Maximize Your Bottom Line by Maximizing Your Automation Potential

Curt Anderson  00:00

Hey there. Happy Friday. Good Good afternoon, good morning. Allison Deford, my goodness gracious. What are you doing here today?

Allison DeFord  00:10

You know I was, I just stumbled in this room and decided to hang out. So is

Curt Anderson  00:17

it like? Is like the time during covid About four years ago when I said, Hey, I call you up, and I’m like, Hey, what are you doing? You’re like, I know much. I’m like, Hey, join, join Damon and myself, on, on, we’re just having a video call, sure. And we were live, like, how remember that night? Yeah,

Allison DeFord  00:32

scared the shit out of me. I thought, are you jealous? Oh, no, we’re live. So, hi everyone.

Curt Anderson  00:39

Yeah, so, so. But this I gave you, I gave you a little fair warning, little fair warning. So, hey, I want to give a huge war man, just a wonderful welcome. Lots of love to my dear friend, Alison, to Ford. Phone in for Damon today. So Allison, thank you, my friend. Appreciate you just what an honor privilege to share the stage for man. This is not an all star, Allison, this is not an all star. This is a Hall of Famer that we have in the house today, man, we got Rogers the third so Wilton, happy Friday, dude. How are you? Man,

Wilton Rogers  01:09

happy Friday. I’m doing well. Curt, thank you so much. I appreciate that’s a Hall of Fame. I love that, man. I appreciate that. Well,

Curt Anderson  01:16

yeah, I tell you, this is an honor. I’m, you know, good buddies with Rob house, you know. And I think you guys, you you know Rob. How’s right? You know that guy. Do you know Rob at all?

Wilton Rogers  01:24

I know him a little bit, maybe for about five years and six years now, yeah, maybe even longer now. But yeah, he’s been around. He he’s still holding on to he’s still hanging around. I don’t know why, but he’s still hanging around bugging me every day. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  01:36

he’s something. Well, he might have a special bond, man, I could, I could go on and on about Rob. So anyway, we’ll dive in. So we’ll you’re the automation guy. We’re going to dive in on how to make everybody’s lives just a little bit easier, maybe even a lot of bit easier. We’re going to show some examples. We’re going to dive into that today. Hey, we’ve got a little chat here, a little comment so AC Hello, everyone. Enjoy the weekend. So guys, everybody out there, drop us a note. Let us know where you’re coming from. You absolutely want to connect with Wilton on LinkedIn. You want to connect my dear friend, Allison on LinkedIn, while you’re at it, I’d love to connect with you too. So Wilton, here’s our first question of the day, my friend, are you sitting down? Are you ready for this one? Are you ready? I’m

Wilton Rogers  02:15

ready. Alright,

Curt Anderson  02:16

Alison, here we go. Here’s the first question of the day, Wilton, when you were a little guy, grown up, little guy, you know, I know a big guy now, when you’re a little guy growing up, who

Wilton Rogers  02:25

was

Curt Anderson  02:26

your hero? Who did you look up to just admire the heck out of who was your hero when you’re a little guy grown up,

Wilton Rogers  02:34

I think still is my my father,

Curt Anderson  02:37

your father. All right, now, I’m not gonna make the same mistake twice. All right? Allison, I had Eddie Saunders Junior on the show one time, and I said, Eddie Saunders Junior, who’s your hero? He goes your dad. You know what my question was, hey, Eddie Saunders Junior, What’s your dad’s name? You know, like Mr. Einstein, that I am, right, so, well, I’m not going to make that same mistake. Rogers,

Wilton Rogers  02:58

did you get that one? Did you get that?

Curt Anderson  03:03

Eddie Saunders Junior, what is your What’s your dad’s name? So, well, I, you know, I am definitely not gonna make that mistake twice, since you are third. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m, I think we’re talking about Wilton Rogers number two. Is that correct? That

Wilton Rogers  03:19

is correct. You got it, alright. Well, hey

Curt Anderson  03:21

man, ding, ding, ding. I passed the math test. Allison, so Alright, why was Wilton Rogers? Number two, your hero? I want to hear all the awesomeness about your dad.

