Have you heard the buzz and talk about automation? About Marketing automation, sales automation, and how automation might be able to apply to your business?
Well, that is exactly what we are going to talk about today with our guest, Richard Schnitzel, who is an expert at business automation. He talks about the 5 areas of the business to automate and how automation is NOT a people eliminator, rather it is a people enhancer.
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LINKS
**Check out Richard’s company: http://bowtiebots.com/
**Book a meeting with Richard: http://richardschnitzel.com/
**Email Richard at: richard@richardschnitzel.com
**Learn more about Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Rich owns and operates a done-for-you automation company helping 6 figure entrepreneurs build the automation they need to scale their business to 7 figures and beyond.
He teaches entrepreneurs how to level up their business through the power of technology using “Authencious” Automation, a framework for capitalizing on all the benefits of automation without the negative.
An engineer, nerd, and a husband to an English/Theater major he excels at having technical conversations when tech makes your head hurt. A skill he uses to guide entrepreneurs through the process of automating their business in positive and impactful ways.
Sponsor
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
Transcription
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:00):
You’ve worked hard to build your business and now it’s time to grow. Welcome to Multiply Your Success Podcast. I’m your host Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team and a serial entrepreneur. And the purpose of our podcast is to give you a weekly dose of inspiration and education to help you multiply your success. And as we get the episode going today, it’s all about automation. And have you heard the buzz and talk about it? Things like marketing automation, sales automation and have you wondered how might this automation apply to your business? How can you use it to help your company? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about today with our guest Richard Schnitzel, who is an expert at business process and business automation. And he talks about the five areas of business that you automate and how automation is not a people eliminator, rather it’s a people enhancer. So you got to tune in, listen to the whole thing all the way through to get all these little tidbits. So let’s jump right into the interview.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (01:09):
My name’s Rich Schnitzel. I’m the owner and president of Bow Tie Bots. I am a mechanical engineer by training, a husband and a lifelong card carrying nerd. And I have found this niche in life and this calling in my business of helping people understand how tech can be a real tool in their business and in their life. And I get to have conversations with people all the time about what that looks like and how that plays out in reality, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what we see in theater and news of what the perception of it is and then the way that it can really be used for really powerful change and good. And I enjoy having those conversations and changing people’s minds and turning that light bulb on in their brain of going, okay, cool, this is a new landscape and something that I can now grasp.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (02:14):
Just maybe to get us started on this whole idea of automation, that’s one of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show here. And automation has been a, it’s been, I think, a little bit of a buzz word, it’s been popular, but I think for a growing business, someone who’s trying to figure this out, how do you… Number one, what is automation, I guess first let’s start there. What does it actually even mean?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (02:41):
Yeah. Great question. Automation is in the simplest form, it’s the flow of information from one program to another, with the goal of doing two things: one is increasing the efficiency of that load of information, which I think is the point that most come to when they think about it. And the second for me is that it has to improve the efficacy of that transfer of information as well. And I think that’s part of that key litmus test of looking at automation of is adding automation to this process making the outcome better than it was before and not necessarily faster but better.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:25):
Oh, that’s interesting. So using this automation to whatever the outcome is. Is it better than what was currently or previously being done? Is that what you’re saying there?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (03:35):
Yeah, exactly. And saying that also makes it much harder to understand what is good automation in your business, because that phrase is entirely upon you to justify whether or not it’s better. I can’t tell you that one automation fits that because it comes from you and your business. And adding that piece, efficiency is easy. You can measure it. Did it take 10 seconds? Did it take 30 seconds? Okay. That’s really black and white, but when you start talking about what your process wants to feel like and be in your business, you need to have a good understanding of what you want that to look like without automation regardless of the tools you’re using, whether it’s automation or an assistant or a salesperson or an outside third party, if you can’t define what better looks like in an outcome, then it really doesn’t matter what tool you’re using. I could do it entirely in automation or I can do it entirely with assistant. And if you can’t define it, you have no basis to understand whether or not one choice is better than another
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (04:45):
Interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as I’m thinking back of just things that I’ve done, where I read some things or got hooked on some automation, something or other, and try to incorporate and I really, the results, I can’t even say there were results or anything. It just muddied the water. It made things a little more confusing than it was before. And as I’m hearing you explain this, it sounds like clearly we had some homework or pre-automation things that we needed to do. So I guess is as someone who’s maybe thinking about adding automation into their business, what are things that you might look at as you’ve worked with your different clients and customers and automating different processes, especially for a growing small business. We help companies franchise their business. So now they’re taking from one to many kind of an idea. What would that look like for… Or where would someone maybe even start with something like that?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (05:47):
Yeah. So you typically start with a pain point, something that’s happening in your day to day life and your business that you have this feeling of I think I can automate this. And if I can, if I’m right about this, this completely changes the way that I’m going to be interacting on a day-to-day basis. And we do that because it solves two things: One, because it’s a pain point it allows us to have a conversation around it and it allows us to be really intelligent about what our needs are, because it is so front of mind, we know exactly we can articulate yet. This is a pain point because of this. I’m trying to get it here because of this. So that information is really powerful in figuring out the benefit and where we were just starting a conversation. The other aspect of that is pain points usually tend to be smaller adjustments in our business.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (06:44):
And what I’m looking for with somebody is to make 1, 2% changes in different areas that connect together, kind of like building something with Legos, right? So you look for a 1% change and then you look for the next 1% change and you stack it on top. And then you look for the next 1% change and you stack it on top. And those 1% shifts are what creates that 30, 40% structural change in the way that we operate, but we can’t go for 30% out of the gate. We’ll lose ourselves. We’ll get confused. We’ll lose sight of the path that we’re trying to follow. And that pain point is really often a really small 1% thing that gets the ball rolling that goes, okay, this is how it’s working. This is how I have to validate this with my team to get them to get it. It gets buy-in with everybody else. Oh, cool. We got an ROI out of this. It answers all of those questions for people and their concerns about automation, because the framework that they bring into it, that then fuels the conversation going forward.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (07:52):
Interesting. And I guess as I’m thinking about the idea of automation, just, I think for most of the folks who might be tuning into this, I always think of marketing automation in something like that, but it sounds like what you’re talking about is far broader, much broader, more broad, much broader, much bigger than just your marketing funnel that you’re creating for marketing automation. Because I guess what we’re bombarded, I should say I’m bombarded almost weekly, for sure if not daily from marketing companies saying, oh, we’ll automate this or we’ll do that or we’ll send some through emails and other things like that. So talk through, I guess, a little bit about maybe a misconception of automation or what the differences are there.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (08:42):
Yeah. I do agree that most people, the first thing that they hear automation connected to is marketing. That has become the big thing. All of the major marketing programs have some level of automation that connects them with else. And we’re really comfortable now with automated email campaigns and that sort of thing. And I think the misconception that that brings into the conversation is when we think about email marketing, we don’t think about a person interacting with the automation through the life cycle. And I think that when you can add in a human element to what’s going on, that’s when you take automation from something that’s cool and maybe beneficial to something that’s really powerful in your business, because you can say I have a bunch of marketing emails. I’m waiting for something to happen in that chain because I noticed somebody clicked on this email and then I’m going to intersect with a human call, because I know that that’s the point where I need to be talking to them and they have to be booted out of the sequence.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (09:49):
Then once I have that call, I can put them back in the automation to close the sale. Once I close the sale, then they come back out of the automation and they go to the next step of having an onboarding call with somebody. I sent a message out to my team to say, hey, we’ve got a new person. This is what we have to pull in. This is what they bought. This is what their life cycle is. And then we put them back into an automation to get them through that next process. So you’re pulling people in and out of an automation. And the start and end point is always a human is doing something. And we know it happened because we’re using tech. A whole bunch of stuff has to happen to get it to the point where a human can then interact. Again, I don’t treat automation like the replacement of a human. I’m treating automation as a tool somebody is using to do their job better.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:43):
Well, and that’s a great point and I’m glad you’ve kind of gone this way because when I was kind of doing some research on you and your company and your approach, one of the reasons I was really attracted to have you on the show is that you really focus on keeping that human aspect into this, that this is the technology is designed to support human connections and relationships and things that are going on there. And it’s hard to read really almost any kind of news or tech, anything without the idea of artificial intelligence coming up and basically artificial intelligence on the verge of surpassing humans and so on and what’s going on there. So talk about how you do that and a little bit of what’s different so that it is a little scary to think, man, am I going to get replaced by some robot or something? And talk about your answer to that.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (11:40):
