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In this podcast, Sam had the chance to speak with Michael Devellano of the Automate and Grow Podcast. Below is a quick overview of the conversation. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Here are some of the things we discussed in the podcast:
- Finding things to automate in your business
- Tools Sam likes to use for his clients
- The one book Sam recommends everyone read
- He nominates a terrific future guest and more
TRANSCRIPT:
Sam Ovett: Every industry, no matter what business you are, you’ve got like five pillars. If you will, that you have to think about. And, and we’ve we thought about this, cause we were getting people from different industries. So we were like, well, what’s a framework. That’s crossing the street and this is something people can take away. And how to think about their business.
Michael Devellano: this is another episode of the automate and grow podcast. My guest today is Sam Ovett. Who’s like pronounced his name, like Corvette does I’ve been introduced. So that’s how I remember it. And Sam has a company called mobile pocket office and he is like myself very heavily in the automation of businesses for clients.
So Sam, first of all, thanks for joining me.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here. Um, so what is mobile pocket office? So mobile pocket office really simply. We are at it. At its core and suppose is a firm that takes clients through the journey of mapping out and doing the consultative work of understanding what they could automate and then actually doing it on top of that, the technical implementation to make that a reality for people.
There’s a lot that we can get into, but like, that’s the core of what we do here. Beautiful. And how did you get started with this? So I got started with this and about, uh, four or five years ago now. And I think it is something like that, like really full on, you know, full, serious. Uh, I, I was in the outdoor industry for a little while.
Professional kayaker guide. Yeah, like full-time outside. And then, uh, I started as a PA was as a professional athlete. What I noticed was, okay, I have a marketing tool, right? Like athletes are marketing tools. You’re just on the marketing budget and you know, it’s fun for me. I get to go play outside every day and do all these amazing things.
But like really, I’m just, I’m just part of the marketing plan, you know? Um, and so I started to recognize that and I started to look at it and I started to understand that, you know what, there is a lot of missed opportunity here because I was learning about automation tools relative to marketing. Cause I was helping be involved in the plans more and more with these companies.
Um, and on top of that, I’ll introduce Josh not, he’s not here with us, but he’s my dad. Who’s my partner in this business. He was always in the business of, uh, some kind of automation through software, but more so on the back end of the analytics side of things for a long time. Um, and on the back end of like the process side of manufacturing is a lot of what he dealt with, not on the marketing and sales aspect of it as much.
And so I was seeing this through the marketing lens and initially just happened to start in the outdoor world. And then I wanted to transition out of that. You know, there’s not a lot of money in professional whitewater kayaking, um, and there is a whole lot of fun. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I, I like funny, quick story.
I remember being in an airport on the way to Ecuador. And there was a group of folks that were traveling down that were from one of the universities. And the professor said, oh, what do you do for a living? And I was like, oh, I’m a professional kayaker at that point. And I had already graduated from college and I had a degree in science and everything.
And, um, didn’t have any debt from college, from scholarships. So I was, I was doing my thing. It was great, but he says, oh, how do you make a living at that? You can’t eat your kayak. You know, and that kind of stuck with me and yeah,
Michael Devellano: the reality is a professor who like, yeah,
Sam Ovett: exactly. And so what do you do? Yeah.
And, uh, so, you know, after that, that sort of ended up, there’s a lot of the story there, but I’m not going to go into all the details unless you want. And then the idea is that I started seeing these holes in the outdoor industry that I was participating in. Um, And these dropouts, so it’s like, oh, you get all these interests.
And then you were not following up with people. And so that, and the combo just like being around my dad, growing up and him thinking that way in process, uh, made that come to life for me. And for whatever reason, there was a period where it’s just like click. And I was like, wow, this. This technology aspect is like amazing.
You can use this stuff to like really create a way better experience in your business. And so then we started and so that I, I got laid down and I was like, well, you know, I want to transition out of this, this outdoor world basically. And he was like, cool. I’m, I’m bored of this, you know, manufacturing process stuff I’ve done for years, like, uh, with, and he was running his own business.
He was like, why don’t we, why don’t we. Start a company that’s focused on the marketing and sales aspect because that’s where people have the issues upfront. And then that flows into all the process work that I already know a lot about that we can then do. And so we got involved with different software companies, um, that were actually really the tools that people are using for marketing automation.
