Interstellar Business Show​

With Andrew Bull

Podcast for Technology CEOs and their teams.

It's time to grow your mind, elevate performance, and own your future 🚀

Interstellar Business Show​

Podcast for Tech CEOs who want to grow their minds, elevate performance, and own their future.

Automation: Jimmy Rose on automation ideas and trends

Featuring....

Special Guest
Jimmy Rose from Content Snare

Episode Introduction

Andrew chats about business automation with Jimmy Rose, an expert and teacher of automation. If you run a technology business, and you’re not sure how automations can help your business, you need to listen to this week’s episode and get the benefit of Jimmy’s insights and advice.

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Episode notes & resources

Connect with Jimmy Rose here:

Jimmy Rose – Videos and articles about automation & productivity: https://jimmyrose.me
Zapier Mastery Course: https://jimmyrose.me/zapier-mastery
Content Snare: https://contentsnare.com
Agency Highway Podcast: https://agencyhighway.com

Transcript

Please note, this transcription is autogenerated, so there may be errors.

Andrew Bull 0:14
Welcome to another insightful episode of the interstellar business show. Today’s show is all about automation. Why? If you are not automating parts of your business at the moment, you are throwing away time and maybe a bit of money too. And as you know, I’m really keen for you to grow, work and live smarter. And I think automating parts of your business is one of the power plays that you can add to your business and to your life. Okay, and I really think it can help you grow, work and live smarter. So today’s show is all about how you can automate and get better business results and better life results. Let’s dive in and talk with our guest this week. so pleased to welcome to the show today. Jimmy rose, founder of content stare and automation expert. Welcome, Jimmy.

James Rose 1:07
Thank you so much, Andrew, I am very excited to be here. I love talking about this stuff.

Andrew Bull 1:13
Okay, great. Great. Awesome. So let’s dive right in. I suppose automation is widely talked about right now in the marketplace and people hearing about Sales Automation and marketing automation. And it’s all very exciting. But I suppose maybe some people still don’t understand why what you know, why should they not be using it? Yeah, let’s put an alternative spin in it. Why should a business owner not use automation is right now?

James Rose 1:38
I had a good think about this earlier, actually. Because, yeah, like, I think every business can benefit from automation. But I would say the main stuff is like highly personal businesses. Like I’d say that’s the biggest push back against automation is like the loss of personalization, which I don’t think you have have to lose personalization. But I guess we’ll dig more into this later. But some people just really like to get involved in every piece of that business. And obviously, that’s pretty time intensive. So you better be charging some seriously premium prices. If you’re, if you have that kind of business, it’s like Uber personal and you want to do all the bits yourself, maybe that’s the only kind of business I would say, okay?

Andrew Bull 2:24
Otherwise, there’s a lot of value from automating your business for a lot of business owners to automate their business, saving time and obviously, workflow efficiency and hoping to, you know, hopefully, it’ll help you grow your business as well and help with the marketing and sales and, and so on as well. But what what do you think stops people getting started with automation.

James Rose 2:45
So I can tell you for sure that the biggest thing is just not knowing where to get started. And that’s because I did a big survey of people on my blog, and through my email list, everyone that was interested in the sort of my course or just learning about Zapier, in particular, I asked, you know, what’s stopping you getting started, and 80% of the responses were some variation of like, I know where to get started, I don’t know what’s possible, that kind of thing. So that’s the main one. The second one that I see is, it sounds funny, but like, I don’t have the time to automate, even though automation is going to save you time. There’s like an initial investment, I kind of see setting up automation as like a, like a cash investment to like you put a bunch of money and up front. And then that pays back over time. And automation kind of works the same way. As far as I’m concerned. Like you spend, let’s say, you spend an hour now to build something that gives you five bucks, five bucks, five minutes back a week, you know, then 12 weeks later, you break even and it’s free, free time from there, but that initial one hour took some time and busy business owners alike. No, I don’t have to to spend on this right now. So I think that’s a really big roadblock as well.

Andrew Bull 4:04
Okay, cool. All right. I think that the that’s one of the things that people, like always see the pain of adopting something as a bigger challenge. And it’s not worth the result that they’ll get. And I think that’s what we have to get over, I suppose in people are trying to explain how automation is working, the benefits they bring is getting people to move away from how they work and understand, you know, how amazing the benefits will be. for them.

James Rose 4:27
Yeah, well, there’s I guess the other thing there, I said, it’s an hour that pays back five minutes a week, but I didn’t include the, you know, 10 hours or whatever, learning a new system and working out all works. Yeah, once you’ve got once you’ve made that investment, it pays back like that’s the big thing.

