Business Built Freedom

Automation Is Life Live Episode

Joshua: So good morning, everyone, and thanks for having me. So today we're going to be talking about automation and how your business can be more automated and what automation means to everyone. So I'm going to go and ask, I guess everyone, what do you think automation is? What would you say automation is?

Learn more about automation at dorksdelivered.com.au

Audience member: Do something once and not have to do it again.

Joshua: Perfect. So removing repetition. That's a good answer. Is there anyone else that has any different understandings of what automation is?

Audience member: Stuff happens without you having to do it.

Joshua: That's very good. As long as it's being monitored for and you're told when it's not doing the things that it should be doing. So yeah, absolutely. Yep. That's another great example of automation. Any other answers?

Audience member: Taking care of certain processes, setting them and allowing them to happen.

Joshua: Yup. Yup. Absolutely. So automation is a very used buzzword at the moment around the place. And automation as I've written here, which was for Neil, but he's not here, oils just ain't oils and automations just ain't automations. I wrote that line just for him and he's not even here, jeez. Anyway. And the important thing is you need to automate as much in your business as you can, because if you don't, your competitors will. And automation is happening all the time and innovation and technology is happening all the time. And people think, "I'm scared of technology," but you go back only a few years ago, back 150 years. And refrigeration wasn't around. No one's scared of fridges now and no one's scared of microwaves now, no one's scared of a lot of things that we just take for granted.

All these things are automating processes within our own home. We're able to have things washed in a dishwasher instead of slaving over a sink. So all these little things speed up your process and there's just a lot of automation happening at the moment to speed up all your processes. Automation shouldn't stop at work, though. Automation should happen at home. And so ultimately you have more time to spend with your family and your friends, because we've only got that once on this earth and that's our time. Everything else should be able to be automated. Does everyone agree? Good. Because otherwise the next 23 minutes is going to be really boring. So that's good. Everyone agrees. So as I said earlier, my name's Joshua and I'm from Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts. I've got my business cards here. Don't actually have them in the box, but if you want to pass them around, that'd be awesome.

So Dorks Delivered does a lot of IT stuff, but a few years ago we found out that more and more businesses were getting us in to automate their processes, hence Business Efficiency Experts being born. So what we do is we try and automate and document... tell me if I talk too quickly as well. I naturally talk quite quickly, so, okay, cool. No worries. Pull me up on it. So yeah, so anyway, Business Efficiency Experts was born out of the need to have businesses automate their processes better. And that can be through removing repetition. That can be through better documentation processes and making sure you're doing a task once. Because you're doing it once and it can be repeated a hundred times or a thousand times, that's awesome if you're not doing it. Automation can be just documenting the processes down. So if you're... you said you had a problem with a staffing member leaving. You can make sure that the onboarding process is much faster.

You then are able to have them onboard and have them profitable in a significantly faster time. It can be removing or creating accountabilities and removing any sort of repetition. So anything that is going to speed up your processes in business is giving it elements of automation. And this goes for home as well. So my home, I'd have to say out of... you've seen my home. Garry's been... lucky enough? I don't know.

Audience member: Fortunate enough.

Joshua: Fortunate. That sounds good. My home's very automated. When I go to bed I can call out to Alexa, which normally when I say that it starts talking, but it's not doing that here, which is good. But I can call out to Alexa and turn off all the lights, shut the gates, lock the door, turn the sauna off, turn the turn the pond waterfall off or whatever else is happening around the place and make sure everything's locked down.

So very easy. You don't have to sort of be in the warm blanket reading a book and then have to have a fight over who's the one who gets out to turn the light off. So it removes arguments, automation removes arguments with your partner. So anyway, so in my spare time when I'm not doing stuff with Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts, I'm a columnist for My Entrepreneur Magazine. I've been featured on news.com.au, and soon to be published in every entrepreneur's guide, focus in on your marketing. As I said earlier, though, today I'm gonna be talking about automation and that's covered off heavily in our podcast, which is called Business Built Freedom.

So I started automating things 19 years ago and I didn't even realise at that stage that that's what I was doing. I was going through a process where I was earning only $6 to make these number plate bracket things. And it was taking me an hour and a half to make them. I got this task, and as a 12-year-old, now you know how old I am, as a 12-year-old, I was making these number plate brackets, an hour and a half for $6 so I was earning $4 an hour. Not very good money but more than every other 12-year-old that was out there. In hindsight and looking back, it was child labour, but I'd chosen to do it. So I guess it's okay. Now, these number plate brackets, I used Lego, and I don't know if you know Technic Lego and robotic Lego and stuff like that. I saved up some money and built a cit that allowed for me to automate the process of creating these number plate brackets. And as a 13-year-old I was creating 10 of them in an hour. So as a 13-year-old, I was earning $60 an hour from home in mum and dad's garage.

So that's more than what most 20-year-olds were earning and a lot of people were earning, as a 13-year-old. When I got to 14 and nine months, I registered my first ABN number. I then had it as a registered business, so it was legit. I then from there started to have my friends come over and work for me and work with me and had the rate increased to $10.60 per number per bracket. That meant that I was getting $106 per hour of work that was being done and then I was outsourcing that to other people to do it. Now, at that stage, I was just trying to make the process as quick as possible. I didn't really look at what I was doing as automation, but it was absolutely automation, and that's just where my love for automation has grown from there. So who here would say they're automating things in their business?

Yup. Cool. Awesome. And who here thinks that they could be doing more with their business in the way of automation that they're not? Everyone should have their hand up. There's always ways to improve. I've automated a lot of things right now, but we're talking... How I'm talking at the moment. This will come up and be on my podcast. It'll be edited down and go into my podcast, it'll be transcribed, and from the transcription that'll end up on my blog. That will then be posted through Facebook, Instagram. Not Instagram, sorry. Facebook. No, it will be Instagram. Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. So that's in a doing all my marketing for me, it goes through a search engine optimizer that puts in all the heading tags and everything else, so then I've got content that's going up on the web, and I'm doing that all while talking to you guys. Because my time is valuable and all your time is valuable.

How much would you say your time is worth per hour? I'm going to go around the room and I'm going to get Roger to grab your calculator out and you have to add all these up. Okay. Just quickly shoot.

Audience member: Yeah, it varies depending on whether I'm selling a house or whether I'm doing a...

Joshua: What would you like if you had to look at it, if you were sitting at home and you were told you needed to fix something or change a light bulb?

Audience member: You know, when I've sold a house and I've sold it within a week, I've earned a lot for two hours' work.

Joshua: But what would you say your time is worth? So if you were told that you're going to put a dollar figure on it, would you say your time is worth $5 an hour or $500 an hour?

Audience member: Oh, it would just plummet. $80 an hour.

Joshua: $80 an hour. Okay.

Audience member: $250.

Joshua: $250.

Audience member: $450.

Joshua: Okay. You adding this up real quick?

Roger: Yeah, I'm adding up.

Audience member: $250.

$250.

Joshua: $450.

Audience member: $380.

$550 at the moment.

Joshua: Okay, cool.

Audience member: $500.

Joshua: $500? Yeah.

Audience member: I have no idea. I'll go with $50.

$110.

$250.

Roger: Let's just say, ballpark, we're up to about three grand or so.

Joshua: Three grand or so. Okay. So roughly, and how many people do we have here? Five-ish, 20, 15? Okay, so we're talking about $150 an hour roughly, is what we have as a group accumulatively here. So every task that you do, whether it's at home mowing the lawn, or whether you're out and about shopping, you should be putting that number as whatever the number you've put in your head. So $5.50 is very competitive. That's going to be difficult. You need to have a dollar figure put on it, and not just for the time that you're spending, when you're earning money, but for the time that you're spending all the time. If you go and mow the lawn at home and it takes you two hours to mow the lawn, that's $10, $11 that you missed that on there.

And with the different numbers we're looking at here, even as the average of $150 per a per hour, that's $300 to mow the lawn. If you can get someone else to mow the lawn for $50 and they're using better equipment, faster equipment, that's time that you can be spending on your business or with your family. That's more valuable time. So my dad's an engineer and one of the things that I saw him doing was fixing a DVD player, a $25 DVD player. It took him two hours to fix. Now, that is absolutely stupid, but he was learning and seeing how it all works. So if there's a learning experience then it's a different story. And that comes down to, again, automating what you're doing. If you enjoy learning, then do the task. But don't continue to do the task if there's better time that you should be spending your money, or time... better things that you should be spending a time and money on. Does that make sense? Cool.

I know it sounds like I'm just saying the same sort of stuff in different ways, but that's cool. As long as we're all on the same page. So what would you say you'd like to be able to automate in your business? Everyone's sort of said that they had something that would like to automate or know that they're going to be doing something better. I'm going to go around the room and try and work out a way... or a business problem, maybe. Let's do it like a business problem. What's a business problem that you'd like to see removed? Roger, what would you-

Roger: I like your automated postings and so forth. I've got some automated postings. I'd like to polish those up and improve them. [inaudible 00:10:57] exploited them to their full-

Joshua: What ones are you using at the moment?

Roger: What do I use? I use IFTTT.

Joshua: Yep. That's really good.

Roger: Yeah, that's what I use more than anything. And I use SocialPilot.

Joshua: Cool. And how about you, Julian?

Julian: Julian, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to be able to take a business card and just scan it and then have it send all the emails and introductions.

Joshua: Do you have a business card?

Julian: Yep.

Joshua: Okay. So while I'm here... This is great. That's really, really good. Really good answer. So I'll send you an email while I'm doing this presentation. So I've just taken a photo, and I'll show you how to do that later. So yeah. Okay. And Sarah, would you like to automate?

Sarah: Well, I just recently automated it. When I go do hair and makeup for weddings, I kind of don't really have time. So now I just pretty much put it in a drop box, somebody then takes it from there and they post it up for me and now it's done. I don't have to worry about that. As my business is very visual, people want to be seeing work all the time. That was a big thing. So that's been a good thing that I've just recently done, so yeah.

Joshua: Cool.

Audience member: So what we do do or what we want to do?

Joshua: What would you like? What would you like to have automated? Or a business problem that you're trying to overcome?

Audience member: I suppose for me it's making sure that my numbers are competitive with the rest of the market. So it would be really cool if I didn't have to go and check every time I needed to do a quote. Automating that sort of process of finding out what everybody else is charging, it would be great if I could do that with automation.

Joshua: Is price a big deciding factor?

Audience member: I think it is for people.

Joshua: I know people look around a lot and you've got a lot of... like Vistaprint, very competitive. Not competitive probably in the quality of what you'd be doing versus what they're doing though. And so I strongly think everyone in business should not have price as a differentiator. You've got personalised service, localised service, fantastic face and you're able... Vistaprint have no face to their business. They just a cold business that are online and they're convenient and cheap, but that's not what-

Audience member: It's finding the balance.

Joshua: Absolutely. Yeah. And Willem?

Willem: More of a social media presence.

Joshua: Yep. Yep. Yep. So getting a better presence.

Willem: I was able to farm that out to my wife.

Joshua: Absolutely, causes less arguments. It comes up with blue screens of death when there's problems as opposed to arguments within the relationship.

Audience member: Did you say you want to automate your wife?

Joshua: Automate his wife! Do you have content at the moment that you could be putting up?

Willem: Being part of a worldwide organisation, there's always something happening somewhere in the world.

Joshua: Vetting your website with some of the videos and bits and pieces that go up and it looks good. So yeah. And Gary, how about yourself?

Gary: I'd like to start a revolution to have Google shut down. I need young, smart fellows like you to be able to go and come into the industry and put decent competition against them and stop them from destroying small businesses.

Joshua: Yeah. Well, I think between the big companies, Amazon, Facebook and Google, they're too big of a conglomerate. And Microsoft and Apple and everything else further from that. But the big three there that I already mentioned should be divided up and split up so that they're not owning the entities. I completely agree. I don't know what sort of militia we're going to have to put together to do to achieve this.

Audience member: It looks like it might be happening in Europe.

Joshua: Yeah? Yeah, I haven't haven't seen it, but... Yeah, it's a... Definitely. I agree with you. It's very difficult to do that the way... it's sort of like the devil. You have to just be with the devil. Now my rankings are going to go down for this social post. "What are you doing? You can't badmouth Google!"

Audience member: That's the problem, everyone thinks like that.

Joshua: Oh, you can.

Audience member: If a lot of people started standing up to it...

Joshua: It's just... So what sort of phone do you have?

Audience member: Samsung.

Joshua: Okay, so there's more than 200 touch points that Google gets from what you do every day through that phone. There's an experiment they did where they removed Google and Amazon from their life. They were unable to log into any of the other services such as Dropbox from the different ways and methods they using to proof it was a human or wasn't a human. They weren't able to use any Google maps. They weren't able to use anything else, so they started using Waze and then Waze was working but it cost a lot of money. A lot of the services that we use and take for granted are backed by Google, even if it's not the systems that we're using directly. And the problem is... Because they are selling our information off. That's how they're making money. Facebook makes $10 a month off of the data that we give to them. If we weren't marketed through anything on Facebook and the information wasn't sold, it would cost us $10 a month to use Facebook, and no one would use it because it wouldn't be worth it. So it's a balance. I think, yeah, the system should be changed, 100%. People should be very aware of how much data is actually being thrown around there about you. And Valerie?

