Discussing Automations, Integrations, Employee Buy-in with Sean Weisbrot of the We Live to Build Podcast

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Transcript:

Addressing Problems Before They Become Pain Points

generally I think that people don't think about how they want to make change

within their organization until they have some sort of reason to do so so until there's a pain Point that's kind

of slapping you in the face every day be it I I missed a dozen emails because I had too many or whatever

um people don't really view problems as problems they view them as uh just the way we do things and so if you can find

somebody who has the ability to look forward and say hey we're at a

growth stage this is going to this particular aspect of our business is going to become a problem let's figure

out a solution to that problem now before that happens it tends to be refreshing but it's kind

of rare welcome back to another episode of The Wheel of civil podcast I'm here today with Danny Nathan the founder and

CEO of Apollo 21 Adventure studio and technology consultancy that builds new

products and services both for internal and client company use so I originally

found Danny through helper reporter I was looking to speak with people just like him who are engaging heavily in

automation integration and AI so that we could talk about what they've been up to

how they think about it and where the world is moving in this episode

we're going to talk about his experiences running the Venture studio and how they think about these tools and

how they're using them for themselves how they're using them for their clients and surely we'll talk about other things

beyond that so thank you for taking the time to talk with me Danny I appreciate it why don't you tell us a little bit

more about yourself and how you got into founding and running Apollo 21. Apollo 21 came about sort of serendipitously in

my previous role I was had a product for a video technology startup based in Los

Angeles and um for the last year or so of my tenure there I was focused primarily on helping

other companies in our Investment Portfolio uh build out platforms for

their needs and so that uh eventually kind of got me noticed by a few people and led to the opportunity to step aside

and start my own company doing much the same thing so

um that led to the start of Apollo 21 in April of 2021 and uh we've been running

at it since then I actually know several people exactly like you where they may

not be running their own companies yet but whenever they enter a company the first thing they do even as an employee

they just look for things that suck and then try to make them better

um my brother is one of those people he's really obsessed with like figuring out how to fix things and I I think I'm

like him in that regard as well um so before we do go any further I do want to

have a disclaimer on this episode because as of today I finalized an investment in a new

company that is going to focus specifically on Automation and integration so one of the reasons why I

started reaching out to people like yourself is because I wanted to see kind of how other people in the industry were

Automation for Growing Companies

thinking about these things what kind of things they were experiencing and and maybe there's some pitfalls that we may

be able to avoid um in the start of the century now I'm not going to be operationally involved but I am I I

don't have an insignificant amount of equity in the company congrats I will uh I'll try to watch what I say then yeah

give away all of the secrets with that in mind I really got interested in this

stuff in the last six months I'd say mostly because let's be fair Chachi PT I

don't consider myself terribly sophisticated when it comes to putting things putting systems together

I would never really say I'm like terribly operationally Savvy and I never really tried to be but in the last six

months seeing Chachi BT come out seeing what's become available and having started to kind of put my own

company we live to build in more of a growth phase for myself I started

looking at these kinds of tools because not only are they valuable for me for

that company but they're also valuable for my personal brand since a lot of people are talking about AI now as well

as for potential investees and things like that so my first experience was really like

zapier and that was a few months ago and like I had a singular goal to create a uh an

automated workflow for a passport company that I'm trying to to form well

a password company that I've recently launched that's going to help people to purchase citizenship through

um uh like investment usually they'll donate to a specific government's economic diversification fund Etc

um and so I wanted to do it lean I wanted to build an automated workflow for building a referral Network

I spent weeks and weeks in weeks trying to make this process work and eventually

I gave up and did 80 of it manually um and so I the reason why I share this is

because it's probably something similar to what you've experienced with your

clients when you first start talking to them they're like well this is what I want to do but maybe they don't know how

to do it or they don't know what the process is and how it can be done so like why don't we talk about

um what you think or what you see the starting point is for most Founders and

most companies that you come across right now in terms of automation I think that um in our experience a lot of the

need or the interest in automation comes from companies that uh fall into the

realm of what we tend to call Tech motivated and so they're companies that are not technology companies

um by trade uh but rather companies that are you know operating doing their thing

and growing but who understand the technology can help them streamline those operations can help them

um move their business forward grow faster Etc without having to scale their human