Wilton Rogers  03:31

Well, you know, growing up, we really weren’t TV family. We live on a farm, so really didn’t have a whole lot of TV. In fact, back then in the 70s, you probably only had one and a half channels. They both came in snowy, right? You know, remember that he had to turn the antenna to sort of move around on a good day and try to get a channel just to watch the source or something, but, uh, but the reason why is because he came from poverty. He came from a place where, you know, wasn’t very high crime, low income. And he, he His shoes were passed down by his older brothers. And he was, I mean, you know, so he came from, he came from, really nothing, and he, and he became, got his masters, got his doctoral degree, went to, became a HR director for university, so education and hard work was always something that he drilled into me, and then living on the farm, I sort of took that to a different level, not only in studying, but also with just working around the farm and just seeing what he’s come through, and knowing that his, you know, being around his siblings and seeing how much they rely on him, even though he was the oldest, like, he stepped out of that, that bubble and became, now he’s, you know, everybody in his whole family is like, looks up to him, but he’s, he really worked hard to where he did, and he never made it. He never had an excuse. He never made an excuse. I never complained about anything growing up. And my mom’s little, tiny Spanish lady, and in the 60s growing up there, you know, there was not a whole lot of mixed kids like myself. Now there is, but not back then. There was exactly the 60s and 70s. But never heard him complain about anything, never made an excuse. And so just it, just it always being positive. So, you know, I never really had an idol. I liked even growing up and watching sports and stuff. I like players. I never idolized them. I never got excited to when I met my one guy, I like to follow. This tells you my age, Tony dark, right? That’s why I like the Cowboys, because Tony Darcy wasn’t running back back in the day, right? When I met him, it was like, hi, nice to meet you. I wasn’t like, all starstruck or anything. Some of them really haven’t been high on that. So he’s been because I’ve been able to see his, see him for the last 50 plus years, to sort of what he’s done and follow, try to follow his footsteps. That’s the reason why you know he is, he’s the person I look up to, for sure. Wow,

Curt Anderson  05:59

what? Man dropped a mic. Allison, first, you threw a Tony Dorsett comment in there. That’s that was that brought me back, right? Well, you look like 10 years younger than me. We must be the similar age. Well,

Wilton Rogers  06:13

thank you. I

Curt Anderson  06:14

wish I looked as good as you do. My goodness gracious. Hey, we’ve got a couple friends who are dropping a note. We got Carlton saying, Hi guys, enjoy your Friday. We’ve got Joy saying, Hello, everyone, feels good to be here. Joy, I totally agree. Well, man, shout out to your dad, getting a PhD, educating the farm, raising kids. Allison, what’s your takeaway on this inspiring story here? What are your thoughts?

Allison DeFord  06:41

I what comes to me is like in a day and age where I feel like so many people idolize celebrity and influencers and not that there’s anything wrong with that, I think it’s refreshing to hear and be reminded that ultimately, at the end of the day, doesn’t it make so much sense to look up To and learn from real, authentic hard work, struggle right? Because you can’t usually have real success, lasting success without struggle. And I love, you know, the he didn’t complain, because I think we live in a first world problems, kind of, you know, world now. And if there’s one thing I want to teach my girls, it’s all the things you just said, you know, it’s it’s to be grateful for whatever is happening in the moment, and that the sky’s the limit. Nothing holds you back, but you so that was my takeaway. And I, God, I’d love to meet your dad.

Curt Anderson  08:01

Yeah. How about a round of applause for Wilton Rogers number two? Man, so Well, give your dad a big shout out. Lots of love from us. How about, you know what? And I’m going to go off script a little bit your legacy, man, I’m like, you just really laid it out on on your dad. If we were asking somebody like, Hey, who’s your hero? And they said, Well, hey, it’s Wilton Rogers. What type of legacy do you feel that you’re leaving?

Wilton Rogers  08:26

You know, I think that I’m hoping I’m leaving someone they stay in my father’s footsteps. Just really hard working, you know, in in not making excuses. I mean, along the way being raising the farm, you know, you had to sort of learn how to use your hands and get up in the morning and do chores, right? And I feel like nowadays there’s not a that, that hard work is not really seen as much. And I think when you touch people, and people say, hey, you know what? Where do you want to what kind of legacy only on? I want to leave a legacy like, hey, you know what he he worked hard for everything that he did. He put everything that he got into it, whatever he was focused on. He went all in. He went all in and and didn’t stop until he got the got the results they want he wanted. So I think that, um, you know, pushing, pushing forward through adversity and being able to come out, you know, clean on the other side, or at least try to in a very respectful and humble way as Alexia, hopefully.

Curt Anderson  09:29

Well, I absolutely love it. So let’s slide into where we’re at today. So, you know, fascinating, fascinating background, dad, PhD, farm, so and so forth. So now we’re going to dive in your CEO, the Hall of Fame extraordinaire at simply automate. What? What inspired you to pursue this career in automation? Like how? Walk us through that. And then we’re going to dive into what you guys are doing at simply automate. Yeah,