Valerie: I'm helping people to understand that once some data is taken, it should then be what a software industry is built on, plus it's growing more on bugging people's Bank statements through their systems. But it's not a huge buy-in to that. So I think in terms of my own business automating, I guess my process is automating that hasn't been done.

Audience member: For me, it would be networks. Documents sending and receiving.

Joshua: It's big thing that annoys me in your industry, how much paper goes everywhere. And also, has anyone heard statement, "Don't marry me on the first date"? Has anyone heard that? You have people that jump in and they go, "Oh, hi, yes, I'm Josh Litt and I'd love to do some work with you." And just really, really selling themselves without building the relationship. I've dealt with a broker in the past and they... It was like, I said, "Oh, can you help me out? I'm a small business owner, and that that makes things of question mark on complication." And they sent me an eight-page thing I had to fill out. I'm like, "Ah, I'm not going to go with you."

Joshua: Well, have you seen some of the open banking stuff that's coming in in the start of July?

Audience member: Open banking?

Joshua: Open banking, so the bank statements and a lot of the information can be fed through APIs to different systems. Yeah. This bank statements, I think, dot com, or something like that, allows you to... that's really good for your industry.

Audience member: Probably a structured onboarding process video and having it easily accessible. Can you sign it off as well?

Joshua: Yep. Cool. Cool.

Joshua: Bob?

Bob: Probably the process of intakes, where the lawyers do a lot of writing. That can be digitised and then put back into our lead CRM system, development management system, so still when the client comes back, they don't have to redo it, it's actually from hand to digitised to CRM. Or it could be onboarding for a normal conversation as well. I've started a little bit, but I think it's culture change more than anything. I've looked at people with a Microsoft tablet.

Carrie: We're in a relationship with business, so I think we've just got to be a little bit careful. We've automated our, what? We've got electronic work papers. The ITO is making us automate things because things come through electronically now, so we're trying not to have the whole paper thing, etc. But what everyone else said, I guess, we could do with some work on our CRM. Because it's rubbish in rubbish out with a lot of this.

Joshua: Absolutely.

Audience member: It's a little bit awkward in our business because a lot of those people who are just looking for insurance, they don't want to fill in forms. But in terms of having a social media presence, that's probably what I'm interested in.

I would be firstly automating my data collection, so I'm still handwriting our analysis. It would be great to do it online so I'm not wasting paper. And the other thing that I want to automate ,gathering reviews. So when we've finished the process, we have a system where an email or an SMS, whatever, goes out with the link seeking reviews.

Joshua: Cool. Cool. Awesome. I'm going to try and go around the room really quickly to give everyone a quick answer as to how to automate this stuff a bit better.

Joshua: Okay. So your business, if you want to have your posts automated a bit better, you do know what RSS feeds are?

Roger: Yeah, I know RSS feeds.

Joshua: Being able to collaborate and join RSS feeds together. So what they do is that if you do updates on things on your website or updates anywhere, you can have it so that update is pulled and pushed to any other location that you want around the web on different times and different schedules and you can create different ways that it all works. And using RSS feeds in Sendible is what we use, and we found Sendible's fantastic. It integrates into most things.

Roger: I haven't looked at Sendible.

Joshua: Oh, it's fantastic. It's great. I've managed a couple of businesses through it. And yeah, it's by far the best one that I've seen out there. Not the cheapest but the best. Yeah. And you'd have to have some automation to be able to sell the websites for the price that you're selling them, because there is no money to be made in that otherwise. Yeah. So with your onboarding process, everyone sort of said something here and everyone's sort of... The answers they've got, it's not like there's a question mark for most of them. A lot of the things that you want to do are able to be done. It's just a time thing to be able to do them for most people, I'd imagine. Yeah? So for me, one of the biggest things that I did in my business was automating every single task that I did and documenting every task that I did and then finding something to do everything that I did so I could go traveling.

And I went over to America for nearly three months last year and didn't have to touch a computer, didn't have to touch anything to do with the business, which was awesome. So that was my big a-ha, champagne moment in automation, being able to really step away from the business. Because a lot of the time we put ourselves into these businesses that we buy and we sometimes don't really buy into a business. We buy into a job. We've bought into our position in business. And that isn't a good position to be in because most of it's buying for more money or more freedom. And a lot of the time you end up with less of both. And the only real way out of that is by automating things.

And automation isn't something you need to be choosing, do I do or don't I do it? It's, if you don't do it, you will be left behind. Because if you didn't have a microwave and you didn't have an oven now, it'd be very difficult to cook your food on a fire out in the backyard. And that's just-

Audience member: No, we had three years without an oven.

Joshua: You did? Three years without an oven? Did you have a dishwasher?

Audience member: Yeah, my son.

Joshua: See, see, you've got automation, that's automation.

Audience member: Yeah, you'd want to sit and think.

Joshua: So it's not monitored automation. So you need to always just be looking at ways to automate your business. We were contacted by a government agency in what we've been doing with some of the different things we've been putting around the web, and they've asked us to help businesses out, to automate their businesses. And they've actually reduced down the rate of what we charge out to $40 an hour to be able to help businesses, small businesses automate their processes. So if there's anything you ever see that needs to be automated at that sort of price, yeah, there's no reason why you shouldn't be getting someone in to at least look over your systems and see what needs to be automated.

The great news is everyone already knows something that needs to be automated. Most of the time with fresh eyes and another perspective, you'll find that there's always more and more that can be automated. It's always great to get someone to come into your business and see how your process is working and how everything is going together. Because as theold quote goes, with the NASA spending millions of dollars to develop a pen that works in space and the Russians used a pencil. So it's a just a perspective thing. that didn't actually happen, but it's still a fun quote.

So yeah, so that's, I guess, the main thing is make sure you're automating everything in business. Very few people here brought up automation, automating their marketing, only like a couple of people. And that is a big thing because you want to make sure your name is out there. If your business has no voice, your customers won't have any ears to hear it, so you need to be out there and be present in one way or another. Most businesses here are business-to-business businesses, I think, most of them. There's a few business-to-consumer businesses, but generally speaking, we all have a skill set that we can bring to the table to help each other's businesses out. Even if we're just going in, individually reviewing how things are working and how things could be better.

With your systems to be able to see what your competitors are doing. you can do things such as what's called web scraping and you can have it so that all of your competitors and all their prices are automatically update in a spreadsheet or a dashboard that you could see each day or each month, however often you wanted to do that, and then you can use tools such as Proposify, which would allow for you to go in and see how you can go about change... sorry, you can use Proposify to be able to quote to your customers really quickly and easily in a templated way and know the prices that they could be seeing from any of the competitors around the place, and know the pain points and the reasons why you'd want to push away.

I've worked with Sarah in the past and one of her concerns was there was other people out there that were cheaper in price. And I said, "Yeah, but they're not going to be anywhere near as good as what you're doing and how you're doing it." But we put a cheaper price up on the website and then just made conditions that it had to be a certain amount of people and it only included the same things that the other people included. A lot of the time, if people are looking to things such as Vistaprint, they're not going to necessarily go, "Is the stock as thick? Is it good glaze?" Or whatever the situation is, they're going to just go, "Oh, the cards are cheap. And then you can sort of just pivot that and you say, "Well, is that the image that you want to have from a business front? Do you want to have an image of a cheap business? Do you want to have these cheap cards"? Doesn't really sound very good.

Your first impression's a crappy card, so that's where you can then sort of change the argument. But have the pricing on your website as competitive as Vistaprint so you're not backing people away. But you don't know if they are or not backing away from that without having some data to really sink into and work that out, which is what we love. We love building businesses up with lots and lots of data so that you're able to make informed, decisive decisions. You can work out if your staff force is efficient, if your systems are efficient and if things are as automated as they should be. Automation doesn't remove jobs. Automation brings health and life back into your business because the jobs that people are doing aren't repetitious. They are fun loving jobs. Automating your wife is a fantastic idea. Automated wife, happy life.

Audience member: They have special shops for that.

Joshua: And they can fit in your pocket. Sendible would be great to help automate all your social media marketing though. Sendible, the same thing I was talking to Roger about, which I can talk to you more about. It's a fantastic tool. It lets you see everything, all the comments and everything in one spot for all of your customers so you can just respond to everyone in one location. You can post everything out, you can make sure it only posts during certain hours. And set there so that it posts out videos and everything else. We've got our marketing down pat, so in one hour, one hour a week, I'm able to create two youtube videos, three podcasts, five blogs, and we've been doing that one hour a week for the last six months and we have over 160,000 written words that have all been SEO optimised and put onto our website. Which has increased our traffic for a B to B website, which we don't pay for any paid advertisement on our website.

We get about 3,000, 4,000 unique visitors a month, so that's pretty good for a B to B business where we're not selling anything on the website whatsoever. There's no reason for them to come there except for see our services and see the blogs that we've been writing. So my time's up by a minute more than what I should have been talking, but plus extra and extra. But has everyone enjoyed this? It's been good? We've learned a bit? I could talk for hours and hours, but if you want to hear more, definitely if you've got my card, let me know. As I said, because the government rate is pretty, pretty amazing. We're pretty happy that I got into that.

Audience member: The one big obstacle everyone's trying to overcome with all these message bots and things is automating the sincere personal touch.

Joshua: You'd never automate that. I'm here. I can't automate what I'm doing right now because the feeling and the heart that I have for what I do in my business can't be seen through an automated message. So you can't automate the personal touch, but you can automate everything else around it.

Audience member: They try.

Joshua: Yeah.

Audience member: You can't automate passion.

Joshua: You can't automate passion. What you can do...

Audience member: You could give them a microwave once started. My mother would think this is witchcraft.

Joshua: It is.

Audience member: Oh, it is, that's right.

Joshua: Getting back to Google, it is. So you can't automate the passion and drive you have as a person, but you can remove that requirement. Say Google, the face of Google, the face of Amazon, the face... none of these big companies have a face. Apple had a face but then PC killed him. Do you get it? Yeah. It's a terrible joke. Anyway, you can't really automate that passion, but what you can do is create a lot of content around it so you can build a relationship beforehand, having dozens of videos and lots of social posts that sort of show that same approach.

So I've got a comical approach to the way that I approached people, and showing that and having that means that you can build 80% of the relationship up and then the other 20% can be nurtured in person. I have seen some of the stuff they do around the reading, the psychology on how people talk. If people are talking in feeling words of people talking and doing or hearing words, you say, "How do you feel about that?" And it can analyse with their words and then reword whatever you've written to then post that back to them in a way that resonates more strongly with them. So you can do some things like that, but I still think we're all operating a small business. We need to be able to automate, but we need to also keep that personal touch. You don't want to remove that. It's one of the best things you've got in small business. That's what Vistaprint don't have!

Special Interview with Dan from Pasfield Plumbing

Josh: Good morning. Good morning on this wonderful morning that is this morning, and I'm here with Dan and he's going to introduce himself and why he started business. So Dan, tell us a bit about your business.

Dan: Howdie. We started our business for getting some freedom.

Josh: Yeah, cool. And that's a great reason. A lot of people decide to start business to either get more money or do something different or get some more freedom or be able to at least choose their working hours. And my understanding is you're trying to build a family as well?

Dan: That's correct. Yeah, we've got one daughter and that's probably enough for us.

Josh: Enough? Enough, definitely, I'd say. That's one more than me and I can totally say that's enough. I've got 10 nieces and nephews and no way would I want to have one full time at the moment. Too much other cool stuff to be doing. But you're still managing to make time to be able to spend time with your family and still manage the business at the moment?

Dan: Yeah, we are. I mean, obviously we're in the building stages of our business, so we are time poor. We would like more time, but we know that comes with more time and development on the business.

Josh: Yup, yup, yup. It's always a bit of a battle, especially when you have to wear multiple hats and you have to be the salesman, the businessmen, the every man or woman. You can be all these things, all at once, and then still have time to be a dad and a husband. So balancing that can always be difficult. Knowing, I guess, that you need to balance it gives you the ability. Being aware of it lets you at least put your time into different containers.

And that's what we're all about, is all about automation and making sure you're getting your time back. So you've got your first employee as well, which is really exciting times. It's exciting stuff. And what would you like to see come in your business in the next 12 months?

Dan: Next 12 months ... more workflow from the customers that we would like to see. More private customers, more people who ... Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who call up through the website or whatever platform and they have problems and we're here to help kind of thing.

Josh: Cool.

Dan: We'd like to grow our team with one more plumber on hand and we would also like a bit more time for us-

Josh: Yep, yep. That's all really, really good goals. And do you know what you'd like to see out of those things first? Like, I guess a marketing approach first and then cruise onwards from there?

Dan: Hundred percent. Yeah. So we can't really move forward with our goals until somebody comes on to help, another plumber, but once we have that other plumber, then we'll be able to drop back a few hours per week and focus on getting the website built.

Josh: Yeah. Cool. Awesome. That's really good stuff. So you've been in business now about two years or so, coming on two years?

Dan: Yeah. Correct.

Josh: Yup. And what would you say for anyone out there starting their business or not even started. They've just got this brain fart in their head and they want to see something happening with it. What would you say is the advice that you would give them?

Dan: Forget any opinion or idea that you have as being the only way. Be open-minded. Listen with two ears. Speak with one mouth and be ready to work very hard.

Josh: Yep. Yep. I could not agree more. As I was saying earlier, it's kind of like you have to choose. If you're happy working full time, would you be happy to work double full time, working an 80-hour shift, knowing that you're building up this fantastic thing that's going to flourish into the future?

It reminds me a bit of what we call the bamboo story, which it goes that you plant a seed and it takes up to five years for that seed to really take off, and you plant a seed and you're watering it, you're nurturing it. Anyone else would be looking at you like, "You're stupid. Why don't you just go plant something else that's actually started to grow quickly?" But then, after five years, it goes from growing only a few inches to 80 feet in a matter of months.

And that's what it is all about, being a business, I think. You need to know that you need to plant these seeds and really need to push forward, knowing that you've got good common sense goals. Because if you end up shooting and you're not aiming at anything, you're not going to hit whatever your target was.

Dan: 100 Hundred percent. You need to have goals. You need to know that the moment that you're in the early stages that that's not going to be permanent. You know, it is exactly the bamboo story. You know, you're growing at the start and you can't expect to all of a sudden become self employed or be the boss and then earn the big bucks or, you know, achieve the goals that you want. It takes a lot of time. That's why not everyone becomes self employed.

Josh: That's exactly right. And the people that do sometimes have very unrealistic expectations, and that's why businesses fail in the first 12 months and in the first five years, in the first 10 years, and all these other different metrics that you hear about. They just don't hang around long enough or they had very unrealistic expectations.

I've got a friend who's come to me and he said, "Oh, Josh, I've got this fantastic idea for an app." And I talked to him and he goes, "Oh, but you can't steal my idea." And I'm like, "Well, you haven't really ... ". It's like saying, "I've got this fantastic idea for a new type of wood." I say, "Okay, cool, but you have nothing or no practice or process in here to allow for this to happen." But he wants to have his million idea purchased with just being two sentences on paper. And that comes down to I guess all the planning around your business and making sure that you've done the proper planning and you have a business plan. You've scoped things out and you've done a SWOT analysis and things like that.

But more importantly, knowing that that needs to be reviewed and that no way sticks and is the one thing. Did you make a review at the start of business, whenever you first started, a couple years ago?

Dan: Yes. Yes, we did.

Josh: Have you gone back and reviewed that recently?

Dan: We have and the fact that we had a review, we had goals to reflect back on and we kept that on the wall in our office. So we see them every day and we work towards them and we had our champagne moments when we achieved those goals. Yeah. You have to have your goals clear and you have to know them and you have to see them every day and in those moments when it's so hard and you're like, "What am I doing? Should I give up?", you need to look at those goals and you need to punch forward.

Josh: Absolutely. And keeping in mind the goals, but also that your life circumstances change, your knowledge changes. A lot of people that we help out in business, they start off as a technician and they're looking to grow their business. And as I've said, you can't really do both. You're only one person, or two people, depending on the size of the business, and you can't just go and jump in and expect to be able to have 40, 60 billable hours and then still be growing the business.

And I know from myself how I've gone through those growth pains over the years. So it's important to have those goals, but know that what you've written there, it can be adjusted. If you didn't get the jet ski by the time you had the business for two years, it's fine. You can adjust that and make it the three-year goal and then know that you've achieved some other things. And write down the things that you achieve, even though it may not have been on the original scope. Like, maybe you've decided to do this really cool documentation system or marketing thing you weren't going to be doing before, or some of the stuff ... we're talking about the quoting and lead generation stuff ... and maybe doing that is more important and is going to ultimately lead to a bigger, better goal. We have more bamboo instead of just one shoot growing 80 foot in the air.

Dan: That's right. Hundred percent.

Josh: Well, it's been really great speaking with you and I've enjoyed our time here. And if you do have any plumbing requirements around Southeast Queensland, don't feel afraid. We'll chuck the contact details on this blog article and in the description below. If you do have any questions or have any needs, feel the love to send us some feedback there on iTunes. Enjoy and stay good!

Special Episode: How to Prepare Your Resume

Joshua: Good morning. Good morning. You're talking to Joshua and I've got a fantastic guest on this show. I've got Denim here and he is actually going to be talking about why he's decided to start his first business. Now this is really exciting because there's a lot of different people that we have that talk about lots of different things and this is right fresh. There's a lot of reasons why he wants to do this. Now he's worked for many different industries and what he's found over the years is people have shit resumes ultimately and we want people to have great resumes because great resumes lead to great jobs. So what do you think Denim?

Read more about resume preparation: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/463-how-to-prepare-your-best-resume

Denim: Yeah, thanks Josh. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so the business ACS consulting services, we're actually I've been there for looking at people's career development right from where they are from either a graduate level from a 5-10 years sort of working perspective or a senior sort of person from 10 years plus. As Josh has pointed out, have worked in various industries. Some of those including banking and finance, telecommunications, defence, hospitality. So I've got a wide variety of experience in those areas, but my most recent experience in the recruitment world has led me to actually see and what's actually happening on the ground with those who are job seekers today. I see a lot of a gap, I guess, between the skill sets that people have versus what they're actually putting down on paper and so the business has been set up to help people actually realise what abilities and competencies they have to deliver into their industry of choice and look for us to actually help them, guide them in the right direction so they can present themselves in the best manner.

Joshua: That's a great answer. I guess what you're saying ultimately is we're not all salespeople and ultimately no one should have to be a salesperson except for a salesperson, but you want to make sure you're leading the right job that you're getting. Would that be right?

Denim: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I've spent a good 17-20 years in sales predominant environments and when I look at the resume or CV coming through for job seekers today, I actually unfortunately for them, haven't been involved in sales areas, but presenting yourself on paper is actually a sales position type of activity and a few hints and tips and support along the way will go a long way in terms of getting your key strengths highlighted and getting you to that next step which is an interview.

Joshua: I couldn't agree more. And now from my perspective as a business owner of 12 years who has interviewed countless resumes and seeing the shit come through, I can say that if I was able to see some golden stars through some of the shit that I've gone through, I would definitely be going towards those more than anything else. So you want to make sure that you're really honing in on your resumes. You don't want to just be sitting there going, "Oh man, look at this thing," and you creating this resume and it looks like this boring thing. If you're bored to read it, if your wife's bored to read it or your 12 year old daughter or whatever is bored to read it, your employer or potential prospecting employer is not going to have any interest in reading it. Would that be fair to say?

Denim: Oh look, absolutely. That would be Josh fair to say and I think to add to that, I think what's necessary is to provide a very genuine and very honest account of your experience to date and have that presented in the right fashion that meets the criteria of the role that you're looking for and again, it's very important to be yourself. Tell your story on that paper. That's an actual genuine representation of yourself.

Joshua: I completely agree and you want to make sure you're representing yourself right? Yeah?

Denim: Yeah, that's right. You've got to be able to represent yourself the right way and to do that sometimes just requires a little bit of support and guidance as to looking at the experience you've had in the past a little bit deeper, pulling it apart and assessing where your strengths have actually been that are relevant to the next step of your journey.

Joshua: Well, I can say this and this is something that I've found. So when I've employed in the past and I've found someone that's absolutely amazing at doing tech work and then they push themselves forward and push themselves through and then I think, "Man, I've got to start paying them more and I've got to start doing whatever I'm doing with them and making sure I'm staying with them, staying engaged," and sort of decide to put them up to a managerial role and you know what I found out is they are terrible at that role. They're terrible at being a manager. They don't want to be a manager and what is important is you don't have to pay your managers less or more.

You can pay them whatever you want. It doesn't have to have any relation to the people that they're managing all to ultimately. The reason I'm saying that is people have managerial skills. People have technical skills. People are great at what they do, but most people are not great at writing resumes and most people are not great at marketing themselves and this is something that Denim is really bringing to the marketplace that I've not seen before Denim. So it's important that you think about how you're writing your resumes, why you're doing that, and what your outcome is. What do you think? Denim?

Denim: Yeah, thanks Josh. I think you're absolutely right. The motivation behind why are you searching for a particular position needs to come through within what you're presenting on paper. I think that motivation needs to be honest so that you don't get, find yourself in a position where you start in a new role and you find that that's actually not the right role for you. So on the flip side, I guess yes, your employers looking for you being the right fit, but you're also looking for the right place for yourself and what does that really mean for you? Look, I mean a lot of people would say, "Look, I just need a job. I'm desperate to get a job," but how does that impact you? What sort of lifestyle are you really looking for? What hours are you looking for?

What sort of salary are you looking for? What are you looking to do with those sort of things? So are you looking for additional time or are you happy to work really hard so you can pay off your mortgage faster or are you looking for more work/life balance where you might be able to spend with your friends and your family because that's really important to you. So it's important when writing of a resume that you take into account, I guess your complete picture as to where you are today and where you'd like to see yourself over the next few years in particular.

Joshua: Absolutely and that comes down to I think about when you go to sell a house. You love your house and you had the best way to promote why your house is your house and your house is beautiful for your house. When you go to sell that house, is that the house that everyone wants to buy? When you start talking about the reason why you put something in and it might look really obvious and maybe you're talking in your resume about why you got that training.

That may have nothing to do with the buyer that you're selling that to. So you really need to think about why are you selling what it is that you're selling? That could be a skillset. That could be a time. That could be your freedom. It could be anything and all of the above. The important thing is you need to know the person that's buying your resume in this situation and you need to make sure you go through a broker or someone that is going to be able to listen to what you have to say and be able to represent you in an appropriate way for the person that's going to be buying your services.

Denim: Yeah, great and I think it's all about identifying I guess through a session of exploration with ICS to discover, I guess what it really is that you're essentially looking for. Some people might be looking for career progression that might also require some support with your existing resume or CV. So I think that's really important that what we can help you with is actually identifying for yourself what it is that you're looking for, what your key strengths are, how you will apply those in a new position. Coupled with, I guess, following on from that process or combined, intertwined with that process, looking at how will you make yourself presentable in an interview sort of a perspective.

What sort of questions you might have in moving into a position. What do you know about that particular company? What can you bring to the table? What are your key areas of strengths that you know in your heart that again can make a difference. That you've made a difference in the past before and highlight some of your achievements. Always very important start and from there we can sort of look at coaching through that whole process of initially starting to search for a role, putting together a very sharp presentation on paper and then delivering within an interview environment so that we can get you the goals that you're after and the dream job you're looking for.

Joshua: Well said and I'd say ultimately know yourself, but know your competitor even better than you know yourself. So you make sure that you are the one that is there to win the opportunities that are going out. So I've hope you've enjoyed this. If you have, definitely make sure to jump across the iTunes and leave some love there. Stay good.

How to Prepare for Your First Three Years in Business

The first three years in business. You've got all these things to do and I've got some great news for you. It's the most stressful time that you've had up until now, but it doesn't disappear. It continues, you just get used to the stress. All jokes aside, it is the most rewarding thing you can ever do, starting a business, but making sure you set the ground correctly, making sure the footings of your business are set up adequately will mean that your business will last well into the future.

Read more about Business Preparation: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/461-how-to-prepare-for-your-first-three-years-in-business

My Story

So, I've been in business now for 19 years. The first business was just myself as a sole trader. Then I went from that to get a sole trader ABN that was registered with GST and trading under a business name instead of my own name. From that I got all sorts of good stuff such as Pty, Ltds, trusts, distribution trusts and all that fun jazz.

What Do You Need?

What you need to think about when you are looking to get into business is what sort of model is going to be best for your business. Now I'm in no way, shape, or form an accountant. All I know is what I've done, what's worked for me, and what hasn't. You definitely want to make sure that you are talking to someone about your company structure, make sure they're giving you a review. You need to know what you want to do in the future. because the difference can be as simple as you have kids or you don't. If they're coming up to adolescents and there's some tax offsets to be made with trust distributions rather than with Pty Ltds. The most important thing is have that discussion before you go forward and start working it out. There's lots of different ways that you can set up your business to protect yourself with asset companies, as well as with different structures that allow for you to have a little bit of a firewall between you, and if something was to go wrong, heaven forbid, shit hits the fan. So a company structure review is really, really important.

Review Client Vertices

You want to make sure also that you're reviewing the client verticals that you want to be advertising into and that you want to be pushing into. It doesn't matter what you're doing now, what you want to be working with is not everyone. There's a famous person, I'm not going to mention the name, but they decided they were a PT and they decided they did not want to deal with everyone and anyone. They wanted to deal with just the top 5%, and they wanted to deal with the 5% that were in the movie and TV industries, so they wanted to make sure they were in front of those people. So all their marketing and everything is around that exact vertical. Now, they didn't want to be overly known them self, but obviously through virtue they became. Now, you might want to deal with only accountants because of some reason for whatever the product is. Maybe it's zero accounting and you want to deal with just accountants, or maybe it's something else and there's a certain vertical. You're selling paint and you want to deal with artists or whoever, but you don't want to deal with people in the automotive industry. Maybe you want to deal with one or not the other. But advertising and working out what your ideal avatar is for your company is one of the most valuable things that you can do to make sure that you can target your audience.

Technology, IT and Infrastructure Review

You also want to look at where you think your time's going to be spent with technology. Make sure you give yourself a technology, IT, and infrastructure overview. Create a topology of how you think your business should be working, and then have that reviewed by a couple of independent companies so they can give you some hints and tips of different software that's out there to be able to make the process even better than what it is.

