Welcome & Session Kickoff welcome back everyone that was such a great activity thank you so much to Brent for guiding that and for his hosting throughout uh these last couple days it’s been really amazing uh so I am Elizabeth Luhan i am your your co-host here and I am one of the founders of Vinrock Media we’re a digital marketing agency and just like you I am very excited about the opportunities that come with integrating AI into our agency i’ve learned so much already and I’m sure you have too so next we have um a panel session on the topic of from chaos to clarity building SOPs with AI agents and so we’ve got two amazing panelists who are going to be joining us we have Robert Patton and Carl Seis and so they’ll both be coming in now hello Robert thank you so Robert is a creative agency growth specialist a three-time best-selling author and the founder of Creative Agency Success he helps agencies grow smarter and more sustainably um and then we also have Carl here with us he is an agency adviser and executive coach helping agency leaders work less earn more and build high performing teams so we really appreciate the two of you coming in to share your expertise with us um so just Meet the Panel: Robert Patin & Karl Sakas to kind of um kick things off first um so I know that uh Carl you’re taking kind of a leadership approach to things so kind of tell us a little bit about your approach um to to uh the topic today you know in my work with hundreds of agencies all over the world one of the questions is how do you do more with less and AI gives you some solutions with that and particularly uh AI agents around how do you accomplish more with the team you already have and the things we’ll be talking about today will help fill in some of those answers as you mentioned my approach is especially around leadership um thinking about your human team and your AI team great wonderful and then Robert tell us a little bit about how you approach this topic i mean generally speaking I’m a very operational mind um so I’m going to approach it kind of from two different angles first of the traditional oriented SOP but how to be able to create them define your systems within your agency right now to create more clarity and then two how to actually augment your existing process with AI agents with custom GBTs with that sort of thing that allows for you to be able to do more act faster being able to um provide more um a systematic way in the way that you operate wonderful wonderful well Carl I I had a question to you um to kind of get us kicked off here and I was curious where do you see these AI agents making the biggest positive impacts in day-to-day agency operations i would focus on two areas for everyone who’s listening you’re like where do we where do we focus uh two areas one of them would be what are the areas that are happening most often in your agency for instance things like client onboarding that’s happening every time you have a new client or client invoicing that’s happening every month Where AI Agents Make the Biggest Impact or at least when you get started and autodrafts and all that those are some opportunities so what happens frequently the other category would be things that don’t happen as often but they tend to be very timeconuming or if if something went wrong it would be catastrophic uh those particulars may be unique to your agency but I would take a look at that what are the things that are super complicated and what are the things that happen all the time okay great so that’s really helpful to give us kind of a limited scope of where to start instead of just being overwhelmed i can’t tell you how many times when I’ve been working with agencies they’ll say “My goal for this next month is I’m going to make every single SOP that we need to have for our agency.” I’m like okay I I know you’re not going to do that in the next month right we got to start somewhere and that’s a great way to give us clarity on that so Robert in terms of actually building these AI powered SOPs what does that look like today can you share a real example um of of how that actually happens sure i take a step back for a second and just start talking about SOPs to begin with and that I want to clarify something that’s really important kind of off the back of what Carl was saying is that I think it’s really important for us to recognize that if we put bad information in we’re going to get bad information out and so what I see happen in so many instances with the vast majority of agencies that I come across is that there’s too much variety everything’s bespoke we don’t have a systematic process in which we’re doing things in the first place and that if you don’t have a process AI isn’t really going to help you in that instance that you’re not going to create order out of chaos you have to go and do the underlying logic thinking inputs to make sure that you’re able to actually create clarity so AI is not going to replace you fully think about it as a junior level team member and how can you leverage that fully and take something Why SOPs Must Exist Before AI Can Help and being able to streamline so there’s as I was saying there’s kind of two different angles that I wanted to approach it of how do we take and document our existing SOPs our existing processes that we’re already following and you have them and making sure that you have them documented so they can be repeated with every single team member and so the way that I like to do this is me being the Excel geek that I am taking just a very simple kind of Google uh sheet and creating a prompt creator that allows each person to actually create a video i think that being able to just document a quick Loom video or a video