Wilton Rogers  09:53

it’s a funny story. I’m not a tech tech guy, right? So it comes out to automation. And the AI in the back end, you know, I can do it, but I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, even from young age, if you go back to my stories, I was selling aids, you know, yeah. And you know, sort of have that, that love and that passion of servicing people. As I started growing businesses and creating businesses, I saw that technology was sort of taken over, and I saw that, you know, the more you use the right tools, the easier was to be able to grow your company and build stability. Well back in 2016 I was in the fitness industry for a while, and after that, I sort of figured out what the heck I wanted to do. And this company has started company, and they were on RPA robotic process automation, and they were telling me how, how they can automate all these manual tasks, rule based tasks, and you don’t have to switch software. Long story short, they taught they talked me in they showed me what we’re all about. And I was thinking in my head, wow, if I did this for my company when I before, before I let it go, before I sold it, I could have grown that too. I could use the personnel, the retention would have been low. I would use that the personnel for the right skills that they that I could use them for. I was just like, blown away when I got involved. It was more in the enterprise world, which I didn’t at that time, when you’re thinking, I was thinking on small businesses, small businesses, right? But when I got involved, it was all about the enterprise world. So at the time, I was just thinking, Okay, well, I’m in it. Let me learn as much. Whatever goes up must come down. It’s gotta there was an enterprise we gotta feed into the small businesses sooner or later. It was just too expensive back in 2015 and 16. But I was learning as much as I possibly can. So I would ask the developers, the analysts, the project managers, can you do this? Can you do that? How do you do this? How you do that? And is there software they can do it for small businesses? They kept telling me, No, we use this software. Can’t do it. It costs too much. They’re limited to what they can do. All these different hurdles that that were, you know, in front of me, but I kept that back. My mind is like, okay, someone’s going to come out with a software that’s going to be able to do this, you know, I just want to be on the front end of it. Lo and behold, they did back in 2018 I found a software that can do it. So one of the developers, I asked, Hey, can you do this for a friend of mine that has a has an accounting firm back home? And I told accounting firms like, hey and a property management company, both you guys that I knew, like, let’s do this. You don’t have to pay me and work for a company, but you can. I’ll have them do it. You pay them, the developers, and you take care of it. I mean, they’ll let them develop it for you. Long story short, we’re able to automate a few processes. One of the county firms saved about 25 hours a week. Property management company at the time of saving five, but they were able to about five, six hours a week. But they were able to scale because of it, without hiring any personnel. So they were replaced that personnel that would have probably been 20, 3040, hours a week, but they didn’t have to, because they had that software. So I was like, Whoa, this is mind blowing. Going back to the company to tell them what I was doing. They want to stay in the enterprise world. And like, hey, now we’re we’re doing well here. We’ll stay here. We’ll stay here. I was like, Alright, so my contract was over 2018 decided to walk away. I told my wife, you want to move back home, downsize this all in had her 100% support. You know, that’s that’s part of the reason why, you know, we have, we’ll be able to do what I’m doing because of her. She really supported me. And it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy, but when I started figuring out that this kind of for small businesses, I was all in. And then I noticed that everybody was like me. They need the education they need, you know, they I’m on the borderline of the baby boomers. So, you know, having that, that the mentality like was, if it’s not broke, don’t fix. Don’t mess with my system. You don’t know more than me. I know my business more than you. Type out, you know, personality. I knew what I was involved with, and at that time, that’s most of the companies that that I was talking to, but I was able to, you know, relate to them. So I was able to get some opportunities. And little by little, we just sort of start growing, growing the company. And the reason why I did that is because I know as a business owner, you want to be able to scale your company with the with the personnel that you have. You don’t want them behind the computer typing all day and sending emails and collecting data and all this stuff that’s boring, that’s boring. You want to use their talents, their skills, for things that are going to bring more value, not only to the company, but for them as well. They’ll allow them to feel like they’re bringing something to the company. And once we realized that the automation I was involved with can do that, I was all in. So just want to start taking off that way. And here we are five and five, six years later, and still at it.

Curt Anderson  14:58

Wow. Five. Great story, man. And you know, you talk about having that support system, right? Dad was a big support. Your wife is support for your entrepreneurial journey. That’s I’m going to go back to your entrepreneurial journey was for folks out there that, you know, say they’re looking to start their own entrepreneurial journey. They’re working for a corporation. Maybe they were downsized. They’re an accidental entrepreneur, whatever. How were you when you launched into your entrepreneurial journey yourself? Scary, exciting. What was, what was going through your mind? What feelings did you have

Wilton Rogers  15:29

both? I think they were both right, scary and exciting. But I always saw what will what could be right. I knew that if I did this, what it would do for them. So I got to figure out how, what, how to do this in order to make sure that they’re that they look at me like, Oh, you got you. You made a difference in my life and my company’s life, my family’s life. If I know I can touch that part of somebody, then I did my job. So I got to figure out, okay, I know what we’re doing. Can do it? What do I need to do to get there, right? So that’s sort of the personal attitude I had in any business that I was doing. But you started off, you know, I would say I was always learned. I call it a site. It was a side hustle, sort of, because I always learn from from I went to work for somebody first, where there wasn’t I had a mortgage company, I had a cell company, at a fitness company and automation company, right? But I would work for somebody first so I can at least have, you know, feed the family, take care of things, right? But I was always learning. But I always knew there was going to be a cap, you know, I was going to hit, I was going to hit it somewhere where I couldn’t grow, I couldn’t be part of the inner circle, right? So I never made sure that I was I kept my mind like, Okay, I’m gonna build this company up. Do what I can to build it up, but I want to learn as much as I can. And I’m gonna, little by little, take those check marks and start putting them inside, so when I walk away, I have this in place. I’ve already built my name in the industry. I sort of, you know, put my name out there, and people know who I am. So I sort of did that. That was the way. So it didn’t make it was scary, because you wanted your own but you I didn’t walk into something that I didn’t know, right? I didn’t walk into something like this, just, okay, I want to open up a coffee shop and like, I don’t know coffee shop. I don’t know what to do. You know? I don’t I work for that. I figured out what to do. I followed their system, seeing, seeing the things that were they were doing right, the thing that they were doing wrong, the things that I can change, that I can improve on my own. I worked on all those little things before I jumped ship. So, yes, it was scary. It was exciting, because I always knew the outcomes. I’ve always I saw the outcome working for somebody else, right? And I can see if I can do that for myself and build a team to help us do that. It’s going to, you know, it’s going to change, change what we’re doing. So, yeah, that’s sort of, it’s, so that’s your question. It was both

