June 12, 2024
865: ALL the ins and outs of AUTOMATION for your business w/ Camilo Henao
Unlock the transformative potential of automation with Camilo Henao, the visionary founder of Catalytics Automation, who joins us to demystify the complexities of integrating AI and automation in business growth. Camilo's expertise, honed from his time as a data scientist at IBM, shines as he maps out the entrepreneurial route from conception to execution. Witness a blueprint unfold for businesses large and small that promises not just time savings, but a tangible uptick in revenue. Through our discussion, you'll glean how automation is reshaping sales and marketing, enabling your focus on the work that genuinely matters by eradicating redundant manual tasks.
Today's marketplace is a jungle of software tools, and we're here to be your guide. Through our conversation with Camilo, we navigate the role of AI and automation in business operations, offering strategies to avoid the pitfalls of inefficiency and optimize your workforce. Imagine transforming your sales team into a powerhouse of efficiency, where AI enhances capabilities, and process bottlenecks become a thing of the past. This episode isn't just about understanding the potential of these technologies; it's about harnessing them to scale your business to new heights.
As we conclude our tech-forward journey, Camilo imparts a clear, actionable approach for implementing automation in your own enterprise. We dissect the process of identifying operations ready for automation, the critical nature of ongoing support, and the importance of maximizing your tool subscriptions. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just embarking on your business journey, Camilo's practical insights and real life examples and strategies will get your juices – and processes – flowing.
ABOUT CAMILO
Camilo Henao hails from a lineage of inspiring entrepreneurs in Colombia. His entrepreneurial journey is rooted in a rich family history, beginning with his great grandfather who established a soap business in the 1940s. This legacy of innovation continued with his grandfather, who built a successful corrugated box manufacturing company. His father also embraced the entrepreneurial spirit, adding to the family's legacy of business acumen. Despite this deeply ingrained entrepreneurial environment, Camilo was not the typical enterprising teenager; he didn't start ventures in high school nor engaged in small-scale businesses to earn extra cash. However, the desire to create and lead was always simmering beneath the surface, representing a latent potential waiting for the right moment to leap into the world of entrepreneurship.
LINKS & RESOURCES
00:00 - Automation for Business Growth
08:11 - Automation and AI in Business Operations
17:31 - Automation and Efficiency in Business
29:28 - Streamlining Business Processes Through Automation
34:39 - Entrepreneur Podcast Appreciates Guest Support
WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento.
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In today's episode, we have got an absolutely brilliant person and a brilliant entrepreneur on to join us to talk all things automation.
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This is someone who not only helps big businesses he's worked inside of businesses like IBM, but also small businesses to understand this popular buzzword of automation and how it can improve our bottom lines.
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This applies to every single one of us, whether you're a entrepreneur, whether you're a beginner entrepreneur, whether your business is in the growth phase.
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We've got an incredible guest.
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His name is Camilo Henao.
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Camilo is an ex-data scientist and consultant at IBM.
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He's an ex-data operations program manager at H1 Insights, which is a health tech startup creating a source of truth for all things healthcare.
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Now, importantly, with his own business, he's impacting so many other business organizations because he's the founder and CEO at Catalytics Automation, a startup aiming to help small to medium-sized businesses optimize their most valuable resource time by automating their operations.
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I love his business model.
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I love the way he articulates it.
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It's the only time I've ever seen it described as automation as a service.
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So if you want to start automating your business for growth, you're in for a real treat.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Camilo Henao.
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All right, camilo, I am so excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks, brian, thank you for having me, Thank you to your listeners for listening to this episode.
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Heck yeah, Camilo.
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It's because we're all looking forward to learning a lot from you in today's session.
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So first things first.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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Who the heck is, Camilo?
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How did you start doing all these cool things that you're up to today?
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Yeah for sure.
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So the quick background on me is you know I come from a family of entrepreneurs.
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My great grandfather started a soap business back in the 40s in Colombia.
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My grandfather built a corrugated box manufacturing company.
