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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and there is one quote that I think about so frequently when it comes to running a business and the operational side of it and, very importantly, systems, and that quote is from James Clear, where he said we do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.
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And when it comes to systems, that's where big businesses have an advantage over so many small businesses.
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They have incredible systems in place.
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Using tools like Salesforce is one of the worldwide leaders in it.
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So we went out and we found someone who is incredible at understanding this operational side of the world, the systems that support it, in order to make businesses flourish.
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He's an incredible entrepreneur in his own right.
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Not only does he help other businesses grow, so let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Ilya Filipovich.
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He's the founder of Flatforceco, where he helps businesses streamline their operations and drive growth through tailored Salesforce solutions.
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With over a decade of experience as a Salesforce expert, ilya offers flat rate consulting services that make digital transformation accessible and efficient.
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You're going to see how much this guy cares about efficiencies for companies of all sizes.
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Flat Force specializes in monthly packages designed to optimize workflows, integrate complex systems and implement robust Salesforce architectures.
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If you're thinking to yourself, Brian, I don't have any architectures in my business.
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What are we talking about?
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Ilya is going to open your eyes in so many different ways today.
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Ilya and his team work closely with clients to ensure they achieve their business goals through the power of Salesforce technology.
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I'm personally excited to learn from today's entrepreneur.
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He's amazing in the way that not only he helps people, but he thinks about business growth and support as a whole.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Ilya Filipovich.
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All right, ilya, I'm 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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Thank you, Brian.
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Thanks for having me Heck.
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Yes, I am so excited to get inside that strategic and operational mind of yours today.
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But before we get there, take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Ilya?
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How did you start doing all these cool things?
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Oh, that's a good one.
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So I was a geek as a kid.
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I started coding in my teenage days back in the websites, and then I was a geek as a kid.
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I started coding in my teenage days, back in the websites, and then I had a bit of a formal education in mathematics and computer science both bachelor and master's and I started my Salesforce career back in 2012.
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I was working for one of the large Australian telco businesses where I got introduced with Salesforce and Salesforce was my number one technology.
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Since then, I never went away from Salesforce and I just wanted to improve more.
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I also was always close to the business, which was always opening my entrepreneurial side of the brain, I guess, and then decided to start my own consultancies in different ways and help other businesses achieve better with Salesforce.
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Yeah, I love that overview, Ilya, because you already highlighted the fact that you love the technical component of it.
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You love the business component of it, and obviously it's those ingredients that support the operations of real life businesses.
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So I really want to start at the basic level, though, because I know a lot of people don't have systems as good as what you help other businesses to implement.
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So I guess it's a double-edged question that I'll toss to you first, which is what are these systems?
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When we look at the architecture of a business, what systems do you look at?
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And why, of course, leveraging Salesforce?
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Why is Salesforce the answer for so many companies?
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Because, let's face it, it clearly is one of the biggest players on planet earth across all different types of businesses.
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So give us some of those insights.
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Yeah, I mean Salesforce.
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As you said, salesforce is a system.
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It started as a CRM only.
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Crm, for those who don't know, is a customer relationship management system Basically takes care of your customers, care of your customers.
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If you imagine the small shops and the small shop owners they know each of their customers individually and they know everything about them, even the customers or potential customers or buyers.
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But when we try to scale that to a larger extent, having a lot of people coming and going through our companies and having the centralized picture of what's happening with your clients and relations that's where CRM is the key piece of every business that wants to scale.
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Salesforce started with that idea back in 1999, I believe, and has been driving the evolution ever since.
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It's not just the CRM.
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Now it's the complete platform, because all of these businesses, they start with selling something or providing the services.
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So that's why most of the companies 99% of the companies can use the Salesforce and the CRM as a core of their system and then build on top every other aspect that needs to be built.
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Yeah, Ilya, I've actually long argued.
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I personally believe that the CRM is the single most important tool in all of our businesses.
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People give a lot of thought to what should I build my website on top of?
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They think about where to host their emails.