Curt Anderson  17:52

little scary, little exciting. All the above, right? Allison, what are your Hey, Rob is in the house here today, so Rob drops a comment, Rob, said, Man, hopefully your ears are ringing. We’re chatting about you earlier. What a journey. So absolutely love it. Allison, you’re dealing with entrepreneurs all day, every day. 30 year entrepreneur. You’re Are you 30 years now? How many years you’ve been 30? You’re 30, right? So your thoughts here in Walton story, what’s what’s your takeaway?

Allison DeFord  18:17

Well, I think what’s so exciting and what makes him successful is the thing that Kurt and I and Damon are always talking about and preaching and shouting from the rooftops for whoever will will listen, is focusing on the customer. So I loved it. You talk a lot about service, and if anybody that’s joining us today or for the replay, if you have not checked out Wilton’s LinkedIn profile, look at his about it’s so interesting and heartfelt. It’s one of the most interesting about I’ve ever read on LinkedIn, by the way. Thank you. And my point in sharing that is that that gave me more insight into if I was considering hiring you, if I was considering working for you, if I was considering, you know, what is his company all about? He’s, he’s the leader. It was, it was so much more interesting and enlightening than all of the, you know, I think a lot of times we get stuck with, like fluff, marketing speak, or sales speak, or, you know, kind of the the typical, and yours is atypical. So first of all, I love that. Thank you and and I think it ties directly in with what you just said is, well, how could I make their life better? So Kurt and I talk about this endlessly, and we encourage our clients to do the same thing. It’s like my question to clients is always, well, how do you. Your customers to feel and I get crickets because they haven’t thought about that in a long time, or maybe ever. So I feel like when you put customer first and then you reverse engineer and go, Okay, now, how can I get there? I’m like, bravo. That’s, yeah, I think that’s how you get from point A to point B, even faster and and in a more successful and sustainable way. So it’s just, it’s authentic. Give you a hug.

Wilton Rogers  20:35

Well, thank you. That means a lot. Thank you so much, you know. And just going off that. I think if you go into entrepreneurship and you try to it’s for the money you’re not going to do well, you know, when you go on for the passion for love of it, things will start dropping in your way. They’ll start coming right? It may be soon, maybe later, but as long as you love what you do, it’s going to happen. It will happen. Yeah, right.

Curt Anderson  21:01

I absolutely love that. So let’s dive in. So curious minds are dying to know will and so you’ve kind of teed it up. So five, five years ago, you started your company, and you’re starting to give, give us a little flavor of what you do. Let’s dive in. Simply automate. Let’s get into the meat and potatoes. How do you your team, make the world a better place. Let’s, let’s dive into some of the activity that you guys provide here, absolutely. Well,

