Work Smarter, Not Harder: How Systems Save You Time with Aaron Gorrell

We are gonna be talking about some powerful systems that you can implement not only in your business also in your career but also in your personal life , to make sure that you get the most out of every single day . That's what today's call is all about .

We have a expert who's gonna be here sharing some of the strategies that he has done to successfully not only build an incredible business but also create a deep connection at home with his family .

So if you're someone who runs out of time and you're like I don't know how to generate more time in my life while still being able to make the progress that I truly want to in my business and my life , well , stay tuned , because that's what we're doing today . So let's go . It's time to redefine leadership .

Welcome to Modern Leadership , where we see things differently . Our podcast is all about empowering entrepreneurs like you to achieve the next level of success in business and life . We believe that you can create a massive impact in the world without compromising your personal life or family time to do so .

It is a really powerful business that helps make a huge impact in the criminal justice world , and what I say in reverse is normally he's the one who's introing me to all of his people , and I asked him , because of the powerful , not only systems and structures that he has in place , to be able to run such an impactful organization with very few people , but

also because you're going to hear today like some of the things that he does is next level , and I really wanted to bring you guys an expert , so that it was both me and Teresa being able to chime in , but also having someone who has a different level of systems , of skills in place , that really helps him get more stuff done in less time .

So , aaron , welcome to the call and it is so great to be able to intro you for once .

My hope today is that I can provide some little bit of insight for your folks , for your audience , that helps them take their business to the next level , and maybe you'll learn something too , Mark I don't know , probably not .

So , first off , I know that not everybody here knows you , but we want to give you an opportunity to kind of introduce you to the team here of Modern Leaders . So could you tell us a little bit about you ? Maybe your family and your business Give them a little bit of idea of your behind the scenes .

He's off at CU Boulder right now and the other two are in the workforce doing their thing , boulder right now , and the other two are in the workforce doing their thing .

A little bit about my background and I promise I won't go too deep into it , but I think , as I was preparing for this , thinking about what are some of those critical points in my life that kind of led to where I am today .

I went through college actually on an Army ROTC scholarship and ended up being commissioned into the military police , so that was kind of my touch point for criminal justice . Quite frankly . It's what kind of got me intrigued . But I found out very quickly that not only did I not like it , I didn't like the structure , I didn't like it .

So it's very big on structure and and and levels , but I also , I just personally didn't like it , I didn't enjoy it , and so I fell back to my college degree in accounting and even faster than I realized that the military wasn't for me , I found out accounting wasn't for me .

It just was no bueno and I kind of fell into , quite honestly , a position as a financial advisor , working as a junior partner to a more senior person , and in that it was formulated because , first of all , I saw what a really amazing boss was .

One of the things that he told me , ironically , given the business we're in , is that the best kind of business to be in is one where you're making money at night Because you can only work so many hours a day , you can only charge so much per hour .

Yeah , and then you know , I got to say it took me about 15 , 20 years to figure out what that business model is , but I finally accomplished it with Justice Clearinghouse . I went back to college , essentially got a second degree in information technology .

I worked at a couple of companies FedEx , worldcom and then about 20 , it was about 25 years ago I entered the world of criminal justice technology consulting . We work all throughout the country with law enforcement courts , probation and essentially help them work on developing their systems , developing their processes and automating .

. In the summer we started off with , I think , we had two attendees and I'll be honest with you , mark , it was terribly embarrassing because I was leveraging my contacts in the field . I thought , oh boy , you know , I've got , I've got folks at the fbi presenting here . This is going to bring them in by the bear . Nothing could be further from the truth .

that happened overnight , right , like you just flipped a switch and then 1000 people .

I was traveling two to three weeks a month and , you know , if I got two webinars in in a month , it would be a good month , quite honestly , because there's , as you know , there's a lot that goes into producing these programs and finding the right speaker and finding the right format . I was very fortunate .

I used a site called Upwork I don't know if you're familiar with it , yeah and I ended up connecting with Chris Christina McHale , who is I would say she's my number two person , but that would imply that she reports to me and I don't know that that's so true anymore . Honestly , she was phenomenal . I mean , within months .

We were booking one a week , two a week , three . We ended up having to add a second slot . We used to just be one time a day and then we went to two webinars a day for a little bit . We went to up to six webinars a week . That burned us out , but that was really critical .

Having the right person that could essentially help build our calendar our webinar calendar . Having the right person was absolutely critical because I couldn't quit my day job . I couldn't quit the consulting business until it was 2019 before I could even start backing off of the consulting , because Justice Clearinghouse was burning a fair amount of cash .

are weak , right , it just totally changes the game because it's leveraging everybody's strengths and instead of getting people to do things they're not good at or don't enjoy , right With that kind of like energy , if you find that mixture of like this beautiful place in the synergy where everybody's like leaning into their strengths and it shows , it shows in the videos

, it shows when I show up on webinars because that's how you guys run it Right . So , um , I love that you were able to do that . I'm also glad that you found it . Did you find her , the ? Was that the first hire that you actually had , or did it take some time before you found Chris ?

I'll tell you , um , the first webinar that she had to do completely on her own , that she had to do solo , was because I was in a meeting and I couldn't get out of it a consulting meeting and she called me up after and said I'm never doing another webinar again and so I that would be .

The other thing is finding people that , um , maybe have more capabilities than they're even aware of , that are willing to grow with you , that have that , that have kind of the willingness to grow . I think is is a really critical part to 100 percent .

the world at that stuff , right , so it's , it's powerful when you hire for that versus just hiring for the skill . And then you know that person doesn't want to learn or add anything , anything else to the repertoire . So , um , okay . So I mean , I guess this is a really great intro into what we're doing .

But let's kind of like tap into like technology and systems , et cetera , because that's something that you had to do working full-time still , and then creating this justice clearinghouse , doing all these webinars . I'm sure that that took a lot of systems to put into place .

So I'm curious , like just starting off with the basic stuff , like thinking about like how technology and systems could help entrepreneurs so they can accomplish more in less time , especially not just in business but in their personal life Like how , how does technology help ?

. I , very early on in my 20s , developed that audacious vision of having a job that doesn't control my life , that gives me the flexibility to kind of work where I wanted it , when I wanted it .

I got to tell you the technology consulting wasn't it , it definitely wasn't it , but it of course created a really important foundation and helped me develop really deep context in criminal justice .

So one of the things that I set out , especially as I started working down this , working through this , developing this business model that I have with Justice Clearinghouse , is making me the least important person in my business , that it doesn't revolve around me .

You know , the show can and will go on , even if I'm on vacation , if I'm sick , if I'm up in the mountains working those kind of things . And I've got to say the first critical path , the most important thing I think , to accomplishing that is a really simple one . It's writing down your business processes . Really simple one .

It's writing down your business processes and it sounds like such a simple thing but you feel when it , when it's a solopreneur , when it's just you , you feel utterly absurd documenting this stuff . But as you're documenting it .

One of the really empowering things is to think , is to know that someday someone else is going to be doing this work or some other system is going to be doing these work , and there's there's a lot of things that we've automated . I feel like we've gotten to the point where automating much more is going to be a diminishing returns kind of situation .

But there are amazing people . You know this is the gig economy and I highly encourage people to take to take advantage of that . I mean , chris and I are full-time justice clearing house , but I've got a whole staff . You know another four people behind desk . They're part-time and every one of them is a contract .

a CRM or even a human another human can do this , like maybe even better than I can , and it's that awareness piece . Um , I'm curious do you have like a maybe potentially a story of how technology systems have like have maybe helped you overcome , maybe a challenge that came up while you were trying to grow Justice Clearinghouse ?

The guy who is actually working with me right now on improving some aspects of the website he's from I never even heard of it . It's like part of the former Czechoslovakian Republic , it's like CzechSec or something like that . I couldn't pronounce it . So that's been really , really important throughout the growth .

A website that was hosted on Wix I don't know if you're familiar with Wix . It's a great turnkey . You can drag and drop your way , have your website up in about an hour . But technologically it's a dead end , it just is . There's not much more that you can do with it .

You have to work and play within their ecosystem and I ended up , after some research , discovering WordPress no-transcript . One of the critical moves that we did was hiring a guy to build us a WordPress site and then creating some custom functionality . That was kind of the beginning of our automation .

say you know what , even though we still have this thing and it's working , how do I make this pivot and not only like pay money and find somebody and try this new technology , because we all love change , but what do you think it was that helped you to lean into that , so that you could actually have that more advanced technology and protect your future ?

You don't ? You don't have to be a coder , you don't have to be a software developer for 15 years in order to implement your own technology , but you do have to be willing to experiment . You have to be very willing to fail a lot , yeah , yeah .

Doing it well versus just like giving it away . Right .

right . I mean , I think one of the things I learned in the software development business is that in the bulk of software developers the bulk of developers are actually kind of they're kind of lazy people quite honestly , and they will .

They will find every reason why a task is going to be a problem and , if you're paying them by the hour , why it's going to take 10 more hours than you thought , and so you just have to kind of you know , getting that second opinion talking to a friend , talking to a resource , I think is really important to be able to make sure that you're going to get

what you want at the end at a reasonable cost . I know people that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on systems , and it was probably by magnitude of 10 too much .

Even though it's not necessarily moving the needle , you can actually see what it is that you need to do right there . So I love that being able to tap into that and then start . You know , using your technology to be able to create more in less time . But I think Teresa has a question for you now .

We couldn't do any automation with it . But you know there's a lot of other dead ends and I know there's probably a lot of podcasters out there and it certainly has a place . But I've always had a couple of key problems with the whole podcasting business model , and one of them is you don't own the platform . You know you could be deplatformed , you can .

You know they can change the algorithm and suddenly no one can find your site . But I think the biggest one is you're completely dependent on that platform for being able to talk with your customers if you're potentially and so I think , while they're a great place to start , I think to avoid wasting time with them , you have to be able to see the end goal .

You have to begin with the end in mind , as Steve Covey said . So it's why , when we did webinars , I actually considered making it a podcast initially and I said no . If I want to make it a podcast , I can extract the audio from one of these things and there's my podcast show . But now I can put it on YouTube .

I can put it on my own site , which is what our , our first business model was was to take the webinars that from our expert presenters like you , mark , and to be able to put them behind our paywall and generate revenue from , from our membership that . Who can access that library ? Kind of like a YouTube bot .

Um , one of them I forget the name of the actual app , but it's an app that you load on your phone and you basically say , between these hours and these hours , I can't use these specific apps .

And in order for you to use one of those apps within that time frame like , let's say , you're like I absolutely have to go on Facebook or whatever you have to tap this button 100 times to unlock the app .

And what he said is like you get to about 30 or 40 and you're like this is a waste of time , I'm going to go do something else , right , and it's like it holds your browser . It holds like something . It prevents you from going down any of these rabbit holes that we could potentially go down .

But you're right , like building on a space where you control , you own it and if something were to go down , you could take it somewhere else . I mean that is so critical .

I mean it's something that early on , like even the business model that we were a part of , it could very easily be changed in a second if you're working for somebody else versus you know , owning your own stuff .

And there's nothing wrong with doing some of those things you got to plan in advance , like , ok , if something were to happen , how am I going to make sure that I protect what it is that I have ? Right , and there's a lot of technology that can actually help you do that . You can create your own .

I know we have our own app right that we can actually take people into the mighty networks and be able to have like environments like that where we pay for it and Facebook can't decide if we're going to join it or be shut down . So I really , really love that .

But so I we have a lot of people who were here who might just be getting started when it comes to like business and technology and using this kind of stuff . So if we were to take this back at its most basic level , like , what are maybe for those people just getting started , what are some quick wins that they can actually get with technology ?

But in 2019 , we started to pivot a little bit to developing online courses and , to answer your question , we used a tool called Articulate Rise to develop those online courses , and there's a couple of things that I love about Articulate Rise . It's an expensive platform . I think it's still about $1,100 a year , so it's not cheap .

But what you get out of that is a product that you can drag and drop your way into a course . It's very , very easy to use and very , very straightforward and simple to use , and what it churns out is a course that you can implement on a lot of different websites and a lot of different platforms .

So you can use a platform like Thinkific , which has some great traffic , but the reality is that traffic probably isn't going to find you in all reality because there's 100,000 other developers on that platform . But whatever you develop , this and this goes back to that technology dead ends whatever you develop in Thinkific you can't use anywhere else .

If you want to put it on a different platform , you've almost got to start off from scratch and using a tool , a third party tool . If you would like our particulate rise , you can use a protocol called SCORM Don't ask me what that stands for , by the way , as SCORM , which is a very standard way , no .

There's another example . I literally , the way I was found out about Particulate Rise was a friend that worked on the courts and she told me that she spent 50 . She does it's kind of ironic , she does kind of financial management coaching . She spent $50,000 getting training for Articulate Rise . My mouth dropped open because I spent zero .

And Chris , as the majority of our technology , of our course development , she doesn't have a technology background and so it's . You know , your own education is really really important , but also just experimenting and playing with it , find out what works and what doesn't , is really important too works and what doesn't , is really important too .

So what is a system that I can lean on that can help me through this process ? Because you probably didn't want to do all that stuff yourself and a system like this can help make it look professional , can help make it resellable so much easier because you're leaning into the system .

So I know somebody asked in here is , like , what automation should I choose to use ? And when I think about , like , what automation I should choose to use , it really depends on , number one , where you are in business .

But , like we always got to ask ourselves , we've got to begin with the end in mind , like , what is our goal right now and what is maybe a problem that we're in terms of like what some of the processes that we're doing that is taking us the most amount of time . So for us , one of the things that we do is we never edit any of our videos .

We never do any of our podcast editing either . We don't do any of that because it would take us so much time . It would take us out of what we do best .

It or even at least just speed up the process for me doing it , so that I don't have to be handcuffed to doing this thing all the time . Right , whether that's a person or an automation or a system , if it's something like that , you can look at the things that you're doing , like writing out your . This is what I do every single day , right ?

So , marie , if you wrote down , these are the activities that I take every day , this is the process that I take people through and then look at that and go what people through ?

And then look at that and go what of these things could be automated so we can open the door for me working on other things , right , we call it like working in the business versus working on the business , right , and the less that you can work in the business , the more you can work on the business and like create those systems . Does that make sense ?

Yeah , so I really love that question . I really love that feedback . One thing that I do want to share too . I know that you and I were talking offline about this too , aaron , and that is like chat GBT , right ? I cannot tell you how much time that has saved me .

This morning I'm redesigning a program that we have , and normally what I would do is I would try to grab all of the copy that I've ever written and I would try to see what it is .

And literally what I did is I copied and pasted the copy , the old copy , and I said , hey , this is what I want it to sound like and this is the changes that I want to make , and this is what the price is going to be .

And it spit out like this beautiful thing that I had to make a few adjustments , but I'm like this literally took me 10 seconds to do , right , I mean , it writes the copy for these videos , it comes up with some of the questions of these , and it's one of those technologies where a lot of people are afraid of it .

But I'm like , if you're trying to , even if you're having a conversation with somebody , right , and you're like I don't know how to answer this you could literally copy what they said , put it in the chat GPT and say how can I respond to this , and it will help work through so many different things .

So if your thing is , I need to get more creative , I need to be able to put together stuff like this . I would ask you are you using some of the technology and tools like ChatGBT , something that's super readily accessible , but I still don't see a lot of entrepreneurs using it . So what do you think about that , aaron ?

It literally doesn't use any pre-programmed instructions , and the whole reason I preface my comments with that is because it makes me uncomfortable at times too . If I can look just like the scenario you talked about , I need to write an email . Here's what I kind of want to say .

It does a great job for creating that first draft , giving you an opportunity to go through it and make any corrections , modifications . They've gotten pretty good . They don't do that hallucination stuff quite so much anymore .

And so I spent a couple of weeks training chat GPT and then I started testing it , and in hindsight I should have started testing it sooner because I said , one of the questions I asked literally was what does it take to become a member of justice of jch ? I use the acronym even though I trained at jch as justice clearinghouse .

And it said the japanese cinegraphic society . Um yeah , and it's it hallucinated . And so I was like , all right , it's not quite ready yet for that . Uh , interaction with my end user , with my customer , where I can't get in the middle and correct , correct , not fallacies like that .

So yeah , ironically , I've asked that same question after that like four or five times and it gave me exactly the right answer . And so this is the part where I'm like I'm not really comfortable deploying that , but boy , that would save us a lot of time I can answer some of the questions .

It definitely would even if , like , um , like for example here , like grabbing that script and saying , okay , these are the answers , and just having somebody who goes to it , reply and then paste the script and then send it so that it doesn't have to be us I mean , that's the leveraging of like , not only the humans , and I would , I , I would be hesitant on

letting ai directly communicate with my customers too , because I'm like I want to have a little bit of a personal touch with that .

But yeah , being able to like , look in it , look at it , make some adjustments and then from there I mean that's a lot of what we do is like making those adjustments and then just using that kind of like as a script flow the next time somebody asked that question , right , I mean , it just brings up a great like .

A point is like how many times have you guys been asked the same question in your business and you create an entirely brand new response ? What have you sat down and you said these are the five or 10 questions that people ask me all the time and I'm spending time answering these .

I'm actually going to perfect it , spend like five or 10 minutes like putting this together and I'm never going to change it again until maybe something changes in the future . But like I have this script now , I just go to that page , copy and paste it , so I don't have to rethink it , right ?

And that's not only saving you energy , like in your brain's brain space , but it's actually going to be able to you're going to be able to get more stuff done and actually have a better response , cause I know for me , if I'm exhausted , my response is do this .

If I'm not exhausted , it's a little bit longer and it's like oh hey , great question , here's how you do this . You're like , what if I did that one ? And that could be the best version of me every single time , and I don't even have to copy and paste it , right ?

The only reason I thought about that , by the way , is what you said about developing those responses for those repetitive questions is what you said about developing those responses for those repetitive questions . Now I will tell you , my whole goal with those responses was to shorten the conversation as much as possible .

I had other things I had to work on , and so they were fairly in terms . I will tell you . I recently , because in one of your presentations earlier this year , you said are you working in your business or are you working on your business ? And I was like I've got to get out of this customer service .

Not only is it not making me happy , I think that terseness is probably turning some people away and , quite frankly , there's other people that just are a lot more patient maybe than me , or something like that . But now the way it works is that if she has a question she can't answer she .

She basically escalates it to me and I take the question or at least I give her the right answer .

And especially if they're a good , like a good person that works for you , they're actually going to put more time and energy into it than I typically would If it was like early in the morning and like somebody wants to , you know , ask it's all like back of what you started with , right , writing out what your processes look like , what like , um , what you're

currently doing right now , and asking yourself , like , out of these things , what is taking me the most amount of time and what is a piece of technology that I could invest in to really be able to save time

? Now I do want to hear , like I , we're getting close to the end here and and I want to ask you a question , because this kind of just came up for me right now and that is like when you're early on , especially when you're early on in business , I have a lot of entrepreneurs who are like I'm not making enough money , I can't afford to do that thing .

I can't afford . Automation , I can't afford . A VA I can't afford and they're stuck in this like I've got to do it all myself because I can't afford it . And once I make money , and once I'm like I have enough income , then I can go and do those things . What piece of advice , aaron , do you think you would give someone who's in that state right now ?

Being able to manage your own communications with your customer is critical . We built up this amazing mailing list and when we transition , or added to our repertoire at doing those online courses , we had a ready-made customer base . Well , that started off with MailChimp's free platform that I think allows up to like 1,500 contacts , yeah , yeah .

And if you're using WordPress , which you can get a WordPress site and set up for like $8 a month or something like that site and set up for like eight dollars a month or something like that , if you're using wordpress , there's all sorts of plugins that you know . You fill out a form on the website and it goes straight into into a mailchimp .

Um , so I I would say that there are some really great options out there and when you're starting off , yeah , you have to use a lot of free tools . You have to , you have to use . So you know , but , but you are going to have to have some kind of free tools . You have to .

You have to leave you , so you know , but , but you are going to have to have some kind of budget . I think starting starting off that expectation that you can accomplish what you want with no cost is probably not realistic . You're going to have to invest a little bit in your business , even early on .

What else am I going to do next ? And before we would do it , we did have we had a lot of money going out , but it was like it allowed us to work more on the business , like we were talking about . Because if you're constantly doing those things , those day-to-day things , you can't think outside the box .

You can't think about like , what is a new program or product that I can put together ? Like , how can I make some different sales , some new sales ? Have you know , connect with people from JCH , be on larger webinars ? But if you're constantly just working and doing the day-to-day , you can't see some of those awesome opportunities , right ?

So so just starting small and then seeing how it feels when you don't have to do that anymore and , like Aaron was saying in the beginning , your business is growing while you're sleeping .

Right , we have a VA who lives in the Philippines and one of the greatest feelings that I get is I wake up in the morning and I get a message from her and she's like hey , I just finished work and I she I literally just woke up and she's been working while I've been sleeping and she's been sending messages , having conversations , posting up videos on our

platforms , and I'm like that feels amazing because I wasn't doing any of that and the business is moving forward for her . But the second piece is I always love when I realize the impact my business is making in some of the other people's lives .

Like her , like Naeice , she's able to live a great life over there because of our business and because of some of the work that we give her , and she's also the kind of person that gives back to us so much by just like really crushing everything that we do for her Right .

So it's kind of like this synergy of of not only does it help us save time and energy , but it actually helps empower them because they , you know , have some income , because we're actually able to support them through that right , and it's a beautiful place when you realize that that's the impact that you get to make and then you can spend your time and your

energy like where it's best spent .

It's so beautiful because when my day's ending , her day's beginning .

Probably one of the biggest game changers out there we touched on it earlier is AI , and that can be kind of scary , but here's the thing that AI is going to do for entrepreneurs is that it really levels the playing field between these mega companies that can spend hundreds of millions on technology and little guys like us that are just happy to have a six-figure

business . Yeah . Because AI is going to break down those barriers and because AI is infinitely scalable , it's going to be able to be done so much cheaper and you're not going to have to have people with 20 years of experience doing some of this stuff .

So the sooner that we start using it and actually getting us to save more time and do things quicker and sometimes better than we would be able to do , like , the faster that we're able to do all the stuff that we really want to do . So , aaron , appreciate you so much for being here . I'm sure people are going to get to the end .

They're going to want to hear a little bit about , like , what you do , maybe get to know a little bit about Justice Clearinghouse . I know we have a lot of criminal justice professionals here because I was a police officer from LAPD , so I attract a big audience there . So where do you think would be the best place for people to connect with you at ?

Now , you have to make yourself available at a particular time of day , of course , but that's that's especially for those folks in criminal justice .

But I'll tell you , a larger and larger portion of our audience are non-criminal justice , because when we start talking about leadership issues , managing Gen Z , things like that , that's a challenge all of us are facing and even though the examples might be criminal justice based , they really do apply everywhere .

Personally , folks can reach out to me . If they ever have a question about technology or process automation , those kind of things . Reach out to me . My email is Aaron A-A-R-O-N at JusticeClearinghousecom . I'd love to hear from you .

And just remember , like what Aaron said at the end , like technology is our friend , let's lean in , let's see how it could be used for us , instead of all of the thoughts that can potentially go on when something new happens , when there's some change . Instead , use it for you instead of against you . So I appreciate you guys so much .

Thank you for making it to the end , thank you for what you do out there every single day , everybody , and keep leading from the front . Bye everybody , bye .