Automating Workflows for a Financial Services Company

resources at uh the same Pace that they would otherwise and so uh a couple of

examples I mean we've we've worked on major automation projects for a financial services company for example

and they came to us essentially and said we do everything via email we run literally thousands of transactions

every day and I mean it doesn't take a huge leap to figure out that thousands of emails every day will be overwhelming

will cause things to be missed and uh eventually make some clients unhappy make some employees pretty stressed out

and so we sat down with them and really started at kind of square one and

um evaluated their internal workflows which I think it was a process they had never been through and so even just

asking them to describe what the day-to-day looks like or what the um the

flow of tasks through the the company looks like um was more of an undertaking I think

than we expected and so as we began to kind of paint that picture we were able to work with them to boil down their

their kind of core processes and workflows to um I think we ended up at four or five

workflows that cover like 80 to 90 percent of their needs and we started

building out an instance of our mission control platform that would automate those workflows for them and so the

edict essentially that came down was we never want to look at email again um unless it's from a client and we want

a system that will help us keep track of all of these requests that will keep audit logs uh we're dealing with

financial data so of course it has to be built with security in mind um and really kind of went step by step

and evaluated everything along the way until we could achieve that Edict of no more emails we want to handle everything

through Mission Control and so uh you know that was one of our early you kind of major forays into

Automation and I think last time we spoke Sean we were talking integration as well which of course becomes kind of

a core part of the thinking around automation or at least the expanse of Cape the expanding capabilities there so

that your automated workflows can handle more of what you're trying to get done so

um we have another instance of Mission Control that's been stood up that functions much like a CRM and marketing platform and in that case the automation

is focused primarily around um what happens after somebody sits down in front of Mission Control creates an

audience segment and then wants to communicate with them and so the automation there is primarily through

integration and uh the ability to send out SMS push and email notifications all

at a click um and so you know we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to

streamline operations through that um that automation capability and build

those those functions into Mission Control in particular and then into the other

Documentation and Automation in Business Operations

products that we're working on as well uh so that we can make life as easy as possible for the people that are using

them so I have a few follow-up questions for that before I ask them I I would

like to share real fast that I am currently uh I do some mentorship and I

do some paid advisory and I found that consistently

these are they're early you know they're they're young entrepreneurs you know in their 20s and mostly

not entirely sophisticated in their operations either and when I talk to

them about the documentation of their processes or the automation of their processes they generally have not

thought it through and they're just trying to get through the day so I'm not surprised that that's what

you've been experiencing so the first question I'm curious to know is how old were the decision makers how old

was the company and how many employees do they have so the financial services company that I talked about

um I think is about five to ten years old and I realize that's a range forgive me I can't

remember exactly when they started um but they are not exemplary of young entrepreneurs they are a better example

I think of the the kind of tech motivated mindset that I talked about so the company's been around for a while

they know how to do what they do they had hit a growth stage themselves which was leading to them being kind of

overwhelmed and drowning in email and that led them to the moment of we know that technology can make this easier we

just don't know the first thing about building it because we're a financial services company

um the second company that I was talking about is a much younger company I believe that they're coming up on two

years old and similarly they are not run by young entrepreneurs but rather by a

team that comes from a pretty diverse background across um consumer applications and in this

case uh the company has focused on the western Sports area and so

um that audience in general and the industry is a little laggard in terms of

how they adopt technology you know as you can imagine a lot of the companies that are putting

on rodeos are doing so every weekend but they're doing it in places that are not

um technology ridden so to speak you know you're talking your uh you know your outdoor horse riding arena

generally in small towns things like that and so uh the technology space hasn't exactly caught up with Thea or

the rodeo space rather hasn't exactly caught up with the the flow of technology and so I think that that's you know that's part of what this

company was trying to bring to bear and to um help the world of rodeo kind of Step Up

what were the sizes of those companies the financial services company was about 80 people and the Western Sports company

was around 25 I think when we started

Implementing Changes in Companies: Factors to Consider

working with them and are probably 80 now the reason why I asked those questions for anyone who's interested is

that when you're trying to do anything with a company those factors are very important

based on what it is you're trying to accomplish in this instance what he's talking about is trying to change the

way a company operates and so the older the founders are the decision makers are

the more resistant they might be to change despite being interested in

knowing that change is possible the and the size of the company will determine how long it will take to

actually get buy-in and implementation and change so I'm curious now that this information

has been shared how long did it take to successfully implement the changes in

those two companies our work with the financial services company uh took about

six or eight months with a little bit of kind of trickle through the final stages uh for a little little while after that

um the work that we did with the Western Sports client

um it's a little tough to pinpoint John because we started with a very specific

ask from them which was to help them get their data and analytics in order that

particular process was about six weeks and then uh we found that we had a

really good working relationship that developed into about a year and a half long engagement during which

uh we built a ton of new products for them we built mobile applications we expanded on the capabilities of Mission

