Today on our Tech for Business podcast, we're joined by Cole, our power platform developer,
and Kelsey, our graphic designer and librarian strategist, which we might be feeling like
this is a weird pair up.
But both of these people are working a lot with workflows and automation, and so we're
going to just have a really beautiful organic conversation about what that looks like.
So to start, I'm kind of interested in what both of you, what really excites you about
this type of work, like what really motivates you and gets you interested every day.
Do create workflows to create automations.
Maybe Cole, it might be easiest for you to start.
Sure, yeah.
So what I'm really excited about whenever I'm working with like a new automation is really
just how it affects the day to day employees and just can make things so much less frustrating.
I know we've all been there where something's not working with heck in the world or when
you're getting your coffee and they're like, oh, yeah, the computer systems being funny
with me again or something, but even more for those automations, there's just so many
things that people don't even realize are kind of bothering them until you show them
how much easier it can be.
And so I really like that it kind of increases that frustration and that it can kind of help
with the burnout a little bit too, because it makes it so much easier for employees to
kind of do the meaningful work and not as much of the busy work, whether you're just
typing in a yes or a no or copy pasting things from here to there.
Your answer was so good that I'm sitting over here like that kid in class who's like, sure,
fun fact.
You know, like my fun fact is not as cool as your fun fact.
I think that you touched on so many great things that are that really distills it down
nicely to go.
Why would we do automations in the first place?
And I think that aha moment of going, hey, you're next to somebody and they go, I'm doing
this, this, this, and this, and you go, did you know that there's an app for that?
Or did you know that you could just do this thing and it'll do it for you?
And the look of relief on their face is probably the best part.
I selfishly get to do it for myself and go, hey, I hate doing this thing.
Hey, we could do this.
And then get to bring it to my own team and go, look, we don't have to do that thing by
hand anymore.
And for all of us to go, yes.
I agree when we talk about automations really high level.
That's definitely the best part.
Yeah.
I mean, I was going to say Kelsey is the person implementing a lot of the automations that
I use.
So it saves me a ton of time and I don't have to create it because it's just not.
In my wheelhouse, but you know, Kelsey, maybe we'll start with you.
What are some of the processes that you think are really perfect when you kind of workflows
you see and you say that is perfect to create an automation off of?
Yeah.
I think a my brain of course goes, nothing's ever perfect.
We can always make it better, but that's just my own personality coming into this.
But I think whenever we look in a marketing process, if you can define it in a framework
and I was chatting with my husband earlier because I was like, man, how am I going to
get all these ideas into a 30 minute podcast?
And I said, well, did you know that when you set up an email, you're out of office, that
that's an automation?
And he goes, oh, yeah.
And I was like, so again, we can framework that.
I can sit there and go, I'm going to be out of office from this day to this day.
And I want these people to get this reply.
And I want this other group of people to get this reply or the same reply, whatever you
want it to be.
And then you set it up and you go, but you can step by step it.
So when I look at it from the marketing side of the house, even if it's a creative something,
I look at it and go, what could be a framework?
What has clear defined steps or processes or applications?
And how can I put those into a way that it just keeps going?
Because I think, Errol, you've seen me go into things and I go, we can do this and
this and this and this and this and this.
And we're like, okay, that's too complicated.
It could be a workflow.
It could be an automation, but we probably need the help of somebody like Cole to do
it versus something like an out of office.
Somebody at some point did all the coding to do it.
I just get to use it now.
Yeah.
And that's so interesting because the flip side is Cole who maybe takes these way more
complicated processes for people and creates or different frameworks to make that work.
So Cole, sort of your side of this, what do you see are perfect frameworks to create automations
or is there a point in which it gets too complex?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I usually use the power automate stuff.
And I love what you're talking about there, Kelsey, where it looks like that framework
and where it's like, when this happens, then this happens.
It's just such a like, that's exactly what we're looking for, complex or non-complex.
I'm more on the low coding side.
So I'm not doing anything like too crazy at some kind of Excel function based, right?
Where it's like, if this column is greater than this column, I want that column to be
green kind of stuff, right?
So it's very much that framework and stuff is just like one layer deeper into the code,
which is why I really like about it.
Because I don't like going too in depth into that code stuff.
But I really like that it's super accessible.
But the things that I'm looking for whenever something is just like, oh, that has to be
automation, like give it to me and I would love to get that to be a little easier for
you.
If anytime you're copy and pasting information, because it is so easy to get just like a character
off there.
And depending on what you're doing, that can be a huge difference, right?
Because you copy and paste the wrong account number because it's one short and then it
just like, right the whole system.
It's like, I don't know what to do with this because this doesn't make this.