Wilton Rogers  21:25

I want to give a shout out to rob, because Rob been Rob was my him, and I he started when I first opened the company. He was the one I called right away in meeting the big partners and and he had been doing some marketing stuff. And I was like, I love this personality. And I said he needs to be the guy to have me brand this thing. And man, he’s been, he’s been a blessing ever since I had to get some love out to him. But, you know, just sort of give an idea of our company. When we first started off, we were considered, we were an automation company, just automation. It’s called RP, robotic process automation. And the reason why is because a lot of businesses with those we go into businesses and we look at what you’re doing manually, what are repetitive type tasks, what a rule based type tasks? The things that are mundane that you do every school day, if you can walk into your office, you say, I gotta do that again today. I gotta do that again tomorrow. I gotta do it two or three times a week. All these themes could probably be automated through rpa, right? So we focus on that as little low hanging fruit, because you want to get those off your plate, so you can sort of focus on other things, right? So if we can get, like, I’ll give an example, like inventory processing, with a huge thing of what we continue to do right, inventory or invoice processing and things like that, we do a lot of right, because there’s a lot of grab this data, put it here, send it here, save it here, whatever the case may be, right? All these different tasks have to happen within a process to be completed. But it’s all manual and it’s all digital. It’s all rule based. You follow certain rules to get to get it done. So we got involved like no one’s doing this for small businesses, and that’s where people were using so many hacks or so many hats to have have to do those. So we did is like, Okay, well, you know what? Let’s eliminate that. Let’s automate it. So we start automating it. And that’s sort of how we our company started. And as we start growing, we noticed like, Okay, well, now you’re out. We’re helping me automate stuff. Here’s AI, here’s machine learning. Got to use all this. So now we got into Intelligent Automation space as well, right? So RPA is more like, hey, this. What are you doing? Let’s get this off in place. We can focus on Intelligent Automation now. We’re using AI and automation combined, right? So that’s our focus now. So the way we got involved was basically seeing that no one was actually using RPA for smaller businesses like these are the ones that need it the most, because they’re the ones that were a lot of hats. If you go to, we went to an enterprise company, you know, one person did one this one thing 100 times a day, right? And they had a staff. They grew so big, and they’re a build on company. They had 20 people doing the same thing because they had to going to automate. That was easy. Was like, boom, automated, and now they can do other things, right? Actually, enterprise, we’re trying to down, we’re trying to cut their overhead so they can, you know, the investors can get a bigger piece of that pie. So that’s what. But in the smaller businesses, they don’t want to, they wanted to use their people to do other things, right? So now that we start doing the RPA space, get into health and automation, that’s when the creativity from the employees start coming like, oh, we have this software. What if we use this? Ai, what if we start doing this? How can we put that all together and make it work? So now that creativity start coming I was like, Wait a minute. We have the team to be able to do that. Why don’t we do this as well? You know? So now we’re in the RPA space. We’re all Intelligent Automation, because everybody’s talking about AI, but no one really knows how to use it. They’re like, Oh, yeah, we do AI. What do you do? You know, we do chat. GBT, okay, that’s like 2% of what AI. Is right so but when you get involved with with what they’re looking to do, and you lead them in the right direction, their vision and their creativity will take you on the on their path for them. And it’s so quick because everything’s sort of already laid out for you. I

Allison DeFord  25:15

have a Can I ask a quick question, absolutely, if, okay, do any of these companies ever feel fearful that, how can we trust that the automated process is going to do it right, versus the person like and this may be a dumb question, but like, is there any fear in switching over

Wilton Rogers  25:43

all the time, all the time. Great. That’s a great question. But most of the time you you see that fear two things. People are going to fear to lose their job. First of all, second fear is, is this really going to work? So what we do? We do two things. Let’s start with the latter. We test it first, we let them see it before they so they’re still doing it. We’re just building on the side, and then we test to say, Here, see it work. You’re still doing it, but doesn’t work. You’re still doing it. And all of a sudden, start doing like, oh, I don’t do it anymore. And then press it again, okay, can I do it anymore? And all of a sudden, a week later, like, oh, I don’t have I’m gone, right? Second part of that is the same, in the same breath, is they’re fearful of losing their job, but now, like, I don’t do this anymore. I can do more of this, right? I don’t do this. I can focus on this. So that’s when it comes to small business. What we love about small businesses, because all your your your the owners, the founders, the directors, the leaders of that company, are always looking for to grow, and they’re usually looking internally first, right? They that retention, right? So they’re like, oh, you know, Allison does great over here, but now, instead of her having to do this, now she can run this whole department over here and sort of bring her vision of what she wants to do to help us build this part up and focus all the time, attention over here. So there was fear at the beginning, but now people are starting to see that technology is sort of already stepping in. The fear is sort of fading away. But the other part is, does it work? That’s the fear factors like. So we test it out, and we do what’s called, we put it what’s called hyper automation. So our hyper care. So we put in hyper care. So we we tested it, test it, test it. And then once it’s ready to run and we know it’s working, then we just turn the bot on, turn the employee off, on that one, and they can do other things that

Allison DeFord  27:30

would give me so much peace of mind. And I love that. You call it care,

Wilton Rogers  27:35

hypercare, yeah, hypercare.

Curt Anderson  27:37

And what’s hysterical the person you know, and you know, we’ve all been there, I know. Or at least, I’ll speak for myself, you’re like, hey, I you know, this is my baby. This is my task. Nobody knows how to do it like I do it, you know. And so you take such pride in it, and then all sudden, somebody like Wilton comes along and like, you know, I feel totally threatened, you know, I don’t want to, like anybody you know, lose my job or think like I’m not working. But then also, you pull that task off my plate, and then ask that person, hey, you know, what do you want to take that task back? Gosh, no, man, I couldn’t. And now it’s like, now you’re relieved, and you’re like, I can’t. And, you know, I had an E commerce business 100 years ago. I used to constantly, like, we used to always challenge ourselves, like, what are we doing today that we’re going to make fun of six months from now? You know? Like, how could we, you know, I was in my 30s, and so I was a little bit more, little more agile, I guess, Allison, but you know, I love what you’re bringing to the table. Walton is like, you know, hey, what are we doing today that we’re going to make fun of six months from now? Like, man, how did we get by without Wilton and the team? You know? So, and I’m sure you guys hear that all the time, well,