Andrew Bull 4:42
Yeah. And then once you have it installed in your business, it’s there. Right? So you invest a bit now. And then you’ve got that automation, it just carries on saving you time. Yeah. Do you think there’s a failure, then to understand the human and lifestyle benefits. And, you know, this is one of the things I was going to talk to you about a little bit later on. But so much the language about automation is just about moving data around connecting this app to that app. And it doesn’t really relate back to any kind of end result for how an overly busy business person would leave work earlier because of it.

James Rose 5:13
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people that I speak to understands the benefit, like they, they know, the end goal is doing less work. So I think, I don’t know, there’s a misconception about that. I know, you know, if we’re going to talk about like the way some of these automation companies portray, like in their copywriting and stuff about lifestyle, we’re going to get into that later. Right. But for the people that I speak to not really like they understand the end goal, they just don’t know any of the process to get there. So that’s kind of, I don’t know, maybe I’m talking to people that are really tech savvy. You know, a lot of the people I know I’m talking to a business owners, online business owners, agency owners, these guys are across technology already. So make maybe they understand it, but the rest of the crowd don’t like I don’t generally associate with many small brick and mortar small, just just brick and mortar anymore. So I don’t really know. Okay, all right. Well,

Andrew Bull 6:11
I think that’s interesting, because, you know, people do break into different segments and groups. And I think, obviously, a lot of people you’re talking to our marketing agencies or or people who own agencies, and then we’ll use it already using automation, to some extent, whether that’s retargeting numerous things that they could be doing for the, they’re already aware. So I’m thinking more about people who aren’t quite glued into it on a daily basis. And, you know, I believe there’s just not a good general awareness about what could be done with automation. A really crude example, I suppose, would be the building industry. And you know, how difficult is to get your bill to sort of lock down to a time to do something. And actually, that’s something that could be solved, you know, online calendars and scheduling stuff, they those guys could totally if they were willing to adopt it, they could probably get a real competitive edge from using that way of working.

James Rose 7:01
It’s so funny, you mentioned that because I just did the final stage in the Zapier experts program like the certification to say you get listed on their website as a quote unquote Zapier expert. And the you had to basically run through a real client, what a fake client scenario, Don, as if it was a real client, and it was a renovations construction company was the example. And I was as I was going through it, I’m like, these guys are like this, this fake company very forward thinking for a construction company.

Andrew Bull 7:35
Those guys, they always turn up, they met text automatically text message when they’re running behind. Yeah, I can see. Yeah, I do actually think there’s an edge in that market, but trying to get those guys to properly, they might be the lag gods in our adoption cycle. And we’re going to come into early adopters, of automation and so on in just a minute. One of the one of the other thoughts of mine is that the were too focused on our financial goals, genuine business as well. And not enough focused on how we get our rewards from our business in terms of gaining back personal time and improving our quality of life. And if those were different metrics that we use to measure the success of our businesses, that we might actually be more interested in automation as well.

James Rose 8:17
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s going to depend on the person, some people are really just all about, I don’t want to say this, like, I was gonna say all about money. But that sounds kind of negative. But some people that’s kind of barometer of how they going in their business. And even though they making lots of money that we might even not care, you know, that’s that that’s just a thing that they try to achieve. And I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not. I think there’s a select group of people that are way more focused on the the lifestyle, side of business. I think one another roadblock is since that’s what we’re kind of talking about is that. So right now, I could spend two hours on a project for a client, which is directly billable, and I get money from that. Or I can spend two hours on something that’s not going to pay back immediately. So I think that was probably be the biggest thing of financial goals that holds back from automation.

Andrew Bull 9:11
Yeah, gotcha. They don’t Yeah, I don’t see the immediate tangible benefits from doing that. And and part of that also might be the automation in itself. But the work that I do a buyer’s agency is automation in very specific ways for aiding the sales process, qualifying leads, and so on and nudging people along the cell. So it’s a very precise use of it. And I’ve been there maybe that’s part of the the way that we need to look at that as giving people direct tangible outcomes related to investment, rather than just talking about automation as a whole wide term.

James Rose 9:43
Yeah, for sure.