So anytime you are sending kind of like wrote information to a standard place and that's
exactly what that you know that out of office is where it's just like, hey, I've defined
the time period that I want this to happen.
And I've defined exactly what I want you to send to this thing.
And if you expand that out a little bit, it can also be for like any of your processes
where it's like, oh, I've just completed this shipping label.
So I want to send an email that's got the shipping labels barcode and it's got this
and that information from the shipping label to so and so in this department so that they
can have that and it's ready to go or into a queue for multiple people to access stuff
like that.
Whereas just you're sending something that's the same every time with a few bits of dynamic
information.
That's what I really like to see there.
Let's see.
And Kelsey, I think you covered a lot of these actually, but I'm just going to go through
my list here.
And anytime you have simple, yes or no or like a B if ABC, then XYZ kind of stuff like
that go back to those email automations are so simple that we're kind of a little bit
used to as a culture where it's, Hey, when I get an email from so and so, I want it to
go to this email box, right?
That's an automation.
That's how simple they can be.
And then all it is when we're looking at slightly more complex ones is having a little bit more
definition around that ABC and then a little bit more definition around that XYZ.
Does it go to these three groups or just this one person?
So on and so.
Last thing I look for is anytime you want data to go from one place to another place
and like that data needs to be able to talk to the two things.
That's a really great place to look at for automation because it's a little bit technical.
However, we have to have data from one place to another place.
But with those automations, you can say, Hey, I know it says it like this over here, but
I'm going to make it go.
I want it to look like this to the other system so it can kind of properly digest it.
And I feel like that's where a lot of the meat of like the like more coding side gets to
even in that low coding space.
I totally heard that 100% just I'm even think they're always I'm like, yep, it's that one.
Yep.
And I've been right if say we're using that, I'm like, I'd love to give the metaphor here
of going, these meta ads, if we do a lead entry form, how am I getting that over to our marketing
automation platform and right?
It's simple for me to go into something like Zapier and go, you go here.
Yes, there's all the safety and regulations and tech talk and everything that goes behind
that, but it took me less than five minutes to go.
I set up the ad.
I made sure the fields matched in the low code, no code universe.
And then I tested it and I'm like, cool.
Now it's flowing.
Now it's running.
I'm going to spend hours trying to go different APIs and find fields and translate data and
do all the stuff that I'm going high level.
I could maybe understand it, but there is a reason that I stopped being a computer science
major.
Yeah.
I, it's so interesting how, and we're going to, I mean, maybe we dive into tools a little
bit, but it's how accessible this is starting to become for like, I hate to say the average
user.
I don't know if you are so intelligent in how you think about the, if this, then that,
you know, first, second, but it's, it's so complex to me.
But again, these tools are out there and these resources are there that are making it easier
for someone like me to do that.
You know, it's just an interesting development.
I don't know if you have anything you want to share on that.
No, I, no, I totally agree.
Cole, you go ahead.
Yeah, I think we're just similar things, but no, I like, uh, totally agree.
And I, you know, I think one of the things that's going to be really cool as like the
next generation kind of come into the workforce, like I'm going to be shocked if people don't
have like kind of a really basic, like, you know, when we went to school at, you know,
you have your English and your math and so on and so forth.
And you know, I think they're just starting to come up with like computer classes a little
bit more, but it's going to be like, no, everyone has a computer course to so you can get like
the broad sense of like, here's how you access email and here's some like really basic automations
you can do.
And I think by the time that they get really into the workforce, it's going to be really
cool because they're going to be able to do whatever they need to to kind of make their
job just easier, right?
And that's the whole point of the automations is it's supposed to make it easier for you
to do your job.
So I totally agree.
And that's a great point that I'm like, we can have a whole nother podcast talking about
it, but the last thing I'll say about that is even to tool like Zapier and write things
like chat, gptle's language models that you can just chat with that you don't even have
to understand what you really need.
The front page now when you log into Zapier is like, explain what you want.
You're like, oh, I need to be able to pass leads from Facebook to this marketing platform.
And it'll go, here's my suggested flow for you.
Here's the things and here's how I connect it.
And I'm like, it just holds your hand through the whole thing.
So it's that going, yeah, you don't have to be the kid that signed up for the computer
elective high school and figured out the stuff.
You're like, no, you can just be a kid who wants to make a tip talk and you want your
tip top cross posted on Instagram.
So you set up a Zapier, right?
Like I'm like, that's a pretty easy, that's one of their flows.
You can do that.
It doesn't have a business sense, but it has so many implications that once you get into
the workforce, you go, oh yeah, I've been doing that this whole time.
I just didn't know that it had that technical name behind it.
So that'll be interesting to see is how many people even realize how much they use it.
