Welcome And This Week's Business Lessons

Dave 0:02

Welcome to the Business Enscripted Podcast. We're here to share real life insights, practical strategies, and the honest lessons that we have learned from our own states because frankly, we have been in your shoes. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, financial knowledge, details, or maybe just getting your mindset right, we are here and it is the right spot for no fluff conversations and tools that work. So grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. Let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. It is the Business Unscripted Podcast, which means it's another Friday morning, Friday episode. We're here every Friday, sometime between 8:30 and 9, depending on when Jordan and I can stop talking for show. But or I talk to myself because apparently, even when I'm by myself, I get started later. But hey, we're here. So if you are a business owner or aspiring business owner, you're in the right place. We talk about our experiences, you know, with ourselves and our business, but also the things that we do with our clients. We got combined, what, 20 years experience doing entrepreneurship plus different corporate gigs. You know, I have another 20 years in corporate. I think Darren, you have another 15, 20 years in corporate as well. So we are are very attuned to different obstacles and situations. So with that, welcome, Darren. Good to see you again, sir. How was I know we were talking, you know, about our weeks, but tell the tell the peeps, tell the peeps, the friends. How was uh how was your

Turn Repetitive Work Into A Useful App

Dave 1:21

week?

Duarne 1:21

Was crazy busy week. Came up with one of those solutions this week where I realized that my time is of a value that I couldn't keep repeating for a task, so we did exactly what you and I tend to do. We I built an app to solve the problem, and now I have a scalable way to solve my problem. And it was kind of rushed out, but it was very well thought out because I'd been doing it manually for so long, even though it was a lot of automation in the process, and uh yeah, I was super, I'm super excited about that. So we're probably gonna be doing a launch, beta launch next week for it, and we've already got a few clients lined up who want to test it, which is awesome.

Dave 2:05

And and I think that is a way to go, which we've talked about in the show many a times, and I'm victim of this, is that you you definitely have a V0, right? And and so many people, like maybe even myself, would have had the idea that you did to turn something into a project and then try to make it perfect first, right? They're like for the first version has to be perfect, and then you keep adding more and more things because you think it's just gonna add to the experience, and overall you might not even worth it. So you're I like your approach. It's I have this project or I have this problem, I solved it, it's gonna help us serve clients quicker, easier, more efficiently. Let's roll it out. V0, let's roll it out, test it, figure out the the quirks, and then start to improve. And I think a lot of people want to jump in and make it perfect, but once you make it perfect, you don't know if there's actually a model for it, or you know if there's actually demand. So I think going out with v0, you're gonna you're kind of testing your concept at the same

Ship A First Version And Learn From Feedback

Dave 3:03

time.

Duarne 3:03

Yeah, absolutely. And this is something I got from the guys at 37 Signals 20 years ago with their getting the rulebook. All right, this thing, I built frameworks around this for my team. And it's about you'll never solve all the problems that people are gonna come at you with. So get it out as quick as you can, get the feedback, improve based on feedback. Because what you might sit there and try and make look amazing and work just perfect, someone else might not care about. And that happens all the time in like development world.

Dave 3:39

Um, I mean, I with the command center, we're you know, we we mentioned that I'm kind of the same way. You know, it there's a a fine line between trying to make it look pretty and make it look perfect versus making sure the back end works as well. And I think you have to be organized if you're gonna do things like that. But I also feel like testing the what's kept me motivated at least is that as I've been having conversations with people about it, is they're interested in it, right? They're like, oh, hey, what when when can we get you know help with that? Or when what what's how can I get in right? How can I get involved? And so that's been kind of the motivating factor to keep it going. Plus, it's also been something that I've been using right for months now for myself. And so now it's just kind of taking that proof of concept for myself, and then how do we turn it into multi-tenant and be able to help others with it? And and to me, it's big solve the problem, you know.

Duarne 4:38

Well, it's funny, right? Like, I mean, I've approached a lot of these apps that I put together as how do I need to solve my immediate problem right now, and that gets me to halfway to the version and a usable version that I can test and do all my alpha testing with, right? I'm not a general user for a lot of this stuff. So, what tends to happen is I have a very specific use pattern or use case that I like to work through. So a lot of people don't work the same as me. So they won't, like in my instance, they won't prepare a brief to upload. So we have to ask a series of questions to get the information that we need. And collate, gather, grow. And those questions need to be dynamic to be able to adjust accordingly to the previous questions and grow on the previous information that we've got. Where for me, I know what I need to say most of the time. So I'll just blurt it all out and record it, and then at the end of it, go, yep, that's it. I'm

Design For Your Customer, Not Just Yourself

Duarne 5:40

good. Um, I've got what I need. But I think this is, and this is where if you are gonna go down the path of solving a problem, always remember, like we keep saying all the time, ICP, who is your intended client who's gonna be using this? Because if you're building it for yourself, that's probably not gonna be suitable for a client's use case. So you're gonna have to adjust it accordingly to suit a client. So if that's the case, you can do what I do, where I have my way or the client's way. So I offer both now, and I say, your entry point is this way or this way? Which way do you like to choose? And that way I can do it the way I want, test it accordingly, and then let other people take a different path if that's their choice.

Dave 6:26

And I think I think a lot people are diving in, it's gonna be internal use. You know, you guys are probably busy, or you probably own a business and you're like, I I love what I do, but I just want to think how can I make things more efficient? Uh, and I want to dive in, I want to kind of test some of this stuff. And I think the biggest lesson you can learn from this is just for yourselves, dive in, solve it, make it look presentable, but again, it doesn't have to be perfect, right? The idea is what is your outcome? Go into it with what is the outcome that you need it to produce, uh, and then give it that outcome. And and and sometimes it's also even better to say, help me figure it out. And and the models right now are so smart, you don't need to give them all that you know direction of, well, you know, I want to go this way and then you know go step A, B, and C, unless it's part of your process. Otherwise, just say, hey, I this is the outcome I'm trying to do. Speak what you do for that process manually right now, and then say, hey, help me figure out how we can you know automate some of this or make it more efficient. And the system's gonna go back and forth with you and give you suggestions of things that you could do if that's something that you're interested in trying, or be willing to you know, kind of find a partner or somebody who's doing it that can help you put it together for you if you don't want to do it all yourself.

