Your Tech Stack Is Killing Your Growth - And What to Do About It with David Boice

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. many businesses. We'll talk about a secret tool, simplification, high growth companies, and a tech stack that is impenetrable and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to David and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, is this your year to take your business to the next level?

1:12Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark, and now featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. David, I am fired up to have you on the show today because we're gonna talk all about your tech stack and how it's killing your growth and what to do about it. So I wanna just dive right in with the silent killer. The silent killer in so many businesses and why is our tech stack often the biggest bottleneck to scale, not marketing sales or talents?

1:55Well, you know, it's a big topic within the industry that I primarily serve, which is automotive, but I'm sure this is applicable to all industries. Huge. Because, yeah, because technology has obviously grown over time and evolved over time. And And essentially what's happened is a lot of individual siloed technology applications have been created. And in the industry that I'm in, it's not uncommon. If you were to go buy a car today, you would probably end up being touched by 14 or 15 different technology applications that don't work together. So by the time you get to the showroom, you've seen different prices on the same car, different payments on the same car.

2:41uh did sometimes different features and and so on and so forth it's just because these these systems don't talk to one another so while technology is supposed to be saving everybody time and money and effort and energy uh it's difficult to cobblestone these things together into a cohesive customer experience in certainly in the in the area that that we in uh we live in which is primarily trying to help people, you know, purchase or service a vehicle from a dealership. So we just simplify all that. The world that we're in, which is like we took all of the 14 or 15 different software applications, we put them together in one, and then we offer that to the market.

3:21It works better. The consumers have a consistent experience from initial click to a final transaction. And it's much easier on the end business to actually execute what they're good at, which is serving their customers. So technology, as good as it's supposed to be, oftentimes ends up being the prohibitor because things just don't work together. And the way that people think that they do, oftentimes they don't, certainly in the industry that we serve. So to build off of this, let's talk about why simplification is actually the new innovation and how a unified platform can slash this complexity that we're talking about.

4:09It can actually cut costs and most importantly, supercharge performance across the board. Yes, I mean, takes just basic things that are out there. Let's say you're putting up a website for your business. The question is like, how many plugins do you need to put into that website? And the more plugins you put into that website, the slower it is. the slower it is, Google looks at the site. Let's say you just want to pass Google core web vitals. Well, in our industry, only 1 % of our entire industry passes core web vitals. Let that sink in. 50 % of the world passes it, but not the car business because they've added so many plugins and widgets and so on and so forth to their websites.

4:49It's like a plane with just way too much, the cargo is just too heavy to get off the ground. And that's just one example of where something that's not integrated doesn't perform well, and then Google doesn't rank it as high as it should for SEO rankings and organic traffic, which is vital to businesses in today's environment. So we just see example after example of where things that are not integrated, that were never designed to work together, create these bottlenecks in a process for businesses that was unintended because each of those companies individually is pretty good. You know, take a company like Salesforce.

5:32We're an enterprise level Salesforce customer. They solved a lot of those problems for our organization. We had six or seven different type applications. We were cobblestoning together to operate a very large business with, you know, 600 employees in it. We moved everybody to Salesforce three years ago, and they became a single source of truth for the way that we operate our business. It was a perfect example of something that actually works together and the benefits it created for our organization were substantial. And we were just trying to cobblestone things together for a long time. And we had seven different places for one piece of data.

6:11I think this is such an important conversation to have because tool overload, what does it do? It drains our efficiency. It creates these data silos where people can't talk to each other, can't see each other. And that blinds us to what our customers really want. So let's talk even more about this, David. Like specifically, how do we find out what our customers want? And then what's the simplest way to deliver it to them? One thing that we spend a lot of time studying because it is something that we can get our hands around. Let's say, what does a customer want? And most often when they're visiting it, let's say visiting your website or trying to do business with you, they just want the fastest, most personalized, seamless way to go from point A to point B.

7:08Let's do something super basic. If you want to get your car serviced at a dealership because it's due. The light went on in your car, or you got a notice saying that you're due for service. You don't want to spend any time. You don't care about using some piece of technology that talks to another piece of technology. You just want an oil change tomorrow morning at 10 o 'clock on your Toyota 4Runner, period. So the studies that are out there are very clear that consumers want, often, by the way, what they're getting at places like Amazon, right? I mean, Amazon has set a standard out there for certainly transactional.