Yeah.
And I was going to say your example, Kelsey, of the out of office, I had never thought about
that and it's so true.
So I'm trying to think right now about how I'm already experiencing and doing these
things without even thinking about it.
I'd love to, I know this makes people uncomfortable, but I'd love to give a moment of just bragging.
Is there anything that either of you have implemented that you are so proud of or just
so excited to see work?
What kind of flows or what kind of automations have you put into place recently?
Yeah.
So I've got a couple here that I'm just like really excited about sharing just because
like I think they kind of highlight how much easier things can be when you allow them to
be easier, right?
So this one was actually at a previous job, but basically what we had is we were converting
this really painful, multi-step back and forth, painful process that took things from one form
and then to another group, back to the original group, back to the admin group.
And then the admin group had to put it into this really complex form when like the core
of what the person was trying to do was super, super simple.
So essentially what they did, and this was for a financial institution, what we were
trying to do is just have an automatic transfer of money from this account to that account.
Here's how much, here's how often, you know, really basic kind of a thing.
But originally the person had to look up the person and then grab all of this stuff.
They had to grab the account that it's coming from, the account that's coming to, and you
know, they're copy and pasting those account numbers.
Like I said before, if they're one off, I don't know what account that is.
They had to do the how often, starting when, ending when, amount, what type of account
it came from, what type of account it came to, who is the person you're doing this for,
what's their member number, what's their phone number, what's their email, what's your name,
your phone number, your email and your employee number.
And it's like, oh my gosh, that is just so many things.
And you know, when you're sitting at your computer, you kind of assume your computer
knows some of those things and it definitely does, right?
When you send an email, it knows to say from you, right?
Like it just knows that somehow because like, of course it does.
But so they would send out all of these things, then the admin people would check everything
to make sure that the date was for a date in the future.
You can't set it up for the past.
Make sure that the account number exists and that you gave it the right type.
If it's a checking account or if it's a savings account, so on and so forth.
And then if that was correct, they would have to put it into another system that said things
like they had to make a choice of, is this from checking to checking?
Is this from checking to a loan?
Is this from checking to a savings?
And it's like, you already kind of know that because you know the first type of account,
you know the second type of account.
So why are we having this 30 list drop down to select exactly what it is?
And then they would also have to do weird things with the dates.
I don't remember exactly what it is, but you know, there was a difference between every
two weeks versus first and the 15th.
If it happened monthly, you had to specify it was on the first day or if it was on the
last day or if it's on a specific day anywhere in between.
And it was just like, oh my gosh, this is just so crazy.
But what we were able to simplify it down to is the user would look up the member and
then they would just select from their accounts.
So they're not copy and pasting, they're just saying this to the account is the one that
we want it from.
And then this is the account that we want it to go to.
They type in how much they select one of the five frequencies that are just like, these
are the ones that we can just do.
Then they would select a starting date and had some like little bits of automation around
there too that would force you to do the date in the future because that's the only dates
that are valid.
So why are we even letting them import a date in the past, right?
It's sent to the admin team and they would be able to use it just so much easier.
So that's my most exciting one.
I talked for a minute about that.
So I'll just leave it.
You're good.
No, I love it.
I love it.
A little bit of yours is like, it's all these numbers and my brain is going, oh, I can see
all of the ways that I would mess that up manually.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
I'm like, that is crazy.
Everything you said was such a great logic of, I know.
Here's, we talked too much about being like, it's about the user experience of going, why
would you select a number in the past?
It's not an option.
Don't give it to them.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it is what it is.
And I don't know, it was on another podcast.
So I apologize that I don't have the correct, quoted this, but the human brain can only
comprehend six options at once.
So that's why Starbucks doesn't put their full menu up on the board, right?
They say, hey, this is what it is, even though they can do a million and one things for you.
That's such a beautiful example, but I could do a million and one things for you.
But this is what you're trying to do.
So these are the options that I'm going to give you, which to me is one of my favorite
examples.
So I think that that's so cool, even though I've never worked in finance and I'm like,
I don't want to try to touch numbers, but I can feel how much better that would be.
So that's awesome.
Awesome.
Yeah.
And really quick, I'll talk about the workflow of actually even selecting our podcast platform
and what we do with the podcast afterwards for content because it's one of my favorites.
So essentially we use our podcast.
It's not a secret to generate content across our marketing stream.
So essentially we use it to generate blog posts.
We use the transcripts, help write emails.
We generate email content.
We do social media posts, Reels, Tiktok, all of these things, right?
All kind of comes into the same ecosystem.
So that's my very not technical way of saying, we use the podcast for everything across all
systems.