Control that's where some of the integration work came in and I think that um the actual integration to enable the

automation that I was talking about was probably a couple of months worth of work at that point but bear in mind we

already had Mission Control stood up and had all of their data ingested and everything so we had a pretty solid Head

Start when they got to the point that they were looking for for that type of work um and then the other thing that we

built for them that I think is relevant is a uh kind of an event management platform for executing rodeos if you

will so you know if you think about it every time you go to create a rodeo there's a certain subset of the tasks

that are roughly the same you have to you have to get the Bulls to the arena and pick who's going to ride which bowl and the same with the horses and the

registration process and all of that stuff and um the build out of that platform I I'm working from memory here

was about five months start to finish all right so definitely not a short

period of time when you're working on a project like that especially something you know when you look at uh at our

financial services client for example who was truly looking to automate all of their internal workflows and processes

you can kind of see from the start where that's not going to be a quick fix and there's a fair bit of

Building Internal Advocates for Successful Implementation

um iterative development that has to happen there so that you know we can test improve and make sure that we're

covering off on all of the needs that they have so that the system does what they need it to and so that they have

the confidence in that system to begin using it on the day-to-day to manage

their business essentially so uh you know to your point earlier about being resistant to change uh I agree

completely but it's also not hard to see where when a company is uh is putting their day-to-day operations into the

hands of your software um it's going to be a little bit of a process to get them over the hump and

comfortable and confident to the point where they're ready to roll full time on that who do you think is generally the

most resistant to buying in generally I think it's you know who I refer to as

kind of the key stakeholders um the folks if you look at a company that has been around for a while the

folks who are sitting at the top of that company um you know generally have been there for a while they're looking at it saying

um yes I understand that we have some pain points here but at the same time we have built and grown our business based

on the way that we've been doing things so uh instigating change in those situations always requires a certain

level of reassurance hence the the kind of longer build phase the uh the Deep testing that we do we spend a lot of

time working with our clients introducing them to the platforms that we're

building for them letting them use it in kind of a test environment or deployed for like one client of theirs for

example so that they can get used to it give us all the feedback along the way and in doing so we build support from

kind of the the operational teams within those organizations so that when those key stakeholders or the c-suite for

example has questions or wants to see um proof in the pudding so to speak that

the things that we're doing are uh driving value for their company not only

is it is it Apollo's team that is advocating for those changes but generally we aim to have support from

inside the company as well so that somebody who has been helping us test the platform for example can say to the

you know the stakeholders no no I've been using it it does exactly what I needed to do I worked with Apollo 21 to

ensure that you know we fine-tuned these few things so that um we know that it

works for our need and so building kind of internal advocates in that way uh

tends to help assuage the concerns of of the folks that might voice them it's probably not very

commonly thought of to actually talk to the people that are going to use something before it's built I imagine you'd normally build something and go

all right boss this is what it's gonna do and then all right cheers thanks and then the person used it and they're like this is not what I need that is

Involving End-Users in the Software Development Process

certainly one approach to to building software and it's uh it's one that we're not a huge fan of

um that Apollo we uh we do tend to try and involve the folks who are going to be using things on the day-to-day

um from the very beginning and that I mean that starts at the research phase you know understanding workflows core

processes things like that so that we can build out automations that will help streamline those those workflows

requires us to the to talk to the people that are handling those tasks on a day-to-day basis because uh you know

generally the the c-suite or the folks who are um you know the folks who we talked to in

early in the sales process for example are not the ones who are as familiar with the discrete

um pain points that we're looking to solve and so you know while they understand how to how to run the company

and how many transactions are flowing through the financial services request for example

um they're not going to have as clear an understanding that uh that the guy who handles the bank transfers will around

you know every time I go to Bank of America to make a transfer I have this problem or I know that for this account

from this client I have to call this person to get uh sign off on it and so

it puts us in a position where we really have to talk to those people but we view it as a good thing because as I