Duarne 7:48

I totally agree. And I think at the end of the day, it's it's like creating an SOP, like we've talked about a ton of times as well. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be there in place first. And the first sign that someone try comes up and hits a roadblock with it, that's when you correct. So the amount of times that I've seen SOPs put out, and then you go and talk to someone who's actually doing the job and say, Hey, you're following the SOP. No, it doesn't work. Oh, show me where it doesn't work, and you find the breakdown and then you correct it. Apps are the same thing. Use it, test it, find the breakage, move on. There's always gonna be one person out there on your team when you're building an app or you're doing you're creating your app who's gonna sit there and their their main focus is gonna be around the UI or the user experience rather than the functionality. And I would say avoid that person until the very end. Focus on the people who are gonna be talking about functionality, not UI, because making it look pretty is the easy part, making it functional, that's the tough part.

Dave 9:26

Oh, yeah, that that's that's the that's the beauty that like the functionality is is what sells and what's gonna support people. And I think that's the biggest thing is what is it solving. Like I had a conversation with my stepdaughter, you know, and she's trying to figure out like what she wants to do with the rest of her life, right? And you know, I said she's like, I don't really want to like work for a job. And I was like, okay, well, let's find a problem, right? Think of a problem that is in a passion area that you have, and then think of some way that you could possibly solve that problem, and that's how you're going to be able to make passive income by producing a solution for that. And you find out a way where it doesn't have to rely on you to provide the solution, right? You solve the problem, but it doesn't necessarily need your time in order to do that. Uh, and that's where long term you're really going to be able to kind of grow and scale and do more of that. But more and more people I have conversations with, you just hear, and I I'm kind of a victim of this right now, but you hear that it's really a lot of it relies on them, right? You know, they got to provide the solution, they got to do the work. You know, now I'm starting to, you know, kind of expand that. So we have you know a team where we're building more and more, but it did for a while. Just rely on me to provide all the service, all the meetings, all the advisory meetings, all that kind of stuff. And so if you're building that way, you're only limited to the hours you're willing to put in to client service. But if you build it from the beginning, of how can I begin to, or what's my plan to bring other people in to continue to support clients while I'm able to step away and work on the business, that's where you're gonna be able to see the growth and the scalability, you know, of your of your organization, which you you can talk to because you have what 30. You said you had 25, 30 people right now.

Duarne 11:12

What how many of you got people on the books at the moment? Yeah. It's pretty scary when payroll comes around and I see that number, and then I realize I have to do that many transactions. I didn't automate my transactions just yet. That's the next thing. Automate like the payroll transactions? Payroll transactions, yeah, yeah.

Dave 11:33

Yeah, because you're using your own custom payroll software, right? For that?

Duarne 11:36

We built our own payroll system 100%, and we're using WISE for our releasing system. So integration into that platform is a little limited, from my understanding at this point. And also, it's kind of like a sanity check, I guess, when we're going through doing the release. It doesn't take that long. We're talking like 20 to 30 seconds a person. It's not that crazy, it's just more of a fact that it's a manual process. I think it's important though to remember that some manual processes in businesses are good. You don't need

Keep Human Judgment In Your Automation

Duarne 12:07

to automate everything, you don't have to automate every decision. You don't have to, you can get suggestions, but you don't have to automate everything. And this is something I constantly find myself coming up against. I've got business owners who you and businesses that I deal with and vendors, they've tried to automate so much and AI so much that their responses come across very generic, very un, you know, very unhuman, and it starts to get frustrating. And then when you push back and you go, hey, look, can we have a can I have a real conversation with a real person about this? I am a real person. Stop replying with just generic you know responses then.

Dave 12:50

My favorite is like when I'm So basically, like they're they're using AI to give them the post, and then they're just posting it as is, they're not even like making it their own.

Duarne 12:59

Or they're using macro responses and stuff like that, and just pre-made, ready-to-go, simple responses, keep reiterating and repeating the fact. Or they've got poorly trained agents who basically haven't been trained how to be humanized on their communication or how to communicate in the way of the individual who's actually the communicating on the behalf of. There's plenty of different reasons for it. It just feels impersonal and frustrating sometimes. And I know that sounds like a strange thing for someone who's very heavily involved in the AI industry and technical technology industry, but there's a way, there's a there's there's two parts to the coin. You've got to have a certain level of customization and customer service involved in what you do to show value and also get that personal touch while still being in the industry. Otherwise, people are just gonna look at you and go, everything you do is AI, I can do it myself, and they don't see the value.

unknown 13:59

Right.

Dave 14:01

That's one of the first things I tell a lot of people, which is why I still approve like everything. No, sometimes I get behind, but I I think it still works because you still have to have some sort of approval and control as a human, right? You just a lot of times I say, No, I don't like the way that sounds like that doesn't sound that doesn't sound like me. Like, let's change it. And then you reteach the system how to again learn more like you and and write like you or or or talk in DMs like you, whatever it ends up being. But the idea is how do you you're you're trying to clone yourself or allow your like employees to be cloned in terms of uh work hours so they could be more efficient, uh but you still want them to like you gotta have some sort of process set up.

Duarne 14:45

Yeah, and this is I think this is the biggest thing that I see all the time is people try to go too far too quick. And it's like slow down. Like one of the things that one of my my ops director of ops just we introduced a full Hermes agent team for him, which is about 13 agents or 14 agents to solve all the things that he's trying to achieve. And I've been checking, and that was about three weeks ago we started that process. About took him about a week to put together his concepts and ideas. I built out the team for him, he's implemented the team, he's been running it for two weeks, and I've been checking in with him every few days, going, Hey, how's it going? What's going on with that team? And it's interesting because he's like, Yeah, look, I've got a few of them working really well. A couple of them haven't quite got themselves sorted out yet. I'm I'm spending time with them, and I haven't looked at these other ones over here yet. I'm working my way through them, and I was like, thinking to myself, I generally work through really quickly and get mine sorted the way I want them over the first week. But he's got a different approach, and then I thought sat back and went, let's see where he goes with this because we don't all have to work the same on these systems, and we you know, every person's gonna treat these differently. It's almost the same way you treat a team of people, because effectively you've got a team of agents and a team of people, it's gonna be very similar. Just one works 24-7 and doesn't complain about days off. Right.

