Get Ahead of the Curve by Automating Your Processes with Brandon Zobel: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to get ahead of the curve by automating your processes. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought to Brandon Zobel and EO Fire Studios. Brandon is the CEO and founder of Prosper Spark and uses 20 plus years of experience to provide Excel consulting and process automation, serving over 200 clients and simplifying their workflows. And today we talk about how when automating, focus on small processes as well as large ones and how to use technology for tasks that don't require a human touch and oh, so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brandon and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 50-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days.

1:24John Lee Dumas:Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Brandon, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey there, Fire Nation. Something that I believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with, I would say that you don't need a perfect slash super detailed business plan to start a business or be successful. And I think You know, for me, as a very, very logic driven, very analytical person, that's a little odd for me to say. But the reality is you don't. And I speak to a lot of clients. We've got 200 clients and some of those are looking to start a business.

2:10And really, they just need to aim for progress, not perfection. And we see that a lot where just that analysis paralysis happens. And I know not everyone shares that viewpoint.

2:21John Lee Dumas:Progress, not perfection, Fire Nation. And today we're talking about getting ahead of the curve by automating your processes. And we all hear about the power of systems and automations, Brandon. What is process automation to you? I think there's a real simple explanation or definition, I'll say, for me. And that is, you know, utilizing technology to perform tasks that really don't require human touch. And I got to tell you, it's 2022. I mean, there are a lot of tasks that, frankly, can just be automated. And we come in contact with that daily, right, with people that are just spending time on just silly tasks.

3:02And, you know, in every business, nobody's immune to it. Every business that is, you know, selling product or service or what have you has an opportunity in their operation, whether it be sales, operations, accounting, AP, AR, you know, business analysis, reporting. It doesn't really matter. And I think oftentimes, John, the viewpoint is, hey, you know, it's only the large processes that we should be concerned about. But really, the small ones matter a lot. And even just those small five-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute processes, they add up, especially if you have a larger team and they're just doing the same thing over and over again.

3:42So that's process automation to me is just getting rid of those things that you just don't need a human touch for.

3:49John Lee Dumas:This powerful, Fire Nation, because I can tell you doing the little things right add up to huge results. and man, a lot of people say, John, like how do you only work five days a month and run a seven day a week podcast? It's all about processes. It's all about automations. It's all about systems. They didn't come overnight. They came over time, but all of these both big and small things that I do every single day, or I should say over the past 10 years to build to where I am now, have given me the systems, processes, and automations that allow me to do just that, work incredibly efficiently with a very small team and be very profit focused.

4:29John Lee Dumas:And you can build a business just like that too. I mean, when I was growing up, I was always that person like, why, why do I have to do this? Why is somebody doing that? Like, isn't there a better way and always looking for a better way? There usually is. There usually is. And guess what? Not a hundred percent of the time, but there usually is a better way. Cause you're going to get an answer a lot of times. Like, well, that's how we've always done it. And guess what? I hate that answer. It's the worst answer because it's like, that is not the right answer. The right answer is if you give me a great reason as to why you do it that way, then I'll be like, okay, okay, I get it.

5:01John Lee Dumas:But it's how he's always done it. Or it's just better that way. No, it's not going to happen for me. So you have a lot to care about in your life. Why do you care about process automation, Brandon? When it comes down to process automation, like, and really anything in life for me, it's all about time. And if you lose money on an investment, right, or somebody quits, like, you can replace those things, right? And, you know, you can, you know, you can get back, you know, you can get your money back on a bad investment in terms of working harder or, you know, invest, you know, making better decisions, so on and so forth.

5:37But you can never get your time back. And for me, that's really what started this, you know, I left my, I started this company almost five years ago, and we're starting our fifth year here. And I really wanted to help more than one company. And I saw the opportunity to improve processes. So I left, you know, I left my job and I haven't looked back. And now we have, you know, 200 plus clients. And for me, I wanted to, as a, you know, previous, you know, employee of another employer, I wanted to work on high impact tasks that required the human touch, right? I didn't want to work on silly little tasks and I didn't want the people that I managed and led to be doing the same thing as well.

6:25So that's really why I care. I also see all the time where errors, I mean, are super costly to businesses. I mean, I mean, how many times have you just seen like, oh, whoops, yep, sorry, we made a mistake. And that's going to happen because we're all humans. But if you can reduce that and mitigate that, That's such a huge impact. But again, just kind of go back to my earlier comment. I mean, for me, it's all about time. And it's just, it's all about just getting back that time.