So then we were sitting there and we went, okay, how do we simplify down our marketing
workflow to make it also make sense within the content creation stream?
So we started, we're on a tour right now called Descript.
So anybody watching will throw in the link, do all the good things.
It's a tool that records three separate transcripts.
So each of us talking has our own transcripts.
That's the big technical.
I won't go into all of that, but saying that's what starts my flow is the transcript.
That's what gets my content going from there.
And then have a flow that goes down and says, okay, then it calls another tool that we have
called Poppy did AI.
I have a separate workflow built over there to take our transcripts, remove out some of
the personal things, any customer names that we say anything like that, if we don't just
say, oh, and write us a blog post.
And it doesn't end up forming headers, just for SEO, suggest the titles, like some meta
description, all of those things goes into there.
Then from there, I have it connected to money.com, which is our test manager to say, hey, go
ahead, give the blog post, assign it to Ariel, notify her, let her know that she's been assigned
and then from there be able to go.
Okay.
So then it goes to this status and we have other workflows that are all built into Monday.com
that I should have written this all down because I would have been more clear explaining
the exact steps.
But from there, it pretty much goes through the workflow that I'm going, Hey, Tara goes
in, is our boss into the back end of WordPress to prove the blog.
If it's approved, everything goes there.
Then we have another flow that writes it into a content or that we can track all of our
content, but then we can action that off and get separate workflows to create social media
posts, to create notifications internally.
I'm like, essentially that's where it goes from there is to go.
If there's a content stream, I probably have a board setup or I have an AI workflow to help
us generate the content so that Ariel can spend most per day, ideating or going through
and making the content better or making an image that improves it so that the user experience
is better or so that we can sit there and spend more of our time going.
How do we make sure that the user experience is great?
Cause that's what I'd rather spend my time talking about and not going back and forth
and going, let me copy and paste that somewhere here to your point, right?
So over here, I got past this over here and then I'm going to message Ariel and let her
know that it's ready and then she's going to message Terri and let her make a sort of
review that she's going to message out back.
And then we get an email thread over here and then we have a teams chat over here and
you're going, that's so many things to try to keep track of all throughout a day.
And then you have multiple meetings to approve things or talk through things and you're going.
Wouldn't it just be easier to start it with the thing that's starting at the podcast and
then in the end, you know, let's give it a framework so that when we have meetings, we
can talk about more exciting things.
But Hey, did you have time to go through and edit that transcript?
And did you then copy and paste it and spend five hours making it a blog post when it takes
less than 10 minutes to make a blog post over 500 words?
Yeah.
And I mean, I wish I could give you numbers because I'm terrible at tracking, but it has
saved me like days of work.
Like my old calendar was just filled with like a full day every week doing podcast stuff,
which would include all the things that Kelsey mentioned.
Now like today, I'm probably spending maybe half my day to do two podcasts.
Like now I'm doing so much more and get to make such higher quality content rather than
just spending time with like the basic wrote stuff, you know?
So yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
You know, to go to write anybody in leadership or go to Cole and go, hey, can you write us
a blog post?
Can you write us a blog post?
Can you write?
Nobody, I love all of our internal resources.
Nobody has time for that.
Nobody has time to sit down and write it out and do all these things, but they have more
than enough time to sit down in a quick meeting.
Yeah.
Which is essentially all these podcasts are and say, hey, yeah, I'll give you my story.
I'll tell you.
And then we're getting great content that then if you're anything like me, you don't
look at under piece of paper and go, well, it's not good enough.
The grammar is bad.
And I don't like the voice there and this and all these other things.
I'm going, yep, I'll hail AI overlords because please take what I'm saying and make this.
Oh my gosh.
Oh man.
And I mean, AI is potentially a different conversation because that changes everything
as well.
I don't know how involved that is or how connected that can be.
We love automations.
We do a lot, especially in the marketing.
I can speak to it.
But are there any hurdles or challenges either of you have faced or that you know could trip
somebody up if they start exploring this?
What's some of those challenges they might face when creating an automation?
And I throw my one thing and then call it, let you go.
Because I got one thing, bad data.
Yeah.
I'm sorry to cut you off, Kelsey.
I heard if automation is like the car, data is the gas and you have to have the right
and good quality like fuel.
Otherwise, it's not going to drive.
Does it work?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I'm like, you take all of this and you can say, call if you're trying to be your example
of the count numbers.
If a number is off, does it work?
It doesn't work.
I just sat on a podcast with Ariel and said, let me tell you about my cat.
That is a good quality content.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I love that example of the car and the gas.
I think that's a really good kind of metaphor for what it is.
The other thing that I've seen is a lot of work, technology is changing all of the time
and people are kind of getting a little bit tired about it, honestly.