Dave 16:19

So let me I I think there's probably because it there's differences, right? In terms of you know, a lot of people say, Oh, I have I have 35 agents, right? But they're they're explain to those people who are watching, who are watching the replay, whatever it is. Welcome. You know, is it 35 installations, right, of of Hermes, or what are you doing to provide X employee with, as you mentioned, for this case, 13 agents. Like, what is it that that actually is, right? Because some people can get overwhelmed, like I don't want to, I don't know, I'm not gonna manage 13 different right agent accounts, all that kind of stuff. So what what does that mean?

Duarne 16:59

All right. So realistically, what we do is first agent you get in your team is the chief of staff or the orchestrator,

Give AI Specialists Clear Roles

Duarne 17:06

and that's the one you communicate with. So everything comes out via the communications channel of that chief of staff, typically. And everyone reports underneath that chief of staff. And what every person has is uh every agent within your team has is they have specialty skill sets. So we train them up on specialty skills, access to special apps that they need to be able to access and do their role, and they generate collate and push that forward to get eventually to the chief of staff who then passes that along. Now, in one instance, like for him, he's got two different ticketing systems, one for one of our clients and one for internal. He has one agent for that checks each of them. The reason for that is because it doesn't confuse the way to interact and communicate directly with those platforms. It also means that those two agents can then talk together and sync without making assumptions. We also have a reviewer who goes and reviews evidence.

Dave 18:10

We have to when you say agent though, it's it's essentially a guardrail around a person uh a persona, right?

Duarne 18:19

It literally says like you've heard about Grokbot, it's uh an individual bot which lives inside of a community environment. So Hermes is like a harness that holds it all together. You have multiple agents that sit underneath there, and each agent is effectively a bot or an agent, depends on how you want to refer to it.

Dave 18:38

And and and I guess too, like the big thing to understand, right, is that because it's a guardrail persona of that is right bot agent that we call it, you know, that one thing could also be doing three or four things at the same time. Like it's it's basically just a session. Every session is a bot happening and or an agent.

Duarne 19:01

They can clone themselves to do different things. So it'd be it'd be like me going and saying, I'm gonna communicate with three different team leaders in my team at the same time, ask them all for updates at the same time, get all that information back and read it, collate it, and then question it at the same time, and then cross-reference between team leaders and ask them the questions about it. You can't physically do that with people, but with agents and bots, you can because what it's doing is effectively multiplying those sessions for each and allowing you to have multiple conversations at the same time. It's a bit like when you're using Chat GPT or Claude and you open up a new chat, you start a new chat, and it's doing two or three things at the same time for you. It's still one instance of Claude doing all of that.

Dave 19:47

So it has a single memory, it has a single which one account. Yep. So when you think of this, like when you hear people like us, you know, don't get overwhelmed, right? When we say whether it's 10, 15, 85, right, essential people or agents, they're they're basically just agent setups, right? They're they're agent guidelines, rules, regulations that only that person or that agent can do, right? So you can't go out and do everything. And essentially who routes it to them is as we mentioned, right, is the chief, right? You would have your incoming chat, and then it goes to your chief, depending on you know you're routing to your different departments based on what the request is looking for. Your chief then decides, oh, this this is asking X, Y, and Z. So this goes to this person, and then it sends it down. The beauty of that is that you can control right the model you, especially on Hermes, you can actually set up each persona with its different model that it would be running on, because you don't want all these to be running on the top model, it's going to use up your credits. But like

Run Your AI Team Like A Kitchen

Dave 21:26

these mundane tasks of like pulling reports, things like that, you don't need the top model, you don't even need the second best model. Pulling pulling reports can go with like you know, maybe a third-tier model. And so that's the beauty of doing this, because then you can manage right your tokens more and manage your usage. So then your chief is getting the responses back from all these subagents or personas that you know that are there, and then it analyzes and then says, Is the job done? Yeah, okay, I'm gonna pass it back. Or is the job not done? I'm gonna send it back to the agent to redo.

Duarne 21:57

A hundred percent. And if you think about if if you've ever watched like uh the Gordon Ramsey's kitchen show where he's got like all the chefs and they come in for the competition, boys versus girls, red versus blue. One thing you'll see is you can treat agents the same way as a kitchen. Every kitchen has stations which are responsible for meats or poultry or fish, they're responsible for garnish, they're responsible for entrees, they're responsible for desserts, whatever, right? Then you've got front of house who's responsible for the serving, and you've got the cashier who's responsible for their role. You've got the head chef who's sitting there directing and organizing everything and getting the meals prepped and out the door, right? It's the same thing. You have a very well orchestrated team with minimal tasks, which means they could be more efficient. And it's effectively like running a production line where everyone's got a very small task that they need to get done. And that's why you hear people saying, I've got a team of 15, 18, 50, 100 agents. Personally, I don't run any more than 24. I think 24 is probably in a team is probably more than enough. But that's just because of the way I like to set my teams up. Everybody sets their teams up differently. And for me, it's about trying to run a few more agents than you'd probably need, stretching those skills out to be more specialized. Right. And then having, you know, introducing people who review people who check the evidence. Or sorry, I keep saying people, but the ev the reason I say people when I'm referring to agents is this is because I put human personas on my agents.

Dave 23:45

So well then you still give them job descriptions. Like that's like that's the thing you gotta think about when you when you're description, exactly skills.

Duarne 23:52

It's like hiring for someone to do a certain job for you, right? And when we do virtual assistance and we actually provide real people for virtual assistance, I mean we've had this conversation, we talk about the unicorn, someone who can do everything. And it's just they if they do everything, it's probably they're doing it pretty poorly, or they're doing a couple of things really good and other stuff really poorly. So instead of hiring one person you or one setting up one agent, you hire multiple people and create a team that has specialties. And that's the key to this.

Dave 24:22

And I've got a whole But I think too, like when you when you think about it, I guess this is a better way to get started if you if you haven't gotten started, is think of your departments kind of as your unicorn employees. So if you if you think about that, your chief is kind of your unicorn, and their specialties are all these individual personas and things that are underneath them and building it out, like you know, I don't know, marketing, right? You want marketing. So you want, okay, you want it somebody that has experience with go high level, you know, you want somebody that has experience with, you know, your industry and your ICP. Well, here's the beauty of that, right? You can have a chief department for marketing. Yeah, you can have a go high level agent underneath it that that is an expert and connected to Go High Level to do anything you need to do in there, or your CRM. You can have a research expert underneath that. So they have they know your competitors. You have somebody that's an ICP expert that understands and researches things that are going on with your ICP, right? There's so many different things, and then it becomes your unicorn department for marketing when you're trying to search for this person.

Duarne 25:29

And instead of having one agent or one person responsible for all of it, you can build out very specific rules. So effectively, at some point, like if you're talking about a marketing team, you might have a branding specialist. That branding specialist understands your brand and your customer so well that they have to review every piece of content that gets generated by the design team before it goes to the social media team to go out and get posted. So it's the same as your internal organization. If you create processes and SOPs, this is why a lot of the SOPs you create can be translated into teams on agent platforms. And you know, we've got Hermes that we like to use, grokbots out there, and it's got the capability of having multiple agents and doing a wonderful thing. You've got dots now with Chat GPT, you've got Claude Cowork, which has some of that capability there as well. And they've got agents in Claude. There's lots of these platforms that have agents. I like running Hermes because Hermes gives me a lot more control, it's locally installed, it's free. Once you get through the quirks and you understand them, you can do a lot with it, and you can set up whatever whatever functioning subscription you want to work with it in most cases. You can use Grocks.

Dave 26:51

Yeah, it's free to download, but you still have to have some sort of kind of usage with it, right?

Duarne 26:55

So an AI model to run it. So you can run it local with a local AI if you're running a good graphics card, but most people are not. So you'd normally get like a chat GPT account and you'd sync it to it, and you can use that or a Groc account and sync to it. You can use Minimax and some of those other, you know, other smaller frontier models that you might not have heard of. Claude, unfortunately, you can't use with it unless you're using API because it's against terms and conditions. There is ways, but we're not going to talk about it because it's against terms and conditions. But effectively, it's a really good starting point for people. And when I first started, I was just setting, I had one agent, it was a super agent, just did everything I needed, and I trained him up with lots of skills. Now I've got multiple machines running multiple agent teams. So I've got an administration team, I've got a marketing team, I've got another, I've got a social media marketing team, I've got, and I and I've broken it down very granular because I do things at volume. And because I do things at volume from I need to compartmentalize a little bit more.

Dave 28:07

Yes, and I think that's the biggest thing that like you're listening. You don't have to do all this. Like just start with like what's your biggest you know, I've talked about the two lists almost every episode. I'm gonna say it again here now. Like, make a list of everything you're doing manually, the things that you need

Choose What To Automate With Two Lists

Dave 28:21

or want to be more efficient at that take up all your time every single week. Write a list. That's that's the first list. The second list is what's all the stuff I know I should be doing or I want to be doing more of in list number two. The way you use them together is list number one is the stuff you start replacing. Pick one or two of those things off that list and just get started. Like you don't have to try and do everything at once, save one, two, three hours a week, whatever that ends up being. And the beauty of list number two is you already have what you're gonna replace that time with. So many people, what they'll do is they'll free up one, two, and three, and then those hours now get caught up in like everything else that was on list number one, anyways. And they don't replace it, right? They don't have a plan. So we talked about in a round table here in the office earlier this week. You have to have a plan that when you save time or or you know, free up time, what are you gonna do with it? And that's where you replace it with things off of list number two, so that when you free up that two, three hours a week, boom, I already know that these two, three hours that I used to do X, Y, and Z, now I'm gonna do more outreach or I'm gonna do more networking, whatever it ends up being. Boom, you already have it. So make those two lists. If you have it, like that that's the first thing you need to do. If you haven't done anything else, start with those two lists, it's gonna direct every decision that you make from here on out as we get deeper and deeper into this you know technology age.

Duarne 29:40

Absolutely. And if you've got an actual physical human team that works for you as well, ask them for their list as well. So when you build your first little team out, once you get through what you can do and you get some time back, start giving them some time back. And then they can move on and they can start filling that time with other more productive things. One of the biggest things we see is miscommunication with clients. And this is very common with clients, it's miscommunication because they're too busy or they got caught up with other tasks. Most of the stuff they're dealing with Monday, not following up and not fast enough turnaround times, and not being able to do more outreach, right? So if you could do all that ad mini stuff and then focus on the their time on doing more of that other stuff, that's probably the stuff they prefer to do anyway, and that's what's normally the case. Most employees that we have, if we ask them what are you focused on at the moment and what's taking up a lot of your time, they're not really that thrilled with a lot with a lot of the mundane stuff, but they know they have to do it because it's part of the role.

unknown 30:45

Right.

Duarne 30:45

So if you can automate some of that, it makes a huge difference.

Dave 30:48

It makes it makes it makes the enjoyment of your day that much better, too. Yeah, same thing for your employees. Like if you if you can take out some of that stuff that they dread doing during the day and you can turn it into some sort of efficiency, you're you're really just gonna have that much more happier employees in your in your day. Your culture is gonna be improved. It is truly a spiral upwards instead of a spiral downwards when you think of the negativity. So and and the thing, so it's crazy. So and I mentioned that, you know, pre sure that I wanted to kind of show that, but I want to show a clip. You know, I saw it this morning, and it's from the basketball coach from Duke. And I thought

Learn To Handle Hard Better

Dave 31:29

the more and more conversations that I've had, you know, with business owners, you know, they're waiting for AI and process improvement and all that stuff to kind of get to get easier. And so that I think is what I want to kind of show here. And I think I have, let me just make sure I have the the include screen audio. Uh where do I uh I I we obviously you can tell. Yeah, we we don't we don't normally stream stuff, but I just want to make sure I don't know if this will play the audio, but let me know if you can hear it, Dwarne.

Duarne 32:05

Let me just know. No, I can't hear it at the moment.