6:51John Lee Dumas:Now, I will say we need to move into kind of a challenging part of this interview for anybody that right now has a team. And I can speak from personal experience. Like I, at one point had 13 people on my Entrepreneurs on Fire team. And now we have five and we're still doing the same revenue. and we're still doing a lot of the same things that are really great. But we went from 13 to five people. And some things we were cutting out projects that weren't working and some things like we tried this and tried that. And so there was like not eight people were so-and-so axed because of our process and systems got so efficient, but definitely a couple, definitely a few.

7:29John Lee Dumas:So I can definitely speak to that from personal experience. So let's talk about that a little bit. Does automation mean replacing employees? It can mean that, like, you know, what you just spoke to, but oftentimes, oftentimes it doesn't, right? I mean, you know, if you think about it, like, if I were to give you an example with a sales team, right, and if you can reduce that time being spent, right, from on a particular proposal or a quote or what have you, and you can automate that and write and get down to half that amount of time, well, you're not going to probably get rid of a sales rep, right?

8:03You're going to use that resource, you know, to help generate more sales, right? So oftentimes it means just freeing them from repetitive tasks. Again, I'm going to kind of use this phrase a lot throughout this discussion, but, you know, really free them to work on high impact activities. Like that's the key, right? You don't want people working on things that a computer could do, right? I mean, people contact us all the time, John, where they're like, you know, hey, I have this process. We, you know, copy and paste from this report and copy and paste from this report. And then we sum it up, right, and a pivot table and send it to our, you know, our executive team, right.

8:42And it takes us, you know, 30 minutes, you know, every day, right, every week or whatever, right. Like, those are not high impact activities. Like, do you really want to be paying people to be doing that? And for me, the answer is always like a resounding, you know, no, we don't want people to be spending time doing that. So automation doesn't always mean replacing employees, John. It can, but oftentimes you're just, you're freeing them up to do things that are just going to have a bigger impact on your business.

9:09John Lee Dumas:And that's exactly how I like to look at it, Fire Nation. You are freeing up your team to do what they should be doing, what only they can be doing, maybe what systems and automations cannot be doing. Like should somebody spend two hours or three hours a day doing things that can be automated and only four or five hours a day actually selling? Of course not. You want that person selling for eight hours of the day if that's their work time. So think about it in that manner. You are actually freeing up your team to do what they should be doing, the best use of their time, and that can get really exciting.

9:45John Lee Dumas:And we have a lot more to talk about around this area when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed, all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most.

10:21John Lee Dumas:When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Fire Nation, if you've ever thought, I know I'm capable of more, but you're not sure where to start, I've created something for you. It's called 50 Days to Something. Not 50 Days to Perfection, not 50 Days to Overnight Millions, just 50 Focus Days to build something that matters.

11:03John Lee Dumas:Maybe a product, a service, a course, a coaching offer, something real, and something that will generate real revenue. 50 days to something is my passion project. Each video is short, is tactical, and it's designed for you to take one meaningful step forward each day. Picture this, in just 50 days, you will have built an asset. And the best part, it's completely free and is on my YouTube channel right now. If you are ready to create something that matters, visit eofire.com slash YouTube. That's eofire.com slash YouTube and start your 50-day journey today. 50 days will pass in the blink of an eye.

11:41John Lee Dumas:The question is, will you have something to show for it? Brandon, we're back and Fire Nation loves case studies. We love examples. So what kind of impact can automating a single process have? Tell us a specific story. I'll tell you what, I'm going to give you three examples. The first example I'm going to give you is just kind of talking about our example from earlier with the sales reps. So we're talking about an impact, right? So get this. If you have a team of five sales reps and let's say you're spending 30 minutes per proposal. Now, this could be any like this could be really any division department, you know, process, whatever.

12:19But in this example, you get five sales reps, 30 minutes per proposal. And let's say each of them are doing 10 per week. You know how many hours that is per year? It's 1300 hours. It's 32 and a half like weeks, 40 hours a week. I mean, it's incredible, right? I mean, just on a proposal. So now if you think about it, you're like, okay, great. Well, what if you can reduce that to 15 minutes by half, right? Or even just two-thirds. That's a lot of time being saved to your earlier comment, John. Like you were talking about, yeah, you can spend more time selling. That's exactly it, right? You're going to close more deals.