You know, so that’s where we started developing our client base around that. So that’s how it got started. Like that’s the core, but I think the main thing for me, I was like, oh, number one, I want to go with the internet. Like, I want to figure out the internet, you know, I want to go with the internet and like, figure out how that works and I’m still working on that.
But, uh, but the idea was that, like, there are a lot of missed opportunities out there.
Michael Devellano: And when you say missed opportunities, like what, first of all, what type of businesses do you typically help?
Sam Ovett: Yeah, so, you know, it’s interesting. We’ve ended up working. In the, in the past really two years, our core focuses as ended up with businesses that have a large online infrastructure.
Uh, and they seem to be the most excited to work on this stuff for themselves. And so someone with like an online course or like, um, some kind of digital product or even physical product that has, that is sold direct to consumer or a SAS, SAS companies, those are kind of the big, uh, three. And what happens.
There, those are the, those are the industries. But what we see in those industries is like every industry, no matter what business you are, you’ve got like five pillars. If you will, that you have to think about. And, and we’ve we thought about this, cause we were getting people from different industries. So we were like, well, what’s a framework, that’s crossing the street and this is something people can take away.
And, and how to think about their business is like you have, you have to attract business, right? And you have to then convert that interest into leads and sales, right? Then you got to fulfill whatever you promise people. Otherwise you’d go out of business real quick. It’s fascinating. I think you’re, you might be metered it Michael, uh,
Michael Devellano: that helps if I don’t have that off. And, uh,
Sam Ovett: and then, and then after you’ve fulfilled, that’s like most people stop there. They get occasional refers, but the really good businesses delight their customers. So they go, like, you bought this, you might like this pairing that goes with it, right. Or here’s another way to use this thing that you bought, or they keep reminding you to use it so that you actually get a lot of value out of it.
And then they have a systematic way to get referrals for business. Oh, that’s okay. And that can be a really personal thing. And so that’s like the core and mobile pocket office where we decided as well. Well, we want to take the approach of helping businesses be human, where it counts and otherwise automate.
Right. So everybody starts with automation and they think, well, number one, I’ve got usually a couple of little things automated. Most people have a few little things automated. They don’t even realize it, right. There’s stuff that happens. Maybe they bought a system that, you know, sends a, uh, automatic invoice out when somebody purchased something, boom, that’s a little bit automation
Michael Devellano: makes sense.
Sam Ovett: Um, and some you don’t have to do manually. So the idea is like you can be human or accounts and otherwise automate. You can be the creative person in your business. You can be thinking about how to grow the business. And the hardest part is that attract phase, right? You gotta, like, if you can attract that new business, you’re the champion.
But if you don’t do the others, then you’re quick to go out of business because you don’t fulfill your promise or, uh, you have a lot of opportunity to convert more of that business to sales. And so that’s, that’s like just if you want a guide in any direction, let me know. But that’s where we start is we look at the core of what people are doing there.
And the systems that are there and then the processes and the systems. And then, and then only then at that point, do we get to what could be automated? And then we look at the value of automating things and that’s how you go down the path of automation.
Michael Devellano: So, so when you, when someone comes to you or you find a client, um, are they starting at the point where they’re, they’re like, Hey, I want this plan.
Sam Ovett: Yeah.
Michael Devellano: This overarching plan and then, you know, to build technology or is it more like dirty and business? They’re having problems. And they’re like, yeah. I’d like to automate things like what’s the driver that brings people to yeah.
Sam Ovett: So the driver that we see in our, our best clients, because we’ve taken on some people that go like, I’m starting this thing up, I’m pretty smart.
I want to, I want to make a plan, you know, I want to do this. Right. Um, but the, the people who we see the most stuff and we work with the most are ones who go like. All right. I’ve got a business, it runs. And usually it’s like half a million in revenue or more is kind of what I’ve seen below that you’re generally still like adapting a lot of your process and adjusting it.
And so it’s, it’s not really super necessary to automate all of it at that point, you know, and, and really dive deep on it and spend a lot of money on figuring it out. It’s the people. A good example is like our friends, Robbie and Cyrus, [email protected]. They have this, they have online courses, they have in-person events.
They have that they’re putting on webinars, they’re doing all. They have like guides that people can buy. Um, and they help people work through their diabetes, both type one diabetics, super fit. They manage their diabetes and they use it’s all about that. Primarily I had to manage your, your, you know, insulin and blood glucose levels.
