Automation Saves Time, Money, and Stress

Damon Pistulka  00:03

All right, everyone, it is Friday, and you know what that means? It is time for manufacturing, e commerce, success. And boy, I’m excited today because we are going to have some fun. I’m one of your co host, Damon Pistulka, that guy right over there is the pretty Curt Anderson. He’s going to be the other co host. Today. We’re going to be having some fun, talking about automation, talking about how it saves time, money and stress, with none other than Rob Howze, but I am going to let Curt Anderson take over from here.

Curt Anderson  00:37

Damon, this is like such an honor, such a privilege. Man, you know who’s in the house today? We got Rob Howze in the house today. Rob, how are you? Dude, what’s happening,

Rob Howze  00:49

man? Man, I’m doing fantastic. I’m just happy to be here with you guys. Man, I’m looking forward to this conversation always. It’s always going to be good, you

Curt Anderson  00:57

know. And I don’t you know you might be mad at me. I’m gonna let something out of the bet. You just, what age did you you just told me you turned it and a number, and I need to see some ID, because I don’t what number did you just turn I

Rob Howze  01:08

just crossed the 50 yard line. Man, I’m a half century old now here.

Curt Anderson  01:14

I just crossed the 50 yard line. I don’t know if I’ve heard that one before. That’s That’s awesome. Well, hey, welcome to the other side of 50. It’s a great place. The water’s warm, you know. Just enjoy and it’s, I’d say, Damon, I don’t know about you, but I just I 50 has been my best decade. I just love my 50.

Damon Pistulka  01:31

No doubt you’re,

Curt Anderson  01:32

you’re absolutely going to love it. So, yes, alright, Rob, let’s go. We’re going to dive in. Simply automate. We have tons of cover now. You are a repeat offender. You’ve been on the program before. And so I open up with a question, and I might have, I don’t know if you, I know you love when I do this, right? I might have a little surprise for you, you know. But hey, Rob, when you were a little guy growing up, who was your hero? Who was your hero when you’re a little guy growing up?

Rob Howze  02:00

Oh, man, little guy. What? What? Now? What little guy we talking about? Which little

Curt Anderson  02:05

guy when you were when you were young, when you were a little kid, when you were grade school, like teenage, who did you look up to? Who did you admire? Who helped shape the amazing guy that you

Rob Howze  02:17

are? You know what I would have to say? Sugar Ray Leonard and Martin Luther King

Curt Anderson  02:25

and Sugar Ray and Martin Luther King, those are two great answers, man, do share, I tell you, I was a huge Sugar Ray fan. Why was Sugar Ray such a hero to you? Well, you know, with

Rob Howze  02:37

Sugar Ray, his style of boxing, it was just so amazing. His confidence in himself, his dedication to his family, and what he wanted to do for his community. I actually boxed at the Sugar Ray Leonard pal in Maryland, and this had got a chance to be around that kind of energy. Just a really cool, down to earth guy, but can really get it done. And it’s really about what I got from him was the dedication. That’s the part I really got from him, the dedication. You can be charismatic and you can be have fun, but you have to put in the work. And he made putting in the work look fun. So, yeah, and of course, Martin Luther Martin of the King. I mean, that’s me, you know that I could just say Martin of the king, Yeah,

Curt Anderson  03:24

everybody’s here, you know. And the thing is, is, you know, the more as time goes by and you realize, how on, you know, like, I, you know, I was with a bunch of buddies last weekend. It was like, you know, without texting, how do you even coordinate anything like, how do you round up 250,000 of your best friends without cell phones, social media, yes, you know, like, it’s just, it’s in, it’s amazing of what was accomplished during that time. And, you know, I, my family and I, we were at the 50th anniversary at Washington, DC, of his speech, and it was just such a wonderful, moving time when you think about, you know, his here. His legacy still carries on all these all these years later. So Rob, thank you for those two answers now And now, Rob, you know I you love when I do this. I know you do so I can’t have you on the show and not show. So Damon, I don’t know if you remember this at all, but I’m going to show I got it. I think we’re going to have a I have to show a friend of mine here. So Rob, I found i i found a new video for you ready. So Damon, this is so I live in Western New York, near Buffalo, and so I grew up big sabers fan. My dad had had season tickets, and I used to go to college. You know, when I was at college, I’d come home, we’d go to saber games, and there was a gentleman at the sabers games, who would just get the whole place just rowdy, yelling, cheering. So I found a new video. So are you guys? Are you guys ready for this? Are you ready? Okay, so you.

05:04

Nice, you.

05:20

Yeah. All right, wait, let

Curt Anderson  05:26

me go back a bit. All right, so I’m going to show Rob. I’m going to show you something. So on top of that, do you see this comment over here to the right? This comment says, right here, he was the first person to know my wife was pregnant, 28 years ago, went to a game as usual, and he asked her if she was having her usual beer. When she said, No, he said, Why are you pregnant? Bam. So this guy knew was a first person. Is that crazy?