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My father's also an entrepreneur, so I really have that entrepreneurial blood in me.
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But I was never the kid in high school building businesses or selling X product to make extra cash.
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I always wanted to do something but I never made that leap, if you will.
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So if you fast forward over to college, I studied finance and business analytics at Boston College but I found myself really enjoying and naturally excelling in my business analytics classes.
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So after school I was able to join an amazing program in New York with IBM where we were trained and labeled as data scientists.
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But really the fascinating thing about the team was that we weren't trapped behind a computer screen all day long.
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We were put in front of top management to solve real business problems.
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There was a time in a project where I was working and presenting to our CMO, michelle Peluso, who is now the CMO of CVS.
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So all in all, beginning my career on that team was a blessing because I was able to learn so much on the technical side, but also on the operational and leadership, and everything really changed.
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When COVID hit, that entrepreneurial itch really came alive.
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But I still didn't have a business or service I could really get behind.
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So I chose the next best thing, which was to join a startup.
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I joined H1 Insights as a program manager and I was in charge of overseeing and managing our data pipeline and overseeing a large team of engineers overseas.
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And it was managing that team overseas that I was introduced to automation and I saw the impact that automation could have on a business.
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I saw how much time and money we were saving by automating and how that translated into more efficient teams and more revenue.
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So that's really when the aha moment happened for me.
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I finally made that leap of starting a business and I started Catalytics Automation.
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So Catalytics is an automation agency and we help businesses build growth systems with tailored solutions for each client, systems that are designed to do either two things One, cut costs by streamlining processes and eliminating manual tasks, but two, generating incremental revenue by creating more efficient processes so teams can focus on their higher value work.
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We also focus on building revenue-specific generating systems for sales and marketing systems.
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So that's a little bit about me, my background.
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I'm happy to jump in and dive into any part of that.
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Yeah, camilo, I love that overview.
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You know I've told you this before about the way that you think as a data scientist, but I think it's so clearly laid out there, the way that you think about things so logically and in a concise order, and it's that sort of analytical mind that we're going to dive into here today.
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I will quickly interject.
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I didn't realize.
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You and I also had Boston in common, so I grew up in Boston.
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We're both now.
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We've traded in the Northeast for warmer Florida weather.
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I love that.
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We're both Floridians now you obviously growing up in the Miami area of Colombian descent, so I think that's such a cool part of your backstory and something that we share in common.
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But, importantly, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is the very word automation.
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So many people throw around this buzzword, and, especially with the rise of AI and so many cool tech tools out there, everyone loves talking about automation.
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But what is automation from a practical business standpoint, camila?
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Where do we even focus when we start thinking about implementing automation into our businesses?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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I think the best way to answer that is that, you know, we probably think of automation as like really skilled data scientists or computer science, you know, experts creating these systems for these large companies.
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And there was actually a study that was done by Bank of America that highlights how many employees it took to generate a million dollars in 1990 and then what it looks like today.
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So in 1990, it took about eight employees to generate one million dollars in revenue and today that number is two and I would argue it could be even one.
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So the reason, you know, that decrease in amount of employees is because technology has gotten more advanced.
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However, these large companies have always had, you know, a strategic advantage over small businesses, and that's capital.
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They were able to, you know, a strategic advantage over small businesses, and that's capital.
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They were able to, you know, invest in top talent, the computer science talent.
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But that talent is expensive and today that barrier entry is no longer a reality because of automation tools like Zapier and Make and NAN, and it allows small businesses to really leverage the capabilities of large companies in their day-to-day operations.
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So automation is the improvement of processes and automation of those processes, so the day-to-day operations can be streamlined, automated and your employees can focus on other things, and those other things being more high-value work.
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Yeah, camille, you are preaching to the choir here, because you just name-dropped one of my favorite tools in business, which is Zapier, and I think it's important to use this part of the conversation to really point out to listeners that if they're sitting there saying, well, camille, you've worked inside of this stuff, you've worked inside of this stuff, you've worked inside of IBM and high tech startups, well, of course you know about these things and it is truly a case of we don't know what we don't know.