of the step-by-step process that you’re actually taking and making sure that you do it in a very systematic kind of format and following the traditional kind of SOP format of what is the purpose of this SOP any related documents templates things that are going to be involved and then the actual process that you’re going to follow step by step the frequency that’s going to be involved who’s responsible for doing this this this action and if something goes wrong who does it get elevated ated to and who needs to be involved in order to actually correct this specific challenge that you’re going to encounter and then actually going through that in the video and then taking the transcription to allow AI to create a documented format the reality of any process is that some people prefer visual auditory and then reading as far as learners and if we cover all three we are able to actually cover the gamut and sometimes I just want to quickly get to an answer and then on the ladder um there’s so many different ways that you can go about actually leveraging AI to make your processes faster um but as examples it could be how do I take a proposal um how do I take a sales call recording and generate a welcome email to a client in the onboarding process that is automated it’s already drafted that’s in your outbox that you can send out that shares excitement shares a little bit of background that creates this really welcoming feel to your clients while being able to take the questionnaires that are sent being able to then distill that into a creative brief that is done in an automated fashion that allows for you to be able to do things faster Building SOPs with Loom, Prompts & Google Sheets great so am I understanding you correctly that um you’re still recommending that the human generate the process first right and then we we we’re using the AI tool uh more to follow it so if you don’t already have your process um AI might not be the first step it might be to actually identify what um what the process is and to systematize it okay so I would add on to that just I would like ask AI to yes and you right so here’s the what I’m doing what am I not thinking about what areas do I need to cover yes and you not actually replacing okay okay that’s great yeah because for example yeah a follow-up email some people might not be doing that from a sales call so it could be an additional step okay so as we’re uh starting to integrate these uh AI into our SOP systems what KPIs should an agency be tracking after they’re doing that integration to to see that they’re effective yes Robert yes yeah Robert yeah um it’s a really broad one but I would say that there’s a couple key ones that I would be looking at is what are the adoption rates of the existing process and systems that I’m currently using which is a really important one the effectiveness of that so how much time is being saved so if you’ve got time tracking within your agency now I’ve implemented this process did it make it faster did it make it slower what impact did that ultimately have and if we’re talking about processes that are powered by AI meaning like the example that I was saying where draft emails being done is what is the frequency by which human intervention is necessary to actually override AI i am really think that it’s important especially at these initial kind of infasy still stages of AI that you’re testing because the reality is it can kind of go off in left field sometimes and do things that we don’t want it to do make up information and do all sorts of stuff so you want to make sure that you’re doing it with a reasonable amount of accuracy and so testing to until the point that you feel comfortable okay so a lot of hands on it still here as we’re as we’re in in this first stage so Carl you have so much experience seeing you know helping leaders uh become uh you know incredible uh incredible leaders of their organization so what leadership challenges do you arising with AO AI SOPs and how can teams and leaders adapt to that so first a challenge that’s not arising which would with employees you know if something isn’t getting done or it’s not getting done well I think of a vend diagram desire competence and capacity you need all three of them if you assign something to someone if they don’t have the desire to do it they’re probably going to avoid it if they don’t have the Automating Emails, Briefs & Proposals with AI competence they’ll do it poorly and if they don’t have the capacity they don’t have the time to do it they’re probably not going to get it done now thanks to AI eliminate those three things whether the AI wants to do it I mean that gets into a question of consciousness but okay desire to do it competence and capacity that’s all set but there’s another thing which is what I would describe as your values goals and resources your VGR if you’re asking someone on your team to do something if you don’t give them what they need they’re going to keep asking you questions about it they’re going to keep asking “Well what this popped up what do I do?” Or “The client said this what do I do now?” If you’re running a smaller agency you’re still going to get pulled into that but as your agency grows if you keep getting pulled into questions like that it is time to empower your team and one of the shortcuts to do that is what I call VGR values goals and resources the idea is that you want to make sure that everyone in the team knows the values to follow that is how do you operate the goals what are you trying to accomplish but which could be at the agency level it could be at a client level it could be at a campaign level it also could be for their role what are they what are their goals as a project