And these guys came to us and they had like 64 different tools that ran their business tech tools. Right. We talk a lot about the tech tools and we just, we like all of them from, from all the marketing. Yeah. And like all the marketing to the email stuff to all the way through to their finance stuff.
Right. So it’s just like tons of tools and we’re doing all this manual moving of data. And they were like, they were really good at it. Attracting new people to their site. That was not a problem. Wow. And they were just. They were good at like their organic content. They wanted to get into more advertising so they can scale even more.
But these guys were doing, you know, over half a million in revenue, on an annual basis. And like that meant a lot of interest and people coming through. And what they found is they had the feeling that number one, we have to either hire more people to handle these manual processes that we do between the different steps.
And we’d like to convert more of the business that we have. And can we use automation to handle that because you know, we’re getting 300 new leads a day. Like we can’t,
Michael Devellano: Wow that’s crazy.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. So like that’s the type of business that is as a great candidate. They’re like, They’re really good at generating business.
And they even know how to close and sell their stuff. I think that’s very important, whatever it is. Um, and they know who their audience is, you know, everybody can grow and like find more people, but they were, they were good. They were a sustained business with a team of people, but their problem was to do more.
They had to hire more people. Right. And it just, they just rolled out a New York times bestseller. They went through that whole process. They wrote that book and that was their challenge was like, well, how do we convert this interest? And also handle the backend process. So we don’t have to hire more people because I think one of the things that.
Automation does for you if you use it, right. Is when you have an issue and you’re weighing the scales of justice. Do I hire more people or do I pay and, and ma do some automation, right? Well, if you hire people in a role that’s not super creative and not helping you grow, but just something you have to do.
That’s cool. But you gotta pay that person continuously forever. And people usually want more money, which is reasonable to expect, and they probably deserve it because they’re helping you and, you know, and, uh, and then the, and then the other side of it is, you know, and they may take vacations. Of course they should.
Right. They should take time off all these things. And so if you have have parts of the business that are automated and keep filling up that process where the person has to handle it, If you don’t have automation to move people to that next step in your business and handle it automatically. And all the scenarios that could occur now, you’re stuck continuously paying someone.
It’s hard to let people go. You don’t want to do that. And they’re not always a fit for a more creative role, or you could invest in automation to handle those pieces of the process and think through it. And now you’ve made that investment once. And it’s probably good for at least five years, you know, until technology makes a shift where you want to make adjustments, right. Something of that type.
Michael Devellano: So I find your, your approach is really consistent with what I try to. Talking to them in, in, um, automate and grow the book. When you keep hitting on this point that I think is important to emphasize, um, you know, what do you automate? And I think, and I think what you keep highlighting is letting people do their highest value work. It sounds like ..
Sam Ovett: That’s absolutely right, because that’s like number one, that’s more fun, you know, to work with people and like, And, you know, and it’s tough, right? It’s a tough conversation in just like, as a whole, as a society, right? Like, oh, well, you know, when we use automation, jobs go away, you know what it’s true jobs go away.
But other jobs open up that are more creative, probably better jobs, better jobs, higher paying. And then somebody still got to like tweak the automation to make it work better. You know, and improve it over time.
Michael Devellano: I mean, it makes total sense to me, that makes a lot like, so for example, you know, I think we get this fear-mongering around automation and you get these old kind of like, um, how do you put it, uh, Lew date views, because it’s, it’s uncertain, it’s easy for people.
Right. And they don’t rather than work to understand. It’s just either easy to demonize it. Yep. Since like union
Sam Ovett: and you see it in, in like the factory mindset, there’s a robot now it took my job. Well, guess what? The same job that has to manage all the programming of the robot and like, keep that robot up to speed and make it do new things.
That job is way more creative, way, higher paying and way more mentally engaging. Does everybody want that job? You know, of course that’s the challenge, right? And that’s like this discussion nationally and globally, like, well, how do people get skilled? But ultimately from a business owner standpoint, you know, it’s definitely like way more efficient, way more reliable.
Um, and. If it’s, if it’s done in the right way, then it’s something that people don’t necessarily notice. They just get a better experience. Whereas there’s the opposite side of automation that creates terrible experiences, you know,
Michael Devellano: which we see in chatbots, which we see in call centers, like, you know, stuff where you’re, it’s not elegant.
And obviously the technology is not perfect and some are better than others. But I think to your point that. Is really important is if you’re out there and you’re trying to deal with the complexity, what I’m hearing from Sam, and what I keep trying to tell people is, um, you know, actually the best example I use in the book is from Dan Sullivan.
