Unlocking Opportunities with Process Mapping feat. Daniel Cooper

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off 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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast, you all know the drill. We invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems for scale. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And I have the privilege to have Daniel Cooper with us today. And he is the founder of lolly.co. And he’s on a mission to transform repetitive business processes into slick systems by watch this combining process consulting, and superior software development. If you’re like, Whoa, that’s a lot. That’s big. Trust me, he’ll break it all down for you in this episode. But he started out as a video game developer, and found his way into serial entrepreneurship. And his aim today is to automate 1 million companies. Daniel, welcome to the podcast, man. How are you doing? I’m great. Thanks for having me. Chris. The Privilege is all mine. Yes, yes. So So you know, the second you you said process? You had me. Right. So I want to there’s there’s a part of me that just wants to jump right into it. But I understand I wanted to be fair to the audience, give us a little bit about your background, and how you made it to where you are, you’ve got this process. You’ve got software now you’re process driven. But you started as a video game developer, like, how did what?

Daniel Cooper 2:19
Yeah, you know, I ended up in because I’m a terrible employee was poking holes in everything. But the way I got here was I, I love to code since I was a kid. So if you ask my father, I like to break his computer’s adequacy in the same way. But you know, we’ll agree to disagree. And after years of studying, I ended up working for Sony PlayStation developing games, that which was, which was great. And I think I got the itch really want to start my businesses and one thing led to another and a few businesses along the road, you know, some good ones, some some bad ones, either in a situation where I was CTO of a medical clinic in central London. And I was I was brought on there to sort out all of their internal processes and to bring in technology. Because it was just, it’d be in the same way, then I think, since really like, almost 1998, nothing changed. Yeah, no.

Chris Davis 3:25
Now let me ask you this thing. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Daniel, when you were as when you were a software developer, are game developer for Sony? Is that where you started to see, like, as you were writing the code and developing, you started to kind of lean more towards processes, maybe some object oriented passing variables, it was that the exposure and then when you went into this role, you kind of leverage some of that thinking.

Daniel Cooper 3:50
I think, Sony, being a Japanese company, it was incredibly organized. You know, so I’m unsure and unaware of other game development companies are all the same in the way that they develop their games, but I highly doubt it. It was like a military operation. It was so well organized. Everyone had their tickets, it was down to an absolute tee. And I think that that was a really great example of a highly organized company that was able to produce these games on mass, because of course, they use other game development companies who would make it primarily for Playstation or Xbox or whoever. But of course, they’d make their own games in house and that’s where and that’s where I was. But that’s really where I started to see the process. But for me, I think the biggest part of processes was in my own businesses where things just became painful, right? We just get sick of doing some stuff, man, I’m sick of doing this one thing over and over again. And that’s where really, the process orientated side of it started to come through, but I believe that the consultative aspect came once I was inside the the medic Good clinic primarily because you had to kind of put your case forward right to all of the shareholders. Yeah. And that was the and that was the challenge there, right? That’s what you have to kind of come in from a more consultative point of view. Yeah.

Chris Davis 5:13
I love it. I know one thing that that I’m realizing in and these are this, this is just life, right? Like how it happens. But you do a thing for so many times, and you start to realize the where the value is, right. So I take like an athlete, at a basketball star will or athlete will dribble, they’ll run, they’ll shoot their pass, they’ll do all of these things, right? But it’s not until they figure out that one thing that they’re doing that’s actually impacting the team. So it’s like, you know, I can do all of the things that athlete does. But when I play defense, we win. Right? When I shoot the three, we ended up winning, I need to do that more. And I feel I can just see so many parallels in every profession. So it’s like here, you do all of these things, hey, I can build a business, build a website, I can do some automation, this, this and that. But then you start to see, when I put structure where there is none. businesses grow. Right? Yeah. Like, when I introduce structure, when they bring me in and say, Hey, this is what we’re trying to do. Can you make sense of it? And maybe they don’t say it in those words. But essentially, everything around you is like, who this is, this is gonna take quite a bit, and you start to add the structure. And you’re like, that’s really what’s moving the needle?

Daniel Cooper 6:35
Yeah, right. But no one’s there is no team in the NBA, that does not have a coach. Just Yes. You can’t be at that level and not have the coach, right. It’s equivalent, that basically not having a plan. How many businesses do we all know. And we’re all guilty of this in some aspect of some level in different areas of the business where there isn’t a plan we just haven’t had the time is the equivalent though of every single player, no one’s playing defense, everyone’s just trying to shoot constantly, right? And it’s not going to work. And that’s where being organising, having systems and strategies is, is really, really important. And there’s an odd glass ceiling in all businesses, whether we’re hit that will only grow at $2 million in revenue, and they just can’t work out why they can’t break for the next one. Is that like five? And then beyond that, like 15. But it’s really common at that point. Because there and the thing is the game changes. Right? The high school team compared to the NBA team, that’s a different game.

Chris Davis 7:38
Yeah, requires a different level of stamina, a different level of organization, different level of performance. I’m so glad you brought that up, because it is something that I’ve realized, and it’s relative to the company, but there just are certain plateaus, that you just are gonna hit in an experience. And you’re gonna have to do something different. I think the best quote I heard is what got you here won’t take you there. Yeah, so it’s like, look, that disorganized, chaotic way of running your business may have gotten you here, but it’s not gonna take you to the next level. And sometimes people tap out and they say, I’m fine with a million or two, I just keep running it this way. I guess it’s their prerogative to run their business how they want to, but give us give us a little insight on where did Lolly what First off, tell us about your company Lolly CO, and what drove you to create the software?

Daniel Cooper 8:32
So the company was formed almost purely at our accident, really. I was working for the for the health care company. And a contact of mine said to another contact is you need to speak to Daniel about automation systems within our company. They’re a big finance company. And they came in to speak to me, I gave him all the advice. And the guy said, I don’t want to do it, I want you to look at the time, like, I’ve got a job here. I’m good. And he said, name your price. So I just did something stupid. And he said, sure. Okay, cool. So when can we get started? Okay, right, fine. What, okay, I’m gonna start trying to work my way around all this now. And that’s, and that’s really how it started. But it the company that we have, really, there’s two core focuses and what we do, the first thing that we do is we’re looking at processes, and we’re looking at systems, we’re looking at how the business physically is running. And then the second part of the company is actually building custom automation for our clients to then power, those processes that we’ve redefined and optimized. The important part part of all of this is that it is a it is terrible advice. If someone comes and says, I just want to automate this, you’re cool. Let’s just build it. That’s a bad idea, because the process might be wrong in the first place. Or it might be that ROI is terrible. For instance, if you catch me said Hey, Dan, I want to automate our blog writing, can you please build us some automation so that machine learning writes and blogs for us? Sure. But I’m 100% certain that that’s going to cost way more than just hiring a professional writer. Right? And that’s the thing, the ROI is terrible. Why are you doing it? And for us, it’s about working with our clients to try and establish that the processes they trying to automate are actually meant for machines. And not and humans are doing things that humans you don’t run your bank, or you might do. But I’ve never heard of anyone bringing their back saying, hey, just put me through to a robot. Someone I could speak to my bank Boy, that make a big difference, right? I don’t care if they want to make the rest. Yeah, they should

Chris Davis 10:50
know, that’s, man, that’s a really good point that what is that? You know, like, how do you help somebody understand, hey, that action you’re doing is actually better suited for a robot to do like sure technology to do, you’re actually doing a job.