05:55

I gotta, I

Rob Howze  05:56

gotta send, Oh, I gotta send him this. So

Curt Anderson  05:59

I’ll send you the link. So I so Damon when I was, like, funny, so when I was a young guy. So this gentleman, his nickname was Earl of Bud, okay, his nickname was Earl of Bud and Rob can and so he would get the the, you know, Buffalo sabers games, Buffalo Bills games. He would get 10s of 1000s of people just rowdy and just yelling and cheering, just, you know, he brought sheer joy and exhilaration to 10s of 1000s of people. Rob, can you please share with me who is Earl of bud?

Rob Howze  06:34

That is my wonderful father, man and that that is I, my me, my brother and I actually went and danced with him for his birthday. We are on the I’ve been trying to find a video of us on the dugout with them. And he did that thing for decades, came came back, did it in his 60s. Oh, my. And what, what’s, what’s incredible is that we came back to the sabers they had for the it was a Hall of Fame type of event. They flew him in, and they were had the bobblehead dolls, and there were people lined up around the corner in all age I’m talking about little kids. It reminded me of Michael Jackson, how you have little kids with the Michael Jackson jacket zone. Like, yeah. I’m like, wow, it was so incredible. But what it spoke to me was that there was an energy, there was a energy of goodness that was left in the memory that people just appreciated, and they told their kids about. So I’m like, You know what that is great, that it’s great about areas.

Curt Anderson  07:35

Yeah, right there. Man,

07:38

that is so awesome. Man, is his

Curt Anderson  07:42

father and I every time so Rob, I know I every time we’re together. I tell this story, but it just so he and I. You know, Rob, if you guys aren’t First off, if you’re not connected with Rob Howze, please do so you’ll thank me later, later. I just don’t know of anybody that just brings such a contagious enthusiasm. You’re just, you’re like, I you know what, Rob, you’re like a wrecking ball of positivity. How’s that for a line, man, I like that wrecking ball. And I say wrecking in the most loving way possible. I like that. And you’re just such a just a genuine, just kind hearted person. You and I connected. This is a great LinkedIn friendship here. And you and I connected, and we started chit chat. And you’re like, hey, Curt, where are you from? I’m like, I live in Lakewood, New York. I’m, you know, south of Buffalo. You’re like, oh, buffalo, did you ever go to a sabers game? I’m like, of course, I went to sabers game. This is all you do up here. And he’s like, do you remember Earl of bud? I’m like, Oh my God. I like, I of course, I know Earl bud. I’m like, you know? He’s like, Well, that’s my dad. I’m like, Well, Rob, I probably paid for your couch tuition. So anyway, so Damon, we got a bunch of comments here. And yeah,

Damon Pistulka  08:49

let’s roll through a few of them. We got narciss saying, Hello, Curt, Damon, Rob and everyone, hello. We got Pradeep saying hello. Today. Got see Diane comes to us from Twitter. She’s saying, happy Friday, everyone. Then she jumps into LinkedIn and says, Rob house. We got Pradeep Scott samorica, and we got Fei Fei Yang saying awesome stuff. So thanks for stopping by today. Everybody Drop your comments in. If you got questions for Rob, drop them in there, because we’re going to start talking about automation. This is something that Rob does every day, helping people figure out automation in business, and it’s going to be some good stuff. So Curt, let’s go.

Curt Anderson  09:31

Let’s dive in. So Rob again, thank you for taking time of your busy schedule. So first off, please, you know big hello. Lots of love to your dad from his buddy Curt, and tell him that Western New York misses him, and we’re just, we’re just showing him with love. And so let’s dive in. And so you do amazing work you’re at simply automate. Please share with folks who is simply automate. How do you guys make the world a better place? What’s going on there? Well,

Rob Howze  09:56

thank you for asking that question, man, and our our. Goal to make the world a better place, is to help people understand how to have better access use of their time. That’s really the goal help people to have better use of their time, I think. And I’ve never said that before, but I think that’s really the ultimate goal, because we all have the same amount. 24 Yeah, we have the same, yeah, we had the same hours, minutes and seconds? But some of us are doing things we don’t necessarily have to do but, but it needs to get done. So our our main objective is to go into companies and help them identify, where are people spending all this repetitive time and being stressed out? Where are these bottlenecks? Where can we had automation. You you could see the joy people’s faces. And sometimes, man, it doesn’t even take that long, a week, two weeks, three weeks a month, but you do all that to save hours, 1020, 3040, 5060, 100 hours. Sometimes it’s a it’s really amazing. And so our that’s our main objective, help people get their time back, I think, um, one of our favorite slogans is too much on your plate. Simply automate. I mean, you know,