And Dan says, listen, every 90 days, and you can do this as an individual or a business owner owner, you make three lists. And the first list is all the stuff that’s repetitive, but not important. If you try to eliminate the second list is stuff that’s repetitive, but it’s important. And that’s the stuff you try to find a tool for or automate or delegate.
And then the final list is when you’re talking about, which I think is really important. Which is, what’s the stuff that inspires you and is your highest value work. And that’s where you want to spend most of your time. And so I love your approach, which is, you know, identify that, automate the stuff that matters that matters, but isn’t necessarily the best use of a human cell.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. Like I have to do it to run the business. Otherwise I can’t run the business, you know, that’s like the, the busy work of business,
Michael Devellano: I don’t know about you, but I’m a master procrastinator on stuff.
Sam Ovett: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are because. You know, not everybody there, like my wife, she’s like incredible at stuff.
Like, you know, she just knock it out and then also do the creative stuff. But like, yeah. The boring stuff is just boring and it’s not fun and it’s repetitive, but if you don’t do it, that’s a fast way to take your business. Right.
Michael Devellano: And I think that that’s the,
Sam Ovett: that’s the stuff that you want to automate
Michael Devellano: because, um, I have a black belt in procrastination. Right. And, um, you know, I’m like surgical about how I can put stuff like that off and make us pieces of my brain. And who do I answer to? You know, it’s like, it’s a client, but if I’m good at getting clients, then.
Sam Ovett: Hey, just get another one.
Michael Devellano: Yeah. Almost that’s cynical, but sadly it’s how it works. Right? Where you’re like panic. I got to find more stuff because I didn’t, you know, it didn’t work out and, and you, I think what your approach is, is listen, deal with your digital product automation of your product, use tools, making sure that it’s consistent. So that’s, that’s really important. And then automate marketing sales and support, which is what we talk about in automated. So it’s like, it makes total sentence.
Sam Ovett: And then if you like want to do a crazy unique marketing campaign, like that’s where the creative work comes in. You know, if you want to improve the product, that’s where the creative work comes in. If you want to improve the automation, and this is something I don’t think it’s talked about enough and something, we, we really hammer home with people we work with is like track your automation. So if you are tracking, if you are doing automation to either improve the efficiency of process, number one, track it is it actually improving it. Number two and. This is related to the customer experience side of it, not the internal business process side of it is it. And I’ll give you an example. There’s this company that we worked with there were, they make a connector that connects a bunch of e-commerce stores to QuickBooks.
So you could get all your transactions and manage your inventory and lose a lot of, um, challenges with your finances, right? Your bookkeeping around that. They were like primarily a engineering team with some customer support people and their product was so good that like, they didn’t have a hard time selling it when somebody actually had the issue, right.
Like I need to manage these. And it was the easiest, it’s easiest one out there today, but they wanted to create a better customer experience. Cause largely their customer experience on the marketing and sales side was like, We have this thing. Do you want it buy it or go away? Like, we don’t have anything else to follow up with you, but like, let’s teach you about it.
You know? Cause we’re like very engineering focused and we don’t have a lot of marketing to share all the scenarios and case studies and examples. So they were like doing webinars every few weeks and it was mostly their customer service teams, like doing a live webinar, you know? And like maybe people would show up.
Maybe they wouldn’t. It was it. Like random times and it wasn’t super consistent. And of course, if you have the problem, like you kind of want to go learn about it as quick as you can, because you’re trying to make a decision. So we did, uh, one of, one of the, we did a lot for them, but one of the things we did was just made. You know, we help them with the actually execute on the creative work of like they did the webinar. Right. So we like get made sure they got this webinar done. It like told the story right. And help sell the product in the sense that like explained what the problem was so that it was very clear. If you had it, that this was a great tool for it.
And then we automated it and made it a, a, you know, webinar that you could attend, recorded webinars that you could attend at any time. And then it had automatic follow-up, you know, if you, if you registered, but didn’t attend and made sure that you could get a free trial. And now they went from, I think they were getting like 25 to a hundred people in any one of these given live webinars. Right. Every three to six weeks, depending on if they got busy with customer service
Michael Devellano: to bring people to that webinar.
Sam Ovett: So I’ll get to that, but like they, yeah, so they, they, they then, uh, Have this now automated webinar, which people have heard of before. So like the newest thing, you know, if you’ve hung out in the automation world and automated follow up, that lasted, that helped re you know, go through the different scenarios that someone who is interested in a product would encounter.
And now they had like a hundred people. Every two to three weeks attending this thing versus 25, maybe a hundred, every three to six weeks, the way they got business, they didn’t actually have to do a lot of advertising because they were, and this is a cool thing. If you’re an app, right. Or SAS product, they were in a lot of the marketplaces for the e-commerce stores.
So people would like, if you had a Shopify store, you’d click through and you’d be like, I can this to QuickBooks and you’d see them and you’d go to their website and then you were there. And the only thing you could do is I get a free trial, but you weren’t sure if this even solved your problems. You’re like, I don’t, I don’t even know if I want to like go through all the works for free trial.
So you can now watch a webinar, you know, pretty much on demand. And find out if that was something of interest. And so for them now, they actually actually started to do advertising because they had something that people could learn about the product through. And it was, you know, it’s, it’s obviously.
Something that was very successful for them in this situation. It happened to be things aren’t always successful when you do these kinda things, but they ha they have a great product. So they’re fulfillment.
Michael Devellano: So they have a digital product and then they have a digital marketing and sales process. But
Sam Ovett: exactly. And so like, and, and now they didn’t have to like, cause they were thinking like, do we need, do we hire business development people? What do we do? You know? Cause they had this issue of what we want to sell more, but we don’t know how well let’s start with making it easy for people to learn about you in an automated way.
Michael Devellano: That’s. I mean, that’s a great, that’s a great case study and it’s definitely the Nirvana, so,
Sam Ovett: yeah. W and then there’s one more thing. One more thing there is that now it was like, we gave them the visuals to look at the metrics for it. So it was like if people came in from certain sources, right. Different e-commerce sources where they like click through, find out if those people who watched the webinar actually convert to customers, like how many people come attend, watch.
Take you up on the free trial and then become a customer. And at what level of the package, so that you know which stores are bringing your most or your highest value customers to you?
Michael Devellano: Here’s my question actually. Cause I was going to ask you when they set that up, then how did they manage it? So,
Sam Ovett: and that’s like, the idea is now put a human behind, improving that thing, split, test it, do two and see which one works better. That’s right. Great.
Michael Devellano: Just build the machine. I love it.
Sam Ovett: The machine now try and make the machine work better for you. And, and like this has missed, I think all the time is like, make a baseline that is, is working for you and then have a B you know, your a and your B and then try and improve the worst performing one until it beats the best performing one.
And do the same thing. And now you’re always improving because I see a lot of people go automate and like change all this manual stuff we do. And then they do that and people were like, Hey, the experience sex now. Um, give it away to somebody else. Like this is no longer what it was. And then you like, you’re like, Hey, we automated everything. And it’s like, yeah. And you take your business to like,
Michael Devellano: well, I think, I think the other thing that, you know, what I am hearing is find incremental wins because people sit there building, building the machine, not knowing, not having the leads coming in already. Right. So it’s almost like they had the problem of, we’re getting a lot of attention.
We’re getting a lot of interest and then they created the machine to. Do something with it too, you know, it’s your questions like people are searching for, and then convert them
Sam Ovett: versus like build the machine and then hope your marketing works. You know, like, yes, you need a little bit of a machine at work, right?
Like you need a little bit, but like don’t spend so much time on the machine. That’s after the marketing. Figure out the marketing and then like do whatever manual stuff you need to do until you have an actual problem with fulfillment. And you’re getting close to that. And now work on that next problem.
You know, if you’re like, you see those guys at that at like the state fair or whatever, the clowns who are like spinning balloons and, and it’s like, they put air in the balloon and then they like spin part of this. This is from my dad. This is his animals. Balloon animals. And so like, you start with one and you spin like the end and now the air didn’t go out.
It just been pushed, it moved. So like that’s, you know, do automation that way, give yourself a problem that moves downstream and then fix it and then fix that and then fix that and then fix that. It kind of works in that order. Fix your attract problem. If you, if you haven’t gotten that fixed, you’re going to be quickly not stoked to spend money on automating and thinking about that because you don’t even have anything automate.
And then once you fix that problem, then fix your convert problem. Right? Like get that work in better, those kind of go together and then fix your fulfill problem. So that’s super dialed. Don’t let that get. That get bad at any point, cause that’ll impact people’s, you know, word of mouth, but then you can automate more of that, then fix your delight problem.
