0309: Future-Proofing Your Solutions: Strategies for Long-Term Effectiveness

Daniel Cooper [00:00:00]:
Hi, this is Daniel Cooper at Lolly Co and you’re listening to EA Interviews.
Mario Fachini [00:00:04]:
EA Interviews episode Three oh nine inspiration transformation success Stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Fuccini for today’s expert authority effect interview Automation. You’ve probably heard about it for your business. But are you implementing it? I know there’s things that I’m like, wow, this is so cool that I can set one thing to do another and have it take care of stuff automatically. And there’s other things I’m like I’d really like to automate. But that’s why I’m excited to have Daniel Cooper here, CEO of Lolly, because he’s helped companies grow from 3 million to 15 million in seven months using automation. And he got through his education using it too. So I can’t wait to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor to ask him about that. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that’s why I’m launching my new book to help you. Regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are, Visit Eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that’s eapublishingmethodbook.com. Here it is. Ladies and gentlemen, hailing from the UK. Daniel Cooper. Daniel. How are you feeling today?
Daniel Cooper [00:01:24]:
I’m feeling great. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Mario. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Mario Fachini [00:01:28]:
Oh, the pleasure is mine. It’s amazing what you’ve done. And I want to learn some things myself and ask questions for expert authority. World and my first one is why would you say automation is so important for business?
Daniel Cooper [00:01:44]:
Sure. So I Think In Business, there Are many, many Things that You Shouldn’t automate. And That’s Something That Is really important. So when it comes to things like customer service and being having that direct communication with the customer, that’s vital. But automating, the boring stuff, the repetitive stuff, the stuff that bogs us all down day to day, that’s really, really important. Because as founders, we can get lost in the daily grind. That is business. And actually being able to be freed up from that and look at things from a high level is wonderful.
Mario Fachini [00:02:17]:
What do you think you should be focusing on instead of the daily grind stuff?
Daniel Cooper [00:02:22]:
Sure. I think what you should be focusing on is creating systems and processes around your whole team in order to actually grow the business out and be less reliant on you. Most businesses as they grow their constraints so much on growth, they tend to forget about all the systems and operations behind them. And it’s really, really important. Otherwise, you end up building this wonderful prison that earns you lots of money but you can never escape from.
Mario Fachini [00:02:51]:
How many hours do you think someone should be working a week?
Daniel Cooper [00:02:55]:
Listen, you’re asking the wrong guy here. I think I think, like most founders are working a lot of hours still. Right. But I think that really everyone should take into account that putting the grind in and the hours in, after some time the productivity drops off. So I think there really has to be a limit. For me personally, I’ll work half a day on Saturday. I won’t work Sunday at all, but I’ll typically do a ten to twelve hour day Monday to Friday. It suits me really well. For others, that may be too much or too little, but where I’m lucky enough to automate a lot of the processes, then I’m able to kind of get away with those, I suppose, reduced hours, if you will, for an entrepreneur.
Mario Fachini [00:03:40]:
Yeah, I like when you said that might be too much or too little. I mean, it sounds like you’re slacking there. I’m counting 80 to 110 hours still left in the week that you could be just going nonstop. But yeah, I just want to ask that as a baseline, because if someone’s working 40 hours, 60, 8100, whatever the case may be, I think it’s safe to say well, let me ask you, let’s pretend this is Jeopardy. And I’ll phrase it as a question. What is the percentage you think you could be saving by using automation regardless of what you’re working?
Daniel Cooper [00:04:18]:
So if you look to do just purely automation, I would say really in anyone’s day to day role, there are about 30% to 35% of tasks that can be automated. If you look at a traditional business which has back office marketing sales, you would tend to find about 35% of all of the systems can be automated. And that’s a huge saving of time. But the one thing to kind of bear in mind with all of these things that the business owners need to be careful of is Parkinson’s Law. And for those who haven’t heard of Parkinson’s Law, parkinson’s Law is the effect in which when we all went to college or university, we will set work we had to do by a certain time period. Right. I don’t know if you found this marrow of your work, but it doesn’t matter how long you have to do the task, a lot of the time will only become completed just before the end. Now, Parkinson’s Law dictates that actually, if you were to reduce the time, you’d get it done much quicker out of necessity. I know there’s a limit to that type of thing, so you do have to be careful with that. When you’re automating things, you don’t just suddenly just take a lot longer to do the rest of the work you were doing in the first place.
