out there and practice your pitch because if if your pitch is your little needs a bit of practice it's a great way to do that because there's so many people to practice it with and eventually by the end of the day you'll get it really good. Right? You'll be spot on ready is for the next one as well. So I love that I think you know from a perspective of looking for where you know where to go and find clients it's really good. But as we talked about before it's really hard for some people because they don't even know who their ideal clients are. You know they haven't figured that part out they think they can go fishing everywhere and you know this is where I think whether it's in person whether it's prospecting or if you're using social media you've got you can do it with automation but it makes no difference if you're going after the wrong customer base. You know and if you want to if you want to know the truth of it just go out to a conference if you're in marketing and you turn up at a marketing conference guess how many new clients you're gonna get probably in no you could go there right yeah you're going there to hopefully learn and educate yourself on ways to improve the impact that you have with your clients so not for new clients yeah your expectation should probably be different than you know don't just search for things that are in your in your realm right go go outside your comfort zone and find those areas and those events that again but don't have the expectation like I'm going here to find clients.

Dave 40:40

No no go there with the expectation that you're researching you know what's happening what are people experiencing because we are biased in our own internal mind in terms of like oh I think this industry needs the X. So I'm going to try and do this well you could put yourself in that industry's you know big conference and start talking to people in the industry and you may find out that your assumption that you see from the outside is completely wrong. People in the industry are feeling a different obstacle or pain. So you may be wondering why are people in no want to buy I know they have this problem because nobody has it right nobody's really feeling it they're feeling something else and you have to solve potentially that first before they see your problem.

Duarne 41:25

You know there's a bigger problem. It's the sprain risk versus the broken arm. Maybe you're focused 100% on the spray and risk but no one cares about that they're too busy with the broken arm. And we've we've witnessed this plenty of times where people are coming in saying you know we we need to look at fixing this problem in our business and it's like well yeah but we're not selling enough we don't make enough money so fixing that's great but if we're not getting enough business coming through then what's the point of fixing that we need to solve that problem first. Can you help with that?

Dave 41:57

Well no that's not really what we do okay well let's uh let's go find someone to collaborate and partner with who can help you with that and then bring us in for this other part you know find a way but if you don't identify that and this is it's really interesting because in this day and age like I think we talked about it once before you can do so much with AI like to the point where it's just mind blowing what we can generate and create and come up with ideas on but how many people actually bother to put the research in to see if it's really a viable idea people just get so gung ho with it now they just go they build something and then it's like well what's your problem what's your solving problem you're solving right and it's I don't know if you have them in the US there but you know the little two dollar shops the one dollar shops like the dollar stores yeah yeah yeah like your dollar stores so you go a dollar store but I don't think much in there is a dollar much anymore but yeah not anymore back in the day right we used to have them back in the day too in Australia and if you want to see a bunch of bad business ideas or bad product ideas just go into one of those stores they're guaranteed to have a bunch of like containers of products that were built you know because someone thought it was a great idea and they're selling for a dollar selling for two dollars and you're like what's that for why would anyone need that right yeah like can't you just use can't you just use your hand to do that or can't you just and I think this kind of brings up another thing that we you know that I wanted to kind of think through right is that there is a there's a difference and I had this conversation a couple times actually this week there's a difference between AI and automation like they're not the same thing right and so somebody asked well you just do AI right and or or find finance and AI and it's like no no no like like our goal right with TBS is to one give you more knowledge around your business with on the financial side to make better financial decisions and advice and strategy but we want to help you be more efficient right give you more time back of your day by understanding your workflows and determining what makes sense to like automate and turn into a process or a workflow like through a go high level solution where you have email automations that go out or when somebody accepts a proposal the agreements are automatically created and sent it's that is not AI right that is creating the process in the system so that you're becoming more efficient. Now there's other things where AI is involved where maybe at the end of a month you're analyzing reports and you're teaching the AI to what you want to analyze and then give you the summary that's also right part of efficiency and workflows. So when somebody says oh you're just AI no like it's a lot of automation and workflow plus AI and we're using them together to give the business owner

AI Versus Automation In Real Workflows

Dave 44:51

more time back right to be able to do more with the same 24 hours that we all have. Because that's the thing that it's no different between me and Elon Musk is that we have the same 24 hours in a day. You know he obviously utilizes his way more effectively because he's got a bigger team right and my biggest thing is in order for small business owners to really be effective and to grow and to make an impact they have to have bigger teams but they just don't have the money for it. Which is where the agents all of that the departments can give you that leverage as a small business owner to truly operate like a medium or larger business. Yeah you just have to understand or or outsource to somebody that can help you set that up and that's where you start making those strides forward.