Check Your Finances

You want to make sure you're financially set up. Now I can say I was able to start the first business that I did 19 years ago on a shoestring budget. I was living at home with mum and dad and so I had that huge advantage as a teenager starting a business. I had a little bit of support behind me in that regard. You may or may not have that, but when I decided to start the company Dorks Delivered, I needed to have some financial backing behind me. And I wasn't going to have anyone do that. I needed to do that on my own steam. So I was working two jobs to make sure that I was able to get enough money in my pocket for that rainy day. Look at what industry you're in, maybe your in here in makeup and you know that there's certain times that the industry is flooded with people that want to get this done around Christmas time and for formals and wedding seasons and stuff like that. Or maybe you're in the IT space or a business-to-business space and you know that around mid-December up until mid-January to the end of January, businesses pretty much just turned off. No one cares to spend anything and you may not get invoices paid or there may not even be any work happening. In those cases, you want to make sure you're preparing for that rainy day.

Now what you feel comfortable and where you want to prepare, it may be different to me. I am very cautious with how much I have in savings to make sure that I can do what I need to do long into the future, and that's how I've been able to be around so long. If I had less than six months of money saved readily for every single expense, without any income whatsoever, I would start feeling a little bit nervous. So making sure you've got the ability to have a safety net behind you is a very, very invaluable tip that I would give anyone looking to go out in business, so make sure you've got that. The first three years in business for myself, as I said, I was working a couple of jobs and that allowed for me to save up enough to be able to jump out and have enough of an income coming in from the business that I was confident that it was going to work.

The last thing you want to do is start biting off little bits of the business and seeing how much you've got to go, realising that this thing is an elephant and it's going to take you a while to set up and get through it. If you're doing that and it's an elephant and you've quit your day job, you may very well be finding another day job and you've just burned through all your savings and a bunch of time. Work longer hours at the start to be able to get the flexibility to know that what you're going to do is going to work and it's not going to be a waste of your time.

Buy In

One of the other big ones is thinking about if you are buying into a business or if you're buying into a job. If you've been in and out of work all the time, maybe have a think about why that is. It's easy to point fingers at someone else. It's easy to say, "Oh, I hated that boss. Oh, those dickheads. They're all dickheads that work there." Or whatever the case is. Try not to do that. There is a chance that you are the consistent thing in all your unsuccessful relationships when it comes to work. There is a chance. And if that is, you've got to just check in with yourself. Just make sure that you know the reason that you're getting into business, because if you're looking to get away from the hostility of a work environment and having a boss, you will find you're going to have multiple bosses and everyone there is peer-reviewing you. You're going to have customers, whether it be other businesses or people walking in off the street, you're going to have people that are continuously reviewing you. Now, of course they're not going to give you all of your income, but they are all going to be adding up to that and it only takes a few pissed-off ones to leave some nasty Google reviews and it can topple down from there. So you want to make sure that you are aware of why you're getting into business and if you're buying yourself a job or if you're buying yourself the freedom, the career, and the lifestyle. Make sure when you've done that you look at where you want that to go in the future.

What Happened With Me

I'll comfortably say that when I started out in business, I wasn't buying myself a job, so to speak, or I didn't think that I was. Given that I had no interest or intention at that stage when I was starting it up, and that could be through to my naivety or that could be a number of reasons, but when I started it up, I had no intention of really growing it to have as many people working with us as we do now. I had the intention of doing a great job and really pushing through earning lots of money, doing what I love doing. I soon realised that that is not possible if I want to go on holidays and all sorts of other things. So I then started to change around the way the business worked so that I wasn't the head cog and the bit that was needed in the business for it to run.

It would've been much easier to start off with that same attitude. That would've saved me years, and I would stress strongly, think about why you're doing what you're doing and how you're doing it. A business owner, if they're running a pie shop or an accounting firm or anything else, is the same person. They've gone into the role of being a business owner. Somebody who owns a McDonald's franchise is a business owner. They're not flipping hamburgers. They didn't start off flipping hamburgers and then start one day, "Oh yeah, I'm now the business owner of McDonald's." Some people probably have, but as a majority rule, it would not be likely. So you don't work your way up. You want to work out what the structure is to start off with and why you got in there.

How Will You Measure Success?

Once you've worked that out, you then need to look at how you're going to measure your own success and the success of your peers and contractors. Putting in key performance indicators where you're able to see what they are doing, how they are doing it, how we can improve on it is absolutely imperative. And those different key KPIs that you put in place can only come about when you have measurable data, so make sure the systems that you're putting in place allow for you to measure things. If you're a plumber and you're running a mobile plumbing service and you're looking to be bringing someone on with their own van, you know how long jobs take. Use that data to measure how long their jobs are taking. Even if it means for you to go along with a few jobs and just see how they're doing it. There might be a few tricks of the trade that you've got over your experienced years that you can teach them that's going to improve their processes. Documenting that down and making sure that you've got the time to do that and create this means that when you bring the next van on with the next plumber, it's going to be so much quicker. The onboarding process is going to be fast as, and that's going to save you countless dollars because you've then got it there and it's repeatable.

The other cool thing is, if you do decide to change the process and the way that you're doing it, you can just send that out to all of the trucks, all of the plumbers that you've got working for you, and then that'll just flow down from there. And this can be applied to any and all industries. Make sure that you've got the ability to see how your data's working and put up key performance indicators that allow for you to make those goals.

Sales Objective Training

The next one we're going to talk about is sales objection training. Now, you really need to make sure that you've got sales objection training because you know your product better than anyone else. When you start selling the product or the service that you're doing, you want to make sure that you can think of any single reason someone wouldn't want it. This could be price, quality, time, guarantees, or anything else. If there's something that you can think about that they may ask and say, "No, I don't want that. It's too expensive." You have to know and have an answer to why it is the price that it is and what they can do about the cost or the problem that they've got on their mind. You need to make sure that you know your product better than anyone else. And more importantly, when you've got that all documented down, make sure that when you find a new objection that you didn't think about, and that could be a time dependent something. Maybe for us in our industry, an objection might be, we don't want to upgrade because the hardware's fine, but Windows 10 has come out and we have to upgrade. You might need to then tweak and refine that over time to make sure that you're able to overcome those objections and explain why they're important to be done. So this is a live document and you want to make sure that anyone that is customer-facing has had the sales objection training. It's super important because it will really increase the professionalism of your business.

Hiring and Firing

When it comes to the hiring and firing, you're going to need to know how to hire someone and how to sit down with someone. If this isn't something you're comfortable being in, if you've never been on the other side of the desk, you want to get someone in there. Talk to your local business coach, join a networking group, sit there with a professional friend and talk to them and play it out. Sit there with your partner and work out how you see it happening. We have staff that can sit with you and listen to what the person that you're interviewing is doing, and we can hear and look at different traits that they've got there and look at the psychology of how they're moving their hands, how they're moving their eyes, why are they looking away, why do they wear this colour, ask them the same question in three different ways and see if they answer the same answer all three times, see if they're lying and pick up on any of those minor details before you get them on board. So HR training is very important. And that's something that can come with time and experience, and it's very industry specific, so we can't really get into too much details around that.

Have a Knowledge Database

One of the other things that you should really be doing, obviously you've now got all these awesome procedures, is you need to have a knowledge base section or location with a database with all of this stuff in it. There's a few different tools that are out there and you need to have a place that everyone can reference that has all this cool, awesome information inside it. So you want to make sure you have a knowledge base portal that has all the runnings of your business, any standard operating procedures, KPIs, and the how-tos for your business.

The Final Word

I hope this has been useful, we've come to the end of this here and hopefully you've enjoyed it. If you want us to have a look at your business, shoot us through an email. I would love to talk to you and see how we can collaborate. Stay good.

Cash Flow Management Tips

We all love money, but most don’t really love cash flow management stuff. Despite being a pain, ultimately cash flow management will give you more money. In no particular order below we will go through 10 fantastic tips around how you can have better cash flow management in your business.

Learn more about cash flow management: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/457-some-tips-you-need-to-know-about-cash-flow-management-by-dorks-delivered

Outsource

Number one is outsource things where possible. You might think that doing everything yourself and keeping it all in-house is the way to go, but it has been shown time and time again that it is not. Outsourcing gives you a huge advantage. It increases your accountability because you have a position to point you finger at when something goes wrong, and it also increases the brain force of your company. You know the voodoo that you do pretty well, but the reason you're outsourcing, they know even better than you know. Therefore, you should be outsourcing it. It'll save you countless hours and ultimately bring you more time to be able to do the voodoo that you do. So, keep that in mind. Outsourcing is a fantastic way of increasing your cash flow.

Changing Your Payment Terms

One of the other ones that I think is fantastic is changing around your payment terms. Drop your terms down to Net10. Now, a shorter pay period doesn't sound like it's going to make that big of a difference, and obviously depending on the business that you're working in, this may or may not apply. If you're selling pies, probably don't increase it to Net10. That'd be stupid. But maybe give them a discount card or something like that if they are to buy multiple pies at once, or if they are to be a loyal customer. That'd be a great way to increase your cash flow. Having said that, if you're doing government contracts and very commercial things, then it's a different kettle of fish again. They may not really respond well to Net10, so your mileage may vary on this one, but ultimately you want to be able to give them a shorter payment period if you're able to do that in your industry. This means that you're able to get cash in your pocket sooner. You could also try change around the payment gateway that you're using to a different merchant facility that gets the money into your bank account a little bit quicker. This could end up making a huge difference. I did an example a couple of weeks ago where we went through the process of what it would cost if you had $10,000 outstanding for 30 days every month, always outstanding. It was always paid but it was always 30 days later. The results were fantastic. It worked out to be about a carton of beer a month that you could have extra in your pocket just by changing around your payment terms, so that's a big one.

Direct Debit Requests

The next one is stemming from that, and that's setting up direct debit requests. Instead of waiting for your customer to pay, a fantastic way to manage your cash flow is by making you the responsible one to be able to pull money from their bank accounts. You set it up in your payment terms, so maybe you invoice on the first, it gets pulled out on the 10th or on the 9th or whatever it is, and then you end up getting the money in your bank account, reliably every month so you know that it's there. It's removing a headache and heartache for them and it removes a headache and heartache for you. Everyone wins and then you have a reliable cash flow. If you aren't doing this, there's some fantastic tools out there that allow you to do it. One of the ones that you could be using is IntegraPay, Bill Buddy, or even PayPal. To be honest, we use a combination of all three of those internally, just depending on what it is exactly that we are doing. Keep that in mind, because it makes a huge difference in making sure that payments are coming in on time. You're not sending out overdue notices, because the payments are coming in on time, and it means that you know reliably when money's going to be there. There's not a question mark next to it.

Offer Pay On Time Discount

Now, moving on from that is incentivising for the people that don't want to sign up for the direct debit by offering a pay on time discount. Now, the reason I say this instead of offering a fine for paying late is fines aren't well received. You'd be better off offering a discount and that is a positive frame around the same problem. The way I'd suggest doing this is increasing all your prices by said discount amount, so maybe it's 5%, 10%, or 20%, and then just have in your Net10 terms that if you pay before this date, this is the rate. This means that they get to continue to pay the normal rate and you get either more money for them paying later or you get your invoices paid on time. This is a fantastic win/win for the cash flow management.

Selling in Bulk

Your next one hopefully you've already got as an offering. If you're selling a service where you're selling per hour or per month or whatever the frame is that you've got around the service that you're selling, if you can package that up for them to be able to purchase it in bulk, you're going to get people that want to do that. That's great for their business, because if they're doing that before tax time's up, they're able to offset that in the previous financial year which is an advantage to them. If you're able to sell whatever you are selling in bulk, you have a bulk amount of cash that's sitting in there. If it's in an offset account, it means that you're paying less interest against your house or whatever you've got that offset against. Either way, more money in your pocket, less money in theirs initially, but it's a win/win for everyone. The reason I say that is it means that there's less bookkeeping that needs to be done by all parties. There's less administration overhead. Because of that, it'd be a very sensible idea to offer them an incentive to incentivise for them to buy in bulk. Say for instance if you were to be giving the service for 10 hours, if you normally bill per hour, you give them 10 hours in block amounts and maybe you give them a 5% discount. Or, if they're paying for something per month, ask them if they'd like to pay per year and give them a 10% discount or a free month or two free months or whatever you think would be of value to them, and of value to you. You don't want that to cut into your profits, but you've got to keep in mind that that money is coming to you right now, and you're earning interest ON that money right now for the next 12 months. You also know reliably you've got that customer for 12 months. There's lots of great reasons why that will improve your cash flow tenfold.

Keeping Expenses In Check

Number six is keeping your expenses in check. You'd be surprised how many places we go into and we just see people throwing money at stupid shit. We go in, we see phone systems that they're paying $600-$650 a month for. We jury rig it all around, get it all fixed up and we drop it down to below $100 a month with no locked in contracts, and they are just like, "Whoa, geeze, you've just saved us thousands of dollars a year with just a small conversation." It's a conversation you guys can be having with any of your current providers, but the problem you may have with your current providers is they're ripping you off or they aren't going to give you the full story. We always suggest for our customers to look elsewhere all the time to see what they can find. See if people are offering the same things that either we're giving away, or that they have from other suppliers. We had a business that we were dealing with in Brisbane and the service they were offering us was costing us nearly $1400 a month. We've been with them for about 10 years so we did a bit of a shopping around. We found the same service for $465 saving us, that's right ladies and gentleman, over $900 a month. That's a $10,000 saving a year that we had from having a maybe two or three hour discussion between the different suppliers and vendors that we rang around about. That gave us a $10,000 saving. Money saved on expenses is money you don't need to find through new customers. Definitely make sure to keep all of your expenses in check. Most suppliers are going to be able to give you a little bit of leniency there, even if it's not directly on cash. We ourselves for our customers offer fantastic incentives for finding other businesses that they work with and referring us on. Now for us that could be anything from several hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars that we give someone for finding a customer. It's not all about reducing your prices down if you're on the other side of this. It's definitely about making sure that you're adding value and you're having everyone grow together. Giving everyone the tools to empower themselves to be able to do the voodoo that they do, and make sure that you're able to grow, they're able to grow, and you're able to hopefully keep your cash flow in control.

Automating Processes

The next one is definitely easier said than done. It's around automating processes in your business to remove employee, financial, and time expenses. You'll notice if you've got more than one employee that everyone doesn't have the same go-getter attitude that you have. You want to make sure that they do, but you know honestly, they're never going to. It's your baby, you're passionate about this. They're never going to be as passionate as you. Try automate some of their tasks and let them work on things that they enjoy doing more, or bring other things and other aspects into your business that you've been wanting to do for years. If you're able to remove repetition and automate some of those processes, you'll be ahead of the pack and you'll have the advantage over your competitors. That's what you want to do. You want to make sure you have the advantage over your competitors, and you want to make sure you're running a lean, mean, growing machine. As I said, get a business advisor in to automate your process and see where that ends up with you.

Explore Other Technologies

Talk to any of the people in your business about the technology they're using or about the processes that they are following and see if they can be adjusted. Now, when you've been a leader and you're telling everyone how to do things, a lot of the time people aren't talking back to you on how things can be done. They're just listening to you because you're telling them. Empowering them to be able to go out and search for different tools that might speed that process up could be great for cash flow management. Maybe you've got some quoting extraordinaire and they're using some arbitrary Excel, Word, monster system that's not really working that well and not very efficient. You explain to them to go and have a look and they might find tools such as Proposify, or other different quoting tools that speed up their process and speed up their deliverables. Giving them the power to find these tools will give them the power to own the project of implementing them, and they're going to love the whole process. It's win/win for everyone, and ultimately, that's going to affect your cash flow and that's going to affect it in a positive way, which is what we want.

Time Management

Number nine is building on number seven. Look at where time is spent and if there's a process that takes a long time, give it to someone else in a different area of your business to look over it. One of the best things about our business internally is we have people from different areas and from different walks of life. We have people who are in their early 20s, we have people in their late 40s and we have people everywhere in between. We have advisors that come in that are nearly in their 70s. We've got people that are giving us advice from everywhere. It goes without saying, everyone knows the old story that NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that works in space, but the Russians used a pencil. There could be something very clear that you're missing, very obvious, that you're missing in a process or in business. Dick Smith had a great attitude towards this. Any member of the business, anyone that was a staff member, regardless of your level of management or wherever you sat in the hierarchy, you needed to be customer facing for at least one day a month. You do this to make sure that you don't lose grips with what's important in the business. That is a great attitude to have and we use that same model in our business. One day a month, if they're lucky enough to get on the phone with me, I'll help them out with their support requests, and that gives me an idea of their feedback, it keeps you front of mind with the customer, and it allows us to change the direction of where the business is going.

If you've got a team and you've got multiple people in different areas, you want to make sure the engineering team and your operations team and your marketing team are all building your products together. In doing this, you might find that an engineer has a solution to a marketing problem that you wouldn't have seen or otherwise thought of. Maybe you weren't aware that the product that you're selling could even do something that it's doing, so making sure that you are sharing all of your knowledge between all of your team members is very important.

Get Your Name Out There

Give reasons for your customers to spruik your message. Make sure that your product is a product that encompasses the message for them to be able to market for you. Gmail pay very little to be able to have everyone use their email service, because it's such a great deal that they're able to have the people tell everyone else about how great it is, and everyone else markets the product for them. In this situation, the product although appears to be email, you are actually the product and then they're using the emails and the data that's coming in through Google Adsense and the Google AdWords Networks to be able to then push out and market and make profit from it. You need to make sure you're able to encompass a similar model where your customers are spruiking the message about how important your product is to them. If you do this that'll affect your cash flow tenfold. If you don't know what your customers want, join a network marketing group, talk to them, sit down for a network breakfast or something like that and find out what it is that they do and how your product could help them out. There's all sorts of different network marketing stuff, depending on if you're a small business that's been around for six months, or you're a big business that's been around for 20 or 30 years, there's something out there for you.

Review Everything

Time for a bonus one! Surprisingly, give yourself time to review everything in your business. This is by far the best tip. A health check to see where your business is at can save you thousands. I know myself it has saved us thousands. Just the example I gave you earlier by ringing up that vendor saved us thousands. Keeping the mobile phone companies in check saves us thousands. Keeping everything in check and setting up a schedule in your calendar for every few months to have a look and go over everything. I've got this as show me the money, and it says all the different things that I can go through. Then, at the end of the financial year, I have another list of all the different things that I can prepay forward. That could be investment properties or any other software vendors that I already know that I can prepay those forward and I save some money. That gives me more cash flow for next year, although it's kind of in a sense converting OPEX to CAPEX. You're ultimately going to have more money at the end of the day.

The Final Word

I hope you've enjoyed this. We've covered off on a lot of information so if it has helped let us know. Stay good!

Marketing to Millennials

Today we are going talk about how the digital age is influencing the industry. It doesn't matter if you've just started out in business or if you've been in business for 50 years, if you are still in business you're going to have to take some of these new things into account. If you're selling to a business, so you're a business-to-business business, this may be less required now, but it will definitely come into play as these young millennials start owning their own businesses. If you're business-to-consumer, you need to jump on this now.

Read more about online marketing: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/456-effective-marketing-to-millennials-welcome-to-the-digital-age

But How?

There's so many different ways to market to young people. You could be marketing through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and the list can continue to go on. There is literally dozens and dozens of these different social sites that are all geared towards, the majority, millennials. Everyone can use them, but millennials are the ones that are using them the most. So if your target market is millennials currently, if it isn't it probably will become them, you need to be using these mediums. If you live in a world where your business is very visual, 100% jump on Instagram and start posting.

Make Sure You Know Why You Are Posting

The old adage goes, you can easily fill your car up with petrol and not know how the engine works and still get from A to B. The same goes for posting on social media sites. You can easily chuck a post up on Facebook or on Instagram or anywhere else and hope that it's seen. And that's all you're doing. You don't know how the engine's working, you just want it to get up and be seen. You've been told that "you build it and they will come" is no longer, so you're trying to build other stuff to have people come, but a lot of the time that doesn't work either. You need to look at the psychology behind your customers, what they're clicking on, why they're clicking on it, the times they're clicking on it, the type of images and colours and backgrounds that they'd be more attracted to. How you can squirt a little sexy on your business posts to make sure that people are seeing whatever it is that you want them to see in a way that makes them want it. Not need it. Even if they need it, you need to have them want it. It's 100% important. If you haven't read Purple Cow by Seth Godin, it's an impressive book and it will open up your eyes as to how you can make sure you're selling a unique offering, and how you can make people want it.

Don’t Get Left Behind

Now, if you don't jump on the technology bandwagon, you will be left behind and your competitors will jump on the technology bandwagon. So if you're in the stage of looking at an exit strategy or you're not in the stages of looking at an exit strategy, if maybe you're not looking to get onto the digital bandwagon, it would be sensible to start looking at an exit strategy because your business won't be around in five to ten years time, regardless of the industry that you're in. All of these millennials are getting their own businesses, they're automating things, the technology that they're using is absolutely cutting edge, and they will rip the carpet out from underneath you if you're not able to keep up with them. So you either need to make sure that you're keeping up with them, keeping in front of them and using your skillsets, your experience and your financial ability that they don't have to be able to stay at the forefront of your business. If you don't, you're better off just to jump out. Jump ship and do something else, because it's here to stay.

Technology Will Always Progress

We're not going to be bringing back the fax machine, and that was a technology revolution. It changed the industry. We're not going to be bringing that back, there's much better ways of doing it. In ten years' time, what we're doing now will be obsolete and there will be better ways of doing this. So you need to be on the technology bandwagon as soon as possible. We use technology. We use social media marketing for all of our businesses, and we use it to show presence and keep at the forefront of people's minds. A digital magnet more than anything else. A digital fridge magnet.

How Does Your Business Fit in Socially?

You need to think about how your business fits in with the social aspects of everything. For our business, we're a business-to-business business, so it's harder for us to bring a customer in through social media, but it definitely keeps us at the forefront, and the images that we put on Instagram don't necessarily line up with the same images we put on Facebook, and they're different than the images that we put on LinkedIn. The reason for this is, we want to make sure that we have a different presence, because we know different demographics use each of the different tools. We don't want to give access to my niece or nephew, or your son and daughter who's on these platforms a lot to start doing your digital media marketing. That is a terrible idea that's destined for failure. The same thing, and I was just saying before about knowing how to fill your car up, is knowing how to put a post up. It's not going to let you know how the engine works and how to make sure it's efficient and effective. If you let someone drive a car that has been driving for many, many years and understands how to break lightly, the car is going to be running significantly more efficiently and costing you less fuel. In this example, fuel is marketing dollars. If you have someone who just throws images up here and there and all over the place going gung-ho, shotgun approach hoping that something sticks as they flick mud at the wall, you're not gonna have the mileage that you want, and you're not gonna be running anywhere near as efficiently with this digital media marketing.

The Final Word

If there's something that you'd like to discuss, maybe have a review of how things are looking, making sure your website presence is staying secure and you have all of your ducks lined up to make sure that you do have a fantastic online presence, shoot us an email at [email protected]. I would love to have a bit of review, even complimentary review and see where you end up. Nevertheless, I hope this has been valuable. Make sure that you're in front of the millennials before they become in front of you, because once they take over we are destined for failure. As I said, you've got the experience and the finances behind you, so use those to your advantage. I hope you've enjoyed this, and if you have, jump across to iTunes and leave us some love. Stay good!

Common Mistakes In Small Business: Part Two

Well, we had such a fantastic response from the previous podcast that we've decided to do another one expanding on common mistakes in small business. So we already know remove repetition, step one. Document, step two. Remove objections from your customers, step three. How are you going to have time to do all that? You're already pretty busy.

Read more about Common mistakes in small business: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/455-455-common-mistakes-in-small-business-part-two

Time Management

The answer is, time management. Make sure you're better at managing your time. Use different things in your life when you're able to make sure that you're aware of how long you're spending on things. Work for 25 minutes, break for five minutes. You might have heard of it before, The Pomodoro. Now, The Pomodoro timer or tomato timer gives you an indication of how long you should be working on something and how long you should breaking for something. It's what they have found to be a very productive way of running your business. This goes especially well for things that are very time intensive and complex in nature, so you want to make sure that you're doing things like that. I've said this also before and I'll say it again, being aware of where your time is going. Your time is the most valuable thing you've got. Spend it with your family, spend it with your friends, don't spend it on things that you shouldn't be spending things on. Don't start automating tasks that don't need to be automated, and I know I am guilty of this. I’m in the process of making a cocktail machine that goes along, and you can order the app off your phone, that goes along and pours the drinks out of the each of the different things, and mixes it all up for you, and bang, presto, you've got yourself a cocktail. What I'm saying though is automate on things that you want to learn about and spend your time on things that you want to spend your time on that may increase the value of your life or increase your knowledge. Don't spend your time on useless things.

Be Aware of Your Time

Being aware of where you're spending your time is the most important thing. If you download things such as Rescue Time or ManicTime or any of the other different time tools that are out there you can see how much you're spending your time on, and then put a dollar figure on it. If you think that your time is worth 10 dollars an hour, which you'd be surprised at how many business owners are sitting at around 2.50 to 10 dollars an hour, if you think your time is worth 10 dollars an hour work out all the math for that. If you want to be earning 200 dollars an hour, or 500 dollars an hour, work out the math around that and then break it down and have a look at how much it costs you to spend the time that you spend on Facebook on Facebook.

You might think “Oh, I don't sped that much time on Facebook. It's okay, it's only when I'm doing something else. It's only when I'm in an elevator I just on Facebook.” Well, it's not really downtime for your body, it's not really downtime for your mind. It's releasing some small hits of dopamine and a bunch of depression, so you need to be aware of where you are spending your time and is it valuable? It's not if you're going to be spending it on things like Facebook, but put a quantity next to it and see if you'd be comfortable spending that money to use Facebook, and then think would you rather be spending that money to do something else?

Look At the Big Picture

I look at every tasks that I do throughout my entire week, month and year and think “How much is this worth to me?” That could be a relationship that I have with a friend, them coming over for a sneaky beer on a Friday afternoon and I'm sitting there for two or three hours, or four hours chatting about stuff, and I have already pre thought “Okay, I'm here for four hours having this beer. Is this worthwhile to me?” And you have to be around, you have to be living, you have to be around for a reason to be do something, and I know that if I quantify the relationship with that person and think “If I want to be earning 400 dollars an hour and I'm spending four hours with that person, is this time worth 1600 dollars?”