Mario Fachini [00:05:31]:
Do you think that has to do with the psychological component of it?
Daniel Cooper [00:05:37]:
Yeah, I do think so. I don’t think we’re all productive 100% of the time. If you asked one of our senior developers, here what we see as productive time. So when we’re setting our own tasks internally, we’ll only set six and a half hours worth of time per day of tasks to be done, simply because we know that none of the team are productive for 100% of the time for 8 hours straight. It’s just impossible. We’d like them to be, but it’s just not going to happen. So that’s the best place to put it. I think that’s the way to go.
Mario Fachini [00:06:12]:
Do you think there’s a difference between when you say productive, do you mean actually doing tasks and doing things? Or does that also count? Sales calls, meetings, conferences, stuff of that nature?
Daniel Cooper [00:06:24]:
If someone tells you sales calls aren’t productive, man, that person is very wrong. But yeah, of course it includes all of those things. But it’s important to time block them and to work these pieces out. I think if you’re not time blocking a calendar and working these things out, then we all tend to drift and wander off in different directions. This is the wonderful thing about the internet and God forbid in the middle of the working day you load up Facebook because you had a notification. You suddenly you enter the hole that is Facebook and then you emerge 3 hours later realizing half your day is gone.
Mario Fachini [00:06:58]:
Yeah, one of my favorite things for Facebook is the Facebook newsfeed eradicator. I put that thing on there I don’t even know how many years ago and it blocks the newsfeed on the desktop.
Daniel Cooper [00:07:09]:
That’s smart. Yeah.
Mario Fachini [00:07:10]:
So if you message me on there, obviously I want to message you, but you don’t want to get sucked into, oh, there’s 58 other things going on and like you said, you’re in the middle of doing something important and it’s like, well now it’s the end of the day. What was I even working on? Because this story and this headline and someone’s practicing their copywriting, so they got your attention with this. And then there was a video playing and the retargeting of the ads that you were clicking on last week or serving up to you or probably even I’ve noticed some of them are so efficient. You can be on the site right now and then browsing looking at other stuff and they’ll hit you within 30 seconds to a minute. So the whole attention and the discipline, I mean, everyone’s vying for your attention. What do you do to stay productive amidst the total chaos that the world is nowadays?
Daniel Cooper [00:08:05]:
Sure. So what I try and do is I block out periods of time which are going to be either light work or deep work. So light work is when you’re jumping between tasks. So if I need to be phoning clients, updating them, if I need to jump on a sales call or a meeting, this is what I call light work. Deep work is when you’re really trying to focus on something and concentrate. For instance, a good example is your tax return. You need an uninterrupted period of time to concentrate to get this done that’s deep, deep work. So what I will try and tend to do is I would try and tend to beat the clock. So I will try and get to my desk, if I can, most mornings for [06:00] A.m., because that allows me to get a good 4 hours of deep work in really before anyone really starts to kick into gear and trying to distract me or pull me into the light to touch stuff. And then I’ve got the rest of the day to deal with all of that. What I call light work. It’s not light in the sense of it’s not hard. It’s light as in I can jump in and out of tasks without losing where I was. If you interrupt some of your deep work, it will take you half an hour to get back into the work, likely only to be interrupted again later on. So I think that’s really important. So controlling of calendars and actually trying to beat the clock and beat the rest of the nation to their desk is a really big advantage. And hey, you know what, if you’re like me and you say okay, 10 hours is my limit, apart from the occasional evening meeting, then if you start at six, then finish early, right? Go and play with your kids for a few hours or get some sun or I don’t know, watch a game, do something fun.
Mario Fachini [00:09:39]:
Yeah, have that play in there. I’ve noticed it’s interesting growing up. It’s like all you do is play. And I’ve noticed a lot more business professionals like us, they’re all talking about how they’re doing corporate retreats just for fun and stuff. And it’s like, I agree 100%, but it’s also kind of like who was the one in the last few years that was like, you know what, I’m going to tell all these business people they need to have fun more and charge them for it. But it’s working because to your point of having the fun, if you’re not, there’s no way you’re as productive. I also don’t work on Sundays either and I know when I hit the ground running on Monday, it’s like you’re just in a different state than just feeling like, oh, I got to power out this. And you never know if it’s I would like to think we design it, that every day goes good, but I’m Mr. Optimistic and not every day goes good. And sometimes it’s like you might still have 17 things on your plate. Hopefully not, but you still have to get through them. Otherwise it just snowballs.
Daniel Cooper [00:10:51]:
Yeah, that’s true. You got to keep going at it and you have to keep grinding through it. I think being organized is a really big part of it. For me personally, being organized really helps me deal with the stress quite a lot. It just means I know where all the pieces are and what needs to be moved in what direction at any one time. And I think that really helps. But yeah, I think decompressing on some days is really good. I try not to break the rules when it comes to no work on Sundays. Occasionally I’ll have a brainwave, but I restrict myself to a notepad and a pen, which often gives me some of my best ideas. It’s why I think that way. I mean, look, I’m a process guy at the end of the day who happens to be a programmer at the same time. So for me, that allows me to really deconstruct all of our own internal practices and try and improve those as we go, right at the same time as our clients. So it’s a good thing to do to have that time, no matter how you spend it.
Mario Fachini [00:11:46]:
So for anyone listening, I want to ask, where would you say they should start? Because they’re probably going, you know what? I have some automation. I have a little bit. I could be more productive. What is like the main area you get all the time that we would say is the biggest time suck? That if we were to tell them, do this, and here’s how you’re going to improve it, it’s going to be the biggest bang for your buck, if you will.
Daniel Cooper [00:12:11]:
Okay, well, everyone listening, watching, and you included as well, Mario. If I start talking to you about in your own business, where do you feel the pain points are? Where are the fires at the moment? And as I’m just talking about pain points and fires already in your head, you’re thinking, oh man, there’s this stuff going, I really need to deal with this once we finish all these calls today. I really need to deal with this stuff here because there is a small fire burning in the corner of your business. It’s the same for everyone, right? We’ve all got fires. Some are tiny, small things we’re quite happy with. Others are raging infernos that we need to deal with now. And everything else is just in between. But it’s about feeling those pain points and saying, okay, how do I fix this with the process? First of all, how do we drill it back so that I can take my eye off it and know that actually it’s going to improve? And so by that I mean, how do you workshop that out? So what I would suggest to everyone is that you get as many postit notes as you can find and you pull together everyone on the team in one department where the fire is, and you process map. We call it process mapping with postit notes the actual exact process that it takes and it flows through and time box each step and don’t change it. And be honest. So if you are in your business, if you are printing and I’ve seen this, if you are printing emails or spreadsheets and walking them up the stairs to someone else’s desk and that person then inputs that into another spreadsheet. Don’t try and optimize now, just write it down and get all the time of all this stuff, how long it’s taking, and then together optimize it. What can we do to improve this? How can we actually start to optimize it and make it faster? And you will be surprised. Out of almost all the processes you’ve got in your business, how many of them have suffered what we call normalization deviance, where at the beginning it was this beautiful thing and you’ve left it and it’s been slightly altered by other people and it’s transformed into this horrible mutant thing. This goblin just sat there on someone’s desk, which is no longer the thing it was in the first place. And you’re looking at it and you think, god, this is not what we wanted. Once you redo all those processes, you’ll actually find instantly you make a load more money because it’s taking less time. Things are smoother and customers are more happy and that’s a really good place to start. And if you want to look at automation, the very base of automation to look at is what we call the no code and low code movement on the internet at the moment. And these are areas where you can go and you can sign up for an account. There are services called things like Zapier and IFTTT, and they do very simple thing. The idea is simple. You take one thing and you connect it with another. So it could be, for instance, let’s say every time we get a new email subscriber, we add that to a spreadsheet so that we can monitor it and there’s almost unlimited possibilities that you can do that. And it’s a really good place to start.