12:54So the ROI on that is pretty simple, right? It's going to be pretty quick as well. And so that's just one example there with the sales team. But let me give you some real-life examples. Now, this first one, we were working with a real estate valuation firm, right? And they had some clunky code. So we're a spreadsheet consulting firm, right? That's what we do. We live and breathe Excel and process. That is what we do. And they came to us and they said, hey, we have these spreadsheets that we're using for valuations. They're really clunky. They crash a lot. We're doing a lot of double debt entry, right?

13:31They're just very inefficient. and I mean we're talking dozens of users that were using these files for these you know essentially financial models John and we save them 12 and a half thousand hours annually I mean it's that is a mind-blowing number John I mean you know that is one you know that's a pretty that's one extreme right but there's others like you know where they're still saving several hundred hours or you know or 50 hours i mean it happens all the time and we worked on hundreds of projects that's that's literally what we do day in day out but i mean 12 and a half thousand hours i mean uh and they have been using those for a long time i mean several years and so when you think about all that loss right what what what sort of growth could they have had john had they just made some changes, automated some of those things, right?

14:26Made it that process cleaner, you know, I mean, who knows, right? We'll never know. But they are definitely growing right now. And to our earlier company, you know, John, we were talking about, you know, does that mean replacing employees? And for them, it was like, they're not replacing anybody with the savings that they have. What they're doing is they're growing like gangbusters, right? They're just growing like crazy. And so now having to hire a lot more, they're now able to prolong a little bit of that hiring, right? Because now they have a process that's cleaner, right? They have processes that are automated, they have better tools.

15:03So now they're just not having to hire as soon. And those are big cost savings, right? And it allows them to scale quicker. This next example, and the last one I'll give you too is we have a client that's an insurance company and the they had a tool that they use to create different documents that the insurance company has to you know utilize and issue to their clients and for them it was taking them like you know over an hour to complete and And it now takes them five minutes, like five, five minutes, man. And so now they are just absolutely cranking out business because of that. And so when you think about what kind of impact, that was your question.

15:53And I think it's real clear. It's like it's going to vary depending on department and function. So in those cases, I mean, your errors are going to be absolutely just significantly lower. Right. And beyond that, you know, when you talk about from a financial perspective, John, like, there's usually a huge positive financial impact when you are automating processes. And the reason for that is, again, you're saving time, you're reducing your error. And so people are able to spend more time on things like sales and the quality of their product or service, any number of things. And so those are huge impacts, real life examples that I gave you.

16:31I'll give you one more. We had a client, it was taking her like three days every month to do this. They're an online retailer and to generate commissions, John. It was taking her three days to do that. We automated it to less than a minute. So when you think about that, now they have time for pet projects, right? And things like that. And those pet projects are important because those are the things like I can think with you, John, right? You've automated a bunch of processes in your business, right? you've grown like crazy over the years and had great success, right? Those things where you can really improve the quality of your service and your product or your, you know, how streamlined your operation is, those, the way you do that is having time and the space to do that, right?

17:19And you can't do that if you're spending time on low impact tasks that just simply just should be automated.

17:25John Lee Dumas:And let's talk about happiness of your employees. Like, do you think people want to do processes that can be automated. That's mind numbing tasks. I mean, that's a person like pushing a button at a factory and literally going insane. Because again, these are potentially mind numbing processes that don't have to be done. You can give them creative things, those pet projects that Brandon just shared. That's exciting. That keeps your employees happy. So if we're going to go all in on this, Brandon, I mean, obviously, I'm convinced I hope Fire nation as well. We want to ensure the best results. How can we do this?

18:01And actually, before we talk about that, like I kind of want to piggyback on what you were talking about when you're talking about the happiness of employees. And I mean, for sure, right? I mean, if you think about how many times, you know, I think about my years in management, it's about, I spent about 20 years in management before I started my own company. And how many times have people left because they just aren't challenged, right? And they're working on a task that just isn't, you know yeah it's just mind numbing right and uh to your point right like they're just not gonna be happy and happy people don't stay so i mean i think that's an important point that you made there right like you want to be fulfilled and people want to be fulfilled and especially when there's technology and when people know that there's a better way right they don't want to stay right so i think that you know just it's a great point you brought up i think it's good to highlight that for people that might be listening is you know you want to keep good people people People are really what drive business.

18:53That's what's going to separate you from your competitors, just continually making better decisions and having employees and team members that also make better decisions. And they're going to do that if you keep them and you keep them challenged. So back to your question, you said, OK, how do we ensure the best results? So this is a multifaceted answer here, John. But let me let me kind of give you, in my opinion, how you best approach. approach hey how do we you know automate a process how do we improve that process just in general well the first thing you got to do john is just determine should this be an employee right should it be an employee process that should be handled should it be automated in some cases john there might be a situation especially if it's sensitive information where you don't want to automate it and maybe it does need to be handled by a human being aka you know like an employee, right?