So what I find is sometimes is people who are kind of resistant to that change because
they're just a little bit burnt out of things that don't quite work for them.
It's always something that the company is like, oh, well, we're just going to do this
thing.
And they're like, well, why didn't you ask us first?
And I'm happy to say that the solution is actually really simple, it's just talk to
them, right?
Your stories get out.
What is going to make this actually easier for that end user and make them really feel
good about what they're doing there?
So for example, like the automation I was talking about before, the admin team was originally
really kind of hesitant for this because the multiple hours of work that they were doing
of confirming that each tech box along that process was going as it should is now being
done by machine and they don't necessarily trust it.
We could admit something and that's totally fair.
That's a really valid reaction to it.
So the way that we actually overcame it in this situation was we created a little bit
of a trial period where instead of just executing the full automation whenever the form was
imminent, the admin would receive an email that said, here's what we're doing and what
we're going to do here.
If this looks okay to you, please just press approve and then we'll go through that whole
back end process, which was still a huge time savings for them because they didn't have
to go and copy and paste all that stuff from the email into the thing.
They could just press the button that does do it and then it all gets done.
I think we even ended up creating an even smaller automation that would run locally
on the machine.
So what it would do is they have a way to double check what has been set up for those
automatic transfers.
So it would go through that and they can see it going through step by step nice and slowly.
So it's like, it punches in the code to bring up the account, it punches in the code to
look at the last one that they just did.
It punches in the code to say, pull up what this is set up as.
And right there, they can see exactly what they've seen every time that they've done
it in the past.
It's no longer this like back end kind of scary thing that they're not used to.
You're meeting them right where they are and you're saying, hey, this is what this has been
set up as, you know, go ahead and double check it, make sure you feel comfortable.
And then once that trial period is done, they're feeling great about this because they know
this is working exactly how they want it to work.
If it's not, they can kind of give us those feedback of, hey, every once in a while, here's
an issue we have.
And then, you know, we throw in another if end statement that says, if this is a thing
that we're going to do this, or, you know, even sending them the few that don't make
sense for the computer.
Sometimes you do get to those situations where we don't quite have all of the data that
we need, and we need to ask for just a little bit more, and it's just a little bit tricky
to get to the computer.
So that part is great to have that human interaction and that human control on it.
But it's about making all those things that we don't need to have a whole meeting about,
you know, it's the classic expression like this could have just been in an email.
Exactly the same with automation, right?
Where those things that the computer should know, let's let the computer take care of
and the things that are a little bit more complex than that.
Let's let the humans take care of.
For sure.
I love because sometimes people when they hear about these tools that are out there, they
think that you're really removing the human element and you're not.
So like I am still very much involved in the full process that Kelsey has put in there,
but it's just a little bit more in depth.
It's a little bit more meaningful use of my time and having those checks and balances
are really important.
So absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think you make a great point about user friction and user adoption of, yes, I live
in this happy world.
We're pretty much it's aerial and I get to go, we're doing this.
She is okay.
Cool.
And I'm like, that's what I had to convince.
We're done.
Congratulations.
But I've seen the other side of it, right?
Even just cross departmentally when I'm sitting crossword meetings and I'm like, we could
do this, this, this, this, this, this, learning how to position that in an entry way that
says, yeah, I'm going to focus on how we're going to do it and then giving you the tools
to say, but you're going to have full control or we're going to be able to look back through
kind of that lifting behind the curtain.
There are ideas.
I was such a great point to go.
Yes, it's scary.
Yes.
You don't have to understand it, but I'm also not going to, for lack of better terms,
mansplain my workflow to you and say, I'm still going to give it to you in a way that
you feel like you have ownership or control so that it's not so scary that I'm just taking
it from you and saying, well, the computer is going to do it for you.
You just don't worry about it.
Just sit there, smile, look pretty.
I'm going, no, no, no, no, no.
You're going to do more important things.
I'm just going to help you with some of the things that you're doing on repeat that the
computer can do for you because I think your point is great.
We expect technology to know things for us.
Let's just utilize the things that maybe it already knows.
Absolutely.
I love that.
I don't know if I'm going to put it.
Sure.
Let's jump a little bit into if someone is so excited to do more, learn more, start
implementing.
Where do they even start?
I don't know, Cole, if you can jump off first.
Where does someone start?
How did they begin figuring out what process is an easy one to start automating?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mostly work in Power Automate and I think it's a really nice one to get started with
because you can actually get a free developer account.
I don't know if anyone knows this, but through Microsoft, they actually have a free, like,
hey, try it out because they want more people to be using it.
You can set up your own development account there and start playing around with it.