You know, how can you get people to get more out of it? How can you, uh, offer more things that go with it? Right. If you sell t-shirts, maybe you want to offer a complimentary brand shoes and then you get a little more average transaction value and you make more profit. You know, like that’s an example. And then once you’ve done that, then make sure that you’re asking people to refer for referrals.
If they’re naturally referring people, that’s a good sign. Now make sure that you never forget to ask for a referral. And if somebody had a bad experience, that’s part of asking for referrals because you want to catch that bad experience and make it right before you were ever to ask them for a referral.
Right. And that person, if, if maybe they, you hiccup hiccup on something, And they had a bad experience. That could be your best referring person if you made it right for them.
Michael Devellano: I love it. That’s a great approach. It’s consistent with what we try to help people with. And I think you add a couple other interesting components there.
Um, can you actually can use, hold on one second, I’ll cut this part out. Okay. sorry about that. The joys of working at home.
Sam Ovett: No worries.
Michael Devellano: Um, okay. So I love your approach. You hit on all the different aspects of the business. Um, I noticed on your site, I think you have Ontraport as a tool that you use, um, is that a platform that you consistently use or what’s one tool that you would recommend to people or a platform that you think is really useful to accomplish everything you just discussed?
Sam Ovett: So, And you’re right. We were, we’re pretty psyched on Ontraport and that’s a particular automation tool that people can use. And generally you need a couple of tools to, to pull things off, you know? Um, but what, what we really like to do with folks is encourage and sometimes push very heavily that. You want to keep your data in one spot, because if you can slice and dice and manipulate your data and very easily see what’s going on, you can make clear decisions faster and make changes faster and know what’s going on.
As soon as you add many, many tools into the mix and lots of what we call point source solutions. And you’ve, you’ve seen those, you know, Hey, there’s always this one tool that does like everything perfectly, but it doesn’t connect to anything else
Michael Devellano: which is useless,
Sam Ovett: which is useless. Right. And, and that’s how a lot of people start. They go to go, I just need to do this one thing. And then when I, to this thing, and that’s how I ended up with 64 different tools or whatever to power your business. Now, it’s now it’s now you are converting. You are running a business, but you’re moving data around you’re importing export in Google group, updating, and then you got to like hire people and you got, now you got more 300 leads a day.
Let’s say like these guys mastering diabetes, Cyrus and Robbie. And like that is a lot of work. And that is guaranteed way to drop balls in the customer journey and forget about people accidentally. Um, and so that is why. We encourage people to look at a tool that allows them to put all their data in, in one spot or connect different unique solutions to that where the data can flow through with also, and this is the key.
It needs to have great customer service because in technology things break, they don’t always work and you need to be able to pick up the phone and call somebody and say, Hey, why is this function not working? As I thought it would be. That’s responsive is going to fix it. And so that’s, that’s what we look for in tools that we use in Ontraport happens to be the one that we’re we use as a core automation tool.
A lot of times it’s not always a fit and if it’s not, we won’t use it. But that’s, that’s why we, we, we put some, you know, if we got this, we like this one, you, we use it, we eat our own dog,
Michael Devellano: like your CRM, but also your marketing automation, any around marketing, like landing pages, maybe, or email campaigns. So the, and that’s a well-known tool.
I think even pagan actually. There’s an investor in that company. I don’t know if you know, even, well, I know before, right. It was like
Sam Ovett: they were called office autopilot and I know they don’t have they’re privately owned still.
Michael Devellano: Yeah. I think he puts money into it privately a long time ago. The rebrand to Ontraport. I remember him telling me that. Yeah. Whether
Sam Ovett: you’re probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, is it an inside that, you know, I don’t, but now everybody there, it was just a conversation we had in Nevada. It was like, But, um, that’s why we are excited about that when there’s others out there that one does that one works for a lot of people for a lot of industries, pretty darn amazingly.
Michael Devellano: I love it. Well, let’s, I want to be conscious of your time. So I’m going to wrap a couple things. First of all, I want to acknowledge you for, you know, the leadership you show in this area and helping companies to automate the things that are important, but repetitive and to free people’s time for their highest value work.
If, uh, first of all, how do people get in touch with you?
Sam Ovett: So you can go to our website, mobile pocket office.com, but then, um, if you’d like, I’d be happy to, I dunno if you put stuff in the show notes, we can, we can make a unique link, mobile pocket office.com forward slash what, what should we name it? What’s unique. That would make sense to the audience. Just the name on my desk. Yeah.
Michael Devellano: Automate grow.
Sam Ovett: Yep. And, uh, and then we’ll put some resources about those five pillars and then like how to think about automation, um, that are free. People can get, and then. That way you can get started with thinking about what should you automate in your business. And what’s the highest value thing that you can automate first.
Michael Devellano: I love it. That’s super useful. Um, yeah. Okay.
Sam Ovett: I also like that thing people said is this, this idea of, well, how do I figure out what my processes are today? If I don’t even know we’ve got a little simple worksheet, you print it out analog style, you know, write stuff down.
And, uh, and it, and it works amazingly to like figure out what do you actually do in your,
Michael Devellano: I love that. The other that’s a great, all right. So we’ll, we’ll include that in the show notes, which will be mobile pocket office.com forge that automate grow. Okay. A couple of quick things. First of all, if you could recommend only one book to people, what would book would you recommend?
Sam Ovett: Um, one book
Michael Devellano: in the world, in the universe and boat, anything, man. Wow. That’s it.
Sam Ovett: That’s pretty, you know what I mean? This is a cliche one, but like that, that the, the Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people was influential to me early on. And then another one that I learned. This has nothing to do with automation, but, um, that I recently listened to you on an audio book that I, I found to be very useful was a book on negotiation.
Um, and this kind of the opposite of this whole idea of getting people to say, yes, it’s getting people to say no first by this guy. Chris Voss, who was an FBI negotiator. I think he’s been promoted. Pause. I met through an event.
Michael Devellano: Well, yeah, he was supposed to do the podcast. So Chris, I don’t know what happened, but
Sam Ovett: I just recently got a book and I think that that can influence the way people think about their marketing, the way people think about their sales, the way people think about the way they do business and, um, I think it’s different than most of the, you know, just drive people to a yes.
Michael Devellano: Yes. Yeah. He’s, he’s a master, um, FBI negotiator and he has an incredible if you’ve ever seen masterclass.com. That’s right. He’s got an, a, he’s got one of the most popular masterclasses. It’s very good, actually.
Sam Ovett: So have you watched it? I haven’t, I haven’t watched that one.
Michael Devellano: Excellent. Yeah. Masterclass, whatever. I spent on a hundred days a year and they gave me,
Sam Ovett: I should go look at it. I got it. I got masterclass for training, our dogs. Somebody had a masterclass in dog training.
Michael Devellano: Yeah. I watch a little bit of that. I should watch more. I have a Husky, so I’m skeptical, but I’m okay. Ha, uh, who if, sorry, Jim Rohn says that you were the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.
So who do you Sam spend the most time?
Sam Ovett: It’s been the most time with my, my wife, my brother who lives over here too in Colorado with us and, uh, my dad. And then, so that’s three and then my mom as well. Uh, cause we’re always talking, talking to her and um, this person who is the fifth person that I’m like, there’s not a consistent fifth person in there.
Michael Devellano: That’s all right. But that’s who you spend the most time on.
Sam Ovett: That’s where I spend the most time with. And I think it’s absolutely absolutely true. Uh, and I’ve noticed that if I want to get better at something, I just try and spend time with someone who’s already really, really, really good at it. And that is, and then I just like level up way faster. Like I recently have been improving my ability to rock climb. Right? Like,
Michael Devellano: and you mentioned that you created a rock climbing gym and they get better.
Sam Ovett: Yeah, we have a, we have a shipping container on our acre property here, and we built like a full, you can go in and book. I get to work on
Michael Devellano: very interesting reasons. Send me pictures.
Sam Ovett: We’ll include any pictures. Yeah. And, uh, and like the walls are now adjustable at different angles. And so we want to get better. So we started hanging out with a friend of ours who climbs he was climbing the climbs that we’d like to do in the future that are bigger, harder, and, you know, the level up and like his knowledge of just the athletic requirements to meet it and how he, how to actually get there. Not just like theory, but like how to actually do it has improved my climbing dramatically through that period of hanging out with him. So I think, and I tried to do the same in business too. You know, anything I want to get better at it. Just like, hang out with people who are leaps and bounds better because they’ve already been there and I know what to do. They know what to do.
Michael Devellano: Final thing is, or final two things. How are you Sam? Changing the world?
