Building Business Automation with Richard Schnitzel #superentrepreneurs #shahiddurrani

[Music] welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast today we have with us rich schnitzel how are you rich i'm doing really well happy to be here uh so happy to have you on the show yeah looking forward to whatever we talk about yeah i'm looking forward to it as well i i love uh automation i want to know more about it but can you kind of introduce yourself you're like on your own terms like take the stage yeah absolutely so my name is rich schnitzel i am a mechanical engineer a nerd a husband to uh english theater major and i own a business helping entrepreneurs build automation in their business and not only helping them build it but helping them understand what automation is how you can use it in an impactful way and how you can leverage it and get the benefits out of it without detracting from the things that you do in your business that make it a special thing right like without all the positives and minimizing all of the negatives yeah because there's a lot of stigma like they say for automation they say oh don't automate don't automate so but this is really um this kind of automation actually helps you grow so i'm very much interested to learn more if you can speak about like a specific business for example how would they utilize your service yeah exactly most people think about automation in like a factory standpoint of you know big machines taking away business you know everything's automated from the very beginning to the very end and that's not what i do and what i talk about at all i'm talking about taking i'm working with a company right now they do custom websites and they have a long validation process to find the right leads identify whether or not they're a good fit for their skill set identify what the ultimate project is supposed to be and then deliver that project to them and there's over 100 different steps that have to happen from a new lead coming in to somebody saying yes i want to work with you and paying them and signing the contracts and beginning the work we've automated that entire process down to about 20 manual points of interaction that they have to do so lead comes in we create a folder and a google drive to hold all of the accounts we create a list of all the tasks and click up so that they can track the progress and we send an email of the next human interaction in the process which is a one-on-one call with them kind of talk about what's going on so chunk of information and then that that human to human point of reference where they have a conversation if that conversation goes well they go into click up and they say yes okay this leads qualified and then we do a whole bunch of other steps in terms of creating a proposal so that they can automate a proposal so that they can customize that and send it out to them so that they can pull in the test documentation and all of the templates that go along with the project and we use that same theory throughout the entire process of human interaction okay now that we've been able to make a decision make that decision and then let automation take care of all the little things like you know the creating of the folders or automated email follow-up sequences of hey just a reminder this is the next step in the process this is what we're expecting from you so is this uh similar to like some of those dashboards that are available like crm um they provide a lot of these things right but this is more custom it's more custom and it's using multiple programs and tying that all into one aspect so yeah all crms have some form of automation whether it's integrating to a couple programs or within the crm itself being able to automatically move leads through a lead flow what we do is expand the realm of possibilities that you have so you're not just limited to your crm you can go out to all of the other programs that you're using in your business and pass information between all of them so integrating almost every component of a business yes yeah yeah and you know it's one of the challenges that people have when they come to me is that there are so many possibilities when you start thinking about that it's a little bit like being a kid in a candy store you kind of go like well i can go here i can go here you get pulled in so many directions and that's that's where the conversation and the consultation part of the business comes into play is having a conversation with somebody being a sounding board of well this is what i'm doing in my business okay well you're using trello and you're using google drive why don't we just create the folders when your card changes to the next column instead of having you to you know do that manually okay that's a great idea then what's the next step can we chain the step on top of that as well you know a little bit like building with legos and you start with a single lego you put another lego on top another lego on top and you end up with you know whatever you try to build spaceship or whatever yeah yeah so um when a business comes to you that there must be a design or or um a whiteboard situation i kind of actually design out the all the components how they connect together to get a visual initially before you start designing it absolutely yeah there's two types of clients we work with one has an idea of okay i want to build this specific thing and you know that's pretty straightforward we just create the scope of work and we do it the other is somebody who does want to go through their entire business and that is a lot of whiteboarding i actually have a digital whiteboard behind me and i do live zooms on the digital whiteboard where it's a three month project i'd say the first four to five weeks we don't build anything we just talk we talk about the business we talk about what you're doing what your workflows currently are and i draw out all of the different steps in your business so that we can build this flow of what all the events are so that we can then have the conversation of one how do we want to modify this flow of events to make it more efficient right we don't always need to be following the same path that you're on now we may be able to determine a better past path through something by having this conversation and then once we can get there what in those processes can we automate because it doesn't it doesn't need a human to do it right i want to have you focus on the aspects of your business where you're going to have the most impact where you're going to be making decisions and thinking critically that are going to elevate what's going on and for you to be able to tell the automation okay this is what i've decided now go perform everything that's supposed to happen because i decided to go down this path so all these components like connecting everything together i i assume i think i believe you are using uh zapier right