manager versus an account manager versus a strategist and the final is resources what are the resources they have available in terms of time money software what have you you know for instance if you build a system that’s really great at getting things done but you’re not feeding it with the appropriate data you’re not going to get great results so make sure that your AI team members know the values goals and resources just the same as your human employees so it sounds again similar to what we were talking about earlier your AI is only going to be as healthy as your organization first place right exactly um I’d love to kind of dive a little bit deeper into this with you Carl and talking like how do you ensure that AISOPs reflect company values and culture i mean that it’s how do you make your robot right um h have values yeah well I mean Measuring SOP Success: KPIs That Matter they I I would say they can’t read your mind they can to some extent for instance if you loaded your employee handbook they would have some ideas of things if you loaded your website though I have to say um you know agency owners will reach out to me about getting help and they’ll say “We focus on such and such industry.” And I’m like “That sounds good that’s not necessarily what their website says right do things reflect that or not?” Um but the starting point would be to get clear on your mission vision and values you know um a lot of agencies have values they’ll be on the website if you have a physical office you might have them painted or otherwise posted on the wall you might have a sense of a mission you might have a sense of a vision the question is does everyone on your team know what those are the mission vision and values often the answer is no so if you’re listening here and you’re like “Oh I don’t know if we’ve done all that.” It’s okay but now it’s time to do something about it when I onboard new clients for my agency growth diagnostic I ask “What is your mission what’s your vision what are your values?” And what would your team say if I asked you what were those at your agency and often the answer is that well I don’t know we kind of have a mission maybe it’s in my head we kind of have some values like we talked about it once and I don’t know I vision I I just want to get through this week you know it’s hard to think further out that might be a sign that you’re stuck in firefighting rather than shifting to being the fire marshall as I share in my com the chaos book so getting clear on your mission vision and values um I I’ve just shared in chat uh a template that I use with my clients on determining your mission vision and values that’s direct link to the Google doc there’s no opt-in required or anything like that um you know you can download it yourself um and it’s going to take some time i I mean to Robert’s earlier point about kind of putting the bad data in I before you start automating and AIing things you probably Aligning AI With Agency Values, Mission & Culture need to have some very human conversations about what you want what you’re trying to accomplish it’ll feel like it’s slowing down the technology but this is a vital human step before you proceed [Music] i’m also curious Carl on your take because I interestingly last week I was meeting with a client on site and in the leadership conversation there was a lot of conversation around AI and implementation of AI and one of the challenges that we were facing as a leadership team was a discussion with the team actually fighting actively fighting i mean to the point that there was conversation about the ethical component of AI and the green component of AI and I largely um these are conversations to be had but the basis of it to me was fear amongst the team and am I going to be replaced and there’s a lot of resistance and actually leveraging it there’s a whole lot of unknown in the space and what are your thoughts on combating that challenge because that’s a significant one that so many agency owners are going to face i I definitely hear that at agencies I work with as well where often the owner or owners and the leadership team are very much on board with applying AI uh but frontline employees may be concerned now of course this has been a concern throughout all of capitalism uh I I I had a client you know pre pre-AI uh their paid search team was really overloaded and they brought in contractors to help as freelancers to help reduce the paid teams the employee team’s workload and the employees panicked they thought the contractors were there to replace them that was never the plan and it wouldn’t have made financial sense it’s like they’re paying twice as much per hour to the freelancers generally as they were to the employees it would not have made any sense but employees took that perspective and they kind of ran with it um you know so it is for sure a legitimate concern about what are you going to do um I do see better results when agency owners and leaders talk with the team about what they’re trying to accomplish and what success looks like you know if you’re telling the team that success is you’re able to work on more strategic things while custom GPTs and AI agents and other other things are taking care of the less fun part of your job that we’re not doing this to replace you we are hoping to make your work easier that’s a bit different from we’re here to take all of your jobs but some of that is kind of built into capitalism general yeah I would also say one of the things that I really like to do I mean from a like pragmatic standpoint here is that there’s a there is a lot of unknown um yes and I mean there’s the principle of kind of like failing forward and the Overcoming Employee Fear of AI