Damon Pistulka  11:09

it’s such a I tell you, just in the simple things that that, that I’ve seen in in organizations, when you talk about some of these repetitive things, like you guys are helping people with you see administrative people. You see executives. You see all across the board, people are finding themselves doing much more. They might be moving files, they may be transferring information. They may be reformatting something to get it to go someplace else, and the types of automation you guys work with eliminates that, and then you go, okay, that time that I spent on that every single day, every single minute of every single day, for somebody like you talk about a customer service situation or something like that. If I’m sitting there and copy and pasting information or I’m moving files, I mean, you can save hundreds or even 1000s of hours a year doing that

Rob Howze  12:04

kind of, Oh, my goodness, man. And stress always. Yeah, well,

Damon Pistulka  12:08

and the one thing that I think people often overlook is quality of results or quality of data. Yes, because how many times have you been in a situation where you have to do something, you’re supposed to do it consistently, right. You’re supposed to do it over. And you go, I did two out of three, but I forgot to do the third one, and it goes unchecked until you really need it. And you go back, oh, darn, I forgot to do that. I have to go back, figure out what the heck I was going to do, or or fix all the stuff that that was wrong because of it. And that’s, that’s a huge time waster. So the quality is so much better, yeah,

Rob Howze  12:44

man, you said time waster. And it goes the energy waster, you know, the brain uses 25% of the body’s energy, and so the most of that is coming from thought. And so if you could say that thought time, you can say thought brain energy. And hey, we can use it for something else.

Damon Pistulka  12:59

Yes, yeah. And, you know, and some of the, some of the E commerce clients I work with, if they did not use automation, they could not do what they do. I mean, because when you’re talking about hand and handling 1000s, 1000s of orders a day, you just can’t the data the way things moves around. And then what you have to do, you just can’t do it right? You can’t do it manually. Because what you’ll find out is, you, you pretty much burn everybody out trying to move data, and then in the end, you have those mistakes, and you have all that stuff, and then you go, we got to do something else, because this is not sustainable.

Rob Howze  13:31

Well, put that’s a good clip.

Damon Pistulka  13:35

So what are some of the situations where you guys really see benefit? Where you go? Wow, we gave people some of their brain time back.

Rob Howze  13:46

Yeah, you know, so anything that has to do with invoice processing, document management, data analysis, any anything like that, obviously, anything at all that we automate takes the stress off someone, because that’s now manual labor taken away, but you see invoice processing and on onboarding, offboarding, type of especially with companies that have a lot of that activity, but it’s the same activity, yes, and so if it’s the same activity, that means you can now bring a digital Employee into the mix, right? That’s what automation is. We call them digital employees. And they’ll come in and they’ll do that one thing over and over, never make a mistake and report to you. So this way now you can see the process taking place, whatever it was, invoice processing, payroll in between, management, whatever it is. You can now see where it’s happening. And then if there is a, let’s call it, um, a pause. Then the gatekeeper, the human in the loop, right? They’ll be notified. And so then they can take a look at what was the pause for. Because maybe these times are now making an adjustment. You make that adjustment once, and you never have to make that adjustment again. So remember. You saying we did 123, we forgot four. We forgot one of them. Well, this time, once you find out what you forgot, noted the bot remembers and never forgets it. So it’s a continuous process improvement.

Damon Pistulka  15:12

Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  15:14

all right, this is phenomenal. And what’s fascinating, I just had a conversation with a friend over the weekend, and, you know, they were complaining about, you know, their company just, you know, being bogged down. You know, so many, so many touches with invoicing, on receivables, payables and so Rob, what you guys do you come in with your team, and you’re just really streamlining these processes, and it’s not taking away jobs. I think you run into like that resistance of change, you know, is, is, you know, people are complaining that they’re too busy, but they’re not busy enough to stop and make a difference, right? Do you run into that?

Rob Howze  15:48

Oh, yeah, my goodness. Well, we don’t want change, but we don’t want things to say the same. Yeah, that, yeah. Run into it all the time, and that that’s when you have to sit down and paint. Help them paint the picture. They paint the picture that they want to see. Once they paint the picture they want to see, then we map to that, right? So we show them. They show us what they’re doing, and they and then from that, how do you want this to go? And then what we provide from the automation map, it’s essentially showing them all their entire process, and then where automations can take place at and where the free time can now happen. And then we also discuss, what would you do now with this time? So in regards to the jobs, Sammy, Sammy who’s been coming in and spending two, two and a half hours a day doing this repetitive work, now Sammy can do something else right now, we can talk about maybe marketing sales, or maybe public speaking, or getting out into the field and and for the other business owners, maybe this or or operators. Maybe this means you just don’t do that right, and you save time, you know, instead of having to do the work, like, if you’re the one, if you’re the one operating it, then maybe now you go home early. That’s happened too. Yeah, helped us. We helped the CPA firm, and they were they just is incredible how much time they were able to save. It’s only like 15 of them, but they didn’t have to hire any more folks, and they were able to go home earlier, which is big, huge.

