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In this podcast, Sam talks with Rocky Lalvani of Profit Answer Man about one of the biggest problems, many businesses face is marrying all the technology they use so that they talk to each other and it automates many of the tasks that are routine and boring for the employees.
And that’s what we’re here to help you do is to improve yours, but it also improves the customer experience and it helps your top line grow as we’ll hear about how to. About automating the sales processes as well.
TRANSCRIPT:
Rocky Lalvani: Hey, it’s the Prophet Answer Man. Rocky Lalvani. If you’re new to the podcast, check out my interview with Mike it’s episode. Number two, if you want to hear about each chapter in the profit first book, go back and listen to episodes. Three through 13 episode one is the wine. On the prophet answer, man, we learned money mastery without all the complicated accounting, mumbo jumbo, using a simple system.
Your accountant is busy, documenting your transactions and creating a rear-view mirror of what happened. My guess is you don’t even look at the reports they sent you. If you’re like most business owners, you struggle with this and it’s not your fault. We aren’t taught money in school. And accountants aren’t taught how to be profitable.
The profit first system created by Mike McCalla it’s works and he certified me to help you implement the system in your business. Remember, the new equation is sales minus profit equals expenses. Let’s face it without cashflow. You can’t pay your employees, buy needed materials or pay your mortgage and support your family.
I help you to do that and more so you can focus on the parts of the business you love and receive the rewards for your labor and investment into your business. The stronger you are as a business owner, the more jobs you create, the better we are as a country, small business owners are the backbone of America.
And for that, you deserve to be well rewarded. Just remember more revenue does not equal more profit. That’s why we focus on the bottom line. One of the biggest problems, many businesses face is marrying all the technology they use so that they talk to each other and it automates many of the tasks that are routine and boring for the employees.
Getting this right. Isn’t easy. And that’s why I wanted Sam to join us. Good automation, not only drives profitability. And that’s what we’re here to help you do is to improve yours, but it also improves the customer experience and it helps your top line grow as we’ll hear about how to. About automating the sales processes as well.
Sam Ovett is the co-founder of Mobile Pocket Office and is leading the way to help new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamlined, productive. As a previous professional whitewater kayaker and guide Sam has translated his experience navigating class five, whitewater and mitigating life-threatening risks and hazards into the business world.
He sees it as always evaluating the potential consequences of the action in the business, in the market. And in the automation plan, let’s meet Sam.
Welcome to the Profit Answer Man. Sam Ovett. It’s great to have you joined today.
Sam Ovett: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Rocky Lalvani: Can you share a little bit about yourself and your business and what you do?
Sam Ovett: Sure. So, my name is Sam Ovett, and I’m in business with my dad. Who’s my partner. I don’t work for him, but he’s my partner in business.
So that’s a whole interesting story that we can get into if you’re interested or for another time. But we work together to run Mobile Pocket Office and our firm helps people look at their business through the lens of automation and we do consulting with people. To understand what can be automated, how that would look.
And then we actually functionally put in the technology to automate stuff and we focus. The starting point is really sales and marketing. Um, and then, you know, if we can help people with that, usually excited to talk about the other pieces of their business, but revenue is the starting point. And that’s where people get excited about.
Rocky Lalvani: That it is. And that sounds very much in alignment with what we do. Cause I, as a profit first, we look at that’s the first step, you know, how are you generating revenue? What’s involved in that and then is it profitable? And then how do we systematize everything to make it easy so that your business runs on autopilot.
And that’s one of the reasons you’re here. Cause I see so much synergy. And the way that we both help clients. So, one of the things I’ve heard you say, and I think this is where everybody tends to operate their business. It’s called cowboy mode. Can you share what that is?
Sam Ovett: Absolutely. So, cowboy mode is, and I think if you’ve been in business and you’ve had any bit of success you’ve experienced, this is where you have been presented an opportunity and you need to capitalize on it.
And this is usually how it begins. And then you just start doing it generally. Stop planning very well. But you start doing, cause you got to capitalize on an opportunity that look it’s hot and the iron is, you know, hot and it’s like time to strike and you do whatever it takes. And it is generally tiring.