Wilton Rogers  28:37

we do. We do, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of people that just already forgot about their that those tasks are automated. They’re like, Oh, yeah, we’ve been doing that for years already. We totally forgot about it, you know, you know. So, yeah, it happens all the time and but once people start seeing what it could also do there, it’s incredible to see the vision and creativity that happens within the organization, because now the whole not only physically are they away from it, but emotionally and mentally, they’re they’re that’s erased off their mind completely. They don’t have to focus on that at all. So it’s not even a seed in their head to worry about it anymore. So that’s totally gone. So now they can replace that with something

Curt Anderson  29:19

better, right? That’s phenomenal. How about do you have any, if I don’t put you on the spot, do you have any wonderful success stories that come to mind immediately that you can share where, like, just somebody rocked it out and just saved a bunch of money and time? Anybody come to mind

Wilton Rogers  29:33

immediately? Well, yeah, well, we have a couple come to mind, but there’s one that we have, it’s a it’s a retail and they had multiple, it’s actually a grocery grocery store, small grocery store. They had five or six locations, and they had three and a half employees doing the invoicing and billing, three and. Half, three and a half, and they were wondering like, you know, they they were seeing delays, they were seeing a lot of errors, and they sort of wanted to the employees have been there with them for a while, but they wanted to move them into other areas of business. And they were, that’s why they had someone, we’re doing it part time. Someone were doing it full time, but they had three and a half employees doing it. Long story short, this was 434, years ago. We automated it. All. Three of those employees No longer did it that the part time employee did the ones that would get kicked back to them, because it’s always a human loop, some things that they have to take care of, still, regardless. And it still happens. But we find out, okay, where are these kickbacks happening? Why are they happening? A little by little, we start improving, improving, improving it to now it’s almost like she could do it from her phone, like, Okay, I gotta fix that. It’s done, right? So that’s what happened. So that was a great one, because it was, it was a three and a half employees, I mean, full time, just doing it for, you know, three doing a full time, part time, it’s a lot of hours, and their, their ROI was just ridiculous. I can’t, it’s 100,000 I mean, it’s, it’s, they don’t even, they haven’t even been doing it over, you know, the last four years, three or four years now, and sort of forgot off their plate now, right? So don’t even hire anybody to do any that anymore, because I know they just, they bring you more vendors. All I gotta do is add that into into the system and about will take care of it. So that’s one of them. And then we have a smaller, a smaller company that we did one for. It was an accounting firm, and it probably had like five, four or five employees, and we started doing their tax return and their onboarding. And I think that that went from having one, one person doing it full time to them not doing it at all, pretty much, you know, and all the information, all the information that together, for the employees came or from their clients, came in, but nowhere put in the system. Know how to put it, put to put the put together, send it for approval, write it off. If not, they can manually put in what they need to put in, boom, and then off and running in onboarding was, you know, the cells trying to sell it, sell it. Which onboarding information is, sort of on board them. All they do is onboard them, send the information about pick it up, take care of it, and they’re done. Wow. So

Curt Anderson  32:24

absolutely, man, that is awesome. Hey, we’ve got a another fun comment here from Sean. Sean, happy Friday, aloha. Kurt Ellison Wilton, automation is super important for any business. Enjoying this talk a lot. Well, happy Friday too, Sean, thank you for joining us again. Drop a note in the chat box. We’re here with our dual friend, Walton Rogers, the third we’re talking simply automate. So now I have a dear friend who, like, he’s kind of like my automation coach, uh, he’s more in the manufacturing side automation, and he always says three things Allison, our friend Dave Chrysler, he says, you need to either eliminate, automate or delegate. And so I was just talking about that with somebody this morning. And so I just, I so I just, I couldn’t love what you guys are doing more now. Well, I don’t know if I’m if you even know that I’m going to do this. So I love these case studies, these success stories. You’re just making the world a better place, saving folks all sorts of crazy money and processes. I actually have somebody that I’m going to pull on stage that’s going to share their experience of working with you. Do you mind, if I don’t embarrass you? Do you mind?

Wilton Rogers  33:27

Let’s see, let’s see what

Curt Anderson  33:28

this gentleman has to say. You ready? Let’s see sales

33:30

and operations planning for Hello, my name is Justin. I’m the director of sales and operations planning for a Can Am Steel Corporation. We have seven plants across the United States, and we have been working with Wilton and the simply automate team for about three years now. Our main issue at the start of our partnership was we were having trouble getting data from our legacy systems into our Power BI planning environment. Since partnering with Wiltons team, we’ve been able to save about three hours of report running per day and have up to date data to help run our sales and operations planning process every single month, and since working with the team, we’ve also been able to achieve a 95% accuracy on our forecasting process because we’re spending less time pulling data and more time analyzing it and talking to our teams. So thank you to Wilton and the simply automate team for everything you’ve done for us and looking forward to our continued success together and working more in the future. Thanks.

Curt Anderson  34:51

Wow. How about so let’s you know. Hey, Rob drops a comment here. Complete. Game changer, fire. I agree, my friend Rob 100% Well, tell us a little story here. So this is right in mind. And Allison space manufacturer, sounds like seven plants. What’s what’s our story here?