Damon Pistulka  17:17

This is huge. There are some industries that, if you look in healthcare, if you look in CPAs, or finance, people very hard to hire. Yeah, we’re just not getting enough people that are interested in out of college right now. And those kind of industries, as you said, when you can go into a CPA firm, and you can eliminate a lot of that manual operations that they do over and over because they’re doing all this thing. It could be taxes, could be reviews, could be whatever they’re doing, or just monthly stuff for for businesses, Mm, hmm, they don’t have to hire, and that is just such a big pain for a lot of businesses.

Rob Howze  17:52

Yep, yep. So

Curt Anderson  17:54

I want to, I’d like to dispel a couple of myths, and before we do that, Rob Damon, we got a few comments here that I thought we could grab if you want to just go through the chat box here.

Damon Pistulka  18:03

We’ll do, we’ll do. Let’s get going here. So we, let’s start with, where do you want me to start? Curt, we got a lot today. Diane listening and typing on LinkedIn. Okay, so she’s getting in and out on that automation. Quality of results so important in my effective and efficiency reviews, quality of our results, that’s for sure. And then Diane talks about the fear of change. Yeah, yeah. We all know that when we step on the scale and go, I really should change what I mean, not going to magically get there. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  18:39

And I’m, I’m going to grab this one here, because we can’t buy time using money. Pradeep, thank you for that. Yeah, you see comment so Rob, I’m going to spell a couple myths with you today, because your services are really powerful. And so you know, as we’re talking to say, different entrepreneurs or whoever might be listening out there, they’re like, you know, I know I have a problem. But sometimes you know we know we have a problem, or we don’t know we have a problem. And if we do know we have a problem, just don’t know how to fix it. Okay, walk us through the process when a business owner, entrepreneur, whatever, reaches out to you for the first time, walk us through that process on like how your team comes in and starts identifying some of these, these, these culprits that are, you know, you call them time wasters. I call it like those profit killers. What are some of walk us through that beginning process, yeah,

Rob Howze  19:29

that’s good. That’s good. So the first, first process is that discovery call. So that discovery call is where we get a chance to hear the pain point, hear exactly what’s going on, get the visualization of what’s actually happening, and then this is also where the team is sharing their actual pain points and what they’re doing. And it’s very, very important when you begin to start talking about it, because a lot of times we discover people don’t know what everyone is doing.

Damon Pistulka  19:58

100% it’s. Just getting done. They don’t know how, yep, that’s it. Uncover a lot of waste that

Rob Howze  20:04

way. Yeah, a whole lot of waste. So just getting on the same page. And then, like I said, once we once we do that, what our team does is, once we identify the process, we identify one process that we’re going to take a look at. Once we have that, and we create a design document to show them where the automation can take place, right? What was had this design call and what, not only where the automation takes place, but how much time is being safe, right? And any other ROIs that we can incorporate into this document, showing them how it’s going to actually happen, and then talking about, now what’s next? We’re future pacing. So we first, we sat down and got an understanding of exactly what was happening, who was doing what. Second, then we put together a document to show you where the automation can take place, so you can see it for yourself, right? And then third, we’re going to say, Okay, we’re going to future pace now what? What are we going to do with this time? How do you see that? Because when you can see the future, you feel more likely that it’s possible, and that’s actually inspiring.

Damon Pistulka  21:03

That’s an awesome step. Because you can, you know, when someone imagines, I have an hour or less each day in that kind of work, this is what I’m going to replace it with. And they see they get to do more of what they love. That’s great thing. Yep, yep.

Curt Anderson  21:19

So Rob, let’s go. So one, a couple of the myths that I wanted to dispel here today is you don’t have to be a massive corporation to take advantage of your solutions. This is completely viable for smaller companies, companies that have, you know, like you mentioned, the accounting firm, service based firm, we’re targeting manufacturers. So if there’s a manufacturer, you know, and that. And typically the person that’s managing the finances and manufacturing, they’re doing, HR, they’re probably doing a little bit of marketing. They’re probably like, they have three different hats, and they would welcome, but sometimes they’re just so busy they can’t stop to call a timeout and say, Could somebody look at this of how to make this more efficient? Um, the other thing that I want to talk about. So, so first off, I’m going to, I want to, I want you to dive into, like, the size of the company. You don’t need to be a huge corporation to take advantage of these services. Could you hit

Rob Howze  22:10

that, please? Yeah, you don’t. But I would say, you know, any company can do, can do automation and needs to. I don’t care what size is. Be one person, okay, there’s something that you’re doing repetitively now regards to the type of services and automation, like rpa, AI, and type of things that we do, the companies typically have between a minimum of 20 employees. We’ve had some, we’ve had 10, but we we’ve been seeing around 10 to 20 being a bare minimum, but more so on the dollar number we’ve held the company. It’s only about a million dollars. Now, we’ve noticed that the companies million dollars to 5 million, they’re having a little more trouble grasping it’s something about that pocket. But you want to get the 1020, and 30 now they’re ready to start incorporating some things because they got a lot of they got a lot of arms. So it can work for anyone. It can work for the $500,000 a year company, right? You know, if they’re ready and focused and ready to get busy and understand what they’re doing, sometimes, like you said, we’re so we’re so focused on what we’re doing, it’s very difficult to lift up. But this is the time to lift up, right?