Duarne 45:48

Oh I totally agree and it's interesting because what about People don't realize they've probably been using automation for years in different parts of their business. Anyone who's using an invoicing system online is probably using recurring invoices, probably using automatic follow-ups, so they can get paid on time. They're probably using automatic responses on social media platforms or on email ticketing systems and things like this. So these things are already in place. Like there's this little trick that a lot of IT companies use where they say one hour response time is a guaranteed part of the SLA. You know, the service level agreement. Well, one hour response time is the ticket response machine, the ticketing system responds back to your email and says, I have acknowledged you've sent a ticket through. Our team is actively aware and working on it. Congratulations, you've just met your SLA with automation. There's no AI there. That's automation. The AI component is where the ticket gets read by an AI agent. It determines if there's already a knowledge base article that it could send back in response to try and help you. It then listens to you when you respond back and say, that was useless. Why'd you send me that? It'll then go through, go and ask you further questions and do more research. Try again. If it still fails, probably hand off to a human and let the human deal with it. Okay, I've escalated this to a level two. No, you've escalated it to a human who can understand my situation better. But this is where a lot of people get confused. Like you're right. Automation and AI go hand in hand and work well together, but they're very different systems. But they're not. No, they're not. And there's a lot of people who used to use platforms like Zapier or Make, or you know, there's others out there as well, which help you, you know, create automations between different platforms and systems to do more. Whereas a lot of AI was never designed for that purpose. It was designed to help you create something as the next step or come up with something fresh and new and unique. Whereas automation typically just takes the same thing and repeats the process. So having a process and knowing your process and being able to automate that process is the purpose of an automation. Whereas AI helps you be a little bit unique in that approach, like you were talking about earlier with your responses. Right.

Dave 48:24

AI is the addition to the automations, you know. So it does it's that extra layer of analysis that like you can't unless it's like truly hard-coded into your your routing, which like if you think of it, you could potentially build a automation without AI, but think of all the different trees you would have to make off of that one automation tool in order to get it right, right?

Duarne 48:50

So go high-level from four years ago.

Dave 48:55

Yeah, like so, like, you know, one like one first message, like if okay, if this person is if the message hits this keyword or these keywords or these keywords, and then you have like 17 different branches depending on what keywords are in the message, to then direct it to the right location. Well, now you can have AI analyze, and then it's it's just in the AI's model and and the cot context that AI to then route it correctly or find the right article because it's helped create all that, and now you simplify the entire process. So AI adds into automation to one, add an extra layer of impact and engagement, but two, a more efficient and streamlined system, is what you can do with AI when you add it in.

Duarne 49:39

And if you look at that, I mean, help, you know, if you look at like communication agents on websites, it used to be dialogue would was what the engine behind it would be. And it was kind of a predictive sort of keyword styled platform before AI really became mainstream for that solution. So it was really hit and miss, and a lot of people had some terrible experiences using the chat systems for that reason. Whereas nowadays, like these AIs are pretty good, like they're not too bad. Like, we've been we've got one client we've been testing one out with for them, getting it trained up, and they're a resort, and they've got some they've got some pretty specialized processes in there in what they're doing, right? And I'm I know what to ask for, so I'm going in asking for things I know are there at the resort and seeing if the agent will pick it up and tell me. If it fails, mark it as a fail, tell my team, not good enough, go try again, and I'll tell them where it failed. But the automations can't do that. Automation is basically just going to come back and it's gonna just give you the same same over and over. Where the automation comes in useful is when you make a hotel booking and then you get your payment receipt emailed to you, you get your bait your confirmation booked to you sent to you, you get a three days later a follow-up email. How was the experience? Was there would you like to book any experiences nearby or during your trip? Follow-up marketing up until the point, all that sort of stuff becomes automation, but none of that goes out and researches you as a person, finds out what you like, looks at your social profiles, creepy as that is, and then gives you an AI summary of the person so that when you turn up on the day, they've got a little information about you. You know, some of these AI systems are very in-depth and very in, you know, very able to do that and tie into the automations. But for the most people in business, they're still two very separate things.