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All of these things are important, of course, but the most important thing is your ability to drive revenue, your ability to close deals and to service those deals.
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It's the entire life cycle of that customer journey and so and even pre-customer, of course, you talk about client relationship management going far beyond that.
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It touches the sales process.
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Give us some of those real-life implications, Because, Ilya, I'll tell you this here on the air is that one of the things that stood out to our team when we came across your work is the various examples that you have about how flexible these types of systems are, Everything from service-based businesses, product-based businesses.
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I love.
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On your website, you even have private air charter operations with Salesforce as an example.
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Give us some of those real life case studies.
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Yeah, I mean, as you said, salesforce, I mean, is very good in selling their product and being part of every company.
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They're actually, I think, by the latest stats they are having around 160,000 customers across the globe and most of them are in the US about 60% so they can penetrate in almost any business, from a few employees or few users to very large companies that you can name them Tesla, coca-cola, facebook and others.
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So they are very adoptable.
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As I said, they are using the core as a central place of the CRM data and then just building on top.
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So the companies can, with the Salesforce platform, they can easily map their current business processes into the CRM methodologies and platforms and then build on top Because, as you said, the core of every business is who's your customer and what do you know about your customer.
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But does it end at the CRM level?
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No, you probably want to do a bit of a billing, a bit of a marketing there.
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You want to connect the other dots and pieces because not every offering is the same.
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You have different products and different offerings and then different combinations.
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I mean you mentioned the private air charter company.
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They need to have a lot of information about all of the world airports, about the aircraft, about the providers, about the vendors who drive the FBOs, as they call them, about the runways, about the weather statistics in the current time on each airport.
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So it's very extensive.
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And.
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Salesforce can enable all of that.
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Which makes sense, because a lot of us I'd say that's probably the main barrier that we all face is we know we need a CRM, but there are so many moving pieces.
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You just so effortlessly gave us one example from just one type of business.
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But how many different data points there are within a program like Salesforce.
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What's so hard about these implementations?
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Obviously, people like you exist in order to help businesses implement Salesforce deeply as part of their operations.
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What do those setups look like?
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What are all the different pieces that someone like you sees that a lot of business owners may not realize when they're setting this up for the first time?
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Yeah well, I mean, every business is different.
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Every business has their own workflows.
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Sometimes, when they see some out of the box Salesforce features, they say, oh, this is very cool, we could adopt our flows to work for us, as they work out of the box for Salesforce and there are others.
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I mean, I used to have a client who had this large Excel spreadsheet where their whole business was and that Excel spreadsheet was updated by all of their staff and there was a manager who was in charge of their Salesforce implementation.
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He said I want exactly this chart to be rebuilt in Salesforce, which was kind of funny.
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We argued a lot because Salesforce is not just one chart, but that's.
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Salesforce is not just one chart, but that's their imagination.
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Once you explain them how systems work and what are the other benefits, then they start to realize that I guess they are pros and cons in their different businesses.
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Some who have full trust and then some where you need to gain trust.
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At the end of the day, it's our job to make the best of their Salesforce implementation.
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Sometimes we need to fight for it.
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Yeah, and hearing that example of going back and forth with that client of yours, it's actually interesting to me knowing that your mind.
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Obviously you've worked on so many Salesforce implementations and projects, but you also do understand the unique considerations and complexities across all different types of businesses.
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I wonder when you walk into a business, are you looking through the lens of okay, here's how I could imagine we set Salesforce up, here's the different data components.
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Or is it business first and then you figure out a way to implement Salesforce within that?
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I'm super curious.
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Chicken or the egg, the age old classic problem?
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Which way do you think about it?
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Yeah, so there is no magic bullet or there is no rule of thumb.
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There are obviously the platform limitations.
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I mean, we need to face them and there are the business needs.
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Usually it's driven by business and their flows.
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So we want to understand the businesses, we want to understand how they function and then provide the architecture and the solution how it should be mapped into the Salesforce or systems world, and there are, you know, both sides.