to connect everything so is that do you find that because of all that connection things break down like or do people experience that or what do you have in place to protect that from happening yeah we do use zapier all the time it's an amazing program to pass that information back and forth the way that we control for things breaking down is in that process of laying something out we're looking for two things one we're looking for a a data point that doesn't change that we can use to link all of the information together because the most common way that automation will fail is you're expecting a and you get b or you go or you get b and you try to search for b where a is supposed to end up so finding some if you're using your crm everybody has like a custom id we use email a lot because email is always unique so we use that singular data point and then if there is a step where if we look for that email and it doesn't show up where we expect it we always have a path back to a human so we have a check in it if everything all the information is there not a problem we just continue the automation but if we don't find it we'll pause where it is at that point and then go notify somebody it's usually a designated person on the team to say hey we're trying to do something it's not really working here's exactly where you need to go look here's exactly all the information that we know about this person and this isn't the phase that they're in in this process go figure out what we're missing fix it and then resubmit it and continue on because you're always going to have errors business is always going to change right you can't you can't solve for 100 of a rule set so you need a way to handle that extra 10 that's going to happen just as the course of business so you provide like a maintenance package after you implement yes yeah it's a maintenance package and it's uh hey we were doing this this way six months ago we've now grown we've changed our business a little bit and we need to right yeah yeah it's hey this is working really well but we're gonna move down to this this next piece we're going to tweak this okay let's see what's what's going on there and we try to give everybody all of the information that they need so if they want they don't have to come back to us everything we do is recorded we have loom videos and recordings of everything that we build yeah so that you you're not doing this in a vacuum where there's just kind of like this black box in your business that you go like i hired rich and his team and they did something over there and it does something really cool but i don't know what it does i i don't like building something that people have to do that with right i want you to have an understanding of what's going on to be able to say yeah okay i know what's going to occur if it doesn't i know exactly where it's where i'm supposed to go look and have that level of understanding which gives you a level of comfort in what we're building and you don't use automation that you don't understand you don't have course it's true what are your top three types of businesses that approach you we get a lot of online entrepreneurs of e-commerce we get a lot of coaches and consultants and more and more we are getting a lot more brick and mortar stores who are because of kova you have a lot of brick and mortar stores who now are pulling dual duty they have they still have a physical location someplace but they're also building out an online version of their store in a limited capacity or a different type of product and trying to merge those two data points together and right so their store they had a system everything worked now they're trying to do something through woocommerce and a commonwealth you know can we connect woocommerce into my quickbooks because they're manually translating all of their records over because the systems don't exist so figuring out how we can say okay this is over here this is over there let's make them play together nicely so that you can stop doing all this manual labor that you just you had to do because of the situation and you adapted so for me the most interesting one from the three would be the second one i'm a mentor so how would that if you had to design it just to generalize it right not to say a specific coach or a specific venture but in in a way how could you kind of explain how you can design and what benefits they would get from the automation i'd say i'll ignore the lead generation part because i don't it's everybody talks about that a lot i think yeah the two interesting aspects that i can see in your realm is the onboarding sequence right so when somebody new comes in automating the process of bringing them in in terms of creating templates in terms of telling them what the expectations are of moving forward and yes that's leveraging leveraging yourself and your team whoever you have to communicate between everybody so everybody knows exactly where this person is in their onboarding sequence they know when they're supposed to follow up and they know exactly what they're supposed to do in that follow up and so so like hire if you got a client basically once you receive a client you just enter their name and you press a button for example it does all the stuff that necessary that needs to be done that we would actually have to do manually right exactly right they made the purchase they automatically get the email that says hey great to have you you can hear from us in two days yeah you know do this download this read this exactly exactly and then once they're in the system you can use automation to maintain contact with them uh based off of one trigger so you're never only working with one person right you're trying to increase the amount of people that you're working with and as that increases one single task it could take five minutes but if you're working with 10 people that's an hour out of your day of maybe sending an email to remind them like hey i you know i've created a call for next week i hope you're joining joining it and trying to invite them all of those five-minute tasks eat up a lot of time you have a bunch of people so being able to say all right i'm just going to submit all the credentials into this google form that i created right time date what the description is and then let automation go out request all of your current class all of your current students and automatically send them an email to say hey this is what's going on show up if you can yeah and you can integrate the texting platform i forgot the name iu twilio you get to create twilio where you could set it up that when a new uh a client comes in you can you know send them a text to ask them if they have done specific tasks for example if they've completed this or give them um some sort of a affirmation or whatever it is you can automate all that where they're feeling they're getting connected exactly that connection but they're not it's not consuming the time right we we built an automation for somebody they had a group call and they had like 100 different people on their group call we created an automation for them when whenever they created a new event and it had like a bracket and a certain code that they would put in the call whatever we see saw a new event in google calendar with that code in it we would go request all of their active students from thinkific and then add each of them to that call so that they would get all of the reminders they'd get the initial email invite they'd get the reminders for the call and all they had to do was create a new event in google calendar and then they didn't have to worry about who was in thinkific what you know did they have a week left they had a month left the automation just went out and said hey who's active you're active okay i'm gonna tag you to this new event it was all taken care of so if if you had to design something like that for a coach or a mentor or whatever um if you're not comfortable answering this that's fine like i just wanna know what's the because people when they watch these things they always have that number one question that comes to mind what is this going to cost me right so is there is there a bracket like something like if someone that wanted to make their life easier to integra i know there's different variants variances right but yeah so i'll give you the call it 80 of what we do if it's a single thought of [Music] five or six different actions within a lead funnel it will take us somewhere between three to five hours to set that up for you which part was that again that's 80 of the work that we do oh eighty percent of the work will take take how many hours sorry three to five hours three to five hours for each workflow of a thought so oh that right so if you're talking about a more complex problem you know three to five hours so i'll give you a real example so you have we'll do a leap process so a lead comes in you want to add them to an automated recurring email sequence you want to create a new lead in your pipedrive funnel and you want to notify your project manager to follow up with them on a personal basis right that's one thought that's probably a two to three hour thought then once you validate their lead and your project manager pulls them to the next column you want to create a google drive folder for them you want to send them all of you the templates so that they can get an idea of how to work with you and you want to auto generate a proposal to send that to them to say pay this this is how you work with us that's another two to three hours and then once they pay you want to onboard them by creating pulling all the information each of them as a thought right so each one of those thoughts is going to be yeah summer low end is two hours high end is usually five hours and that's eighty percent of what we're doing and the last 20 is when there's something really custom that you need to build because we can build custom integrations in zapier or g suite allows you to build custom code if there's something that's really unique to your situation nothing exists for it it's not a no like we can still build something it just takes us a little bit more time and we would have to have a conversation around is the roi for you worth it to you know spend 10 hours for us to build something custom maybe it's stacking up a lot of your time or your ability to scale validates the fact that you'll be able to get a return on investment on that because it's not just the time that you save it's the your ability to then generate revenue off of that new time as well yeah you know it's good that we talked about this because when you when you when you hear all this amazing stuff you you get some you know you think that it's going to be like a you know crazy crazy kind of a situation overwhelming but when this clarity that you explained it's not that uh crazy like it's it's pretty doable for anyone um the process that you're explaining is is simplified um there's a hand-holding component which is very important um yeah i like what i hear it's good i'm glad yeah it's good so what is um how did you get into this like were you you're a coder right like how did how did you go into the business world yeah so a mechanical engineering background and a nerd so i worked for 10 years with other businesses doing sales engineering field engineering estimating all different aspects i reached a point where i kept having the thought that i would do something different when i was told to do it in the business like i paid attention i listened and i started to be like oh i would have done that differently i would have made a different decision in this circumstance and i came to realize that that meant that i should probably go try to make make it on my own and build my own business and i knew i wanted to do something in tech because that's really what i enjoy i actually started in facebook messenger bots oh i thought the tech was really cool i thought it was really interesting what they could do found out really quickly i am terrible at copy can not write copy to save my life shouldn't be really a surprise if you've talked to engineers we tend to write lab reports instead of you know really emotional writing but i realized i was really good at building something really interesting with what the bot could do and then explaining how that worked to other people so and then once i could explain what it was everybody ended up going i tried it can you just build this for me i i don't want to figure this out why don't you just build this for me like okay and that was the start of the idea of expanding that conversation beyond just messenger bots and looking at a business and what you're doing in a business but having that same type of conversation of this is what i'm going to build this is how it's going to look this is how it's going to impact you do you like that yeah i love that that's going to be awesome okay cool now give us a week and we'll build it for you and then you'll get to use it in your business awesome it's amazing it can make life easier right and that's my next question is that we always like to ask our guests what their inner superpower is that got them to this point uh inside what do you feel that that you have inside of you that got you to this point having a business successful business yeah i'd say it's the way that i think so i i think in the reason factor yeah well i think visually and i think in three dimensions so everything that i talk about when i think about it it all has a spatial relationship to something else that we're talking about and when you're talking about a business and a bunch of different moving parts and trying to put all that together and it's like a puzzle trying to figure out how everything fits together the the best way possible and make relationships between different things my brain is just really good at doing that and doing that from the perspective of coming in blind and having to ask questions and clarify things and you know shift things around and going okay this is what i heard you say these are the connections that i've just made how does that sound to you and being able to do that people go like oh yeah i've never thought about it that way that's really cool i like i like the way that you put those together that's excellent excellent so you know really basically the two higher mental faculties that you have used as a superpower that you strengthened you made it stronger as your reason fact faculty and your imagination you combine them both and you're pretty strong in those areas to put this all together and you need to be if you're if you're automating right so that's like yes some of this stuff is like you know like you know i love what it does and everything but um it can get uh it can get a a little uh stressful in the mind when you're not used to it so you have created that strength which is which is great yeah absolutely and you just you could do startups as well like a lot of people like you know when they're developing a startup like a software program they do a lot of the things themselves in it after the fact if they wanted to make simplify some components of it with automation you could do that as well right yeah absolutely the beauty of automation is you can you can go as big in scope or as small as scope as you want an automation can be as simple as making a new row in a google sheet when something happens in your business yeah if you have a automated filter in your gmail or your outlook to tag a certain email from somebody that's an automation yeah right that that's that's basic as you can get of an automation and that still has incredible value right so think about it on just those really small steps and then add them together if you can't if you don't have the muscle that i have of being able to hold this big thing in your head start small where you can hold it in your head and just figure out that one step and then figure out the next step after that and the next step after that that's the we talk about you know making a one percent change in your business and one percent changing your person to grow and scale your business apply that to the automation as well make a one percent change make a one percent change and those one percent changes are going to add up to a massive effect to the positive how big do you want to take this my personal number right now is a million dollars a year run rate um that is in my journey i don't have so small because in my in my journey right now i don't know what that looks like so i need to get there and then figure out what the business looks like at that point and then figure out how to grow it i you know i do think that this can be you know definitely an eight-figure business at some point uh but i recognize in myself that i don't have the the knowledge to think about it right now i know that a million is definitely possible i can understand that number so that's where i'm going for right now when i get there we can start you know you can call me up and i'll probably be shooting for a lot more from that of course yeah i need to have a certain perspective when i start thinking about that and i don't have it yet yeah that's great so you do any automations for the government schools and stuff have you tapped into that because that could get you there pretty quick i haven't yet i've mainly been working with people in the mid six figure range into the low seven figure range one two billion a year as where i've been working so far i do have some very high you know corporation level clients uh but interestingly enough when you work with somebody like that their scope is similar to somebody who's in a midfield six figure business range because the team is always somewhere around two to nine people and you're talking within a team so the the logic and the conversations that we have really don't change depending on the size of the business because it's about the number of people that have to interact with what you're building and when you start to get over 10 the team just falls apart and i think most people have realized that there is a team size that works really well then you just have multiple teams that you grow your business out with well rich it was uh it was amazing having you on the show not a lot of cool stuff that you're talking about i could see you going to to new heights with this um you know these these these things are well needed in the market you know and especially if if someone listening has a business getting into business the easier you can do it like as as the audience right now easier you can make your life with automation it's as is it just it just helps so much with your personal efforts in the business right you just open up some time for yourself i never i never went into automation um in the past at that level that you're talking about i could even just imagine when i had the medical facility if we actually automated so much of stuff like it would have been it would be so easy like from the moment they booked like book a call for example what we do in the back end could have been all automated there's so many so many niches like so many you know whatever you call a niche or niche but it's there's so many areas you could take this with like you could actually create it into a into a franchise model where you can give it to different niche different areas it's just a really good concept when you got going so yeah thank you you know i i love it i think it's incredibly powerful and i just i want more people to know what it is i want more people to understand what it is and how you can use it because it is an amazing tool and i think it's an amazing tool that people need to be having a conversation about and unless you hear it and get that light bulb to go off in your head to be like okay i'm going to start going down this path it gets ignored so my message is if you don't talk with me please just go find somebody in my niche there are more like me like i i'm amazing at what i do but there are other people who are really good too and i think if this is something that you are interested in having a resource and somebody to work with and talk about and start building that understanding of what this tool is and what the path might look like for you it's going to change the way that you interact with your business and how you think about your business awesome awesome richard my books you're super my friend and if any any anywhere i can help or i'd be of service don't hesitate to contact me and stay in touch and again i wish you all the best and if you got something big going on in the future email us message us you know let us know we absolutely will thank you so much for having me on this was the blast [Music] super