It really pretty exhausting. And if the opportunity is right, it’s a hundred percent worth it. What happens though, is people stay in that mode and they keep operating and then. If they had systems, they start to deteriorate. If they had process, which most people do, if you’re successful in any kind of way in business, even if you don’t realize it, they start to deteriorate the process to run your business.
And then next thing you know, everybody’s a little bit stressed out, more tired, and you’re not quite sure how your business. Is supposed to run and drop balls, start to get dropped to that’s cowboy mode. It’s got its place.
Rocky Lalvani: So how do we fix cowboy mode?
Sam Ovett: But I think the lens by which to think about this in my opinion, is that cowboy mode is super valuable.
If you see an opportunity. You better strike while that opportunity is in your hands court and ready for you because opportunities will pass you by always, but as soon as you’ve done that and you straight, you need to make sure that it’s have you improved or created new systems out of that experience that you get them.
Documented, your team knows how to use them, or you update processes that no longer fit because you made changes. And then you go back to a strategic mindset of growing your business. Do it. It’s literally just the self-awareness of recognizing that you are in a cowboy mode. You’re moving fast. You do in a lot.
You’re making it happen. You’ve once you’ve gotten to the other side; you need to slow down. Even if it’s for a short period of time and take inventory of what just happened and how it affects your overall strategy and your business, and if it’s changes the direction of your business and the strategy that’s okay.
And if it’s, you know, not to be cliche, but if it’s profitable, that’s wonderful. That is a good thing. But now you need to make that the new normal systemize, it put process to it, find out where you can automate versus stressing everybody out because. If you have employees, they will leave if you’re constantly in cowboy mode and you’ll probably find you have high turnover and people think that you are difficult to work with.
Rocky Lalvani: What I find is a lot of business owners don’t want to pull on the reins to slow down, to create the systems and the automation. They just want to keep galloping along. And as you said, it does cause problems. And then over time, I think you start to lose money because you lose sight of what’s going on. Do you have any success stories where by doing what you talk about, they were able to be more profitable?
Sam Ovett: Oh yeah. So, we’ve, we’ve done a lot. In fact, most people that come to us. In a pretty excited cowboy state. They’ve met the market in a way with their product or service. And the market is responding insanely well, people are excited, maybe in some instances, their ads are really dialed in and they’re just blowing up and they cannot handle the volume of success and it comes to a literal breaking point.
So. Where they can no longer scale the business by operating in cowboy mode. And I can talk about specific examples, but that’s, that’s generally how people come to us because it’s a, it’s a stressful situation and its exciting new generating revenue. So, you’ve got money to invest, but you don’t have your systems dialed in to scale beyond the point that you’re at.
And I’ll give you an example. There was, there is a company that is out of Canada actually, and they are, this is a very recent example. So, I think it’s interesting. They are a tutoring company, so they tutor children. It’s private tutoring for school work. And you can imagine that during the height of the pandemic, Kids were really struggling.
They’re at home, they’re doing zoom, they’re doing Skype. They’re doing digital school. It’s a totally different way of doing things. You don’t have traditional access to tutors the way you would. So, meeting people in an online space and being able to provide private tutoring. Not that it’s anything insanely new, but the demand was really high.
And so they were effectively by default, had to go into cowboy mode to meet the demand and. They were hiring staff to handle all the busy work involved with onboarding a student, keeping track of when the meetings were all the different things that go into it. In addition to they were running ads and from a, from a revenue perspective, they were profitable relative to what they were spending, but they didn’t know which ad was driving sales, which audience.
So, there was a lot of waste in the system. So, bringing that into an automated, you know, there’s a lot of work that goes into it ultimately, but saying, what does the business functionally look like? What’s the journey someone takes great. Let’s find out where it makes sense to automate. And I can go into that framework.
So, people have one to think about if they’re in this space, cause that’s hard, you know, you hear about automation, but how do you start with automation? Three different things. And be excited about it and actually know where to start about it. So go into that in a moment, if you’d like the go ahead.
Rocky Lalvani: No, I was going to ask you what was the outcome financially by putting the systems?
Sam Ovett: Yeah, so financially the outcome for them was. Namely, they didn’t have to hire one of the big ones because they were time poor. They were making good revenue, but they were poor on time. They didn’t have to hire two more individuals at a minimum of $40,000 all said and done just to do admin work. Cause it was pretty administrative level work.
So, you know, you could get away with a little less, but they didn’t have to hire two more individuals. So. That’s one of the outcomes. And then along the way, we were able to take what they were doing and help them find opportunities to generate more revenue that didn’t require people to actually be there.
And people have heard of these like online courses and stuff. And that’s basically what we did with them is we packaged up their course and made a lower tiered, lower priced DIY option. Increased their sales. So that was like $1,500. Was the price of that relative to the private coaching. They’re selling one to two of those a week.
Now, an offer that previously didn’t exist at all and create an and takes no more additional human time.
Rocky Lalvani: And this is where it really gets tricky. I think for business owners is when you’re looking at an expense, the question is, is does it actually drive revenue or is it basically a lot of excessive overhead where you’re paying people?
That are doing processes that really don’t add value to the system, but suck a lot of money out of it. And it sounds like in this case, that is kind of what was going on. The thing I find is people don’t even know where to start. So, for you, it’s you talk about the customer journey and you were going to say like, how do we get started in this?
What do you, what do you do?
Sam Ovett: the way it gets started is. Uh, I give people first a framework to think about, and you know, there’s a lot of frameworks out there. This one has been working really well for us for a while now. And so, so we use this one, um, it doesn’t mean other frameworks are wrong, but the framework that we look at things through is we from an automation perspective is the following every business, regardless of industry has five categories that they need to look at when it comes to.
Process, we’ll start with process. It’s attracted. Cause you got to attract new business. That’s marketing. That’s the hard work of getting people interested in you, whether that’s advertising content, referrals, whatever that may be. That attract part. Usually isn’t entirely automatable some of the pieces of it are, but you’ve got to have a creative human.
You and work to figure out what’s, what’s working and you need to have the systems to understand if it’s working totally separate conversation, but so you have attracted, then you have converted. Great. You’ve got interest. Now you need to convert that interest to leads and sales. Obviously, sales are most people.
Then you got to fulfill whatever you promised and you had to be really good at that because that’s a great way to tank a business, right? If you’re making promises, people are buying your promise, which is ultimately what we do when we buy products and services and it, it doesn’t live up to it. Well, that’s not going to last very long reputations get around even in the digital age, especially in the digital age, I should say.
Uh, so we have attracted, convert, fulfill, and that’s where most businesses stop. The good ones have processes for delighting their customers, which can take a couple of forms. One is just helping people get a little more value out of what they actually bought. And the other is in addition to value, offering them more opportunities to buy things that increase the lifetime value of that person as a customer.
And create a better experience and people when they first hear that they go. Usually a little pushback, like, well, their customer would, you know, what else am I going to sell them? And the answer is, do people, are they delighted buying more? And if people just think that their daily interactions and all the things that they buy and then buy an accessory item to go with it, to make the experience even, yeah.
It is just all over the place. I mean, take something as basic as coffee, you buy a bag of coffee that you gotta get a grinder to really do it really nicely. And you’ve got to buy like a Chemex or an espresso machine, just the lifetime value of a customer, if done, right. Can enormously expand and create a wonderful experience for that customer to where they’re now even more passionate about the thing that it started with.
And then the last one is referred. So, most people, if they do a good job or they have a great product, they get referrals. It’s wonderful. Uh, but the flip side of that is most people don’t have a system to make sure that they are doing one of two things capturing customer service issues, because that’s why you don’t get referrals.
If you have customer service issues or some kind of issue. And making sure those get taken care of, and then, uh, finding the people who are just overwhelmingly excited about what they got and would be delighted and, in a position, to refer you new business. So, attract, convert, fulfill, delight, refer. Those are the five big buckets, no matter what you do, product service, combo, digital, physical, you got to do those five to really do it right.
And. What we have people do is think about it from that lens and say, all right, for all the digital automation that we do print out, we give people this thing called the personal activity log, and I can give you a copy and give it to folks. If you’d like is in the show notes. Is a spreadsheet it’s really simple.
And you could just do it on a piece of paper if you, if you didn’t even want to print it out. Um, and you write down every 15 to 30 minutes, what you did for two to three days, and it’s not meant to beat people up in an organization. It’s meant to just understand what, what is all the busy work that comm prizes, our time to operate our business.