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They need to have some flexibility.
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Yeah, it makes sense.
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I want to ask you this broad question.
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I hope that it's an easy one for you to answer because, knowing that every business truly is very unique, what are some of those common workflows?
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You and I are talking about workflows and systems and processes here today, and I'm just thinking about all the business owners out there who have never actually implemented a CRM.
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Your real life example of a company working from a spreadsheet is probably way too common for either of our liking.
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What are some of those common workflows?
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I'm thinking even just prospecting and sales, even upfront, for business owners who have never experienced the beauties and the processes in organization of a CRM.
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Yeah, so the most common things are that you need to track information about your current clients, your potential clients and your old clients.
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Well, what that information might be, it varies from business to business, but all of them would probably like to track all of the interactions For the potential clients.
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You want to track all of the interactions for the potential clients.
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You want to track and most of the businesses probably would love to have that in a single report If anything was offered to them, at what price was offered, why that deal failed or went through.
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What are my current customers' needs?
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What products have they bought?
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Was that one soft purchase or it's a subscription?
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What could I potentially offer them more?
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And obviously, the billing.
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So these are the most common scenarios.
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Also, we are throwing in the portals and the mobile apps because the especially the customers who are on subscription they want to provide their customers with portals where they can log in and see their services, their invoices, quotes or something more.
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But these are the most common things most of the businesses have.
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Yeah, and hearing you talk about those examples.
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What I love about those examples is 100% of businesses.
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We all have those workflows in our businesses, and so that's why the deeper I went, Ilya, years ago, when I uncovered the wonderful world of CRMs and I started exploring it, I realized this isn't reserved for enterprise level businesses.
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You don't have to be Fortune 500 in order to have a solution such as Salesforce.
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Talk to us about the accessibility, because I think a lot of people think it's out of their reach, but I'd love to hear from you the different sizes of businesses and solutions that are out there.
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I mean, obviously, for us to provide our services, the sales force is the prerequirement.
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So the sales force comes as, as you said, one of the top players and maybe the most expensive ones.
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But most of the companies, they find a believe it or not in Salesforce who had a lot of information but only two users I mean Salesforce is not earning much on them.
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And then, opposed to that, there are companies who had probably a dozen of thousands of licenses.
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I think you know there is a lot of things that can be observed as pros of having Salesforce.
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I'm not really promoting or selling Salesforce licenses.
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We are here just to serve as support after Salesforce has been bought.
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But on the other side, I don't know any better platform to start with, because there's a lot of things out of the box and the implementation and the customization time is very reduced, opposed to starting from scratch or starting something cheaper.
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It really depends what are your actual needs and where you want to be with your systems.
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Yeah, really well said, ilya, which, of course, leads me straight into Flatforce and the way that you operate, because you've called it out even a few times in the way that you've given us the overview, which is there's really two sides to how you help and support these companies, which is the setup, which is one thing, and then also that ongoing support.
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Talk to us about how those two ways of operating work, because a lot of people probably don't realize what goes into a setup.
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Why do I need ongoing support once it's live?
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Talk to us about those.
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Yeah, well, the setup should come as an easy part.
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I mean that's the initial mapping of the business flow into Salesforce processes.
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I mean I say easy, easy for me and maybe not easy for everyone, it depends on your scale.
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But most of the clients they don't realize the full potential of what they have bought when they're buying Salesforce.
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So they see some nice videos and they can imagine a few of the features, what they like.
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Obviously they all want all these common pieces but then after they start using, as you said, the maintenance is the important piece because there's a lot of moving parts.
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I mean, if we just think of the simple example, you sometimes want to change the signatures or the templates of the outbound emails, maybe you want to onboard a few users, you want to build a new reporting.
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That are just some simple admin tasks.
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But the full potential of Salesforce comes after initial implementation and when all the users they figure out their own features and functionalities.
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They would like to have to make their life easier and to have it all in one platform and that's where the managed service of building new feature comes in.
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Yeah, which to that point, Ilya, I've gone deep into your business and the way that you serve your clients, and I've seen the word unlimited requests so many times on your website.
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You've got to talk to me about that, because even from just a client service perspective, it seems from the outside looking in, that you've got their back.
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You are essentially an extension of their team.
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I'd love to hear more about the way that you work with them yeah.
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So that basically came from our understanding of the current state of the it market.
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There are a lot of layoffs going on, there are a lot of tight budgets, especially when it comes to software and marketing.
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There are a lot of companies who cannot afford the internal resource anymore or pay the rates, especially in the US rates.
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So we had a client who had, let's say, basic needs, a few requests per week, and we came up to Idea to provide the flat fee, unlimited support.
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Flat fee and unlimited support basically means you pay one price, it's fixed in your budget, there are no time and materials and it's much cheaper than the employee.
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It's also pause anytime, cancel anytime.
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It's very flexible in that manner.
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Unlimited request is true in sense that you can pile up the unlimited requests in the backlog, but there is only one active request being done in the time.
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So it gives flexibility to the end customers that they can have a dedicated resource who knows their system and they can have it flexible.
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On the other side, it provides us flexibility that we can serve multiple customers at once.
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Yeah, and hearing you talk about that flexibility, it's again something that I saw when I looked at the way that Flatforce operates.
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It's again something that I saw when I looked at the way that FlatForce operates, which is how flexible you are with people making those requests, just from again an operations perspective.
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Handling those incoming requests is one thing, and having the resources and processes on your side is obviously important to fulfill those requests.
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What's that transfer look like between clients of yours and people who work with FlatForce?
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How do they get in touch with you and make those requests?
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And, on your side, how do you keep track of all this stuff?
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Yeah, so the requests are mostly asynchronous.
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So the ideology is that the customers they receive their board where they log in and they file in their requests.
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There is obviously for the new customers we provide a guidance how the request should look like and for some customers there can be some back and forth in providing the details.
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But I think after a few times we get on the same level of understanding.
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They get to understand what we need and we kind of get the understanding of the customer.
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As we discussed, each customer is different but the requests they come the same.
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So they are bored, they can manage their own task and that's where usually all the communication goes.
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We receive the access to their Salesforce environments as our user and there is the complete audit trail of what has been done on our side and we try to be as detailed as possible when providing the outputs in video screenshot and descriptive text so that can be easily observed.
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But the ideology is to be asynchronous, so none of us is responsible over the phone or Slack et cetera.
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Yes, I love that.
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That is one of my favorite words in business these days is asynchronous.
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I think that we need more asynchronous solutions.
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Shout out to Loom.
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I feel like I use it almost every single day because it's such a great solution out there.
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Ilya, I wanna ask you this question because, like I'd said in the teaser, you are one of us.
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You not only are a subject matter expert, but you're also growing your own business and I know that it's not your first business that you've grown but you've also worked internally at other businesses as well as manager and IT departments.
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I'd love to hear how all of those experiences have played into the way that you run Flatforce and the way that you operate as an entrepreneur, because I'm sure it gave you some things that you said.
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This works really well when I work internally and I want to borrow those, and some things that you say no, I want to do those differently under my own brand.
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Yeah, well, obviously, the work I do gave me a lot of close insights into the many departments of every business.
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I was able to be very close with finance.
00:22:43.556 --> 00:22:45.692
I was able to be very close with sales.
00:22:45.692 --> 00:22:51.711
I was able to be very close with technical departments All of the businesses.
00:22:51.752 --> 00:23:04.888
They have their different nature, their different workflows, but most of the most of the businesses which I you know never got the the idea how to scale in the software world.
00:23:04.888 --> 00:23:16.837
They were working on time and materials basis, where there are long iterations of how the projects are negotiated, how the projects agreed, and there is always some scope creep.
00:23:16.837 --> 00:23:27.974
So that's something very old in my mind and it comes to Waterfall and I never liked that idea.