It's very easy to quantify if you then look at other things that you do throughout your day, such as jumping on Facebook, or playing Angry Birds or something else. If you're doing those activities and that was to amount to two or three hours, and then you think “I'm spending four hours spending a beer,” 100% building a relationship with a real person face-to-face is a significantly better thing to be doing than sitting in an isolated room with a piece of glass and plastic in your hand, flicking things around on a cancer stick. It's much, much better to be doing something that is building a relationship and forming something, in my opinion away. Obviously, each to their own, but you want to make sure that you're productive in your business.

Lists, Lists and More Lists

Time management is massive. Make sure you're managing your time. Lists are huge to me. I make lists of everything that needs to be done in the business, everything that needs to be done around the house, everything that needs to be done everywhere. I've got lists and I know if I was called to go overseas next week, if I was called to go overseas in two hours time, I've got a list of exactly what needs to be packed depending on how long I need to go overseas for. I've got a list to know exactly what tasks need to be done around the house from cleaning pool filters to washing windows and shampooing carpets. The whole lot is in there, anything and everything that needs to be done around the house has been documented. Any of the tasks that need to be done that are maintenance things have been documented. I know exactly the status and health check of where my time is going over the next day, month and year.

Make People Aware of Your Way of Doing Things

People need to be aware of what you're doing, because there is always mishaps, there's always things that come up, there's always those annoyances that occur, a friend gets sick, you get sick, your car breaks down, you get a smashed windscreen, whatever the case is, that is something that you can't predict and it just happens, so you need to be able to be aware of where you want your time to go for when those things do happen so that you can be aware of how you can shift everything along and organise your life around the model of a Gantt chart.

The Final Word

Time management is super, super important, crazy important. So is documenting everything down so that you can have people starting to do the work that you should be doing. Ultimately, what we'd love to hear from you guys is how would you like to see your business time improved? Do you think you are the most productive person out there? Is your business up to the test? We're giving away a special deal here where I'd love to come in and personally help you and your business out. I'd love to come in and see how we can go about improving your time and improving your bottom line. If that's of interest to you email @[email protected] and I'll personally respond and jump onto it and see what I can do. And when I say personally, I mean I personally wrote the automation that will respond to you and then I'll, we'll go from there. It'll be automated, it'll be amazing. We're going to make your business and profitable and it's going to be so cool. Let's go along the journey together. All right, if you have enjoyed this jump across to iTunes and leave us some love, give us some reviews, and stay good.

Common Mistakes In Small Business: Part One

If you've been in business for a while, you'd know that there's definitely some mistakes that you've made. Today we've been asked what are the common mistakes that we see around the traps in small businesses? It's a great question, because we see a lot.

Read more about small business' common mistakes: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/454-common-mistakes-in-small-business-part-one

There Are So Many Mistakes!

Are you using paper? If so, you're probably making a common mistake. Have you yourself answered the phone in your business recently? Probably a chance that you're making a mistake. Can you monitor what all of our staff are doing and can they reference a document that shows them what they're meant to be doing? If the answer is no, then you're making a mistake. We're going to go through some of these different ways that you can overcome these problems.

Stop Using Paper

If you've got a lot of paper usage in your business, there's always better ways to do things. Think about why you've got the paper there. Most of the time it's either for a paper trail which you can easily do with mobile phones. Most people have a mobile phone in their pockets, very few people carry around a notebook and paper. It's easier just to take notes with your phone. Start doing it. There's great tools out there such as Evernote, Google Keep, or OneNote that let you take these little slight key quick notes and you can also set up awesome reminders within them. We really like Google Keep’s ability where you can set a location reminder as opposed to a timed reminder. Maybe next time you cruise down to the shops it comes up with your shopping list and you can see exactly what you're meant to be buying. That is an invaluable tool.

Now, all I've spoken about there is removing the need to have a notepad with you or writing some scribble in your phone. You can use that with different lists at different locations. I've got one for Autobarn, Officeworks, Woollies, all the different places, and that allows me to see exactly what I need to be buying when I'm at those locations so you never get home and forgot the milk, for instance. That's only obviously a small part of the paper usage problem that we see in businesses all the time.

My Paper Gripe

We're going to be talking about the big paper gripe, the gripe that you have with paper being everywhere. Now let's have a think about your process. Here's something that annoys me and it annoys your customers. I went to a mortgage broker and they presented me with a six page form of stuff that I needed to fill out. I looked and I went, "Oh, man." What have they done, without me even knowing anything about them other than they're a mortgage broker that I've been told is okay, they've presented me with this huge amount of stuff that I need to fill out. A huge objection for me to want to work with him. I don't know if he's any good, all I know is I have to fill out all this stuff, I have to find out all these different financials and give them enough information that they will be able to steal my identity and screw me over, and I don't even know anything about them. That was a huge objection. Do you know what I did? I didn't go with that mortgage broker, because I looked at that and went, "That is a massive hurdle" and it bothered me because he sent the document digitally but there was no ability to fill it out digitally. You had to print it out and then fill it out, and then scan it back in. That's wasting paper and resources at my end, as well as having that other person at the other end have to rewrite that back in, decipher my shitty handwriting, and then put all those details in and then send it off to a bank for the bank to then decipher my shitty handwriting.

It's a process that no one wants. It's just a terribly wasteful process in all regards. For me to fill out six pages would probably take, oh let's call it an hour, maybe an hour and a half. For me to find all the information, might take me two hours. Call that three and a half hours. For them to decipher the information might take another hour and a half. Call this like five hours, six hours of time, plus any other times required by the banks.

That is all overhead that shouldn't be there. As a business owner, I don't want to be spending that time mucking around. My time's valuable. The mortgage broker for the most part, most mortgage brokers are business owners as well, and so they should understand the value of time. While they've got an amazing advantage over a lot of other business models in where they have a trail book, that means that they can use that to their advantage and try to automate the amount of time that they are spending to make that as valuable as possible, and don't be putting in these roadblocks.

Go Electronic

There's plenty of services out there that allow for bank statements to be able to come through automatically, to be able to do different look ups and to be able to find as many details as possible. The problem is that there was additional paperwork that could have been done with online forms and a lot more automation to save everyone time. I still wouldn't have filled it out, because he hadn't created the rapport with me first. He hadn't gone through and described why I am an ideal client for him, and why he is an ideal mortgage broker for me. You need to really think about that. When you're trying to contact a customer, a big problem that people have is they try to marry you on the first date. You don't want that. You don't want to put in any objections, either.

If he gave me a small form to fill out, if it just said, "Type in your annual income, type in a couple of details such as your dependencies and this is roughly what you could be borrowing," awesome. No worries. It's got me through the loop, made sure that I'm comfortably able to maybe do something here, and then you can get down to the nitty gritties and see if it's actually a yes or a no later. But having six pages is a huge objection and that will stop your people coming through. You want to make sure that you have people converting, and you want to make sure that you're removing all objections through your sales funnel. Make it easy for people to work with you.

Reduce Paperwork

That is a huge problem we see in business all the time, and that's just stemming from in this example, too much paperwork. I can't give a shit about filling out paperwork. If I was to be going to several banks, obviously I'd have to fill it out several times, and that's very annoying. The whole open banking system that's coming in is going to be something that will make this process a hell of a lot more straightforward for everyone. There's pros and cons to that which I'm not going to get into, but the major thing is if you are not removing objections for your customers, you will not get as many customers coming in the door.

Document Everything

We've covered off on two topics there. We've covered off on removing double data entry and repetition, as well as removing objections for your customers coming in the door. They're both things that need to be addressed in businesses. The next step is make sure you document everything that you've got. I know I say it all the time, but we see it so often that people don't. Regardless of what you think, if you decided to go out on your own and get your business all set up and you decided, "I'm going to be working, doing this, and doing this better than everyone else, going to earn more money" or whatever the situation is, most of the time, and put your hand up if this is you, yes, I can see a few hands going up, most of the time you haven't bought a business, you haven't started a business, you've started a job.

You've started something that is just you. Now, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but the difference between starting a business and starting a job is the documented processes behind it. If you document your processes, you've got something valuable to sell. If you document your processes, you're able to have someone else come in and take over different parts that are giving you the shits or taking you too much time. If you look at the simplicity of making a hamburger at home, if you documented that process and then you repeated that several times and then you optimise it, you're no longer making a hamburger at home, which is a simple thing to do.

You've turned your making a hamburger at home into Mickey Ds. You've turned your small activity into a franchise that's worth billions and billions of dollars. Simple, but powerful. If you can't document the process, it can't be repeated accurately. If you can't document the process, you can't train someone else accurately. You need to document everything. If you start document your processes now, your onboarding time will drop significantly. If you're removing repetition, the amount of morale you'll have within your customers' mindsets as well as your staffs' mindsets will increase. Everything will work better. Documenting, removing repetition, and removing objections are three main things that we see in business.

The Final Word

There's lots of ways to automate and if you're unsure, reach out to someone who specialises in it. Business Efficiency Experts or BEExperts.com.au does a fantastic job at helping you empower you to use the tools to be able to automate your business. There's lots of other companies out there that do similar things and we are definitely biassed towards this one, but all I'm going to say is have someone come in and do a review, a check, and an audit. See where your business is at and try to get things as automated as possible. If you've enjoyed this, please make sure to jump across to iTunes, leave a review, and let us know how we can do be doing better. Send us an email at [email protected], and hope to see from you or hear from you soon. Stay good.

So, as I've said, my name is Joshua Lewis, I'm from Dorks Delivered, and I’ve got another company called Business Efficiency Experts. Business Efficiency Experts has been around for about five years, and Dorks Delivered for 12 years, so we've been going around for quite a bit. We started off as an IT company, and then we found that there was more of a need for businesses to be utilising technology better. Since then I've started writing as a columnist for my entrepreneur magazine, I've been featured on news.com.au, and soon to be published in every entrepreneurs guide focusing on your marketing.

Learn more about technology, marketing and business management at https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/451-brisbane-tattersalls-special-episode

Time to Talk About Your Business

Today I'm going to be talking about your business, more than my business. So what I want to do is found out, who here is representing their own business. Yup. So who here is not, and here on someone else's behalf? Okay. So we just got one here, that's right, always the bloody troublemaker. It's going to be a very interactive session with the way we're going to go through with everything, and we're going to split off into groups and it's going to be fun, it's going to be exciting. Are we pumped? Yeah? Look, we've got to annoy the other groups. Yeah? Woo.

Okay, perfect. Raise your hand if you have kids? I already know Carolyn has kids, and we've got Amanda with kids, so a lot of us have kids here, which is good. I'm lucky enough not to. But I've got 10 nieces and nephews, and treat them like my own. Who here would say they spend enough time with their kids? Who is there for all their critical moments in their life? Who would rather spend more time, or have at least the flexibility to be able to step in and out?

I was talking to Tony, I was talking about some of the automation, or some of the things that he's put into his business which allow for better time management. And in particular we were talking about some of the Lean Management, which is fantastic, and I will be touching on that for some of it.

Who started their business to earn money? Yeah. What did everyone else start it for? Who started their business to have more freedom? So we've got a few hands. It's nearly 50/50. Who believes that they've achieved both goals in that they're earning money and they can step in an out of the office at any time?

Ideally we're going to split into three groups. I want everyone to have a think about what your time is worth per hour. I'm going to start and go around the room. Carolyn, what would you say your time is worth per hour?

Carolyn: $350.

Joshua Lewis: $350. Peta?

Peta: I can't value. It's... Time is invaluable.

Joshua Lewis: Invaluable. Time spent is worthwhile. Tony, how about yourself?

Tony: Probably $2,50.

Joshua Lewis: $2,50. That's good, that brings your averages back here. Tracey?

Tracey: I don't know what it's worth but I charge $450 an hour.

Joshua Lewis: Okay. And if we just continue around the room. I didn't actually get your name, sorry.

Amelia: Oh, Amelia.

Joshua Lewis: Amelia.

Amelia: About $150 an hour.

Joshua Lewis: Okay, is that what you're charging or what you think your time is worth?

Amelia: Roughly about what I charge.

Joshua Lewis: Okay, no worries.

Melody: I charge between $200 and $300 an hour.

Joshua Lewis: It gets wishy-washy, doesn't it?

Amanda: So I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

Joshua Lewis: That's okay.

So has anybody been adding up the totals? I haven't been, but we're going to go back around with a more solid answer and everyone's saying what everyone's said. I'd say everyone's roughly saying what, two, three hundred dollars an hour, yeah? And it's about like what, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 of us in the room. So there's about $3,000 an hour being spent in this room right now, and for my talk that's going to go for 20, 25 minutes, it means you're spending roughly about $1,000 to $1,500 to listen to me, so thanks guys! I appreciate that and I'm going to make sure your time is spent well. I like that!

If your business went down, how much would that cost you? A lot of people don't really take that into effect. We were talking before with Mark from ETG, a fantastic person who makes sure that businesses stay up and running, he's going to be answering the phone within 30 seconds. You know that your business is going to be able to stay alive and stay up and running, which is what you want. You don't want to have downtime, you don't want to have those problems. But people do have downtime, people get pregnant, people go on holidays, get sick, people change jobs, die, pass away, all these different terrible things and nice things that can happen. Ultimately it means you have more problems in trying to cope with the amount of hours that are either coming in or with hours that are going out, depending on the person that's disappeared. Either way, your business needs automation. Automation is super important, because if you can automate elements of your business, you no longer have to have those employees doing those repetitious tasks.

So I'm going to go through and go around the room and ask everyone what their pain point is in business, and what they are wanting to overcome, and then I'm going to explain different ways that you can go about doing that using automation. So I'm going to start the other way around and start with Amanda first.

Amanda: Uh, so I don't need a lot of staff in my office but when that one staff member is not there, it's an issue.

Joshua Lewis: What do your staff predominantly focus on?

Amanda: So the pain point... Oh well, it would be answering phones and answering emails.

Joshua Lewis: Okay, and at the moment how many employees do you have?

Amanda: Well, out on the field there's 15, and in the office... we're kind of in a vortex at the moment, there only needs about one to one and a half.

Joshua Lewis: And that can be a problem because you're at that stage where if you have one and then you grow to two, you have to have twice as much work for people to answer the phones or they're costing heaps of money.

Amanda: Yes.

Joshua Lewis: So it's a good answer. What would you say your biggest pain point is in business?

Melody: I'm a consultant so people... I'd say filling in tenders. There're so many different formats out there and it would be nice if they were standardised from your perspective.

Joshua Lewis: Absolutely.

Melody: It would help to standardise them so consulting with companies that are putting and that are filling in those tenders are spending less in [inaudible 00:06:08] because at the end of the day, translate in dollars for each individual out here of resource cost.

Joshua Lewis: Makes a lot of sense and IT is one the industries that they haven't really standardised yet. A lot of the civil industries they have standardised tenders, but not in IT. And knowingly there's a lot of... it seems that there's not much legislation around IT, which is annoying to know who's good and who's a cowboy, etc. How about you Brendan?

Brendan: Probably managing emails.

Joshua Lewis: Managing emails? So how many emails do you get a day?

Brendan: Last time I counted, probably about 360.

Joshua Lewis: Yeah, that's a lot, that's a lot of time. Continue around, is anyone also relating to some of these problems? Does anybody have anything to be different to these that you'd say is a big problem that you'd have in business? I know you're only just starting out so that's...

Brendan: Yes, my widest pain point is to bring awareness to some [inaudible 00:06:56], so making awareness, that would be my pain point.

Joshua Lewis: Okay, and definitely that could be somebody getting your name out, they're getting your brand out, they're having people know about you, and especially you're in a marketing company but you need to still get yourself marketed out there, so it's a bit of a conundrum. Does anyone else have any different pain points that they would...? Yeah, Peta?

Peta: Hi, organising customers to meet their deadlines.

Joshua Lewis: Okay, and how many customers do you have that you find where you run into that problem with?

Peta: 80%

Joshua Lewis: 80%, that's a lot. Okay. So, are you one of them?

Amanda: No.

Joshua Lewis: Well that's not good.

Amanda: An automatic puncher would be good.

Joshua Lewis: Yeah, that's right. Well people getting paid is a huge pain point. I'm surprised no-one bought that up. People lapsing on invoices or waiting for invoices to get paid.

Amanda: I have an automatic solution.

Joshua Lewis: Are you using Zero or?

Amanda: I'm using Zero integrated with Integripay.

Joshua Lewis: Yeah, cool. So we also have Zero integrated with Integripay, so word up to the solution.

Amanda: I don't have customers that owe me money, so I take it from them.

Joshua Lewis: Yeah, and do you only deal with customers that you can set up directive requests with?

Amanda: Yes.

Yeah, cool. So that's a level of automation that you've put into your business, which is awesome. It overcomes that pain. So I'm going to try to go around the room and answer some of the questions. At the moment there's heaps of different places that you can jump onto that give you the ability to have a very scalable per call call centre where they can be answering five calls a day or 500 calls a day, and you can pay a very small amount per call. Now although that's not necessarily automating the calls being answered, that's offsetting the responsibilities allowing growth. Which the problem isn't really your calls not being answered as far as I can see, it's the growth and having to bring someone on having extra tasks that need to be allocated to that person.

So we went to a solution where we found the same issue. So our business started off as an IT company very similar to Michael's but different, and we found by automating so much of the business, 98% of it was being done in the back of house and we didn't have any customers talking to us, which is great but it meant that we then had to have so much work to have one person sitting there answering the phones or have the technicians being interrupted while they're doing other work. We found there's solutions, one's called Call Assist and that we use all Euron CRM systems, Euron training manuals, the whole lot, and they can just sit there and answer the phone for you as part of your business. So would that overcome your problem?

Amanda: Yeah.

Joshua Lewis: Woo!

Amanda: Yay!

Big clap, that's great! Hey, one down! So I'm just going to go through some of my other notes here. As I said I didn't really get to rehearse or do this. This is all off the cuff right now. So more freedom. See automation doesn't stop at the office. You need to make sure that the things that you're doing around the home aren't being wasted, your time isn't being wasted there as well. Who mows their lawn or has a lawn to mow? Yeah? No lawns? You have lawns, have you been mowing your lawns yet?

Brendan: I mow the lawn, yes.

Joshua Lewis: Yeah. And...

Brendan: I'm thinking of astro turf

Joshua Lewis: Not a bad idea.

Tony: I'm just trying to think, for a weekend... you're away from the family.

But it depends on how much you like your family. If you're able to do it with a beer in your hand, you can get a ride-on or something. Well I found that definitely things like mowing the lawn you can outsource that stuff, pruning the gardens, you can outsource that stuff. There's always different ways to repurpose the systems that you're using at home, the way that you're utilising your kids if you've got kids, to make sure that you're automating as much as possible so that the time you are spending with them is valuable time. Because if everyone's time here, as you worked out, is worth about $300 an hour, the time that you're spending at home is worth the same amount as the time that you're spending at work. You shouldn't be changing the dollar amount because you're at home.

If your time is worth $300 at work, you shouldn't be mowing the lawn and taking an hour to do that. You can pay someone $60 to do that every two weeks and they'll mow the lawn and do all the things that you need to have done. And that's where you need to really make sure that your time is important. So automation isn't just about technology, it's about putting in place solutions and peoples and procedures to make sure that people are doing the jobs for you and you're not having to stress that maybe you have a big week, a big month at work, or you go away traveling and then you come home and the lawn's up here, and if you're a lawn connoisseur, which I am, that means I say I like grass but it's not what it means at all...

Anyway, if you are a lawn connoisseur and then you have the grass grow up, it just completely destroys off the whole ecosystem in the lawn, creates too much shade and all these other different problems, and that lawn analogy goes into every aspect of your life. There should be always ways to make your business and your life better. So Carolyn was saying that she's using a product that helps her out with LinkedIn, but it's not helping her out right now with LinkedIn because the automation behind it is broken. But we've all said roughly, again just using rough numbers, our per hour rate is about $300 an hour. For $8 an hour you can get a virtual assistant online that would be sitting there looking at it, monitoring it and doing anything else, and that goes for your emails as well. For $8 an hour and they don't even have to be employed full-time, you can have them doing that. Some people are for and against outsourcing. Who's for outsourcing and who's...? Yeah? That's the majority. Who's against outsourcing?

So why don't you like outsourcing? f there's no outsourcing, your IT company wouldn't exist.

Brendan: Because when I was outsourcing for the Indian company and I got to a customer site, they want to pay in Indian dollars and I've got to make a living here. And also I'm looking at... you know you've got to balance books, billing the capability here or are you going to destroy the capability here and is this going to manufacture offshore everything? So then I had this dream one day and "Hey what will my kids do if we end up pushing all the manufacturing offshore, pushing all the IT development offshore, what will people do?" So we need to find a balance where you know this is like "We will go forward..."

Joshua Lewis: Absolutely!

Brendan: There's less crime... People need some kind of motivation in life to get up and do something in life.

That's absolutely right! And most of us are operating a small business. Does anyone have more than 15 employees here? Yeah, so the big thing with automation is if you're running a one man shop and you're able to automate some of your tasks, even if you've got two or three or five people and you're able to automate some of your tasks or axe off some of those tasks, those tasks are giving you time to be able to focus on bringing in new business as opposed to giving you... where you're just spending a mundane task going through 350 emails in a day. If you know that they're being categorised into most important, middle important and least important, which I discussed in a podcast on our Business for Freedom podcast channel, you're able to think "Okay, this is important."

Only spend 15 minutes in the morning and then one 15-minute break at lunch and then know exactly how much you're spending. If you're able to outsource the majority of it, although you are still creating wealth over there and you are outsourcing some of the dollars, it's a job that you wouldn't have been able to afford to outsource here. And don't outsource and go for the cheapest bidder, go for the person that understands your business, understands the model and you're not undercutting everyone. Eight dollars, US, an hour is someone that is going to go to do the work that you want them to do and normally where they're getting paid, they're getting paid significantly less than that. So you're still helping out them and they're giving you more time to get to grow your business which lets you employ more people locally, which is ultimately what you want to be able to do.

All of us as business owners need to be the best salesperson at what you're doing, although it's a dirty word and no-one likes salesperson, we're the most passionate people about what we do. And so you need to be able to be there in front of people, which is the problem that you are having, be there in front of people so that people can hear your story and hear how passionate you are. When I started in business, I was introverted, overweight and did not want to talk to anyone. But your business doesn't work very well like that, and so my extrovertedness has come as a learned behaviour. After losing 38 kilos, it was easy to learn the behaviour, I will be honest, but it's definitely a learned behaviour. But you need to be in front of people because that's where things start to happen, where things really start to show. And if you're there reading emails or buggering around with LinkedIn and other stuff, you're not going to be able to be in front of the people to make a difference. Does that all make sense? Does anyone have any questions around that?

A team is the most important aspect. As soon as you go from a single man band to a woman band to a larger team, that's when you really need to start investing in the right people. The News.Com interview that I did was on selecting the right candidates and filtering out any of the crap that you get on Seek, and it's definitely a process. You want to make sure you've got a team of unicorns that work together with your business to help your business grow into the future, and it sounds really wishy-washy but knowing that they're able to do things, and some people don't employ... because they go "Ah, they don't know what I know. I've been in business too long. I know everything that I'm doing and I'm just so good at it." The problem is, you are, and that means that you won't find someone like you. But if you're able to find someone that does 80% of the work and they're 80% of the way there, that's only 20% that you have to do.

And as they grow with you, it becomes easier and they become your right-hand man or lady, or left-wing lady or right-hand man, and that's where you want to make sure your systems are growing as well with the people. You want to make sure you're documenting down your processes, it doesn't matter what size business you're in. I started off in business by myself, two years later got my first employee, thought this is amazing, and continued through. Two years after that we're going gangbusters. I was turning over more money that I could ever do. I was doing a lot of big contracts with Education Queensland. The problem came about when my offsider, as a 27-year-old and working 65 to 70-hour weeks at a stroke, and that then meant I was inundated, had to cancel contracts and it was shit spot to be at in business. I grew way too quickly and that's the same sort of dilemma that you're having, where do you put someone on and waste a whole bunch of money until they grow up, or do you just grow with the one person and then when you're too busy, not have time to train someone, which is another dilemma.

But automating the on-boarding process is as simple as writing down every single task that you do per day in business, writing it in your daily list, your weekly list, your monthly list. I've got this exact process written out when I started doing it a number of years ago, there was 500 items on the list and I thought "My God, I have to go through 500 things. I'm doing 500 things at the moment. How am I going to do this?" And like eating an elephant just one bite at a time, and I've got anything on there from how do you go about replacing your coffee filters to how do you answer the phone to anything... how to onboard a customer, how to let a customer leave, how to onboard a staff member, absolutely every single process is there. It doesn't matter what size business you're in, start documenting it down because when you can bring someone on, instead of having three or four months for them to be trained up, it's a two-week period which is automating the process, which is giving you more time to be out there finding new business and making a business better.

So as an element of what we do in business and how I've automated my life and my business, I can work 10 hours a week. Of the 10 hours that I work a week, I can spend one hour a week making YouTube videos, blogs and podcasts, and that gives me enough podcasts, that's three podcasts a week, two YouTube videos a week, five blogs a week, and it's only taking me an hour to do that whole process. The other nine hours, I'm talking with existing customers and finding new business, potentially things like this, but I only need to work 10 hours a week with what I'm doing, with the way I've automated everything. Most people, if you said "I need you to write five blogs a week"... because our web guy told us it's going to get us better ranking, which it will, you won't have the time to write five blog articles in a week. But if you have it automated to a spot, we're able to do that, which we've done that through a 78-page document which details exactly how to go about doing it, we then no longer have this problem and it only takes us an hour, which is awesome.

So think about what you do. What takes up heaps of time in your business? What would allow you to remove that time away from your business and have it spent with your kids and with your family, going on holidays, mowing the lawn if you love relaxing by mowing the lawn... while reflecting on it. But that's definitely what you need to sort of just hone in and try and work out, so... yeah. Any questions? There's got to be a couple of questions.

Amanda: I've got a question.

Joshua Lewis: Sure.

Amanda: At what point did you realise what this... that you needed to do, this more automation, at what point did you realise the benefit was offsetting the cost? How did you work that out?

Joshua Lewis: If I was to start my business again... when you first start your business, a lot of the time you go "Okay, I'm just waiting for a new client and I've got all this spare time." If I'd started it then, I would've seen the benefits significantly sooner. Already now, if anyone has any question in the room, I've noted it down and then I'm answering that in a podcast, YouTube video or blog. So to notice the difference, I would say, it's probably about 18 months if I had to put a number on it and that is a process of a lot of documentation, but it meant that when I went from the next staff member and everything had been documented, the staff member after that and the staff member after that and the staff member after that, I had zero training.

I did the interviewing with them and then that was it. The other person that I trained up to start off with, which is when I wrote the documentation, was the person who then trained up the next batch of people, so the business over the last number of years has grown to 11 employees and I've trained up three or so of them, that would be about it. Everything else has happened through documents that have already written up which everyone hates doing and everyone agrees with that. No-one wants to write that up, yeah? You can offset that as well, so doing something as simple as just clicking record on your computer screen, you can record what's happening and then have that transcribed and outsourced.

Tony, you'd have to sit down with people in meetings all the time and take notes on what they're saying and very specific particulars on potentially companies, holding companies for assets and all sorts of stuff, and have to note that all down, yeah? And what are you using to do that at the moment?

Tony: I need to get clients' confidence that everything I do for them is in confidence. The last thing that I want for my space is when recording them on file, I'll use diagrams and staples and a whiteboard to explain things in a diagrammatical way and I find that they're more responsive to that. Yeah, and that file might be saved and it's accessed through the network so I can pass the job onto another staff member and they can pick up the file.

Joshua Lewis: So the difference between recording it as you're dictating it onto the computer versus recording it through a digital means nowadays has become very, very blurred, especially like Alexa and Google Home and everything else already recording what we're saying all the time, one of the key words. I found a lot of the time customers are more comfortable, especially if they already know, that as you said that you've got a built-in trust with them and they then understand that what they're saying is in confidence so if they were to say something untoward, you would have that potentially written down if you really wanted to anyway.

There's a fantastic tool called Otter on your phone which, if you download Otter, it'll have everything that you say, it'll dictate what you say and if we were talking together in the same conversation, it would dictate your voice and my voice separately and then it'll pick up on different key words throughout the discussion and then you can add that to a file against that customer, which then means if you had... if we were to catch up and I was talk about some of the R&D stuff that I'm doing and I was talking about the trust distribution that we have and all the different models of our business, and he went "I know we caught up with Josh a year ago and I can't remember exactly what he said", this not only transcribes the whole lot, but transcribes it and adds key words and notes that are completely searchable down to the exact moment things were said, and it's completely free for 10 hours a month, so a pretty cool tool.

Amelia: What's it called? Otter?

Joshua Lewis: Otter, like the animal.

Amelia: Yeah, it's a cool app.

Joshua Lewis: Otter.ai is the name, it's on Apple.

Amelia: Is that spelt correctly?

Joshua Lewis: Yeah, yeah, like the animals that hold hands when they go to sleep. Yeah, so that would definitely help out a lot of businesses that have no taking... I would imagine that would help you out as well when you're trying to sort of key around different mortgages and how they want things to work and where income's coming from and how they can offset different expenses, and so it's an invaluable tool. But there's all these tools out there that can really help your business out, and the number one thing you need to be doing is asking the IT company that you're working with, or companies that you're working with, to see how you can automate any of the processes in your business. There should never be double-data entry. You should never be having someone fill out a form or 5-page application that states "Here is... List your income, your partner's income" and all these other different things. I'm sure you've got them in a digital form, yeah? You don't have people...? Yeah, okay, cool! That means you're ahead of the curve.

Most people don't and it's so stupid because you're asking them to fill this out so that you can make money, and it's a hurdle that you've put in front of them to fill out so that you can make money. You need to sort of remove any of the hurdles and make it so it's easy for people to spend money with you. You want people to spend money with you and not have hurdles like that.

Brendan: What's your number one piece of software for automation that you favour?

Joshua Lewis: That could be used diagnostically with any business?

Brendan: Yeah.

Joshua Lewis: From a marketing perspective, it's all very hard to answer. Otter is fantastic for note-taking and that kind of relates to most people in this room, which is why I bought that one up. But from a marketing perspective, Active Campaign I think is fantastic. It's really, really useful but there's... if you're looking to having professional note-taking... because that doesn't go to any other third parties, that's just shared with you and done through artificial intelligence to work out who's saying what. There's another tool called Rev, so the way our podcast works... I'm recording this now, this'll turn into a podcast which is cool. All the ums and ahs and dirty jokes get edited out or not, and then that thing gets transcribed and then gets images added and then key parts are all outlined, and that's all done through other people, so outsourcing would be the ultimate way to automate your business, but that's not really a tool as you said. But from a transcribing perspective, Rev.com, fantastic, Otter is fantastic, Active Campaign amazing. What sort of element would you like to automate?

Brendan: As much as possible.

Joshua Lewis: Email follow-ups when you have someone call through, there's auto follow-up as an Outlook add-in which would be touching on what you were saying before. If someone hasn't responded to you, it automatically sends them an email back and you can tell if they've opened it, if they've looked at it, if they've responded or what the situation is.

Carolyn: You've won awards for what you do, right?

Joshua Lewis: Yeah.

Carolyn: How do you stay on top of this game?

Joshua Lewis: I hate it. It's a good question. Just the best way to do it is by not looking within your field, because if you're at any user meeting that you ever go to, you're already there learning the same information as your competitors at the same time, which means you, if you don't have as much work force to implement it, are learning it later, or you're implementing it later which means your customers and the ongoing effect is then later. So looking through other industries to learn about any of these different tools is my number one way to do that, so I go to lots of different industry meetings that have nothing to do with technology and IT. But then, yeah... Dorks Delivered is the IT, I'm Business Efficiency Experts is the business that I've been talking about with automation and getting your life back, which is described heavily in the Business for Freedom podcasts.

But you really want to just make sure that you know what direction you want your business to go in as well. If your business is there to... well like a hobby business to have a bit of side hustle, a bit more money coming in, it's a completely different story. If that is what you want to be leaving your legacy to your kids and that's why you need to be building it up so that you can allow yourself to not be the primary key person in the business, so you can step out and in but still have the incomes. Does that make sense?

Carolyn: Yeah.

Joshua Lewis: Cool! Cool! Any other questions?

Joshua Lewis: No-one's asked about the book! What about the book! So the "Go-Giver" is something I believe in very, very strongly. Bob Burg has a fantastic range of books. I don't know who he is personally, but it sounds like I'm doing a sales pitch for him. It's all about giving more than what you're... and you'll receive more. So you give more, you give more information, you give everything that you can. Any bit of... anyone that ever called me up, I would be more than happy talking on the phone or catching up for lunch or coffee and going through any problem that they have, because ultimately... and you guys should all be the same because ultimately you are all the best at what you do.

And is anyone familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect? It's a statement that says "The more you know, the less you think you know." Anyone that does not think that they're the best at what they do, is because they're already more knowledgeable than their peers who haven't gone as deep into it as you. So everyone should be comfortable enough to talk and give the information to their clients as much as you can, and don't try and sell information, give it all away for free. That's why we started the YouTube channel and we found it to be very, very effective for all of our clients, more effective than even person-to-person conversations because it gives them a digital fridge magnet that comes through each week, they get to see what's happening, they get to understand from a technical pers... sorry, what's happening technically from a perspective of an advantage for a business owner.

But he describes some of the different ways and how that benefits and how that comes back tenfold, so everyone needs to... we had a raffle here last time, man! That's why I bought the book. What is this?

Tracey: I'll buy a ticket.

Joshua Lewis: You'll buy a ticket, sweet! Everyone put their business cards into a bowl, it's not even a fishbowl here. Hey, there you go, perfect! I think I've got half of the business cards. Okay, ready?

Amanda: Have you got the business card in a box or are you going to just say a name perhaps?

Carolyn: Probably

Joshua Lewis: So I bought a book! I bought a book and everything!

Carolyn: But we have to take it off your hands.

Joshua Lewis: It's a fantastic book. It's definitely... it's great! I've actually got another...

Amanda: If I win, I'll share it.

Joshua Lewis: I've got another book he has on what he calls a success formula which is just a smaller book around the same sort of principles, but more definitely based around sales more than just life, and how to do everything.

Joshua Lewis: Sweet! Well, did everyone enjoy that today?

Carolyn: Yes!

Joshua Lewis: So you're all going to be on like a podcast and a blog and everything else.

Peta: Thank you!

Joshua Lewis: And you'll get an automated email from me with the latest blog that's just come through, and me asking you all about your hobbies and that, it was all done while I was sitting here, so utilise your time. Do it!

Patching as a Service

So, you're in the cloud. You've got all this awesome infrastructure and you want to make sure that your transactions through the cloud to wherever the data is stored is secure. One of the main things you need to do is make sure you have patching as a service. Before we discuss patching as a service, what exactly is patching?

Read more about patching: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/446-patching-as-a-service-101

What is Patching?

A patch is set of changes rolled out by the developer or company designed to update, fix, or improve it. This usually includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs and improving usability or performance.

Why Should You Do It?

At the absolute bare minimum, you need to make sure that all of your equipment, hardware, software and everything else is patched. You don't want to be in a situation where something happens and you lose all of your data, or what's worse is if you don't even realise something has happened and all of your data is being captured and shuttled off to somewhere else for them to be spammed and credit card details to be exploited. So, patching as a service isn't just about patching windows. No. Patching as a service is about patching everything. This includes your switches, your routers, your access points, your printers, everything. All the things need to be patched and everything needs to be up-to-date. Without things like this being done, you end up doing yourself a disservice. In the last couple of years, there's been major changes and vulnerabilities found in core protocols, such as the WPA2 protocol attacks, the SSL or heart bleed attacks and RDP vulnerabilities that have happened in Windows 7 and Windows XP systems.

Make Sure to Stay Patched

You need to make sure you stay patched. The better you are and the faster you are at patching, the less likely you are to have some of these nasties come in. Now, don't get me wrong, you still need to have a quality managed anti-virus and anti-malware product and make sure that you have increment or backups of absolutely everywhere stored on-site and off-site. But, you don't want to be just be backing up these security holes. You want to be making sure there are no holes when you got your backups going and they're all backed up. So, patching as a service can be that thing that bridges the gap. It means you can have all your stuff in the cloud, and you can know that your infrastructure isn't going to be being peed on by unscrupulous eyes.

Find Out About Your Patching Situation ASAP

The other cool thing about patching is sometimes it brings about new features and functions, which is an awesome little added bonus. If you don't know if you have patching as a service currently, it's a really sensible idea to reach out to your chief technology officer. Even if it's a stand-in one that's been outsourced, make sure to reach out and ask them, "Do we have patching as service?" Because if you do, and it's a quality service, ask the provider how they go about applying the patches. The way that they normally work is they'll have a test environment or what's called a sandbox. From the sandbox, they take the information and they patch an environment that's not too dissimilar to yours, and they patch this and they do this offsite to make sure that if there was to be a problem, they'll solve it.

Why the Sandbox?

The reason they do this is that patching isn't always 100% for everyone. Although there are many, many companies that bring out patches, Microsoft brings them out very regularly. You have companies such as Java which bring them out about every two hours. They bring out these patches all the time, and if you don't apply them, you're stuffed. But if you do apply them, sometimes you're also stuffed, and it can be that there's just an incompatibility between the software stack that you're using, as well as the patches that are being deployed. Something doesn't go quite right and it runs amiss.

You Need to be Able to Roll Back Patches Too

That being the case, and if that does happen, you want to sure that you're able to roll back the patches, as well as prevent it from happening altogether by having it done in a test environment. Making sure that the companies you're going through for patching as a service are quality companies that are tested, trialed and have a procedure in place with the way they're doing it will ultimately save you a stack of money. They're not just ticking a box say, "Apply all updates automatically." That is not going to work.

Real Life Example

I will give you a great example. Now, this one is going back into the archives a bit. There was a company that we deal with in the Southeast Queensland area that had this patch go out for Windows XP that upgraded service pack two to service pack three. Now, when that happened, the minimum specification for RAM nearly quadrupled, and that meant all of their point of sales systems, over 400 different terminals, stopped checking in. That meant that across all of their stores everywhere, no-one could have a transaction go through. Can you imagine how much money that cost their business, because they had it set to automatically send out these patches and no-one was managing it? Absolutely ridiculous. Now with the right setup, you can roll back those patches. With the way they had it set up, they couldn't even have the system boot. So, they were in strife. What they ended up having to do is have a bunch of people very quickly drive around to all the stores and upgrade RAM for all of the computers, and then upgrade their computers wherever they couldn't have any more RAM. So, it was a terrible situation, and it cost the business hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a matter of days.

The Final World

It is very, very sensible to make sure that you're not a statistic, and you don't come into that sort of field. Make sure that you do have patching as a service, or something that allows you to know that everything that you're running with is secure, tight and controlled. Remember, if you have any questions at all, Dorks Delivered would love to help you out.