Massive Business Growth Using No-Code Software feat. Gareth Pronovost

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 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 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And I would say you are you all are in for a treat. But I’m actually in for a treat. Today, I have someone who is going to help us understand the power and the possibilities of using no code to build your business. And and this is an individual, he’s not on the screen for a reason, because I don’t I don’t want to have a spoiler alert. But he is somebody that in the community and the membership that we have, his name comes up at least at least once a week, where we’re mentioning Hey, have you heard about this new airtable update? What is this smart sweet thing? Hey, look at softer, did you check that out? He is are in the community from afar resource for all things, no code, and he is come on to the podcast today. None other than Gareth

Chris Davis 2:38
Get now Gareth is teaching others about the strategies he implemented to scale his agency. His second brand built to scale is breaking the barriers for other consultants who want to drive new leads become known in their niche and ultimately drive value for no code users. Gareth this that is I didn’t say your last name Gareth. Pronovost, everyone, just in case you’re listening on the flightline I wonder if this is Gareth? Yes. This is Gareth. Pronovost. Gareth, welcome to the podcast, man. Great to have you here. How you doing?

Gareth Pronovost 3:12
Oh, Chris. This is an absolute pleasure. I’m doing really well. Thanks for having me.

Chris Davis 3:16
Yes, yes. Now. Now, I’ll start off by saying this, I need to let my listeners know. I was tempted. See, I’ve got a green room. And Gareth and I were in the green room. And I could have I forgot so many questions, so many questions. But I save them for the podcast. So I could be an active listener, just like you all. So everything we’re about to hear from Gareth is going to be new to me. I do not have the inside scoop everyone. But I think it’s gonna be super valuable to have someone like himself really help us navigate this No, coach base. So, Gareth, you were you were at a corporation and got laid off. Tell me a little bit of about life before being laid off. Were you in capacity? Were you working?

Gareth Pronovost 4:03
Well, about five years before I was laid off, I was struggling entrepreneurs, struggling solopreneur never, never really was able to get my business ideas off the ground. And they ranged from manufacturing to you know, some tech ideas, things I wanted to build. Just generally curious about life and just overall, right. I want to I see all these opportunities to make things better, and I want to do all the things right. Yeah. So that was that was me five years ago.

Gareth Pronovost 4:38
And after another, you know, we can say failed venture because yeah, it’s exactly what it was. After another failed venture. I said, Okay, you know what, I have to be responsible now and go get a job. I have to have to do the right thing. Obviously, I have got something something’s not clicking for me on this small business owners.

Gareth Pronovost 5:00
So I went out and and actually, friend of mine through my college had, he was the director in the San Diego. So when I was living in California, San Diego’s Small Business Development Center, which is SBDC for short. And they are a branch of the Small Business Administration or SBA. And he said, Hey, I need somebody here to to help consult with small business owners or interested parties and people who want to start their own small business. And I said, Well, you certainly don’t want me I just, you know, failed another business. And he said, I bet you learned a heck of a lot more when you fail than then you realize, Wow, I know you by reputation. And, you know, few conversations, why don’t you come in and work for me? So that was that was kind of my intro to consulting. And I gotta tell you, the first time I sat aside, you know, or SAT, opposite, somebody wanting help. I was like, I felt so under qualified. I mean, the imposter syndrome was, you know, I’m sure everybody can relate to that, right? Well, I was, I remember just thinking, well, if I can help them with one simple thing, right, just one thing, then their time won’t be wasted with me. And that became my mantra that I still repeat even to this day. But

Chris Davis 9:46
Probably the worst. You know, when I look at what I know now, and I’m not even like, have the greatest, but I just understand it a lot more groups, views and everything else. I wasn’t using any of that stuff.

Chris Davis 10:00
Back bail, just like a colorful spreadsheet to me that, you know, you could do some other stuff with. So right, excuse me, right around the time where you were discovering putting content out on YouTube, here I am discovering the same tool and trying to get it, get some adoption, internal, you know, to the company that I was working for. So for me, when that stent ended, that’s when my I mean, airtable it when I had to use it for my business and my livelihood. Oh, my gosh, it just took off. It took off, and I don’t I don’t know what I would be doing and who I would have had to hire and how much money I would have. I’d be spending out without air table.

Gareth Pronovost 6:15
then my, my fiance, and I decided that we would move to Denver, and I let that job go, even though I loved it. And found a job in a in a for a payment processing company, very similar to stripe, like a competitor of stripe. And I was the sole financial analyst for this company. And they did $100 million private equity investment, and I was super stoked, and we were acquiring all these companies and bringing them into our payment processing. And then everything was going great. I was an Excel wizard, you know, living and breathing and smell, like so many, you know, financial professionals. Yeah. And then just got laid off one day unexpectedly came back from lunch. My boss called or called me into her office, and she let me go, totally stunned, because I thought I was I thought I was crushing it. And so I did a little bit of contract work, found air table in the midst of all this and thought, Why isn’t anybody talking about this tool? Yes. You know, I went to the same place. I think most people, you know, who are our age plus or minus, you know, five years go when they need to understand how software works. I went to YouTube, and there was nothing just like, it was like a deserted wasteland. Right? Oh, you know, in terms of airtable content, and I thought, well, certainly, something’s getting missed here. Put together a YouTube video, which was terrible. But you got to ship right, you have to show you got to show a shift. And before I knew it, people were calling up and saying, Hey, can I get on your calendar? I want to talk about how you could implement this for my business. And the rest is history now,

Chris Davis 8:02
man, I love it. I you know, I’m gonna overlay some of my timeline. This was around 2018 2019. For you. That’s when the layoff happened. Yeah. So I believe you and I discovered airtable Around the same time, and I remember you, oh, my gosh, Gareth. I had Greg, on the podcast. And I didn’t even mention this. You just brought it to my memory. There was a post. Greg Hickman, he was in his on his Facebook page and his group. And it was like, Hey, what are the three tools you can’t live without? So in regular lurching fashion online, lurking faster, I’m going through and I’m just like, Oh, what are people saying? And airtable came up like five times, I’m like, What the heck is this? I’ve never heard of this. Then I go to it. I’m like, Oh, fancy spreadsheets anyways. But then, like, I read more comments, and so many people, and I was like, Maybe I should try this out. So I ended up, signing up and everything. And at the time, I was at Active Campaign as a director of education. And I remember when it clicked for me, I was like, oh, wait a minute, I get it. Columns are like custom fields. Rows are records. It’s not the same as a spreadsheet. This is amazing. Look at what you can do. And in just so pure excitement, I just go and I’m throwing it at everybody. Hey, we should be using this. And Gareth, if I could go back and see how people were, they trusted me. That’s the thing. They did trust me. I had a lot of people because I was the director of education and I knew my stuff. They were like, Okay, let’s use this tool. If I could go back now, some of those airtable databases were probably just shameful.

Gareth Pronovost 10:42
Right? So the thing is, it’s it’s so it’s almost a ethereal, I don’t even know how to describe it. And yet I use it. And one of the, you know, probably one of the leading experts on this tool. And yet, I mean, you know, for the longest time I kept hearing people say Excel on steroids, right? Yeah. I don’t love that. But no. Okay, that I guess that kind of describes it. Yeah. But it’s more than that. I mean, ultimately, it to your point, it looks like a spreadsheet. So when you first start, you’re like, Oh, this is familiar and nothing fancy. What’s the big deal. But what it really allows you to do is build a custom application to manage and automate any workflow imaginable. Yeah. And you can do it all without knowing any code whatsoever. Yeah. So once it clicks, and you’ve it takes some time, for sure. You’ve got to play with it. You have to experiment. Once it clicks. Game over. You will love no code and be an you know, an evangelist just like we

Chris Davis 11:49
do. Yes, yes. And that’s really the topic. Listen, everyone, I’m on my best behavior. Because at any one of these topics that we talk about, I could just nerd out with Gareth, I promise you, I am using all of my discipline myself control, not to keep going down this airtable hole. But I want to I want to keep the focus on no code, because though you are, you know, you say one of the but I, I’m going to give you some flowers here, based on when I search airtable. And the amount of videos that come up the quality of the videos and the quality of the content. I do not think there’s a comparison, there are some people that do really good jobs on on YouTube. But you know, you have to give credit where credit’s due and go buy the flowers, no matter how much they cost to give them to the people while they while they deserve them. So I want to take my hat’s off to you. Because I know that level of effort of being consistent with any form of content, any form. And one thing that I’ve enjoyed about like seeing your evolution is that you you made a name, definitely in the airtable space. But you’re really no code, that if if we were to put a very more global appropriate tag on you, you’re no code you through through your videos, I learned about software, I learned about smartsuite, I learned about a whole bunch of other stuff that was too complex for me. So I want to talk about when for you, Gareth. When did you realize that no code is going to be the way to run and grow a business? Because you had these failed efforts before? Right? Like, did no code give you that new that new drive and say, Oh, this is what I was missing? Like, what was it about the no code space and how it evolved that really made it click for you?