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So using Zapier as an example, because it's a tool that I know of and that I use across my businesses is that it can make things talk to each other.
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Programs and processes talk to each other.
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That otherwise wouldn't Shed some more light on that, because you obviously are way more of an expert at this stuff than I am.
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For listeners who don't know what they don't know, what are these types of tools?
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You just dropped a few valuable ones on us.
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I'd love to hear your insights into how those actually implement into a business and how they can actually help.
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Yeah, for sure, for sure.
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I think the best way to explain that is if you imagine a world, the year 2000,.
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And you have a sales team, your sales team.
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Really, their primary focus was selling, getting on a call, sending emails, closing deals.
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But the introduction of so many software tools has really changed the landscape and the day-to-day operations of a sales team.
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So sales teams now have crms, they have salesforce, hubspot, prospecting tools, outreach, gmail, instantly, you the list of software tools is endless and you know internal communications, contract management and on and on and on.
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And so sales teams responsibilities are now split between all those tools, and all those tools require your time and attention.
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The data is duplicated sometimes between those systems and they're not communicating with each other.
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So the idea of automation is to connect those systems so they work on the back end, so you can focus on really what your core responsibility should be, which is selling.
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Yeah, Camila, I love that you brought us right there to selling, because it's part of my argument is that what is business?
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All of us have a responsibility to get really good at marketing, which the entire purpose of marketing is to get us to be able to close a sale and then serve our customers and clients.
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But to get there, there's you listed off, Camila.
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I don't know how many tools your brain has inside of it, but you listed off so many different tools that all of our real life businesses use.
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I mean, for me personally, you touched on real life tools that my businesses use and, with that in mind, where do we even begin to assess automation opportunities inside of our businesses?
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Because you just talked about some of those on the marketing and lead management front.
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But there's also we're managing accounting.
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We're managing our financial outlook, we're managing our employees.
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We're managing accounting.
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We're managing our financial outlook, we're managing our employees.
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We're managing our client onboarding.
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How do we pick and choose where we can actually automate?
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Yeah, so well.
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The process that we use at Catalogues is, you know, taking a step back and understanding your different departments.
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Right, you have sales, you have marketing, you have operations, you have finance, and really you want to then go into each department and understand the high-level process.
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Is it 30 steps?
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Is it 20 steps?
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Should it be 10?
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Should it be 5?
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Should it be just two steps?
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You know, if you can cut down on those processes, you're then streamlining your day-to-day work, but then, once you get to a streamlined process, can you automate it?
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And you know you mentioned client onboarding, marketing.
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You know these are all examples of great automation workflows, but in terms of deciding where to start, you need to one.
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You can either calculate how many hours your employees or yourself are spending on each of these processes and then that way, you can see the return on your time saved, and that's really the calculation that we implement in Catalytics.
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Yeah, which is an important first step.
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It's something we hear from so many amazing entrepreneurs just like yourself, Camilo, who join us on this show which is we can't fix anything until we have that self-awareness.
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We have to take inventory of our processes, of our operations.
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You talk about it on a departmental level, of whether those departments are filled with other employees, or even if we're early on in our entrepreneurial journey and all of those departments are ourselves.
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We still have to measure those things so that we can then manage them and improve them and apply that automation.
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So I love that call to action.
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All of you listeners.
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Camilo isn't saying this stuff theoretically, he's saying this practically.
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You need to take action on all of these things.
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But it also introduces an important topic that I'm sure you're faced with all the time, Camilla.
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You are a young entrepreneur and I'm sure the older generation, some of your clients, may push back on this saying well, hold on, is automation just going to replace our employees?
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You use the Bank of America example of they need far fewer employees these days to generate a million dollars in revenue.
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Now, granted, that's a huge corporation, but where do you fall in that automation can improve things and streamline things versus still humans have some valuable input, and there's places where we're not looking to replace people, we're looking to optimize their performance.
