AI & Automation for Your Workflows (Plus a Live Offer Creation Workshop) with Grant Hushek

for this? I need that. And he's Oh, sounds like you need a spreadsheet in Zapier. And I'm like, what? So it's incredible. So let's dive into that. This is an obvious stupid question, but Why AI and then why don't need AI. And I think there's a, it's the flip side of that, of we want to leverage technology. want to be ahead of the curve. Where do you see clients get it wrong? And why are you making it simple? Like maybe we just use make Zapier spreadsheets.

Does is there does there need to be creative work or is there judgment? Is there decision making on the inputs? And traditionally, you need to have no creative work and you need to have no judgment. And that's when something could be automated. But now you can jump a few branches higher into the chain. When you use a I and I think that the AI step in an automation accomplishes a lot of the low level decision making that pulls us out of our flow states.

And a lot of the kind of push that I make with people. Around automation is that yes, there's the quantitative aspect of we're saving you minutes, which rolls up to hours, which was up to, cost per hour. And therefore you save X number of dollars per month. But I also think the qualitative side is super important that if we can just remove a few of those micro decisions. Of how do I categorize this thing?

Or is this a one or a zero binary decision making that allows you to stay in your flow state or in your concentration mode longer, which ultimately allows you to get more stuff done. So there's a lot of the qualitative side of this to that. A. I inside of automation. Allows you to push forward on.

Can you derive some key data points from this? Or I have a like a sales call review, like here, though, here are the ways that I want to structure my executive review for

the sales call or et cetera, et cetera. So I like that you're mentioning it's low level judgment. Where can this go wrong? I know the creative front is not perfect, especially for copywriting. It's still revolutionize your stuff. But where can this go wrong? Or where have you seen this go wrong in either logic for clients or in real life from other people that you come in, you look at their workflows like, Oh, this is jumbled together. We're doing too much with AI.

For instance, if you have a customer support ticket that comes in. And it might get routed to 4 different teams instead of just saying, it's the product team versus the UX versus UI versus to the founder. It's an urgent thing. Instead of just like saying here, my categories put pretty strong definitions around those things of a founder should get notified if. These three bullets are true, and the UX team should get notified if these four things are mentioned, right? Or one of these four things.

The stronger your definitions are, the better your logic will be. So I think that's a pretty Important thing to keep in mind when you're putting some of these judgment action steps into your automations, because if your definitions are bad, your logic will definitely be bad.

Like we're doing tactical things. I know I'm buying tactical things, but I need the thinking. I need the strategy behind

the tactics and I know we need to work with you. But let me just fill out these tactical things first. Do you find the same way? Like people try to go straight into let's automate everything without actually having a strategy behind it. And how do we get to strategy quicker?

And I've learned the hard way that is, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you're thinking that there might be a change in process, because you want to lay the tracks, you want to lay the railroad tracks, one time for an automation and have it run. 10, 000 times on that track. But if you're going to move the track or the track is going to bifurcate at some point, you're going to have to lay a new track after that.

So that's a very important question to ask yourself, or at least to have your automation partner ask. Because If you go too soon and you build infrastructure before, like really long infrastructure before your processes are set, you're going to end up wasting time. And it's been really difficult for someone like me who knows what can be built and our processes, we're a young company, things are changing all the time. I'm like, I would love to automate this, but we're still finding our way.

So sometimes it can be frustrating. Even when I know what's possible, I'm like, ah, let me give it a month. Let me make sure this is not going to change. And then we can build stuff. And I'm finally getting to that point in a few exciting parts of the business.

the precursor is. There's a, help me understand the gap between the no code. Cause essentially you're doing digital transformation.

And when you do this, the stats I'm doing, some of my clients are in software the stats are, digital transformation isn't always a hundred percent clean, especially for larger orgs, like fail rates, 17 percent are black Swan events and usually fail rates are like 30 to it doesn't happen across the course, but help me understand and maybe I know no code on a no custom software, but are the lines blurring and more now that we have the co pilots higher weight ways, way more intelligent no code

tools to go to execute and actually build code for you. Like, where is that inner intersection now? And what's, where do you see the future of the custom software side with the no code solution side?

And so the convergence of low code and no code will definitely get there. And even if you don't know how to code at all, you can still ask the model to write it, explain it line by line. And if the, and then if you run it and it doesn't do that, then you can still say, Lines 36 to 40 say they do this, but the thing didn't do that. So let's take a look at 36 to 40. I think that's going to be very common and par for the course for a lot of no code agencies.

So I definitely think there's a convergence happening. Am I putting all my time into learning code right now? No, I think the no code tools are going to be plenty sufficient and really your average Joe plus an LLM, I think you're going to get a lot done.

Let's dive into one of the things that you mentioned, especially because we met, like I mentioned earlier, we want to integrate AI where we can. We want to be more effective. We want to boost profitability by lowering, working hours or tasks and maybe do more higher strategic level thinking. But you also mentioned you need to have the process. We need to have the actual strategy dialed in first. But there's also the I don't have everything dialed in. So how where do we start?

What are the lowest hanging fruit? Do we have do you have a roadmap or like a playbook of here are the lowest hanging fruits for your bigger pieces? You can automate certain pieces, but not all of it. Where should we be looking at when we're trying to refine

and redefine how we operate using the new tech?

And then just applying it to its fullest capability. That's even before you get a automation system built in, right? So those two tools, if you get the foundational data put where it needs to be, so your company records are all filled out, your contact records are all filled out.

Even if you're not, looking at building the HubSpot workflows or the ClickUp internal automations, just making sure that your data is all in the right place and consistent, I think is a really good first step to then use all the features later, right? And we're not talking about using any Zapier or Make. We're not talking about using any AI in any of this stuff yet. This is purely Making sure that everything is filled out the way it's intended.

And then you can start using the bells and whistles. And if you're on a tool like ClickUp, then you've got whiteboarding, which is a Miro competitor. You've got a video recording tool, which is a loom competitor. So you could actually get even more bang for your buck if you're just aware of all the features. And the same thing goes for HubSpot, right? If what's all there, you can get.

The lowest hanging fruit, which is, I really just think data integrity is that's the lowest hanging fruit that a lot of people are ignoring because once you have all your data in the right spots, then it's pretty easy to apply automation when the time comes.

Inbound integration, warm signal, like all these is a sales mechanism tool, but all these different things, and it was all packaged in a really competitive price. It's not, it sounds expensive, but compared to all the other tools and how much money I just dropped in one, just over the weekend

I think their marketing's phenomenal. Sometimes the app can be very difficult to use, but the way that they're approaching it is fantastic because now, since all your data lives there, it allows you to enable, to use a new tech in very unique ways that you couldn't before, but the data has to be there. You have to be using the right tool sets first to your point on that. Yeah.

And so I think that when people are also looking at complicating their tech stack, really think about am I getting the most out of the current tools I'm using, right? And then if you're not fill out all the data requirements, fill out all the data fields and Pro tip, you can also make it so that you can't move a deal to a certain stage or you can't do something unless fields are filled out. I'm turning that on for myself, like super valuable, but then it's all about leveling up.

Set it all up correctly, get someone's help if you want, but set it up correctly. Get the next layer feature and then the ROI that we're coming to the table with is if you can get HubSpot to talk to ClickUp, to talk to DocuSign, to talk to QuickBooks, that's another layer of ROI before you purchase the next tier of HubSpot or the next tier of Salesforce. So another thing to think about there. Totally.

Moving on the flip side, you mentioned earlier that you were looking at, Improving your processes, improving the way that you execute your work and on board clients and work with clients. I know one of our precursor pre calls. We were talking about like pricing and the way that the markets are shifting and I'll set this up with the frame of I'm finding and this has been true for quite a while.

But now with the with the rise of new technology and the rise of getting quicker, like solutions faster with AI, it is exasperating the problem. For anyone who's charging by the hour, if your agency is hourly billing, like you will be commoditized if you haven't been already and run to the ground for pricing if you haven't been already, but the AI is accelerating that even over the last week, I saw a tool. I'm not sure the validity of this tool. Cause it's a creative like briefing tool.