Andrew Bull 9:44
So just thinking in terms of going back to the lifestyle, you know, people are more focused on lifestyle, but benefits and work benefits. And maybe life Stoker’s would be a good market if you’re trying to set people up with nations. But moving on ship business owners be thinking about how they can help the team members with automation as well. So it’s not just about me, it’s about my team as well, keeping them happy as well, right? Oh,

James Rose 10:07
absolutely. I’m just a screw up the flow there. If you’re talking about people that are interested in automation, I can tell you digital nomads all because that’s like the entire premise is of the digital nomad community is like creating a lifestyle business, like Tim Ferriss four hour workweek style. That’s kind of my audience for the Zapier stuff. But yeah, we on team members, I think that’s where most of the benefit can be achieved, or I’d like if I’m just setting up automation for myself. There’s only so much time I can save, it’s just one person’s time, right. But if you’re setting up automation that your team members work with, and it’s like exponential on how many team members you have witnessed what exponential is linear, on how many team members you have, but there’s just, I don’t know, like, I’m just thinking about all the different things you can implement, whether it’s Marketing and Sales Automation, as well as like process, even, you know, like automating processes to an extent. That’s why tools like process Street and process flow, and all these things kind of exists. So you’re getting multiple people through some level of automation, where it’s saving them a little bit of time every day, and it adds up across your entire team. Okay, yeah,

Andrew Bull 11:17
yeah. And I think it’s not just about saving time. I think it’s also about like, eliminating some of the mundane, boring and repetitive. Oh, yeah. So they have to do as well.

James Rose 11:26
Yeah, yeah. A lot of people treat that team like monkeys, where it’s just like, do these things like this is a process that’s going to be done 100 times a week or not a maybe 100 times a year. And I’m just going to hire someone that doesn’t need any training to just go through this thing and do it like they’re a machine? And I don’t think there’s many people that really can enjoy that kind of job for very long.

Andrew Bull 11:46
Yeah, I think it really impacts you mentally after while you’re stuck on a loop a bit like that. Right? You’ve just been programmed to do a job like a robot. And that’s not Yeah, don’t much fun in that. Yeah, I get that. Is there a danger though we automate too much, we’re just going to start eliminating people’s jobs, then obviously, there might be some resistance from team members because of that, or you don’t think we should worry too much?

James Rose 12:07
Yeah, I’m probably not a good source of authority on that. I guess I haven’t come up against that much. I mean, I like to help my team members, like get their input on the stuff we automate as well. So I guess there’s more by in there. I guess there’s the only kind of jobs at the moment anyway, that you’re really going to eliminate with automation? Are those robotic ones? You know, and I think for the most part, not many people are happy doing that kind of work. Yeah,

Andrew Bull 12:40
yeah. I don’t know who they are. Yeah, there’s, I think there’s always efficiencies to be had. And I think it’s a case of getting your team to do other more interesting work. And I think for me, that’s the Yeah, the benefit of actually moving away from the repetitive boring tasks, which can be done manually. But it just can be done better by machine and get people to do it. Things which have better high level tasks. For people.

James Rose 13:02
Yeah, stuff that’s more fun for them. And then that mundane stuff, repetitive stuffs going to be less prone to error as well, because I mean, anything that humans do is going to be screwed up at some point. It’s just, it’s the coolest human error. You know, it’s like it’s got a word because a phrase because it, it’s a thing, like it’s inevitable.

Andrew Bull 13:20
So true, too true. We just forget, you know, everything you can’t forget, you will forget eventually, and you’ll do right at some point. And also people will, they might have more time to actually talk to customers and clients or other team members. And there’s a lot of benefit from that, like you say, to make sure your business is still very human and personal.

James Rose 13:39
Yeah, people love that people love that personal touch as well. And that’s like we’re talking about the pushback on automation is generally that it’s not personal enough, but if you if you’re using automation to do these crap tasks, so that you can be focused on personal stuff, you know, like, customer success manager has become like a that was in quotes for people not watching on video. The customer success managers is now like a major role, because people have realized how important it is to be constantly helping out your customers. And you know, it’s one of my favorite things. When people say stuff, like, the support is outstanding, and that kind of thing. And I can, we can have outstanding support because all this other stuffs automated.