Mario Fachini [00:15:10]:
Wow, that’s powerful. I love the idea with the process mapping, with the postits, because I was smirking when you said don’t try to optimize it. Because I was just cringing inside going, someone would get an email, print it out and then walk it to like every single thing you’re doing doesn’t make sense and you don’t need to be doing. But the point isn’t to go, how can we improve it? It’s to just say, here’s what the reality is going on right now.
Daniel Cooper [00:15:41]:
Yeah, right. I mean, one of the frustrations as a business owner is you spend a lot of your time thinking to yourself, why is it that a lot of the guys and girls that work for me can’t seem to wrap their heads around why we need to do it this way, right. That the staff aren’t you and they can’t be you. Because if all of your employees and all your staff were like you, well, they wouldn’t work for you. They’d have their own businesses and business would be a lot harder. Right. There’d be far more competitors. So we should start being thankful that Bob or Janice from accounts is printing off the email every time and walking upstairs. One less person we need to compete with. It’s just one person we need to try and educate in our own business. You’d be amazed at how many of these things you do find. And I think that people who are sometimes working these businesses just aren’t aware of the wastage they’re creating and they’re not doing it out of malice. It’s a whole subconscious thing that they’re doing and they only really realize once you point it out and they go, oh yeah, why am I they may.
Mario Fachini [00:16:39]:
Have just been doing it that way for 20 or 30 years and back then it made sense, but things changed.
Daniel Cooper [00:16:47]:
Exactly. We come across that a lot and that’s where we hear, we’ve always done it this way. Right, but that’s what Blockbuster said.
Mario Fachini [00:16:58]:
Ouch. Yeah, I’m thinking of cars too, people. Then who was it? Henry Ford. He said if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Daniel Cooper [00:17:10]:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there’s plenty of stories of these types of things happening. Kodak was a prime example at the time. They said that Nokia wasn’t a threat with a digital camera because digital cameras would never replace real cameras. And by the time they eventually shifted to doing something about it, it was too late.
Mario Fachini [00:17:30]:
Let’s talk about that. Why do you think they thought digital cameras wouldn’t do anything just because they weren’t as good in the beginning?
Daniel Cooper [00:17:39]:
Yeah, I mean, they stuck, right? They were so bad. I mean, if you were to look at then we have funny, our memories are terrible as humans. It’s like if we think back to when we were kids playing our Nintendo’s or our Sega Mega drives in our bedrooms, you remember 32 X. Yeah, right? That looks amazing, the graphic stuff. Get your hands on one now, you’ll be like all blurry. You’re thinking, how did I play this? And it’s the same thing with the old Nokia phones. If you take a picture in a really old Nokia or an old BlackBerry, the images are awful, like, terrible. And I think at the time card, I looked at it and said, look, this is ridiculous because these things are taking awful pictures. And look at the quality that we’re getting from our they’re not digital cameras, but look at the quality you get from them and it was such a success. Right. But when you look at the drop off of sales, it’s just incredible how it just quickly turned on them out of nowhere.
Mario Fachini [00:18:33]:
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because I don’t want anyone in expert authority world turning it into Kodak or Blockbuster. So beyond doing the process mapping, would you say that the next step would be to optimize or is there something in between before you refine it?
Daniel Cooper [00:18:51]:
So, look, I think if you can optimize your processes, that’s something you can do internally. If you really dedicate your time to it, you can do it. And I think that a realistic goal there is. You can improve your bottom line by maybe 1015 percent and for many of us that’s great, right? Who wouldn’t want ten to 15% more profits every year? I mean I would, right? That’s another holiday to the States from every year to come across the Detroit to see you barrio, that would be great. But I think that the real, what I call the last mile in business and the competitive edge is the automation because it’s something that the competitors will find very difficult to copy, it’s very difficult to emulate. And your processes are your processes and systems. No one else is doing exactly the same way. So if you can automate that and work out the very best way to do it, you can then shift all of that time that you were spending in that 30% to 35% of your business’s time back towards your customers. What is important you don’t do is say, okay, let’s just get rid of 35% of the staff. Gone. Right? It’s money saved. Gone. This is a really bad idea because you will have exactly the same customer service. Of course you have the automation, but then if a competitor shifts that 35% of the actual companies spend towards customer service, they’ll win every single time. Who doesn’t want to speak to a human more?
Mario Fachini [00:20:20]:
Yeah. I’m not going to say the company, but I called someone just yesterday and it took three different phone calls, all of which were over five minutes, just to get a hold of someone because they were like, oh, do you want to know about A, B or C? And I thought, oh, they’re just sending me to the department. No, you’re telling them what you need help with so they can send you different links and emails and notifications to the help desk. It’s like, I already called the freaking help desk. It was so convoluted. And I was just like, they’re probably doubling down, spending millions and millions of dollars on advertising to get new customers. And it’s like, how about not irritate the ones you have who have been with you for 17 years plus?
Daniel Cooper [00:21:12]:
Yeah, absolutely. If you churn your clients out, you’re just making your life much, much harder. If you can increase the LTV of your clients, you’re going to win again. It’s just that simple. If we can make excellent customer service in everything we do, it’s really hard to beat that. Really hard.
Mario Fachini [00:21:33]:
So with talking about automation and customers, what percentage of sales do you feel should be automated?
Daniel Cooper [00:21:41]:
Okay, I’ll give you a really good prime example. So if you look at our own sales, the way we do things is we have some automated kind of lead gen, if you will. So we’re snipering out companies you want to target and we just get the company name and the company domain name. And we’re doing this from automation looking through Google, I’m not going to say scraping looking through Google, this is the important difference. So once we have that, then what happens is we then set about doing the research to find the C suite, one of the people in the C suite, and then a few other names. What we do then is we actually then that’s when our automation kicks in and we automate actually the digging out of all those emails automatically. So we can do that with automation. We can enrich all the data. So we get huge massive data enrichment lists for every single one of these people we’re researching. And then all of our email outreach is completely automated as well. So I would just get people booking into my calendar. And at the moment so I’m constantly at the moment on private equity firms. So I have big private equity firms from across the world just booking straight into my calendar, which is a great thing to have. Right? And then their entire C suite is then on all our retargeting lists. And then as soon as our meeting is finished and I’ve done the presentation, then bang it’s straight into our follow up after that. A whole sequence of follow up after that. And these are all automated emails so that we don’t have to hand send them. There are hundreds of emails leaving my account every week. Highly personalized, highly targeted, and it’s a really good way of doing it. And then from there, if we’re getting people to the point where they’re saying, right, look, let’s do some business, we can then start to automate our sending of NDAs and then we automate sending out contracts and sign offs. So it’s just a click of a button and it all just ravels, which is much, much quicker than where we started. But the really important thing here is, I should say, is that it took, I suppose, the grunt work to figure all those things out. What are we sending, why are we sending it? How are we going to send it to then understand what we should be automating? If we started off trying to automate it from the very get go, it would have been a disaster because you don’t know what you need to automate, you don’t know what works yet. Right? Yeah.
Mario Fachini [00:24:01]:
And that’s why I loved what you were talking about with the process mapping because if I ask you about Zapier, is that what you’re using to do a lot of this? I’m sure it’s a combination of a lot of different things, but I love Zapier also.
Daniel Cooper [00:24:19]:
Yeah, I think it’s great. I think it depends what’s good for our clients, right? So for us internally, everything we do is custom development. So we have a whole team of engineers and developers who work for us. I’m a computer programmer myself, so a lot of the automation when it needs to be done and I want to get it done quick and dirty. I’ll just do it myself rather than bothering the guys. I’ll just quickly do it if it’s something this is for me personally, for my own role. But most of our stuff is custom development. So we’re creating basically pieces of cloud software for our clients that controls all of their automation and has parameters. So you can turn the dials up and down or slightly tweak things the way they’re working to future proof all of their automation. Now, if it’s that they want something very simple, then yes, we may like pull in Zapier or IFCT or one of the other many, many systems there are out there in order to pull something off the shelf. Or if it’s that for instance, like most people in sales is CRM. You might have a HubSpot or salesforce or whatever it is, we won’t reinvent. Yeah, right. We won’t try and reinvent the wheel. We’ll hook clients up for those. But we’ll integrate with the APIs which allows our code to communicate with pipe drives code and then automate a whole load of stuff that’s going on there as well. And that’s really our focus for our clients is leveraging the stuff that’s off the shelf but using custom code to automate all of the processes within that. You’re taking pipe drive and you’re injecting steroids into it.
Mario Fachini [00:25:50]:
Yeah, that’s a lot of fun because there’s a lot of stuff off the shelf. But I developed software to build WordPress websites automatically. I am not a programmer, I have a great team, but it was the same thing. I was like, this just seems so repetitive. And this was over a decade ago and it was just like if there’s one thing you should be able to automate a little bit more, it’s a freaking website. The whole thing is code. You know what I mean? Sometimes, especially with sales, obviously you need to get involved at some point in the process. But when you’re dealing with apps and websites and stuff that literally its home is online. You have to map it out first. Because like you’re saying, if you don’t know what you do, not only can you not visualize if it’s the best way, but you might be doing something wrong thinking it’s something good. Because I’ve always asked myself, will this work? Times 100, times 1000, times 10,000? The postits for process mapping. Great idea. Postits for being your sales CRM might work for I think I got to 16 or 18 of my 1st, 1st clients over a decade ago. But when you start going into the 2030, 5100 postits don’t work yeah, it just falls down. There’s breakdown points with all this. So I love that you’re taking the big picture and you said the word future proof in there because how can you do this now? So that way a decade from now it’s still working.
Daniel Cooper [00:27:26]:
Yeah, right. And I think also as business owners and I’m guilty of. This as well. We search for the perfect software solution to our problem. Every time we use one thing, it doesn’t quite work exactly the way I want. So I’m going to move to something else that doesn’t quite work. And what we’re trying to do here is we’re picking up all this software and each of the bits of software like a Swiss Army knife. They’ve got everything you could possibly need in there, but what you really need is a proper size wrench. Yeah, right. Like an actual property. So it’s not going to work. They’ve got every combination apart from the one that you actually particularly need for this tool. But the others are helpful. Sure. And that’s where you find these problems. That software off the shelf is never going to be perfect for anyone. And that’s okay. We live in an imperfect world and business is often imperfect. But if you’re seeking to really get kind of ahead of the competition and win that extra mile, then that’s where taking something off the shelf and saying, right, how can I improve this on our own side and make this something that is now great, but then awesome after that? And how can I hook it up to all my other things that are going on and sew this into this and just make things sing? That’s what we want, to have your business sing.
Mario Fachini [00:28:48]:
I want to ask you about the transformations that you’ve been able to give your clients. I had talked about the one where you took them from three to 15 million in seven months earlier on. Is that your biggest transformation and success story?
Daniel Cooper [00:29:03]:
One of one of I had a.
Mario Fachini [00:29:06]:
Feeling that was it.
Daniel Cooper [00:29:08]:
That was one of the stressful ones. I think one of the other really big ones that we’ve had is that we have a company who we work with who manufacture glasses, so spectacle glasses. And when I first met them, this was February of last year, and I remember walking into their offices and sitting down and talking to them and trying to understand some of the problems. And they were talking to me about how they’re having problems in the manufacturing process, or at least getting the glasses to the UK. And they said, oh, we produced our glasses in China. Okay, that sounds like a problem. They said, yeah. I said, Where in China are you producing these glasses? They said, Wuhan, okay, this is a problem. Which was a problem because they couldn’t get the glasses out. And then if anyone who’s in supply chain or shipment knows that, suddenly everything went crazy. So we’ve had shipments just waiting in Singapore for ages, or here or there, or then Brexit happens and then obviously COVID arrives to Europe and the States, and then we end up again having issues in different ports at the same time. This company then got involved with Amazon, and Amazon really liked what they did and started putting in some big orders. So this is a company that we work with really heavily to automate a lot of the systems, to automate a lot of the ordering and the control of stock and the prediction of what Amazon we’re going to be taking from them to quadruple their business in nine months. Which has been an insane ride, I think, for both them and us trying to kind of keep all the plates spinning whilst Amazon are putting bigger and bigger orders in. And it’s fantastic for them, but there’s many examples of that. And a lot of these business owners that we meet, they are so busy growing that they haven’t got the time to deal with these fires and they need a team just to deal with the fire. And that’s where we come in.
Mario Fachini [00:31:06]:
Well, that’s probably one of the most impactful stories I’ve heard. I can’t even fathom I’ve had stuff held up, but nowhere is near on that scale. And I know what an inconvenience it is, but that’s just like, good for you for finding a solution for them.
Daniel Cooper [00:31:28]:
Yeah, it’s certainly tricky for this one company in particular. Now we have two pieces of cloud software. We have a piece that the guys in Wuhan use and a piece that the guys in London use. And the piece in Wuhan is in Chinese, which makes it a lot more complicated. And then the piece in the UK is obviously in English. And then what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to order these things across from China, track it, because you can’t just order put it this way, they have almost 30,000 different SKUs.
Mario Fachini [00:32:02]:
That’s a pretty big shopping cart.
Daniel Cooper [00:32:04]:
Yeah, that’s a lot of different things to track. That’s an insane kind of thing to deal with. But you know what is fun? I think if we didn’t enjoy the work, we wouldn’t do it. Right?
Mario Fachini [00:32:15]:
Yeah, I can tell you have a passion for it, that’s for sure. So I got one more question before we thank our sponsor and go to the Imperfect Action Round, and that is the wheel of whatever. Do you want yellow or black?
Daniel Cooper [00:32:28]:
Okay, with yellow.
Mario Fachini [00:32:29]:
It kind of looks like a spaceship when I do this. Never done that before. Yellow. I think yellow is more popular. My question for you is what do you think will never be able to be automated?
Daniel Cooper [00:32:46]:
This is a very good question. I think one thing that won’t be able to be automated, I think is sales. I think that sales on the phone ringing up a prospect, speaking to them, making a relationship that can’t be automated. That’s impossible.
Mario Fachini [00:33:02]:
You don’t advise Robo dialing them and being like, hi, I want to have conversation with you today, Bob.
Daniel Cooper [00:33:09]:
No, I mean like auto dialing and when they pick up, your phone picks up great. Right? If you’ve got them in a headpiece and then it does it like that and connects wonderful right. If you can have a system that’s quick enough to flash their name up on the screen. But I’m old school when it comes to sales. I believe in making relationships, and I think that’s purely human.
Mario Fachini [00:33:32]:
My horrible impression was a joke, but, yeah, the auto dialers are effective, but I’ve also received the voicemails, hey, I wanted to reach out to you. And I’m like, no, yeah, right.
Daniel Cooper [00:33:45]:
I mean, sure, it’s a numbers game, right? Sales. And we all know that, but I think there’s a bit of danger.
Mario Fachini [00:33:52]:
But once you have someone as a client, it’s like, get to know them. And actually, my philosophy at Fee has always been over deliver, actually care and have fun in the process, because it’s like, you know what I mean? If you really, truly want to serve them, it’s not going to be transactional and it’s not going to be a short time deal.
Daniel Cooper [00:34:12]:
Yeah, right. And you need to understand what your client really wants. Right. There’s a whole thing behind what they’re asking you for as well. Right. So if someone’s saying to you, I want more leads, what they’re saying to is, I need to lift revenue. So don’t just give them the leads. Spend time with them. Speak to them about sales, like their sales experience. Give them some free information. Talk to them about CRMs, recommend them CRM. Help them check up on all of their statistics. Make sure they’re following up on people. Actually be of a real use beyond your own service, because if you can dig out behind what they’re trying to buy from you, what they’re really trying to achieve and help them with that, you’ll both win.
Mario Fachini [00:34:51]:
Well, I appreciate everything you’re sharing. We’re going to thank our sponsor and come back for the Imperfect Action Round. You’ve heard me say every business needs a book, including yours, and it’s true. And that’s why I’m launching my new book@eapublishingmethodbook.com. So you can learn the Seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business. Book in eight weeks. But you know what? Don’t take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors, like Lori. And I went from having an idea and a possibility to actually getting my book published. Or Catherine, thank you for making my mom number one best selling author. Or Mary Alice, what he got done for me in three days. Regarding my book launch, unmanageable john Cody I’ve worked with Mario over the phone and online, and he’s been very helpful in getting me where I needed to go with promoting my book. Rocio there’s no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I’ve attempted it in the past. It didn’t serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele if you’re looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend mario Fuccini or Bill Benner. I can’t make a higher recommendation than to work with Mario Fucini. He has been great for me, and right now, I won’t work with anybody else except for Mario. Hey, their words, not mine. Visit Eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy, and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that’s eapublishingmethodbook.com. And we are back with the imperfect action around Daniel. You ready to take imperfect action?
Daniel Cooper [00:36:37]:
I’m ready.
Mario Fachini [00:36:39]:
First question for you is what is the fastest path to the cash?
Daniel Cooper [00:36:43]:
Fastest path to cash? I believe it’s concentrating on sales, on outreach, both email outreach and phone outreach every single time.
Mario Fachini [00:36:54]:
Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?
Daniel Cooper [00:37:00]:
I think the biggest problem I think I see them make is trying to move so fast that they think the process doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just teach this one guy how to do this one thing, and then it’s solved. This is a really big problem, because if that guy leaves you’re back to square one, they need to write the process down.
Mario Fachini [00:37:16]:
Document number three, and I was smiling when you said it earlier, but what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?
Daniel Cooper [00:37:26]:
The best way to maximize customer lifetime value is to create a relationship with your client, get to know them, and genuinely care about the service you provide and the results they get.
Mario Fachini [00:37:39]:
Thank you for that. What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?
Daniel Cooper [00:37:45]:
There is a very good book I read recently called no Rules. Rules, by the guy who is the founder of Netflix, is an excellent book, and it’s fascinating to have an insight into Netflix’s culture. I don’t know if you know much about it.
Mario Fachini [00:38:04]:
I’m thinking of Reed Hoffman. But that’s LinkedIn.
Daniel Cooper [00:38:07]:
Yeah. This is Reed Hastings.
Mario Fachini [00:38:09]:
Yes.
Daniel Cooper [00:38:10]:
Okay. So it’s a fascinating thing when they transition from doing DVD mail order, which is what they did for a long time, they transitioned there to doing, as we all know, streaming. And he knew that he had to replace a lot of the C suite and a lot of the management, and he sat down and he did what he called the Keeper test. And it’s something they do to this day. The management there once every call to ask themselves, would I fight to keep this person? And if the answer is no, then you get a great severance. But I’m afraid you’ve got to go to balance that out. They pay some incredible wages, but it’s a really good way for talent density to increase there. They have a real sports team mentality rather than a family business mentality. So a really interesting book to it. I highly recommend it. Wow.
Mario Fachini [00:38:57]:
Thank you for that. And I’ll throw in your book upgrade.
Daniel Cooper [00:39:01]:
Oh, thank you. That’s nice of you to say. So, yeah, so my book’s released in June on Amazon. It would be great if people had a read and gave me some honest feedback on it, but really, the book is about everything we’ve been talking about process mapping, how to optimize processes and how to automate, plus some business intelligence on top as well, showing people how they can make data led decisions in their own business.
Mario Fachini [00:39:25]:
Excellent. Well, I appreciate everything you’ve been sharing. Where would you like people to learn more?
Daniel Cooper [00:39:30]:
It’d be great if you could have a look at our website, which is Lolly co or head to the book website, which is upgradthebook.com and download free. First chapter from there.
Mario Fachini [00:39:43]:
Excellent. Well, thank you for everything you’ve been sharing. It’s a pleasure.
Daniel Cooper [00:39:46]:
Thank you so much for the absolute pleasure, Mario.
Mario Fachini [00:39:50]:
All right. Expert, authority, world. We have another great episode here today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless. You’re already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you? If so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit Eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started. Now. Once again, that’s eapublishingmethodbook.com. Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out Eainerviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview, video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I’ll see you tomorrow.