The way that you do this is you just go to, let's see, I have it in here.
If you just Google M365 developer program and then click, you know, get started with
that and then you give it some basic information about what you're using it for and, you know,
your email address, you got to have an account to sign in.
They'll give you that free developer account.
With that, if you have Outlook, you can do some really, really basic things like, hey,
I'm going to set up an automation that sends an email, right?
And, you know, that's not a really viable automation for the business because if you're
going to send an email, you open Outlook and you send an email, right?
It's not that complex.
But what I like about it is it kind of just gets you to have your hands on it and really
start understanding, like, how simple it is.
And then you kind of build on that.
Similar with SharePoint is you can have it just, you press the button that says, run
the automation and it will create an item in your SharePoint list.
And I really like that approach because it gives you a really easy way to kind of get
your hands on it and just see what makes sense for you and start learning and start building
that skill set and that comfortability with here's what it looks like to automate something.
Yeah, I love that.
And I think to, and I played around Power Outta Beat just a little bit that I was like,
you know, just poking around, doing a few things, doing a few flows, worth Microsoft
partners, so sorry, self-promotion sitting over here in the marketing department.
And I'm like, we can do these things for you.
But to your point, that's such a good thing to know.
And I think you brought up a point for me of, if you can storyboard out your day, which
is such a marketing way of going about this.
Okay, let's say I'm a team lead and I send out a team's message to my team every single
day saying, what's your top three for that?
That's what I do every day.
I probably have it saved at a notepad because it got too easy to type it in every single
time.
Control C, control V, doing all the things.
That's a super easy workflow to go on this day, this time, in this channel, you post
this and they may get so easy.
You go in, it's visual power on me has some of the same things as Zapier where they have
templated outflows.
So even if you don't know where you're starting, looking at some of these websites and we'll
put a bunch of links with a bunch of tools, but just looking through them, Zapier has
a full, Hey, here's all the popular flow.
So if you don't use their tool, you may think of things.
Power Automate has something similar.
I'm sure Gmail, even though I haven't, my personal email is a mess.
So don't use me as a use case here.
I'm sure that they have similar things.
I know that they do between Google Sheets, Google Forms.
So whatever platform you're on personally, that's a great way to get started and then
be able to do things for your team, for your business, scale it up.
Same thing calls pretty much saying is, Hey, beta test it yourself.
Maybe set a reminder to feed your cat before your cat reminds you, right?
Those types of just play around with how your life can get a little bit easier and give
yourself a little bit back time.
And then it's so much easier to then go and say, I could save somebody else time.
I had empathy for Ariel and the podcast because I didn't produce to her.
So I said, I used to spend all this time.
I knew that you spent this time.
I can do this for you.
But if I didn't have that understanding, I could have created a flow that would have
just created more work.
So I think when you're looking at it and saying, how do you get started?
Understand what your problem is first.
And then maybe try the simple metal fixes because any of these big, complex workflows
are just smaller flows combined.
So do the three-step and feel really good about that and then you can keep going.
I really like that.
I love how you talked through that of like, understanding what the problem is just such
a huge part of that.
And any automation at its core is what is the trigger?
And for a lot of these things, it's like this time of day, right?
Like I've got on my phone, it's not like you wouldn't really consider it an automation.
But now the way that you're talking about this Kelsey, I'm thinking about everything
is an automation, right?
I've got it set up so that if it's a Monday morning, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
sound my alarm at 7am.
If it's Saturday or Sunday, sound it at 9am, right?
Like that's an automation.
It's just what thing is triggering it.
And then what do you want to have happen after it?
If you can get it into those terms of like distilling your problem down to that, you
can make an automation for it.
Like you absolutely can.
Well, yeah, and there's so many, so many tools.
If you select, if you use teams, if you use asana Monday.com, like where I could throw
it all these notes and anything that you can do to try to organize your technology at this
point probably has an automation built in that you're probably already using or they've
made it in a no-call, low-code way.
And really what we're talking about is just taking it and going, how do you connect those
systems?
You're just scrolling between three separate monitors and right doing all these things
where you're like, yeah, I feel like I'm at mission control and it's Ironman waking up
Jarvis and I feel so cool.
And you're like, yeah, but you can also take some of that out and simplify it so that you
don't get the technology fatigue that you spoke about earlier called because that's so true
of going, I get really excited about it, but that doesn't mean that if I walked down the
street and looked at somebody and was like, hey, I just did this automation, I'm not sure
if he was going, please don't do that.
I would get the same amount of excitement out of the general population.
Not done talking to anybody else.
That's just going, I get to get excited about it because I feel bad about it in my job,
but it doesn't always, it's not as important for some people.