Andrew Bull 14:20
Yeah, yeah, it frees up the time to actually help customers. Yeah, which I think you know, and customer success is kind of a funny salesy kind of title. But I think it’s also true that for our, you know, we have to help our customers be successful for our business to be successful. I think that that is cheesy but true, I think, what kind of businesses can benefit from automation? Is it just for big, big corporate? So can one or two person businesses benefit from it? What do

James Rose 14:45
you think? I think it’s pretty, I think everyone can, in some level, like I was having to think about this earlier, too. And it’s like, I was trying to think of the most offline business, I could think of where it was just like some mom and pop shop, doing something totally offline, right. Like, they don’t have an email address. Like, even though that’s not really anybody anymore, I was trying to think of that kind of business. And I mean, even they have a list of customers, right. And, to an extent, if you’ve got like a place to store your customers where you can like, like, it’s just a CRM, hopefully everyone’s familiar with the term CRM, but like, even that’s some extent a level of automation. Just having a sales flow, knowing where each client is in the in the pipeline is, is like a basic level of automation. So I think every business can absolutely benefit from automation, obviously, online businesses are probably in a better position, because there’s just so much stuff you can automate, when everything you do is online. And, and then in the big business side of things, I mean, I don’t know too much about big business, but they have a whole nother level of automation, and went down this rabbit hole of RP, a robotic Process Automation the other day. And I backed out really quickly because I was like this is so enterprise E and they using all these big terms that I just don’t. And I found out there’s such a thing as an LPA engineer. And at that point, I went, Oh, that’s how complex this stuff gets. I’m out because I don’t need to know this stuff yet.

Andrew Bull 16:18
Yeah, that’s fair enough. I mean, you just got to limit your knowledge sometimes. And I think that’s also a case of reaching people in smaller businesses as well. I like to say, Mom and Pop businesses as well, that actually, I guess it’s down to the education that’s coming out. And I’m going to segue to you talking about your course for just a moment in a minute. But I think it’s about making niche courses for different markets. So let’s say if you want to help businesses, you know, you want to help construction businesses, book calls easier and schedule site visit is is that you set up a training course, which shows them how specifically for that niche to get that result. And make it really easy for them just to get those simple, but really powerful results. Yeah, so you can you share a bit about your course as well.

James Rose 17:02
Yeah, for sure. It’s funny, you’re talking about unleashing down there, so you can give them very specific automation. And that I mean, that’s the biggest challenge I have in my course is that it’s a more like a how to learn to use Zapier in this in this instance, which is a tool for automation. And I mean, it’s just one out of many tools, clearly, but it is my one of my go to favorite tools. And I just got a lot of people asking me how to use it over and over and over and over until I was like, Well, what if I do a course and some people said, if you do that will give you money. And I was like, will you though? Yeah, you just had to be nice. So I did a pre launch maybe three weeks ago or something, and a whole lot of people signed up. And I was kind of blown away. So now I actually have to make the course. Because people have put money down in I guess, faster than I expected. So it’s kind of exciting, I actually get to create a course and offload this knowledge. But the biggest problem, like I was saying is that it’s it is starting out fairly generic, you know, I have to teach people how to use the platform itself. Before I can get into the specifics of like, here’s some really like practical automation that you can put into your business, and the fact that everyone’s using different tools. So it’s all well and good to be like I here is how you automate, I don’t know basic sales funnel with Active Campaign and kind of a box to just like a lead generation tool and a CRM. But everyone’s using different tools. Not everyone’s using those two things. So being kind of generic with automation, I think is a necessity. That’s the only way I’m going to make this course work. It’s a big challenge. But it’s also kind of exciting at the same time.

Andrew Bull 18:48
Yeah, got it. And you’ve got a Facebook group for the course as well. Right. So people can always ask you questions in there as well.

James Rose 18:54
Yeah, for the moment that’s actually owning the people who’ve bought the course. And right now the question he’s closed a bit if people want to jump on the waiting list, so that when it goes live, I’ll put out a discount, obviously and in an email, but it’s Jimmy rice.me slash Zapier dash mastery, I guess we’ll put a link below.

Andrew Bull 19:15
Yeah, we’ll put a link in the show notes for sure. And I have to confess the I’m an Integra Mac user. So Zapier is probably the biggest automation software in terms of size of companies we’re talking about in general. But Integra ama is a different automation software, which I like, because it’s a lot. It’s a bit more geeky. It’s a bit more involved. But it’s very powerful in terms of can lay lay things out. But it’s it is awesome. And I totally recommend Jamie’s course as well, and so much. So I was like, you know, I’m going to sign up to Jimmy’s course anyway, because I’m like, I know quite a lot about automation. But if I can just take one or two bits of genius away from Jimmy, then it will definitely be investment.

James Rose 19:56
So and thank you so much for joining in Andrew.