described it uh it ensures that we get it right and helps build that advocacy

at the lower levels that then kind of trickle upwards do you often find that

there's pushback from those uh people that will be using it I find that there is skepticism so you you know we come in

and say hey we're here to we're here to change everything or we're here to automate everything and the first thing

that people generally do is kind of go whoa I don't know about that you know um but I think that as we open up the

conversations and as we start asking questions of the people who are going to be using whatever it is we're building

generally they come around to the mindset that we really are there to help make their lives easier and once you hit

that kind of turning point in the um in the interaction generally Things become

a lot easier and they become very excited to work with us because they can see that um you know as you said they're

probably not used to somebody from the outside coming in and talking to the people who are going to be using the stuff on a day-to-day basis

um and so it provides kind of an eye-opening opportunity to help them understand that you're there genuinely

to help make their job easier the financial services company I guess hit a growth phase and then they went oh crap

yes basically I you know they turn around found themselves drowning in email and went okay this is unsustainable and I my sense was that

they knew it was coming and it was one of those things where um you know they'd put it off for a little

Anticipating Change and Standardizing Operations

while because it's always difficult to uh to instigate that much change but I think they uh they hit the straw that

broke the camel's back moments and realized that um if they didn't get themselves off of an email dependency

that um they were either gonna have to hire so many people to make sure that all the females can be read or they were

gonna have to to change how they did things and so lucky for us they they opted for change do you think it's more

common for that to be the case or for someone to look at their company and go I think we're gonna grow really fast you

know or we're planning for growth let's create this change now before it happens which do you think is more common and

which do you think is smarter the latter is smarter and it is definitely the less common approach

um generally I think that people don't think about how they want to make change

within their organization until they have some sort of reason to do so so until there's a pain Point that's kind

of slapping you in the face every day be it I I missed a dozen emails because I had too many or whatever

um people don't really view problems as problems they view them as uh just the way we do things and so if you can find

somebody who has the ability to um look forward and say hey we're at a

growth stage this is going this particular aspect of our business is going to become a problem let's figure

out a solution to that problem now before that happens um it tends to be refreshing but it's

kind of rare I try to tell people that I advise you should think about these things before

you start to grow so generally one of the ideal clients

that I work with is making about 20 30 000 a month they're probably by

themselves maybe they've got a contractor they're at a point where they can grow

but they need a better internal systems they need standardization of of their

operations and they need to stop taking money and calling it their own right

they need to consider that they're actually stealing money from their business my goal coming in is I'm going to advise

you on how to turn your business from 2030k a month into 100K a month but it's

going to be painful because you need a month or two to fix your operations before we can even talk about anything

else and generally they're like right they're used to doing things in a

certain way and so I mean I'm like you call yourself a company

but when you take all of the money every month and you only have one person you're working with you're not really a

company if you want to be a real company and generate seven figures a year or more this is what we have to do and so I I I

kind of see something similar um even though I'm working with people installations Yeah you mentioned

something earlier Sean around uh around documenting process that um I think is

Documentation for Repeatability and Growth

not something to pass over lightly and in fact it's it's a process that we've gone through multiple times in Apollo 21

uh most recently just a few months ago and um you know as we think about for us

specifically what it means to build products for our clients and also for ourselves in the um in the Venture

Studio model uh having that repeatable process and having it documented clearly becomes incredibly important for us

because it part of how we build confidence both for ourselves and for

the folks that we're working with that um that's what it bluntly that we know what we're doing

um and so you know we we sat down and documented every stage

of every engagement uh recently and put together a checklist of I I mean I kid

you not I think it's about 75 items deep and there's sub items and whatever and it sounds overwhelming and I could see

where the you know the one or two men show that you're describing wouldn't want to bother going through that

process but the reality is that um by documenting all of it and then

following it and uh consistently asking the question of what's working in that

process what isn't and giving yourself uh what I call sort of stringent

flexibility so you know you have to be stringent about going through the process but you also have to be flexible

enough to recognize when that process needs to change and so we focus a lot on that and we're huge advocates for the

level of documentation that you're talking about because it creates repeatability and it makes it so that um

to your point you know if you're a one-person shop who's looking to grow and add three or four bodies for example

um it's really hard to train those new people to do everything exactly the way

that you do it and uh frankly it's kind of a bad way to work as well I mean when you hire people you want to hire people