Dave 51:45

Right. And a lot of a lot of small business owners, they just don't know the automation full full out. Like there's probably, I mean, even me, like there's still things that I should probably build out better automations for. I just don't have the time, right? I don't, I don't have like there's a lot of things that you think about that you're probably like, oh, I should I should really automate that. Or I need to build that into a process, right? So, you know, a an agreement signature process or a follow-up journey, you know, all of those things need to be built out with your prospects, your with your new contacts, you you know, anything, instead of you having to rely on yourself to remember to do it manually.

Duarne 52:29

Well, one of my biggest problems always being with automation is I only ever consider automation typically if it's something I have to do more than once, if it's something that I have to repeat up repeatably do. And I also have to consider how much human interaction or how much thinking I have to do to determine the outcome sometimes. And if in automation, can I even automate the whole thing or just a portion of it? When you start combining automation with AI, you can get a lot further through the process, but you still need to understand what the full process is to be able to build that. And one thing that consistently I see happening is people jump onto things like cowork with Claude and go, I want to do this, and they tell it what they want to do. And then you look at it and go, Well, 50% of that could have been an automation and saves you all those tokens. But because it's getting the result they want, they don't really care. So, no, it's all right, it's just it's getting what I want. I'm not, I'm happy with that. Whereas you can do a lot more with automation if you understand what those automations actually are and the benefits of them are, and how you can tie those systems together. But you've also got to understand that sometimes automations or and AI are not the complete answer. Sometimes you need to tie that human interaction into it as well. Because the human oversight, the human like you do with your messaging, that human interaction makes a huge difference. Someone checking, you know, if there's something's being done a little bit off or something's not quite right, all it takes sometimes is casting a set of real eyes over it to see, oh, they've used the wrong logo, they've used the wrong color. Oh, that's

Agent Teams Oversight And CEO Time

Duarne 54:11

not the right information. They've referenced the wrong customer here.

Dave 54:15

Um it's it's literally like you are becoming you're becoming a CEO, a president, to staff, right? And you wouldn't, if you're if you're a true CEO or two chief anything, you wouldn't just let your staff go out and do anything and everything without ever checking, without ever ensuring that it's correct, right? And that's how you have to start acting with AI, right? With your agents, you know, that's why for me, everything still got to come through to me. You know, I have to approve it, I have to see it in order to make sure that it's correct before anything gets done. Because I'm that approval source. But what it's what it gives you the power of is now you have teams, and you know how we've built it is you know, we have nine different departments with eight to ten subagents under, you know, technically employees underneath every one of those departments. And then when a task goes to one of them, right, it still goes up to the orchestrator, which is the main high level, whether it's a CFO, whether it's you know, a CIO or COO, whatever it ends up being. But even then, it still got to come back to me to be approved, right? To say yes, that's on brand, or yes, that's what I wanted to say, or you know, anything like that. So exactly. But but now I get to manage my time more like a CEO and visionary versus being in the trenches and have to do everything, you know, and that's ultimately where you're gonna end up growing a business, is because you can't grow a business if you're the one doing all the work.

Duarne 55:42

It also helps you from getting sidetracked. Yeah, how many times you started doing something and find yourself completely sidetracked doing the project? I mean, it's like picking up your cell phone and seeing all the notifications. And when you picked and then going, what did I pick the phone up for? And you knew you had a reason for it. It was to check a bank account or transfer something or respond to somebody, it was something, but you got sidetracked with it. Having these automations and having some of these processes with agents ran just means that you don't have to think about those things so much until they get to the level where you do have to think about them. And by that point, hopefully it's already 80-90% done. And you're just giving some feedback, you're giving some review, it's like you're doing the QA on it, you're doing that quality check just to make sure everything's okay, and give some feedback. And keep in mind that a lot of these systems are learning all the time, so when they learn, they get better. So you can give it the feedback, and it's gonna get better and hopefully not make those mistakes as often.