Dave 32:11

No, man, I there is something, I know there's something here in streaming. Yeah, somewhere reduce and what that's why you when we're doing stuff in doing stuff live, you know, and we're our own. We are our own.

Duarne 32:34

We have ideas, we try things. We're an amateur podcast, we don't pretend like we're professional level podcast producers, but we hope our information's at a professional level.

Dave 32:48

Man, what is uh uh let me I think I know we used to do this a while back.

Duarne 32:53

We used to have a couple of queued up videos that we had play back in the day.

Dave 32:58

Yeah, I remember that. I mean, I I think why can't I figure it out? Maybe I'm just a bum when it comes to this part.

Duarne 33:49

No, I'm not gonna I am not is it a screen share function that you're utilizing at the moment?

Dave 33:57

Yeah, well, I'm just going straight through StreamYard, actually.

Duarne 34:00

So yeah, StreamYard should have a sh a screen sharing.

Dave 34:06

Yeah, because I thought there was a setting.

Duarne 34:08

And I'm just clicking some screens let you share audio. Look for the share audio checkbox next on the next window. On the next window, huh? Screen share.

Dave 34:25

Oh, uh yeah, it's so it's when I'm actually sharing it. There it is. Okay, share with audio. Look at that. See, we figured it out.

Duarne 34:31

Problem solving teamwork.

Dave 34:33

Problem solving 101. Let me all right, cool. I'm gonna play this now, and then you can just confirm. I think I'm gonna turn the volume down. I think it was a little high. D last time. All right, let me know if you can hear it.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

I was talking with Shay a couple days ago, and one of the things we talked about was um how we all wait in life for things to get easier. I think in your own life, if you've waited for something to get easier, oh, I just gotta get through this and then it'll be easier. I've just got to get through preseason and then it'll be okay. I've just got to get through my junior year high school, and then the classes are gonna get easier. I've just got to get to my spring of my senior year of college, and it's gonna be easier. It's what we do. We wait for stuff to get easier. It will never get easier. What happens is you handle hard better. That's what happens. Most people think that it's going to get easier. Life is gonna get easier, basketball's gonna get easier, school's gonna get easier, it never gets easier. What happens is you become someone that handles hard stuff better. So that's a mental shift that has to occur in each of your brains.

Dave 35:47

And I think like it just hit, like, especially on AI or just in business in general. I think there's so many conversations. It's like, well, how can I make my processes easier? How can I make the journey easier? It's never easy. It's never easy. Like you're just dealing with the difficulties of being a business owner better, and then that's how you feel more comfortable, right? Because it becomes part of your comfort zone versus being uncomfortable. And uncomfortable is when things feel hard. And so that the idea I just thought that was it hit. And then especially in our conversation when you know we're talking, you know, AI, I think everybody's like, well, when is it gonna get easier to understand and and set these things up when really it's not? It's really the time, the attention that you're dealing with because there's a lot of stuff that you and I are doing that we are finding like it's hard to get to that next level that we feel it, right? That it how do you get to the next level in AI or generation and and all of that? That we're learning we're hard. But where we're at is looking, you know, if you're looking up at us or looking, you know, at us, and you're like, well, that that's hard. And really it's just about repetition and getting better and learning and growing and evolving as an individual, as a business, etc. So uh what you're thinking about.

Duarne 37:04

I love that. I think because for me, that brings back a conversation I had today with my director of ops, and we're sitting there talking about something, and one of the realizations I had at the time was yeah, I am I'm at where I am, he's at where he is, and he aspires to be where I am. The rest of our team that underneath him are

Make Learning Part Of The Job

Duarne 37:26

intimidated, and we put them through a 30-day upskilling program where a tailored we I created a tailored program for each of them, and they've all just finished their 30-day program, they're probably at a 40 day 45 now, and we've done a reevaluation, we're about to do a reassessment to see where their current status is, which is how I created the original programs because I saw that I saw their shortfalls. Each and every one of them, we had him in a meeting, referenced something, and I picked it up in the meeting, he picked it up differently to the way I did, and that was I asked the question, how how did you find the experience? How did you find this upscaling experience? And each of them said it was like I was back in college, it's like I was back in college and I was really, I was, you know, the passion was there, I was learning, and I was really and it was great. And I thought that was a and I'm thinking that's a great, that's a great thing. Okay, cool. That's a cool thing. Yeah, I love the fact you got the passion, and that he pointed out a different perspective to me today. He said, when they said that I felt I need to pull them aside and have a conversation and say, You realize that you work now, this is your job, this is your career. When you are in college, you are building up your knowledge for a career.

unknown 38:46

Right.

Duarne 38:47

The train, the the training, the upskilling, the learning doesn't stop when you get out of college, it continues into the workforce, it continues. And if you stop, you stagnate, and your career stagnates, and you don't grow, you don't get better. And this is where we've forced a kick start to get them back into that learning, training, willingness to upskill mindset. Right. And it's really quite interesting. He saw it that way, and I saw it as oh, great, their passion's back. And it really comes down to how people perceive that information. A lot of people go in and clock in, clock out, and don't do anything to upskill. And if you're going through life as a business owner and you're not upskilling, right, you know you're gonna stagnate, you're gonna fail in business in a lot of cases, or you're gonna have problems.

Dave 39:40

Well, is I I'm reading this new book by it's called Limitless by by Jim Jim Quick. And it's interesting you kind of bring this up because the chapter I read this morning was about right, how to do things better, right? Remember it. And part of it is if you don't continue to want to learn and grow, your brain, right, starts deteriorating. Like your brain desires to learn more, to grow, to continue to evolve. And so as you get older, if you continue to do that, your brain stays young, you know, all that, right? But and really it's about how do you just how do you just open yourself up to be willing to do more of those things day in and day out and want want to learn and grow before you, as you've mentioned, you're gonna you get stagnant, you get passed by. And the thing there's an example he used in there, he said some people can say they have 20 years of experience and they can be two different responses between two different people because somebody actually has 20 years of learned experience and growth versus somebody has one year of experience they've repeated 19 times.