that you can trust bring something unique to the table and while they may or may not do things exactly the way

that you do you have to trust that they're going to get those things done successfully which presumably is why you

hire them but the checklists and the the process definition that I'm talking about create those guard brails or the

you know the bumpers that you put in the bowling lane when you're a kid um so that the new folks can look at the

checklist and go oh okay uh at Apollo 21 we do this and then this and then this

and then this but how they accomplish those tasks or occasionally even the

order in which they accomplish those tasks um is Up For Debate and up for consideration and you know it opens the

door for somebody new to say hey you know the process says do this but I've always done it this way or I find that

for me this particular approach is uh is successful have you considered this and

you know again if you're if you're a good leader looking to grow your company then hopefully you're open to that kind

Openness to Feedback and Finding the Right Team Members

of feedback and everybody's considering what somebody's bringing to the table whether or not you choose to kind of

change your process to fit their needs or to fit their recommendations time will tell but um

you know I think that being open to it and having that level of care around how you approach projects and problems just

makes business more sustainable and easier to grow definitely I remember when I was working on nerve my B2B SAS I

was in charge of product because we didn't have anyone else who could do it and I was the only person that knew the product

even though we were a team of about 14 at the time and eventually we hired someone

thankfully because I was miserable I was tired of doing a product and gosh this woman we hired came in and

she spent a few months cleaning up the mess that I had created because I had I had no experience with products but I

was forced into it because it was my baby and nobody else understood it like I did that's kind of the the beauty of starting up if you will is that you know

you hit a point everybody has to wear as many hats as they can just to find success and then as you continue to grow

you have the ability to streamline and and so on we we had a similar experience um we had product folks that were kind

of running the program or project management aspect of our business and while I'm a firm believer that

um some measure of that type of responsibility is part of the product role uh once you hit a certain size

finding somebody that is solely responsible for that aspect of the business and the client relationship

um just makes things easier and you know that person his name is Kevin and stepped in and you know he's been

pivotal in helping us do the doc documentation around our processes that

I've described and ensuring that we're following them and you know he's always the

the voice in the room that's saying hey by the way the checklist says this did you do it was it valuable do we need to

keep it on the checklist and he loves that he's also very good at it that

sounds more like an operational manager than a product manager am I wrong yeah

he is a program manager kind of operational person and so

um I have I have had a product who sits separately uh my head product's name is Calvin and uh he's fantastic at the the

kind of product strategy and design aspect of product if you will helping to Think Through

um how we translate requirements that come from a client to the thing that we're going to build and interfacing

with our engineering team whereas Kevin my program slash operations manager is

more focused on ensuring that we're running through repeatable processes that we're hitting the steps that we

need to hit and um measuring the kpis around each of those steps so that he can evaluate how

well our processes are working and one of the other issues that a lot of companies that you probably talk to is

Organizational Structure

that they probably don't understand that their organizational structure is probably messed up and do you ever have

you ever had someone say okay we need help with Automation and integration and

as a result of all of your research you go look I've discovered that your organizational chart is messed up we is

it possible to fix that in order to make these automations actually function properly or do you just leave that alone we have definitely run into that and how

we approach it I think that you know Falls onto a bit of a case-by-case basis and Depends a lot on the relationship

that we've built with that client when that moment happens if it's um you know if it's a new client that we

don't know terribly well we might broach the subject but do so with a little bit more care a little bit

more kid gloves around um how we tell them that their their stuff is broken or that their org is is

broken um whereas if it's a client that either uh we have connections with or that

we've been working with for a while and have developed um you know a bit more of an open relationship then we have an easier time

saying like hey guys you really need to consider changing this or uh you know have you thought about this person in a

different seat or things like that but um yeah it really it depends a little bit

and you know when you come in as a technology partner or somebody who is there to build something that um the

organization you use as a technical kind of endeavor whether or not you have

permission to make those suggestions really does just come down to the relationship that you've built with that

that client so I want to go back to um kind of the documentation thing real fast

because I was thinking about it uh so one of the people I'm working with right now he's also pretty early in his

SAS Journey and he would like to hire multiple people for his business he's not there just yet

but when I asked him about documentation he said he had none and I was he's like I'm busy developing

and serving clients like great but you want to build a team what are you going

to do when you hire them if you're having a documentation to train them on and he's like

hmm here's two scenarios one you slow down on hiring but you spend the next few months documenting everything that

you do and it's gonna suck and you're gonna hate it but when you hire people you can hire faster and you can train faster because you know who you're

hiring you know why you're hiring them and they know what it is their job supposed to be or you do the opposite of

that you hire faster and then you force them to build the documentation with you

but then you're not going to have time to develop or serve clients and they're not going to have time to develop or serve clients because they're working

Documentation and Operational Processes

with you on the documentation he's like ow yeah I I guess my question there would be does the does the documentation

of the process have to be a full-time job for one or two people over a period of months I mean you know when we when

we did our documentation exercise recently for example we held a you know an off-site we're a remote company and

so getting everybody in the room together was of value for that exercise but um over the matter of about three days

we were able to get high level documentation created and then kind of assign out tasks to each of

the individuals to go and round it out and then kind of come back together to discuss as we move forward and so um I

think you I think you've hit the nail on the head with kind of the the two options there but I would question a little bit whether there's months

involved or whether you can't serve clients and document your process at the same time with with at least some level

of success well the thing is he's a technical founder and so he doesn't have like the back end

architecture document like he doesn't have anything documented and depending on the complexity of the

product that could take a significant amount of time because you may find that maybe

you don't have coding standards or naming conventions possibly because you're just doing this on your own so

you don't really have anyone you're reporting to or managing right I didn't I haven't looked at his code so I don't

know what it looks like and I'm I'm not a coder so I don't want to get there but but like let's say you want to hire a

salesperson and you don't have a standard sales process

what's going to happen to that sales person right so what so what I do with him is I

actually keep a weekly list of things that he's he's committing to doing so that we can move him forward especially

because he's on his own soul so you know one of the things right now that we're working on is like okay I'm committing

to documenting two things this week like two documents this to completion so like

every week let's let's hit it a little bit right let's work on some bugs let's add some new features let's do this because like he's he's a technical

person but he's not a CEO so operationally he's he struggles and I

find this a lot with people so just got to keep them on track for

that so that he can get to his goals yeah absolutely and as you're describing kind of the technical documentation that

makes a lot of sense and I I can certainly see where that would take a fair bit of time I was I was thinking more around process and operational

documentation but I I see your point entirely right and like he also struggles with marketing so like in next

week's call we're going to focus completely on the redoing the website content because he has a product but he

Finding the Right Partner for Automation Implementation

doesn't really know how to Market it very well and he didn't know how to price it very well thankfully I was able to convince him to multiply his price by

five times because it was too low so yeah making progress but so I I'm

excited to see how uh the new company I've invested in does with this I

imagine will end up being larger companies because we don't want to work with people that are too small because otherwise you can't really make any

money and grow um but yeah me personally

right but me personally I like working with small people you know small companies that don't really understand

things yet and so it can help them to to get a leg up even if they don't have a big team or millions of dollars to work

with yeah there's a lot of fun and a lot of opportunity that hits at the early stage because it's such a a malleable

place to be where you still have the opportunity to Define process and think about

rolls and seats and how people come together so I get it there's a ton of fun there is there anything we haven't

really gotten into that you think we should be talking about the only thing that comes to mind kind of quickly off

the top of my head Sean is uh you know how companies approach that realization moment around

the need for Automation and how they go and find the right partner for it and um

I don't know that I have a a specific point but as we're talking around that kind of idea

um you know I'm sitting here thinking uh how companies find us that we work with and you know how companies find the

folks that you're describing and um you know when you think about when I think about how we market and

describe ourselves for example there's always this moment of uh helping people understand what we do as a company and

what we can bring to the table for them that um to be blunt I struggle with a little bit

because I always wonder whether there's a missed opportunity in oh if I had told them that Apollo 21 does this or is this

would it have resonated more closely or would they have understood more quickly um

what benefit or value we can bring to their company and so um I guess to turn

it around I'm curious do you have any insights on um how to talk to the companies that are

looking for that kind of automation or how to how to kind of make it known that it's something that you can help with

when at least we don't Market ourselves directly as an automation company but as

a company that helps solve business problems for example I think it depends on how they find you like if you're

doing cold Outreach then it's about finding someone that you

think would benefit from it so for example one of the things that I'm going to be doing for the business is

Building a Successful Referral Network

establishing a referral Network because in the businesses I've worked with before that I've created that are

successful it's all Word of Mouth I've never I've never made money of doing ads I don't even know how to do ads

personally and so when you set up a referral program like that John is it

incentivized at all or is it just uh Encouraging Word of Mouth the most successful business I had people were

getting 10 to 20 000 commissions and they were very very happy and you

better believe they were trying to bring me new clients every day because who doesn't want a brand new car

I mean this was you know 2016 27 2018 you can still buy cars for 20 grand one of the guys actually bought his mom a

house in cash he got a quarter million dollars in commissions working with me over like a two-year period they bought his mom a house in cash with the

commission money he told me he was like so happy wow I like businesses that charge a lot

of money and then build a referral Network so that basically what happens

is if you know someone that knows people that are your potential clients

and those clients trust that person that's your referrer when they refer

that client to you what's happening is psychology of trust right the TR the

trust is being transferred from the middleman or middle woman to the company that's going to provide the service

and so the difference sales process basically goes away

um so before I built my ever my first ever referral Network for that first company that was that went crazy

my close rate was 10 percent and with those and it would it was very

it was very difficult it took a long time and close rate was was uh very low and they wanted contracts and it was all

sorts of stuff after I built the referral Network I had a 90 plus percent close rate I had a

single call for half an hour maybe or an hour with people I was charging 50 hundred plus K2

no contracts 100 paid in full before you start so I changed the entire thing because it

went from hi I'm Sean and I can do this for you to oh that Sean he can do that for you you need to work with him he's

the guy for this thing and then giving them commissions upon success interesting I like it I'm gonna

have to do on that and they didn't even have to do much selling they just have to introduce me to them and I do the clothes I much prefer that to cold

Outreach because with cold Outreach like who the hell are you how do I know I can trust you there's a bunch of questions right you can make content and people

get familiar with you but the set the cycle on that could be one or two years before someone decides that they're

ready to work with you um there's all sorts of problems especially B2B the cell cycle is longer so when you have a referral Network for

me that's like and I've I've already identified the two perfect referral types

The Power of Referral Networks

that I want to go to for this business I'm not going to share it with you sorry

we can't give away all of our secrets I'm quite excited about it and I actually discovered one of them

when I was trying to do cold Outreach to build a referral Network for my passport company

and I started I started talking to some of them and I was like oh they're the wrong people for that business but

they're perfect for this other one so I held off on contacting them and and once we have the website up in the next

few weeks I'm gonna start going to these people and I think it'll be extremely interesting for them and their clients so

uh so yeah for me a referral network is is always best because if you can be

trusted and and so like I've got the podcast that's a form of social proof right oh how can I trust you well I've

done almost 150 interviews with a bunch of people that are running seven eight nine figure businesses

like I'm not hiding anywhere right I'm not gonna run away I've got a company that's established like you know there's

there's ways to social proof for that and so it's just a matter of getting people to trust you and making sure that

you're talking to the right people that have clients that they that can actually benefit from uh from the service

so I think that really cuts down the speed at which you can grow um so I'm you know I think that's

for me that's the best way to do it so if you take it from that approach where

clients are coming to you it's a lot easier to sell them and

chances are the hard work has already been done because that person has already maybe gone to them with some

knowledge of your business and your your pitch to say you know this is something that I think you could benefit from because I'm

providing a service to you and I can see from you know from what I've seen this is something that you know you could

benefit from what do you think I want to introduce you to them I think they can help you you know

um but then again if you're doing cold Outreach directly to the potential client it's a very different game it's a

lot harder I've heard of people using Twitter like dming people on Twitter and

getting closes not for for automation but for coaching and um social media marketing as an agency

like there's a lot of agencies that employ uh Twitter and Linkedin and

Instagram DMS as a way to outreach um so yeah I think it depends on your

your Outreach whether or whether you're doing Outreach or whether it's inbound I always prefer inbound

um I think it can go a lot faster I think it scales a lot better what is the craziest request you've had for an

automation one that we thought about it and you're like oh Jesus what honestly

handling the automation work for a financial services client was was a bit of that um you know my team doesn't come from

The Challenges of Workflow Design and Automation

the world of finance and so sitting down and understanding uh what the workflow

looked like for this company and then figuring out how to accommodate all of the different

checks and balances uh that they wanted built in was um

was a bit of that moment you know and eventually we got there but there's a lot of

uh there's a lot of moments of well if this happens then so and so needs to receive

it and if this happens then so and so needs to get it and uh if it was this

person that approved it then it needs to be approved Once More by somebody senior but if somebody's senior approves it the

first time then it doesn't need a secondary check and all of those things

um kind of around that and it makes sense because um the requests that are coming through

this system literally handle the transfer of just hundreds of millions of dollars on a

daily basis and so the the system of checks and balances and the rules are there for a reason which we understood

um but figuring out how to build all of that into a system

that required as little kind of input as possible hence the you know the automation aspect of it

um took a fair bit of thinking and it's part of the reason that you know that the project took a fair bit of time as

well because we we had to spend a lot of time understanding how it worked today how they wanted it to work on this new

system and then ensuring that the system was capable of managing all of the edge

cases that I'm describing around you know if this then that moments if edge

cases occur then you discharge them more and go and and support it yes

yes there is that aspect but uh it was not a scope yes the scope conversation

becomes a whole different thing um and uh a difficult one sometimes to figure out

when you don't know entirely what you're getting into from the beginning so um yeah what are your favorite AI tools

right now I mean I have boring answers to that because it's the same thing that everybody else is playing with these

days but uh I I use chat GPT on an almost daily basis now

um I've found myself interestingly using it uh in place of Google for search on

things that Google doesn't do a great job with so hey what are you know what

are other services that are similar to XYZ for example and you know Google gives you websites that show the the

compilations of services that do certain things or whatever but they they're never

they never catch the Nuance for example of you know no I like this one because it does this what else does that and I

find that chat GPT is actually really good for kind of helping me discover things that I wouldn't have otherwise

found um and then the other one that I've been playing with a ton lately is mid-journey

Creating AI-Generated Video Content

and um I've been playing with uh some voice AI

things there's a company called 11 Labs that has a really solid um

uh kind of voice Transformer that you know you you submit five minutes of your own voice basically reading whatever you

want and it clones your voice and so um I kind of took on a little personal experiment of uh generating an

introduction video for Apollo 21 using only AI tools and so I had chat GPT

generate the script and then I cloned my voice in 11 labs and uh had it read the

script and then I took the audio file and uh an image generated from

mid-journey and put them both into an application called did that kind of pulls it all together and uh animates a

still photo of that uh that audio clip and so

um it was just kind of an experiment to see how quickly I could get a video made um but it was a fun journey of how do I

String these tools together and of course provides a lot of thought fodder for things that we might want to build that

provide value based on of what we're seeing in other places well I wouldn't say that was a boring answer I think

it's quite valuable well I I just interviewed a guy who uses some tools

like 11 labs and he cloned not only his voice but also he made a digital Avatar

of himself that um now creates videos for him with the audio so he he uses Chachi BT to make

the script he uploads the script into 11 Labs downloads the audio throws it into

this other program and it makes a video of him with his digital Avatar and the

11 Labs voice the only the only thing that's funny about it is he's from Ukraine and he has a heavy accent and

the voice that comes out from 11 Labs sounds American that's funny no what you're talking

about is exactly what I what I was attempting to describe did the same thing where you give it an avatar and a

script and it spits out a video of the Avatar speaking the script and so uh he

might be using did then interesting yeah yeah um you know the idea the idea that

you can create video content faster and kind of Churn it out based on you know oh I want a video version of my blog

post that I just wrote or whatever it is um suddenly makes that kind of workflow a very interesting opportunity and you

know of course as we're talking about Automation and we're talking about the four or five whatever different tools that um

that it currently takes to string all of that together uh you begin to see opportunity in terms of you know that

that moment of video creation and how you uh how you string the pieces together into something that's more usable so that you don't have to you

know go to the buffet line and pick a little from here and a little from here and a little from here to create the final product so how can people follow

Contact Information and Request for Reviews/Subscribers

up you can check us out at apollo21.io we're on all of the socials

as Apollo 21 IO or some variation thereof

um feel free to email us at hello apollo21.io or IMD as in Danny n as in

Nathan at apollo21.io and uh we love hearing from people all right thank you very much for your time and energy I

appreciate it Danny don't forget that entrepreneurship is a marathon not a Sprint so take care of yourself every

day and if you're listening to us on iTunes please leave us a review we've

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subscribe so thank you very much and we'll see you in the next episode thank you Danny

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