Curt Anderson  23:20

It’s time to lift up. And I’m a culprit of that, Damon, you know that very well. And so Rob, let’s go. I want to hit that right there, that one to $5 million company, definitely. They probably need this more than the 10, $20 million company. So let’s, let’s talk to that, that person, that company right there that’s listening, right? Yeah. How, like, how do you handle it when they like, I said, you know, maybe a little bit resistant, or, you know, a lot of times. Unfortunately, it’s human nature that we want, you know, we need to justify our existence. We want to justify our job. And so I do this busy work because that’s what I’ve always done. That’s my job security, or whatever, you know, how do you help people reduce that threat of like, Oh, my goodness, you’re gonna the, you’re going to expose me to the boss that that I haven’t been efficient this whole time. How do you help soothe those people? Say, like, Hey, listen, we got you. We’re going to get you through this. Like, how do you how do you guys handle

Rob Howze  24:10

that? Oh, that’s such a great question. Such a great question. Always focus on the goal. Again, to the future pacing. Always focus on the goal. So the goal of the objective is to be efficient in what we’re doing. Sister, call this up, Sammy. I’m Sam who are you? Susie. Now, okay, it’s important now, Susie may feel if you do this, then I might look like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do, and I may not be necessary anymore. But that’s not true. What instead Susie, what it’s going to do is help you do what you do better and faster and give you more free space of mental space, so then you can understand exactly how you can do your job and better, I like and better. And that’s what this is all about. It’s about being able to do things better, and that’s because of the the freeing up of the mind. It’s the mental space, again, only so much time in the day. It, if we can free it up. And now, instead of being bogged down this entire day, now we have this day to think freely so much more we can do. And what we find out also that Susie now can get three, four times as much stuff accomplished. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  25:14

How did that happen? Well, again, when you when you go back and you look at the actual makeup of work, the work we do in business, there’s very little time that is spent on the actual work itself. There’s so much time preparing and stopping and starting and all throughout the day, and a lot of times we’re only actually doing those tasks about 30% of the day or less, so that your automation by taking out that time is I can imagine that they get multiples of of productivity from it. That’s a

Rob Howze  25:49

great perspective, though. You broke that down, yeah, exactly, yeah.

Damon Pistulka  25:53

Because it’s not about when, when people we used to do this in manufacturing all the time, when the people that from years ago, when they started talking about Lean Manufacturing. It’s not about making the process steps faster, because they’re pretty fast, already nine times out of 10. Sometimes it is. It’s all the junk around it, right? So that’s why you saw on manufacturing, they went to quick changeovers, because if a changeover takes me eight hours, but only takes me an hour to run the parts I need to run. Well, I only have one hour making me money, and I have the other eight hours where I’m not well, if I can make that into four hours. Now I got three more hours of running making money. So that’s really what we see with your process automation, I’m sure in those companies, is that that little bit of time they’re doing value added work, they get a lot more time to do value added work. Now that’s

Rob Howze  26:43

it, lot more time to do value added work. Come on,

Damon Pistulka  26:46

yeah, that’s the thing, man, because it’s, you just look and you see this in business and in manufacturing, like you said, it could be simple invoice processing. It could be taking something to get, you know, all my shipments from one system into the into the UPS thing or whatever, and I’m doing 100 shipments a day, that kind of stuff just robs people of brain draining time when they could get it done and do better things, right?

27:11

So Rob, let’s go here.

Curt Anderson  27:13

Let’s dive into some of your solutions. If you don’t mind, I’m trying to grab your your website. But just give give us so say again, entrepreneur out there, manufacturer, maybe somebody in the finance department is like, man, you’re like, you’re speaking my love language right now, like you’re going to help. You know, my goodness gracious, I really don’t want to hire anybody, but I kind of need to. But if you could just pull a couple hours a day off my off my plate, man, things would just be gravy. Let’s dive in. You mentioned invoicing. What are some of the other services and solutions that you guys provide? So

Rob Howze  27:45

it’s really automation for anything. For from I’m going to name, name a couple, like supply Supply Chain Management, as we said, invoice processing, auditing, which is really big, any data analysis, export expense reporting, there’s what else we got here. Let’s see what’s my favorite one. It’s none of it’s one. Oh, accounts payable. That’s a great one. I would say this, though, because, because, even even with, let’s say, accounting firms, even their accounts payable and they’re is different, like everyone may may do something somewhat similar, but everyone is unique in their way. And so the number one thing to do is to have that first discovery call, where the my, all the minds can come together around what the objective is. And so that way we can identify what the process and the way we do that is, you look, you immediately look for where the pain points are, who’s having pain, who’s having stress, like, who, where are the bottlenecks? And then from there, we go into, okay, what are the steps within this? And that’s when you really start to find out, wait a minute. We We thought we had four steps. It’s like 44 steps. Wait a minute. Okay, okay, well, wait, we don’t actually need 44 come to find out. We only need, like 12 of them, so little more than four, but not quite 44 right? With that, Discovery call allows for that, you know, analysis to come, come to fruition. So really it’s anything in at any time. Just look for repetitiveness, whatever. Wherever you see repetitiveness, there is a digital employee out of work wanting to get to work. Okay, put them to work. These digital employees are pretty cool, though, because they don’t complain at all. They don’t take vacations, they don’t go to take a break, they they don’t eat the donuts in the coffee, they don’t, they don’t do anything besides what they’re supposed to do, and they only pause if they need to ask you a question so they can get back to work. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  29:52

Well, and the thing, the thing that I really see in this is we, we’ve grown to expect a different level of customer service as because. Dollars, right? And whether it’s internal operations that you’re talking about, or external customer facing operations, we have to be faster and allowing these things to happen. 24/7, as Curt and many other people we talk about, you know, having allowing people to do business with you when at 7pm on a Friday night, if that’s what they want to do. It’s really important to look at how this can help enable your business to do that. Yes, there’s a lot of things in that. So Diane talked about something here that I think you know this, the automation does. You know three or four more, three or four times more accomplished, but with less stress and feelings of being overwhelmed or overburdened and burned out. It’s so true, so true that you know that you’re taking that excess off the plate that just mind numbing kind of work, and you’re getting them back into the stuff that they really feel valuable in doing. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  30:59

and here’s another myth that I’d love for you to dispel, Rob, it’s, you know, a lot of times we, you know, I’ve had buddies that I’ve talked to, you know, they’re, they’re not AI, you know, they, they’re not up to date on AI. And so then somebody will, like, scare the bejesus out of all of like, AI is going to take all of our jobs, and, you know, we’re taking over. You know, it’s not about eliminating jobs, it’s about making your company more competitive. Could you please just share a little bit, you know, again, like these tasks, these processes that you are implementing on these tasks are not eliminating jobs, it’s creating opportunity. Could you please elaborate on that

Rob Howze  31:38

they they nail on the hit. And we’re doing, we’re doing, we’re doing a webinar next week. We’re going to, going to go, go into that too, and it’s about, it’s about using automation to streamline and scale and succeed quickly. That’s the webinar, using automation to streamline, which means all the things that’s bogging you down, get this thing automated, and you can scale once you do that. Let’s talk about that for a minute. You can scale once you have freed up the time. That’s where the scaling comes from. The scaling comes from because now the people are now doing, as they were saying, things of more value. Well, that value add to the company. That’s going to create revenue, it’s going to create opportunity. That’s just the direction of that momentum. And so it’s, it’s, it’s important, and key word is quickly, because this does not take long. It’s really amazing how fast it can work. And it’s not, it’s not magic. It’s just getting organized with your thought, and then you can work your magic. Okay? It’s getting organized with your processes, standardizing your processes, and then you see the magic.

32:44

And So

Rob Howze  32:45

never be afraid of losing your job. Never, never be afraid of losing when it comes to automation. Now, I’ll be honest, some of the larger companies, you know, they will get rid of people. That’s just people are always doing that. We don’t really work in a space. We we haven’t seen that. We haven’t seen it at all. What we’ve seen is the companies that we work with, and we do, we do a couple, a couple B’s, a couple B companies, but most of our companies are, you know, 500 million, 10 million. They’re really wide range, but none of them cut people. They all find a way to reallocate the energy of the people. As a matter of fact, that’s part of the discovery call, and then not a discovery call the design call, because when the discovery is still I understand what’s happening during the design call, we come back and show you where we’re going to add the automation, and also talk about the future and where we’re going to put this energy everybody, everyone starts to get fired up, and the paradigms is shifted forever. So, yeah, I’m saying a lot.

Curt Anderson  33:48

No, this is phenomenal, Robert. And I think that the big thing is, my takeaway is, I’m going to make a little change here. And so, you know, the big takeaway for me is, you know, again, you use examples with Susie, or, you know, Joe, whoever it is is, you know, they were doing busy work of matching invoices. You know, there’s 10,000 invoices went out this month, and, you know, they’re busy, you know, batching them all, or matching whatever they’re doing. Yeah. Well, now, a sudden, you and Wilton and a team come in, you remove that off of Susie, Joe, whoever’s plate. And now, like, you know what, we’ve been talking for years, that we want to negotiate some different contracts, and you know what, we just haven’t had time. It just hasn’t been a priority. So now let’s sit down with ups and negotiate our contract. Or let’s go find a different vendor or supplier for this. Or let’s spend more time. You know, we’re Rob just came in and saved, you know, cut 2% 3% off of our, our, our expense line, which went right into our bottom line. Yeah. And now Joe and Susie have more time to, like you said, either business, you know, I’m on the growth side or I’m on the cut expenses side, and both going to my, my bottom line, right? Right?

Damon Pistulka  35:00

That’s a huge point. Because you think about it, and you go, Okay, if, if you’re automating, and you’re allowing your your administrative staff to say, Let your business grow 25% and no one else has to be hired or more resources don’t be added. That’s that’s incredible on your profitability. It’s incredible what that’ll do to allow you to scale like you said, said in you guys are going to be talking about next week, that scaling factor is huge, because the the your overhead is is it’s a cost you have to, you have to incur, but it really does increase your profitability quickly when you when you don’t have to do that, and you end up running companies that, while we’re not cutting people, but if I go from 10 million to 20 million, and I don’t have to add anybody, just think how that impacts your profitability. It’s a huge thing, major,

Curt Anderson  35:53

major and think about, you know, I remember years and years ago, I had a client, and, you know, they they had to turn off their marketing because their operations couldn’t handle the influx a new business. And again, because so many things were not automated, nothing was automated. It was antiquated. Everybody was doing business, you know. So, you know, just it opens a door. And I love the word right there, kind of a drop the mic moment right there. Rob is like the scalability, and that’s what you guys are teaching at the webinar this Thursday, one o’clock Eastern time again. Connect with Rob on LinkedIn. As matter of fact, I’m going to drop in the chat box right now for you guys and put that out there. So guys definitely, absolutely connect with Rob on LinkedIn. You want to join the webinar, Rob, we’re going to start winding down. I want to be mindful of your time, because you’re helping 1000s of businesses out there just make all sorts of money. You talked a little bit before we went live, you talked about, you know, like, how communication and just a lot of positivity has been coming into you personally and for the business, can you just share a little bit, like, what has been, what’s been a game changer for you, A and B, why do you think you guys have been so successful with your communication. So

Rob Howze  37:02

for me, personally, in Curt, I don’t even know what I called it. I know, I know I mentioned collective consciousness, but you know, and essentially, the the the breakdown of what I was speaking about is we’re always listening, engaging with other individuals. We’re getting ideas from videos. We’re we’re reading books, we’re getting from different sources. And so what I like to do is have these moments where you sit down and you so you can go into this flow state, and by being still and then discerning all the different things that you actually have downloaded, taking the time now, understanding your own objective. Now you can now take Curt’s information, Damon’s information, we got Susie the only got Susie and salmon house, take their information and now distill it down into how I want to understand it aligned up with my objective. It really is just taking complex ideas or thoughts and ideas and sitting down this moment of stillness is very interesting. We don’t do this a lot. We don’t do this a lot, but it’s a powerful thing. I want you to imagine this. Imagine there are because you have 60 to 70,000 thoughts, right, a day, right? That’s what they talk about this. Imagine your head like a highway, and you have 60 to 70,000 cars on the highway of your mind, right? A lot of noise, 60 to 70,000 cars going back and forth. What was stillness does is it removes all the cars. Now I can hear, now I can think. Now I can take all the thoughts that I’ve just downloaded and consumed, and I can really digest them. And this is how you get clear clarity of thought. Um, Brian Tracy talks about it a lot. Bob Proctor talks about a lot. All the great thinkers talk about it. But I would encourage people to find your pockets of stillness and then take complex thoughts into that, get still first, and then discern, and then for for the company. You know, we’ve been seeing a lot of we’ve we’ve been we’ve been having the right people come to us, because our communication has been to the people who want to see it and the people who see our content. It’s valuable because it resonates with what they’re doing. And so I encourage people to anything you’re doing in business that’s working, share it online, but also share the details around it. Tell stories around it, because people are going through it, and then they’re going to see the stories and see the outcomes, and they’re going to be drawn to it. So both have been working the personal and the business, and I think it’s stillness and and presenting things of value on the other side.