Andrew Bull 20:00
No, my pleasure. I’m just I just can’t wait to see what we’re all going to learn. And yeah, so I recommend check out his course. So moving on. Jimmy, can you share some of the major players when it comes to automation online?

James Rose 20:12
Well, I mean, you got what you mentioned one of them. They are Integra. Matt and Yeah, I know. It is like totally. I would Well, from what I understand. I haven’t dug into it too much. But it seems to be a lot more capable than Zapier. I’m not gonna lie. But the problem is, like you said, it’s so geeky, it is so bloody technical, that I’m I don’t want to teach people that because it’s got the kind of interface where I’m going to put someone into it. They’re going to go Nope, like hands up in the air. I don’t want to deal with this. This is way too difficult, because I really did. And I’m technical.

Andrew Bull 20:47
And I second that, yeah, I can write Python. And I was like, Oh, this is a little bit more complex. Yeah, definitely.

James Rose 20:54
Yeah. So I would love to help people out with Instagram and it gets a little cool stuff set up there. But I’m going to work on Zapier. First, I’ve got to try and work out how to communicate that to somebody first, and then if I can do that, then maybe we’ll talk about Integra Matt. But I mean, this Microsoft Flow i think is another one. But to be honest, pretty much everyone I know. Well, everyone knows using those three, Zapier Integra Matt Microsoft Flow. But I think there’s more to it than just these like quote unquote, automation tools. There’s other things that work in conjunction with them that make them even better. Like for example, Active Campaign is my CRM, which is it’s not necessarily just a CRM, it does email marketing, automation, and that kind of thing. Sales Automation, is using Zapier and that together, it gets really powerful like you can hands daughter off, you can have an automation that’s running in Active Campaign on a particular contact of yours. And then when a certain event happens, pushing daughter over to Zapier to do an action. So for an example, in Active Campaign, I have an email that goes out that asks people how likely they are to continue using a software product content snare. And then an automation and Active Campaign tracks the the clicks on that email, so Zapier can’t do that. Right. That’s a feature of Active Campaign. But when that happens, it hands off that data to Zapier and says, you know, Bob, click this link, and then in Zapier, I can put that into my own to do list to go, oh, Bob said, He’s unsure if he wants to sign up, maybe I should reach out to him. So that’s where I see it getting really fun and really cool is when you actually build it in with all the tools like marketing automation, perfect, perfect match,

Andrew Bull 22:43
totally, I’m a big user of Active Campaign. And that’s what I use for my clients as well for the Sales Automation side. And there’s so much you can do with it in terms of like getting lead scoring information and automatically passing it in or automatically arranging meetings, there’s just a ton of stuff that you can do, which really help you out. And I like, Yeah, I like the idea of auto scheduling tasks based on link clicks. That’s really, that’s really a nice idea. Can you share free other ideas, you know, free, simple and easy to execute automation ideas that people should or could use?

James Rose 23:15
Sure. So I mean, the one that always comes to mind for me is social media. Because actually, I have a quite a few people always talking to me about how like, they’ll be like, you’re everywhere, like I see your stuff on LinkedIn, and Facebook and all this stuff. And to be honest, I pretty much never go on LinkedIn, and try to spend as little time on Facebook as I can. But this stuff is getting pushed out through my automation system all the time, using like a bookmarking tool. So as I’m browsing around the internet, I find so much stuff that is very helpful for my audience. And I just have like a little button, I can hit in the browser, type in a few words about why it’s helpful. And that gets scheduled out to go out on all my channels at the opportune time. So that’s just us a little extension called push by Zapier in Botha as my social media scheduling, I think a lot of people can benefit from that. Because especially if they finding cool stuff all the time anyway, and just like, haven’t bothered to share it because it’s too hot. It just makes it so easy that you know, and then people remember who I am because I seeing my stuff all the time. Another good one for service businesses, super basic is getting like a notification when you get a new inquiry. So I think what it can really help you to stand out, you know, this, and this is one of those like automation slash personalization bridging things where someone submits a contact form on your website, if you can get that to send you a like an SMS or something. So you can call that person immediately a like the SMS comes through with like a little bit of information about what they requested, or what they’re interested in. And you can call them like straight away like that is a serious point of difference. That shows how I guess personal and on it, you are as a business. So that sorry,

Andrew Bull 25:01
yeah. And I think that and also not only is that good from a customer experience, it also from it’s been shown that if you call within like the first five minutes for your chances of converting that lead, are hugely, hugely increase. It’s a great idea.

James Rose 25:15
Yeah. And it’s just so simple, you know, contact form to send SMS to yourself, like that’s pretty much it. Two steps.