Wilton Rogers  35:12

Yeah. Well, you know, Canada came to us. They that, like Justin was saying they want to pull some some information out of the legacy system. It was taking them quite a while at each location, and we found out as each location was doing a little bit different, had the same logic, but they were sort of doing it different. And so we figured out which is the best route to take to sort of do it. And so we can so no one can be involved, because if you get everybody involved, but like, well, I’m doing this one, doing this one. I’m doing it this way. It’s like, no, let’s just build it, build it, build it, and then just implement it at all the locations. And that’s what we did. And once we did that, it was just like, it was like, Thank you. You know, we’re just, it was a game changer right now, I think they have five or six processes running with us right now. We’re working. I think we’re gonna one or two of them as we speak, because manufacturing, when we found out, and that’s why we like manufacturing, because there’s a lot of different logic that’s built into manufacturing a lot, and there’s a lot of and it’s all rule based, I mean, down to, you know, gathering little nuts and bolts and trying to figure out how to order these things. And in we so we created areas where, you know, there was no delay. We could tell when things were coming in, how much they were getting sold. Where the delay, if they need to order it, here’s we place this order. Here are the areas you need to place it here where you can get it faster. All these different and they had all these rules. And I was like, just show us the rules, and it just sort of and it worked. And when we found out manufacturing is that they already have everything working, they just gotta, you know, sit down and figure out how we can get most of this automated. This it’s already done. It so manufacturing has been been fun for us. Accounting has been fun for us, because everything is already it’s already done for you. It’s already rule based, and they use so many applications. They follow so many, you know, rules and different things. And all we have to do is figure out what they are, just show us what they are, walk us through. Not only will we can automate it, but we can show you ways that we can improve it and eliminate some in some in some cases, eliminate things because you don’t have to have this. We can go straight from here to here. So they had to go here, here, here, here. We can just go from here to here, because it’s all automated now. So, you know, Canada has been a great, great client of ours. We love the manufacturing industry. We really, really do. I think there’s, there’s, and we’ve seen a lot of, a lot of growth, and a lot of them are starting to come on board, like, Okay, we need to learn more. They know they need it, and what they’re doing is they’re looking outside of their, their their walls now to figure out, how can I improve it more, even though they have an IT teams, we work with Canon, still it team all the time, and their, their, their thing is to keep that structure internally, right? So we have a good relationship with them team. But as far as bridging everything and putting everything together, they need that knowledge and experience for people that do a regular basis where IT team doesn’t have that IT team knows how to once it’s implemented, they know how to take care of it and work it, but they don’t, they don’t know the industry like like we do. So they they’ll bring us in to talk to them, to build it for them, hand it out to them, and when something happens, I teach who knows exactly who to talk to when they’re going to get it and and how fast going to get done? So yeah, we love, we love manufacturing, and kind of steals one of our, one of our great clients. Well,

Curt Anderson  38:32

congratulations, super impressive man. Pat yourself on the back. What a win. That is. Allison, I know what’s going through your mind as far as your manufacturing world and automation,

Allison DeFord  38:44

a lot. First of all, I’m gonna invite you on my podcast, so we’ll talk about that separately. And if you watching this are not already following wilton’s podcast, automation nation, you need to go subscribe, because it’s amazing. And I just want to Oh, thank you for stepping outside of the box, and really for doing courageous, hard things, because you are making people’s lives better, their businesses more successful. And I think, you know, I have such a big My heart is filled with love for manufacturers and to see somebody that can come in and help them streamline things right, so that they can create more, which is what they’re so good at. I just it fills me with joy and excitement for the future. So I just want to say thank you.

Wilton Rogers  39:53

Thank you. Thank you for the amazing words. I really appreciate it. It’s so much fun. We really, really enjoy what we do. I. Um, we know that once people are on board, they understand, they see what we do, that we know it’s going to make a difference. We can have one conversation with a company, and within 30 minutes to an hour, we know what we’re capable of doing or how we can help them improve what they’re looking to do,

Curt Anderson  40:16

you know, and I love you’re saying Allison, because I’m thinking of like so many small manufacturers we work with, you know, 3040, 50 employees. And just, you know, everybody’s grinding, you know, like, you know, they’re like you said it first, right off the bat, well, and they’re throwing on different hats. And just, you know, so that’s to stop, take a time out and ask myself, like, hey, gee, you know how I’ve been doing this for the past five years. Is there a more efficient way can I, hey, let me go out and shop for a new software, stop what I’m doing, take a chance and a risk that this thing might blow up on my face. And now, now I’m responsible, you know, like, so it’s wonderful that you guys come in as that mentor, that Sherpa, that trusted guide, and like, hey customer and Allison, what’s the word right? Care. You’re going to come in, you’re going to hold my hand and like, and again, like these guys are coming in, like, I’m here, my boss is down the hall. Like, you know, my job’s on the line, or my reputations on the line. So you kind of come in and say, Hey, listen, I’ve got your back. We’re going to help you save time hours, and we’re and I’m not taking your job. Let’s get you doing some more challenging things, since you’ve been doing this for so long. So I just, I couldn’t love more what you’re doing. Rob says, eliminate, automate, delegate. Thank you, Rob for the comments. Let’s start winding down, because, well, we need, you know, Alison, we can’t eat up all this time. He needs a lot of manufacturers to get out there and help save time, money, energy, all these things. Well, as we wind down, I’ve last two questions for you. Number one, as an entrepreneur, I love asking this question, best business advice that you’ve ever received, or that you would love to pass along to your younger self, a younger entrepreneur. What’s the best business advice you feel that you’ve ever received?