If I was building a car room, I probably would not care about what my calendar flow was doing.
I just wouldn't.
Yeah, well, I don't know, I think that that can make for some good tick tocks is running
up to people on the street and saying, Hey, have you thought about automating your outlook?
I've got some automation tree to try to gain their react.
Hey, what's your favorite rest rest?
Hey, what's your favorite workflow?
Oh man.
Well, credit, if we go viral credit goes out to you.
Oh my gosh, I love it.
We might have to do that.
As we close out today, I want to talk about future friends or how things are going to
evolve going forward.
I want you to start with in your field, how you think automation is really evolving or
changing your specific field, and then what you see, how businesses can prepare.
Get a little bit bigger, how businesses can prepare for automation or get started in that,
if that makes sense.
I know, I mean, honestly, Cole, it might be easier because you do work very in depth with
businesses and stuff.
It might be easier for you to sort of start.
Yeah.
You.
So I think that the biggest trend is just we're going to see a lot more.
No matter what happens, we're going to just see more and more of this.
It's all going to be about this.
We're getting rid of the chaff.
We're getting rid of the, we're not doing click here, click here, click here.
It's about just doing less of that manual work that the computer should be able to do
and doing more of that meaningful work, which we've talked about in depth.
So I'm not going to go too deep in that.
But for the other point that you were bringing up of just how can businesses prepare for
the future of automation?
I think one of the biggest things is just recording your processes because exactly like
Kelsey was saying before, right?
If you know what your problem is, which, you know, your processes shouldn't be a problem.
But as you know, at the pain point, all right, where are these things frustrating for your
employees?
Or even like, if you have it so that it's very clear on what step happens and then what
thing comes after that, so on and so forth.
When you hire a company or you start using your internal resources to automate some of
those processes, they can look at it and that's going to be so much easier for them to automate
because you already have done so much of the legwork of figuring out what does this actually
look like?
And then the next step is what can this look like, right?
The other thing that I would say that I think is even more just like hugely important is,
you know, getting to know and understanding your employees because when we remove the
mind numbing busy work tasks, what do they want to do?
How can they feel fulfilled at their job and how can they get the most about doing things
that are a little bit more, you know, using their mind and the fun stuff of the job instead
of the mind numbing stuff?
Because like some of these animations are going to remove hours of busy work like you
were saying Ariel and that's where we really need to know what are they doing after, right?
Like how are we going to take this from we were doing a lot of busy work stuff and now
we're going to do more meaningful stuff and how can we get them excited about that, right?
Because if you're just going to tell them, hey, help these guys know what your process
is because then we can let you go and it will be cheaper for us.
You're not going to get a lot of buy in.
People aren't really going to be excited to make the secrets of their job.
But if you can tell them, here's how we're going to actually use this time to help you
have a more fulfilling life and you can do more things with it that are exciting to you,
then you're going to have excellent buy and you're going to have really good automations
because you have people who are bought in and excited to help the people who are automating
it, do a really good job with capturing what that process should be.
Amazing.
I don't know how you're going to follow that up, Kelsey.
I'm so much pressure that I was like, A, wholeheartedly agree with everything that you just said, ditto.
But also, I think if I pulled it back and said, okay, from a marketing standpoint, which
is the standpoint that I live in, I think where it's going is, A, we've already talked
about AI, but B, you're going to see that we hear it all the time, hyper personalization,
people want that personalized experience.
So as far as automations go, we're going to see a lot of data being automated, right,
where you're having data from all these different marketing platforms.
You're going to see more and more products like that.
Hey, do this dashboard.
Hey, go to Looker.
Hey, here's funnel.io.
There's all of these platforms already out there for AI.
I think that's only to get it more and more prevalent because we have social media and
we have Google and we have all of these platforms that I want you to go into.
And saying the more marketing technology we have, the more data we have, the more analytics
that we have.
And the next thing is we're going to start seeing that in a more intuitive way for marketers
that makes it more accessible and makes it easier to translate the data, to know what
consumers are doing, to know what your user is doing, and to be able to identify their
pay points and make better marketing experiences for them, which I think we're already kind
of seeing with experiential marketing, right?
That's already kind of what's happening is you're not just opening an email, you're
going to a pop up for a new line of soda and you're getting swag and you're like, this
has nothing to do with what the original product was, but you're experiencing the product.
And I think workflows and things like that is what enables marketing companies or smaller
marketing teams to have that bandwidth.
So that's like a very vague, we're going to keep on using it to keep on doing our job,
but we're going to do our job better with less people, but more people in a different
way.
Yeah, that was super clear.
But I think as far as where business are taking it, well, you're 100% right on.