Andrew Bull 25:21
Yeah. Nice, nice.

Unknown Speaker 25:23
And you asked for three. So I’ll give you a third one. That’s not necessarily like Zapier or an Integra Matt related, but just like a unified inbox, some kind of team inbox is one of my favorite things, I was one of the best changes we made to our agency clients used to sort of email me or the project manager that they were talking to, or the emails were just going all over the place. But we had two generic email addresses, one was like websites at El domain and one was held at for ongoing website maintenance. And they would email that address and it would get sucked into a unified inbox, there’s a whole lot of he’s out there, like help scout is an example, we were using teamwork desk. And that was because it was just so easy. Once that email came in, you could create a task in the project management system teamwork, and assign it to one of our developers. And it was just done like it was so smooth, other than trying to like, copy stuff out of emails and put it into task. And then when it’s done making sure you email the person back and it was just like it was rubbish. So that process of having a unified inbox was just awesome.

Andrew Bull 26:32
That’s made a big difference. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about unified inbox is I’ll have to look at as well as those for thanks for sharing those free, awesome ideas. Can we talk about some advanced cases and and one of the things I would like to talk about is Sales Automation. I know we mentioned earlier, how people forget, we’re all human and fallible. And the reality is what often happens as you work so hard to gain a lead, and then you get the lead into your business. Even if you have got a CRM, they might sit there gathering dust, and there’s no like, systematic process for moving that person through your sales stages. And to the point they get the contract signed. And so for me, this is one of the advanced and you know, brilliant uses of automation, is actually putting those people in a complete sound stage automation funnel. So the whole thing is constantly nicely nudging the potential lead and nudging the sales team to actually follow up, send relevant material case studies to book more meetings. And just to give you maximum chance of closing that lead, rather than leave it to someone remembering to follow up with people that that was just my personal advanced use case. But I wondered if you’ve got one as well that you could share, Jimmy?

Unknown Speaker 27:48
Yeah, I actually had it was talking to someone who was setting up a system just like this the other day, and they wanted to create a notification for themselves. They wanted to know, when’s the someone was had been sitting in the same deal stage for seven days. And when I showed them that that was possible, they had to their mind blown, you know, and this is like a digital agency, a tech company. That’s kind of when I was like, Oh, well, maybe there are still a lot of people that don’t understand.

Andrew Bull 28:17
Yeah

James Rose 28:17
yeah, I was thinking about advanced use cases, though. And I kind of see my automation is, it’s just like the series of basic stuff, because that’s all it really is, when you send it a lot, it is just these little pieces, you know, like there’s that one automation that just says if someone’s been in one stage for seven days, notify someone, but that is actually quite a powerful slash advanced use case for businesses. So I guess advanced is kind of relative, the most advanced one I could think of was a referral system that I built. Okay. So yeah, using just a series of zaps Active Campaign, like I was saying, before our marketing automation solution and our payment gateway, I literally just a way for people to generate their own coupon code, using a form on our website to refer people. And that coupon code would give their friends 50% off or something and would give them a full month’s credit on their account. And if their friend uses that coupon code, it actually looks them up in a spreadsheet that gets created. So yeah, I could talk about this one all day, I don’t wanna go too complex, but I’ll try and break it down. The first zap is literally, they put the coupon in, and it puts them in a spreadsheet. And then basically, what’s happening is when they share it sends them emails, obviously from Active Campaign, and then they copy I think coupon codes, send it to their friends, when their friend uses it, another zap catch that, look up that coupon in the spreadsheet to see who it belongs to, and credit them with some with a month or whatever. And you know, there’s a lot of people can pay a lot of money for referral system, if they’re not sure it’s going to work. But I thought it was cool that I could set that up in, I don’t know, maybe an hour’s work and test if this is actually going to work for us, right, this referral system. And from there, it would even did it went one step further and just said, if someone does three referrals, then we’ll send some emails to them trying to get them on as an actual partner, you know, once they hit a certain level of referrals.

Andrew Bull 30:22
Nice. I think that’s a great idea. You’re going to be covering that in the course.

James Rose 30:26
Hopefully. Yeah, I haven’t really planned that part out yet. I’ve got a lot of samples, apps and all these walkthrough is that I want to do. They’re going to take me so long to film, but we’ll get there.

Andrew Bull 30:35
Okay, good. I’m excited to see what it where you get to have it. Yeah. And I hope that one’s there. That’s great. I love that referrals. I mean, I think referrals are often so underused, or under optimized. And if we can use automation to help us with that, then that’s brilliant. is the best channel. It’s the best lead generation channel there is when you get those warm leads handed to you on a platter. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, you got, you know, having a raving fan, it’s got to be one of the best best tools that business can have, I think just moving slightly away now from talking directly about automation, and just thinking about automation as a wider issue. And also in terms of a wider business issue. Do you believe the automation industry is still in the early adopter phase right now?

James Rose 31:20
Yeah, was it we’ve kind of talked about this a bunch. At first, I was like, No, I don’t think it is. But the more I think about it, I think it there’s so many people who have no idea what’s possible yet. You know, like that the client that I was talking to that I thought was a tech company. And it turns out, I had no idea of these like, it’s actually just really simple stuff that makes such a big difference. And that makes me think that Yeah, there’s a lot of people that still stand a benefit. It’s definitely not mainstream, yet. It’s hard to take that step back. You know, because I’m so deep in this automation space, you want to Andrew, that I kind of just assume everyone knows about it, because I do and a lot of people that I talked to know about it. But to really go and talk to a lot of businesses I don’t, I don’t think it’s mainstream,

Andrew Bull 32:06
I don’t think it is until I think it’s because we’re in that bubble of surrounded by people who’ve like, oh, I’ve got this new tool, and it’s got this API, and I’m going to cook. But that’s just your small bubble, when you step back from that then actually realize that there’s a huge amount of people who are not getting those benefits at all. So it is a big opportunity for people like us, I suppose in the market, to help people and for people to get the benefit as well. So I think we’ll hopefully we’ll see some niche solution businesses coming up to help people because that would be, that’d be awesome. What would mainstream mass adoption look like? Then? What’s it gonna look like when it crosses over the divide and hits the mainstream?

James Rose 32:46
Man, I don’t know. I almost don’t want to hit that. Because then I can have the edge on everyone still.

Andrew Bull 32:55
Is my mom going to be sending me a Calendly meeting link? I mean, what’s going on?

Unknown Speaker 33:01
You know what, I would totally do that. Now. I would send my family a calendar a booking link. Now, I’m, I’m kidding, I wouldn’t. But you know, I kind of do do that like that personal to business life. Right now. It’s, it’s the easy divide for me is just business hours, right? If someone wants to book something in business hours, it’s done through calland Lee, I’m not calling my mom and business hours, I’m calling at like seven 8pm. So if she wanted to call me in business hours, and probably be like, yep, book book a time. Yeah, I like mainstream adoption. If you’re talking about consumers, that’s a whole nother thing. Because then we’re talking like home automation. And there is a lot of stuff you can do as a consumer, you know, like text to speech as a form of auto speech to text sorry, is a form of automation, I type everything on my phone with my voice now, just because it’s so easy, so accurate. And anyone can do that. And then you can actually Graham things into Google to be like, add something to my to do list, and it’ll put it in like Trello, whatever, you know, whatever project management system I’m using. So I don’t know, I think a lot of people will be talking to their phone for sure.

Andrew Bull 34:14
Yeah, I mean, I think there is an opportunity that I mean, people will obviously have their like Amazon buttons on their fridge, but they’ve pushed and get a product. So I think people are kind of starting to get used to that way of doing things. I think they don’t understand the power maybe of gluing things together. So for them, it’s just like a one step zap at the moment, which they’re not using as a PA, but they have a one step zap in parts of their life already. So I guess it would be they can do multiple things. So be interesting to see if the market does cross from B to B to B to C. And then we get some, like more consumer facing API concierge type services. That would be that would be interesting. Yeah,

James Rose 34:51
for sure. I think just thinking about this now, I think the future looks like voice in automation, right? Because all my favorite automation is involved voice and there’s not many other. Yeah, they’ll get there.

Andrew Bull 35:02
Yeah, but Yeah, I agree. Voices is huge. That’s going to be massive, you know, people used to speaking to their speakers. I mean, I find it terribly creepy, to be honest. But I think yeah, we are going that down that way you want you want to talk talk and go on the computer to respond. But I still think they’ll be they’ll be an instance where people want to set things up and join things as we get more more educated. And obviously, it’s not maybe not going to be our generation, but maybe the generation to come because let’s face it, we weren’t using any of this, you know, we weren’t using any of this technology 1020 years ago, so I think it’s gonna it’s gonna all advanced so much further than we can probably imagine. Right now. Anyway. So where can people go to learn about your course? Can you share the address one more time?

James Rose 35:47
Yeah, I’m probably just go to Jimmy rose.me is easier because I’ve got the the link to Zapier course link in the head of the so and that’s JIMMYROSE, like the flower.me. And it’s all there. There’s a whole bunch of videos and blog posts and stuff, too. I like to release a favorite of free content just on how to automate things. That’s kind of on the back burner right now, because I’m recording tons of videos every day for this bloody course that I’ve decided to do. It’s taken a lot of my time, but I will be back on that YouTube bandwagon soon enough.

Andrew Bull 36:23
Fantastic. Glad to hear that. And have you got any final automation advice you want to leave our listeners with today? Just start just start learning

James Rose 36:32
this. Like I said, the biggest barrier people say is they don’t know where to start. Just start playing around like jump into Zapier, for example. There’s a if you go to zapier.com, there’s an explorer and an Apps tab at the top. And you can just start plugging in the tools you’re using and see what it literally gives you ideas, you can just say I’m using these tools, and it’ll give you ideas. It’s It’s crazy. And that’s the best place to start I think is just start getting your mind going and seeing what’s possible. And then jump in and just try to create some zaps ad. If you’re using Active Campaign, create an Active Campaign trigger, and then just see what the options are. That’s the only way to learn is to just walk around and play around in the

Andrew Bull 37:12
Cool, cool, nice, great, that’s great advice. And there’s so many apps that connect with their with Dave here as well, right? Just tons and tons. So you’re bound to your bed. If you use any software for your work, you’re bound to have an app that connects with it. So yeah, definitely go have a look. Well, thanks for joining us today. Jimmy, really a pleasure to chatting with you about automation for so long. And good luck for your course. And yeah, thanks for joining us.

James Rose 37:37
Thank you so much, Andrew. Obviously, I can talk all day about this. And it probably comes across in how fast and annoying I will be on this interview. But I love this stuff. Thank you so much for letting me talk about it.

Andrew Bull 37:48
You’re welcome, bye now.

So had a good time this week talking with James rose about automation. There’s really so much you can do in terms of automating so many aspects of your business, and saving time for you, your team and getting time back for your life. So you can leave the office earlier, because it’s not all about selling Moore’s it’s also about getting some time back and improving the quality of your life. And in fact, isn’t that what it’s all about improving the quality of your life. So I think automation has the potential to help you do that, and help you live smarter. I mean that that’s a real key part of what automation can do for you and your business. Now, I know it might seem overwhelming that there is so much you can do. But I think the key is to start small. And here’s a really small takeaway idea that you can use now, head over to calland Lee, which is CALENDLY. search them on Google, there’s other apps available like this, but it’s a booking app currently booking app or calendar booking app, and you can set up a free account on there, the paid ones, of course better, that’s the way it works, right. But even the free ones good because how it works is you set up a page with the times that you’re available, you can sync it to your Google Calendar, and probably your Microsoft calendar, if that’s what you use. And then you can send people to that booking page. And then they can just book a time to meet with you, which cuts out a lot of time back and forth over wench we me what dates you available, what time you can do, you can send it to teammates, you can send it to prospective clients, you can send it to current clients, and just find a much easier way of organizing meetings. And if you go on one of their paid plans, or even send out reminders to people. So if you’ve had no shows for meetings in the past, or you’ve got to go to a meeting and someone’s not ready to see you, then these reminders going to help stop that from happening. But there’s a free plan on that as a starting point would be a good place to start. I recommend if you interested in learning more about what James does. And I’m going to drop his links in the show notes for this week’s episode. So if you head over to bright arts.co.uk and look on, put on the podcast tab, and then you’ll find the episode this episode which features James, they’ll be some links to his course and his social links there as well. So you can connect with him there. I’m also working on a marketing versus Sales Automation blog post as well. So that’ll be coming out in the next few weeks. So I will drop that in the show notes as well, because I think you’ll find that very interesting. There’ll be a whole load of other useful ideas you can use in your business. Otherwise, thanks for staying tuned. have you subscribed yet? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’re the first to know about our next episode. Next episode featuring Marco is an expert in finance and investment. And if you’re considering trying to get some investment for a new tech business, or maybe you’ve already got a tech business and you want to reassess your investment options, then you’ll find what Margo has to say very interesting and we’ll be exploring all the options that are available. Okay, so do subscribe so you know when the next episode is coming out of wise, that’s it. Thanks for listening. Stay smart.

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