7:47They dominate. Why? Their website's incredibly fast. It's highly personalized. You can get straight to what you want and purchase it in the shortest amount of time possible. Well, people want the same thing. I just want to get my car serviced tomorrow morning at 10 o 'clock. Do you have any appointments? They don't want to go through, here's the car, every single detail that takes five minutes only to discover at the end, there actually is no appointments available for the next three days. It's a waste of five or seven or 10 minutes when the customer just wanted their question answered up front.

8:22It's even worse when you're trying to buy a vehicle. I mean, people go to deer ships literally and spend four hours at a deer ship trying to buy a car and they've already spent four, five, six, seven hours online. that it's a maddening experience for customers. So we know what customers want, at least in the car business, but it's no different than other businesses. They want to be treated, they want to be, if they're a current customer, they definitely want to be treated like a current customer, right? Like for example, if you've serviced your car before, you just want to put your phone number in, right?

8:51And for it to go, oh, John, looks like you got a 2022 Toyota 4Runner with 45 ,000 miles on it. Looks like you are due for service. I have these appointments available over the next four days. Click which one's most convenient for you. Done. That's what they want. And so that doesn't exist. We offer it. We offer it in our platform. But if you wanted that same experience, you couldn't get it because most of our industry, at least, you've got different people sending emails, different people hosting websites, different people creating service applications. Even the service applications talk to the backend systems, which are all outdated and old.

9:27And so these very simple things that consumers want often are just impossible to deliver to them unless you have a seamless integrated platform that was designed with the consumer in mind. And that's – at least in the world we're in, many of these applications were not designed with today's consumer in mind. They're outdated. Fire Nation, I hope your head's kind of popping off on what is possible in today's world. We have so much more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business.

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12:38All right, Fire Nation, we are back. And David, I want to dive into the next topic. I mean, let's just be real. There are red flag signals that our tech stack is holding us back? I mean, from declining lead quality to skyrocketing acquisition costs. I mean, these will literally sink companies overnight. What are the three, those three red flag signals that our tech stack is holding us back? From our client's perspective is, are you really meeting the KPIs that you wanna meet? Let's just take something in the car business that's easy for people to understand, market share. If you're providing consumers with a world-class experience, your market share is going to gain, right?

13:18There's only so many people going to buy a Ford in Detroit this month. The question is, what percentage of that are you going to get? And so we see a direct correlation to dealers who are, that if they're not meeting that KPI, they're doing something about it. Oftentimes it's in the tech stack. You'll go to their, you'll click some ads and it'll take you to a page that doesn't match the ad, right? You'll follow the consumer's experience and notice that it's very disjointed. And it's difficult for them to move in a transactional way through your current process. So first of all, if you're not meeting a key KPI, and this is kind of more on the business level, you've got to examine that as to why.

14:06And following the consumer's exact path. And if anybody's ever, again, done a lot with an Amazon, heck, buying a$5 cup of coffee from Starbucks is incredible if you do it online and pick it up at one of their locations. They make it easy. So that's the first one. The other ones are kind of more along the way. You start to say, gosh, our website's not generating near the amount of leads it used to. We're also noticing our closing ratio off of, let's say, our website is down considerably for what was before. why. And there's always going to be a reason why. And sometimes your traffic might be down.

14:45Some of the key indicators might be, you know, your site's slow or it shifts too much. It's difficult to use. It's not been well thought through. I also find it amazing how many people that are in the retail business that don't follow their customer's exact click path, exact path of purchase and go back and try to always improve it. It's like, it's like funny, they don't use their own technology sometimes and the and the signals as you call them or the red flags are right there in front of you like oh my gosh we're advertising this vehicle for$4.99 a month but when you get to our website it's$6.27 oh I mean sometimes it's as basic as stuff like that so we look at lead quality we look at bounce rates we look at time on websites we look at key major KPIs like market share, overall traffic.