And it's something that I said to Ariel last week when we were talking to work processes
and she said, well, what's a process?
And I said, anything that you could codify, write down that if we hired somebody else,
right, to do that task, that's what we're writing down as processes.
That's what we're documenting.
That's what we're putting into a library.
And then essentially that's then the next step is to say, hey, if you can tell that
story of how you're doing it, then we can automate it, then we can look at what helps
you do it faster, then we can look at how to improve it.
And that to your point call, then it's not about me going, well, Ariel, I'd just like
to replace you with this machine.
That's not what I'm saying.
And I was like, and I'll do that, but be not going to do that.
Saying, hey, when we go through all of this, it's not that I'm looking to nitpick or micro
manage her processes, my process is that's not what our boss is doing to us.
It's to look at, say, what are our actual goals?
What do we actually want to do?
Yeah.
What's the important thing?
And I think that's such a nice way of looking at it is saying, automations are super technical
if they're very, very core, but we're doing it so that you have more time to do the human
things, the things that machines do.
So yes, there's scary parts of it, but knowing what's going on in your business and what
data is in your business.
And then also building up your employees enough to go.
This isn't a micro manage.
This isn't, I'm questioning how you're doing it.
This is you matter to me.
You shouldn't have to enter a table every single day of the same data until your brain
melts.
Nobody really wants to do that.
So how about we make something that does this for you so that you have the brain capacity
because you probably know something about this process that I don't know that you can
tell to make it better, which is the fun part for me is going, Hey, we fixed it.
And then arrow goes, well, did you know there's three transcripts instead of one transcript?
And I go, no, but I.
Awesome.
And Kelsey, I totally agree with you.
One thing that you said that really resonated with me and I'm going to let everyone in here
on a little bit of a secret, even if you don't automate anything, it's really good to have
your processes written down for when you do have those people coming in, right?
You have a new hire coming on and they're wondering how does my day to day look like?
What do I do here?
You know, if you have those processes documented, then they can do them because it's very clear
and you know, there's always times where there's exceptions and there's things, but it's always
better to come in with a plan and adjust the plan than to come in and say, well, I'm really
flexible, so I'm just going to do whatever and I have no idea where to start, right?
Like that doesn't, that doesn't work.
No, it's the 80 20.
And I think it was Kyler CEO was like, just get it 80% of the way there.
Get it 80% and then we can figure out the 20.
Absolutely.
If 20% crashes and burns doesn't matter, we're just going to keep going.
And I was like, that is a great benchmark to get to because if you approach anything,
but especially animations with going, it's going to be 100% perfect off the door.
Then the second area goes to me and goes, yeah, did you know that this, this, this,
this and then if I was like, nope, it's perfect because I processed it and that's the way
it is, it's not going to work.
So you're reaching it from that.
You're building something with best intentions that's going to have to change and then building
in the process for monitoring it.
Because I know that's the constant struggle that I have is I could spend all day just
improving my processes.
So looking at your business and planning for that and going, okay, everybody maybe, and
I'll, everybody can write down what they do every single day, but who's owning when
automation breaks because a lot of times, right?
You'll, you'll pay somebody to come in.
They set it up for you and you go, cool.
It works and the second something breaks, you're like, oh crap, there goes our entire
process.
Then none of us now know how to fix.
So also documenting what you're doing when you're building it.
And this is behind it.
Cause that's how I approach it is even in Zappier or things like that.
There's a note section.
You can put why you put that stuff there and what you're thinking was.
And so right if I'm designing it, I'm going, if Ariel came in behind me, even if she had
no background, anything else, she should technically, if I did it right, this is on me, not on
her, be able to at least understand at a high level what I was attempting to do and why
I did it.
Absolutely.
Even though it takes me more time when I'm building it.
So yes, I'm not always great at it.
Full disclosure.
I'm preaching it and then going, yep, make sure I'm doing it every time.
Cause it does take more time, but it does save your business time in the long run.
And it's not diminishing my work or my worth to be able to say, if I can explain this to
you, I would love it if anybody coming after me in marketing, did it better than me?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
That would be exciting.
I would love that.
But hopefully I said enough good enough that they don't look at it and go, that was crap.
I'm going to double it.
Perfect.
I love it.
But again, I kind of started this podcast, but this is such an amazing thing that both
of you do.
And it's just not how my brain works, but I'm actually excited to leave this podcast
and figure out how I might actually already be doing it.
So this has been amazing.
Thank you both for being on our podcast today.
It's very exciting.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us today.
If you enjoyed this topic, please let us know.
Like, subscribe, or reach out to us at info at cit-net.com or head out to our website
cit-net.com slash podcast.
We'll be back next week with an all new episode.