Yeah. So my answer is that before I automate anything, I’m a consultant first to help you understand what I’m proposing to you. And all of the failures that I’ve seen in tech and the mistakes that I’ve done in tech is selling somebody on an idea and they trust me because I have an engineering degree behind my name. I’m in this business. They go, okay, you must know what you’re talking about. But they don’t understand what I’m selling them and that they don’t understand how it’s going to affect their business. They think they do, but I haven’t done my job to tell them what’s going on and to help them create the verbiage and create the tools around understanding it. So my primary goal at the beginning is always to start that conversation and get somebody to the point where they do understand the positives and negatives of what I’m trying to build.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (12:45):
My wife is an English theater major and I’m an engineer. So we are the complete opposite brains that you could possibly have. And one of the things that I brought in from my personal life into my professional life is that ability that I’ve been forced to learn of having a conversation around tech that somebody who is not techie can understand, right? Taking everything I know about being nerdy and distilling it down into examples and ways of communicating that you don’t need to be a nerd. You don’t need to understand how a computer works and what a CPU is and like all those nitty gritty details. I can still get you to a point where you can go, okay, I get the principle, I get why I’m doing it. I get what this is going to do for my business, how my team’s going to have to change their interaction with our workflow, how to sell that to my team so that they don’t come back to me and say you’re trying to get rid of my job. What’s going on?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (13:43):
It’s like, no, this is we’re trying to grow. You’re working 40 hours a week. If we don’t do anything, you’re going to be working 60 hours a week and you’re going to want to quit because you’re just going to be tearing your hair out. I’m solving that problem. Now this is benefit for all of us and helping people create the verbiage to have those conversations with their teams.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (14:04):
Yeah, well, I really appreciate that response in that answer there. It seems to me like it can really be a slippery slope. You start going down there and I get the impression from clients and owners and leaders of organizations I’ve worked with where there are some people I’ve interacted with where they think that technology is the only solution. And it’s always tech, tech, more and more and more and more and more and it seems like they’re losing sight of how it all integrates together. And what I’m gathering from you is that you help figure out how to integrate all of these pieces to work well specific to that situation based on the situation and the needs of the, in your case, the client or the organization you’re helping support. Well, and talk about this idea. I like this question here about how to change your relationship with operations so you can understand what to automate. Talk through that.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (15:07):
Yeah. The basis of that thought is that from talking to people, I realized that we all have the same problem and I do it in my business as well. So I’m going to tell you do this, and this is not me preaching. This is me recognizing my own faults. We start trying to understand what’s going on in our business. And we think we’re starting at a 30,000 foot view of what’s going on and that’s a bold face lie. We’re really starting somewhere around 10, 15,000 feet. And we were suffering from not seeing the forest for the trees. And to truly understand the operations of your business, you need to simplify your operations down to the most simplest form that you can think of. And for me, it’s the same five steps for every business. You have a lead, you make a sale, you onboard the sale, you deliver the product and you off-board the sale, right? Every business has those five steps in it.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (16:13):
So start with that framework and then add detail into those steps that creates the magic of what it is that you’re doing and providing to your clients, your customers, whatever they are. But focus on that idea of I’m not at 30,000 feet yet. I have to back myself off so that I can really understand what’s going on. I can really understand the choices that I’m making and why I’m making them. And that mental shift then allows you to make conscious choices in your business and fully understand what those choices are going to do and how they’re going to affect the way that you deliver your product and operate.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:54):
Yeah. And it’s interesting Rich with what you said about a lead, sales, then you onboard, then you deliver the product or service and then you off-board. And what’s interesting, just thinking about all of the marketing automation buzz that goes on, really marketing and even some sales automation that’s out there, it’s really mostly marketing that I tend to run into. Occasionally sales automation, but those are just the first two steps of the process there. So I find it really interesting to your point where I’m kind of validating what you’re saying and myself just looking at it’s like sales and marketing, and then, okay, then we just go and do it. Well, to your point, take us another step up and where does it go from there? What’s that next step you should take or in going from that 15,000, that 30,000 foot view for the whole business?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:56):
Well, it’s really interesting. I guess when someone thinks about automation, we had spoken briefly beforehand in preparing for this, you had talked about this idea about treating automation like an employee. So I thought that was a clever way of remembering this. So talk through that. What does that mean?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (18:19):