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How do you answer that and navigate those waters?
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Yep.
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So to answer that, there's really two answers.
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One is automation streamlines processes, gives you your time back so you can focus on other things, so you're optimizing each employee's final output per day.
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So automation can improve your current employee base performance.
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But also, if you implement automation, you can then hire more people to your business and that way you can grow with automation and more employees.
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So it's not just cutting down on employees.
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You have the option.
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Every business has a limited amount of capital and that capital can be spent on tools, can be spent on marketing, can be spent on more human capital and if you're implementing automation, you're giving yourself more ability to spend that capital on more employees if you implement automation.
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Yeah, for sure, and I think that that is a natural segue into an important part of the conversation, which is regarding AI, because when you talk about utilization of resources, we only have so many resources in our lives and in our businesses and tools.
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Think about how much content we had to manually create.
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Even if it was simple stuff like background information on players, we had to manually do that research, whereas now, with ChatGPT, I can't even imagine what the content creation game is like, but it's streamlined a lot of that.
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Talk to us about your perspective on AI and, most importantly, related to today's conversation, how's AI enhancing automation?
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Because you talk about tools talking to each other.
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Has AI added a new layer where it's not just tools talking to each other, but creating things and doing things?
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yeah.
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So AI has really, you know, allowed the capabilities of automation to expand exponentially.
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Automation improves processes, automates them, gives you your time back, but AI then allows you to do so much more.
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And AI really is a platform shift.
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It's the, you know.
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People think it's a hype cycle, but really AI is just as important as the introduction of the internet, the mobile phone.
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Ai has completely transformed what automation can do.
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No longer are you having to do those a human had to previously, you know, have their knowledge input.
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So you're combining the abilities of you know algorithms with a knowledge base to improve that process.
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So AI has really, you know, transformed the automation space, because when you pair automation and AI together, you're really transforming your organization.
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Your output per employee is incredibly more efficient and, again going back to being employee output versus you know, adding more employees to your business.
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It's a fantastic tool and, you know, in workflows that we implement, you know, within content generation, marketing, sales, AI has really transformed the outputs of the workflows that we're building.
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Yeah, I love to hear that.
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And listeners, I'm about to ask Camilo for some of those practical real life examples, but before we get there, I want to call out that output per employee metric that you just talked about, Because if listeners are tuning into today's session and they're thinking, well, I'm my only employee out of the gates, whether you're at that stage or you're running a seven or eight figure business, shout out to you entrepreneurs who tune into this show.
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Then you're able to optimize that.
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I think, camila I'm going to pile onto what you said that AI is as significant as the internet coming to be.
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I think that AI is the great equalizer.
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Let's say, if I'm a solopreneur today, I now have the output of multiple people just by leveraging automation and by leveraging these AI tools that you're talking about.
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So, with that in mind, camila, I am so jealous of your work because I think it's so cool that you get to work with businesses of all different sizes.
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So lay some of those real life examples on us.
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You talk about the sales, the marketing front, you talk about workflows that's a word that you use frequently with us here today.
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So shine some light on some of those real life implementations for us today.
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So shine some light on some of those real life implementations for us.
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Yeah, for sure, for sure, I'm happy to.
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But going back to the employee output, just to, you know, add another argument there.
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A way to think about the employee output is there was a study done by McKinsey that showed about 90% of people spend about three hours a day on manual repetitive tasks.
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And if you take the average salary in the US, which is around 60K and three hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, you're on 780.
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$29 times the 780, you're on $23,000 of cost per employee for manual work.
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So if you have a 100 person organization, you're spending over two million dollars on manual work.
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If you have a 10 person organization, you're spending over $2 million on manual work.
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If you have a 10% organization, you're spending over 200,000.
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So that's real money that you're allocating to manual processes.
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You're allocating to time spent where it could be allocated to other high value work.
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But to answer your question, some popular workflows that we work on you know leads to sales.
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On client onboarding, employee onboarding, client research, you know you could be, you know every.
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For example, client research is a great one where you could be.