Dave 56:45

Well, and I and I so and it may be been changed, but I think right now I have Hermes is one that self-learns, but it's picking and choosing what itself learns. You can have more control over it, right? And you could also like auto have like run schedule jobs where it's like running new tests to improve itself, and that that is not something that's standard, like that's something you'd have to schedule out, but it does have a typical auto memory. Whenever you tell it something, it will put it into its memory to update it. Now, Claude, on the other hand, doesn't come out just out of the box with a memory system, like you have to build it into Claude and say, This is what I want you to do. Here's how I want you to update your memory and kind of build all that process, build the memory.md file and and and all of that. So some of them, like a Hermes agent, does continue to constantly evolve itself, and some of them don't. So you really have to make sure that teaches skills, you're teaching.

Duarne 57:46

It's like an employee. What do you do when you get an employee? You teach them skills. You so my my suggestion, and that's actually I'm helping a couple of clients at the moment in initiate and run some Hermes agents within their business, and there's various reasons as to why we're doing that. But one of the things that we've been doing is creating a trading guide to get that agent trained up over the first few weeks with everything that the client wants, and that's gonna be the onboarding process where we take all that all those skills are being taught in their own personal frontier models, the chat GPTs, the Clauds. We're gonna take those, turn them into skill sets to train our Hermes agents on, teach Hermes how to accept those and learn from those, then build out you know, projects and skill and channels and the like in another platform so that we could utilize those through the team, right? And this is one of the things that gets a little bit more complicated when you start playing with these platforms because each of these platforms have limitations that you need to understand, and then when you start using something like Hermes, it's kind of like a super agent that you can just go and you know link up with different platforms, right? But I mean, I'm looking up at my Hermes at the moment, and about a week ago I updated it, and I'm pretty sure it was like 14,000 updates at that point. I'm looking at it now. There is now 19,656 new changes available. Click what's new, that's a lot of changes. So, like these platforms are just changing so rapidly and so quickly, and most of the time they're not regressions, most of the time, most of the time, these are improvements because there is so many people using them. And one of the things that I've been asked a few times is, but it's free, isn't it? And it's like, yes, it is a free download. You still need to plug in your own AI platforms to make it work. You have to connect your own codecs, you have to connect your own APIs through Claude, etc. And if you connect the wrong ones, it can be expensive. So understanding a little bit about it can definitely help you, but it also you've got to understand how to communicate with it still too, and you've got to know that you've got to train it just like a regular employee. Take time, work out a training plan. What do you want it to know? One of my clients, we taught it how to be a network engineer. He was about to change all of his equipment, and I and he was saying to me today, I'm so stressed, can't get something to work. And I said, Have you asked your Hermes that we trained up to be a network engineer? Oh, forgot about that. Go and talk to Hermes, see what it can see if he can figure it out. And 30 minutes later, he had a whole different direction on things to check and test. So I'm sure I'll check into it tomorrow and I'll find out if he actually achieved the goal of getting what he wanted working. But at least he had a sidekick, a partner, someone to help him, and he could bounce concepts and ideas and and problems across who could give him some feedback. Right.

Dave 1:01:05

Um, obviously, and we've talked about it over the last week and a half. You know, Hermes was something that I didn't fully understand in terms of like, oh, I have cloud code, I have cloud cowork, I don't need a Hermes, I don't need something else. So I didn't, I didn't touch it, right? I didn't use it. Week and a half ago, said, hey, let's look into this, and now it's just been a complete game changer in terms of what I'm able to do on a day-to-day basis, because it's that missing layer that Claude Cowork or any cowork specifically doesn't give you, because it allows you to do everything, you know, remotely or you know, on that computer, and this and this allows you to, which we talked about, like have that separate agent-only computer that is on running, and it's not on your main computer that you have to do day-to-day business on, right?