Yeah, to me, it means that what I think about like somebody hiring an assistant, I can make an analogy that that is automation, right? If you go back to the idea that you are trying to, in automation, you’re trying to do something with greater efficiency and to have the result be better than before you added the automation, that phrase applies to an assistant, right? When you hire an assistant, you get more work done quickly because you can offload a bunch of tasks that you don’t have time to get to. And typically you’re offloading the things that you’re not good at and you shouldn’t be doing and they’re going to do them better because they have the full focus and time to complete them. So an assistant is fulfilling the litmus test for an automation. So why not think about automation in the same way?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (19:15):
It’s just another employee that’s doing a certain set of tasks that it is really good at doing that your assistant shouldn’t be doing, right? We’re talking about a new lead coming in and we have to send them a response email. Hey, great to connect with you. Here’s this free product that you got, right? You don’t want your assistant doing that. That’s going to take them five minutes and you can automate that out and it takes 15 seconds. Right? Okay. And from that standpoint, the outcome is better because it’s happening quicker. There’s no possibility for a typo in the email and getting it wrong. Everything is exactly the way that it’s supposed to be. And I think that changing that frame of reference also falls into the way that I’m talking about thinking about automation and that it is a tool in your company that is supposed to help everybody out.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (20:12):
It’s not about taking away a job. It’s about saying, how do we do our jobs better? And thinking about an employee in that way is really easy for us to contextualize and fit into the way that we run our businesses. So that comment comes out of be trying to find those… There’s different ways of describing what I’m doing that somebody can go, okay, I get where you’re trying to go. I can begin to build a scope and a framework around what you’re trying to tell me and contextualize it in my business and my very unique circumstances.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:49):
Yeah. that’s very helpful. And I think framing your mindset around this idea of treating the automation like you would any other employee on your team is brilliant. It really makes it very clear and a lot easier to understand and process how you would see this fitting in and working with someone like yourself in helping, once you figure out those pain points, go through those process, that you can then start to implement. I like how you said that the 1% change, I think for myself, when I think of adding automation in, I start thinking, oh man, this is a daunting thing. I’m going to have this huge overhaul of my business. It’s going to be really painful. And you’re saying no, no, no. Start with that 1% change. At least for me, that eases my mind as I’m thinking about that.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (21:44):
Awesome.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:45):
Yeah. Well, I’d love to find out. We ask every guest the same questions, Rich, before they go, and I would love to find out your answers to them. And the first one we always ask is about this idea of a miss. And has there been a miss or two along the way and something you’ve learned from it?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (22:05):
Yeah. Yeah. I think the miss that comes to mind is one that I’ve realized very recently. And that was a miss of not hiring people onto my team sooner. I always had a very perfectionistic frame of mind and the idea of relinquishing control of my baby, my business to somebody else was really scary for me. And in the past year, I’ve ignored it and then gotten over it and worked through that and gotten to the point where I could build a team and what we can produce now and what I can now do with my company, because I have a team behind me who can compliment the things that I can’t do, that can take over things that I don’t want to do and just help me grow and scale my own business.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (23:03):
I know I can remember people telling me when I started out three years ago to hire a team and I never did it. I kind of ignored it, but that’s… I’m not there yet. I need to wait and if… That was a huge miss on my part. If I had took that advice and gone, okay, I get it, I would be in a completely different place right now and I feel like that place would be towards the positive.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:29):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a big lesson that I hear, very, very common where the resistance to add people, relinquish control. Myself, included I’m in that camp. I’ve been there. I remember going through that myself. So I appreciate that. Well, how about a make or two that you’ve had?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (23:52):
Yeah, it was interesting. You keep me in that before we were on this that these would be questions so I was trying to think about them and it struck me that the makes that come to mind when they happened, I didn’t understand that they were a make. It’s only in hindsight that I really understand the makes of my life. And so the one that really comes to mind is one of my past jobs was a field service engineer for a company called Flender Graffenstaden. They built gearboxes that went on steam and gas turbines. So they’re the size of a room. They can weigh upwards of 50 tons. Massive, massive mechanical machines. And my job was to fly around the world and go to job sites and overhaul these machines. So I have on 24 hours notice I would end up in Buenos Aires with a couple hours to book a hotel room and no idea where I was going, who I was working with, really what I was doing other than showing up on a job site and assessing the situation and trying to figure out what to do.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (25:01):