And then you do, you make sure that the people that are handling those five different components of your business are build that out. And now you have an idea of the busy work and the processes and busy work doesn’t mean it’s not necessary. It just means you have to do it, um, that are in those five different areas.
And with that in mind, now you understand the processes that are in you. Within the different five systems, the areas. Now you have an idea of what could even be up for discussion for automation. You with me,
Rocky Lalvani: I am
Sam Ovett: now, now is when, when it gets tricky, because you got to in either invest your time or you got to hire somebody.
To do this automation thing to pull it off. And the first thing is I tell people, if you don’t have time, if you feel like you do not have time to make decisions and think strategically, the very first thing you need to do is find out as a business. Can you offload things that just suck up of a high volume of time using automation?
If you can. Great. That’s step one, make some time for yourself. And now you can think now you have space to make decisions. Usually, those tasks are fairly automatable. If they’re to consuming that much time and repetitive, and you have to ask yourself the question for everything else that we do. If automation, if a computer, some, some programs, digital or mechanical, where to take care of this.
Does it impact the customer experience and by impact, does it change the experience that the customer has for everything that the answer is? No. And you’re paying somebody to do it. You should look at automating it to make it consistent. If it impacts the customer experience, red flag slowdown, you don’t necessarily want to automate that right away.
And if you, do you want to automate a percentage. Of the customers that experienced that to find out if it works cause automation, while it saves time, it doesn’t always improve the customer experience if it’s not done. Right. And there are instances where having a human touch makes all the difference and also generates a lot of referrals and keeps people excited about your business.
Rocky Lalvani: You know, it’s funny. Cause I call up all these major companies and they have automated systems for their phones. And so, the first thing they do is they tell me, hey, did you know, we had a website and I’m like, really? You’re a major corporation and you have a website I couldn’t have. Cause sees that. And then they tell me my answers can be found at the website.
And I’m like, if I could get my answer there, I would have gone to the website. And then give me eight choices, none of which have anything to do with anything I’m calling about. And by this time, I’m fuming.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. And, and are you excited to refer business at that point?
Rocky Lalvani: Usually not, but I mean, you know, you’re stuck with some of these big companies and I understand their, their automation systems, but nobody’s thinking about the choices,
Sam Ovett: right.
And so that’s exactly what I’m talking about, that I, that idea of like, if you could get straight to someone and get your answer quicker, your experience is going to largely be a lot different. And it may be that they’ve said, you know, the trade-off just, isn’t economically viable for us with the volume we have, but it, but if you could, or if you could improve this system where it made more sense, that’d be a much better experience.
And I think that’s part of, one of the trends that we’re seeing is. As a consumer, we have choices and where we have the choice between similar, uh, services and one have great customer service and one doesn’t relatively similar price point. Even if one’s a little bit higher, I’m generally going to choose the one with better customer service, where I can talk to a human to solve my problems.
Rocky Lalvani: And I think automation is going to continue to happen. And especially now I think the number one complaint I’m hearing from the business owners is they can’t find employees and the cost of employees is skyrocketing. And I know McDonald’s is solving that by automating everything from the order process through to the cooking process.
And so, they’re going to be able to compete better than somebody else, and every business has their own. Particular areas and you have to figure out where it makes sense and where automation actually makes the system go easier. So, for like me, when I go to the grocery store, it’s actually faster and quicker for me to go through the self-checkout.
So, I don’t mind doing it because it turns into a better experience. It’s when it doesn’t turn in and you’ve got to sit down and figure it out and you offer options because the grocery store has both.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s where I’ve seen that stuff take off and, and stick around, um, any new technology, which it’s kind of getting past new technology at this point, you know, it has its challenges and we worked through, I’m curious.
Why do you think folks? And I obviously it’s a, it’s an issue that’s currently happening, but why do you think folks are having trouble finding employees?
Rocky Lalvani: So, nobody knows the exact answer. There’s a lot of guesses. One of the biggest guesses is that the unemployment incentives were so lucrative that people were better off staying home too.
I think they’re still. Even though. And I mean, at this point, we’re hopefully well through COVID, but earlier on, there’s still fear. And I think the fear is legitimate in that, you know, if you’re working or living in a multi-generational family in somebody’s 30 years old coming home to somebody who’s 70 there’s fear there.
And I get it. And, and along those same parts of fear is if you’ve got a kid at home, because he’s got to go to school from home. Most of these people cannot afford daycare for three kids or two kids when they’re making 18 bucks an hour is just not feasible. So, I think there’s a multitude of things there that come together.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. And I think too, just, this is kind of a side note. We’ll get back to more of the automation, but it does play into this is yeah. I think companies should be trying to automate jobs. Where they can’t pay people more than they’re not willing to pay people more than unemployment, you know, like if you’re not willing to, as a company pay people more than unemployment.
Yeah. I think you should invest in automating it. Uh, I think that’s a good thing actually, because these are jobs that are largely pretty undesirable and don’t necessarily create always an experience where someone moves up.
Rocky Lalvani: That is correct.
Sam Ovett: And, and, you know, that is a, probably a controversial statement and people have a lot of opinions on it and I think that’s okay.
But I think if we’re, you know, if you’re a business owner or in charge of something and you are not willing to pay, someone’s like truly living wage where someone can succeed with things and government unemployment incentives. Are more enticing. Yes. Fear is involved for sure. But government, unemployment incentives are more enticing, but I think we’ve got a problem there.
So yeah, that’s definitely probably something that should be automated instead where possible. Um, and we can circle back to wherever you’d like to take this, but I, I find that contextual, usually that conversation really interesting. And it’s something I’ve kind of been paying attention to. And I was curious your thoughts on it, not to dig on you, but just to find out because.
I think it’s kind of a weird thing. You know, we get these giant corporations and people can’t even make like living wages from, well, maybe, maybe we’ve got a greater issue here and, you know, The opposite
Rocky Lalvani: side, philosophical. The opposite side of that issue in is what do you do with those employees?
Because there are not going to be, there may not be new jobs for them. So, then you have a permanently unemployed group of people, which is not good for society and for our country. So, there’s gotta be these balances out the challenge.
Sam Ovett: It’s a challenge. And, um, and largely when you automate something.
Whether it’s physical or digital, it creates higher paying jobs for someone to manage that automation. But yeah, the, you know, that’s kind of the big discussion is like as a, as somebody who runs business, you definitely should be paying attention to automation. It’s kind of help you be more profitable.
Most of the time, there are some times where I don’t think it makes sense. Um, but most of the time it’s going to help you. And, uh, and it’s going to create these really engaging jobs, because you’ve got to now manage this, this automation. Somebody’s got to manage automation and think about it and how it impacts the customer experience, but it does leave a hole.
And that there’s truth to that.
Rocky Lalvani: On the accounting side, it gets scary. You know, some of this software automate the, the accounting and I start looking in there. I’m like, who put this? Where, how, like, they don’t have clarity because. The people who were supposed to be watching the system are not watching the system.
And then if you don’t have good numbers, you can’t make good financial decisions. So that is one of the things. So, automation has its pluses and minuses. You mentioned earlier that you work with your dad, but you don’t work for him. So, I’d love to just dig in and learn a little bit more about how that works and how you get along.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. Um, let me give you a quick story. It’s pretty short one, but relative to accounting and automation, we actually use a company called bench. Uh, and it is a, it’s like a semi-automatic thing. It’s mostly automated for our accounting, uh, for our business, but there is a human and we tried fully automated accounting.
It didn’t work like you said. It didn’t work. There were nightmares, but, uh, but we with a human and someone who is fully, you know, an actually certified CPA monitoring the account, it’s an incredible experience. It’s so easy. And we have someone actually pay attention to the details and the nuances that exist in there.
Yeah. So that’s a little side note that it’s like that beautiful human touch with automation combo.
Rocky Lalvani: The problem. Cause I have people who use bench work for every business is that that human needs to talk to you. And if you’re not communicating human to human, then everything gets stuck in the system because they can’t guess we’ve got a note from you.
We get
Sam Ovett: answers. Yep. Yeah, that is true. You gotta talk to them, you know, and like you should be paying attention to that stuff anyways, but you are right. Yeah. Yeah. That is, um, that is for sure. I didn’t really think about that. Cause I like, of course we talked to them, but yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Talk to the people like it’s going to be a problem and your stuff’s going to be a mess, you know, regardless.
Um, but working with my dad. Uh, as business partners, you know, it is something that I did not envision growing up. Um, and. I was not always in the world of business, but I was always exposed to the world of business growing up because he was always an entrepreneur and had his own thing. Um, and I was actually a professional athlete for a period of time and then guiding, doing outdoor adventure, guiding for whitewater kayaking, both here and in Ecuador and was.
Uh, paddling professionally for brands. And I was actually using a lot of automation because as a professional athlete, you are not only physically engaged, but you are a part of the marketing department. And so, what I obviously, with my exposure to business growing up, I realized that really quickly. And I always did.
Made myself in a position where I was involved with like marketing. And so, I want it to be on expeditions. I want it to be paddling my kayak over waterfalls, you know, steep, remote gorgeous. And I had to automate the marketing that I was responsible. As an athlete. And so that was my initial foray into the world of automation was using as an athlete.
And then I had made a transition in my life where I decided I wanted to not do that for a living. And I was very familiar with, with process and automation and using it, and also growing up around it with my dad, um, that it was something that. Had drawn my attention and it made sense to me at the time to be on the right side of automation.
And I decided I want to be the one building automation, not getting automated. And so that is a, there’s a lot there, but that’s how we started working together. Cause my dad, he was interested in making a shift. He’d been working with very analytical business stuff, fulfillment with large corporations and decided he was ready to make a shift in what he was focused on and wanted to, he was in a position where he was like, excited about work with me.
And it just worked out to that, that, that moment in time we started Mobile Pocket Office and. We started partnerships with software companies, um, and started, uh, sponsoring their events. And that’s how we launched this business however many years ago it’s been now, but, uh, working with him, I think there’s one key thing that people can take away.
Whether they’re working with, uh, a spouse, a parent. And they don’t have to be partners. They can be working just together, you know, or somebody can be hiring the other, um, or working with just someone who’s a very close friend. Like those are all very challenging, stressful relationships because you don’t want to lose him.
And we do something called catalyst events because the other thing is, if you have someone who’s very close to you and you work with them in business, and this, this is entirely relates to finances and automation. And all of this stuff is what you get sucked into in my opinion, is just pleasing the other person and making bad decisions.
Does that make sense? Like what I’m saying there it does. And I see it all the time and we were fortunate to recognize it early on. My dad is, is, is super amazing. And so, you know, that was that’s helpful. You know, you should work with wonderful people in your life. That’s, uh, if you’re not make that change, but, uh, but we all have our challenges and things get heated and discussions and decisions have to be made.
And to really smart people can have completely different opinions on how that decision should be made. And if you’re really close, that makes it really hard. Um, and so we created a. Space for ourselves, just like a mental space that we call catalyst session. So, if we need to make a tough decision or one of us, doesn’t like the other person’s opinion on something, like we think from a merit perspective, it has flaws and needs to be rethought or isn’t going to work.
And we say, we’re going to have this catalyst session and then we just get into it and we figure out we, we poke holes in it. We try and tear it apart as if we’re doing. Essentially. And what this does is it creates a space that everybody knows that nothing here is against that other person personally, there’s no personal attack.
It’s just taking a part in idea based on its merits. And if it’s functionally makes sense or is a good decision financially or business-wise or strategically, and. Anybody who has a close relationship like that can use this. So, let’s do a catalyst session and you notice that you’re getting a little bit heated.
You realize your ideas are conflicting and you go, wait a second. Let’s just do a catalyst session. And then it’s a, it’s a space for someone to work with that other individual to really, and you and them to work with you to say, I don’t like the merits of your idea. I, and here’s why let’s tear it apart and let’s try and evolve it to a solution oriented, better place.
So that, I think if there’s one takeaway outside of the fact that like, it’s just fun, you know, like a lot of times to work with my dad. And I think he’d say the same there’s challenges. Of course, we’re human, but, uh, but that catalyst session is probably the biggest thing and being able to make good decisions and not get sucked into just pleasing the other person at the expense of good decision making.
Rocky Lalvani: And I think for my clients where I’m dealing with two people, sometimes husband and wife, two business partners, a lot of what I’m doing is listening to both sides and helping them understand the other point of view. And I’ll call both sides out. You know, like this is right for this, this one is that. And y’all got to get on the same page.
That’s what happens when I deal with those types of clients
Sam Ovett: and it’s challenging, isn’t
Rocky Lalvani: it? It is, it is challenging. Um, and that’s why I prefer to work. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work with smaller businesses, where there’s a single person in charge, because then we don’t have to deal with all that drama.
They can deal with their employees, but I don’t have to deal with it. But, you know, it, it all works out. If people would like to get help, automating their business, learn more about what you do, what is the best way for them to do that?
Sam Ovett: Well, so the easiest and simplest way is just to go to our website.
Imagine that mobilepocketoffice.com. We’ve got a giant button on there that says, book, a call. You can read about stuff. You can watch videos. Of clients’ experiences. We were fortunate to have a good client who are happy to talk about their experiences and that, and we’re on that call too. So, you can get a sense of if you, if you think we would work together well, and then you can book a call and then we can, we can have a chat, um, to see if automation is a fit in your situation to help you, you solve some of your problems.
I will say you; you do need to have a sense. Of your processes or that you know, that you even have some that you’d like to be automated, you don’t have to know them exactly. But, uh, if you, if you are just changing everything all the time, you’re probably not in a position to work with us, but if you are more established and trying to scale and, in a place, where they’re deciding whether or not to hire people or invest in technology, that’s usually someone that makes sense to talk to us.
Rocky Lalvani: And that’s a good decision point. Like when sometimes people ask me, oh, should I hire somebody? And I should probably start asking them, is that something you can put into an automation process or is that something that we actually hire some, um, and putting the person in the seat. And so that’s a good decision point.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. You’d rather see people spend a lot more money on really good, smart, creative people. Get new interest in their business. Cause usually that’s like the hardest thing to do, uh, or design and create like new products. If you’re product oriented versus hire somebody to do busy work.
Rocky Lalvani: And I am very much with you there.
I, we talk about paying people more, hiring good people, and then letting them do their job.
Sam Ovett: That is, I think we’re on the same page. Cut from the same cloth on
Rocky Lalvani: that one. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I will put all of that in the show notes to make it easy for people to find you.
Sam Ovett: Wonderful. Thank you for having me on Rocky. I appreciate it.
Rocky Lalvani: What can you automate in your business? Which systems of yours do you wish would talk to each other? Are you always having to band-aid systems together to get the results you need? Take the time and fix it. I know it takes time and effort, but the results are so worth it in your improved efficiencies.
Check out Sam site, I’ll put a link in the show notes, mobilepocketoffice.com. Remember you don’t need more resources. You need to be more resourceful. We focus on the bottom line. If you want a done for you service, you can have me as your chief profitability officer, because you have your zone of genius and want to spend your time doing what you love.
I only work with a handful of clients, so they get my full attention. I work with business owners who have, or growing to half a million to 5 million in bread. You can use the scheduling link in the show notes to get on my calendar for a good fit conversation, to see if I’m the right person to support you and how I can help you.
If you want to learn about living the life of your dreams, check out my other podcast, richer soul. As we close out, let’s repeat the money. Revenue is vanity profit is sanity and cash are king having abundant and profitable.
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If you answer yes to one of these questions.
- Need to fix your business and get a life?
- Just starting your automation journey?
- Feeling overwhelmed on where to begin your automation?
- Just feel sometimes like chucking your whole system out the window?
Then we can help.
Here’s the problem: You are manually doing everything in your business. And have no idea where to where to start or how to start automating. Finally, you want to be working ON your business not IN your business.
Here’s the solution: Understand what your process looks like to acquire a customer. By making a map of each and every step a customer takes in your funnel. Then reduce any mistakes they can make when entering information.
Easier said than done. Traditionally this is called Business Process Engineering and we at Mobile Pocket Office have taken this concept along with Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing concepts concepts to improve a business … aka be human where it counts, otherwise automate!
Just because your business is still afloat, doesn’t mean it isn’t taking on water. But you probably already know this, and that’s why you are here. Identifying that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be is the first step, but what are the next steps? Mobile Pocket Office is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.