Wilton Rogers  41:53

The best business advice I’ve received is passion and patience. PMP, right? You have to have the passion to do it. You have to have the patience to to make sure that that you’re doing it the right way, right? If you don’t have that patience, you’re going to fall into a hole that’s going to either take you down or is going to give you a bad name. So be patient. Don’t take, don’t take everything you know that you, that you that you can just grab on to. So I think passionate patient are something that I stick by. Because be an entrepreneur, you have to be very patient. You have to pass it for sure, but you There’s no quick get quick scheme out there. You know those things, if they are, they may last for a day or a month or even a year, but after that, it’s going to you’re going to take a big fall, so be very patient and build it right.

Curt Anderson  42:44

Well, drop the mic on that one. Absolutely great advice. Allison, as we wind down, your takeaways, thoughts from our conversation today that you want to share,

Allison DeFord  42:56

I have many, but I will distill it. Since we’re wrapping up, I think I can speak from my own personal experience of being fearful of and getting stuck in a rut, and I and I talk about this a lot. You know, this is the way we’ve always done it, like that’s death to your company. I’ve been that person, so when I talk about that, I’m talking from experience with my clients. I do understand that fear and of adopting something new, and of letting go, letting letting this bot do it right instead, but you have reinforced my newfound belief that I love the hyper care. So showing me, if I’m your smaller or mid sized business, I’m going to do this alongside your person, and we’re going to test it, and we’re going to make sure we work out any bugs, and we’re going to show you, all you have to do is let go right and allow your business to grow faster, if you just let go a little and trust try something new. So I love that. I’m excited to continue following you, to learn more, to see where you take things and and really to explore. I think you’re a prolific guy and but also pragmatic. So I love those two P’s where it’s your thinking, but you’ve got your head on straight, and I appreciate that in a consultant and a business owner. So gosh, keep guiding people that way that’s

Curt Anderson  44:49

found and well, how about this comment here from Sean? Sean, thank you. P and P, love it. Wilton, it’s hard to have both sometimes, at least for me, for me at least. Heavy on passion, light on patience. Still working on it. Sean, you’re doing awesome. Thank

Wilton Rogers  45:04

you, Sean, we’re, yeah, we’re a trust me, it’s not easy having patience. Trust me, I’ve been the game for a long time. I feel the pain, Sean, been light there too, but we keep grinding. You know, it’ll it’ll come for sure. It’ll

Curt Anderson  45:20

come for sure. So well, I want to thank you for joining us today. Just what a joy, what a privilege. Keep making the world a better place. You your team. Rob your family. Rob Wilton, or I’m sorry, Wilton Rogers, the second man. Big shout out to him. And so we just want to thank you. Best way to connect with you, obviously, here on LinkedIn, social, simply automate anywhere else that we can find you,

Wilton Rogers  45:44

LinkedIn or on it every day you see us posting every day Rob isn’t in the building. If someone’s posting and doing something under where I’m not, if I’m not available, he’ll ping me. Let me know. Hey, you got to answer them back. You got to get with them. So, you know, have a great team. You know, Rob’s amazing. So LinkedIn is probably the best way we’re there. We live there, you know. And we do a lot of education, a lot of support, knowledge based things on there. So I would say, reach out to us there, awesome.

Curt Anderson  46:14

And catch their podcast, of course. So hey, Allison, how about this? You know, we always like to say, you know, as we wind down, you know, we close out the week, go out and just be someone’s inspiration, just like our dear friend, Wilton. And if you’ve been hanging out with us for the past, however long we’ve gone, it’s a great opportunity to stand up and stretch and give a big stand innovation for Wilton Rogers, the third for just absolutely hitting the ball out of the park today. So thank you. Thank you, dude. God bless you. Keep making the movie. We appreciate you so guys, thank you in the chat box. Thank you for your comments. We appreciate you. Allison Deford, my friend, just sending you a boatload of love. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for filling in for Damon and just, you know what I might maybe Damon, we will call in sick next week too. So anyway, well, that’s another for another time. So don’t tell anybody I said that. So alright, guys, have an amazing, blessed, crazy, wonderful weekend, and we will see you next time. Thank you.

Wilton Rogers  47:10

Thank you guys, so much. You.