And it’s a make for me because when I started that job, that idea scared the hell out of me. I was somebody who wanted a plan, I wanted contingencies for all the things that could go wrong. I wanted to know every step that was going to happen along the process and doing that job forced me to learn how to operate without a plan, to operate totally on the fly and trust my knowledge and my intuition and my ability to assess the situation, come up with a set of choices, choose one path and continue down that path regardless of the outcome and get to the end of the project. And I don’t think if I didn’t have that experience of forcing myself into those situations that I would be half as good at my job now.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (25:50):
Just that teaching myself how to integrate with multicultural teams who sometimes didn’t even speak English and I had to learn how to communicate a very complex engineering principle with them and move a 20 ton machine over the tops of our heads. How do you figure out a form of communication? How do you work on a job site with different political tensions going on and say this is what I need, this is why I need it and convince somebody that you’re right when sometimes your news is you now have to spend $100,000 dollars because this part is no good. All of those things that I didn’t realize I was learning in the moment, but looking back on it and then looking at what I can do now because of it, huge make in my career that I’m really fortunate that I got to do.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:42):
That sounds like an experience and opportunity. It also sounds very challenging and it sounds like maybe some laying the foundation and groundwork for you to become an entrepreneur and go into business for yourself and own run your own business.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (26:58):
Yeah, absolutely.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (27:00):
Well, let’s talk about this idea of a multiplier. This is slowly turning into kind of my favorite question that we ask because we get such a diverse, just a very broad range of responses and answers and has there anything been… Have you used anything that’s helped you multiply your success?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (27:21):
I’m hesitant to say it because I feel like because it’s what I do, it’s a little bit of a cop out, but I’m going to say it because it’s really what I think is true is that understanding automation and how to use it effectively has been a huge multiplier for me. Having seen it been done effectively and being able to have others experience it being done effectively, I think the ability to magnify a positive aspect of your business and in that sense, multiply its ability to make change on the world. There are a few things that I’ve come across that have that potential beyond automation.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (28:05):
Well, I kind of assumed you’d probably give that answer. So I’ve kind of hopeful that you would. It certainly seems like it as people and you help people through that and going through it and just for the sake of a continuing conversation, how did you end up in the automation business?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (28:26):
Yeah, it was an interesting turn of events. So I started my business working on Facebook Messenger bots. I saw the tech, I learned what it was. I thought it was a really cool new way to communicate with people that had the potential to solve a lot of different problems. So that’s what I started doing. And I realized really quickly that I am terrible at writing copy. Anything I write comes out like a lab report because I have this engineering background. I want bullet points. I want really concise sentences without a lot of emotion that gives you exactly what you need to know. And that makes terrible copy. Nobody wants to read that. But in working on that, I realized that I was really good at building the tech or building these workflows in a bot that had this really cool result of an experience that somebody could have with the technology.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (29:20):
And then I was really good at, once I built that, explaining how it worked to the other people I knew building Messenger bots. And that grew into them going, hey, I want to do what you did with your bot online for this client. Can I subcontract out to you and have you build the tech and I’ll write all the code? I’m like yeah, okay, cool. This is what I enjoy doing. I enjoy the puzzles. Great. And then that conversation blossomed into other parts of the business. Hey, you did this really well. What if we looked at this other aspect of the business and following that conversation led me to the point of having conversations about automating every aspect of a business. And the key point for me was then to say, okay, I have a unique way of looking at this that I don’t see anybody else having.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (30:15):
And I’ve always heard in business you’re trying to find your niche, you’re trying to find the thing that makes you different than the rest of the market. And I had that aha moment of, oh, everything I’m seeing about marketing, everything I’m seeing about tech and automation is over here on the right. And where I want to be is over here on the left. And maybe this is my thing. And to a certain extent, then just having the guts to plant my flag and say this is me, this is what I stand for, this is what I believe in. Yeah. That guts at the end of the day is then what has brought me to going to this place of having a business about automation and being able to touch people. And I love that moment when I can get somebody’s eyes to light up of going like, oh my God, we can fix this. You can do that? Yeah, we can do that. We’ve done it before. This is like… Having those moments with people, I love that that’s part of my life now.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (31:24):
What a great story. What an interesting way to go in. And I think you’re right. Finding that focus or differentiator for what stands out and often to your point that sometimes you don’t even realize that you do have these unique attributes or differentiators. You just kind of assume, oh, doesn’t everyone have this because? And you look around, you’re like, wait a minute. No.