Duarne 40:49

Yeah. If you've got and you know, we see this all the time that you know a lot of people are very comfortable in their positions. And the one thing I think is really it hit home about two or three months ago when we started our planning for this upskill cycle was we're not going to accept team members who are unwilling to upskill and improve. We want team members who are willing to upskill and improve. We had a couple who decided not to push forward with that and chose other alternatives, and that was fine because at the end of the day, you can bring yourself up as a business owner as far as you want, but your job at some point is to bring everyone around you up to your level as well. Keep bringing them all up. Imagine if you just build up you upskill your entire team, or at least the leaders in your team who then inspire and bring up the leader, them as a leader, bring up the people in their teams, and then suddenly everybody's getting to that sort of level where you're all playing on the same, playing the same game, rolling in the same direction, getting the same results. Suddenly it's not. I don't understand how that guy's doing so much. And we see those silly AI ads at the moment all over YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. Oh, how did he get that promotion over me? He's only been here for six months. And it's like, he studied AI, he's an expert. Go on to Coursera and learn how to do AI. And it's like, yeah, it's nonsense, but at the same time, there is some truth to it. If you're upskilling, you can do better. So imagine if you had all that wonderful experience from being able to do it manually and then introduce all that experience of AI to help you, you either work less and achieve more. Right.

Dave 42:43

Well, you do what depending on like your job too, right? Like, it doesn't even necessarily need to be AI. It's you know, upskill in general, in terms of learning new processes, new communication, new support techniques, right? New information that you provide your clients

Build Skills Beyond Routine Bookkeeping

Dave 43:05

that you weren't providing before. Like if you want to, and I said this before, and I'll say it again, especially in bookkeeping, because it's where I have some of my a lot of my experience, right? Is in accounting and finance, bookkeepers are no longer worth like a significant amount of money for just bookkeeping, right? Because I can give it to AI, right? I I can give it, you know, to anything, and they can categorize probably quicker, better, and more efficient than a bookkeeper. So if you're a bookkeeper and you want to continue to be relevant, it's not about hey, I'm gonna help you reconcile your accounts and categorize your transactions anymore. It's about I'm gonna help you understand projections and KPIs and your margins and your products, and I'm gonna help you identify trends and when things are out of the ordinary, which that's the support that's going to pay. Not I'm gonna keep your books in line so you can give it to your CPA at the end of the year. So you have to evolve. So that's just one example of businesses having to evolve now. And none of that relates to AI, right? It it the support side does it, but you don't have to become an expert in AI to do those additional services. You could have all those things as a learned experience. And a lot of bookkeepers, I don't know how to, I don't know how to project, I don't know how to talk K APIs. That's your upskill. Uh find somebody that is either going to train you to give you that support, or if you're still looking to grow, uh find resources. We live in a limitless, it's limitless educational informational age. Uh find it. Like you have no excuse. And that's it's like every time I hear somebody give you nails, it's like nails on a chalk bar. And I've said this before to you, right? Uh if uh somebody says I'm not where I want to be, and then makes excuses in every single turn when you make a suggestion, it's just like okay, you don't want help. I get it. I don't want to hear about you telling me you're not where you want to be now, you know? Yeah, so I know I kind of went on a little rant there.

Duarne 45:09

It's it's really it's legit, it's real, it's true. And I think this is the thing, right? I mean, people just start jumping down the conclusion that AI is the only answer for self-improvement. It's not. There is a lot more opportunity and up and options out there, but it really comes down to just identifying what do you what's that one change you can make in, you know, and focus on learning, and you probably will enjoy it. You don't realize just you know how passionate you can be about learning one thing. It it can become a little addictive.

Dave 45:43

Yeah, we we had round table with the with the office where we had like a round table this week earlier, and they they kind of organized it, but it was around um Like just kind of giving yourself like the freedom to sort of reset sometimes, right? And it really came down to somebody had asked somebody else a question where it was like, Well, what's your passion? Like, what are you passionate about in your business? Like what what are those things that you do that what drives you? And it was funny to kind of watch some people's like eyes open and then realize that a lot of their time is actually still spent not doing those things. It's like, well, why are you making the excuse or why are you making all these other things a priority in your business for your day-to-day when it's not your passion? It's not what's actually gonna kind of help you move forward. And so those are the types of things you gotta think about. Like, okay, what am I spending my time on that I that doesn't drive me, that that's not passionate for me. And then find ways to either limit those for yourself, find some support, find you know, outside, you know, outsource, whatever it ends up being, whatever works for you in your situation, because every situation is different. But find ways to limit that and then really put your attention on what drives you, what's what you're passionate about, and what you want to do with your business and the support of your clients. And I and I'll kind of leave it with this, and and again from the book this morning, and it's what is your what's your most dominant question that you're asking yourself every day? Right? Is it how can I how can I make more revenue? I don't think that's a really important thing. And I think I wanted to kind of go, I'll probably go a little bit more into this like next next show. But like just think about that, like over the next week, like what is that dominant question that you're asking yourself? Is it is it how can I support people better? Is it how can I get people to like me more? Like, because the question you ask yourself defines how you look at different situations. So if you're if you're if you're asking those like, well, how do I get people to like me more? Which because well, you have that negative you're having a negative belief about yourself that people don't like you in the first place, right? Instead of asking yourself things of like, how can I use this information, right? How can I take this and improve it, right? How can I serve my clients better? Those are motivating questions. So really start thinking over the next week, like what are those questions that you keep asking yourself on a daily basis? When you look at something new or you hear a new strategy, maybe you're watching this podcast and you're uh and you're like, none of this stuff means anything to me, too, too overwhelming, whatever. Like, just because you think you're not able to do it, when I say this all the time, anything we say around AI, anybody can do. We're not giving you any sort of you know secret sauce, right? We'll give you some stuff that we've used, but it's not secret sauce, it's out there, it's in the model. So you can do all of it. The biggest thing that we talk to everybody about is we're saving you, you know, stress, time, and anxiety. You're gonna have to worry about it yourself. But yeah, so ask what what are those questions that you ask yourself? You know, and I thought about this morning and I realized like it's sometimes you can get off track, but a lot of times I, you know, for me it's it's how do I serve people better, right? How do I support? And I think that's what's led into some of the stuff that we're doing now because of that, because I've had that openness or eagerness to want to learn, which has driven me further to do more.

Duarne 49:02

So I like that, and you know, it's interesting because like I've automated a bunch in of my communication in the last month as I've been testing out some new methods and in my communication for uh automating my email communication, and it's very intriguing, it's the sort of stuff you normally would have got a virtual assistant to handle, but I I just never felt comfortable having someone else physically go and look through my emails. I'd rather, but I don't mind an AI that reports to me doing it and analyzing and telling me what I should focus on. And one thing that I've done is it's interesting you should say, like, I actually put at least 50% of the time I've gotten back from that, I'm putting into things that I'm passionate about. I'm putting it back into the things I'm passionate about, you know, building new things, creating new things, designing new things. Because what I'm finding is I don't want to be just moving on to the next task. I don't want to find myself just okay, I'm gonna automate that so I get more time to do these other things that I have to do. So, what I'm doing is I'm putting a bit of time into the stuff I'm passionate about, and that's almost like a reward for myself. I'm going, you know what? I can reward myself because I've I've automated that part, I've improved that part of the business and the way I deal with that. So I'm gonna reward myself with a little bit of time to go and build something over here for myself that I want to do. And that's been quite interesting for me. And I think people should take a it's kind of like that when you have a big moment and something, you know, celebrate it. We always talk about. It's the same thing. If you can get some time back, if you were to get three hours a week back by automating something or putting in an AI agent in or a team in of AI agents, and you got three hours back. What if you were to spend one hour doing something you're really passionate about and then put two hours into working out what that next thing you can automate is? Yep. I mean, that's so I think that's a great use of your time. And there was a quote that I saw from a on YouTube, I think I shared this to you earlier this week, and it was would you rather have a two million dollar business or a seven hundred thousand dollar business where you with the two million, you have to work 70 hours a week, but you

Choose Profit And A Life You Want

Duarne 51:22

could work 30 hours a week for a 700k business. What are you trying to achieve? And it follows on what you were just saying. What is your goal here? Are you trying to be the biggest, bestest, work a ridiculous amount of hours? Well you're trying to have a work-life balance with a comfortable lifestyle. You don't need to bring on a hundred clients to be happy. Work out what makes you happy, works out what makes you comfortable, right? And just and aim for that, and then see where you how you feel at that point.

Dave 51:52

And there's like things to think about there, right? So it's it's obviously you know, 2,700,000 people think of it, but it also comes down to you know profit. Like you want to have two. I I think when I when I see those things, I think my might bring home, right? Or I take home net income, anything like that. But a lot of people will look at their top line, and and the answer shift, you do need to think about yourself. Like a lot of people say, I have a million dollar business. Great. How much do you how what's your net profit?

Duarne 52:17

Like, well, I lost a thousand.

Dave 52:20

Yeah, like like like I broke even. Oh, perfect. Well, where do you that means you have a lot of improvement you need to make, right? It's not necessarily about your top line number, it's really about what is your bottom and well, two numbers. What's your what do you take from services, your gross profit, and then what's your actual bottom line? And so for a lot of people, I think the 700k take home with 30 hours a week is way more than what they would expect. But there's also more things you're managing above that, you know.

Duarne 52:48

Absolutely.

Dave 52:48

And then same thing with the 2 million, like you're you know, to take home 2 million, you gotta probably have a 15, 20 million dollar company, you know. And there's a lot going on with that too, you know.

Duarne 52:58

So and what are you willing to take on? And you know, obviously, when you start doing those sort of calculations and it does become a money conversation, that's when having a conversation with someone like yourself and talking about things like profit first comes into an actual habit and something to do within your business, not just I'm gonna pick an arbitrary goal, which is this, and then when you get there, go, well, yeah, I hit it, but in order to hit it, I did a few deals that were well below what I should have and dropped my margin across the board and stressed out my company beyond what I expected to do, etc. Right. And this is like when you grow a team, adding one extra person to your team doesn't necessarily mean more profit. It actually, in a lot of cases, means losing money and sharing the profit, but it might reduce the stress, it may reduce the workload, so there's gains over there.

Dave 53:55

And well, I think it it does depend on so there's different types of employees there, and so understanding what type of employee you're bringing on, right? If you're bringing on an admin person, it's gonna take away your margin. But if you're bringing on a productivity type, right, where like so for in your case, your your company, your one of your KPIs should be gross profit by employee for people that are giving revenue services. And in that case, every new employee should generate you more money. Yes, because you have that metric and they're revenue producing. Now, if you're just adding somebody in the back end to take paperwork or services off your plate as a as an owner, yes, you're right. That's gonna have a negative effect on your on your net operating margin. So it really does depend. And I think, I mean, I don't know, Dwarren, do you have do you know your revenue or gross profit per per employee right now in your services department?

Duarne 54:53

Yeah, I know what my I know what my percentage is, my minimum and my average. And I'm happy with them. I'm not gonna say them here. No, you know, but yeah, I'm just saying this is due to an exercise about 18 months ago that I went through with yourself on that. And it's an interesting fact when you start doing that, and then you start working out what is your minimum that you're prepared to earn per person, and it's no different to knowing what the minimum is you should charge per job or per website or per service monthly recurring service that you're offering. And there was a quote that I I grabbed the other day, and I think I shared it with you, and I turned it into a nice little poster, which I intend to print out once I fix my printer. It's on my list of things that I want to focus on. And let me just find this if I can. And it was a simple little quote I don't know where it is now, but basically, it was along the lines of my price is based on my value and my skills, not on your budget. So if you don't, and and I had a job where a client wanted me

Adjust Scope Instead Of Discounting Your Value

Duarne 56:09

to reduce my but you know, my offering significantly, I considered it for a moment and then rejected the idea. And realized, no, I'd rather put more time into something else. As it turns out, a phone call that I had the next day made that a much better solution because one of our other clients doubled down on what they were doing.

Dave 56:30

Right.

Duarne 56:31

And the resource.