Replacement reality is is in testing of AI there’s been so many pieces where I have absolutely failed at it and it didn’t work and I tried and then this didn’t work and I tried another idea and actually just kind of sharing that experience that you have with it as a leader of the organization to like share hey I’m testing something it didn’t work here’s what I did here’s what I’m experimenting with that allows for them to feel that failure is actually kind of part of the process to success and so that it doesn’t quite as scary as well i think people will also see that yeah it AI is not ready to take an entire human’s job for for most agency roles right i you know I’ve I’ve built tools to make my life easier as a coach as a consultant as a trainer and and and it does um can they completely replace me not yet i mean I’m I’m working on it but it it’s not there yet uh part of it is just different differences in going back to data sources uh I did a a survey with datab box the analytics firm and one of the things we were looking at was comparing profit margins like what do the most successful agencies do that’s different to market themselves than others part of it is making time for the self-marketing um but one of the things we want to look at was what are the profit margin differences and people could link their Quickbooks they could link zero or other things what we found though was we had to manually ask people their profit margins because QuickBooks API wise and zero API wise report net profit margins differently and so we would have had to manually calculate things to compare if people even had it loaded correctly in the first place um so you know we are a ways away from AI taking over um but certainly using AI as a helpful colleague a sounding board a writing partner uh the the analyst so that you don’t have to do quite as much in Excel that’s where it is now now where will things be in 10 years who knows that the analogy that I’ve like to use recently is like the age of the dot boom right where e-commerce was really taking off like everyone was saying retail’s dead we’re not going to have stores down the street anymore and I’m pretty sure that Target still is a mile away from my house um and while there’s a lot less being sold in retail and ecom is definitely a predominant source the amount of packages that arrive at my front door is proof of it um but it’s it’s been that way we’ve been talking about it for nearly 30 years it it is fascinating to see what Amazon will deliver you know if you’re near one of the warehouses same day or you know at like 4 a.m yeah yeah i I mean uh for instance you know some stuff is not surprising toilet paper uh you know cold and medication I Leading Through Change: The VGR Framework did notice that uh there’s the book fear play about delegation in relationships and you basically get a card deck you can divide up who’s in charge of the trash who’s in charge of medical appointments who’s in charge of this or that uh that it turned out was available for delivery as early as 4 am the next morning yeah I’m sure there were some uh marriage fights uh relationship fights that needed that rush delivery uh in order to have a good day the next day so I everything you guys are talking about is so inspiring i have kind of a a practical question um with well it’s practical but also very valuesoriented so one of the core values of of my agency is that we invest in relationships and that to me has been really kind of our our center core value because it it really has been what’s generated our revenue it’s been what’s kept our company healthy what’s um kept us with incredible partners uh and so as we’re looking at that uh and looking at how these AISOPs might impact client relationship client delivery onboarding workflows and things like that i’d uh I’d love to kind of hear maybe Robert your take on that value and how you can see that impacting um AISOPs client delivery client onboarding client relationship all of those pieces and then um Carl I’d love to hear from you on that as well i mean I think it’s depends on how you approach it right i mean because it can actually further deepen relationships so here’s an a practical example um I’m a big gifter um bit of a love language of mine i like to really pay attention to what the person enjoys and send a a gift that’s really personal to them and I sent a gift to a client recently that was like very purposeful for her and it was powered by AI and she absolutely loved it felt very seen i took some detail of conversations that we had things that she enjoys and asked it to do some research give me 20 different options of things that I could potentially buy it actually didn’t give me the exact product that I ended up buying but it led me down a path that resulted in me finding the thing that was actually really perfect for her and she absolutely loved it she felt again very seen and recognized so it actually deepened our relationship and it allowed for me to be able to move faster something that would have taken me several hours probably walking around uh walking my dog to be able to come up with the idea and I may not not have even gotten to something quite as meaningful as what I ended up choosing and so it can actually deepen the relationship if you use it appropriately i I am a fan of gifting as well i I’m generally spending at least $2,000 a year on postage uh in in in my business uh yeah yeah it I mean that idea of showing someone that Using AI to Deepen Client Relationships you were thinking of them um I was on a trip to Australia several years ago and I noticed that right across from my hotel was the Australia corporate office for one of my clients biggest clients so I took