It's what, 300 bucks, something, 150 bucks a month. So good pricing, but it develops a creative brief, like strategy for like creatives or planners in like larger agencies. does all the market research for you. And it delivers this brief so that you can execute with your marketing team. That usually takes maybe two to three weeks. If you're doing it with a sprint, this can do it like an hour. So the time to value in what the tools are allowing us to do is increase

decrease the time to getting to value quicker so that we can execute. Anyway, that's a lot to dive into, but where, what are you seeing when it comes to value Pricing, user economics what are you saying?

I think that you're spot on that things are going to get commoditized if you're, Making the pitch that my retainer is going to be 10 hours of someone's time here or whatever it ends up looking but we do have to think about how are we positioning ourselves against the value you're driving for the company? One thing I struggle with. And again, something that we talked about earlier is we are inherently cost reductive, right? In the automation world.

So as I apply a much better project management system, I'm going to save hours for the project manager and everyone below to make sure that things are getting done on time and in full. That is reducing costs. It's not necessarily driving more revenue. Now, if I'm reducing the time for each of those roles that allows the fulfillment team to maybe handle one or two or three more clients per month, then there's an to be made about. Revenue. Great.

But it's that positioning that becomes a really difficult challenge to overcome. And so I think that a lot of businesses right now need to think about how am I going to position myself, whether it be to generate more leads? Great. Everyone loves more leads. But on the automation side, if you are doing cost reductive activities, it's the Great. Expansion of the business that needs to be prioritized.

And that's a tough, that's a tough one to make the jump for a lot of people just have a gut feeling that their operations are not ideal. And I don't really know how to write, does it feel like your operations suck right now? Let us help you. It's that's a tough, that's a tough one to argue for.

CAC, customer acquisition cost, which is acquisition like you're not helping them acquire, but you could reduce customer acquisition costs. Second one's profit, and they either measure it by revenue per employee what is it, the hours, reserve hours that they budget out for projects. A lot of items fall under the profitability. And the last one is LTV.

And I think to your point, you are hitting a lot of profitability and LTV points, but those are the major categories that you got to look at the niches that you're addressing and then specifically what are, and I'm stealing this from a client and you know who you are when I say this, the metric that matters. I love that they said this because each client themselves has a metric that matters to them, even though you might say profitability is oh, that doesn't matter, but they might care about.

You revenue per employee, or like you mentioned revenue per hour. That's fantastic. Revenue per minute. What if the client was like, Oh crap, I never thought of revenue per minute the way that you can reframe that that approach the third part of that is looking at the key frustrations that's causing that key metric to fail. and then everything else is the positioning part, but that's one way that I've found.

identify specifically, but you really need to dive into the metrics that matter to your specific And maybe because you're not vertical vertical focus, we can still like at multiple multiple verticals and look at it horizontally.

If you can improve project management and let everyone know what they're working on and also automate a few steps between, information coming into a form to A, project manager being aware of it or something like that, something that just gets the ball forward a little bit faster, then you can expand, maybe we can take on an extra 25 percent of a customer, or we can take on another full customer, right?

Depending on start days and things like that, then you get more revenue for each brand strategist or for each copywriter. And then that's how you roll it up, even though I'm not specifically. Generating the revenue the space for that, the revenue to come in is very valuable. And I just had this conversation with someone last week where he said, if we get the ability to handle one more client next month from this ClickUp stuff, that's a huge win. I go, fantastic.

I think we can definitely help just get you out of Google sheets and into something that you can see a chart, that's one of my favorite things to hear on a discovery call is, Oh yeah, we run everything. Google sheets. And I go, let's chat.

And they don't make that the promise versus we're going to make this thing better. For example, for her, it was like, why don't you just run a bootcamp or you just like guarantee in six weeks or less, we'll get you out of the day to day as a founder. I'd buy that all day. If I was a founder she sold me like a thing. And this is the framework that I have of like a viral offer. This is not a viral offer. This is a product based offer that stems to your project or your subscription based offers.

And the product based offer is not productizing is not templates. It's not all that crap. It's essentially giving an open and close loop. open loop is I hate the day to day. And if you close it just by buying this thing, even if it's a short term, six week, eight week, whatever program you want.

That's what I'm finding, by the way, if they buy this thing, the very act of the purchase closes the loop in their mind, just like I bought I didn't buy it yet, but I downloaded this new app thanks to our friends that haven't didn't like That sent me like, Oh, this health app. I'm like, okay, cool. I downloaded it. And I felt like I closed a loop. Like I got healthier, just downloaded the silly app, even though I haven't purchased it yet, but because in my mind it closes a loop okay, cool.

Now I know how to do this. Or even for to do's, I think this is a thing why we are obsessed with to do lists, because we have all these things in our mind, we purchase a new to do list. Oh, we used to have paper and a new pad and then we write everything down. And then it's all done. Nothing's done on the list. It's just out of my mind and

You could sell that, but that's more on the project side based.

or whatever, then the flip side is going to be on average. you have a transformation metric for clients? Like how faster can they find this or how more confident do they feel? Or what is one of the, maybe choose a benefit that you deliver. And then what's a metric that you've used to measure that benefit?

One is the quality of life, like a personal, like what happens if I don't solve this issue for me personally, like me as a Then second, what's the business case. Cause every time that you go to market, if it's a product based offer or a subscription service based offer, it has to have a business case. It has to have a solution that. That's that helps

them, which is obvious, but I think framing in them that way helps us think about it this way. But I thought, okay, Look at 10 documents just to do my job day, and I waste maybe two minutes doing that. And that's realistic. Cause sometimes we think we do it in 15 seconds. Things usually for me take longer, like for projects Oh my gosh, it's taking me longer to do this thing to think. So let's just Two minutes on average.

And if your team has eight people, might be wasting 162 hours, let's say conservatively, 160 minutes, to three hours, just to say two hours to be conservative. It takes waste. If you have eight people, your team is wasting at least two hours a day. That's 10 hours a week. And if that 10 hours a week, what can we do with that? Again, I don't know the answer to that, but what is the benefit? Could we onboard five new clients with those 10 hours?

Could we be prospecting and selling for those 10 hours? Can we take, this is a realistic thing. Two more hours of discovery calls the team. And then from there, if you do 10 discovery calls and you close, I don't know, two conservative, I don't like the word using conservative here, but conservative, that's two new deals. You could frame it to that or you can frame it towards

the dollar amount or you can frame it towards the time and you wouldn't frame

what to think about that unless I said, Oh, it's the size of this building or that building. We have to tangify that. But if you can give me 500 hours back a year, anchor it towards what does that mean for me based on what I want? and you could condition it around the offer saying eight weeks, we will find a way to get you 500 hours back. Again, that's the value statement.

We can change that value statement to something else or either time to money or employees, or that's the We can give you two employees back of payroll. In eight weeks and if guaranteed, we don't, we'll work with you until you do, because you've A product and that what's weighed, who is offering that in the market right now?

the whole idea is. And this is something that I stand by if we believe in the work that we do. And I'm talking to the audience here. If we believe in the work that we do, and that actually gets results for clients and you're not selling the results that you actually get, you're not promising a future that's guaranteed. You're promising that you're going to do the work. If I go to surgery, like I had a couple of people in my life that went to heart surgery, open heart surgery.

And if the doctor was like, you might die. But I hope this works, I'm not going to go to a doctor, if they explain, and I actually had a client tell me that he needed to go under for something. He's yeah, the doctor told me, there is a slight risk one in 10, 000, but I've done these thousands of times. You're going to be fine. We're going to do this and you're going to come back, sell the confidence, sell the thing that you do and stand by that work.

Cause if you can't stand by your work, then we're just like the old adage of what we don't want to be in terms of selling a snake, but if you are doing good work and you are actually executing with a, with a. With the marketplace and you can stand by your work. You can just say, Hey, I'm going to, I promise to do this work because no one else is, is standing by their work that way.

Which is why it like gives a higher believability and your risk rate will probably be low because you're going to go through the execution. You're going to deliver that clients are going to love it because they're already like solve the dopamine issue in the beginning. And then from there, the experience obviously should be good and probably is good. I think it's a win. You're just standing out by making a strong offer. You're not promising the world.

Like I see online, I'll get a hundred leads a day and your CRM like no, more about promising the quality of the work towards the outcome that they care

Like a two minute savings or a minute and a half, whatever it ends up being that rolls up to something really meaningful when you have a team, and I've never really made that connection to the eight person team or the 12 person team, the 15 person team, like that's pretty, pretty serious value when you roll that all up into a year. So I hope that's useful for someone else like it was for me.

I think that framing of start small with what you The most tangible thing that you can latch onto and then apply it to a team, not an individual, think about a year, not a day. That's a pretty impactful way to package a service or something up and close that loop. As you said.

Cause usually like I figure out like, Oh, idea, let's I'm training for it, like a half iron man. Right. I got the plan done, then I need to solve other problems. Like what else do I have to do this thing? What else arises in your clients, your client's mind?

A lot of people hire an agency and are worried that you work with the founder in the sales process, and then you're gone. I'll say making sure that relationship and that communication is really a focus. Throughout the entire engagement. I think the credibility side with how quickly AI and automation are coming along, coming online. There's so many new entrants to the market. So it's hard to stand out and make sure that you communicate trust on that first impression.

It's selling safety, it has to sell, like it's going to be safe. And then the offering or the product, like the front end offering to sell the transformation so that they can feel like this is different. This is not just a set of hands. And the more unique you make it to your market, the more Oh, this is made just for

me. But again, that depends on your positioning. If you want to niche down even further, but yeah, what are your thoughts on that? I usually who I was taught, I was talking to Will, if you're listening to this, I was talking to Will Stevens and he also asked me this on his podcast is niching down can be a very hard situation. Like people tell say to choose one niche, you can do horizontal niching. You can do solution based niching.

If you start expanding your target audience, then you have to go to multiple industries. What are your thoughts on niching down?

And I'm like, no, I really just click up and I'll tolerate notion because so many people are on it, and he's okay stay there and that's the niche. And if they don't use Slack, don't even have the conversation, just avoid it because we have to use Slack and so for this service. And so I think that when in the past I've been thinking about, Oh, am I niching down enough In that specific instance with the productized service, not even close, right?

I was allowing someone to do this customization or that customization, but I needed their reframe of the product is this and we'll change the name on the button here. And then if they need anything else, we can provide that because it is automation and it is still custom, but we're following a framework and right now. With your point about solution based, like I mentioned, marketing agencies, law firms, and accountants, all B2B services, all with the same four buckets of problems.

Now, eventually I would like to get to the point where I can say, Hey, we've built the, we built the framework to use. Panadoc for your signing platform. This is the template of the SOW. Are you willing to move it into make it look like this? And I think that will allow us to both provide a higher quality service, but also Bring that confidence to the engagement instead of being more custom and flowing with the wind. But right now I struggle with this too.

It's I think that I've got a pretty good niche within this. Solution based framework of the four buckets of work for B2B services. But I easily could go into specifically, short form video agencies. Cause there are so many now you could do that. Is there, you have to weigh that pros and cons. If you are the guy for that, as the agency for short form video. Content, are they going to pay you a two or three X premium for being that person? Or would you rather.

Flip, invert the ratio, service more people and drop your price. And that also gets to the point that we started this conversation about with AI and all the ability to produce things faster. It's is the premium even still going to be worth it? If someone can be a generalist, but satisfy things in a third of the time. I don't know. And. Do you get more value for doing it in a third of the time?

Can you now charge more and drop the time because you're faster and you know what you're, what playbook you're deploying. We've done it a two dozen times. Now we can do it in two weeks instead of six. Another question, right? I think there's a lot of those things that are all completely up in the air right now. We don't really know, in my opinion, what is going to be that magic formula of I'm going to be on our retainer for.

8k a month, because I know that we're going to do this in month one, this in month two, this in month three, pause month four, assess, and then we'll do something from this bucket of goods for five, six, and seven. And if you've got it down to that level of detail, and you're applying the same playbooks based on the team's priorities, awesome. But if you get to the point where you're so good and you're using AI to the fullest, and your team is six people instead of 60, like it used to be.

To execute the same amount of work. Does that mean that you charge less? Do you charge more because your time to value is higher and you're applying the same skill? I don't know, man it's an interesting time with how much we can compress deliverable times.

So there's a few things that you said that I thought were pretty fascinating. I think that your differentiator is the four buckets because those four buckets make it feel like I have security in terms of the, this is how you know what you know how to solve the another way to differentiate is through the pricing model. Like you mentioned, it doesn't have to be always cheaper. It can just be like, you're doing it right. The first time you're doing it right.

Over time, because like you mentioned, like I know when I set up this app, it's going to break. Cause something's always going to update. Like I had a, just a simple, silly Google calendars zap and it broke because Google calendar Zapier updated and they to legacy. I'm like, are you kidding me?

Cause sometimes some people don't value some services or more than others, or they, so there's that. But the third is like, where's the market going? And I think that's the question. We don't know the answer to completely, but we can either look at macroeconomics. We can look at microeconomics within an industry, and we can look at regulations and compliance because some industries won't be on the AI train until there's further, further legislation, et cetera.

So the thing is looking at those key things and deriving and placing your bets strategically. And then how do you differentiate? that future, that's three or five years out, even though we don't know that future because everything is speculative. And then placing your bets off of that.

And that is a toss up in the same way that I think about for our service. Do you want to call a phone number that's always on that goes straight to a voice agent that can run you through our 15 minute audit and you'll get an email with all of the results of

And we just don't know what the answer's gonna be. So I think that's one of those things where you can hedge your bets. You can play both sides. But that's really, that's a very interesting, I don't know if it falls in the world of ethics or just personal preference and everyone's going to be different, but that's a very interesting question that we're going to see take shape soon.

What are you, I think to close this and close this off as we, we don't know the future

and we're heading into a new advent of technology maybe cyborgs in the future, who knows. What are you doing to stay ahead of the curve it comes to all this information and potential future? And I know the answer, like without having analysis paralysis, but what information are you taking in? What are the trends you're looking at? What are the sources that core to you so that derive the answers?

So I think that's one thing of just having the conversations with people staying on top of it. Super interesting. There's a handful of newsletters, AI tool report what's the other one that I catch up on? I think the guy's name is Mark Colgan for sales intelligence automation. I find his newsletter is pretty good. There's a handful of newsletters. But ultimately I think the thing for the business owner seat to keep in mind is like making space.

Just in general for having these kinds of mental dialogues. It can be very difficult to, at least for me, knowing so much of what I do about what's possible, it is analysis paralysis for me to be like, what could I do with my invoices to make them get sent on time? What a fun problem and. I think that is a fun one to think about, but it's also important to zoom out and have that question of, do we want to start putting resources behind the agent that's going to do the audit?

Cause maybe there are people who want to do that. Like we don't need a chat bot on our website. We're a service based business, or maybe it is good to have a light flow, but whatever the point is that I don't need something crazy there, but if someone does want answers in 15 minutes, instead of 15 days for what their system design is going to look like. Maybe we can build that and put some resources behind it. So that only comes from.

Me following my curiosity, looking at some of the tools that are on the market and knowing that a, it's possible B, how do I want to apply it? And so to make it tactical, like the week of Thanksgiving in the U S I'm taking that week to be think week. So the first three days of the week, the whole team, we're pausing client work. And obviously we have to set ourselves up to do that well, but we want to pause client work from Monday to Wednesday.

Thursday, Friday, we'll be off because it's a U. S. holiday. So our clients won't be expecting anything, but just taking those three days to be like, Hey, a lot of change in the world, everyone on the team is curious, what could we be building? And how are we going to get those things built by the end of the year? So we can go into 2025 kind of ripping. That is something that I'm really excited for. And I put a form out to the team and pinned it in Slack.

And I said, Hey, if anyone has any ideas. Throw it in here and we'll have the conversation. We'll have daily calls and we'll see what is interesting, what can be built, and it's purely a time for you to look at the way that we do things. Look at ClickUp, look at the way that the business works from fulfillment, from growth, et cetera. Ask me questions. I have the 360 degree view.

So if you want a perspective on sales or you want a perspective on marketing, and there's something you've always wanted to build. Let's talk about it and then just go for it and see what happens. Because I think that ultimately when you have a global team of curious people and they all are reading different things, that takes it, that's how you can take advantage of that and the holiday where most of our clients are off. So that's what I'm really looking forward to.

It's time to start making it scalable and where the train tracks are going to be set and run for the next six months. And that if we are the golden shining example of what can be done in ClickUp and what can be done in HubSpot, then we can confidently say you're getting the most up to date version of these two tools for your organization.