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (31:52):
I have a sticky note on my desk that says it’s supposed to be simple because I think that it’s supposed to be complicated. If it’s simple, it’s not worthy because I innately understand it so much because it’s what I do. And yeah, it’s that reminder of the simple stuff is often the most powerful. The simple ideas, the simple concepts, those are what moves the needle the most. The complex stuff is cool and it’s fun to look at, but most of the time, it doesn’t have the same impact.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (32:26):
Yeah. That’s a great point. That’s a really great point. Well, as a closing question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (32:38):
I think success to me is the ability to make a choice. And then after making that choice, having the mental capacity and understanding of life and what’s going on to stick to that choice and continue down the path that you’ve created without regret of making that the initial choice of being able to follow that tree through life and just being okay with the fact that we make choices every day, but we have the ability to choose. And regardless of the outcome, I think having the competence that that choice was the correct one for the moment. If you can say that with confidence, regardless of what you do, your station in life, anything else, I think you are an immensely successful.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (33:32):
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I really like that thought and idea. Well, Rich, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to say that you didn’t have a chance to share?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (33:44):
No, I think this was a really great conversation. Thank you for having me on. I enjoyed it immensely.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (33:52):
Well, great. Well, and how can someone learn more about what you’re doing if they’re interested in say, hey, this automation thing sounds pretty cool. I like how it’s not changing my, overhauling my whole business. It’s maybe 1% and we’re going to start with a pain point that I already have. I’ve got three of them that I’m thinking of right now. How can someone get ahold of you to take that next step in maybe having that initial conversation?
Richard Schnitzel, Bow Tie Bots (34:17):
Yeah. You can send me a email at richard@richardschnitzel.com. Schnitzel is spelled exactly like the German food, Wiener Schnitzel. Or you can go to the website richardschnitzel.com and there’s a link there to get in touch with us and book a 20 minute call to get on the Zoom call and chat with me about what’s going on in your business and what your ideas are around doing something with automation.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (34:44):
Rich, thank you again so much for being here. And let’s go ahead and jump right into our three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Rich talked about you being the judge as to whether or not your automation is successful or improves your processes or not, remember it’s about getting better, not just faster. I thought that was a great takeaway that you are going to be the judge on how it works for your business. Takeaway number two is that you need to treat automation like an employee. Treat automation like an employee. That was a great nugget, a great takeaway for me. And he shared about how adding in a human element into your automation will make your automation process more effective. And takeaway number three is how he broke business automation down into five steps to consider. The five steps in your business where he talked about you have a lead, a sale, you onboard, you deliver and then you off-board. And looking at those five components and how automation might fit into each of those.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (35:53):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win, again, is all about automation, but it’s to focus on that one or 2% of your processes and systems that you can automate and make better to improve upon. And then once you get a few of those completed and you string them together, that’s where you get those large double digit gains. So remember it’s starting small, incremental little changes and adjustments, maybe picking one thing to start with. Don’t feel like you have to automate your entire business overnight. It can be one small step at a time. And that’s the episode today folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and please, please, please give us a review. Remember if you or anyone you might know, it might be ready to franchise your business please contact us at bigskyfranchise.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