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You know, you just got a new lead.
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You don't know anything about this, this new lead.
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The industry, their't know anything about this new lead.
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The industry, their service, your sales team is probably spending an hour, two hours on a bit of research before that first discovery call.
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And implementation workflow that we've implemented is, if you utilize AI tools like ChashBT or Perplexity, you could have that client research done for you.
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So you're all to prepare for that first discovery call, you know, and that allows you to potentially have a higher conversion rate of your leads.
00:19:36.952 --> 00:19:46.407
But yeah, so other tools or workflows internal communications, contract management, chatbots is a huge one.
00:19:46.407 --> 00:19:50.991
You're seeing a lot of large companies implement these amazing chatbots.
00:19:50.991 --> 00:19:59.775
So you're not just talking to a low value knowledge based chatbot.
00:19:59.775 --> 00:20:14.436
Rather, you're plugging in your entire business's knowledge base into this chatbot and you can have high value conversations, whether that's customer onboarding or you know CS problems or customer success problems.
00:20:14.436 --> 00:20:19.912
You know HR questions you could be answering with your internal employees.
00:20:19.912 --> 00:20:46.275
So the beautiful thing about automation is that you know the world really is your oyster in terms of what you can do, and it always depends on client to client, because everyone has different processes, different logic that they implement, and so the pairing of automation and AI can really streamline any type of business, regardless of its size.
00:20:47.079 --> 00:20:48.929
Yeah, camilo, I love that overview.
00:20:49.009 --> 00:21:24.737
It's layered with so many practical examples and that's what our listeners love and, along those lines, listeners also know that part of my favorite thing about these sessions together is that I get to talk to you not only as the content matter expert that you are with regards to automation and with regards to AI and technology and creating those streamlined operations in our businesses, but also I get to talk to you as a fellow entrepreneur, and I'm gonna call you out publicly here, because I think that you listed part of your zone of genius is something that is an incredible skillset that we all could benefit from, and I think it's so powerful that it's something that you have in your arsenal is sales follow-ups.
00:21:24.778 --> 00:21:37.708
That's something that so many people get wrong and it's something that I know that you focus on a lot, not only through your automation and your tech-based work, but as an entrepreneur, and I think that that's incredible insights and strategies to share here on the air.
00:21:37.708 --> 00:21:40.962
So, camilo, I want to tap into your entrepreneurial mind right now.
00:21:40.962 --> 00:21:48.228
Talk to us about sales follow-ups, because you clearly value that more than the average entrepreneur and I'm sure it's a key part of your success.
00:21:48.228 --> 00:21:50.923
What goes into some of your strategies there?
00:21:52.207 --> 00:21:55.438
Yeah, I mean, sales follow-up is so, so important.
00:21:55.438 --> 00:21:58.525
Even if you're not automating it, you have to follow up.
00:21:58.525 --> 00:22:00.589
I live in Miami.
00:22:00.589 --> 00:22:12.192
There was a Miami Tech Week that happened recently and I met a CEO of a consulting firm there and he actually gave me an amazing stat that I'd like to share with you guys.
00:22:12.192 --> 00:22:19.146
So 2% of sales are made on the first contact Very small number.
00:22:19.146 --> 00:22:28.924
3% on the second contact, five percent on the third, 10 percent on the fourth, 80 percent on the fifth to 12th contact.
00:22:28.924 --> 00:22:37.448
Just with those stats you can see the importance and value of the follow up and it's something that I knew already.
00:22:37.448 --> 00:22:39.740
But just hearing those stats is like wow.
00:22:39.740 --> 00:22:51.229
You have to be following up on your, on your leads, because it might be the eighth or ninth time that you contact your potential lead, that you actually get the deal closed.
00:22:51.229 --> 00:23:01.040
So if anything you get out of this podcast, it's the follow-up, something I've been implementing since day one and I'm automating as well.
00:23:01.040 --> 00:23:04.269
I automate that follow-up for my clients as well.
00:23:05.131 --> 00:23:09.501
Yeah, I'm glad you went there, camilo, because even me, I always think about what the listeners will be thinking.
00:23:09.501 --> 00:23:11.326
But even me, I'm thinking about it.
00:23:11.326 --> 00:23:12.911
I don't follow up with my leads.
00:23:12.911 --> 00:23:17.609
Probably I probably follow up with them four or five times, I don't know.
00:23:17.609 --> 00:23:21.845
I genuinely don't know how you manage 12 follow-ups, just as an example.
00:23:21.845 --> 00:23:26.673
So I'd love some of those insights, because I think it does tie the conversation back to automation.
00:23:26.673 --> 00:23:28.317
Is that, listeners?
00:23:28.317 --> 00:23:28.837
I'm going to?
00:23:28.837 --> 00:23:34.028
As much as I give Camilo credit here, I'm also going to confess to all of you that he's not a robot.
00:23:34.028 --> 00:23:41.251
He can only manage his follow-ups because he has tools and systems and automations that support him.
00:23:41.251 --> 00:23:51.663
In that, camilo, I would imagine it's almost like you have the world's greatest virtual assistant who helps you stay on top of all these things, because you leverage technology, because you leverage automations.
00:23:51.663 --> 00:23:53.146
What does that look like for you?
00:23:53.146 --> 00:23:57.646
How the heck do you remember to follow up with Joe, who you met at Miami Tech Week?
00:23:57.646 --> 00:23:59.411
How do you remember to follow up with him?
00:24:00.460 --> 00:24:11.688
Well, it's building the right systems and I also just want to preface that I'm not following up 12 times every time, but I am saying the value of follow up is, you know, in the actual follow up.
00:24:11.688 --> 00:24:21.374
So, whether it's four or five or six times, I'm not saying that 12, will you know you'll convert all of your leads on the 12th time, but it is important.
00:24:21.374 --> 00:24:22.815
It is important, but you know.
00:24:22.815 --> 00:24:27.258
To answer your question, it is building the right systems, right?
00:24:27.258 --> 00:24:41.747
You write contact database, your CRMs, your follow up tools, whether that's email or SMS, your status on those contacts.
00:24:41.767 --> 00:24:47.117
If you do have a conversation, you're logging those, that those, um, that, uh, that conversation, uh, you know main talking points.
00:24:47.117 --> 00:24:54.282
Uh, you'll want to be doing that automatically as well, because you may be having hundreds of uh conversations a day.
00:24:54.282 --> 00:25:02.670
Uh, and with the right systems, allows you to you know follow up properly and also in a non spammy way.
00:25:02.670 --> 00:25:04.576
You would need to bemy way.
00:25:04.576 --> 00:25:19.170
You need to be humanistic in your automation implementation as well, because if you are inputting the same information over and over on these automation follow-ups, then it's very unlikely that you will get anywhere.
00:25:19.170 --> 00:25:27.190
You need to implement some human aspect to your automation and your AI for it to have real value.
00:25:27.980 --> 00:25:31.328
Yes, very well said, and I think it's such an important disclaimer.
00:25:31.328 --> 00:25:40.804
Listeners, if you've got qualms about following up with people, camilo and I both are not saying follow up with the exact same messaging every single time.
00:25:40.804 --> 00:25:47.405
Camilo just said it right there, so clearly is that it has to be a human level of interaction, and so there are AI tools.
00:25:47.405 --> 00:26:04.126
For example, I just got an email from someone the other day that referenced the college that I went to, bentley University up in Massachusetts, and I'm sure that it was some sort of AI tool that pulled from my LinkedIn profile, but it caught my attention because it felt like someone who was recognizing me for me, and I think that's so important.
00:26:05.619 --> 00:26:21.884
And along the lines of thinking like a listener, camilo, I can imagine that one of the objections that people have and especially because you work with such a different clientele at all different stages in business, because we can all benefit from automation is that I'm sure, inevitably, the question you get asked the most is Camilo, how much does this cost?
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