39:45

Awesome, Rob,

Curt Anderson  39:47

we’re, we’re going to take a moment and we’re going to just resonate. We call them moments of silence. We’re just going to kind of resonate that Rob Howze’s brilliance, right there. Dude. Thank you. Damon, I’m going to grab this. Comment here, because communication will help us to collaborate with others and can help present our ideas with others. Thank you for the great comment there. Appreciate that Diane has a nice comment here. Damon, if we want to speak

Damon Pistulka  40:12

here, business and industry is always evolving and changing. Those companies that stay up to date with those changes become leaders. Automating and implementing technology allows you to stay competitive and able to address the evolutions and changes when they arise. That’s a great comment because, oh yeah, it is. And that that’s a sad thing about when you’re not keeping up to date, it’s a slow death by 1000 cuts. Then all of a sudden, you wake up one day and I don’t have any more blood,

Rob Howze  40:43

here comes the alcohol. No,

Curt Anderson  40:47

so Rob, we will wind down and so again, we want to encourage invite. Welcome everybody. First off, connect with you on LinkedIn. Check out. Simply automate wonderful website. These guys are just doing incredible work, helping tons of entrepreneurs, just making their lives easier, better, more efficient, more effective. Webinar this Thursday, September 26 it’s at one o’clock Eastern time. We’ve got a link in the chat connect with Rob, and you’ll see that LinkedIn live webinar that they’re doing next Thursday. Rob, any other words of wisdom, thoughts that you want to share as we wind down,

Rob Howze  41:21

you know, I will, I will double down. I will double down and say, you know, the time is now, and it’s time to really get still and think about how your company could be better. If you are an operator, just take some moment of silent time and think about how your operations could be better. Think about how it could be better. And it’s just the thought that makes it better. I’ll give you a little tip then, and this is not mine. It just came from somewhere. I don’t know where where it came from, but it’s called the 1% method. And you we want to get at least 1% better every day. And the way to do that, to guarantee yourself to get at least 1% better, is by simply reviewing what you did before. That’s going to get you at least 1% better just the reviewing one, because the reviewing now allows you to become aware of what has been done, and just by that level of awareness, now you have some kind of inkling of what you may do different or the same. So my advice would be, get still review, and if you need to reach out, please do

Damon Pistulka  42:36

alright, Rob, Rob,

Curt Anderson  42:39

I’ll tell you, dude, you are such a blessing. Your breath of fresh air. I just, I appreciate you. Appreciate your friendship. Appreciate what you do for your clients, for our community, and just, I wish you guys just monster, much of success. I have one last question for you, Damon, I can’t help myself, since you know Earl of Bud would stand on the top of dugouts doing P learning for 10s of 1000s of people. Rob, here’s my question for you, when, if, let’s just say who now you’re a Maryland guy. Are you? Are you? Orioles? Who’s your Do you have a team? Who’s your team? Who’s your baseball team?

Rob Howze  43:12

Uh, well, actually, Oreos, I would say, because Cal Ripken is just a legend.

Curt Anderson  43:20

Let’s just say, hypothetically, okay, let’s say that there’s an Orioles game. They’re playing the dreaded Yankees, the hated Yankees tie score. There’s a guy on second base. It’s a bottom of the ninth. There’s two outs, and they need a winning hit. They need a hit to bring in that winning run. And the manager turns on the bench and says, Hey, Rob, grab your helmet, grab your bat, get to the plate and hit in that winning run. Okay, you with me? So far, you good? And would you on your way to the plate to hit in that winning run? Rob house, what’s your walk up song?

Rob Howze  43:58

Let’s go get it stronger.

Curt Anderson  44:04

Been stronger guys haven’t found Rob. Rob is notorious for he creates a bunch of his own songs, rap songs. He’s got videos he brings into his videos. And so Rob, I had to ask you that question. So hey,

Rob Howze  44:19

we’re the tiger. Man,

Curt Anderson  44:21

I the tiger, either Tiger baby. So alright, we’re going to close out. I want to just thank you. Thank you for your time. Appreciate you, and as we like to close out every week, man, just go out and be someone’s inspiration, just like our friend Rob Howze and Damon, have a big round of applause for everybody out there, for our friend, Rob, for just crushing it, bringing the heat today. Damon, why don’t you close this out, my friend, alright,

Damon Pistulka  44:45

well, thanks, Curt, thanks so much Rob for stopping by today and talking about automation, how it saves time, money and stress, and how you guys are simply automated or helping companies do that. And I want to thank all the guests that were here today. We got Pradeep and Diane and RCC and missing other people. I’m sure I’m rolling back through the comments here, but thanks everyone for being here, and if you got in here late, you want to go back to the beginning, because Rob dropped a lot of good nuggets about automation. Some things you want to consider during during our talk today, and everyone, as Curt says, Go out and make you best impact you can. And we will be back again next week. Hang out everybody. There we go.

Curt Anderson  45:37

Thanks, Rob, that was awesome, dude. That was phenomenal. Are we? Are we? Are we still not working here?

Rob Howze  45:44

I’m still alive. We still.