a photo sent it to them and you know was thinking of you um will AI know everything about us i mean certainly things you know if we’re talking about like brain implants that could know everything we’re thinking or imagining or what have you then sure but is AI necessarily going to know oh hotel company logo sign client biggest client let’s take that photo and send it to them eventually maybe but right now that still requires humans I I agree that relationship building is is very important um although I’ve designed my work to be remote I love meeting with clients in person when I can uh was in New York earlier this week and met up with an agency community leader um you know uh it finding those opportunities is important um so I I don’t think AI will eliminate that but as Robert said you can find ways to strengthen things um I mean even not as AI related but even things like Google alerts uh getting a notification about some news for a client and you can congratulate them um I I had one case where a past client had we’d worked together before they got acquired i heard through the grape vine they had gotten acquired and I sent them a note hey congrats and they’re like are you are you some sort of ninja but the news had just happened that morning but I happened to be plugged in to hear about it so uh you know whether it’s kind of ninja uh you know it it worked it worked i I have had more than one client say I am the most organized person they’ve ever met uh but technology helps and my team supporting me on that and yeah using AI tools as well so agreed on relationships and um I think that the key thing for everyone listening you can’t hide behind technology you can’t hide behind emails texts and so on like th those have their place but there still is value to having a conversation agree at least for now mhm i hope it doesn’t replace humanto human connection because otherwise I’m not sure what is the point of existence at that point but anyway right oh one theme that I’m taking away from some of the conversations I’ve heard in over the last couple days is um it’s this transition from thinking of ourselves as workers uh doing doing like and the the heavy lift of this is so no one else could possibly do what my agency can do um and saying actually probably a lot of agencies could you know lots of things are becoming easier to do with AI um and they will continue to do so but no one else can have the relationship that you can have as a person so my hope for AI Identifying Gaps & Asking Better Prompts is that it really does um bring us more into realizing our value is in relationship and in finding those moments of connection rather than just creating a whole bunch of deliverables and and work right and then and just being the hardest worker um or even or even the most results right we still want that we still want great deliverables we still want great results um but it’s still got to be this human thing that that’s what sets us apart um so uh this is not on the uh approved question list so I’m gonna but I you guys uh I just love hearing everything you say so I wanted to get your feedback on this idea of um using AI to challenge uh and improve ourselves to fill in the gaps in our agency of what we’re not thinking of and I was curious if if um uh first Robert in any of this um AI SOP process implementation did AI help you identify any gaps or um uh that that oh uh or any uh anything that you needed to kind of additionally say oh we should be adding this into our process um or hey we’re there’s this whole other opportunity we’re not seeing has has AI brought anything like that to the table for you frankly I’m sure that it has i don’t know that I can think of an exact example where that word has done that specifically i mean I I do use it as I was describing earlier as kind of the yes and and just like here’s what I’m currently doing what am I not thinking about or how can I expand upon it like that’s how I use it p practically on a daily basis if not an hourly basis um tell me about the prompting that you do for the what am I not thinking about how do you craft a prompt around that um I mean it depends on the specific scenario right so if I’m looking at it from an SOP perspective I might take that transcript from the video that I was describing earlier and take that transcript upload it and say you know here’s the existing process that I’m following right now i’m encountering this problem that is coming up on a regular basis which is foundationally how I like to look at the creation of process and when do I need to be creating something is I’m encountering a problem I like to only solve things once I don’t want to solve the thing over and over again and kind of live in groundhog’s day so how do I even expand and think about what are the potential solutions to this problem and that it might actually spark an idea that allows for you to solve it fully in in perpetuity or it might actually help you being able to uncover something that you would have never recognized in the first place so that would be an example application mhm carl any any thoughts on that about how I mean the the hope for AI is not that SOP Tools in Practice: CrewAI, ClickUp AI, Custom GPTs we just keep doing the same thing we already do faster right it’s it’s it’s beyond that so what what what do you see in terms of crafting any ideas about crafting prompts um that that could be helpful for us i mean ideally it’s faster and better i am a big fan of asking you know I’ll share and I’ll say “What questions do you have?” And then keep asking that “Do you have any more questions?” I’ll answer this is you know more in like a chat GPT setting any more questions and eventually if the AI runs out of questions to ask it’s probably ready to figure out what to do next uh so you know that can work i’m also a fan for both humans and AI uh of a concept called intelligent disobedience this comes from training service animals service dogs the idea is that if you know say the owner is like “Let’s cross the street.” And the dog can hear that a car is coming they will be intelligently disobedient they will refuse to cross the streets they know it’s dangerous same thing is true i’m hiring team members where I want them to push back if I’ve suggested something that they know to be contrary to my goals or contrary to something else I want them to say that’s a bad idea i had that recently where I was considering a new initiative and I asked the team what they thought and they shared a number of concerns some that I hadn’t thought about uh you know I as an owner I was being overly optimistic and they were giving me a very helpful reality check so intelligent disobedience I I talk more about that in my fourth book latest book Calm the Chaos on 10 ways to run a better agency um you know I wrote that around intelligent disobedience for human employees but it could work for your AI team as well yeah that’s great because there there is this you know trap of AI that it it really wants to create something that you like so it could be the ultimate yes man of of just kind of uh becoming a limiting factor uh so I love that idea of that intelligent disobedience um kind of transitioning a little bit into some really more practical uh elements robert I would love to hear what AI tools you use for SOPs and what your experience has been with them so that kind of covers the gamut really um I mean as I was describing earlier if I’m looking at just creating an SOP that my go-to would be to start with is a Loom video i’m a ridiculously heavy Loom user and so creating a Loom video that goes through those components that I was describing of what exactly is the purpose of this SOP um who exactly is going to be needing to be involved the frequency by which it needs to be utilized any existing templates that sort of thing and um taking the transcript of that to allow for me to be able to document it but if I’m going to expand beyond that and actually start to look at how do we actually create additional systems that allow for me to be able to create AI powered process um I’ve been dabbling quite a lot with a platform called Crew AI that allows for you to layer different AI oriented platforms and it’s um quite nerdy and a lot of fun and I’ve been like really playing with it there was um frankly it was a few week it’s been several months like three or four months ago I was um laying on the couch one Sunday afternoon and got an advertisement on on Facebook and got an advertisement for an application called coefficient and it was describing that it could connect AI to Google uh spreadsheets or Excel and I’m an Excel geek like absolutely an Excel geek and um I was so excited and went immediately to my computer to go like play with it i need to see it it didn’t actually work of what I was wanting to do and then ended up figuring out a way to go about doing it and then ended up like walking outside like incredibly energetic about it and being able to actually just think about how do you take existing platforms like Zapier into a Google sheet that allows for you to be able to reconnect it back into um back into chat GPT or into Gemini um there’s examples within existing platforms like you see constant adaptation and addition of AI oriented pieces into existing platforms you have like I really am enjoying what ClickUp is doing with its AI bots as well um I’ve built probably at this point far too many different custom GBTs for specific purposes examples of clients taking their entire strategy method specific to their industry of how they go about managing specific metrics to Automation vs. AI vs. Stopping Tasks Altogether what exactly is the client having as a challenge what are the potential mechanisms and service offerings that could actually combat or help solve that client’s specific challenge taking recordings of client calls that actually kicks out directly what would need to be done or a custom GBT that would even help you draft a proposal that here’s the different pre-written language that I have for different services that allow for you to inject components of what was discussed with a client um I mean the possibilities are endless yeah as you say that I get really excited but also I get I seize up a little and I get a little bit paralyzed like this a little too much right um and and that you know takes us exactly back to the topic we’re talking about from chaos to clarity right and it’s such a balance of how do we make this a tool that’s something that’s actually useful for us so I’d love to kind of go back to this bigger outlook on everything um and Carl I’ll I’ll put this question to you first and then Robert I’d love your input um so as you’ve seen agencies o overwhelmed by too much process how do they fix it you know somewhat with AI some but I’d let you know kind of the problem is the chaos right the problem is not that we don’t have enough tech tools right the problem is the chaos so how how do we fix that your point about you know we don’t have too many tech tools or or you know what have you or there are too many uh I have an article on project management software for agencies and it is approaching a hundred different options and I keep discovering new ones so like if you’re thinking of building a PM tool there are plenty out there you probably shouldn’t build a new one uh but yeah I mean just that sense of of overwhelm um one thing to consider if you you know if you step back do we need an AI solution solution or do we just need to automate it or is it some combo or maybe there’s something that you’re doing now that you should just stop doing for instance uh I you know one of my first jobs after college was as a sales and marketing analyst for a small mutual fund in New York and uh one of my responsibilities was to create market share reports every quarter that would go to the CEO the COO and our chief investment officer and I inherited this process from a previous team member and she was like here’s the process it’s going to take you about two weeks so like 80 hours of work every quarter so I followed the procedure I followed the SOPs and I felt at the end of it like I was done i’m like this isn’t a very good way to do this there’s got to be a better way and so the next quarter I made some tweaks and then the third quarter before I dived into just doing it rather than say fully automating or you know we didn’t have AI options at the time I went to the stakeholders the seale team and asked them I said I’m thinking of ways to streamline this to get it to you faster right that was the key word for them getting it faster every quarter um and basically asked them what do they like and not like about the existing reporting was there anything they wish they had anything they didn’t care about it turned out some of the things they didn’t care about that my predecessor just been building every quarter and no one looked at them i also followed up with the data provider and it turned out that we got custom consulting time with them every year for them to pre- modify the data before it got to us so actually I wouldn’t have to do as much analysis they would pre-analyze a lot of it and ultimately I went from a process that took two weeks every quarter down to just two days from 80 hours down to 16 yeah yeah so ask yourself do you need AI do you need automation or should you stop doing this thing altogether [Music] i think core of what you’re saying really is defining the business challenge effectively really what exactly is the challenge is this what exactly is the opportunity within this challenge and how how does it actually fall into the the hierarchy of priority effectively I mean the reality that there is endless possibilities that there’s endless different applications but and that’s kind of the plight of the entrepreneur effectively right like we see opportunity in so many different areas which then ends up creating for shiny object syndrome and then the next kind of layer of it is what exactly is the risk factor of doing it so like what is the likelihood of success what exactly is that going to create is what is the risk to clients what is the risk to the business what is the risk to the culture oh I think I’ve I’ve lost Robert uh same same here right oh goodness right in the middle of Oh shoot oh am I back oh you’re back you’re back at what point did you lose me you were talking um about the uh it was just like a sentence or two back sorry go so I what I was saying was kind of risk assessment of really understanding what is the risk to clients what is the risk to business what is the risk to culture oh the internet does not want us the technology does not want us to hear um what Robert has to say it’s too powerful I guess um well we are coming toward the end of the session anyway um and so I know we’re it’s about time to to wrap up um so I’m sad that we’re missing those those final thoughts uh from Robert uh but Carl I Yeah Landon said in the chat Risk Assessment, Prioritization & Closing Thoughts “Robert broke the internet.” There you are okay whatever you’re trying to say Robert the internet does not want us to know about it apparently not um it’s too it’s too hot for us to hear apparently um the and each one of us have a different kind of risk profile effectively is what I was kind of getting to and knowing whether that if that worst case scenario were to were to come to pass is that something that you’re willing to allow to come to pass and then from an opportunity perspective is defining what the opportunity is to the client is that going to have a significant amount of impact to them what does that actually have to my business to the agency what does that have to culture what does that have to the team uh both from like a personal perspective as well as a work life perspective and really going through thinking about each one of those different components and is is the opportunity actually worth the outcome is the direction actually worth the amount of time investment is it’s actually going to take and to me being the numbers person that I am everything kind of comes to a calculus of investment versus reward and is that actually going to be worthwhile and then once I have an understanding of yeah okay maybe it’s worthwhile but what is going to move the needle in my business and what I’m looking to accomplish in the short term what is the most important thing for me to focus on and the further along in business in my career I’ve gotten the more and more that I’ve realized that the less I do the faster I move and so actually focusing my attention a whole lot more and the same is true for your team is that yes there are endless opportunities but that doesn’t mean it’s today’s opportunity well Carl and Robert those are those are great words to to kind of close us out on um I just want to thank you again so much for your time today i learned a ton and I’m sure all everyone listening really appreciates it so thank you guys and coming up next we have a session on how AI is driving digital oceans revolution so we’ll see Brent Weaver back here to host us for that uh here in just a minute or two awesome thank