Dave 56:32

And now there's and I think too, like you you you analyzed, and I guess this goes in this is probably another conversation we can have a full conversation because brought it up too, where you you have to pay attention to yourself. And it's like if you if you see the potential in the client, then adjust scope, like but never adjust price, you know, adjust the scope of the initial engagement. Hey, let's do a project for six months, get things rolling, and then it reanalyze, and and maybe you're ready for that. Then this package in six months. But here's the entry level where we can start getting you some support, it just won't be at the same level that fits your budget. So be know your value, and then uh when somebody wants to adjust, adjust scope. If if uh you feel potential and you see potential, uh if you don't, do what you did, right? Oh, well, then you know that's you know, maybe come back when you're ready, or you know, let me know if you want to rethink it.

Duarne 57:26

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when your budget allows for it, let's have a conversation again.

Dave 57:30

And like you said, you the next day it turned into a greater opportunity where you might have had to say no if you had just said yes to this other client.

Duarne 57:37

So exactly. And it does pay for it. There's consequences to every decision that we make, and sometimes you need to have your mantra that you have internally and remind yourself of that.

Dave 57:51

Yeah, I and I again Tony Robbins quote, yeah, literally just happened. Like he he was talking about like his mom. Like he's talking about his mom who used to beat him. She loved him, but she beat him, right? And so if he had been brought up in a a home, right, that maybe she had he had a loving mother, he maybe he wouldn't be as driven as he is now to become the person that he is to make changes in people's lives. And the the point of that was stop thinking that life is working against you and start uh uh paying attention that life is working for you, right? So, like in that case, that person turned you down uh because life already knew uh that uh the next day you're gonna get that call. Like they it it it already like knows and it's working in your favor. So, you know, just because something didn't work out today, don't think negative about it, right? Think okay, positive, like what's the next thing, and then boom, and it's crazy. You can just if you just think back at your life, you can find those situations, but it's so hard in the moment to do it because you know we're we're human, but in reality, you just kind of have to train yourself to 100%.

Duarne 58:55

And this is the biggest thing I think everybody needs to remember is try not to make decisions from a place of desperation. Yeah, if you can make a place, if you can make decisions from a place of clarity, you're gonna make much better decisions. And we see it all the time. There was a podcast with uh someone you had

Protect Cash Flow And Decide With Clarity

Duarne 59:15

a guest on the podcast one time or wasn't able to make it to, and they were talking about how in their industry there was people who would underquote and lose money on jobs in order just to get the job, right? You know, you know who I'm talking about, and it was ridiculous. Like we talked about that, and it's like it doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? And it's like, well, we've got to bankroll the next job, and that's gonna help bankroll the next job. And it's like, well, no, that's not how you run a business, that's not sensible.

Dave 59:42

And you just when you're losing money, you can't really bankroll anything. Yeah, it's just it doesn't make sense, exactly.

Duarne 59:46

And you know, like Australia just went and did some really dumb things in the tax department. So in Australia, the banks, the government ruled that the banks, whilst the banks and the credit card processes can charge a fee for service, business owners cannot pass that fee across as an additional fee for taking payment from those methods. They must absorb it themselves now, and it's illegal to pass those through. And at exactly the same time, the Australian Tax Office decided to make the announcement that you could no longer pay your tax via credit card. Yeah, that makes sense. And they would only accept cash and bank transfers in order to do it. And the problem is a lot of small businesses in Australia for cash flow reasons use credit cards to pay their tax bills, which are due monthly in Australia. They used to be quarterly, now they're monthly. So they force you to do it. And it's it's it's just talks about you know cash flow being king in a business. So you can't put yourself in a position that's going to affect your cash flow by taking on jobs that are going to be negative, you know, negative to you.

unknown 1:01:04

Right.

Dave 1:01:04

And you know, well, so many people like they just don't you just don't pay attention to the margins. And I think that's some of the biggest pieces where I've had some recent clients where we look at their numbers from last year, you know, that they they set themselves, and then we add their costs. We we they look at their margin like, oh, I was losing ten dollars every service. And then no wonder why I felt like cash was tight all you know all last season. It's like, yeah, because you we didn't, and and then the scary part though is that in order to reach the margin that they need to get to, a lot of times it it's a 7500 price increase to their clients. We just have to explain the value, explain what we did. You saw the service, like this is what we need to do if you want us to continue to provide this. Otherwise, we appreciate you giving us the opportunity, but I can't lose money just because you like our service. Doesn't make any sense. You make money actually by not having it. You you will have more money by by not doing that service because you you know you don't lose ten dollars every time.

Duarne 1:02:00

Absolutely, and this is where you like there's a whole conversation around that, and there's a lot of things.

Dave 1:02:06

Yeah, we can totally go into that more for sure.

Duarne 1:02:09

And you know, you've got that tech calculation that I absolutely love, where working out percentages of your actual sales is never as clear as just adding on a percentage on top, and that's how much you get. Right. There's more to that, maths. It's not if you add 20%, it's not 20% profit, it's a lot less than that when you calculate.

Dave 1:02:27

Yeah, your gross profit at that point is only gonna be like 15-16% of your gross profit.

Duarne 1:02:32

And so many people calculate that wrong. So when you're if you imagine if you're losing money and calculating it wrong and running into problems delivering these jobs and having cash flow restrictions because of late payments, you're putting so much stress on yourself. So just try not to make decisions from a place of desperation and try and do it from a place of clarity, as hard as that can be sometimes. That's my biggest advice.

Dave 1:02:58

All right, sir. That's your biggest takeaway. I love it. You know, I hope you guys had a wonderful and amazing week. You guys took something away from today's episode again. We could we're here live every Friday. If you have any questions now or in the future, feel free to drop them in the comments down below. And uh, we wish you all the best and do all that fun algorithm, fun stuff. You know, like, subscribe, do all that fun stuff. And we'll see you guys next week. Hope you guys have

Share Your Questions And Weekly Wins

Dave 1:03:18

a good one. Good luck with your journeys and look forward to hearing anything. Share your wins down below too. If you guys have a win this week, share it. Like, you know, get get some we'll we'll we'll share some of those in an episode, talk through it. So love you guys. Hope you guys have a good week. We'll talk to you guys soon. See you later.

Duarne 1:03:33

Take care. Bye.

unknown 1:03:35

Bye.