00:23:27.974 --> 00:23:38.473
Every time when I was thinking about starting something of my own, that idea was not so appealing to me.
00:23:38.473 --> 00:23:58.001
The second very popular model of software services is what we popularly call the body shop, where the companies they just rent you to a developer on a day rate and they pretty much don't care afterwards.
00:23:58.001 --> 00:24:04.438
So that model, I mean, was not good to me either.
00:24:04.438 --> 00:24:09.617
So I was looking into something that's scalable and also easy sellable.
00:24:09.617 --> 00:24:14.175
That's how I came up with a flat fee available on the website.
00:24:14.175 --> 00:24:21.558
Easy buy, one click, Stripe just put your credit card in and a lot of flexibility inside.
00:24:22.184 --> 00:24:26.144
Yeah, and I love the simplicity of it Not just flexibility, but also simplicity.
00:24:26.144 --> 00:24:33.713
When you think about the landscape, it's fun considering where you are in the Salesforce ecosystem now and the clients that you service.
00:24:33.713 --> 00:24:36.704
Because I wonder, is this something where you are in the Salesforce ecosystem now and the clients that you service?
00:24:36.704 --> 00:24:45.060
Because, I wonder, is this something where you are educating potential clients and you're showcasing to them this is how we can unlock scale and growth in your business?
00:24:45.060 --> 00:24:54.214
Or, typically, when clients come your way, is it because they're already experiencing some sort of pain and they're already saying, holy cow, we need some external help here.
00:24:54.214 --> 00:24:57.575
What's that catalyst for them to actually reach out and take action?
00:24:59.525 --> 00:25:06.925
Yeah, so, as you said, we provide both type of services, but most of our clients are experienced users.
00:25:06.925 --> 00:25:24.574
As I said before, we are not selling Salesforce, so usually they end up with someone who sells licenses and does the initial implementation and then they realize the full potential of Salesforce and they're looking for someone to cater all of these, their ideas and requests.
00:25:24.574 --> 00:25:27.824
I mean a lot of them.
00:25:27.824 --> 00:25:42.426
They already have the ideas in their head, they understand the terminology and they are very, you know, helpful in that sense of not not having to educate them.
00:25:42.426 --> 00:25:57.248
On the other side, we are also accepting the vanilla clients, as we like to call them, and the process is a bit different, but they are they the, I would say, ideal customer for a flat force.
00:25:58.270 --> 00:26:05.493
Yeah, I fully appreciate how clear you are on your own business's direction and identifying that ideal market.
00:26:05.493 --> 00:26:14.647
Talk to us about flat force then, just from a strategic perspective, because it's so clear to me, even before you and I got together today, how well you know this market.
00:26:14.647 --> 00:26:16.814
Obviously, you've been in it for a long time.
00:26:16.814 --> 00:26:21.938
It just seems like you're so intentional about growing Flatforce in the way that you want to.
00:26:21.938 --> 00:26:23.924
What were some of those principles?
00:26:23.924 --> 00:26:29.403
As far as identifying the ideal clients, as far as how you structure your projects?
00:26:29.403 --> 00:26:35.575
I don't know what your team looks like on the back end, ilya, but I imagine that you love operations, so you've thought about all this stuff.
00:26:35.575 --> 00:26:37.699
What's flat force in your mind?
00:26:37.699 --> 00:26:38.625
What does that look like?
00:26:40.548 --> 00:26:45.194
yeah, well, uh, I I try to simplify, simplify things.
00:26:45.194 --> 00:26:48.805
Uh, the flat force is the remote first company.
00:26:48.805 --> 00:26:53.068
So all of the current employees, they are remotely working.
00:26:53.068 --> 00:26:59.093
The idea is to onboard more people as we scale up.
00:26:59.093 --> 00:27:17.740
Currently there is four of us who are employed, but the idea is to dedicate one employee per customer, two or three, it depends on the seniority or depends on the customer needs or the plans they select.
00:27:17.740 --> 00:27:23.744
So there is no specific geolocation where we look for our customers.