Duarne 1:01:59

And that's important. Let's just let's just touch on that a bit for a second. Both of us started with it on our main machines, and both of us made the decision very quickly to move it across to a dedicated machine.

unknown 1:02:12

Right.

Duarne 1:02:12

And you're probably thinking, why is your machine not fast enough? No, both of our machines are plenty fast enough for what we do every

Why Hermes Needs A Dedicated Machine

Duarne 1:02:20

day. The problem wasn't that. It's that sometimes the way it actually works, Hermes will take over your computer and start using browser windows, it'll start doing testing, it'll start using PowerShell scripts and running different things. So every time it does that, you basically have to sit there and wait for it to finish doing what it's doing, which interrupts your workday.

Dave 1:02:43

And you could be in a meeting, it could like close down all the all the other windows that it's not using in order to make sure it's clicking on the right thing. So, yeah, it's and and what I love about the computer piece, right, is now it's it's yours, right? So, like everything's there, you know, you're not trying to run virtually, you know, and all this different stuff. So it now stays on that PC. Now the models and on all the operations are still like cloud-based, right?

Duarne 1:03:09

So you still got to be um it can be, unless you run your local models. There is a functionality to run local models with it as well, if your computer that you're running on support, but you can also set rules in there that use local models for certain data sensitive requirements, and then others for that are not, you use those frontier models if you want to. There is a lot of control. The average person is going to get a little stressed out about all of those. So if you're worried about data sovereignty and things like that, my suggestion would be start using with the stuff that's not data sovereignty concerning for you. Just use it for regular stuff. I've got mine trained up on my main machine here to manage my Cloudflare account and build all my complex tunnels and everything, run my virtual hosting environment and all my Linux machines. It jumps in and manages and updates all those for me. So all of that sort of stuff, which is time consuming and it stresses me out because I get a syntax wrong when I'm typing it and stuff like that. It just handles that, which is really cool. That sort of stuff's really useful.

Dave 1:04:20

So I think so. I know we I mean that this is a big topic. So I think maybe maybe next week we dive deeper, right? And kind of like the setting it up, like what it is. Like, I think because there's probably a lot of people that are that don't understand, like they hear it all the time, but they don't understand, kind of like what where I was uh you know two weeks ago. And and then you can we both can kind of chat more about what we're doing, how we're using it, and how how simple it was to really kind of set up and what we're doing. So because I know we're at about an hour and I gotta jump, but yeah.

Duarne 1:04:52

But one thing to keep in mind too about this topic for ready for next week is if you've heard open claw as part of you know something that's getting around, Hermes is effectively very similar to that, but a lot better in a lot of ways, in my personal opinion, as well as Dave's now. So that if if you're curious about anything open claw, that will be interesting for you as well, because Hermes is a great alternative to that. Hermes is actually good enough that I would put it on my wife's machine and let her use it and not be worried that she's gonna break something. Or it's gonna break something on her computer, I'm gonna have to fix it. So it's that's the sort of level of you know simplicity that you can have with it if you want to.

Dave 1:05:45

Love it. Well, what's one thing you what you hope they took away from today?

Duarne 1:05:50

Dave loves it when I join the podcast.

Dave 1:05:54

That is true. That is pretty good. Uh I mean, I'm I'm hoping that it's just one of those things it's like find like pay attention to what's driving your energy, like and and really, you know, if something is is taking energy away from you, like find out why and then figure out how you can make an adjustment to it.

Duarne 1:06:11

So yeah,

Environment Energy Takeaways And Wrap

Duarne 1:06:12

but also one more one more real one, and I always environment. Don't take for granted your environment you're in when it comes to productivity. Yeah, take a minute and reflect on your environment. It's all good to be stuck in your head and say everything's stuck in your head, and that's why you're not being productive. But take a minute and look at your environment and realize is it possible that your environment's the reason for your lack of productivity or your lack of focus? And if it is, what can you do about that to make it better?

Dave 1:06:43

Right. Love it. And I love that idea. Wonderful and amazing week, and we'll see everybody in the next one again. We're here live every Friday morning, 8 30 a.m. Eastern. Hope you guys have a good one, and we'll see you. See you in the next one.