19:45In other cases, like it's, again, mind-numbing, right? It should just be automated. And we'll talk about that here in a moment. Or in some cases, you just can't automate it, right? You need to outsource it. And let me talk about where you might need to do that. We had a client that came to us and said, listen, we want you to, we get these PDFs, their invoices, our services to review invoices. We want to extract that text from those PDFs, right, and pull it into a spreadsheet so we can review and analyze that data? Well, I said, well, how important is accuracy? Of course, their answer was, well, very important.

20:22I said, well, in that case, that technology isn't super accurate, right? You should probably just outsource some of that because the quality of those PDFs and some of them are scanned and you're just not going to be able to extract that. And so in some cases, you really just need to just outsource certain tasks like you can't automate them or you shouldn't automate them or they're just not going to be uh consistent so that's the first thing you really should do when you're thinking how do you ensure the best results well just determine if it should even be automated right or if it should be outsourced or handled by an internal resource the next thing is really just to have a project scope you know if you're gonna if you're going to approach even internal resource john it's like it's i'm not even talking for an external resource but if you're using internal or external, you should really have some sort of project scope.

21:07And it doesn't have to be like this big formal document, right? It can really be, you know, something as simple as just, you know, an email with some bullet points just to outline, hey, here are the things that we need to accomplish. Here's the problem. What do we need to, you know, how do we address it? You know, what, you know, what, what, what does success look like? Outlining that, you know, writing that down is important. We get a lot of folks that come to us and don't have anything written down, right? And it's hard to ensure success, right? So just mind you that, again, regardless, have something written down, it's going to help you be successful.

21:45If you're utilizing an external resource, John, so let's say you are going to a firm like myself or others and freelance or whatever, you need to determine, hey, is this time sensitive, right in some cases like you know hey you're you're taking to a freelancer maybe they don't do this right whether it be process automation or maybe you're trying to automate something in accounting you know or whatever if it's something they do on the side right that's something to consider right or do you use a professional firm there's obviously going to be some cost differential there as well the same with like the quality what quality level do you need so when I say quality, I mean, John, I mean like, you know, for some people, they don't mind working with people in a different time zone.

22:32For some people, you know, the, you know, language barrier is too much. For some people, it doesn't matter. We have some people that, you know, really want to work with the firm and others that are fine just working with somebody, you know, freelancer that does, you know, does, you know, whatever service on the side, right, in addition to their full-time job. So those are the things you got to just determine. And then if you go with a firm, right, do you need the new kid on the block sort of firm, right? Or you want to take a chance or do you want to take, you know, more of a reputable firm with large client list, you know, proven success.

23:04So those are all the things that you want to determine. And I think that goes with really any service, business service that you're choosing, but certainly for automation, right? You really got to think through this. And then the last thing, which I think is almost more important, I don't know if I'd say more important, but certainly significant is do you need future support. And I'll tell you, John, what we hear a lot is we get people that come to us and they say, yeah, I used to have, again, we do Excel consulting, right? That's what we do. Hey, I used to have this guy named Jim. He used to, you know, help us with our financial model and our budgeting every year, right?

23:44Might be a finance department contacting us. Yeah, we used to have Jim. He doesn't decide, oh, he's no longer available. You know, he moved to, you know, Puerto Rico, right? You know, wherever. And the difference there is, is for some people, that really can be a big problem, right? Because when they fast forward to next year, maybe it's an annual thing, maybe it's something they do quarterly. That person isn't there, and they're in a bind, and they need that support. That can be a real big problem, especially if, if they're, if that person, that gym, right, in this example, built that automation, and that person isn't there to support it down the road, now you're in a situation where you might have to rebuild it and you have essentially lost that, right?

24:27You've lost that money, right? That investment is gone. You have to kind of rebuild it and your costs go up. So it's important to think about future support for automation because technology changes fast, John. The world is changing fast. It's important to really think through, do you need that? In some cases, the answer is no. you don't really need future support, but in most cases you do, you need something. And so really thinking through what do you need? What sort of impact will that have on my business? You know, how to ensure the best results? Well, make sure you think through that question specifically because automation is certainly becoming easier in some aspects with some of those low code tools like Zapier and IntegroMAT, you know, Microsoft, you know, Flow, you know, or power automate, I should say.