Sam Ovett: How am I changing the world? I would like to think that, you know that with what we’re doing with the automation side of things, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s not this, this big touch everybody thing. It’s like one person at a time, you know, number one, it’s like working on our own, right? The whole like Confucius idea that, you know, clean off the snow on your own. Doorstep before you complain about the snow and your neighbors.
Michael Devellano: Oh, there you go.
Sam Ovett: Uh, so like, I think it starts just like that. And then, and then the other is from, uh, what we do is, is like, we do want to see people be more human with what they do and then relieve the time of automation.
And hopefully for these individual business owners, what we found is like, we’re trying to give them they’re they’re not only like, oh, be way more productive, be way more efficient, but like give them time back. To work with their family, you know, to be with their families and their loved ones and like do the things that they want to do.
Right. And so you automate things and like, Hey, you can do creative work. And then of course, you know, these people work very hard who are very successful that we work with, but. They, a lot of them have gotten a lot of time back in their day, um, just to do whatever they choose to do with that time. And I think that feels more than anything. Like you’re changing the world
Michael Devellano: that I agree with you,
Sam Ovett: you can’t say that we’re making grand changes, but we’re just making changes that are, you know, unique and matter to those people. And then like, Yeah, we try to do the same with ourselves, like try and make it so we can spend time. Like I can spend time with my wife and, you know, I work with my dad, so I talked to him all the time, but, uh, but, uh, I think that is it just like, just, just here with our sales. We also do a lot of stuff in our community and I think that feels. Really good.
Michael Devellano: No, that’s amazing. Yeah. Okay. The final thing is when we have interesting people on the podcast, we like you to nominate other interesting people that, you know, we typically talk to experts or entrepreneurs about the person they serve and problems that they solve. So who would you Sam like to nominate as a future guest on automate and grow?
Sam Ovett: You know, who is someone that I just get a lot of joy out of chatting with it’s it’s someone who’s similarly. I could think of actually a lot of people, but it’s someone who’s, who’s similarly in the automation world. Funnily enough. So. Well, that’s interesting or not
Michael Devellano: as the whole point of the show.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. There’s two, actually people
Michael Devellano: they’re automated or grow
Sam Ovett: different ways, but one of ’em is says, uh, this gentleman, Andrew Wadsworth, and he’s down in Australia and he is just a joy to talk to. And so down to earth and so committed to what he does in his community, but also from a technology standpoint.
I think he’s one of the people who really gets the challenges that businesses face of all different scales and, um, makes it really digestible. And in a way they go, I get it. I, I know what you know, you should do. Like I can help you through that problem. Um, and he’s fun to talk to you and he’s got a super awesome Australian accent.
Michael Devellano: There you go.
Sam Ovett: And then the other would be. I’ll give it to you. I didn’t ask. I give it to you. Is Alan Morte from three ventures and Alan is the only person I know who I would reliably recommend someone to do a search advertising with. Okay. And he’s got some of the biggest brands in the world that he does advertising through and his knowledge of the search advertising space and just really understanding it is, um, Is changes the game. You know, he’s a mathematician around it versus a, this wild marketer that kind of scares you. You know, you’re like the hand over money and maybe lose it all. He’s like, no, we can do this. Like through math.
Michael Devellano: I love it. Those are two amazing. So, uh, Andrew. Yeah, that’d be great. So Andrew Wadsworth and Alan Morte, you’ve both been nominated by Sam to be a future guest of automating grow. Uh, I want to mention one thing, which is on November the 18th. I don’t know when this will air, but November the 18th, um, I have a, a new venture called founder’s pack and it’s on a mission to help a million entrepreneurs in some way in their startup journey, uh, to start up and grow. And we’re having our first online pitch event and we have three pretty stellar judges, which we have David Meltzer. Arabian prince. Who’s a VC and formerly a founder of a NWA. And we have, um, Roger King of bay angels. And we are on the lookout for three more startups that want to pitch and a winner takes all startup pitch event. So I want to invite you as a guest to watch the event on November the 18th at 12 noon Pacific time. And if you know any startups, we would love to talk to them. Yeah. Um, all right, Sam, thank you so much for taking your time today and sharing your knowledge with us.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. Thank you.
WRAPPING UP
Michael Devellano: This has been another episode of the automate and grow podcast. We will see you on a future episode, hopefully with Andrew and then another one with Alan and grow.
Sam Ovett: Cool.
MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST:
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If you answer yes to one of these questions.
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