15:38And usually somewhere in there is going to be where the red flags pop up, at least for the business that we're in. That is also something that just befuddles me is that these companies, they're not going through the customer experience. They're not putting themselves in the shoes of a potential customer and walking through what the onboarding process is, what the actual step-by-step process is. And it's just, it's crazy to me because sometimes there's just these really terrible customer experiences that are really, really easy to be fixed. But these companies are just clueless about it because they just don't even take the time to like say, oh, well, what is my customer experiencing?

16:19Because they're just focusing on other things. And of course, there's a lot of things to be focused on, but if you're not gonna have an amazing customer experience, like what are you really doing? I mean, there's so much there. Go ahead, David. We have a saying in our company called TLC squared and TLC squared just is think like the customer squared, like constantly put yourself in the position of one of your customers through their eyes. And, um, certain businesses are very, very good at doing that. Uh, and others aren't, you know, take, take, again, I'll speak about my own industry here, but, uh, there's a company called Carvana, uh, that you might've heard of, but they only sell cars online.

16:56they have an extraordinarily good customer experience they may have other things about business the business that someone may or may not like but customer experience for the most part has been extraordinarily good this this company is i don't even know where their stock price is now but it's massive and huge and so is their valuations and if you listen to their ceo speak which which i do or read what he writes about it's all about creating a world-class customer experience. And the larger industry at large could learn from that, I think. And certainly we get inspired by that. So they've done something over there where they created one platform.

17:34And from the moment you get involved in buying a car, you sign up, you create an account. And about 90 % of those transactions were handled purely online for customers who are buying a used car, by the way, a car that isn't, right? I mean, a new car might be easier because there's not so much to differentiate them, but a used car is something that they've mastered. So there are companies out there that I think, generally speaking, they overhaul the customer's experience. Certainly Amazon being the most notable of that, but every industry has people who've gone after the customer experience. And I think they're winning in the market over and over again.

18:12So we just aim to provide the same thing for our clients, which is a single platform that's fully integrated that was designed from the ground up to provide the consumer with a far better experience. And it works. It frankly works, Fire Nation. So many times you want to overcomplicate things. You have to just realize that simple sales, fancy fails over and over and over again. David, we talked about so much today when it comes to a tech stack. Why don't you take the mic and bring us home? What is the one thing out of everything we've talked about today that you really want to make sure our listeners get, they understand, they walk away with?

18:48I think we've kind of covered it broadly, but I would not settle for tech stacks that don't have, or companies that you're doing business with that don't fundamentally believe in open APIs and integration. Because you can make tech stacks work together as long as they were designed to work together. So many times you find a company and you work, you find out at the end that this company is not into integrating with anybody else. They kind of have a closed system. And that, it's too late at that point because you, and oftentimes you've put the system in, you've trained everybody on it. You later, someone later says, hey gosh, wouldn't it be great if company A worked with company B?

19:32Wouldn't that be Nirvana? And then you find out that company B's fine to work with company A, but company A didn't design their system that way. And now you're stuck because you like what they do, but they don't integrate with others. So to me, integration is absolutely vital. And if you don't integrate with everybody, that's cool. As long as your system is designed to let people get in and out of it through proper APIs and security protocols, et cetera. So I think that's the one thing that more and more companies are going to, I think, adopt that open mentality of we aren't going to be, can't be everything to everybody, but at least we can open up our systems and our data so that it flows in and out into other prominent technology applications that make it seamless for the consumer.

20:23That is not the norm, by the way. That is so far away from the norm for businesses that if I was listening to this call and I was in charge of technology or marketing or whatever it might be, I would demand that. That's a non-negotiable, I think for, for businesses. David, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today? You know, we have several companies, but the main company is a company called teamvelocitymarketing.com. So teamvelocitymarketing.com is a great overview of a customer experience platform. If you're anywhere near the automotive industry, where you work for an OEM or you work for a car dealership or a car dealership group or an advertising company that services the industry or whatever you might do, you can learn a lot about our company there and about the power of integration and about the power of having one platform.

21:20We've certainly experienced it firsthand ourselves and so have some of the largest dealer groups in the nation. So I would say start at teamvelocitymarketing.com and go from there. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with DB and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type David in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And David, thank you for sharing the truth, your knowledge, your value of Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

21:52Appreciate the time. Thanks for having me. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and David for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free, freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

22:34Fire Nation, is this your year to take your business to the next level? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

23:04Thank you.