Gareth Pronovost 13:59
Well, I think one part is, you know, shots on goal, you’re not going to, you’re not going to score unless you shoot. And yeah, you know, a lot of my past was learning the wrong way to do things, so that I could figure out the right way. And unfortunately, with entrepreneurship, in general, my opinion is, there’s no shortcut, you got to go through the trenches and get beat up a little bit. And develop the skills and the thick skin that you need in order to play this game. So that’s part of it. But the other part is, I mean, to your question about time. I’ll tell you as soon as I opened their table and saw what it was capable of. You know, you mentioned earlier that you’re an engineer from an engineering background. Like my undergraduate degrees in applied math, like how nerdy is that? Right? I’m, I’m the guy who grew up playing with Lego And you thought you could just leave my room for hours now and build whatever. And still to this day, those character traits, those are the same character traits I look for when we were hiring new people to join our team, because it’s the tinkerer who goes out and like, wants to, wants to see if this thing can break, how do I break it? Because that’s when I know how good it is. So when I found airtable, that was what I set out to do. Let me break this thing. Certainly, certainly, I’ll have all these ideas, flooding my brain of things I can do. And I’m like, certainly, I can’t do all these, there has to be a limit. Yeah. And then, you know, I’m able to solve them one at a time, and realize that this thing might be as cool as I think it is. And so when I mean, it was, it was a pretty short learning curve, frankly, you know, all things considered, especially having come from an Excel background formula, the formula syntax in air tables, very similar to Excel. And so that was a short learning curve as well. Yeah, another point. Not that this will help any listeners who have not already started their airtable journey. But in those days, five years ago, air table was still in its infancy. And so it didn’t have all these like features. And so it wasn’t as overwhelming, right, I find the day like, truth be told, I don’t know, that I would feel comfortable saying I’m gonna go out and consult people. Yeah, it’s become infinitely more complicated. But it’s both it’s a double edged sword. It’s both good and bad. That advances in the in the tool?

Chris Davis 16:33
Yeah, yeah. And you, you know, like I said, you, you start there. And, and I would imagine, that’s where the idea that wait a minute, this is it, when you could do so much, without having to write a single line of code, one of the most you have to do is figure out a formula, you can Google and you know, figure those out. But you’re able to start doing things that it’s like, wait a minute, this is like an app, this Hold on, right, we’d had to pay 1000s of dollars, you know, previously. So you, you start to do use airtable. And, and people are asking you about it, you’re starting to meet the demand. And now you’ve got internal to your business. Now you’ve got processes, growing pains that you have to solve. And there’s other tools, no code tools that you were using, or used and are using to do so give, give our listeners some insight. And let me just say this, I know we kind of jumped into no code, no code, for those of you who haven’t heard that term, just means applications that don’t require you to code. So I can do a thing that usually would require code without code. So that’s what we mean when we say no code. So for you, Gareth, give people insight there’s, there are so many people running businesses, agencies that have not hit the million per year, they don’t know what the back, what can no code solutions do for me on the back end of it. Right, like, give us some insight on some of the tools that you found, along with air table that you used and to grow the company.

Gareth Pronovost 18:24
So I’ll keep it as simple as possible without overwhelming because, I mean, we could we could we could talk about, you know, dozens upon dozens rising, right? But let me break it down into what I consider the three main buckets for no code, okay, I think you need a place to store your data. And you could use spreadsheets. Technically, those are no code. But the catch with a spreadsheet is you’re not really connecting data, you’re not linking it the way you do in a relational database like air table. Where Yes, when I have let’s take an example of a project with associated tasks, those tasks don’t live at the project level. They’re they’re a different layer, to put it in, like layman’s terms, and we can associate them by actually connecting them together and then infer or draw data up and down through that connection. Error table is a fantastic database tool. But it’s not the only one we use. We also use smartsuite that you’ve referenced. There are instances where we might want to use Google Sheets or Excel. But I would consider all of these to kind of fit that no code bucket. But there’s got to be a place to store the data. Next, there’s got to be a way to move information in and out from the other systems you use. Maybe you process payments and Stripe or QuickBooks or Xero. Maybe you send automated emails. Maybe you have parts of your process that when people reach certain milestones throughout your business operations. There are different things things that have to occur. All of those things. If they’re repeatable, they can be automated. And you can build automation with no code, which sounds too good to be true. It’s one of those places where I thought, certainly I can’t do that. In the early days, it was Zapier, we all relied on Zapier. But now, a lot of these tools have their own internal automations. That save us from having to go outside the environment. So now I can build automations in airtable, I can build automations in smartsuite. But I do think that there’s a need for some automation component, sometimes you need to get more advanced than what the native database tool uses. So I love Zapier, I love make.com, then the front end, how are people going to access this data? How are they going to interact with this business process? And who are they? Are they customers? Are they internal team members. So everybody has to have a way to engage with the process that’s, you know, reasonable for their role. And so we need to build some sort of interface for that to be allowed. Now, again, airtable, has made a lot of new feature improvements. And so now they have interface capabilities. But, you know, to your point, you brought up software earlier, that was one of the first tools that we used to, you know, actually build like a front end onto our data that lived in air table so that people could access it. stacker is another one. There’s new ones coming out pretty much every day. But you know, a lot of different options for talking to your data. And it enables you to build that way that people actually interact with it.

Chris Davis 21:43
Yeah. And to give you our insight on some of these tools that he mentioned, listen, you may have to rewind, take notes, or in the shownotes where it will link to all of them. But softer. In Stacker, specifically, I remember watching a video of yours. And I’m easily everybody you would think because I’m in automation and how much I love airtable You would think I could just eat this stuff by the boatloads. Gareth To be honest, I can only take in so much of of like airtable knowledge at a time. Because every piece of knowledge open is so tangent chance tangential to what I know. So like it spans my brain faster than sometimes I’m ready. So I think if I was more ignorant and what airtable could do, I could consume more. But you could say something as simple as, hey, you could link multiple records. And this is how, right at that statement. I’m like, Oh, I never thought about linking multiple records edited. And then my brain is, you know, just off. So what I learned, though, when I was consuming one of your one of your videos is I was like, What is software? What is this interacting with data? What does that look like? And everybody imagine, you know, you’ve got information in air in a database software. And it’s just stored in there. It doesn’t have to be pretty because it’s database data. And usually it’s not good looking airtable I think dresses it up the best, you know, but what if you just needed to see a certain amount of information at a certain stage of time? Or what if you wanted to give, let a client or a customer get access to just a portion of that data at a time and create kind of like a custom portal. That’s where these tools like softer and stacker come in. And I think glide. Are you familiar with glide?

Gareth Pronovost 23:40
Yeah, exactly. Like blade is really good for the mobile experience. Yep, yep.

Chris Davis 23:45
Yep. So these are all if we were not demoing right now on the podcast, but I just want you all to understand, you’ve interacted with apps that people have paid 10s of 20s and 30s of 1000s of dollars for these tools that Gareth is mentioning, maybe 100 bucks a month, you know, around that price range. Ridiculous. It’s just amazing. What’s it what’s available here? So all right, let me let me recap. If you’ve got somewhere to store your data, you’ve got some no code solutions to store the data, then there’s no code solutions to move the data from all of the various platforms that you’re using, so that they can talk to one another, keep things in sync. And then lastly, was interfacing are interacting with the data that’s been stored and moved into the three areas that you would qualify the no code tools?

Gareth Pronovost 24:39
Exactly. The nice thing about air table and you know, air table is one of the first tools to market. And so they’ve made these improvements over time. And so the features that I’m talking about here, we kind of identified in the early days that these three portions would be necessary to really build a no code app experience. But airtable didn’t have have internal automations they didn’t have I remember interfaces. It wasn’t even a glimmer in the CEOs mind yet or I. So you know it. It’s been an evolution. And we used to have to rely heavily on third party tools, we still do leverage them. But now if you want you could get that entire experience in air table.

Chris Davis 25:22
Yeah, yeah. Help Help me. And maybe this will answer things for people listening to I often. I have two questions, I’m realizing Let me ask them separately instead of jumbling them up. But I often wonder how to use particular tools in conjunction, because there’s so much overlap now. Right? So for instance, airtable can do some project management, but then I’ve got a project management software, do I still need to use the project management software? I do I do everything in air table? And before anybody starts to answer, there is no one answer. One size fits all for this. It’s literally how your team wants to wants to work. For my team, I’m more comfortable in air table with a lot of the processes at the point where it needs to be taken action on with someone besides me, I’ll create a button, create a button, send a web hook out, catch it, and then have it uploaded to click up or something like that. Right, that keeps me in my environment, it helps them stay in their environment, and things get done. So for for you, how have you kind of compartmentalized the boundaries of your tools like, Okay, this is where airtable starts, it ends here smartsuite For this that, you know, because if you all are listening, Gareth doesn’t use just one. It’s okay. It’s okay to have more than one. No code platform. Even if there’s a lot of overlap. Sometimes there’s just this little use case that’s different. So for you, well, how did how what’s your processing, kind of dictating what one tool handles that another one doesn’t, and what the handoff is like?

Gareth Pronovost 27:13
Well, smartsuite, in my opinion, is going to be a dominant player in the marketplace. And for anybody who goes back and watches this podcast, you know, five years from now that there’ll be surprised by just as when I picked up air table in 2018. And it wasn’t quite there. Yeah, you know, I got it needed some work, guys, that’s where smartsuite is right now. Right. So the thing that I love about smartsuite, beyond what I can do an air table is the way that it helps me also manage tasks across my team. I know, it doesn’t matter what solution or database I’m in in smartsuite, I get to see I have a place called my work a little section of the software that tracks everything that’s been assigned to me. And so for task management, it raises, it wins hands down. So every time that I need something like, you know, task tracking, I prefer to put that in smartsuite, personally, okay. Now, that being said, smartsuite is a new, a new comer to the space, they are not. They haven’t expanded their performance quite as as much as airtable has, yeah, it hangs up every now and then I have to refresh my screen and slows me down just a bit. So for for anything where I need, you know, consistent reliability airtable wins for me. Got it today. But I think that’ll change in six months, you know, so good to hear. For me, that’s that’s kind of what it comes down to. But the other the other thing to take into consideration here is how you’re sharing your data across your different workflows and processes. And so, you know, without going too far in the weeds, we build databases, either it’s called a base and air table is called a solution in smartsuite. But we generally build a database that is designed to consolidate related data and interact that related data in air table. I can’t link one database directly to another, but in smartsuite, I can. Yeah, so that is another competitive advantage for smartsuite. So once, you know, once we’re a little further down the road, and they’ve solved these performance issues. The way that you sync up data is going to be next level. So we’ll see what the future brings. I’m also interested that enterprise seems to be the focus for airtable Where I see smartsuite maybe focusing on the SMBs a little bit more. Yeah, so It’ll be it’ll be interesting to see how that battle unfolds. But at the end of the day, what it means for us as consumers is better no code tools because they’re duking it out. So I’m here for it.

Chris Davis 30:10
I love it, man. I love the only the only time I get nervous is when one tool really dominates because it just it I just haven’t seen that go well, they get lacks, they stopped listening to them to their audience. Let me ask you this, we’ve got a lot of our listeners use Zapier. Some of them may be familiar with make a formerly Integra mat. And some if they’re super techy, have even heard of Padley. Okay, so these three are all third, their integration software out, I call them that, and you hook you use them to pass data from one tool to the next. So let’s say you have a some CRM software, and something is happening in another application that you have. And you want to send that data over to your CRM software. Usually you’d have to code now you have these third party integration tools that can go and say, hey, we’ll handle that for you. We’ll zap it, Zapier will scenario it make what habit Zapier really has it with Zap. Yeah. I’m someone who has all three accounts, by the nature of who I am and what I do. I’m in automation it would it who would expect any less right? I hope you’re right. However, I’m realizing that I do have use cases for each one. I want you to share, you know, as your as, as you’ve experienced them and started to adapt them in growing your company. How did you start differentiating like when to use Zapier when to use make formerly Integra mat or something else?

Gareth Pronovost 31:57
That’s a really good question. It’s a tough one to answer. But I don’t mean to get too much in the weeds here. So rein me in Chris, if I if I over indulge here. So for us, as I said, in the early days, there was no airtable automation. So you had to rely on a third party tool, and Zapier was the most accessible and to connect it to the most things. It had the best integrations that you know, you could just really quickly and easily plug in an API key. And now I’m able to send Gmail, right. So super simple. And I loved that because I frankly didn’t know what the heck I was doing in the early days. Yeah, so some might even say even today, so you know, picking up these tools, Zapier will always have a special place in my heart, because it helped me understand how these tools work. And it allowed me to build automation with training wheels, because you can’t break it. Like they have thought of pretty much everything. And if you go step by step through an automation and it works. That’s it, your automation works. You’re good, you’re golden. So I still love Zapier, but and this is you know, I’m giving you a current stuff here. Yeah, I feel like they’re starting to price gouge a little bit. It’s getting pricey, and I don’t know why, like, the surface hasn’t gotten any better. And I’m still building the same automations I’m okay with, you know, rising rates of inflation or whatnot, but we’re talking double, triple prices on a lot of our customer accounts. So we’ve started to pull into make a little bit make.com, as you said, formerly Integra mat strictly from a cost savings perspective. The issue with make, it’s it’s like an audit, in my opinion. It’s an automators dream. Yes, but you have to know what you’re doing. Oh, man, it’s just it’s not they don’t have great documentation. Oh, man. A lot of stuff can go wrong. So if you haven’t done it, if you haven’t put in the time. It’s a tough one to start with. For sure. Yeah, but it’s gonna save you literally hundreds of dollars a month. If you’re comparing the two tools.

Chris Davis 34:17
Yep. Yeah. I have to I have to jump in there and agree with you, man I make is I have this strange relationship with make that sometimes what is usually pretty straightforward. It’s happier than I’ll do make takes a little bit more to get done. Just because how they handle it. But it’s something about like figuring it out. And seeing that scenario run without air. That’s like so rewarding. It’s weird man. Like, I should not be feeling good because you made it more complicated. But the tinkerer and engineer me is like, you’re giving me a feeling of figuring something out. I’ve achieved something using This. So let me let me tell you listeners, if you have never heard of Zapier or make, if you’re going to get started, I highly recommend Zapier. It’s more user friendly. The UI is there. I know I’ve got a lot of techie folks and engineers that I should say, professional in the science, technology and engineering STEM professionals in mathematics. I know I’ve got a lot of STEM professionals listening to, you can handle make, let me tell you can handle it and I know your brain, you’re looking for a challenge, you want to conquer it already. Okay, go ahead, dive in. It’s a fraction of the cost of Zapier, at the end of the day, we’re not telling you this to get super techy and nerdy, we’re telling you this, because there’s going to be a point in time in your business that you’re going to have to get data from one platform to the next. So all roads are going to lead to you using one or two of these these platforms, you know,

Gareth Pronovost 35:58
you know, and I, I realized that this is probably like your mantra as much as it is mine. But automation opens up everything. If I could rebrand yourself today, Chris, you would probably be an automation consultant. Like, let me let me just do that. Because the value I can like, it’s it’s so simple. But the value is I build an automation that saves me five minutes a day, What’s five minutes a day, right? But it adds up. Like to the point where and I’ve done the math, it’s like 20 hours over the course of a year. Yes, perfectly sanity, right? Like for five minutes saved? Yeah. So if you learn how to put an automate up how to build automation in no code, the amount of work that you will be doing, or maybe I should say, the quality of work that you’ll be doing is going to increase substantially. Because you’re not doing the copy paste, the, you know, move data from here to there. And I see so many professionals still to this day, working in that environment. And I think I’d be one of them. If my boss had an undervalued me five years ago. So thank you to her. And, you know, but but, but heed my words and learn automation, if you haven’t already, because it will change your life and the life of your clients if you’re so inclined. Yes.

Chris Davis 37:23
And I have to piggyback on that, of course, why would I not. But to is in every one to three five minute task that you save is the potential of saving more time and making more money. Okay, that’s there. Here’s the flipside, everyone, and I need you all to get this. For every 1235 minute tasks that you do. That could be automated, you run the risk of wasting hours. It may seem silly, Gareth, how many times have you said, oh, I’ll just go in and I’ll do this. It’s a simple task. It doesn’t take much. And while it’s fresh on your mind, you’re doing it, you’re clicking that button, you’re doing XYZ. But what happens when the human brain kicks in our busyness, fatigue, and you forget to do that little bitty tasks that took one minute, now, it’s gonna take hours to recover or something else, you missed an email that was supposed to go out, oh, the appointment didn’t auto accept, you know, things like that. So it’s something that you all automation is not a buzzword. And it has become a bit of that because everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon. But it literally is, I don’t want people to just think, oh, I can automate millions of dollars in No, no, no, no, you can’t do that. Don’t get me wrong. But you’ll get more out of it when you start to appreciate the minutes. By the ones, twos, fives, 10s 20s and hours, that is going to save you at one time or a cumulatively.

Gareth Pronovost 38:59
Can I give it a quick example. Absolutely. Today, I meet with, with my my virtual assistant today. And we just came back from a conference. And we were learning about AI and thinking about all the different ways that we can incorporate AI into our business. One of my assistants tasks is to take the video that we make for YouTube, and to write up let’s call it the show notes or like a very concise blog, so that when we embed the YouTube video on our blog, we have some verbiage there that’s going to help with SEO ranking and whatnot for our content. And so we decided we need to build an automation, where we take the text file of the word spoken in the in the YouTube video, send it to chat GPT and ask chat GPT the same prompt every time it’s the same thing we want every time we do this process. Please write a you know an SEO rich blog Ogg for me, that, you know, summarizes this content that we, you know, that we discussed in this video text and and make it you know, less than 1000 words or something like that. So this is a process that, you know, took my system, we produce three videos a week, right? This takes my assistant at least, you know, 15 minutes to 30 minutes every time. Yes. And it’s going to chat GPT now, which is like this a whole other level of automation, right? Because we’re talking about AI. So don’t be overwhelmed if you haven’t started down this rabbit hole yet. But I’m telling you that the minutes saved become ours more quickly than you’d expect.

Chris Davis 40:40
Yes, and the consistency of the quality of output, ah, just unmatched. You see, this is the problem, this is the problem, everyone. This stuff gets me going. So so what, what I can now speak for you, Gareth. And if I’m out of out of line, you just say, hey, that’s your, that’s your thing, not mine. If we could bottle it up, package it up in a gift and ship it to each and every one of you listeners, it would be to experience one of your most critical processes being handled accurately. By automation, by technology, I should say being automated by technology. That’s the best way that you can experience in some of you what you’re doing is you’re just buying software and saying I’m ready to automate. And you’re bypassing all of these processes. If you if you just had some you have people, if you’re listening, you have helped Gareth is about to explain where you have additional help from him in a minute. But if you just were able to slow down, talk to somebody who could say, hey, look, this process is really important. This, we’ve got a couple of tools, let’s do this. And let’s get that executed for you. That’s all that’s all i That’s the gift Gareth that I want to get so that they can experience it. And it doesn’t become just a buzzword or a thing that everybody’s doing. But something that they’ve experienced personally, you can say, this thing right here. I don’t care how much it costs, don’t stop doing it. Never turn this off. You know,

Gareth Pronovost 42:19
that’s why the majority of our clients have been long term clients, you know, they sip the Kool Aid. And before you know it, they’re they’re hooked. And they’re like, oh, man, this the efficiency, the amount of money I spent hiring, you know, your agency, Gareth. To build this process, streamline our stuff. More than paid for itself, you know, so we’re willing, we’re happy to do it again. And I mean, to your point, though, if I could bottle it up, I would I would in a second. And I mean, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to create quarter for this, and, and I tried to teach as much, you know, free stuff on YouTube and like, try this out, guys got it. But I feel like I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops. And like, only a select group of people are hearing it. And I don’t know, man, maybe it’s my delivery. Sorry, guys, let me know if you know what I’m doing wrong.

Chris Davis 43:16
Please let us both know, because I know that the adoption of automation is on an uptick. I just think that people aren’t, they’re not as process oriented, as they need to be. They’re skipping steps. And, you know, if there’s not a process, there’s not much that we can do to automate, if there’s no process, and then the output is less valuable. So in closing, Gareth, I want to put up put a bow on this. growing your business, no code there. So you’ve got your, your your three compartments of no code software, you’re leveraging it internally. It Gareth just gave us an example of of he, hey, VA, let’s take this send it to Chad GBT, let’s put some automation in place. So you’re doing it internally to make things more efficient. What would you say? And this is right on the fly. Everybody. Listen, this was not a prep question. By the way. What would you say? Looking back at your growth, and if you experienced hockey stick or whether it was linear, whether it was mountains? What would you say was the pivotal point that really unlocked the business growth for you? Was it a particular thing Legion play? Was it you leveraging the tools internal to your business, if you could, and I know it’s hard because there’s so many nothing happens in isolation, but from your experience as the founder, the visionary and the one responsible for the direction of the of the company? What was that time where you looked and said wait a minute, this thing is working. This As you know,

Gareth Pronovost 45:02
it is so hard to pick one thing, right? If I will answer your question the way you asked it, even though I hate the question, I will answer it. But I want to say that there have been multiple times like, we went from 10,000 A month 250. And that was insane. Like, oh my god, we did 50,000 a month. That’s we can’t do that again. And then we went from 50 to 80. And then 80, to most recently, 140 or 137, last month, and I’m just like, who are we? What is going? What’s going on? The biggest thing for us has been division of labor within the company so that people have the thing that they are good at. And they do that thing. And leveraging systems.

Chris Davis 45:52
Listen, that was a mic drop, right there, Gareth. division of work. And I want to say this, everyone. I’m on the record, Gareth. That I am anti solopreneur. I don’t think it exists, I don’t think it should exist. I think that it takes a multitude of hands and heads to get to where you want to get to. So when I hear you say division of efforts, what I’m hearing is, hey, look, these are the things that need to get done. Let’s intelligently put people in place to do those things, not one person or two people to do all of the things.

Gareth Pronovost 46:32
Exactly right. Listen, I like I mentioned I do three YouTube videos a week. Absolutely impossible to do that. If I didn’t have an incredible team, keeping the other stuff going. So yeah, you know, I mean, there are so many other like nuanced answers I could give you like autonomy giving, giving workers autonomy to do their job and own their space. Yes. But you know, I think the big the big takeaway is allowing yourself to say, as, as the founder, say, I can’t do everything and get where we should be, or where I want us to be. So you got to let go of it. You know, I’m sure everybody’s heard the whole adage of, if you can’t, you know, if you can, you know, delegate it, or what does it eliminate, automate delegate in terms of tasks. But I don’t think enough solopreneurs delegate, automate is great, obviously, especially this audience, they’re here because they love this stuff. Yes. But a team makes you stronger, and I still resist it even to this day. And when it’s like, Should we add a new person? Oh, man, you don’t want to, you don’t want a smaller profit margin. And then I look at the numbers. And I’m like, wait a second. We did. We did $40,000 More this last year, because we added a new person. I think they paid for themselves.

Chris Davis 47:55
But there you go. Yeah, yeah. And the key, I will say this was the other thing that you said systems. When you have systems in place, you know where to put those people. And it’s already prepared for them. So it, it’s almost like putting someone in a position that’s clearly defined, where they’re not just sitting there trying to figure everything out. It’s like, no, look at this system. Look at the required inputs. This is what the output should be. Here you go right here. That’s your system, you know,

Gareth Pronovost 48:26
right. Take it all the way back. This is what no code allows us to do. So one of the big things we needed to learn as a company as we grew was that we could not it there’s the there’s the saying about the cobbler who has the muddy shoes, or I forget exactly.

Chris Davis 48:42
It’s like all everybody has shoes except the cobblers children or something like that.

Gareth Pronovost 48:47
Yeah. Right. And so we realized pretty quickly, like, Hey, wait, we’re we’re doing this amazing work for all our clients, and we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’ve got it gotta reserve resources, and now we do. Reserve resources to dedicate to build if you’re not improving your own internal systems. How are we going to scale?

Chris Davis 49:06
Yeah, absolutely. Gary, this has been great. You know, I’m gonna have to have you come into the community and do a training for us. I think that there’s so much meat on the bone and I listen, everybody, you got this episode. no cost, no charge, but we need to get some members only exclusive content from Gareth. He’s a wealth of knowledge. So we’ll discuss what that what that could look like, going forward. But in closing, Gareth, people have listened where we people have listened to us for the last 50 minutes. Didn’t seem like it did not seem like it. They’ve heard airtable smartsuite stackers happier make they’ve heard all these tools? NoCo, what? 30 $30,000 a month if I could just make five, right? They’ve heard all of these great things from your mouth. And they may be asking how do I get connected with this guy. How do I find out more? How can I get started on my learning journey? To that question, what what would you answer?

Gareth Pronovost 50:10
Well, let me offer two different options, two paths for folks here. Number one, if you want to learn airtable, and you know, how does this thing work? How would it fit into your business, maybe the way that you assist your clients or the way that you do business in general, I would suggest starting off with our air table, Crash Course totally free, you can sign up, we’ll go ahead and provide links, wherever you found this episode. And that’s going to help you over a series of days, we’re gonna send you an email a day for I think it’s like seven or eight days. And you’re gonna get all the fundamental building blocks of air table covered, so that you kind of start to see how these pieces fit together. So if you’re interested in learning air table getting started, check out the air table crash course, if you’re looking to get started as a consultant, you want to maybe dip your toe in the water of no code consulting and offer some help to your own clients. Check out our site built to scale. Again, we’ll include some notes here. But built to scale is our second brand. That’s teaching people how we took this journey with no code. And as one of the early airtable employees used to tell me, this is still the first inning of this game. So if you’re looking at this thing, and you’re late, you are not late to the party. No code is in infancy. In my opinion, I think we got a long way to go before we have full market adoption. And I think anything short of full market adoption is going to be you know, I mean, you’re going to be uncompetitive in your in your industry if you’re not adopting no code. So ultimately, I see the future of work as being everybody uses a variation of these tools. So if you want to help set other people up with that, if you want to start building a consulting firm, like I said, first inning, yeah, let’s let’s get invested now. So

Chris Davis 51:58
yeah. Yes, thank you for that. We’ll make sure all of those links are below everyone. And I really liked that were in its first inning when I think of airtable. It gives me hope. For this podcast, we are in our last inning.

Chris Davis 52:15
I want to thank you, Gareth for coming on. This has been a great joy. I’m greatly appreciative. I know our our collective audience is as well. So again, thank you for coming on, man. And it’s been a joy.

Gareth Pronovost 52:30
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Chris Davis 52:33
Yes, absolutely. So thank you, listeners. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time, your ears and your attention. Everybody, everybody, make sure make sure you all automate responsibly, my friends. We’ll see you all on the next episode. 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 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 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 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge. And I would say you are you all are in for a treat. But I’m actually in for a treat. Today, I have someone who is going to help us understand the power and the possibilities of using no code to build your business. And and this is an individual, he’s not on the screen for a reason, because I don’t I don’t want to have a spoiler alert. But he is somebody that in the community and the membership that we have, his name comes up at least at least once a week, where we’re mentioning Hey, have you heard about this new airtable update? What is this smart sweet thing? Hey, look at softer, did you check that out? He is are in the community from afar resource for all things, no code, and he is come on to the podcast today. None other than Gareth

Chris Davis 2:38
Get now Gareth is teaching others about the strategies he implemented to scale his agency. His second brand built to scale is breaking the barriers for other consultants who want to drive new leads become known in their niche and ultimately drive value for no code users. Gareth this that is I didn’t say your last name Gareth. Pronovost, everyone, just in case you’re listening on the flightline I wonder if this is Gareth? Yes. This is Gareth. Pronovost. Gareth, welcome to the podcast, man. Great to have you here. How you doing?

Gareth Pronovost 3:12
Oh, Chris. This is an absolute pleasure. I’m doing really well. Thanks for having me.

Chris Davis 3:16
Yes, yes. Now. Now, I’ll start off by saying this, I need to let my listeners know. I was tempted. See, I’ve got a green room. And Gareth and I were in the green room. And I could have I forgot so many questions, so many questions. But I save them for the podcast. So I could be an active listener, just like you all. So everything we’re about to hear from Gareth is going to be new to me. I do not have the inside scoop everyone. But I think it’s gonna be super valuable to have someone like himself really help us navigate this No, coach base. So, Gareth, you were you were at a corporation and got laid off. Tell me a little bit of about life before being laid off. Were you in capacity? Were you working?

Gareth Pronovost 4:03
Well, about five years before I was laid off, I was struggling entrepreneurs, struggling solopreneur never, never really was able to get my business ideas off the ground. And they ranged from manufacturing to you know, some tech ideas, things I wanted to build. Just generally curious about life and just overall, right. I want to I see all these opportunities to make things better, and I want to do all the things right. Yeah. So that was that was me five years ago.

Gareth Pronovost 4:38
And after another, you know, we can say failed venture because yeah, it’s exactly what it was. After another failed venture. I said, Okay, you know what, I have to be responsible now and go get a job. I have to have to do the right thing. Obviously, I have got something something’s not clicking for me on this small business owners.

Gareth Pronovost 5:00
So I went out and and actually, friend of mine through my college had, he was the director in the San Diego. So when I was living in California, San Diego’s Small Business Development Center, which is SBDC for short. And they are a branch of the Small Business Administration or SBA. And he said, Hey, I need somebody here to to help consult with small business owners or interested parties and people who want to start their own small business. And I said, Well, you certainly don’t want me I just, you know, failed another business. And he said, I bet you learned a heck of a lot more when you fail than then you realize, Wow, I know you by reputation. And, you know, few conversations, why don’t you come in and work for me? So that was that was kind of my intro to consulting. And I gotta tell you, the first time I sat aside, you know, or SAT, opposite, somebody wanting help. I was like, I felt so under qualified. I mean, the imposter syndrome was, you know, I’m sure everybody can relate to that, right? Well, I was, I remember just thinking, well, if I can help them with one simple thing, right, just one thing, then their time won’t be wasted with me. And that became my mantra that I still repeat even to this day. But

Chris Davis 9:46
Probably the worst. You know, when I look at what I know now, and I’m not even like, have the greatest, but I just understand it a lot more groups, views and everything else. I wasn’t using any of that stuff.

Chris Davis 10:00
Back bail, just like a colorful spreadsheet to me that, you know, you could do some other stuff with. So right, excuse me, right around the time where you were discovering putting content out on YouTube, here I am discovering the same tool and trying to get it, get some adoption, internal, you know, to the company that I was working for. So for me, when that stent ended, that’s when my I mean, airtable it when I had to use it for my business and my livelihood. Oh, my gosh, it just took off. It took off, and I don’t I don’t know what I would be doing and who I would have had to hire and how much money I would have. I’d be spending out without air table.

Gareth Pronovost 6:15
then my, my fiance, and I decided that we would move to Denver, and I let that job go, even though I loved it. And found a job in a in a for a payment processing company, very similar to stripe, like a competitor of stripe. And I was the sole financial analyst for this company. And they did $100 million private equity investment, and I was super stoked, and we were acquiring all these companies and bringing them into our payment processing. And then everything was going great. I was an Excel wizard, you know, living and breathing and smell, like so many, you know, financial professionals. Yeah. And then just got laid off one day unexpectedly came back from lunch. My boss called or called me into her office, and she let me go, totally stunned, because I thought I was I thought I was crushing it. And so I did a little bit of contract work, found air table in the midst of all this and thought, Why isn’t anybody talking about this tool? Yes. You know, I went to the same place. I think most people, you know, who are our age plus or minus, you know, five years go when they need to understand how software works. I went to YouTube, and there was nothing just like, it was like a deserted wasteland. Right? Oh, you know, in terms of airtable content, and I thought, well, certainly, something’s getting missed here. Put together a YouTube video, which was terrible. But you got to ship right, you have to show you got to show a shift. And before I knew it, people were calling up and saying, Hey, can I get on your calendar? I want to talk about how you could implement this for my business. And the rest is history now,

Chris Davis 8:02
man, I love it. I you know, I’m gonna overlay some of my timeline. This was around 2018 2019. For you. That’s when the layoff happened. Yeah. So I believe you and I discovered airtable Around the same time, and I remember you, oh, my gosh, Gareth. I had Greg, on the podcast. And I didn’t even mention this. You just brought it to my memory. There was a post. Greg Hickman, he was in his on his Facebook page and his group. And it was like, Hey, what are the three tools you can’t live without? So in regular lurching fashion online, lurking faster, I’m going through and I’m just like, Oh, what are people saying? And airtable came up like five times, I’m like, What the heck is this? I’ve never heard of this. Then I go to it. I’m like, Oh, fancy spreadsheets anyways. But then, like, I read more comments, and so many people, and I was like, Maybe I should try this out. So I ended up, signing up and everything. And at the time, I was at Active Campaign as a director of education. And I remember when it clicked for me, I was like, oh, wait a minute, I get it. Columns are like custom fields. Rows are records. It’s not the same as a spreadsheet. This is amazing. Look at what you can do. And in just so pure excitement, I just go and I’m throwing it at everybody. Hey, we should be using this. And Gareth, if I could go back and see how people were, they trusted me. That’s the thing. They did trust me. I had a lot of people because I was the director of education and I knew my stuff. They were like, Okay, let’s use this tool. If I could go back now, some of those airtable databases were probably just shameful.

Gareth Pronovost 10:42
Right? So the thing is, it’s it’s so it’s almost a ethereal, I don’t even know how to describe it. And yet I use it. And one of the, you know, probably one of the leading experts on this tool. And yet, I mean, you know, for the longest time I kept hearing people say Excel on steroids, right? Yeah. I don’t love that. But no. Okay, that I guess that kind of describes it. Yeah. But it’s more than that. I mean, ultimately, it to your point, it looks like a spreadsheet. So when you first start, you’re like, Oh, this is familiar and nothing fancy. What’s the big deal. But what it really allows you to do is build a custom application to manage and automate any workflow imaginable. Yeah. And you can do it all without knowing any code whatsoever. Yeah. So once it clicks, and you’ve it takes some time, for sure. You’ve got to play with it. You have to experiment. Once it clicks. Game over. You will love no code and be an you know, an evangelist just like we

Chris Davis 11:49
do. Yes, yes. And that’s really the topic. Listen, everyone, I’m on my best behavior. Because at any one of these topics that we talk about, I could just nerd out with Gareth, I promise you, I am using all of my discipline myself control, not to keep going down this airtable hole. But I want to I want to keep the focus on no code, because though you are, you know, you say one of the but I, I’m going to give you some flowers here, based on when I search airtable. And the amount of videos that come up the quality of the videos and the quality of the content. I do not think there’s a comparison, there are some people that do really good jobs on on YouTube. But you know, you have to give credit where credit’s due and go buy the flowers, no matter how much they cost to give them to the people while they while they deserve them. So I want to take my hat’s off to you. Because I know that level of effort of being consistent with any form of content, any form. And one thing that I’ve enjoyed about like seeing your evolution is that you you made a name, definitely in the airtable space. But you’re really no code, that if if we were to put a very more global appropriate tag on you, you’re no code you through through your videos, I learned about software, I learned about smartsuite, I learned about a whole bunch of other stuff that was too complex for me. So I want to talk about when for you, Gareth. When did you realize that no code is going to be the way to run and grow a business? Because you had these failed efforts before? Right? Like, did no code give you that new that new drive and say, Oh, this is what I was missing? Like, what was it about the no code space and how it evolved that really made it click for you?

Gareth Pronovost 13:59
Well, I think one part is, you know, shots on goal, you’re not going to, you’re not going to score unless you shoot. And yeah, you know, a lot of my past was learning the wrong way to do things, so that I could figure out the right way. And unfortunately, with entrepreneurship, in general, my opinion is, there’s no shortcut, you got to go through the trenches and get beat up a little bit. And develop the skills and the thick skin that you need in order to play this game. So that’s part of it. But the other part is, I mean, to your question about time. I’ll tell you as soon as I opened their table and saw what it was capable of. You know, you mentioned earlier that you’re an engineer from an engineering background. Like my undergraduate degrees in applied math, like how nerdy is that? Right? I’m, I’m the guy who grew up playing with Lego And you thought you could just leave my room for hours now and build whatever. And still to this day, those character traits, those are the same character traits I look for when we were hiring new people to join our team, because it’s the tinkerer who goes out and like, wants to, wants to see if this thing can break, how do I break it? Because that’s when I know how good it is. So when I found airtable, that was what I set out to do. Let me break this thing. Certainly, certainly, I’ll have all these ideas, flooding my brain of things I can do. And I’m like, certainly, I can’t do all these, there has to be a limit. Yeah. And then, you know, I’m able to solve them one at a time, and realize that this thing might be as cool as I think it is. And so when I mean, it was, it was a pretty short learning curve, frankly, you know, all things considered, especially having come from an Excel background formula, the formula syntax in air tables, very similar to Excel. And so that was a short learning curve as well. Yeah, another point. Not that this will help any listeners who have not already started their airtable journey. But in those days, five years ago, air table was still in its infancy. And so it didn’t have all these like features. And so it wasn’t as overwhelming, right, I find the day like, truth be told, I don’t know, that I would feel comfortable saying I’m gonna go out and consult people. Yeah, it’s become infinitely more complicated. But it’s both it’s a double edged sword. It’s both good and bad. That advances in the in the tool?

Chris Davis 16:33
Yeah, yeah. And you, you know, like I said, you, you start there. And, and I would imagine, that’s where the idea that wait a minute, this is it, when you could do so much, without having to write a single line of code, one of the most you have to do is figure out a formula, you can Google and you know, figure those out. But you’re able to start doing things that it’s like, wait a minute, this is like an app, this Hold on, right, we’d had to pay 1000s of dollars, you know, previously. So you, you start to do use airtable. And, and people are asking you about it, you’re starting to meet the demand. And now you’ve got internal to your business. Now you’ve got processes, growing pains that you have to solve. And there’s other tools, no code tools that you were using, or used and are using to do so give, give our listeners some insight. And let me just say this, I know we kind of jumped into no code, no code, for those of you who haven’t heard that term, just means applications that don’t require you to code. So I can do a thing that usually would require code without code. So that’s what we mean when we say no code. So for you, Gareth, give people insight there’s, there are so many people running businesses, agencies that have not hit the million per year, they don’t know what the back, what can no code solutions do for me on the back end of it. Right, like, give us some insight on some of the tools that you found, along with air table that you used and to grow the company.

Gareth Pronovost 18:24
So I’ll keep it as simple as possible without overwhelming because, I mean, we could we could we could talk about, you know, dozens upon dozens rising, right? But let me break it down into what I consider the three main buckets for no code, okay, I think you need a place to store your data. And you could use spreadsheets. Technically, those are no code. But the catch with a spreadsheet is you’re not really connecting data, you’re not linking it the way you do in a relational database like air table. Where Yes, when I have let’s take an example of a project with associated tasks, those tasks don’t live at the project level. They’re they’re a different layer, to put it in, like layman’s terms, and we can associate them by actually connecting them together and then infer or draw data up and down through that connection. Error table is a fantastic database tool. But it’s not the only one we use. We also use smartsuite that you’ve referenced. There are instances where we might want to use Google Sheets or Excel. But I would consider all of these to kind of fit that no code bucket. But there’s got to be a place to store the data. Next, there’s got to be a way to move information in and out from the other systems you use. Maybe you process payments and Stripe or QuickBooks or Xero. Maybe you send automated emails. Maybe you have parts of your process that when people reach certain milestones throughout your business operations. There are different things things that have to occur. All of those things. If they’re repeatable, they can be automated. And you can build automation with no code, which sounds too good to be true. It’s one of those places where I thought, certainly I can’t do that. In the early days, it was Zapier, we all relied on Zapier. But now, a lot of these tools have their own internal automations. That save us from having to go outside the environment. So now I can build automations in airtable, I can build automations in smartsuite. But I do think that there’s a need for some automation component, sometimes you need to get more advanced than what the native database tool uses. So I love Zapier, I love make.com, then the front end, how are people going to access this data? How are they going to interact with this business process? And who are they? Are they customers? Are they internal team members. So everybody has to have a way to engage with the process that’s, you know, reasonable for their role. And so we need to build some sort of interface for that to be allowed. Now, again, airtable, has made a lot of new feature improvements. And so now they have interface capabilities. But, you know, to your point, you brought up software earlier, that was one of the first tools that we used to, you know, actually build like a front end onto our data that lived in air table so that people could access it. stacker is another one. There’s new ones coming out pretty much every day. But you know, a lot of different options for talking to your data. And it enables you to build that way that people actually interact with it.

Chris Davis 21:43
Yeah. And to give you our insight on some of these tools that he mentioned, listen, you may have to rewind, take notes, or in the shownotes where it will link to all of them. But softer. In Stacker, specifically, I remember watching a video of yours. And I’m easily everybody you would think because I’m in automation and how much I love airtable You would think I could just eat this stuff by the boatloads. Gareth To be honest, I can only take in so much of of like airtable knowledge at a time. Because every piece of knowledge open is so tangent chance tangential to what I know. So like it spans my brain faster than sometimes I’m ready. So I think if I was more ignorant and what airtable could do, I could consume more. But you could say something as simple as, hey, you could link multiple records. And this is how, right at that statement. I’m like, Oh, I never thought about linking multiple records edited. And then my brain is, you know, just off. So what I learned, though, when I was consuming one of your one of your videos is I was like, What is software? What is this interacting with data? What does that look like? And everybody imagine, you know, you’ve got information in air in a database software. And it’s just stored in there. It doesn’t have to be pretty because it’s database data. And usually it’s not good looking airtable I think dresses it up the best, you know, but what if you just needed to see a certain amount of information at a certain stage of time? Or what if you wanted to give, let a client or a customer get access to just a portion of that data at a time and create kind of like a custom portal. That’s where these tools like softer and stacker come in. And I think glide. Are you familiar with glide?

Gareth Pronovost 23:40
Yeah, exactly. Like blade is really good for the mobile experience. Yep, yep.

Chris Davis 23:45
Yep. So these are all if we were not demoing right now on the podcast, but I just want you all to understand, you’ve interacted with apps that people have paid 10s of 20s and 30s of 1000s of dollars for these tools that Gareth is mentioning, maybe 100 bucks a month, you know, around that price range. Ridiculous. It’s just amazing. What’s it what’s available here? So all right, let me let me recap. If you’ve got somewhere to store your data, you’ve got some no code solutions to store the data, then there’s no code solutions to move the data from all of the various platforms that you’re using, so that they can talk to one another, keep things in sync. And then lastly, was interfacing are interacting with the data that’s been stored and moved into the three areas that you would qualify the no code tools?

Gareth Pronovost 24:39
Exactly. The nice thing about air table and you know, air table is one of the first tools to market. And so they’ve made these improvements over time. And so the features that I’m talking about here, we kind of identified in the early days that these three portions would be necessary to really build a no code app experience. But airtable didn’t have have internal automations they didn’t have I remember interfaces. It wasn’t even a glimmer in the CEOs mind yet or I. So you know it. It’s been an evolution. And we used to have to rely heavily on third party tools, we still do leverage them. But now if you want you could get that entire experience in air table.

Chris Davis 25:22
Yeah, yeah. Help Help me. And maybe this will answer things for people listening to I often. I have two questions, I’m realizing Let me ask them separately instead of jumbling them up. But I often wonder how to use particular tools in conjunction, because there’s so much overlap now. Right? So for instance, airtable can do some project management, but then I’ve got a project management software, do I still need to use the project management software? I do I do everything in air table? And before anybody starts to answer, there is no one answer. One size fits all for this. It’s literally how your team wants to wants to work. For my team, I’m more comfortable in air table with a lot of the processes at the point where it needs to be taken action on with someone besides me, I’ll create a button, create a button, send a web hook out, catch it, and then have it uploaded to click up or something like that. Right, that keeps me in my environment, it helps them stay in their environment, and things get done. So for for you, how have you kind of compartmentalized the boundaries of your tools like, Okay, this is where airtable starts, it ends here smartsuite For this that, you know, because if you all are listening, Gareth doesn’t use just one. It’s okay. It’s okay to have more than one. No code platform. Even if there’s a lot of overlap. Sometimes there’s just this little use case that’s different. So for you, well, how did how what’s your processing, kind of dictating what one tool handles that another one doesn’t, and what the handoff is like?

Gareth Pronovost 27:13
Well, smartsuite, in my opinion, is going to be a dominant player in the marketplace. And for anybody who goes back and watches this podcast, you know, five years from now that there’ll be surprised by just as when I picked up air table in 2018. And it wasn’t quite there. Yeah, you know, I got it needed some work, guys, that’s where smartsuite is right now. Right. So the thing that I love about smartsuite, beyond what I can do an air table is the way that it helps me also manage tasks across my team. I know, it doesn’t matter what solution or database I’m in in smartsuite, I get to see I have a place called my work a little section of the software that tracks everything that’s been assigned to me. And so for task management, it raises, it wins hands down. So every time that I need something like, you know, task tracking, I prefer to put that in smartsuite, personally, okay. Now, that being said, smartsuite is a new, a new comer to the space, they are not. They haven’t expanded their performance quite as as much as airtable has, yeah, it hangs up every now and then I have to refresh my screen and slows me down just a bit. So for for anything where I need, you know, consistent reliability airtable wins for me. Got it today. But I think that’ll change in six months, you know, so good to hear. For me, that’s that’s kind of what it comes down to. But the other the other thing to take into consideration here is how you’re sharing your data across your different workflows and processes. And so, you know, without going too far in the weeds, we build databases, either it’s called a base and air table is called a solution in smartsuite. But we generally build a database that is designed to consolidate related data and interact that related data in air table. I can’t link one database directly to another, but in smartsuite, I can. Yeah, so that is another competitive advantage for smartsuite. So once, you know, once we’re a little further down the road, and they’ve solved these performance issues. The way that you sync up data is going to be next level. So we’ll see what the future brings. I’m also interested that enterprise seems to be the focus for airtable Where I see smartsuite maybe focusing on the SMBs a little bit more. Yeah, so It’ll be it’ll be interesting to see how that battle unfolds. But at the end of the day, what it means for us as consumers is better no code tools because they’re duking it out. So I’m here for it.

Chris Davis 30:10
I love it, man. I love the only the only time I get nervous is when one tool really dominates because it just it I just haven’t seen that go well, they get lacks, they stopped listening to them to their audience. Let me ask you this, we’ve got a lot of our listeners use Zapier. Some of them may be familiar with make a formerly Integra mat. And some if they’re super techy, have even heard of Padley. Okay, so these three are all third, their integration software out, I call them that, and you hook you use them to pass data from one tool to the next. So let’s say you have a some CRM software, and something is happening in another application that you have. And you want to send that data over to your CRM software. Usually you’d have to code now you have these third party integration tools that can go and say, hey, we’ll handle that for you. We’ll zap it, Zapier will scenario it make what habit Zapier really has it with Zap. Yeah. I’m someone who has all three accounts, by the nature of who I am and what I do. I’m in automation it would it who would expect any less right? I hope you’re right. However, I’m realizing that I do have use cases for each one. I want you to share, you know, as your as, as you’ve experienced them and started to adapt them in growing your company. How did you start differentiating like when to use Zapier when to use make formerly Integra mat or something else?

Gareth Pronovost 31:57
That’s a really good question. It’s a tough one to answer. But I don’t mean to get too much in the weeds here. So rein me in Chris, if I if I over indulge here. So for us, as I said, in the early days, there was no airtable automation. So you had to rely on a third party tool, and Zapier was the most accessible and to connect it to the most things. It had the best integrations that you know, you could just really quickly and easily plug in an API key. And now I’m able to send Gmail, right. So super simple. And I loved that because I frankly didn’t know what the heck I was doing in the early days. Yeah, so some might even say even today, so you know, picking up these tools, Zapier will always have a special place in my heart, because it helped me understand how these tools work. And it allowed me to build automation with training wheels, because you can’t break it. Like they have thought of pretty much everything. And if you go step by step through an automation and it works. That’s it, your automation works. You’re good, you’re golden. So I still love Zapier, but and this is you know, I’m giving you a current stuff here. Yeah, I feel like they’re starting to price gouge a little bit. It’s getting pricey, and I don’t know why, like, the surface hasn’t gotten any better. And I’m still building the same automations I’m okay with, you know, rising rates of inflation or whatnot, but we’re talking double, triple prices on a lot of our customer accounts. So we’ve started to pull into make a little bit make.com, as you said, formerly Integra mat strictly from a cost savings perspective. The issue with make, it’s it’s like an audit, in my opinion. It’s an automators dream. Yes, but you have to know what you’re doing. Oh, man, it’s just it’s not they don’t have great documentation. Oh, man. A lot of stuff can go wrong. So if you haven’t done it, if you haven’t put in the time. It’s a tough one to start with. For sure. Yeah, but it’s gonna save you literally hundreds of dollars a month. If you’re comparing the two tools.

Chris Davis 34:17
Yep. Yeah. I have to I have to jump in there and agree with you, man I make is I have this strange relationship with make that sometimes what is usually pretty straightforward. It’s happier than I’ll do make takes a little bit more to get done. Just because how they handle it. But it’s something about like figuring it out. And seeing that scenario run without air. That’s like so rewarding. It’s weird man. Like, I should not be feeling good because you made it more complicated. But the tinkerer and engineer me is like, you’re giving me a feeling of figuring something out. I’ve achieved something using This. So let me let me tell you listeners, if you have never heard of Zapier or make, if you’re going to get started, I highly recommend Zapier. It’s more user friendly. The UI is there. I know I’ve got a lot of techie folks and engineers that I should say, professional in the science, technology and engineering STEM professionals in mathematics. I know I’ve got a lot of STEM professionals listening to, you can handle make, let me tell you can handle it and I know your brain, you’re looking for a challenge, you want to conquer it already. Okay, go ahead, dive in. It’s a fraction of the cost of Zapier, at the end of the day, we’re not telling you this to get super techy and nerdy, we’re telling you this, because there’s going to be a point in time in your business that you’re going to have to get data from one platform to the next. So all roads are going to lead to you using one or two of these these platforms, you know,

Gareth Pronovost 35:58
you know, and I, I realized that this is probably like your mantra as much as it is mine. But automation opens up everything. If I could rebrand yourself today, Chris, you would probably be an automation consultant. Like, let me let me just do that. Because the value I can like, it’s it’s so simple. But the value is I build an automation that saves me five minutes a day, What’s five minutes a day, right? But it adds up. Like to the point where and I’ve done the math, it’s like 20 hours over the course of a year. Yes, perfectly sanity, right? Like for five minutes saved? Yeah. So if you learn how to put an automate up how to build automation in no code, the amount of work that you will be doing, or maybe I should say, the quality of work that you’ll be doing is going to increase substantially. Because you’re not doing the copy paste, the, you know, move data from here to there. And I see so many professionals still to this day, working in that environment. And I think I’d be one of them. If my boss had an undervalued me five years ago. So thank you to her. And, you know, but but, but heed my words and learn automation, if you haven’t already, because it will change your life and the life of your clients if you’re so inclined. Yes.

Chris Davis 37:23
And I have to piggyback on that, of course, why would I not. But to is in every one to three five minute task that you save is the potential of saving more time and making more money. Okay, that’s there. Here’s the flipside, everyone, and I need you all to get this. For every 1235 minute tasks that you do. That could be automated, you run the risk of wasting hours. It may seem silly, Gareth, how many times have you said, oh, I’ll just go in and I’ll do this. It’s a simple task. It doesn’t take much. And while it’s fresh on your mind, you’re doing it, you’re clicking that button, you’re doing XYZ. But what happens when the human brain kicks in our busyness, fatigue, and you forget to do that little bitty tasks that took one minute, now, it’s gonna take hours to recover or something else, you missed an email that was supposed to go out, oh, the appointment didn’t auto accept, you know, things like that. So it’s something that you all automation is not a buzzword. And it has become a bit of that because everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon. But it literally is, I don’t want people to just think, oh, I can automate millions of dollars in No, no, no, no, you can’t do that. Don’t get me wrong. But you’ll get more out of it when you start to appreciate the minutes. By the ones, twos, fives, 10s 20s and hours, that is going to save you at one time or a cumulatively.

Gareth Pronovost 38:59
Can I give it a quick example. Absolutely. Today, I meet with, with my my virtual assistant today. And we just came back from a conference. And we were learning about AI and thinking about all the different ways that we can incorporate AI into our business. One of my assistants tasks is to take the video that we make for YouTube, and to write up let’s call it the show notes or like a very concise blog, so that when we embed the YouTube video on our blog, we have some verbiage there that’s going to help with SEO ranking and whatnot for our content. And so we decided we need to build an automation, where we take the text file of the word spoken in the in the YouTube video, send it to chat GPT and ask chat GPT the same prompt every time it’s the same thing we want every time we do this process. Please write a you know an SEO rich blog Ogg for me, that, you know, summarizes this content that we, you know, that we discussed in this video text and and make it you know, less than 1000 words or something like that. So this is a process that, you know, took my system, we produce three videos a week, right? This takes my assistant at least, you know, 15 minutes to 30 minutes every time. Yes. And it’s going to chat GPT now, which is like this a whole other level of automation, right? Because we’re talking about AI. So don’t be overwhelmed if you haven’t started down this rabbit hole yet. But I’m telling you that the minutes saved become ours more quickly than you’d expect.

Chris Davis 40:40
Yes, and the consistency of the quality of output, ah, just unmatched. You see, this is the problem, this is the problem, everyone. This stuff gets me going. So so what, what I can now speak for you, Gareth. And if I’m out of out of line, you just say, hey, that’s your, that’s your thing, not mine. If we could bottle it up, package it up in a gift and ship it to each and every one of you listeners, it would be to experience one of your most critical processes being handled accurately. By automation, by technology, I should say being automated by technology. That’s the best way that you can experience in some of you what you’re doing is you’re just buying software and saying I’m ready to automate. And you’re bypassing all of these processes. If you if you just had some you have people, if you’re listening, you have helped Gareth is about to explain where you have additional help from him in a minute. But if you just were able to slow down, talk to somebody who could say, hey, look, this process is really important. This, we’ve got a couple of tools, let’s do this. And let’s get that executed for you. That’s all that’s all i That’s the gift Gareth that I want to get so that they can experience it. And it doesn’t become just a buzzword or a thing that everybody’s doing. But something that they’ve experienced personally, you can say, this thing right here. I don’t care how much it costs, don’t stop doing it. Never turn this off. You know,

Gareth Pronovost 42:19
that’s why the majority of our clients have been long term clients, you know, they sip the Kool Aid. And before you know it, they’re they’re hooked. And they’re like, oh, man, this the efficiency, the amount of money I spent hiring, you know, your agency, Gareth. To build this process, streamline our stuff. More than paid for itself, you know, so we’re willing, we’re happy to do it again. And I mean, to your point, though, if I could bottle it up, I would I would in a second. And I mean, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to create quarter for this, and, and I tried to teach as much, you know, free stuff on YouTube and like, try this out, guys got it. But I feel like I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops. And like, only a select group of people are hearing it. And I don’t know, man, maybe it’s my delivery. Sorry, guys, let me know if you know what I’m doing wrong.

Chris Davis 43:16
Please let us both know, because I know that the adoption of automation is on an uptick. I just think that people aren’t, they’re not as process oriented, as they need to be. They’re skipping steps. And, you know, if there’s not a process, there’s not much that we can do to automate, if there’s no process, and then the output is less valuable. So in closing, Gareth, I want to put up put a bow on this. growing your business, no code there. So you’ve got your, your your three compartments of no code software, you’re leveraging it internally. It Gareth just gave us an example of of he, hey, VA, let’s take this send it to Chad GBT, let’s put some automation in place. So you’re doing it internally to make things more efficient. What would you say? And this is right on the fly. Everybody. Listen, this was not a prep question. By the way. What would you say? Looking back at your growth, and if you experienced hockey stick or whether it was linear, whether it was mountains? What would you say was the pivotal point that really unlocked the business growth for you? Was it a particular thing Legion play? Was it you leveraging the tools internal to your business, if you could, and I know it’s hard because there’s so many nothing happens in isolation, but from your experience as the founder, the visionary and the one responsible for the direction of the of the company? What was that time where you looked and said wait a minute, this thing is working. This As you know,

Gareth Pronovost 45:02
it is so hard to pick one thing, right? If I will answer your question the way you asked it, even though I hate the question, I will answer it. But I want to say that there have been multiple times like, we went from 10,000 A month 250. And that was insane. Like, oh my god, we did 50,000 a month. That’s we can’t do that again. And then we went from 50 to 80. And then 80, to most recently, 140 or 137, last month, and I’m just like, who are we? What is going? What’s going on? The biggest thing for us has been division of labor within the company so that people have the thing that they are good at. And they do that thing. And leveraging systems.

Chris Davis 45:52
Listen, that was a mic drop, right there, Gareth. division of work. And I want to say this, everyone. I’m on the record, Gareth. That I am anti solopreneur. I don’t think it exists, I don’t think it should exist. I think that it takes a multitude of hands and heads to get to where you want to get to. So when I hear you say division of efforts, what I’m hearing is, hey, look, these are the things that need to get done. Let’s intelligently put people in place to do those things, not one person or two people to do all of the things.

Gareth Pronovost 46:32
Exactly right. Listen, I like I mentioned I do three YouTube videos a week. Absolutely impossible to do that. If I didn’t have an incredible team, keeping the other stuff going. So yeah, you know, I mean, there are so many other like nuanced answers I could give you like autonomy giving, giving workers autonomy to do their job and own their space. Yes. But you know, I think the big the big takeaway is allowing yourself to say, as, as the founder, say, I can’t do everything and get where we should be, or where I want us to be. So you got to let go of it. You know, I’m sure everybody’s heard the whole adage of, if you can’t, you know, if you can, you know, delegate it, or what does it eliminate, automate delegate in terms of tasks. But I don’t think enough solopreneurs delegate, automate is great, obviously, especially this audience, they’re here because they love this stuff. Yes. But a team makes you stronger, and I still resist it even to this day. And when it’s like, Should we add a new person? Oh, man, you don’t want to, you don’t want a smaller profit margin. And then I look at the numbers. And I’m like, wait a second. We did. We did $40,000 More this last year, because we added a new person. I think they paid for themselves.

Chris Davis 47:55
But there you go. Yeah, yeah. And the key, I will say this was the other thing that you said systems. When you have systems in place, you know where to put those people. And it’s already prepared for them. So it, it’s almost like putting someone in a position that’s clearly defined, where they’re not just sitting there trying to figure everything out. It’s like, no, look at this system. Look at the required inputs. This is what the output should be. Here you go right here. That’s your system, you know,

Gareth Pronovost 48:26
right. Take it all the way back. This is what no code allows us to do. So one of the big things we needed to learn as a company as we grew was that we could not it there’s the there’s the saying about the cobbler who has the muddy shoes, or I forget exactly.

Chris Davis 48:42
It’s like all everybody has shoes except the cobblers children or something like that.

Gareth Pronovost 48:47
Yeah. Right. And so we realized pretty quickly, like, Hey, wait, we’re we’re doing this amazing work for all our clients, and we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’ve got it gotta reserve resources, and now we do. Reserve resources to dedicate to build if you’re not improving your own internal systems. How are we going to scale?

Chris Davis 49:06
Yeah, absolutely. Gary, this has been great. You know, I’m gonna have to have you come into the community and do a training for us. I think that there’s so much meat on the bone and I listen, everybody, you got this episode. no cost, no charge, but we need to get some members only exclusive content from Gareth. He’s a wealth of knowledge. So we’ll discuss what that what that could look like, going forward. But in closing, Gareth, people have listened where we people have listened to us for the last 50 minutes. Didn’t seem like it did not seem like it. They’ve heard airtable smartsuite stackers happier make they’ve heard all these tools? NoCo, what? 30 $30,000 a month if I could just make five, right? They’ve heard all of these great things from your mouth. And they may be asking how do I get connected with this guy. How do I find out more? How can I get started on my learning journey? To that question, what what would you answer?

Gareth Pronovost 50:10
Well, let me offer two different options, two paths for folks here. Number one, if you want to learn airtable, and you know, how does this thing work? How would it fit into your business, maybe the way that you assist your clients or the way that you do business in general, I would suggest starting off with our air table, Crash Course totally free, you can sign up, we’ll go ahead and provide links, wherever you found this episode. And that’s going to help you over a series of days, we’re gonna send you an email a day for I think it’s like seven or eight days. And you’re gonna get all the fundamental building blocks of air table covered, so that you kind of start to see how these pieces fit together. So if you’re interested in learning air table getting started, check out the air table crash course, if you’re looking to get started as a consultant, you want to maybe dip your toe in the water of no code consulting and offer some help to your own clients. Check out our site built to scale. Again, we’ll include some notes here. But built to scale is our second brand. That’s teaching people how we took this journey with no code. And as one of the early airtable employees used to tell me, this is still the first inning of this game. So if you’re looking at this thing, and you’re late, you are not late to the party. No code is in infancy. In my opinion, I think we got a long way to go before we have full market adoption. And I think anything short of full market adoption is going to be you know, I mean, you’re going to be uncompetitive in your in your industry if you’re not adopting no code. So ultimately, I see the future of work as being everybody uses a variation of these tools. So if you want to help set other people up with that, if you want to start building a consulting firm, like I said, first inning, yeah, let’s let’s get invested now. So

Chris Davis 51:58
yeah. Yes, thank you for that. We’ll make sure all of those links are below everyone. And I really liked that were in its first inning when I think of airtable. It gives me hope. For this podcast, we are in our last inning.

Chris Davis 52:15
I want to thank you, Gareth for coming on. This has been a great joy. I’m greatly appreciative. I know our our collective audience is as well. So again, thank you for coming on, man. And it’s been a joy.

Gareth Pronovost 52:30
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Chris Davis 52:33
Yes, absolutely. So thank you, listeners. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time, your ears and your attention. Everybody, everybody, make sure make sure you all automate responsibly, my friends. We’ll see you all on the next episode. 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