Daniel Cooper 11:09
I don’t know what it is, I think a lot of it is, is really making people assured and feeling comfortable, that we are not there to take the job from them. We’re not there to replace them. And we involve staff at all levels in order to make sure we’re working with them. They are the ones that help us establish what the processes should be, and help them understand how things can improve. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with like, the outseam pitchforks and flaming torches outside the business owners door the next day, right where we’ve replaced everyone with, like Skynet. But that’s that’s not the plan. It is about. I don’t believe that there will be businesses that are completely automated in the future. I just, it can’t happen. Yeah, you know, in what in what you do, but the great automation and marketing is you’re helping salespeople or marketing people leverage opportunity. So where you’re able to line up, you know, all of these marketing touchpoints whether or not that’s email or SMS, or whatever it might be, but then a human then take control. Because we’re terrible at following up on stuff, right? Mm, the C factor, and we remember stuff terribly like humans, our brains are useless, you’ll be in a showing up. Ah, shoot, I was meant to email that prospect. And I forget, right, yeah. And then you walk out of the bottom, they forgotten, it’s gone. Right. But machines don’t forget like that, because it’s not the way it works. So I think that that’s the really important, like, divide between all of these things that both you and I talked about of automation, right, and that we are empowering people to be better at their jobs. And to do that, the more fun stuff, right? Not the hammering out of emails, or whatever it might be, but actually getting to talk to other humans. Yeah.

Chris Davis 12:55
Yeah, and I want to so I want to spend the rest of the the podcast you know, we know about your your your upbringing into, you know, how you matriculated to where you are, and how you started the the company that you own now, and the purpose behind it with equipping businesses to really get a hold of their processes. There’s two things that jumped out to me, that I that I would love to just give you the floor. And the first is process mapping. I told I shared this internally to my team. I’ve been using this term for a while and to see someone else use it appropriately. It just made me smile. I was like, there’s someone else that understands the power and importance of process mapping. But I know that this is a new idea to a lot of people, longtime listeners of the podcast have probably heard me mention it in some variety. But what I want to do is give you the floor and just walk us through what is processing? What is process mapping? And what does it look like when you go through it? Like what are the steps?

Daniel Cooper 14:03
Yeah, so I think you have to look at the business wrong. Like let’s look at this from different heights. So if we look at it from a 10,000 foot view, we see it as x person does x thing, and it results in X goal, right, that’s the 10,000 foot view. The 100 foot view is what we call a standard operating procedure. And this is like a meticulously written step by step in a manual someone walks in bang you put on their desk like here is the exact plan, like the exact play like step by step minute for minute between those two is the flowchart for process mapping. And the idea of this is we’re really now looking at 1000 foot view and what needs to happen here and this is really quite important is that if you look at any kind of business starts to grow, you start to establish multiple people and roles. And if you are not careful if you do not have a view like this like process mapping view, you get what called normalization deviance. So that means that let’s go back to the basketball analogy. One player one day, there’s no coach. So one player has at one day wearing, like sandals. And someone else goes, well, he might wear, like boots tomorrow. And as someone else was before, you know, it’s become normal and like you’ve got a whole team wearing ridiculous clothing, and it’s just become normal. And then it becomes the old saying that we all love, we’ve always done it this way. Right. And that was never how we intended to do it in the first place. And because the founders too busy elsewhere, this normalization deviance kicks in. But this flowchart mapping the processes, what we want to do is we get everyone together, who’s in the same role and assess them. Okay, step by step, what do we need to do? So what’s our trigger? Were all familiar with triggers, we should be worth kind of listening to his podcast regularly. So that like Zapier, or IFTTT, all these things, like triggers is the same thing for process. So what kicks off? So it might be, for instance, let’s assume an incoming support ticket, that’s our trigger. Right? Then what happens next, it’s the someone open the email, someone opens and does something. So we have like actual action boxes, something happens, we have decisions where a decision is made. And the idea is you map these parts out, you don’t need to go too deep and like map out to it’s like intricate details like a standard operating procedure. But you need to have all of these blocks in place, and you need to have the output, what does the output get passed to, so it doesn’t get passed to another department. So that’s another what we call a swim lane. So imagine a pool with swim lanes, it can get a hospital department department. So you can once you’ve done all that and boxed it out with actions and decisions. And you can probably just do it basically like that. And you’ve worked out what the trigger is, and what the inputs are that are required. And that end of it and what the outputs are required. For instance, it might be that we have to pass X spreadsheet out to another department is that output, right? Or I have to invoice a client, we can then establish what exactly is required on the inputs, what is the is required on the outputs. So we’re not over delivering. We’re not under delivering. And we’re also not going back and forth at the start trying to ask for questions and more information. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. By just mapping like that you find madness involved, you will find things we were saying, Sandra, what why are you? Why are you typing into the spreadsheet, printing it off, walking upstairs for David to then type into another spreadsheet? Why you will find all sorts of oddities like this in processes you never thought existed? What goes out, you can then time box stuff. So how long does it take, we can vote. And we can we can do basically like a blind voting system. So in software technology, there’s a there’s a like a methodology called Scrum, which many people are familiar with. And yes, Scrum when we estimate tasks, we often do some called Scrum poker. So we’ll all have an app on our phone, download for free minutes. And when we decide in a time box, how long something takes not just the action, but also a decision. We can all vote in minutes. Once we’ve time boxed everything, we also know how much gets paid. Now we know how much one cycle costs us every time the business does. And now we can start to say cool. All right now how many times we run out a week or a day or a year. And one of them will look over three years and three years is the magic number. Because with that three year number, you can say hang on a minute. This is costing us $175,000 over three years. We could probably automate that for 50,000. And we could just do something else instead and not have to worry about that stuff. Or in half. That’s the power of processes and flowcharts. This simplicity is the absolute key. Yeah, it’s really almost no more complicated than that. It’s about making sure that we all agree. And the funniest thing is when you do these, if you ask if we do workshops, this is how we normally interact clients, okay, like, like mini ones or longer ones are in passing. But the point of it is, you will be amazed at how many times if you ask three people who do the same job to map a process. almost completely different in every single example. It’s amazing. Where people just were unaware.

Chris Davis 19:30
Yeah, that’s a that’s actually a good segue, I saw that. I saw that differentiation across the board even in myself at times, I would map differently. And one of the things that one of the first things I did in my my automation service provider program is create a framework now. It holds me to the same steps and then it even got to the point. Now Daniel, where I’ve got certain shapes that always signify a certain thing you know, and there’s a method of what’s vertical, what’s horizontal. I just remember being so overwhelmed. And I’m an engineer man. I’m an engineer. So this is overwhelmed after engineering of like, how do I get started with a flowchart? I want this beautiful output. I like the boxes and the arrows. And then I would do it in sometimes I just be like, Oh, it looks so plain or bland. So there’s a part of me that also knew it needed to be visually appealing, in my opinion, because when I refer back to this, I don’t want to have to think extremely hard. So I started learning tactics, different shapes, different colors mean different things. So I can look without seeing text, then, like, without seeing any text, I can look at one of my flowcharts. And based on the shapes and the colors, I can get an idea of what’s going on.

Daniel Cooper 20:55
Yeah, you know? Yeah. And that’s how that’s how it should be. I think a lot of people listen to stuff isn’t there. There’s gonna be a lot of people listening, it’s behind time still this man. But that’s the thing. You shouldn’t be doing it. Right. That’s what you that’s what you pay people for. Right? So yes, one of the things that we have we have a rule internally called documentation first. Everyone hates me for the we use, we use notion for our internal documentation. Okay. There are loads of other things out there that you can use right for it. Yeah, yeah. No, she’s

Chris Davis 21:26
a good internal wiki tool, though. Yeah, it is

Daniel Cooper 21:29
right. And it sits in everyone’s desktops easily accessible. But the rule we have is documentation first. So that means when you go to do a task, check the documentation. And if it’s not there, guess what, you’re documenting it, and you’re doing the flowchart, and you’re importing it, or if it’s wrong, you’re the one editing it. And if and if you’re caught not doing it, then you know, someone’s gonna be on your tail about that. But it’s a great way to kind of force everyone along the kind of same line, and it doesn’t put all of the pressure on the founder, especially when you’re kind of layer sub, or around $2 million to have to do all of the operational stuff. Right? It’s not all on you. You know, there’s a shared responsibility for that. And it’s really important that everyone does it. Yeah,

Chris Davis 22:10
I just feel like I’m it this is so important. Because even like you’re mentioning, you know, you sit down with a business owner, get them to you start mapping out their process. And they’re like, what, why are we how that doesn’t make sense. Because they get so used to doing the process, right? How the process makes them feel, maybe it’s happy, maybe it’s overwhelmed. They get really intimate with the feeling. And they’re just totally blind to it. They’ve never seen it. They’ve never seen the process. So they don’t even know what the possibilities are. Until you map it. Then you map it, and it’s like, Oh, my God, why are we not doing this? How about this, I used to do it for fun, just like, Hey, sit down. I remember, I gave a presentation. And at the end of it, I said, Okay, I’m gonna sit in front of my computer, shine it on the on the screen here are projected assists shine projected on the screen here and put people in the hot seat. And I was mapping out their process on the spot, right? Yeah. The entire room is like, oh, wait a minute. Why? Why are they going there? Like everybody Daniel, like, if you don’t have to be an expert, you just have to be willing to embrace like, Oh, that’s not right. Right. Like, yeah. You have to be willing

Daniel Cooper 23:28
to fix it. Yeah. And I think a big thing as well as like, as entrepreneurs and founders are so busy. Yeah, sort of busiest people ever. And a lot of it is we end up presuming we presume that once we passed over someone, well, that’s why they’re always gonna do it. Yep. And even when you hit 200 people, well, I know, it’s cool. Because originally, I told the first person, this is the way we do it. And it will, it will come away from you. And that’s and that’s where it’s really important to have this because it adds that layer of transparency, which is really, really important. I’m a big believer in transparency in businesses. And I think automation can really work well with that, which is great.

Chris Davis 24:07
Yeah, tell me about this. You do process consulting. And I it was so refreshing. I can’t I can’t tell you how refreshing it is just to go to your website and just read through how you’re positioning yourself in the type of service that you offer. But when you when you said process consulting, it made me feel like there’s a certain type of company that understands, you know, what, we’ve got to get our processes together. Are you finding that companies are coming to you having that identified in some capacity that my processes, something’s not working? We’re successful, we could be more successful, or is it a sense of they come to you for one thing, it ends up turning out that they really need process optimization.

Daniel Cooper 24:55
Yeah, so typically, the types of businesses that we encounter they come to us like We got this problem. We’re growing too quickly. Everything’s out of control. There’s like fires everywhere. I don’t know, like, we just don’t know what we’re going to do. Like we need someone to help us sort this out. And that is normally the way that it starts. And occasionally, it’s someone coming to you. And they’ve kind of got some blinkers on. And they haven’t seen that, like, I just want to automate this one thing. And you’re like, Okay, well, let’s, let’s explore that one thing and then in a mini workshop and see what kind of where that takes us. But for the majority of them, yeah, it is because their growth has gone stratospheric. And there and what I hear from almost every single one of these companies, especially from the ones who’ve had previous businesses that haven’t been as successful, they all tell me that having too much business, and growing too fast, is more stressful than not being able to find any business, which seems like a crazy thing to say, yeah. But when you really care about your business, and things are starting to fall apart, and you know, we’re really starting to, like, Excuse me, piss people off, right, not losing customers and clients because we’ve got bad service, because it’s just out of control. It’s a horrible feeling. Right? Yeah.

Chris Davis 26:07
Wow. It’s like the psychology is, I’d rather worry about getting a client, then losing one.

Daniel Cooper 26:16
Yeah, because I would almost guarantee that the people you’re helping people like marketing or sales automation, right? We’re taking a place where they’re like, I’m just sending the emails one by one. And then you go in like, okay, look, guys. Just stop, right. But the reality is, once they hit that point, and then they automated this, suddenly they target my god, this is the best thing ever. Chris, you’re amazing. You’ve saved my life. You’ve changed, like, and I guarantee you here’s, you’ve changed my life. Yeah, right. Your automation and what you’re doing? Well, they haven’t quite clocked yours in six months time, they’re gonna go, Oh, my God, onboarding of new clients has become horrific, right? Because then, because now operations can’t keep up. You go. And this is, then this is where we start to speak to people, right? It’s so Oh, man.

Chris Davis 27:10
I love it. So in the there’s definitely a blue ocean effect to process consulting. Because again, I feel like there’s a process is subjective, right, there’s a process to get your website built, there’s, it’s everywhere, everything we do is a process. Right. But specifically to automation, in scaling a company are are ensuring that a company scale does not cannibalize itself. Right, and that they can continue on that that trajectory, process then becomes the required, it becomes the foundation. And I don’t know about you, Daniel, I want to give you the floor here. But one of the things that I look for, especially in a tech startup that’s come in and say, Hey, Chris, we really want your help to help scale XYZ, I’m actually happy. When I see manual processes that are being exhausted, the people in them are being exhausted, yet they’re producing a profit. Because to your earlier point, being able to map out the process, and then start to get a good idea of if we just did this one thing. This is what you would gain and either hours back time saved, you know, it becomes a to me very valuable skill or resource to be able to go somewhere and have somebody consult specifically on your processes to help you scale. After after a client comes in. I know you do the workshop, and there’s a lot of exploration there and walk away with a game plan start to map out the processes in they see it. Do you see that their mindset towards processes maintains that level of excitement? Or is it just kind of like, oh, that worked, and then they just kind of forget about it?

Daniel Cooper 29:06
Yeah, I mean, I suppose the analogy you can make is kind of like

Daniel Cooper 29:13
it’s kind of like the business equivalent of crack if crack or a good thing. It’s definitely not me. I know. You could see I was pausing like, I shouldn’t. Still, I’ve said it out. I’m joking. So it is a bit like that. Yeah. So what will generally happen is, is that, you know, you’ll run a whole workshop and at the end, you’ll say, Look, here is the same thing. Over three days you would make if you automated this after your automation costs, and then people kind of go full steam into it. But once they’ve then exhausted all those angles, they become addicted to that growth and then Oh my God. Now we could do these other things we want to do. I think we could also automate this they would do this thing we could do this and then we will look carefully but the important part here is to make sure that, you know, when you’re consulting, you need to be really careful that the advice you give is good for the client, right and not for you. So there is often as many times you’re going to say no is you’re going to say yes, because was a bad idea. It shouldn’t be done. If it’s not going to produce an ROI, or if it’s just going to look like something’s like unethical, or just morally bankrupt, that you shouldn’t be done. Right? Or just when you know, it’s just not going to work out long term. Because once the numbers might stack, right, oh, let’s let’s move all of our our call centers to like, voice assistants AI, just a terrible idea. Probably an ROI, a terrible idea. Because long term, you’ll just lose all your customers to someone else who has stopped that says we have real people in support. Right? It’s all about building moats and businesses, right? That’s what we’re talking about here. Like for many companies, like their moat is support. Right? Their moat is customer service. And sure, yeah, automate a lot of stuff. But you’ve got and that can be a moat with automation. But you’ve got to be really careful. I think that that type of stuff. Really can Yeah,

Chris Davis 31:09
yeah, absolutely. And I, I think it leads to especially the average founder, what I found is the average founder gets that excitement. And they’re just on to the next thing. They’re, they’re not necessarily paying attention to the process that got them there. They’re just more so wanting to say, hey, look, okay, we got this done. Next thing, hey, this thing, can we do it? And then it’s you who reigns a minister? Hey, remember how we got here? Yeah, having processes being digital, we’re gonna do that same thing. Yeah. To go to the next or hit the next objective. So that does make sense. You know, it’s short lived, the victory is short live. But I think, you know, when there’s pain there, they don’t forget. When it’s like, Man, I remember when it took me 30 minutes, every client and five clients a day, and now it’s only two minutes, you know, like, it’s a reminder of the value of it. And I find that it becomes like a internal salesperson.

Daniel Cooper 32:15
I agree. I say to my clients a lot. You know, they say to me, I think I think we’re done with process. I think we’re good. I think we might cool. I was like okay, so go on holiday for two weeks. Turn your phone off. No laptop, no phone. How’d you feel about that? They’re like, wow, I don’t think we could do that. Right? Well, yes. And you are not there yet. Right? Don’t don’t start like resting and thinking it’s all good. Because that’s the reality. If if Yeah, most business owners just said Cool, right? I’m off to wherever Australia for two weeks. And I’m not going to any phone, any laptop, no email, nothing. And you come back, there’d be like, a nuclear war in the business. And you’ve got to make sure that that’s not going to happen. Because not only run your machine at some people are quite happy, just like work your way. But like, no, no, I’m good at this level. I’m just going to keep doing like this. I’m good at like one or 2 million. And I’ll just keep it up. Just keep on churning and battling away. You got to take a holiday, you gotta have a break. Like, that’s why it’s not what everyone starts a business because like, I don’t want to work for this guy anymore. I want to do I want to decide when I work, and I want to charge and do what I want, wherever I want. And you build this really horrible imaginary, like invisible prison around you. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And the only way to escape those systems?

Chris Davis 33:26
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You start start with the process. Start with the steps that got you here. Let’s let’s map it out. Let’s get these processes clear and defined. And then what we can we can automate it. But let’s the foundation of the automation is going to be the process. So bad process bad automation is just going to amplify what’s there. So then you I can’t thank you enough man for coming on to the podcast and, and talking through process mapping and consulting. I, my hope is that listeners are starting to have a higher appreciation. And by listeners, I mean, the marketers, the consultants that are actually going to be the ones helping these businesses. Don’t just gloss over process mapping. Don’t just gloss over the process is extremely important. Then on the flip side, for the founders who are looking for the solution. Listen, everything lies in the process in the manner in which you get things done. Right there. There is no sign up for automation, and it just starts working. It’s going to run on the foundation of your processes. So I’m glad to have another voice on the podcast to echo those sentiments. If our listeners wanted to find out more about you or connect or your company, where’s the best place that they can go?

Daniel Cooper 34:48
You visit our website, which is lolly.co or you can follow me on Twitter at imDanielCooper

Chris Davis 34:56
Great, great. So we’ll have those links in the show notes. Daniel, again, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. This was great. I enjoyed it. And I hope our listeners take more than two to three things away that they implement immediately, but more so have a stronger appreciation value and understanding from processes, man,

Daniel Cooper 35:18
I’m so mad. Otherwise it’s just me and you versus the world and process.

Chris Davis 35:23
Right? Right. So get on board, everybody, digital marketers and founders alike get on this process train. It’s all in the process. You have resources, they can never sit down. They can never say that. They’ve got resources and they’ve got a means. So take advantage, Daniel, man. Thank you again, man. And I’ll see you online.

Daniel Cooper 35:42
Thanks, man. Take care. All right.

Chris Davis 35:45
Thank you for tuning in to 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 podcasts, 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 allsystemsgopodcast.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 off 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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast, you all know the drill. We invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems for scale. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And I have the privilege to have Daniel Cooper with us today. And he is the founder of lolly.co. And he’s on a mission to transform repetitive business processes into slick systems by watch this combining process consulting, and superior software development. If you’re like, Whoa, that’s a lot. That’s big. Trust me, he’ll break it all down for you in this episode. But he started out as a video game developer, and found his way into serial entrepreneurship. And his aim today is to automate 1 million companies. Daniel, welcome to the podcast, man. How are you doing? I’m great. Thanks for having me. Chris. The Privilege is all mine. Yes, yes. So So you know, the second you you said process? You had me. Right. So I want to there’s there’s a part of me that just wants to jump right into it. But I understand I wanted to be fair to the audience, give us a little bit about your background, and how you made it to where you are, you’ve got this process. You’ve got software now you’re process driven. But you started as a video game developer, like, how did what?

Daniel Cooper 2:19
Yeah, you know, I ended up in because I’m a terrible employee was poking holes in everything. But the way I got here was I, I love to code since I was a kid. So if you ask my father, I like to break his computer’s adequacy in the same way. But you know, we’ll agree to disagree. And after years of studying, I ended up working for Sony PlayStation developing games, that which was, which was great. And I think I got the itch really want to start my businesses and one thing led to another and a few businesses along the road, you know, some good ones, some some bad ones, either in a situation where I was CTO of a medical clinic in central London. And I was I was brought on there to sort out all of their internal processes and to bring in technology. Because it was just, it’d be in the same way, then I think, since really like, almost 1998, nothing changed. Yeah, no.

Chris Davis 3:25
Now let me ask you this thing. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Daniel, when you were as when you were a software developer, are game developer for Sony? Is that where you started to see, like, as you were writing the code and developing, you started to kind of lean more towards processes, maybe some object oriented passing variables, it was that the exposure and then when you went into this role, you kind of leverage some of that thinking.

Daniel Cooper 3:50
I think, Sony, being a Japanese company, it was incredibly organized. You know, so I’m unsure and unaware of other game development companies are all the same in the way that they develop their games, but I highly doubt it. It was like a military operation. It was so well organized. Everyone had their tickets, it was down to an absolute tee. And I think that that was a really great example of a highly organized company that was able to produce these games on mass, because of course, they use other game development companies who would make it primarily for Playstation or Xbox or whoever. But of course, they’d make their own games in house and that’s where and that’s where I was. But that’s really where I started to see the process. But for me, I think the biggest part of processes was in my own businesses where things just became painful, right? We just get sick of doing some stuff, man, I’m sick of doing this one thing over and over again. And that’s where really, the process orientated side of it started to come through, but I believe that the consultative aspect came once I was inside the the medic Good clinic primarily because you had to kind of put your case forward right to all of the shareholders. Yeah. And that was the and that was the challenge there, right? That’s what you have to kind of come in from a more consultative point of view. Yeah.

Chris Davis 5:13
I love it. I know one thing that that I’m realizing in and these are this, this is just life, right? Like how it happens. But you do a thing for so many times, and you start to realize the where the value is, right. So I take like an athlete, at a basketball star will or athlete will dribble, they’ll run, they’ll shoot their pass, they’ll do all of these things, right? But it’s not until they figure out that one thing that they’re doing that’s actually impacting the team. So it’s like, you know, I can do all of the things that athlete does. But when I play defense, we win. Right? When I shoot the three, we ended up winning, I need to do that more. And I feel I can just see so many parallels in every profession. So it’s like here, you do all of these things, hey, I can build a business, build a website, I can do some automation, this, this and that. But then you start to see, when I put structure where there is none. businesses grow. Right? Yeah. Like, when I introduce structure, when they bring me in and say, Hey, this is what we’re trying to do. Can you make sense of it? And maybe they don’t say it in those words. But essentially, everything around you is like, who this is, this is gonna take quite a bit, and you start to add the structure. And you’re like, that’s really what’s moving the needle?

Daniel Cooper 6:35
Yeah, right. But no one’s there is no team in the NBA, that does not have a coach. Just Yes. You can’t be at that level and not have the coach, right. It’s equivalent, that basically not having a plan. How many businesses do we all know. And we’re all guilty of this in some aspect of some level in different areas of the business where there isn’t a plan we just haven’t had the time is the equivalent though of every single player, no one’s playing defense, everyone’s just trying to shoot constantly, right? And it’s not going to work. And that’s where being organising, having systems and strategies is, is really, really important. And there’s an odd glass ceiling in all businesses, whether we’re hit that will only grow at $2 million in revenue, and they just can’t work out why they can’t break for the next one. Is that like five? And then beyond that, like 15. But it’s really common at that point. Because there and the thing is the game changes. Right? The high school team compared to the NBA team, that’s a different game.

Chris Davis 7:38
Yeah, requires a different level of stamina, a different level of organization, different level of performance. I’m so glad you brought that up, because it is something that I’ve realized, and it’s relative to the company, but there just are certain plateaus, that you just are gonna hit in an experience. And you’re gonna have to do something different. I think the best quote I heard is what got you here won’t take you there. Yeah, so it’s like, look, that disorganized, chaotic way of running your business may have gotten you here, but it’s not gonna take you to the next level. And sometimes people tap out and they say, I’m fine with a million or two, I just keep running it this way. I guess it’s their prerogative to run their business how they want to, but give us give us a little insight on where did Lolly what First off, tell us about your company Lolly CO, and what drove you to create the software?

Daniel Cooper 8:32
So the company was formed almost purely at our accident, really. I was working for the for the health care company. And a contact of mine said to another contact is you need to speak to Daniel about automation systems within our company. They’re a big finance company. And they came in to speak to me, I gave him all the advice. And the guy said, I don’t want to do it, I want you to look at the time, like, I’ve got a job here. I’m good. And he said, name your price. So I just did something stupid. And he said, sure. Okay, cool. So when can we get started? Okay, right, fine. What, okay, I’m gonna start trying to work my way around all this now. And that’s, and that’s really how it started. But it the company that we have, really, there’s two core focuses and what we do, the first thing that we do is we’re looking at processes, and we’re looking at systems, we’re looking at how the business physically is running. And then the second part of the company is actually building custom automation for our clients to then power, those processes that we’ve redefined and optimized. The important part part of all of this is that it is a it is terrible advice. If someone comes and says, I just want to automate this, you’re cool. Let’s just build it. That’s a bad idea, because the process might be wrong in the first place. Or it might be that ROI is terrible. For instance, if you catch me said Hey, Dan, I want to automate our blog writing, can you please build us some automation so that machine learning writes and blogs for us? Sure. But I’m 100% certain that that’s going to cost way more than just hiring a professional writer. Right? And that’s the thing, the ROI is terrible. Why are you doing it? And for us, it’s about working with our clients to try and establish that the processes they trying to automate are actually meant for machines. And not and humans are doing things that humans you don’t run your bank, or you might do. But I’ve never heard of anyone bringing their back saying, hey, just put me through to a robot. Someone I could speak to my bank Boy, that make a big difference, right? I don’t care if they want to make the rest. Yeah, they should

Chris Davis 10:50
know, that’s, man, that’s a really good point that what is that? You know, like, how do you help somebody understand, hey, that action you’re doing is actually better suited for a robot to do like sure technology to do, you’re actually doing a job.

Daniel Cooper 11:09
I don’t know what it is, I think a lot of it is, is really making people assured and feeling comfortable, that we are not there to take the job from them. We’re not there to replace them. And we involve staff at all levels in order to make sure we’re working with them. They are the ones that help us establish what the processes should be, and help them understand how things can improve. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with like, the outseam pitchforks and flaming torches outside the business owners door the next day, right where we’ve replaced everyone with, like Skynet. But that’s that’s not the plan. It is about. I don’t believe that there will be businesses that are completely automated in the future. I just, it can’t happen. Yeah, you know, in what in what you do, but the great automation and marketing is you’re helping salespeople or marketing people leverage opportunity. So where you’re able to line up, you know, all of these marketing touchpoints whether or not that’s email or SMS, or whatever it might be, but then a human then take control. Because we’re terrible at following up on stuff, right? Mm, the C factor, and we remember stuff terribly like humans, our brains are useless, you’ll be in a showing up. Ah, shoot, I was meant to email that prospect. And I forget, right, yeah. And then you walk out of the bottom, they forgotten, it’s gone. Right. But machines don’t forget like that, because it’s not the way it works. So I think that that’s the really important, like, divide between all of these things that both you and I talked about of automation, right, and that we are empowering people to be better at their jobs. And to do that, the more fun stuff, right? Not the hammering out of emails, or whatever it might be, but actually getting to talk to other humans. Yeah.

Chris Davis 12:55
Yeah, and I want to so I want to spend the rest of the the podcast you know, we know about your your your upbringing into, you know, how you matriculated to where you are, and how you started the the company that you own now, and the purpose behind it with equipping businesses to really get a hold of their processes. There’s two things that jumped out to me, that I that I would love to just give you the floor. And the first is process mapping. I told I shared this internally to my team. I’ve been using this term for a while and to see someone else use it appropriately. It just made me smile. I was like, there’s someone else that understands the power and importance of process mapping. But I know that this is a new idea to a lot of people, longtime listeners of the podcast have probably heard me mention it in some variety. But what I want to do is give you the floor and just walk us through what is processing? What is process mapping? And what does it look like when you go through it? Like what are the steps?

Daniel Cooper 14:03
Yeah, so I think you have to look at the business wrong. Like let’s look at this from different heights. So if we look at it from a 10,000 foot view, we see it as x person does x thing, and it results in X goal, right, that’s the 10,000 foot view. The 100 foot view is what we call a standard operating procedure. And this is like a meticulously written step by step in a manual someone walks in bang you put on their desk like here is the exact plan, like the exact play like step by step minute for minute between those two is the flowchart for process mapping. And the idea of this is we’re really now looking at 1000 foot view and what needs to happen here and this is really quite important is that if you look at any kind of business starts to grow, you start to establish multiple people and roles. And if you are not careful if you do not have a view like this like process mapping view, you get what called normalization deviance. So that means that let’s go back to the basketball analogy. One player one day, there’s no coach. So one player has at one day wearing, like sandals. And someone else goes, well, he might wear, like boots tomorrow. And as someone else was before, you know, it’s become normal and like you’ve got a whole team wearing ridiculous clothing, and it’s just become normal. And then it becomes the old saying that we all love, we’ve always done it this way. Right. And that was never how we intended to do it in the first place. And because the founders too busy elsewhere, this normalization deviance kicks in. But this flowchart mapping the processes, what we want to do is we get everyone together, who’s in the same role and assess them. Okay, step by step, what do we need to do? So what’s our trigger? Were all familiar with triggers, we should be worth kind of listening to his podcast regularly. So that like Zapier, or IFTTT, all these things, like triggers is the same thing for process. So what kicks off? So it might be, for instance, let’s assume an incoming support ticket, that’s our trigger. Right? Then what happens next, it’s the someone open the email, someone opens and does something. So we have like actual action boxes, something happens, we have decisions where a decision is made. And the idea is you map these parts out, you don’t need to go too deep and like map out to it’s like intricate details like a standard operating procedure. But you need to have all of these blocks in place, and you need to have the output, what does the output get passed to, so it doesn’t get passed to another department. So that’s another what we call a swim lane. So imagine a pool with swim lanes, it can get a hospital department department. So you can once you’ve done all that and boxed it out with actions and decisions. And you can probably just do it basically like that. And you’ve worked out what the trigger is, and what the inputs are that are required. And that end of it and what the outputs are required. For instance, it might be that we have to pass X spreadsheet out to another department is that output, right? Or I have to invoice a client, we can then establish what exactly is required on the inputs, what is the is required on the outputs. So we’re not over delivering. We’re not under delivering. And we’re also not going back and forth at the start trying to ask for questions and more information. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. By just mapping like that you find madness involved, you will find things we were saying, Sandra, what why are you? Why are you typing into the spreadsheet, printing it off, walking upstairs for David to then type into another spreadsheet? Why you will find all sorts of oddities like this in processes you never thought existed? What goes out, you can then time box stuff. So how long does it take, we can vote. And we can we can do basically like a blind voting system. So in software technology, there’s a there’s a like a methodology called Scrum, which many people are familiar with. And yes, Scrum when we estimate tasks, we often do some called Scrum poker. So we’ll all have an app on our phone, download for free minutes. And when we decide in a time box, how long something takes not just the action, but also a decision. We can all vote in minutes. Once we’ve time boxed everything, we also know how much gets paid. Now we know how much one cycle costs us every time the business does. And now we can start to say cool. All right now how many times we run out a week or a day or a year. And one of them will look over three years and three years is the magic number. Because with that three year number, you can say hang on a minute. This is costing us $175,000 over three years. We could probably automate that for 50,000. And we could just do something else instead and not have to worry about that stuff. Or in half. That’s the power of processes and flowcharts. This simplicity is the absolute key. Yeah, it’s really almost no more complicated than that. It’s about making sure that we all agree. And the funniest thing is when you do these, if you ask if we do workshops, this is how we normally interact clients, okay, like, like mini ones or longer ones are in passing. But the point of it is, you will be amazed at how many times if you ask three people who do the same job to map a process. almost completely different in every single example. It’s amazing. Where people just were unaware.

Chris Davis 19:30
Yeah, that’s a that’s actually a good segue, I saw that. I saw that differentiation across the board even in myself at times, I would map differently. And one of the things that one of the first things I did in my my automation service provider program is create a framework now. It holds me to the same steps and then it even got to the point. Now Daniel, where I’ve got certain shapes that always signify a certain thing you know, and there’s a method of what’s vertical, what’s horizontal. I just remember being so overwhelmed. And I’m an engineer man. I’m an engineer. So this is overwhelmed after engineering of like, how do I get started with a flowchart? I want this beautiful output. I like the boxes and the arrows. And then I would do it in sometimes I just be like, Oh, it looks so plain or bland. So there’s a part of me that also knew it needed to be visually appealing, in my opinion, because when I refer back to this, I don’t want to have to think extremely hard. So I started learning tactics, different shapes, different colors mean different things. So I can look without seeing text, then, like, without seeing any text, I can look at one of my flowcharts. And based on the shapes and the colors, I can get an idea of what’s going on.

Daniel Cooper 20:55
Yeah, you know? Yeah. And that’s how that’s how it should be. I think a lot of people listen to stuff isn’t there. There’s gonna be a lot of people listening, it’s behind time still this man. But that’s the thing. You shouldn’t be doing it. Right. That’s what you that’s what you pay people for. Right? So yes, one of the things that we have we have a rule internally called documentation first. Everyone hates me for the we use, we use notion for our internal documentation. Okay. There are loads of other things out there that you can use right for it. Yeah, yeah. No, she’s

Chris Davis 21:26
a good internal wiki tool, though. Yeah, it is

Daniel Cooper 21:29
right. And it sits in everyone’s desktops easily accessible. But the rule we have is documentation first. So that means when you go to do a task, check the documentation. And if it’s not there, guess what, you’re documenting it, and you’re doing the flowchart, and you’re importing it, or if it’s wrong, you’re the one editing it. And if and if you’re caught not doing it, then you know, someone’s gonna be on your tail about that. But it’s a great way to kind of force everyone along the kind of same line, and it doesn’t put all of the pressure on the founder, especially when you’re kind of layer sub, or around $2 million to have to do all of the operational stuff. Right? It’s not all on you. You know, there’s a shared responsibility for that. And it’s really important that everyone does it. Yeah,

Chris Davis 22:10
I just feel like I’m it this is so important. Because even like you’re mentioning, you know, you sit down with a business owner, get them to you start mapping out their process. And they’re like, what, why are we how that doesn’t make sense. Because they get so used to doing the process, right? How the process makes them feel, maybe it’s happy, maybe it’s overwhelmed. They get really intimate with the feeling. And they’re just totally blind to it. They’ve never seen it. They’ve never seen the process. So they don’t even know what the possibilities are. Until you map it. Then you map it, and it’s like, Oh, my God, why are we not doing this? How about this, I used to do it for fun, just like, Hey, sit down. I remember, I gave a presentation. And at the end of it, I said, Okay, I’m gonna sit in front of my computer, shine it on the on the screen here are projected assists shine projected on the screen here and put people in the hot seat. And I was mapping out their process on the spot, right? Yeah. The entire room is like, oh, wait a minute. Why? Why are they going there? Like everybody Daniel, like, if you don’t have to be an expert, you just have to be willing to embrace like, Oh, that’s not right. Right. Like, yeah. You have to be willing

Daniel Cooper 23:28
to fix it. Yeah. And I think a big thing as well as like, as entrepreneurs and founders are so busy. Yeah, sort of busiest people ever. And a lot of it is we end up presuming we presume that once we passed over someone, well, that’s why they’re always gonna do it. Yep. And even when you hit 200 people, well, I know, it’s cool. Because originally, I told the first person, this is the way we do it. And it will, it will come away from you. And that’s and that’s where it’s really important to have this because it adds that layer of transparency, which is really, really important. I’m a big believer in transparency in businesses. And I think automation can really work well with that, which is great.

Chris Davis 24:07
Yeah, tell me about this. You do process consulting. And I it was so refreshing. I can’t I can’t tell you how refreshing it is just to go to your website and just read through how you’re positioning yourself in the type of service that you offer. But when you when you said process consulting, it made me feel like there’s a certain type of company that understands, you know, what, we’ve got to get our processes together. Are you finding that companies are coming to you having that identified in some capacity that my processes, something’s not working? We’re successful, we could be more successful, or is it a sense of they come to you for one thing, it ends up turning out that they really need process optimization.

Daniel Cooper 24:55
Yeah, so typically, the types of businesses that we encounter they come to us like We got this problem. We’re growing too quickly. Everything’s out of control. There’s like fires everywhere. I don’t know, like, we just don’t know what we’re going to do. Like we need someone to help us sort this out. And that is normally the way that it starts. And occasionally, it’s someone coming to you. And they’ve kind of got some blinkers on. And they haven’t seen that, like, I just want to automate this one thing. And you’re like, Okay, well, let’s, let’s explore that one thing and then in a mini workshop and see what kind of where that takes us. But for the majority of them, yeah, it is because their growth has gone stratospheric. And there and what I hear from almost every single one of these companies, especially from the ones who’ve had previous businesses that haven’t been as successful, they all tell me that having too much business, and growing too fast, is more stressful than not being able to find any business, which seems like a crazy thing to say, yeah. But when you really care about your business, and things are starting to fall apart, and you know, we’re really starting to, like, Excuse me, piss people off, right, not losing customers and clients because we’ve got bad service, because it’s just out of control. It’s a horrible feeling. Right? Yeah.

Chris Davis 26:07
Wow. It’s like the psychology is, I’d rather worry about getting a client, then losing one.

Daniel Cooper 26:16
Yeah, because I would almost guarantee that the people you’re helping people like marketing or sales automation, right? We’re taking a place where they’re like, I’m just sending the emails one by one. And then you go in like, okay, look, guys. Just stop, right. But the reality is, once they hit that point, and then they automated this, suddenly they target my god, this is the best thing ever. Chris, you’re amazing. You’ve saved my life. You’ve changed, like, and I guarantee you here’s, you’ve changed my life. Yeah, right. Your automation and what you’re doing? Well, they haven’t quite clocked yours in six months time, they’re gonna go, Oh, my God, onboarding of new clients has become horrific, right? Because then, because now operations can’t keep up. You go. And this is, then this is where we start to speak to people, right? It’s so Oh, man.

Chris Davis 27:10
I love it. So in the there’s definitely a blue ocean effect to process consulting. Because again, I feel like there’s a process is subjective, right, there’s a process to get your website built, there’s, it’s everywhere, everything we do is a process. Right. But specifically to automation, in scaling a company are are ensuring that a company scale does not cannibalize itself. Right, and that they can continue on that that trajectory, process then becomes the required, it becomes the foundation. And I don’t know about you, Daniel, I want to give you the floor here. But one of the things that I look for, especially in a tech startup that’s come in and say, Hey, Chris, we really want your help to help scale XYZ, I’m actually happy. When I see manual processes that are being exhausted, the people in them are being exhausted, yet they’re producing a profit. Because to your earlier point, being able to map out the process, and then start to get a good idea of if we just did this one thing. This is what you would gain and either hours back time saved, you know, it becomes a to me very valuable skill or resource to be able to go somewhere and have somebody consult specifically on your processes to help you scale. After after a client comes in. I know you do the workshop, and there’s a lot of exploration there and walk away with a game plan start to map out the processes in they see it. Do you see that their mindset towards processes maintains that level of excitement? Or is it just kind of like, oh, that worked, and then they just kind of forget about it?

Daniel Cooper 29:06
Yeah, I mean, I suppose the analogy you can make is kind of like

Daniel Cooper 29:13
it’s kind of like the business equivalent of crack if crack or a good thing. It’s definitely not me. I know. You could see I was pausing like, I shouldn’t. Still, I’ve said it out. I’m joking. So it is a bit like that. Yeah. So what will generally happen is, is that, you know, you’ll run a whole workshop and at the end, you’ll say, Look, here is the same thing. Over three days you would make if you automated this after your automation costs, and then people kind of go full steam into it. But once they’ve then exhausted all those angles, they become addicted to that growth and then Oh my God. Now we could do these other things we want to do. I think we could also automate this they would do this thing we could do this and then we will look carefully but the important part here is to make sure that, you know, when you’re consulting, you need to be really careful that the advice you give is good for the client, right and not for you. So there is often as many times you’re going to say no is you’re going to say yes, because was a bad idea. It shouldn’t be done. If it’s not going to produce an ROI, or if it’s just going to look like something’s like unethical, or just morally bankrupt, that you shouldn’t be done. Right? Or just when you know, it’s just not going to work out long term. Because once the numbers might stack, right, oh, let’s let’s move all of our our call centers to like, voice assistants AI, just a terrible idea. Probably an ROI, a terrible idea. Because long term, you’ll just lose all your customers to someone else who has stopped that says we have real people in support. Right? It’s all about building moats and businesses, right? That’s what we’re talking about here. Like for many companies, like their moat is support. Right? Their moat is customer service. And sure, yeah, automate a lot of stuff. But you’ve got and that can be a moat with automation. But you’ve got to be really careful. I think that that type of stuff. Really can Yeah,

Chris Davis 31:09
yeah, absolutely. And I, I think it leads to especially the average founder, what I found is the average founder gets that excitement. And they’re just on to the next thing. They’re, they’re not necessarily paying attention to the process that got them there. They’re just more so wanting to say, hey, look, okay, we got this done. Next thing, hey, this thing, can we do it? And then it’s you who reigns a minister? Hey, remember how we got here? Yeah, having processes being digital, we’re gonna do that same thing. Yeah. To go to the next or hit the next objective. So that does make sense. You know, it’s short lived, the victory is short live. But I think, you know, when there’s pain there, they don’t forget. When it’s like, Man, I remember when it took me 30 minutes, every client and five clients a day, and now it’s only two minutes, you know, like, it’s a reminder of the value of it. And I find that it becomes like a internal salesperson.

Daniel Cooper 32:15
I agree. I say to my clients a lot. You know, they say to me, I think I think we’re done with process. I think we’re good. I think we might cool. I was like okay, so go on holiday for two weeks. Turn your phone off. No laptop, no phone. How’d you feel about that? They’re like, wow, I don’t think we could do that. Right? Well, yes. And you are not there yet. Right? Don’t don’t start like resting and thinking it’s all good. Because that’s the reality. If if Yeah, most business owners just said Cool, right? I’m off to wherever Australia for two weeks. And I’m not going to any phone, any laptop, no email, nothing. And you come back, there’d be like, a nuclear war in the business. And you’ve got to make sure that that’s not going to happen. Because not only run your machine at some people are quite happy, just like work your way. But like, no, no, I’m good at this level. I’m just going to keep doing like this. I’m good at like one or 2 million. And I’ll just keep it up. Just keep on churning and battling away. You got to take a holiday, you gotta have a break. Like, that’s why it’s not what everyone starts a business because like, I don’t want to work for this guy anymore. I want to do I want to decide when I work, and I want to charge and do what I want, wherever I want. And you build this really horrible imaginary, like invisible prison around you. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And the only way to escape those systems?

Chris Davis 33:26
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You start start with the process. Start with the steps that got you here. Let’s let’s map it out. Let’s get these processes clear and defined. And then what we can we can automate it. But let’s the foundation of the automation is going to be the process. So bad process bad automation is just going to amplify what’s there. So then you I can’t thank you enough man for coming on to the podcast and, and talking through process mapping and consulting. I, my hope is that listeners are starting to have a higher appreciation. And by listeners, I mean, the marketers, the consultants that are actually going to be the ones helping these businesses. Don’t just gloss over process mapping. Don’t just gloss over the process is extremely important. Then on the flip side, for the founders who are looking for the solution. Listen, everything lies in the process in the manner in which you get things done. Right there. There is no sign up for automation, and it just starts working. It’s going to run on the foundation of your processes. So I’m glad to have another voice on the podcast to echo those sentiments. If our listeners wanted to find out more about you or connect or your company, where’s the best place that they can go?

Daniel Cooper 34:48
You visit our website, which is lolly.co or you can follow me on Twitter at imDanielCooper

Chris Davis 34:56
Great, great. So we’ll have those links in the show notes. Daniel, again, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. This was great. I enjoyed it. And I hope our listeners take more than two to three things away that they implement immediately, but more so have a stronger appreciation value and understanding from processes, man,

Daniel Cooper 35:18
I’m so mad. Otherwise it’s just me and you versus the world and process.

Chris Davis 35:23
Right? Right. So get on board, everybody, digital marketers and founders alike get on this process train. It’s all in the process. You have resources, they can never sit down. They can never say that. They’ve got resources and they’ve got a means. So take advantage, Daniel, man. Thank you again, man. And I’ll see you online.

Daniel Cooper 35:42
Thanks, man. Take care. All right.

Chris Davis 35:45
Thank you for tuning in to 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 podcasts, 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 allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends