How to Delegate Automation Tasks feat. Carl Taylor

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:31
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. And you all are in for a treat, because you have to, to automation minds on the podcast today. And when I say minds, I don’t say it lightly, who I’m about to introduce to you is someone who, if you catch us in any regular conversation, we we go back to when marketing automation was just literally two platforms. And I was recently on his podcast and he reminded me of a platform that I have forgot about called sin pepper. So just took me way back down memory lane. And I’m excited to introduce him to you all today on the podcast. So we can talk about how to achieve automation, by way of delegation that you all know I like to do automation by way of education, teach you all how to do it. But what if you want to flip it? What if you don’t want to train someone up? What if you want to just hand that task off? And have someone do it for you? Well, our guest today is Carl Taylor. He’s an entrepreneur, investor and best selling author, and leading expert when it comes to building a freedom focus business that doesn’t rely on you. He is also the founder and CEO of automation agency, an outsourced marketing task team that helps entrepreneurs turn their marketing ideas into marketing DUNS. All right, everybody. Carl, welcome to the podcast, man. This this is this is this will be a joy to record. How are you doing, man?

Carl Taylor 2:23
I’m doing really well, Chris, man. It’s a pleasure to be here. And you know, it’s funny, as you said, we were on our, my podcast recently recording. And we did go down that memory lane. And it’s because we’ve been in this game for at least a decade. I can’t remember. I know, we figured it out on the last few years. But it’s been a long time. And the space, the marketing, automation space, the platforms, how many businesses are actually doing it has exploded in that time. And then now we’re in this age of AI coming in to mix into the mix as well. So just it’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris Davis 2:59
Yes, yes. So So those of you that don’t know, there’s really, truth be told Carl, I think there’s a good two handfuls of entrepreneurs in the space right now, that have been in the business of providing marketing automation, or helping you get it done for at least 10 years. There’s not a whole lot of us, and those who have those, those expert scars on your back in the battle tested wounds. We’re very much familiar if we don’t know each other personally, but we’re very familiar. So you are not listening. Everyone you’re not listening to a newbie. This is not somebody who just got an idea yesterday about hey, I want to start an agency. Carl is battle tested. In fact, Carl, what was that trajectory into automation agency? I remember the days of Active Campaign certified consulting prior to that Ontraport slash office autopilot. But just catch up the audience quickly on How did you land on the idea of automation agency? What was it that you saw on the market, and that led you to decide to start that

Carl Taylor 4:21
I’ll give you the most abridged version that I can think of in this moment. So context, I’ve always been a techie, I start to put myself to code at the age of 10. And ultimately started my first proper official business, you know, not like selling things at school, but an actual registered business in Australia at the age of 15, and it was doing web design web hosting for people. And so I always kind of had this this tech and web online marketing days before I knew about marketing automation, but I was still involved in online business. Way back in the early 2000s 2001, I think was when I was 15. About that. So You’re pretty good, pretty good big Google dominance. Anyways, I had an IT company with my father, after my web design business, I kind of went into this IT company with my father, we ran it for eight years. And towards the end of that, I wrote my first book, read means go. And when I wrote my book, I started to learn well, you know, you need to want to build an email list. And I run this business for years in my IT company without really building email lists, or really doing much email marketing, and now suddenly had a book. And I was getting more exposed to what people would call the info marketer. World, I guess, I’d be a consumer of info marketer products, I didn’t know it at the time. But now I was done to be a info marketer. And email list is what you needed. And someone recommended this tool called sandpaper. And so I signed up I think, was 30 bucks a month. And that was really my first introduction to the power of like, a cool like, you can set up these, an email happens. And three days later, this email happens. Now, before I do need to say before 7pm, I did sign up with AWeber. So it wasn’t completely, I’d never done email marketing, but Aweber didn’t have the real power and logic that send pepper introduced and then later Active Campaign made even simpler and easier. So Sen. Pepper for those that don’t know if you’ve heard of Ontraport send Pepper was the beginning. And then there was an upgrade to a product called office autopilot and Office Autopilot is what got rebranded into Ontraport. I don’t remember what year it landed, and the team did that. But I do remember when it happened. And that was my first introduction. I was like, I’ve got a book, you know, I want to have a bonus when people download my book, there’s a page in the book that says go here to download the bonus. So I needed something. And so I said Pepper was what I used. Now, fast forward for a while I’d sold my tea company. And I was lost trying to figure out who the hell I was. I tried being a life coach, I tried all sorts of things. And ultimately, I eventually ended up starting a coaching company teaching people about buying selling businesses. Now at that point, I was now using Office AutoPilot, the more powerful rules control billing all of these functions. And I was in a community of a whole bunch of other coaches. And what was clear to me, I was doing okay, in my coaching business, I wasn’t doing amazing. I love like, don’t get me wrong, the presenting was good. But the business side of it, I wasn’t Nestle making big bank. And I’m around all these other coaches. And they’re all asking me constantly, how are you? How are you automating all this webinar registration stuff? And how are you getting these text messages sent? And how are you doing this? And how are you doing that? And so I’m just helping them for free, like I did this, and here’s how to do it. And then people that are you, I’d be really great if you hired some VAs and just I could just use them or if I hired a VA, you could train them for me and I like no. And eventually, I got down to my last five grand I was I wiped out all the money that I had from the sale of the IT company. And I was now down to my last five grand and I’m going oh crap, I need to find a way to make some money. What if I, what if I started doing done for you marketing services were all these people who’ve been asking me for years. And that’s what I did. And that was that was the start of automation. And D It was originally very centered on me. You got me I was the strategist I did. So much of the work. And then about six months in, I had an epiphany. I was like, hold on. I’ve been spending the last four years teaching people about how to build a business you could sell, I could never sell this business. Let’s reevaluate my whole business model. And that’s what led to the business model that exists today. So,

Chris Davis 8:35
man, man, what I love about that story is the reluctant answer to the call. Right? Like there

Carl Taylor 8:46
was no, I don’t want to do it. No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. No.

Chris Davis 8:51
Right. And it’s like, Look, guys, I I hear what you’re saying, I hear that knee but I don’t I don’t want to meet that need. And hats off to you is that, you know, it’s it seems like it will be easy when when money gets funny or you know, the account gets low, that it would be an easy decision to say, You know what, let me pivot. But Carl, what I’ve learned over the years, as I’ve talked to many, many business owners is it is not there’s a lot of pride, there’s a lot of this, this is going to work this has to work and a essentially leads them to an unrecoverable dismay. And for you, you looked at the account and was like, wait a minute, hold on 5000 Timeout, timeout, what did the market say again? Okay, let me let me try that. Try that out. So it sounds like there was a point in time where you were doing more of a service based and then the when you realize, wait a minute, I can’t I can’t sell this I can’t scale this is when you went to a mall. productized approach to delivering automation. And at that time, Carl, I remember I remember when you did this, that wasn’t a big thing. There was not a whole lot of people doing productized services. So where did you kind of get the permission for lack of a better term to just say, You know what, I’m going to do it this way.

Carl Taylor 10:25
Yeah. So it’s interesting that around the time, so basically the same time I started automation, MCs, and more productized model is almost to the month, the same time that Russ Perry from design pickle launched design pickle in the model that he did, if anyone seems familiar with it. So basically, same business model, but he’s focused purely on design, whereas we were automation, web design, a whole bunch of things. So it was fascinating that literally almost to the month that we did the same kind of model. But I believe I don’t, I don’t know his story enough. But when there was a company here in Australia, that was quite well known, it still ended up selling to godaddy for I don’t remember what year that was. But it was called WP curve. And they were offering unlimited WordPress fixes and tweaks. And so I was familiar with them in the marketplace, I’d seen them someone who pointed them out to me. But also in my IT company, which I’d had for eight years, we sold in 2011. We were effectively a managed service product, like we were a subscription service, you pay us this flat fee, you got unlimited IT support that we delivered remotely. So I already effectively knew the model. I knew the subscription based model, I knew that hey, all you could eat unlimited. All I did was pick it up and go. Okay, we used to do this in it. Let’s apply it over here in the marketing space. I definitely got I definitely got some inspiration for WP curve. And you know how they communicated their value prop and things which was very helpful. But it was a lot of it was I’d already been doing it in a previous business, it was just picking up that business model and applying it to almost a different industry. If you like,

Chris Davis 12:05
I love it man, I often say or maybe I don’t say it out loud. I say to myself, one of my favorite books was John Maxwell’s sometimes you win. And sometimes you learn but it had lose it was it was axed out and said learn. And as long as you’re a student, and as long as you remain teachable in life, there is no experience, there is no event that has taken place that has that is of waste, right? So you didn’t know it at the time. But there are so many skills and so much experience and exposure that you are getting that you would later use to leverage and Bill where you are now. So I’ve been I’ve built myself my business specially automation bridge, I have a program that trains digital marker marketers how to be automate what I call automation service providers. And my you know, coming from Active Campaign, I just saw a need of education, people really didn’t know what they were doing. And it was like, I had the passion to do it, and say, Hey, let me train you. And then leaning on my experience from LeadPages, I realized that everybody needs a marketer internal to their business to really help them execute. And I’m gonna say this humbly, everyone. This is the first time I think I believe I’ve said this publicly, Carl, that model worked for a time. And we’re actually in the process of revamping it. Because as technology advanced, as automation became more native, and like every application that you can use, it’s almost like living in a country where you don’t need a license to drive, but you should get one.

Carl Taylor 13:56
That’s a really great, I like that analogy. That’s a great analogy,

Chris Davis 14:00
right? It’s like, Look, let me teach you how to drive the right way. However, it’s people out there saying, Why do I need to pay for that training in that license? I could just kind of go on YouTube. And these cars have instructions within them that tell me when to shift. I’ll just drive this myself. And as much as I was like, Oh, wait, you need to learn how to do this the right way the market has spoken. Carl the market has spoken. So I admit that even me there’s a bit of a okay, what is the market saying versus what you want to do? So I’ve been on the education side of implementing automation and you’re on the delegation side. So I wanted to highlight because listen, my my commitment is to the space of marketing automation, everyone you all know that my mission is to make automation accessible. Regardless, I don’t care what path you get to it as long as you get Intelligent Automation implemented. So on on From your perspective, curl, you’re like, hey, look, we’ve got a team for you, if you if you if you know what you’re doing, if you know what needs to be done, just let us handle that heavy lifting. We’ll take care of it for you. I want you to just talk about some of the successes, some of the case studies that those stories you hear like, oh, my gosh, girl, thank you so much. I don’t know what I would do without automation agency. What are some of those things people are saying as a result of being able to delegate automation?

Carl Taylor 15:32
Well, the first success story I’ll share is me, you know, I built again, I shared the bit about what I had the market telling me what they wanted. But I also had a vision in my head of at that time, I was like, I’d like to just be buying and selling online businesses, but I don’t want to be the one doing the work. And I would love a team that I could just delegate to I prefer even though I could push the buttons, I would prefer to just be the idea with the guy with the ideas and go, Hey, here’s how I want it to be, here’s what I’ve sketched out on a piece of paper for the automation go and make it happen. And, you know, I’m a client of mine service I have been from from day one. In the beginning, I was the one who would log in and send in tasks. Now I’ve got team members and project managers who go in and do that. So I very rarely go in even now myself, but the I still can be very much the ideas guy. And so the biggest success there is even someone like me and you, Chris, who we know how to do this stuff. It’s about understanding that sometimes it’s not the best use of our time. And in fact, if if, you know, dear listener, or viewer, you are one of those highly technical people that get a lot of joy playing around in Active Campaign or whatever marketing automation tool you use, there is a high chance that you use that joy in that fun as a distraction from the things that will actually move the needle in your business. And so it’s fun, and don’t get me wrong. And you’re using it as a procrastination method, when really you should get on the phone and sell or you should be reaching out to that person or you should be getting on podcasts or whatever it is you should be doing in your business that will actually move the needle. And so when all of a sudden, you have a team that you can go, okay, hey, go get it done for me, it, you don’t have an excuse, you now have the time to go and do those things that really are going to move the needle that only at least right now in the business only you can do. So even if you’ve got the skills like me, the service has been a godsend in that I can just now focus on the idea and the sketch. And actually, in the beginning, our best clients were people like me, and you, Chris, it was the technical people. So really, it’s about that freeing up headspace and time to allow you to focus on the stuff that matters, selling, designing, creating, what the fuck what you know what the funnel should be, or what the automation should be coming up with the concept of oh, here’s the problem we need to fix. Here’s what I want us to do. But now you don’t have to go around and click around the help docs to figure out how to do that thing that’s not working or troubleshoot the issue that didn’t quite work the way you wanted. Or even if it is a straightforward automation, let’s be honest, these tools, they’re still a bit sluggish and slow, like the speed at which you can draw out what you want to have happen on a piece of paper, versus the speed then takes for you to build that automation test it you know, it’s it’s not the best use of our time as the business owners or if you’re in the marketing team as an as the marketing manager, or you’ve got enough on your plate and other things to do. So I would say that’s that’s the number one case study I would share with you is is me, I’ve gotten my own website, I’ve got the automation NC website, I’ve got social media graphics, I’ve got some social videos, all of that stuff the team do. And all I have to do is set up either some recurring tasks in some instances, for example, like I have, I have a couple of blog posts that I wrote many years ago. Chris, I’m sure you even saw some of them. I reviewed different platforms Ontraport and Active Campaign in particular, and I have a recurring task with my team every month, they go in and they check those blog posts, check the links are working update screenshots, if the websites have changed, I don’t have to do that every month, the system just automatically logs out for the team to do. And that just helps keep those blog posts fresh. Make sure that they’re still relevant for the people who come to check them out. So there’s little things like that you can do. If I if I moved to another type of case study though we work with a lot of coaches, our biggest we have two big markets, we have agencies who are you know, they have the relationship with a client and they follow what I call the 1080 10 principle. This is how we recommend people work with this anyways. You do the front end 10% with the client, the relationship, the design, the strategy, what do you need, you delegate the 80% to us or to internal teams, like you just delegate the 80% and then you do the final 10% That might be the checking the handover back to the client and so we have a lot of agencies who work with us in that That model. And then the other type of clients is a large portion of them are coaches there. They’ve got membership sites, they’ve got, you know, info products, books, courses, coaching programs. And I think that just comes because that’s the community that I came from when I started automation. See that just, we kind of exploded in that in that world. We’ve got other business types as well, but they’re one of our biggest. And so in the coaching space. We have a mentally blanking on his name right now, because here’s the thing that’s interesting when someone goes, Oh, tell me about your clients. We have at any one time, like 200 active clients. I don’t know. I mean, I have an idea of some of them, because some of them are personal friends, or people I’ve met over the years, but I don’t know day to day what they’re asking us to do, right? That’s just it’s in the system. And I’m not aware. But we’ve got this one guy, he’s from the UK. He recently gave us a video testimonial and he’s just said like the amount of time he is freed up being able to now just say, hey, here’s here’s this great landing page and a funnel I’ve seen I want you to use that as a model and build that out on my website. Okay, done. I need some social graphics. And so his whole he’s got like his whole foot 12 months worth of social graphics ready to go out. He does work he’s he’s a coach. So he we do his workbooks and PowerPoint presentations, slides on the graphic design side. So really, the power is in. We say like, you know, we’ve hired everyone you’ll ever need. Now that’s a bit of a marketing pitch. Because the reality is, there’s probably people you will need that we don’t have, we haven’t hired every single person in the world, right. But we’ve we’ve got the core, the graphic design, the video editing, the WordPress, the marketing automation, so your Ontraport, or Infusionsoft, your active campaigns, your click funnels, you know, all those types of tools, Kajabi, etc. And then we’ve got, we’ve just launched AI powered copywriting. So you know, if you’ve, if you’ve used tools like Jasper, or if you’ve played with chat, GPT, we’ve built basically on top of those to just try and simplify the process. So you can just request the task and it just goes straight to the AI comes back with the result. And you can use that to write emails or to write headlines on the right sales pages, social posts. So that’s been that’s been a cool, fun little new new feature that we’ve rolled out to which it doesn’t completely replace all copywriting. But it’s made a huge difference to many of our clients. Yeah, so yeah, like, I keep going. Yeah.

Chris Davis 22:36
Time. Listen, Carl, you said so much. I want to piggyback want to reverse and piggyback on some of the things that you said. One is the the distraction and procrastination piece. And that one really hit home because I as a this is specifically for the techie folks, you can easily tell yourself, that you’re making progress or doing what needs to be done because you enjoy the tech and when things get tough. That’s your comfort zone. Right? That’s your tub of ice cream. When the stress hits, you just go and get that get that tub ice cream and eat that you playing around in tech. And it’s truthfully a fear, a fear of growing a fear of doing what’s what it takes to grow. And I’m not saying that to beat you up everyone, but some of you are extremely techy, and are not experiencing the level of growth in your business that you really should. So I wanted to highlight that because that one hurt in a good way, you know, because I live that life, Carl, and sometimes I revert back. And I’m so glad you said that I’ve got metrics and dashboards and all of that to keep me on track. Because it’s like, hey, if these numbers aren’t moving, none of that none of that other stuff matters. And then two is your painting. You’re just talking about success stories. But I feel like you’re painting a picture of paradise for some listener, right? Some listener didn’t know how can my website be maintained, and my email get written, I it just seems so overwhelming. And here’s what I find. What happens now Carl, is that they’re either going to Fiverr or they’re going to Upwork. And I want to say something about that. One of the things that I personally experienced everyone this is not me just pulling something out of out of out of the air. And you can see this actually, at automation AC car, you all do a very good job of documentation and explaining how to best use AR submit your task so that it can get done to the level that you need it and as a mature marketer some of the questions that that you ask, I’m like, Oh, that’s a good question. Right? Like, you’ll allow people to upload a screenshot of something that they’ve scribbled right, like you’ll walk them through, if they don’t know, what the novice will do is just have an intake form and say, Hey, what do you need us to do? Right? That’s what the novice would do. But you can tell you’ve had so many reps, and doing automation and implementing it, and submitting it yourself, you know, what questions and answers you need, and in order to do the job successfully. So that’s one of the things that are a glaring difference. For me when I’m looking at solutions. I was like, Wait a minute. I’ve never seen that. Right. People are usually so lazy with the intake form. But you ask the right questions, so that you can assume that the person submitting, it really knows. They’re just like, I need an email auto responder. Whoa, whoa, timeout. Time, I mean, emails, what’s the delay? Hey, what are some headlines that you like? What is your, you know, things of that nature. And to hear you talk about AI, I want to talk about the development of the product. Oftentimes, I have founders on here who have created software. But again, Carl, you’ve done a masterful job with treating this service as a product. And in that I see the development, you didn’t outright say it, but I’m piecing it together. For our listeners, you started out with the tasks, right, automation website. But now I was listening to you’re talking about presentations, talking about copy, talk about that development of the product beyond just the automation tasks that you saw as an opportunity, and how did you balance it to where it wasn’t too much? You know?

Carl Taylor 26:54
It’s a constant. We’re still constantly figuring out, you know, and bading internally, have we gone too much, are we expanding too far? But it comes down to just like, you’ve got your mission? You know, for us the mission is, how do we make online marketing simple and accessible? Right, and we can, and kind of one of the core driving missions for us internally is how do we take tasks off our client’s plate? You know, we’ve got a busy business owner, they’re an entrepreneur, they should be focused on what they do best, even if sometimes they’ve got the skills to do it. So either you don’t have the skills and you need it done. Or you do have the skill? How do we how do we take more off their plate and not put things back? And so it’s that driving question that’s constantly led our evolution of our will. We need to add this or we need to add that and I’ve wanted to add copywriting to what we do for at least probably five years, but the the mathematics of what it would do to that price, if we added it held us back. And then when AI got as good as it did, and it was clear to everyone late last year, all of a sudden was like we can we can include copywriting now, we can still have paid extra for human powered copywriting for people who want it, but we can now include it in our unlimited service. Because the AI can do it so well, so fast and at an affordable price point for us. So. So that’s kind of that’s where the evolution, it’s always just looking back at what is the client actually need. And I can’t remember which book or who first said it. But I always keep this in mind is like, you’ve got to fall in love with the client that you serve, not in love with your product. If I was purely in love with my product, which don’t get me wrong, there’s been times over the last nine years that I have been like, No, this is how you know clients ask for things they don’t know, this is how we work. This is how it is like, he’s on my rules. And then eventually, the market kind of batters you into submission that you realize actually no, I need to change, they don’t listen to what the client is saying. So that’s that’s also something that always serves as well. I’ll go back a minute and go with you know, we’re called automations. So most people when they think about us, they think we do just the marketing automation setup. And often people go oh, you do graphic design, you do video editing, I had no idea. And the reason why I call it automation agency is one yes, we we came from that marketing tech world. But I’ve always for a long time believed that automation is just you not doing it. Yes, and that it’s being done either by tech or team. It doesn’t really matter who automation is just like I have no idea. I don’t want to be the one doing it. And I’m either going to use tech team or combination of both to achieve that result. And so that’s kind of where our overarching automation and see comes from. The reason we launched with graphic design was purely because when I transitioned from it being the full service col show of automation T to more strategic model, I had a graphic designer on on staff and he was really good and I thought well, why don’t I make him available for clients? That was that was the pure reason we’d like let’s just throw graphic designing. And interestingly enough, graphic design for us is one of those things that clients either love or they hate, which is interesting. But it’s also one of the things that there’s bread and butter almost every month, someone’s got at least one graphic design tasks they might need done. Versus in the automation. Well, like if we purely just did the tick automation. Often, once you set up your automation once, for most businesses that don’t even run their businesses and always needing to improve every month, but for most businesses, once you’ve got certain projects set up, it’s done, the job is done. And so an unlimited subscription model like ours, purely focused on automation, I think we would have a much higher churn than we do with the full gamut of what we do. So the evolution has come from listening to clients, what do they need listening to myself, What do I need, we more recently launched a higher end service. So for a long time, the client had to be the project manager, someone in the company had to be the project manager, you know, you’ve, you’ve got a big project, where a task based service, so you want to build a funnel, well, you’re gonna have a graphic design task for the designer to design the landing page, then you’re gonna have a tech task to build the landing page and whatever platform you’re building it in. And then you’ve got another automation task for the email follow ups. And so there’ll be at least three, maybe four tasks just for a very simple funnel. And for a technical person, that makes perfect sense. But for the less technical lead always, for them, they just want to funnel their thinking projects. And we always say, well, there’s someone in your company, either you or company to do that. And then in more recent times, about a year ago, we launched our project manager service where now you can have one person, you can hand over the bigger project, and they’re still breaking it down into the tasks, but it gives that that more personalized, almost a virtual assistant like level, that that’s improved that workflow. And again, I resisted it for a long time clients, one of the clients wanted it No, no, no. And then eventually, it was like, No, actually I want this to and I can see how this will make it simpler. Let’s do a small pivot and trial. We did the pilot, and it blew up. And so then now it’s like, how do we scale that, you know, the recruitment, the training, and that side of our business, too. And it’s just been, if anything, we probably sell more of that service now than any of our other services. So it’s just an ongoing, you know, it’s the world of business. It’s ongoing. Listen to the client, what do they need? And that development, even the portal and the wizards that you were talking about the asking you the questions, all of that came from solving little problems. I still remember when we started, we had no web portal, we had no web interface, it was purely an email ticketing system you sent you send in an email, we replied back like that’s that’s how it was, it was just a simple ticketing system. And, you know, that worked for the people who knew what they were doing, but it didn’t for the people who didn’t. And then they’ll just confusion around like people would send reply that people would reply to an old ticket with a new task, and it would create all this confusion. Oh, yes, like we need, we need a visual interface. So we built a portal, which made it very clear. And then we started going, well, you know, people are frustrated that there’s all this back and forward, I sent in my tasks. And you’ve asked me all these questions, and then the team are getting frustrated because the client isn’t there, they’ll answer three of the four questions they’ve asked. And that fourth question is slowing everything down? Because we don’t have the answer to that. And then it was like, Okay, well was there’s a whole bunch of things we do regularly are common. What if we just had these intake for each of those, which asks those questions, and we want to achieve two things, train the client, how to send a task in without a wizard, so they can at least see, you don’t have to write a full pack. Because we sometimes back in the early days, we would get people write these, like long multi page, Google doc briefs, and send that to us as an attachment for a task. And it was it was horrendous. And so we were kind of like we want to try and clients that this is a conversational, just flick off a very hate, you know, most of our wizards, they’ll be like, hey, team, I’m wanting this like this, if you could do it like that. Here’s some attachments like that’s effectively how they get built together. And so we’re training clients, and at the same time for those common things. We’re saving time on both sides, because we’re getting all the answers we need up front. Anything that’s not urgent, we in the Wizards will give an option to say I’ll send that later or I don’t know come up with something. So we’re not because we’re always trying to not put things back on the clients. And as I said, we always want to go how do we how do we not put more workload back onto the client? How do we take it away from them? So it most questions there’s an option to say I don’t know come up with something or use your experience. But for those that do know, it, lets them go, Oh, I haven’t thought about that. I need to upload a wireframe or I need to think about this or give them an example page. So the development is just listen to your clients, constantly, listen, solve problems, and I’ll keep you posted. If I think we’ve gone too far into the scope of what we do. There are days that I think we have I truly do. But I keep coming back to if we, we’ve got a competitor now in the space, I think they started. Well, sorry, they didn’t start, they pivoted to a similar model to us, I think about three years ago, okay. And I keep an eye on them every now and then have a look at what they’re doing. And they have, in my opinion, are ridiculous scope. Like they’ve added, they’ve added all these crazy things that I just, I wonder, you know, I’m sure everyone does this about your competitors. I wonder how the internal workings of their business work to make that not absolute mayhem. But it’s interesting, you know, it’s interesting to see. So I don’t I don’t plan to copy all the things they’ve got on scope, but I pay attention to see what what they add to see if there’s anything to go, I hadn’t thought about adding that into what we need to do. So.

Chris Davis 35:48
Yeah, I think, you know, you said something about automation. And it’s real, right, it’s, the whole point of automation is that you can have team or tech handle tasks for you. So you do get to a point and I, I recorded a podcast episode called an automation guilt, because I wasn’t aware of it. And I started to experience it when I was at LeadPages. And I, you know, really built a system out, and I will come to work, Carl, and I’d be like, Man is really not much for me to do. Like every emails are going out 10 pages on the Webinars, reminders, affiliates are getting their stuff like I was kind of twiddling my thumbs, you know, and I would look around in every department will be be working so hard. I was like, man, Chris, you you got to work harder or something. But what I was experiencing is, there comes a point where the system per your model in whatever scaled capacity you are, is handling things for you. And you simply need to focus on other areas of business. So if I tell you to automate, inherent in that is, at some point, you won’t need to focus on just that automation. There’ll be other areas in your business. And for you to see that and pinpoint that and say, Okay, well wait a minute, there’s only going to be a finite amount of tasks for automation, until they grow or you know, need, you need it at another level. So I love that part about it. And it’s it’s when you when I’m listening to you speak as well, and everybody, Carl is on here for twofold, one because of the agency that he runs. But two is I also want you all to see the person, the brain behind it. And one thing about you, Carl, that if if they haven’t seen it, I’m gonna call it out so they can see it is that you’re always evolving not just with the client needs, but also with the market. Right? Like you’re mentioning how now you have some AI generated copywriting and other things, instead of being scared and saying, oh, no, they I monsters are coming. You’re like, Okay, this is there’s a market shift. This is what tech does, it changes every eight weeks, eight days, you know, whatever. How can we now leverage this technology, this new shift, so that our clients and customers are not left in the dust, but they also aren’t mandated. To figure it all out, they can just leverage it on behalf of you and team. So I absolutely love that. Now, now somebody’s listening. And they may have been, you might have them drooling Carl, they’re like, oh, my gosh, I didn’t know this was possible, or you know, they’re distracted. They’re supposed to be listening to their spouse or you know, on a walk with. And they’re just distracted because you painted a picture of offloading these tasks that they never knew was possible. So so just give that listener who’s like, wow, where would I get started? What would I do? How do I know if my business is ready? What are some of the preparatory steps that you recommend somebody take but prior to engaging with you to ensure the fastest, the fastest onboarding?

Carl Taylor 39:25
Yeah, man. It’s interesting. There’s some clients come to us. And there’s been this list building. So if you if you’ve got this list that’s back of your mind might not even be written down. Maybe it is of these, like someday I want to get to those things. I need to do that little fix on the website. And I know that’s wrong. We need to fix that. Now. You know, I haven’t really looked at a Client Onboarding sequence in a while. You know, that this bit, I’ve always been planning to launch some Facebook ads. I need a funnel, but it’s not a priority right now. Like if you’ve got, if you’ve got this list of things that you’re never getting to maybe you’ve even got A whole bunch of business cards that you know, you scan, but have never loaded into your CRM, things like that. Those are really good starting places. If you’ve got that list, you just go okay, cool, these are stuff I was never going to get to, let’s just get started, delegate this and get these things done. That was Sunday maybes and and get some benefits. And usually it’s just get the ball rolling. It’s similar if anyone’s ever hired their first team member, virtual or in person. Usually, your experience in the beginning is, I don’t know, if I’ve got enough to fill them full time or part time, you know, I’m just gonna start them casual. I’m just going to put that in part time because I don’t know if I’ve got enough. But once you get started, once they’re on and you see them do, you start to see things your reticular activating system, the part of your mind that notices things, starts to notice opportunities everywhere, all I can say that I can say that I can send that. So the number one thing is you start because your mind that particularly RAS will will focus you on finding more opportunities to delegate. The other thing I would say is, if you if you don’t have that back list of things that you’ve not gotten do the next thing is doing do a time audit. What are the what are the things that you’re currently spending your time on every week? And just a couple of weeks, just measure make? Make notes, you know, some people say every 15 minutes, just make a note of what have I been doing. And once you once you’ve done that if you want if you want the shortcut, and you don’t want to time audit, block 10 minutes out in your calendar, sit down and go look at the look at your calendar and go What did I do on Monday? What did they do on Tuesday? What did they do on Wednesday and write out all the things you did? Circle the things that you enjoyed or worthwhile? And then look at all the other things and go, could I have delegated that to someone else? Did you do some graphic stuff? Did you fiddle around on the website? Did you will fiddle around in automation. Now, even if you did that audit and the answer is no you didn’t. didn’t do it. I’m sure you’ll find other opportunities to automate or delegate even if they’re not in my wheelhouse or Chris’s wheelhouse. Then the next question to ask yourself is well, what would I like my business to be doing? What’s missing? The obvious where most people I find usually have the least many people focus on all their sales and marketing automation. And they forget that marketing continues after you get the customer. So Client Onboarding is usually a really big opportunity that’s not being looked at properly is the moment they become a client or customer. What is the flow the sequence of events that happen and that the other thing too is people also think about their automations as emails and SMS is and whatever going out to the client. And they don’t think about well, what about the internal prompts and notes to internal team members to say, Hey, pick up the phone and call this person or hey, send something in the mail to this person. Or maybe they want to integrate with a tool like lob or one of those which can send a direct mail piece automatically I got if listening if you didn’t know that you can actually have the moment someone signs up that that could trigger something to a fulfillment house or to a print on demand service that could print a letter a welcome letter or can send a goodie bag to your client. These are some of the things that there’s a real opportunity there. Another another area that I find a lot of people seem to miss if you’re a subscription business in particular, getting your failed payment automations and notifications, that’s its money on the table right there, the moment you fix those, it’s instant money, if you can get someone to update their credit card or a failed payment, you have it notify them multiple times. And if it can’t fix you then have it notify someone internal to, to do something. So the delivery side. And outside of the tech automation side of things. I often tell people, as a business owner, the first area of your business, if you want to move to the next level of freedom in your business, the first level that you should really look to get yourself out of is delivery. If you are involved in the delivery of what you do, you will always always have a capacity issue. And so you tech automation stuff. Absolutely. But then I’d be looking at anywhere in your delivery. What can you automate? That’s that’s the first obvious outside of what most people think is obvious in the marketing space.

Chris Davis 44:14
Yeah, that is that is so good, Carl, and I’ll add to it first off, absolutely on the delivery side, increase your capacity by removing yourself immediately. Okay, you make more money, but the time audit piece. The other thing that I found that was really helpful for me was in there’s a variety of software tools that you can use to do this. I’m I don’t personally use any of them because I don’t track my time. But I’ve got a post on the website with some time tracking apps. So we’ll make sure that’s in the show notes. But looking at having the team that you do have log their time and auditing where they’re spending their time. And look at that through the lens of what you’re paying them. Because oftentimes you’ll I did this one time, Carl, and I had a I had a, you know, a sheet and and I was looking at the time sheet and it was like 10 hours this month, I was like, what they spend 10 hours on. And it said meetings. I said, Oh, no, oh, I don’t know how that’s possible. Because I love 30 minute meetings and I if I can keep it shorter than that, but it just, it was a quick reminder that wait a minute, that is time, we cannot be spending that amount of time on that thing. So when you’re doing your time audit of yourself, also your team. And again, run it across, okay, could I be handing these tasks off, and getting more I have to say this good help is extremely hard to find specially technical. So if you if you have a resource that can do the technical tasks for you, and remove that load, and this is for the techie and non techie, if you’re techie, this is just an a way to increase your capacity because again, you’re removing yourself from delivery. So it works either way. But you have to you have to understand that you’re not going to easily go to the marketplace, even me, I have a hard time finding people who could truly show up consistently for the business and, and do a high quality of work. So Carl, man, thank you for coming on to the podcast. And and gleaning allowing us to glean from you. You could tell you can really tell you’re not just about the tech and business. You know, as you talk you can you know your mind has expanded around different theories on life and investing and you know, the best ways to build businesses and all of that people have heard your voice. Maybe for the first time, they didn’t know automation agency even existed. And now they’re like, hold on, Chris, where do I find this guy? How do I connect with him? For those listeners? Where can they go? Where can they find out more? How can they connect with you?

Carl Taylor 47:14
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about automation agency, the best place is automation agency.com. You see all our pricing, you see all the information, you can see designed portfolios of graphic design stuff, you can see video portfolio, video stuff we do, you can get started right there on the website. Or if you’d like to book a time to chat to someone, you can book a 15 minute call where we just learn more about what you’re looking to do, what tool texts platforms you’re using. And we figure out if we think we’re a good match for your needs or not. If we are we can demo the platform, show you how those wizards and stuff we’re talking about works. So that’s the best way if you want to learn more about that, if you want to connect more with me personally, maybe you’re like, Hey, that sounds cool. I’ll look at automation and see but right now I’m just more interested in being connected with with UCOL. You can find me at Carl Taylor, it’s Carl with a C. or, you know, I’m imagining this is probably a more American audience. So let’s just make sure I put my pronunciation Carl Carl taylor.com.au. And you can connect with me on socials, YouTube, all of that from from that website.

Chris Davis 48:20
Man, the the America.

Carl Taylor 48:25
I was, I was at one of the Traffic and Conversion Summit. I remember what year it was, but it was so funny. I was I was there. And I met this guy that you know, and I go hey, I’m Carl because that’s when I’m in America. I have to pronounce your My My name better because otherwise it’s always wrong. So hey, I’m Carl. And he goes, Hey, I’m Mari and anyways, we sit down and like hey, so where are you from? And I go, I’m Sydney, Australia. And he goes on from Brisbane, Australia. And also a second we like did you pronounce your Rs? He’s like, Yes, I have to do that here. And it was very funny.

Chris Davis 49:03
Oh man great story. It to be able to turn it on like that is it’s hilarious to me. I’m always fascinated even when actors you know they they have the American accent into you hear their native tongue. You’re like I never knew he was British, you know? So man, Carl, thanks again. Man. This has been great. This is this has been a refreshing reminder to myself, to leverage leverage the hands. there’s help out there everyone there is help out here. So hopefully it is encouraging to you as well, that you too can can remove that tech stumbling block from it again, all of the links will be in the show notes. You can go there right now click on it. And I guarantee you can access Carl in all of the ways that he’s mentioned Carl, thank you for coming on. listeners. Thank you for lending us your yours, lending us your ears. I hope we’ve paid you back handsomely. Many times over with what you’ve heard today. And everyone, everyone continue to automate responsibly. My friends, Carl, thank you for coming on man. Thank you for tuning into this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:31
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. And you all are in for a treat, because you have to, to automation minds on the podcast today. And when I say minds, I don’t say it lightly, who I’m about to introduce to you is someone who, if you catch us in any regular conversation, we we go back to when marketing automation was just literally two platforms. And I was recently on his podcast and he reminded me of a platform that I have forgot about called sin pepper. So just took me way back down memory lane. And I’m excited to introduce him to you all today on the podcast. So we can talk about how to achieve automation, by way of delegation that you all know I like to do automation by way of education, teach you all how to do it. But what if you want to flip it? What if you don’t want to train someone up? What if you want to just hand that task off? And have someone do it for you? Well, our guest today is Carl Taylor. He’s an entrepreneur, investor and best selling author, and leading expert when it comes to building a freedom focus business that doesn’t rely on you. He is also the founder and CEO of automation agency, an outsourced marketing task team that helps entrepreneurs turn their marketing ideas into marketing DUNS. All right, everybody. Carl, welcome to the podcast, man. This this is this is this will be a joy to record. How are you doing, man?

Carl Taylor 2:23
I’m doing really well, Chris, man. It’s a pleasure to be here. And you know, it’s funny, as you said, we were on our, my podcast recently recording. And we did go down that memory lane. And it’s because we’ve been in this game for at least a decade. I can’t remember. I know, we figured it out on the last few years. But it’s been a long time. And the space, the marketing, automation space, the platforms, how many businesses are actually doing it has exploded in that time. And then now we’re in this age of AI coming in to mix into the mix as well. So just it’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris Davis 2:59
Yes, yes. So So those of you that don’t know, there’s really, truth be told Carl, I think there’s a good two handfuls of entrepreneurs in the space right now, that have been in the business of providing marketing automation, or helping you get it done for at least 10 years. There’s not a whole lot of us, and those who have those, those expert scars on your back in the battle tested wounds. We’re very much familiar if we don’t know each other personally, but we’re very familiar. So you are not listening. Everyone you’re not listening to a newbie. This is not somebody who just got an idea yesterday about hey, I want to start an agency. Carl is battle tested. In fact, Carl, what was that trajectory into automation agency? I remember the days of Active Campaign certified consulting prior to that Ontraport slash office autopilot. But just catch up the audience quickly on How did you land on the idea of automation agency? What was it that you saw on the market, and that led you to decide to start that

Carl Taylor 4:21
I’ll give you the most abridged version that I can think of in this moment. So context, I’ve always been a techie, I start to put myself to code at the age of 10. And ultimately started my first proper official business, you know, not like selling things at school, but an actual registered business in Australia at the age of 15, and it was doing web design web hosting for people. And so I always kind of had this this tech and web online marketing days before I knew about marketing automation, but I was still involved in online business. Way back in the early 2000s 2001, I think was when I was 15. About that. So You’re pretty good, pretty good big Google dominance. Anyways, I had an IT company with my father, after my web design business, I kind of went into this IT company with my father, we ran it for eight years. And towards the end of that, I wrote my first book, read means go. And when I wrote my book, I started to learn well, you know, you need to want to build an email list. And I run this business for years in my IT company without really building email lists, or really doing much email marketing, and now suddenly had a book. And I was getting more exposed to what people would call the info marketer. World, I guess, I’d be a consumer of info marketer products, I didn’t know it at the time. But now I was done to be a info marketer. And email list is what you needed. And someone recommended this tool called sandpaper. And so I signed up I think, was 30 bucks a month. And that was really my first introduction to the power of like, a cool like, you can set up these, an email happens. And three days later, this email happens. Now, before I do need to say before 7pm, I did sign up with AWeber. So it wasn’t completely, I’d never done email marketing, but Aweber didn’t have the real power and logic that send pepper introduced and then later Active Campaign made even simpler and easier. So Sen. Pepper for those that don’t know if you’ve heard of Ontraport send Pepper was the beginning. And then there was an upgrade to a product called office autopilot and Office Autopilot is what got rebranded into Ontraport. I don’t remember what year it landed, and the team did that. But I do remember when it happened. And that was my first introduction. I was like, I’ve got a book, you know, I want to have a bonus when people download my book, there’s a page in the book that says go here to download the bonus. So I needed something. And so I said Pepper was what I used. Now, fast forward for a while I’d sold my tea company. And I was lost trying to figure out who the hell I was. I tried being a life coach, I tried all sorts of things. And ultimately, I eventually ended up starting a coaching company teaching people about buying selling businesses. Now at that point, I was now using Office AutoPilot, the more powerful rules control billing all of these functions. And I was in a community of a whole bunch of other coaches. And what was clear to me, I was doing okay, in my coaching business, I wasn’t doing amazing. I love like, don’t get me wrong, the presenting was good. But the business side of it, I wasn’t Nestle making big bank. And I’m around all these other coaches. And they’re all asking me constantly, how are you? How are you automating all this webinar registration stuff? And how are you getting these text messages sent? And how are you doing this? And how are you doing that? And so I’m just helping them for free, like I did this, and here’s how to do it. And then people that are you, I’d be really great if you hired some VAs and just I could just use them or if I hired a VA, you could train them for me and I like no. And eventually, I got down to my last five grand I was I wiped out all the money that I had from the sale of the IT company. And I was now down to my last five grand and I’m going oh crap, I need to find a way to make some money. What if I, what if I started doing done for you marketing services were all these people who’ve been asking me for years. And that’s what I did. And that was that was the start of automation. And D It was originally very centered on me. You got me I was the strategist I did. So much of the work. And then about six months in, I had an epiphany. I was like, hold on. I’ve been spending the last four years teaching people about how to build a business you could sell, I could never sell this business. Let’s reevaluate my whole business model. And that’s what led to the business model that exists today. So,

Chris Davis 8:35
man, man, what I love about that story is the reluctant answer to the call. Right? Like there

Carl Taylor 8:46
was no, I don’t want to do it. No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. No.

Chris Davis 8:51
Right. And it’s like, Look, guys, I I hear what you’re saying, I hear that knee but I don’t I don’t want to meet that need. And hats off to you is that, you know, it’s it seems like it will be easy when when money gets funny or you know, the account gets low, that it would be an easy decision to say, You know what, let me pivot. But Carl, what I’ve learned over the years, as I’ve talked to many, many business owners is it is not there’s a lot of pride, there’s a lot of this, this is going to work this has to work and a essentially leads them to an unrecoverable dismay. And for you, you looked at the account and was like, wait a minute, hold on 5000 Timeout, timeout, what did the market say again? Okay, let me let me try that. Try that out. So it sounds like there was a point in time where you were doing more of a service based and then the when you realize, wait a minute, I can’t I can’t sell this I can’t scale this is when you went to a mall. productized approach to delivering automation. And at that time, Carl, I remember I remember when you did this, that wasn’t a big thing. There was not a whole lot of people doing productized services. So where did you kind of get the permission for lack of a better term to just say, You know what, I’m going to do it this way.

Carl Taylor 10:25
Yeah. So it’s interesting that around the time, so basically the same time I started automation, MCs, and more productized model is almost to the month, the same time that Russ Perry from design pickle launched design pickle in the model that he did, if anyone seems familiar with it. So basically, same business model, but he’s focused purely on design, whereas we were automation, web design, a whole bunch of things. So it was fascinating that literally almost to the month that we did the same kind of model. But I believe I don’t, I don’t know his story enough. But when there was a company here in Australia, that was quite well known, it still ended up selling to godaddy for I don’t remember what year that was. But it was called WP curve. And they were offering unlimited WordPress fixes and tweaks. And so I was familiar with them in the marketplace, I’d seen them someone who pointed them out to me. But also in my IT company, which I’d had for eight years, we sold in 2011. We were effectively a managed service product, like we were a subscription service, you pay us this flat fee, you got unlimited IT support that we delivered remotely. So I already effectively knew the model. I knew the subscription based model, I knew that hey, all you could eat unlimited. All I did was pick it up and go. Okay, we used to do this in it. Let’s apply it over here in the marketing space. I definitely got I definitely got some inspiration for WP curve. And you know how they communicated their value prop and things which was very helpful. But it was a lot of it was I’d already been doing it in a previous business, it was just picking up that business model and applying it to almost a different industry. If you like,

Chris Davis 12:05
I love it man, I often say or maybe I don’t say it out loud. I say to myself, one of my favorite books was John Maxwell’s sometimes you win. And sometimes you learn but it had lose it was it was axed out and said learn. And as long as you’re a student, and as long as you remain teachable in life, there is no experience, there is no event that has taken place that has that is of waste, right? So you didn’t know it at the time. But there are so many skills and so much experience and exposure that you are getting that you would later use to leverage and Bill where you are now. So I’ve been I’ve built myself my business specially automation bridge, I have a program that trains digital marker marketers how to be automate what I call automation service providers. And my you know, coming from Active Campaign, I just saw a need of education, people really didn’t know what they were doing. And it was like, I had the passion to do it, and say, Hey, let me train you. And then leaning on my experience from LeadPages, I realized that everybody needs a marketer internal to their business to really help them execute. And I’m gonna say this humbly, everyone. This is the first time I think I believe I’ve said this publicly, Carl, that model worked for a time. And we’re actually in the process of revamping it. Because as technology advanced, as automation became more native, and like every application that you can use, it’s almost like living in a country where you don’t need a license to drive, but you should get one.

Carl Taylor 13:56
That’s a really great, I like that analogy. That’s a great analogy,

Chris Davis 14:00
right? It’s like, Look, let me teach you how to drive the right way. However, it’s people out there saying, Why do I need to pay for that training in that license? I could just kind of go on YouTube. And these cars have instructions within them that tell me when to shift. I’ll just drive this myself. And as much as I was like, Oh, wait, you need to learn how to do this the right way the market has spoken. Carl the market has spoken. So I admit that even me there’s a bit of a okay, what is the market saying versus what you want to do? So I’ve been on the education side of implementing automation and you’re on the delegation side. So I wanted to highlight because listen, my my commitment is to the space of marketing automation, everyone you all know that my mission is to make automation accessible. Regardless, I don’t care what path you get to it as long as you get Intelligent Automation implemented. So on on From your perspective, curl, you’re like, hey, look, we’ve got a team for you, if you if you if you know what you’re doing, if you know what needs to be done, just let us handle that heavy lifting. We’ll take care of it for you. I want you to just talk about some of the successes, some of the case studies that those stories you hear like, oh, my gosh, girl, thank you so much. I don’t know what I would do without automation agency. What are some of those things people are saying as a result of being able to delegate automation?

Carl Taylor 15:32
Well, the first success story I’ll share is me, you know, I built again, I shared the bit about what I had the market telling me what they wanted. But I also had a vision in my head of at that time, I was like, I’d like to just be buying and selling online businesses, but I don’t want to be the one doing the work. And I would love a team that I could just delegate to I prefer even though I could push the buttons, I would prefer to just be the idea with the guy with the ideas and go, Hey, here’s how I want it to be, here’s what I’ve sketched out on a piece of paper for the automation go and make it happen. And, you know, I’m a client of mine service I have been from from day one. In the beginning, I was the one who would log in and send in tasks. Now I’ve got team members and project managers who go in and do that. So I very rarely go in even now myself, but the I still can be very much the ideas guy. And so the biggest success there is even someone like me and you, Chris, who we know how to do this stuff. It’s about understanding that sometimes it’s not the best use of our time. And in fact, if if, you know, dear listener, or viewer, you are one of those highly technical people that get a lot of joy playing around in Active Campaign or whatever marketing automation tool you use, there is a high chance that you use that joy in that fun as a distraction from the things that will actually move the needle in your business. And so it’s fun, and don’t get me wrong. And you’re using it as a procrastination method, when really you should get on the phone and sell or you should be reaching out to that person or you should be getting on podcasts or whatever it is you should be doing in your business that will actually move the needle. And so when all of a sudden, you have a team that you can go, okay, hey, go get it done for me, it, you don’t have an excuse, you now have the time to go and do those things that really are going to move the needle that only at least right now in the business only you can do. So even if you’ve got the skills like me, the service has been a godsend in that I can just now focus on the idea and the sketch. And actually, in the beginning, our best clients were people like me, and you, Chris, it was the technical people. So really, it’s about that freeing up headspace and time to allow you to focus on the stuff that matters, selling, designing, creating, what the fuck what you know what the funnel should be, or what the automation should be coming up with the concept of oh, here’s the problem we need to fix. Here’s what I want us to do. But now you don’t have to go around and click around the help docs to figure out how to do that thing that’s not working or troubleshoot the issue that didn’t quite work the way you wanted. Or even if it is a straightforward automation, let’s be honest, these tools, they’re still a bit sluggish and slow, like the speed at which you can draw out what you want to have happen on a piece of paper, versus the speed then takes for you to build that automation test it you know, it’s it’s not the best use of our time as the business owners or if you’re in the marketing team as an as the marketing manager, or you’ve got enough on your plate and other things to do. So I would say that’s that’s the number one case study I would share with you is is me, I’ve gotten my own website, I’ve got the automation NC website, I’ve got social media graphics, I’ve got some social videos, all of that stuff the team do. And all I have to do is set up either some recurring tasks in some instances, for example, like I have, I have a couple of blog posts that I wrote many years ago. Chris, I’m sure you even saw some of them. I reviewed different platforms Ontraport and Active Campaign in particular, and I have a recurring task with my team every month, they go in and they check those blog posts, check the links are working update screenshots, if the websites have changed, I don’t have to do that every month, the system just automatically logs out for the team to do. And that just helps keep those blog posts fresh. Make sure that they’re still relevant for the people who come to check them out. So there’s little things like that you can do. If I if I moved to another type of case study though we work with a lot of coaches, our biggest we have two big markets, we have agencies who are you know, they have the relationship with a client and they follow what I call the 1080 10 principle. This is how we recommend people work with this anyways. You do the front end 10% with the client, the relationship, the design, the strategy, what do you need, you delegate the 80% to us or to internal teams, like you just delegate the 80% and then you do the final 10% That might be the checking the handover back to the client and so we have a lot of agencies who work with us in that That model. And then the other type of clients is a large portion of them are coaches there. They’ve got membership sites, they’ve got, you know, info products, books, courses, coaching programs. And I think that just comes because that’s the community that I came from when I started automation. See that just, we kind of exploded in that in that world. We’ve got other business types as well, but they’re one of our biggest. And so in the coaching space. We have a mentally blanking on his name right now, because here’s the thing that’s interesting when someone goes, Oh, tell me about your clients. We have at any one time, like 200 active clients. I don’t know. I mean, I have an idea of some of them, because some of them are personal friends, or people I’ve met over the years, but I don’t know day to day what they’re asking us to do, right? That’s just it’s in the system. And I’m not aware. But we’ve got this one guy, he’s from the UK. He recently gave us a video testimonial and he’s just said like the amount of time he is freed up being able to now just say, hey, here’s here’s this great landing page and a funnel I’ve seen I want you to use that as a model and build that out on my website. Okay, done. I need some social graphics. And so his whole he’s got like his whole foot 12 months worth of social graphics ready to go out. He does work he’s he’s a coach. So he we do his workbooks and PowerPoint presentations, slides on the graphic design side. So really, the power is in. We say like, you know, we’ve hired everyone you’ll ever need. Now that’s a bit of a marketing pitch. Because the reality is, there’s probably people you will need that we don’t have, we haven’t hired every single person in the world, right. But we’ve we’ve got the core, the graphic design, the video editing, the WordPress, the marketing automation, so your Ontraport, or Infusionsoft, your active campaigns, your click funnels, you know, all those types of tools, Kajabi, etc. And then we’ve got, we’ve just launched AI powered copywriting. So you know, if you’ve, if you’ve used tools like Jasper, or if you’ve played with chat, GPT, we’ve built basically on top of those to just try and simplify the process. So you can just request the task and it just goes straight to the AI comes back with the result. And you can use that to write emails or to write headlines on the right sales pages, social posts. So that’s been that’s been a cool, fun little new new feature that we’ve rolled out to which it doesn’t completely replace all copywriting. But it’s made a huge difference to many of our clients. Yeah, so yeah, like, I keep going. Yeah.

Chris Davis 22:36
Time. Listen, Carl, you said so much. I want to piggyback want to reverse and piggyback on some of the things that you said. One is the the distraction and procrastination piece. And that one really hit home because I as a this is specifically for the techie folks, you can easily tell yourself, that you’re making progress or doing what needs to be done because you enjoy the tech and when things get tough. That’s your comfort zone. Right? That’s your tub of ice cream. When the stress hits, you just go and get that get that tub ice cream and eat that you playing around in tech. And it’s truthfully a fear, a fear of growing a fear of doing what’s what it takes to grow. And I’m not saying that to beat you up everyone, but some of you are extremely techy, and are not experiencing the level of growth in your business that you really should. So I wanted to highlight that because that one hurt in a good way, you know, because I live that life, Carl, and sometimes I revert back. And I’m so glad you said that I’ve got metrics and dashboards and all of that to keep me on track. Because it’s like, hey, if these numbers aren’t moving, none of that none of that other stuff matters. And then two is your painting. You’re just talking about success stories. But I feel like you’re painting a picture of paradise for some listener, right? Some listener didn’t know how can my website be maintained, and my email get written, I it just seems so overwhelming. And here’s what I find. What happens now Carl, is that they’re either going to Fiverr or they’re going to Upwork. And I want to say something about that. One of the things that I personally experienced everyone this is not me just pulling something out of out of out of the air. And you can see this actually, at automation AC car, you all do a very good job of documentation and explaining how to best use AR submit your task so that it can get done to the level that you need it and as a mature marketer some of the questions that that you ask, I’m like, Oh, that’s a good question. Right? Like, you’ll allow people to upload a screenshot of something that they’ve scribbled right, like you’ll walk them through, if they don’t know, what the novice will do is just have an intake form and say, Hey, what do you need us to do? Right? That’s what the novice would do. But you can tell you’ve had so many reps, and doing automation and implementing it, and submitting it yourself, you know, what questions and answers you need, and in order to do the job successfully. So that’s one of the things that are a glaring difference. For me when I’m looking at solutions. I was like, Wait a minute. I’ve never seen that. Right. People are usually so lazy with the intake form. But you ask the right questions, so that you can assume that the person submitting, it really knows. They’re just like, I need an email auto responder. Whoa, whoa, timeout. Time, I mean, emails, what’s the delay? Hey, what are some headlines that you like? What is your, you know, things of that nature. And to hear you talk about AI, I want to talk about the development of the product. Oftentimes, I have founders on here who have created software. But again, Carl, you’ve done a masterful job with treating this service as a product. And in that I see the development, you didn’t outright say it, but I’m piecing it together. For our listeners, you started out with the tasks, right, automation website. But now I was listening to you’re talking about presentations, talking about copy, talk about that development of the product beyond just the automation tasks that you saw as an opportunity, and how did you balance it to where it wasn’t too much? You know?

Carl Taylor 26:54
It’s a constant. We’re still constantly figuring out, you know, and bading internally, have we gone too much, are we expanding too far? But it comes down to just like, you’ve got your mission? You know, for us the mission is, how do we make online marketing simple and accessible? Right, and we can, and kind of one of the core driving missions for us internally is how do we take tasks off our client’s plate? You know, we’ve got a busy business owner, they’re an entrepreneur, they should be focused on what they do best, even if sometimes they’ve got the skills to do it. So either you don’t have the skills and you need it done. Or you do have the skill? How do we how do we take more off their plate and not put things back? And so it’s that driving question that’s constantly led our evolution of our will. We need to add this or we need to add that and I’ve wanted to add copywriting to what we do for at least probably five years, but the the mathematics of what it would do to that price, if we added it held us back. And then when AI got as good as it did, and it was clear to everyone late last year, all of a sudden was like we can we can include copywriting now, we can still have paid extra for human powered copywriting for people who want it, but we can now include it in our unlimited service. Because the AI can do it so well, so fast and at an affordable price point for us. So. So that’s kind of that’s where the evolution, it’s always just looking back at what is the client actually need. And I can’t remember which book or who first said it. But I always keep this in mind is like, you’ve got to fall in love with the client that you serve, not in love with your product. If I was purely in love with my product, which don’t get me wrong, there’s been times over the last nine years that I have been like, No, this is how you know clients ask for things they don’t know, this is how we work. This is how it is like, he’s on my rules. And then eventually, the market kind of batters you into submission that you realize actually no, I need to change, they don’t listen to what the client is saying. So that’s that’s also something that always serves as well. I’ll go back a minute and go with you know, we’re called automations. So most people when they think about us, they think we do just the marketing automation setup. And often people go oh, you do graphic design, you do video editing, I had no idea. And the reason why I call it automation agency is one yes, we we came from that marketing tech world. But I’ve always for a long time believed that automation is just you not doing it. Yes, and that it’s being done either by tech or team. It doesn’t really matter who automation is just like I have no idea. I don’t want to be the one doing it. And I’m either going to use tech team or combination of both to achieve that result. And so that’s kind of where our overarching automation and see comes from. The reason we launched with graphic design was purely because when I transitioned from it being the full service col show of automation T to more strategic model, I had a graphic designer on on staff and he was really good and I thought well, why don’t I make him available for clients? That was that was the pure reason we’d like let’s just throw graphic designing. And interestingly enough, graphic design for us is one of those things that clients either love or they hate, which is interesting. But it’s also one of the things that there’s bread and butter almost every month, someone’s got at least one graphic design tasks they might need done. Versus in the automation. Well, like if we purely just did the tick automation. Often, once you set up your automation once, for most businesses that don’t even run their businesses and always needing to improve every month, but for most businesses, once you’ve got certain projects set up, it’s done, the job is done. And so an unlimited subscription model like ours, purely focused on automation, I think we would have a much higher churn than we do with the full gamut of what we do. So the evolution has come from listening to clients, what do they need listening to myself, What do I need, we more recently launched a higher end service. So for a long time, the client had to be the project manager, someone in the company had to be the project manager, you know, you’ve, you’ve got a big project, where a task based service, so you want to build a funnel, well, you’re gonna have a graphic design task for the designer to design the landing page, then you’re gonna have a tech task to build the landing page and whatever platform you’re building it in. And then you’ve got another automation task for the email follow ups. And so there’ll be at least three, maybe four tasks just for a very simple funnel. And for a technical person, that makes perfect sense. But for the less technical lead always, for them, they just want to funnel their thinking projects. And we always say, well, there’s someone in your company, either you or company to do that. And then in more recent times, about a year ago, we launched our project manager service where now you can have one person, you can hand over the bigger project, and they’re still breaking it down into the tasks, but it gives that that more personalized, almost a virtual assistant like level, that that’s improved that workflow. And again, I resisted it for a long time clients, one of the clients wanted it No, no, no. And then eventually, it was like, No, actually I want this to and I can see how this will make it simpler. Let’s do a small pivot and trial. We did the pilot, and it blew up. And so then now it’s like, how do we scale that, you know, the recruitment, the training, and that side of our business, too. And it’s just been, if anything, we probably sell more of that service now than any of our other services. So it’s just an ongoing, you know, it’s the world of business. It’s ongoing. Listen to the client, what do they need? And that development, even the portal and the wizards that you were talking about the asking you the questions, all of that came from solving little problems. I still remember when we started, we had no web portal, we had no web interface, it was purely an email ticketing system you sent you send in an email, we replied back like that’s that’s how it was, it was just a simple ticketing system. And, you know, that worked for the people who knew what they were doing, but it didn’t for the people who didn’t. And then they’ll just confusion around like people would send reply that people would reply to an old ticket with a new task, and it would create all this confusion. Oh, yes, like we need, we need a visual interface. So we built a portal, which made it very clear. And then we started going, well, you know, people are frustrated that there’s all this back and forward, I sent in my tasks. And you’ve asked me all these questions, and then the team are getting frustrated because the client isn’t there, they’ll answer three of the four questions they’ve asked. And that fourth question is slowing everything down? Because we don’t have the answer to that. And then it was like, Okay, well was there’s a whole bunch of things we do regularly are common. What if we just had these intake for each of those, which asks those questions, and we want to achieve two things, train the client, how to send a task in without a wizard, so they can at least see, you don’t have to write a full pack. Because we sometimes back in the early days, we would get people write these, like long multi page, Google doc briefs, and send that to us as an attachment for a task. And it was it was horrendous. And so we were kind of like we want to try and clients that this is a conversational, just flick off a very hate, you know, most of our wizards, they’ll be like, hey, team, I’m wanting this like this, if you could do it like that. Here’s some attachments like that’s effectively how they get built together. And so we’re training clients, and at the same time for those common things. We’re saving time on both sides, because we’re getting all the answers we need up front. Anything that’s not urgent, we in the Wizards will give an option to say I’ll send that later or I don’t know come up with something. So we’re not because we’re always trying to not put things back on the clients. And as I said, we always want to go how do we how do we not put more workload back onto the client? How do we take it away from them? So it most questions there’s an option to say I don’t know come up with something or use your experience. But for those that do know, it, lets them go, Oh, I haven’t thought about that. I need to upload a wireframe or I need to think about this or give them an example page. So the development is just listen to your clients, constantly, listen, solve problems, and I’ll keep you posted. If I think we’ve gone too far into the scope of what we do. There are days that I think we have I truly do. But I keep coming back to if we, we’ve got a competitor now in the space, I think they started. Well, sorry, they didn’t start, they pivoted to a similar model to us, I think about three years ago, okay. And I keep an eye on them every now and then have a look at what they’re doing. And they have, in my opinion, are ridiculous scope. Like they’ve added, they’ve added all these crazy things that I just, I wonder, you know, I’m sure everyone does this about your competitors. I wonder how the internal workings of their business work to make that not absolute mayhem. But it’s interesting, you know, it’s interesting to see. So I don’t I don’t plan to copy all the things they’ve got on scope, but I pay attention to see what what they add to see if there’s anything to go, I hadn’t thought about adding that into what we need to do. So.

Chris Davis 35:48
Yeah, I think, you know, you said something about automation. And it’s real, right, it’s, the whole point of automation is that you can have team or tech handle tasks for you. So you do get to a point and I, I recorded a podcast episode called an automation guilt, because I wasn’t aware of it. And I started to experience it when I was at LeadPages. And I, you know, really built a system out, and I will come to work, Carl, and I’d be like, Man is really not much for me to do. Like every emails are going out 10 pages on the Webinars, reminders, affiliates are getting their stuff like I was kind of twiddling my thumbs, you know, and I would look around in every department will be be working so hard. I was like, man, Chris, you you got to work harder or something. But what I was experiencing is, there comes a point where the system per your model in whatever scaled capacity you are, is handling things for you. And you simply need to focus on other areas of business. So if I tell you to automate, inherent in that is, at some point, you won’t need to focus on just that automation. There’ll be other areas in your business. And for you to see that and pinpoint that and say, Okay, well wait a minute, there’s only going to be a finite amount of tasks for automation, until they grow or you know, need, you need it at another level. So I love that part about it. And it’s it’s when you when I’m listening to you speak as well, and everybody, Carl is on here for twofold, one because of the agency that he runs. But two is I also want you all to see the person, the brain behind it. And one thing about you, Carl, that if if they haven’t seen it, I’m gonna call it out so they can see it is that you’re always evolving not just with the client needs, but also with the market. Right? Like you’re mentioning how now you have some AI generated copywriting and other things, instead of being scared and saying, oh, no, they I monsters are coming. You’re like, Okay, this is there’s a market shift. This is what tech does, it changes every eight weeks, eight days, you know, whatever. How can we now leverage this technology, this new shift, so that our clients and customers are not left in the dust, but they also aren’t mandated. To figure it all out, they can just leverage it on behalf of you and team. So I absolutely love that. Now, now somebody’s listening. And they may have been, you might have them drooling Carl, they’re like, oh, my gosh, I didn’t know this was possible, or you know, they’re distracted. They’re supposed to be listening to their spouse or you know, on a walk with. And they’re just distracted because you painted a picture of offloading these tasks that they never knew was possible. So so just give that listener who’s like, wow, where would I get started? What would I do? How do I know if my business is ready? What are some of the preparatory steps that you recommend somebody take but prior to engaging with you to ensure the fastest, the fastest onboarding?

Carl Taylor 39:25
Yeah, man. It’s interesting. There’s some clients come to us. And there’s been this list building. So if you if you’ve got this list that’s back of your mind might not even be written down. Maybe it is of these, like someday I want to get to those things. I need to do that little fix on the website. And I know that’s wrong. We need to fix that. Now. You know, I haven’t really looked at a Client Onboarding sequence in a while. You know, that this bit, I’ve always been planning to launch some Facebook ads. I need a funnel, but it’s not a priority right now. Like if you’ve got, if you’ve got this list of things that you’re never getting to maybe you’ve even got A whole bunch of business cards that you know, you scan, but have never loaded into your CRM, things like that. Those are really good starting places. If you’ve got that list, you just go okay, cool, these are stuff I was never going to get to, let’s just get started, delegate this and get these things done. That was Sunday maybes and and get some benefits. And usually it’s just get the ball rolling. It’s similar if anyone’s ever hired their first team member, virtual or in person. Usually, your experience in the beginning is, I don’t know, if I’ve got enough to fill them full time or part time, you know, I’m just gonna start them casual. I’m just going to put that in part time because I don’t know if I’ve got enough. But once you get started, once they’re on and you see them do, you start to see things your reticular activating system, the part of your mind that notices things, starts to notice opportunities everywhere, all I can say that I can say that I can send that. So the number one thing is you start because your mind that particularly RAS will will focus you on finding more opportunities to delegate. The other thing I would say is, if you if you don’t have that back list of things that you’ve not gotten do the next thing is doing do a time audit. What are the what are the things that you’re currently spending your time on every week? And just a couple of weeks, just measure make? Make notes, you know, some people say every 15 minutes, just make a note of what have I been doing. And once you once you’ve done that if you want if you want the shortcut, and you don’t want to time audit, block 10 minutes out in your calendar, sit down and go look at the look at your calendar and go What did I do on Monday? What did they do on Tuesday? What did they do on Wednesday and write out all the things you did? Circle the things that you enjoyed or worthwhile? And then look at all the other things and go, could I have delegated that to someone else? Did you do some graphic stuff? Did you fiddle around on the website? Did you will fiddle around in automation. Now, even if you did that audit and the answer is no you didn’t. didn’t do it. I’m sure you’ll find other opportunities to automate or delegate even if they’re not in my wheelhouse or Chris’s wheelhouse. Then the next question to ask yourself is well, what would I like my business to be doing? What’s missing? The obvious where most people I find usually have the least many people focus on all their sales and marketing automation. And they forget that marketing continues after you get the customer. So Client Onboarding is usually a really big opportunity that’s not being looked at properly is the moment they become a client or customer. What is the flow the sequence of events that happen and that the other thing too is people also think about their automations as emails and SMS is and whatever going out to the client. And they don’t think about well, what about the internal prompts and notes to internal team members to say, Hey, pick up the phone and call this person or hey, send something in the mail to this person. Or maybe they want to integrate with a tool like lob or one of those which can send a direct mail piece automatically I got if listening if you didn’t know that you can actually have the moment someone signs up that that could trigger something to a fulfillment house or to a print on demand service that could print a letter a welcome letter or can send a goodie bag to your client. These are some of the things that there’s a real opportunity there. Another another area that I find a lot of people seem to miss if you’re a subscription business in particular, getting your failed payment automations and notifications, that’s its money on the table right there, the moment you fix those, it’s instant money, if you can get someone to update their credit card or a failed payment, you have it notify them multiple times. And if it can’t fix you then have it notify someone internal to, to do something. So the delivery side. And outside of the tech automation side of things. I often tell people, as a business owner, the first area of your business, if you want to move to the next level of freedom in your business, the first level that you should really look to get yourself out of is delivery. If you are involved in the delivery of what you do, you will always always have a capacity issue. And so you tech automation stuff. Absolutely. But then I’d be looking at anywhere in your delivery. What can you automate? That’s that’s the first obvious outside of what most people think is obvious in the marketing space.

Chris Davis 44:14
Yeah, that is that is so good, Carl, and I’ll add to it first off, absolutely on the delivery side, increase your capacity by removing yourself immediately. Okay, you make more money, but the time audit piece. The other thing that I found that was really helpful for me was in there’s a variety of software tools that you can use to do this. I’m I don’t personally use any of them because I don’t track my time. But I’ve got a post on the website with some time tracking apps. So we’ll make sure that’s in the show notes. But looking at having the team that you do have log their time and auditing where they’re spending their time. And look at that through the lens of what you’re paying them. Because oftentimes you’ll I did this one time, Carl, and I had a I had a, you know, a sheet and and I was looking at the time sheet and it was like 10 hours this month, I was like, what they spend 10 hours on. And it said meetings. I said, Oh, no, oh, I don’t know how that’s possible. Because I love 30 minute meetings and I if I can keep it shorter than that, but it just, it was a quick reminder that wait a minute, that is time, we cannot be spending that amount of time on that thing. So when you’re doing your time audit of yourself, also your team. And again, run it across, okay, could I be handing these tasks off, and getting more I have to say this good help is extremely hard to find specially technical. So if you if you have a resource that can do the technical tasks for you, and remove that load, and this is for the techie and non techie, if you’re techie, this is just an a way to increase your capacity because again, you’re removing yourself from delivery. So it works either way. But you have to you have to understand that you’re not going to easily go to the marketplace, even me, I have a hard time finding people who could truly show up consistently for the business and, and do a high quality of work. So Carl, man, thank you for coming on to the podcast. And and gleaning allowing us to glean from you. You could tell you can really tell you’re not just about the tech and business. You know, as you talk you can you know your mind has expanded around different theories on life and investing and you know, the best ways to build businesses and all of that people have heard your voice. Maybe for the first time, they didn’t know automation agency even existed. And now they’re like, hold on, Chris, where do I find this guy? How do I connect with him? For those listeners? Where can they go? Where can they find out more? How can they connect with you?

Carl Taylor 47:14
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about automation agency, the best place is automation agency.com. You see all our pricing, you see all the information, you can see designed portfolios of graphic design stuff, you can see video portfolio, video stuff we do, you can get started right there on the website. Or if you’d like to book a time to chat to someone, you can book a 15 minute call where we just learn more about what you’re looking to do, what tool texts platforms you’re using. And we figure out if we think we’re a good match for your needs or not. If we are we can demo the platform, show you how those wizards and stuff we’re talking about works. So that’s the best way if you want to learn more about that, if you want to connect more with me personally, maybe you’re like, Hey, that sounds cool. I’ll look at automation and see but right now I’m just more interested in being connected with with UCOL. You can find me at Carl Taylor, it’s Carl with a C. or, you know, I’m imagining this is probably a more American audience. So let’s just make sure I put my pronunciation Carl Carl taylor.com.au. And you can connect with me on socials, YouTube, all of that from from that website.

Chris Davis 48:20
Man, the the America.

Carl Taylor 48:25
I was, I was at one of the Traffic and Conversion Summit. I remember what year it was, but it was so funny. I was I was there. And I met this guy that you know, and I go hey, I’m Carl because that’s when I’m in America. I have to pronounce your My My name better because otherwise it’s always wrong. So hey, I’m Carl. And he goes, Hey, I’m Mari and anyways, we sit down and like hey, so where are you from? And I go, I’m Sydney, Australia. And he goes on from Brisbane, Australia. And also a second we like did you pronounce your Rs? He’s like, Yes, I have to do that here. And it was very funny.

Chris Davis 49:03
Oh man great story. It to be able to turn it on like that is it’s hilarious to me. I’m always fascinated even when actors you know they they have the American accent into you hear their native tongue. You’re like I never knew he was British, you know? So man, Carl, thanks again. Man. This has been great. This is this has been a refreshing reminder to myself, to leverage leverage the hands. there’s help out there everyone there is help out here. So hopefully it is encouraging to you as well, that you too can can remove that tech stumbling block from it again, all of the links will be in the show notes. You can go there right now click on it. And I guarantee you can access Carl in all of the ways that he’s mentioned Carl, thank you for coming on. listeners. Thank you for lending us your yours, lending us your ears. I hope we’ve paid you back handsomely. Many times over with what you’ve heard today. And everyone, everyone continue to automate responsibly. My friends, Carl, thank you for coming on man. Thank you for tuning into this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends