Why Attachment to Your Systems is Killing Your Growth with Austin Reed

A lot of people are like, oh, let's hire a guy who's an expert at x, x, y, z thing, right? Okay. I always try to think, now, how could we use code or AI to augment that? One really good example. You could take all of your customer service transcripts, throw them in an AI and train it to do customer service chat based stuff. Now I'm not talking about like the, uh, the typical one that doesn't quite respond like you want it to, but to actually give relevant responses based on the person and actually solve the problem and reduce your customer service time by like, you know, 50% or more, just because you have that in place as the first step before they actually reach a human. All right. Welcome back to Exploring Growth. Today's episode should be an interesting one. Um, I was introduced to Austin Reed, a seasoned digital nomad and founder of Horizon Development LLC. Austin has a ton of experience traveling across 26 countries and running a software development agency, which in which he helps companies with automating business processes. And so when I heard that, I thought immediately, I would love to pick his brain about cutting the fat in in an organization just because I know, you know, running a company has its own trials of, you know, trying to run lean and run efficient. But then if you're doing it as a digital nomad, like your default DNA is going to be a little different how you approach running a company. So I think that if CEOs had a chance to talk to someone like Austin, who's had their whole lifestyle based on being efficient, I think they could learn a lot. So welcome to the show, Austin. Hey, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah. So, you know, before we jump into this, tell us a little bit more about yourself and what kind of work you do with companies. Yeah. My name is Austin Reed. Um, I started off as a developer, and then that kind of transformed into a company by accident. Um, but, uh, but, yeah, I mean, we we work on automating companies. We help them optimizing their processes. We'll take a company, we'll will kind of review what it is they do. We'll try to cut the fat. Our prefaces is if we can save like a team of like 20 people, everyone on the team like 1 or 2 hours a day, every day. That's a huge cost savings for a company and that's a huge win for us. So that's that's our main goal. Yeah. I love it. So business automating business processes is kind of your focus as I understand it. Tell me, like what I want our audience to do is to get to kind of glean some practical wisdom from someone who just naturally thinks this way, which a lot of business owners, they're putting out fires right there, just constantly, you know, their inbox is filled with fires put out every, every day. So I totally am empathetic with, uh, business owner CEOs that, um, are trying to get to saving costs or get to making money. But a lot of times they're just, you know, firefighting. What's your mindset when it comes to being efficient or automating processes? Well, the first thing is I always try to default code. So like a lot of people are like, oh, let's hire a guy who's an expert at x, x, y, z thing, right? I always try to think, nah, how could we use code or AI to augment that? One really good example. You can take all of your customer service transcripts, throw them in an AI and train it to do customer service chat based stuff. Now I'm not talking about like the, uh, the typical one that doesn't quite respond like you want it to, but to actually give relevant responses based on the person and actually solve the problem and reduce your customer service time by like, you know, 50% or more, just because you have that in place as the first step before they actually reach a human. So things like that really add a lot of value in a, in a, and it's really kind of simple to do honestly. Um, so. Simple for you. Well that's what you do, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah I guess you could say it that way, but um, but I mean, all these companies that they probably have all their, you know, stuff, like all their transcripts just sitting around an and email or something. All they have to do is copy paste that and put that in the AI and bam, like, that's, that's already right off the bat, huge savings. But that can scale across different departments like sales teams. You can scale it up to and like AI personalization instead of manually writing out a bunch of emails, you can. I have I write emails, but to do it well, though, that's a lot more difficult. Yes, we can dive into that if you want, but there's a couple examples for you okay. Yeah. So let's let's stick on the customer service thing because I agree with you. I think that being a consumer, you know like I, I have clients, then I will interface with some platforms for them or my team will. And we have to sit on chat and talk to these AI bots or, or, you know, people that are in India who can't speak the language and like there's a lot of like stuff that's been automated, that's been bad for the brand and for their for their customer service. Yeah. So it kind of break it down a little bit more like what are some examples of that. You've seen it work and, and what would be kind of like the first steps of setting something like that up. Well, without mentioning any names, uh, we have a client in the aerospace industry, and their customer service is. It's kind of a mess, right? Um, okay. They get a lot of questions from a lot of people when it comes to valuations about aircraft and stuff like that. So what we're doing with them is we're taking all their emails over the last five years, and we're feeding that into an AI to give the same type of responses. It works well because the data that we're feeding the AI is really good data. Now, if all your customer service responses was people from India who don't really know how to speak English, well, then I'd be training an AI to be kind of stupid. So yeah, yeah it doesn't. It would never work out like that, right? So I mean, you have to have good data coming in because if you don't have good data, good questions and a lot of it, then it's not going to work. If you only have like a couple months worth of customer service data and you don't have a lot of volume, then it's probably not going to work out very much for you either, because you have enough data to train the AI in the first place, because the deal is we want it to make it feel human. We want it to to make sure that it actually solves the problem instead of giving some generic response like a lot of these AIS do. Um, and, and the trick to do that is being very creative with your prompt chaining with link chain and stuff. More technical terms, um, and having very, very good data from the beginning. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think the first step to doing well with AI, as we're kind of running out of the gate with all the AI stuff coming on for everyone trying to use it is good data. So if you're talking to a company that doesn't have a lot of these emails saved or they can't access, you know, any of the data that they had before, then what kind of step would you tell them to take to start getting good data? Would it be just through the like the email interactions with, uh, customer support tickets? Um, or what would that look like? Well, first of all, any documents that they have around the service itself, any FAQs or educational documents that they have, any videos that they have, they can grab the transcripts of those videos and feed those into AI as well. Um, outside of that, yeah, just start recording it, but make sure that the data that you're recording is high quality. So pay a little bit extra for a more knowledgeable, better speaking, English speaking customer service. Don't go the cheap route and outsource to the Philippines or India or whatever. Uh, when it comes to that, because looking at the end goal in mind, eventually you're going to be able to pivot away from that if you have the proper data in place. And then the other thing I would say is just maybe go across all your clients and ask them like, hey, what are the top three questions that you had when you were coming into this? Figure out what those are, right? Really, really good responses to those questions and use that also as data points for the AI. Okay. Yeah. So building up a new base of FAQs to feed into there. Um, and I think that's also good multi-use of time to to have touch points with old clients or even current clients and, you know, maybe a chance to, to sell through some new new products or services too. So if you're talking AI, what are some of your tools that you go to? Um, you know, I think a lot of, um, companies are just trying to figure this out, right? So they need people like you to come in and help them understand, like, how do I DIY this or or what does it look like for a company for you to come in and do it for us? Right. So the DIY solution is probably something like Macomb, which is an automation service, kind of like Zapier. Okay, a lot better or an eight in if you're slightly more technical and it it is the better solution of the two, But you need to have a little bit more, you know, technical knowledge for that. And then pairing that with I mean the simple one is ChatGPT. However, Claudia is doing a lot of really good stuff. Uh, their English comes out a lot more human than the ChatGPT does, or using mixture which is slightly more advanced. That's um, you can download Facebook's O llamas, um, AI or a mixture tool AI and train it yourself. That would be the slightly more advanced DIY version of this. Okay. Uh, and I'll be posting tutorials about this if anybody wants to go check it out for sure. My YouTube. But um, but yeah, I would say, I would say that the simplest, easiest way for DIY is make paired with ChatGPT. That's your DIY solution right there. Okay. Um, when it comes to having us jump in, uh, we don't use, like, we use an Aiden internally to test ideas really quickly and stuff. Uh, but we don't use those solutions for our clients. We actually code their own systems and their interfaces and dashboards, because we find that a lot of our clients there that are using, uh, you know, Salesforce and QuickBooks and this and that and the other thing, and they have like ten different platforms and Microsoft Teams or whatever, where, um, their employees get bogged down because there's so many programs going on. And so we'll take all those, join them all together in AI and with APIs and things, and put it into one platform. So employees have their own dashboard, they log into it, connects with everything. It cleans out all the data, you know, sales teams not updating their CRM. That's a huge problem, right? We help augment that problem by having these systems in place. and we'll build a custom solution for the company based on what they need. Gotcha. So, you know, the question that comes to mind, hearing all of this is privacy. So I assume that this is a you know, this is not something that you would take, you know, private data and throw it out on public and say, you know, throw it against the wall. How do you make sure that this is how does this integrate so that it is still stay private. So what's helped. And and with the Ise specific we could put rails like guardrails in there. It's where we can even feed it. Maybe some proprietary info. But make sure that it removes any contextual information that would, you know, violate any, um, any NDAs. Right. Gotcha. Yeah. So, uh, outside of that, like our CTO, he has a master's in cyber security. And so security is like a huge major focus with us. Yeah. Um, it's more important how you store the data. Yeah. Than anything. And so making sure that things are hosted properly and making sure that everything's been tested. Right. Um, and I mean, because if we if we build a system and it gets hacked, we're liable. And the company that hired us is liable to pay out damages to every single person whose data got stolen. And we don't want that, you know. So so that's why we're OWASp compliant. We're HIPAA compliant. You know, we we understand what it takes to hack stuff because we actively hack our applications as part of the testing process. Gotcha. Well, um, so I think, you know, the customer service or customer support side of this makes a lot of sense. What's what would be the next step if a company wants to go beyond customer support and start implementing, you know, automating more business processes, what would you suggest? Well, it really depends on the industry, right? I mean, like we find in warehousing that there there's a lot of, uh, warehouses and logistics and wholesale companies who still run on, like, Excel sheets and outdated systems. Uh, there are some, uh, brick and mortar stores, apparel companies and stuff that also are running off of outdated inventory systems and things like that. Um, so we'll take those systems, completely revamp it, like for a wholesale company, for example. Like a lot of them will get these huge manifestos that are like PDFs from one supplier and excel from another. And they have a data warrior in India like entering it all. Yeah, yeah. Biden seeds. But you know, humans aren't perfect. And so there's going to be errors and it's slow. So what will the system we're like hey have your supplier upload it right here. It's instantly imported into your system. You don't have to do anything, you know. And so that guys work that you hired full time. You don't need him anymore. It's not bad. He just needs to evolve with his job and get a better. Yeah, sure. Right. But, uh, but from an efficiency standpoint, like, all of a sudden, you don't have to wait a week to have your system updated from. It's not a new. Yeah. You take all the manual work out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just for like one vertical. Right. So I mean, when it comes to fulfillment, it might look something like that when it comes to sales teams, it's like how do we how do we take a salesperson's person's time and multiply it by ten? Because the amount of people that a sales person contacts per day is directly proportional to the amount of DLC is going to close 100%. Yeah. So but how do we take that? Multiply it by ten without losing quality. Right. See, that's that's the huge thing because a lot of people like they have these huge email systems set up or LinkedIn bots or whatever, and they're doing massive automated outreach, but it's kind of bad. Or maybe they'll do like some slight AI personalization on it, but it's still like it's not quite hitting the mark. Like you can tell an I wrote this. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. So what do you do? Well, first of all, you grab their website text, you grab their LinkedIn text, you grab the last 5 or 10 LinkedIn posts, right? You take that, you feed that into a Clodagh, which sounds more human than ChatGPT Also, you pair that with maybe some trigger data. So you're like, oh, I know this company just went through a funding round or oh, I know that they just announced a partnership with XYZ. Yeah. And then you take that and you use that to write the email, and then all of a sudden you have relevant email. It's hitting the right person, it's sounding right and human at the right time. And you just not only maximized your your volume output, but you also maximized the amount of relevance. So you're hitting the right people at the right time. 100%. Have you seen this, uh, company called Clay? Oh, yeah. Clay's huge. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, there's there's another smaller one. Data factory. I've been in touch with them. Actually, no, I've never heard of. No. Yeah. They're smaller. Um, but, uh, you know, I really like. I saw Klay just got a bunch of funding from, uh. Oh, yeah. Sequoia or someone, um, and that, that makes a lot of sense. You know, it's just sort of summarizing what you just said is taking all the all the data and saying, how do we do research on the fly, you know, quickly and make it personalized. Now, it's still not all the way there, but, you know, this kind of going back to like the roles changing and people understand the roles. That's what I think that, uh, salespeople and then again, marketers, depending on your, your vertical or your, your company, they have to adjust to the tools and to and therefore their role. So I think Clay is an interesting example of that. Oh yeah. Clay's amazing. Clay's big because, uh, the speed of testing is huge. Clay integrates with everything really easily, and it's fast, like for sales teams and testing verticals and ideas and stuff. Clay is like, that's where it's at. The thing about it is, is it's really expensive. The credits on clay are astronomical. So what we sometimes see sales teams do. I don't know if you know of Eric or some of these other people that use clay a lot. Eric used to work for clay, actually. He's a good friend of mine, but, um. What they'll do is they'll build stuff out on clay, and then they'll turn around and and hire an automation expert to build that and Aiden. Or make or to build a Python script for that. Okay. And so Clay is for the testing. Once they have something that works, they'll go and rebuild it to reduce the costs. Oh okay. Interesting. So. Okay. That's good to know. Put that one in my in my, uh, list of things to, to look into. I like that because I think I am experiencing that, uh, um, won't get I won't get into that right now. But going back to your, your top, your conversation about the fulfillment, it sparked this question of if you come in and work with a company and help them really, you know, get all their stuff together, you know, for lack of a better way to say it, what's the learning curve for them on the back end of of that new solution, New implementation? Well, it's not as hard as you might think. I mean, first of all, we have a full knowledge base. We do videos, we do full documentation. We also do documentation, if ever. Like you, they wanted to work with another dev team. They could jump in and another dev team could easily figure out what's going on and take it further. Right? Yeah. What's a lot of what's a lot of software companies don't do that because they want you to stick with them. So that's something really important to note. But no, it's it's a lot easier than you think because a lot of our interfaces like first we'll build a design and we'll make sure the design is simple and easy to use. We'll go through a testing process where we'll roll out a feature to the employees or something, and we'll see how it works. We'll try it on and see what happens after that. Depending on the feedback will change. Where some things are, we'll move some stuff around or maybe add a thing or remove a thing. At the end. We find that it's just so much easier for people to use that they just kind of default into it. I mean, everybody, at least now, not when I grew up, but everybody now. Like they have a phone from like the second, you know, they're they're in the second or third grade. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't get a phone until I was like almost in high school, you know. Yeah. Uh. Same here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, but so it's a lot more intuitive than people think, because, I mean, there's a lot of commonalities between platforms and things. Like you go into Google Admin Console, it's confusing as hell. Yeah. You're just like, what am I doing here? But but I mean, you go into these other platforms like clay, for example, maybe it's a little bit more complicated, but but there's a kind of, a commonality in between the UX and all these platforms that a lot of people have gotten used to, and we use that to kind of help aid the transition to the new system. Well, I mean, talking about all these tools, I think your role and what you guys are doing at your company is, is very valuable at the at the current day, because people don't really know what is what, you know, they don't have. They're running a business selling X and they're managing teams and putting out fires. They don't have the time really to digest all of what's happening. And with AI and to think to the depth of what you can think. And are you live in for automating business processes and those kind of things. So I think that what you guys are doing is, is super valuable. I don't see it going away anytime soon, I think. But for the current day, super valuable helping people understand which just the last 10 minutes or 15 minutes of us talking I think is super valuable for people to see. Like, look, there's lots of tools out there that are all racing to be the tool. And, you know, there's outfits like you guys that are out there understanding these tools, working with the tools, you know, and deploying them inside of actual projects. Um, and you can, you know, you can lend that experience, Um, I want to now kind of shift to the digital nomad side of things, because I think that I think this will bring as much value. Um, but, you know, when people think of Digital Nomad, I the way I think of it is like someone sipping a cocktail on a Mexico beach, right? Um, something like, you know, you're traveling, you're you're just living the van life, right? It doesn't appear that that's really what you're doing because you're running a company. Right. And yeah. And so I give us a, give us a look into what does that mean for you? What does Digital Nomad mean for you. Right. Okay. Well, when I started out as a digital nomad, I wasn't running my own company, so it was a lot different. Um, there was a lot more, you know, sipping the cocktail on the beach, right? Yeah. Um, but as I started to, to grow the company, like when I, when I first started, I would move countries every time my visa expired or whenever I got bored. Right. So that would be every 3 to 6 months, right? So every 3 or 6 months I had a major change. Now those major changes are really good because they give you, uh, a chance to change up your routine. Changing your environment is a really, really good way to change up. Like how your day to day looks. Uh, that being said, as I started growing the company, I needed more consistency. So if I was to move to another country, um, and every three months I have to figure out where the gym is, I need to make sure that my place has good Wi-Fi. I need to, you know, figure out where the good food is, how to do this, how to do that. And the other thing, and I'm excited, you know, I want to go see stuff. Yeah. So and that's uh, that can be a distraction sometimes, to be honest. For sure. For sure. And so I've kind of slowed down a little bit now and I'm valuing a little bit more staying in places longer time one year visa here to your visa. There's something like that. Um, and also to get to know the place more because if you're rolling through places every 3 to 6 months, you had a couple tourist spots, you had a couple of local spots, and like you, you moved on and you didn't actually like get to know the country like, and its values. And I've noticed the countries where I've spent more time, more than six months or the countries that I know a lot better. Yeah. You have more connection to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think all that, all the first part, a lot of wisdom came out of that, you know, and having to think through your process of setting up and tearing down every time you go to a different place. Um, you know, you there's a lot of excitement involved, which helps carry you, because if it wasn't exciting, then it would just be. What's the point? Yeah, but I think taking the principles of just moving logistically and getting things set up and all that, um, it's like this forced, you know, it becomes sort of its own DNA, but it's this forced rethinking and refreshing of, okay, how am I going to do this again? Right. And so I think that's what's valuable. So that's what I want to know. Like I want to dig into that a little bit and say, okay, what what did you take from that that you're applying in your company now that you're more settled? Okay. Well, um, I mean, the obvious one is, is as digital nomad, you can't have a lot of things. So if you go in a place and I've done this, you buy a bicycle or a guitar or a TV or whatever. Um, when you move, you gotta leave it behind or you got to sell it. And usually you don't sell it. Usually you just kind of leave it behind. Give it to somebody, right? Yeah. It takes too long. So. Yeah. And so first of all, that that leads you to not be attached to things as much, uh, because you know that they come and go. Um, and so you don't really need to have like, I have my basic stuff. I do have some guitars that I take with me. I have my Muay Thai gloves, uh, and my raps. Right. I have my laptop, I have my extra screen, which is a little portable monitor, just so that I always have two screens. Right? Uh, I've got my camera and my clothes and, like, that's it. Like, that's all I got, you know? Um, so when I moved locations, first of all, packing is really easy because it's like, I don't have a lot of things. You already packed? Yeah, I just store them in the bag. Takes me maybe, like, 30 minutes. 25 minutes, you know? I don't even pack the day before. I'm like, I'll just pack a couple. You're literally like Jason Bourne. Yeah, something like that. That's cool. I mean, once I, you know, you can leave a place. Leave it, leave a trace. No trace in 25 minutes. Jason Bourne. There you go. Yeah. No. That's awesome. The other thing, though, is it's forced me to, like, become a lot faster when I do do these transitions. So, um, it's gotten a lot easier. It used to take me, like, 2 or 3 weeks to get settled in a location. Now I can get settled in like 3 to 5 days, roughly. Um, so, like part of that is, you know, I know that I trained Muay Thai and that's really important to me. So before I go to a place, uh, I'll look on Instagram, on Google Maps and I'll reach out to Muay Thai trainers and get a private trainer before I even go. So that the day I show up the next day, I wake up, I'm still with my same routine of I'm doing Muay Thai in the mornings. Yeah, right. Yeah. Um, also, one thing that's really important is messaging Airbnb hosts and having them send the screenshot of the internet speed. There you. Go. Because I've landed some Airbnbs that look really, really nice and the internet is slow and it's like, dude, I can't be leaving the house every day to go to a cafe. I mean, some people like the co-working stuff. Yeah. Yeah. For me, first of all, I'm making videos. I'm talking to clients, I'm doing sales calls. I'm talking with the team. You know, I have so much stuff going on that, you know, I can't have that in my space. It doesn't make sense, you know? So, um, having a really good Wi-Fi connection at the house is really important. That also brings up another thing. If you're living with someone like my, my girlfriend is a psychologist and she has her, you know, her own business and she has patients like, I can't be around because of patient privacy stuff. Yeah. So we have to have a house that has, you know, doors. We can't do studios. So, like you, you learn stuff like that when you travel. Well, here's here's the bridge that I see in what we were talking about before. And the, the digital nomad life is that you talked about not having attachments to things. Yeah. And to me, I think a lot of business owners, they have attachment to their processes and their systems a lot. And so when you come in, isn't that what you see? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The bigger the companies get, the more attached they are. And they're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on systems. And they're just like, but it would be more of a pain to change them. Like, okay, so you're going to lose a couple hundred thousand dollars just because you don't change. It's like metaphorical hoarding, you know, of of systems and process. Like you would maybe more TVs or whatever you leave behind. Yeah. I think it's so super interesting to think about it that way, where if you thought about your company, like you're going to leave in three months and you have to pack your stuff in 30 minutes, well, what are you taking and what are you leaving and what does that cost to you? Right. Um, and so I think the attachment to processes is, uh, is a real thing because you've got this person who brought you the system that's integral to your organization, and you value them. Right? You don't want to get rid of them. You don't want to hurt their feelings. You know, you're gonna you're gonna rock the boat if you start to change things because they've got their ways. Right. And so all these things start to add up. So when you come into a company, you start to see this. I mean, your reaction was exactly what I thought it was going to be, You know. Yeah. You do see this right there? Attached. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, another thing that that I find a lot is they have a lot of data on a particular platform and they're like, yeah, how do we move all this data? It's already there. Everything's already set up. It's like I mean, there are ways I mean, even if the system doesn't give you API access and no way of downloading the data, we have ways of grabbing that data, trust me. So but that's a huge fear. And so they're not even open for the conversation because they're so attached to said thing. But also it's like, okay, uh, you can keep going this way and keep losing X on your bottom line. But I'll tell you, in ten, 15 years, all these other companies, they're going to pass you, they're going to pass you because you didn't make the important decision before. Yeah. You know what I mean. Yeah. I have a client that I've been doing work with for a long time, and he's very good at not being attached to things in his business. That's good. And that's that's a big reason why he wins. He he's a good leader in that. He will help communicate and translate to his key employees why they they need to get rid of this thing or this company or vendor or whatever. Yeah. Uh, because as he's growing in the vision that the. Yes. For the company, um, it is all clear that things are changing, is shifting and then over, you know, after over the last decade, so many things have shifted and change in all companies. In the last six months, things have changed dramatically. So you can't be a leader of a small or or growing business and, and be attached to anything because you're going to be the bottleneck. Those things will be the bottleneck. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I and I think the bigger the companies get, the more they have SOPs and systems in place. Yes. And it becomes a little bit harder because like me as an entrepreneur, like I changed my mind a lot about things. So like one week I'm like, oh, this is the coolest thing. We all have to use this. And the next week I'm like, oh no, that sucks. We need to actually do this thing. Yeah. You know, and that can be really jarring on employees, right? So I have a buffer system, my CTO and our main PM. Jesus. Um, they're kind of a buffer between me and the employees because I'm like, ah, this. That's good. Yeah. Um, and they kind of, like, roll things out a little bit more slowly. They let it kind of test out, um, so it's not quite as jarring. And a bigger company, though, like, yeah, I can see how, like changing the entire structure, the entire system. I mean, like for example, like HubSpot is a big one, dude, HubSpot is expensive. Salesforce is really expensive. Super expensive. Yeah, yeah. And like, dude, honestly, once you get to a bigger team size, yeah, it kind of does everything, but it kind of is everything in a really clunky, crappy ass way. Like, let's be real, you know? So but they're really attached to it because of the data, because this and that. I'm like, well, that's good. But you calculate, okay, this is the subscription cost, right? It's expensive. Yes. But what they're not thinking about is the amount of time and efficiencies that their employees are spending on that system. So you have to add both of those together. And they'd be like, okay, now does this cost the same as it would for me to maintain a new system that I built for myself? And the answer for a lot of companies is no. I mean, for some companies it does make sense. But. But not for every company. Definitely not. Yeah, I think whenever it's a red flag for me, whenever these platforms that were cutting edge and were very valuable to various different processes in a company, when they start creating certification courses that you get certified in their platform, that to me is the is sort of the writing on the wall for what's coming, you know. Um, and it's again, for a lot of companies, it still makes sense. Um, but when you start talking about being attached to systems and things that are happening in your company, when you start to say, okay, now we're going to get certified in this thing and we're going to hire people who are certified in this, these things. It's going to last for some time, but at some point it's going to come where this now thing that we have 14 people certified in is old hat. Now we have to want to declutter all of this. I'm going to stick with the analogy, but we have to, you know, disconnect all of this and really kind of start over. It's almost like a first principles type of thinking again. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like every time I move you got to kind of start over again and again. Again. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean we we find that too. We find that, um, even with our systems, like. Yeah, they're going to work for like 5 or 7 years or whatever, but eventually you're going to have to do updates. We we build it in such a way and where it's really easy to make changes. So if ever, you know, there's a new vertical or the company ships or something like we, we can kind of pivot the program. But that being said, like programs are also like a learning experience. So like we can build it. It'll work for a couple of years, but eventually, like it's going to have to change. I mean, even the stuff we build is going to have to change everything eventually have to change. That's right. So it's better to have a living and breathing system that evolves with the company than it is to have a system that evolves for the system to make more money, and you're just kind of attached to it. Another thing that we find is really important is having control of your own data. So you know, you're using HubSpot, Salesforce, all this other stuff. I mean, you don't know where they're storing that data. You don't know what they're doing with that data. I mean, you could read the contracts and whatnot, but, I mean, we all know that that Gmail, like Google is selling a lot of your search data to other companies and stuff. Sure. And so having just control of your own data from a security standpoint is huge. But from an analytical standpoint, like the things you can do after you have ultimate control of all your data is insane. Like the predictive analysis of markets, the ability to predict ebbs and flows. So, you know, when your your high months are going to be like the AI is going to tell you that way better than you'd be able to predict it 100% every time? Uh, yeah, 100%. So to round this conversation out, I have a question for you. Okay. If if you were put in charge of, let's say, uh, $5 million company still sort of stage one looking to grow to stage two, what would be some of the first things that you would cut and why? You know, now I say cut for efficiency sake because it's a lot of what we're talking about. But or maybe automate, right. If you went in there and you pick your own vertical pick, you know, you know, because I know you, you've already done this with some companies. Um, what would be the first things that you would point at? I mean, it's really different for every company. That's a thing. Um, customer service is a huge overhead for a lot of companies. Some companies is not, though. But customer service definitely is a huge time suck. Um, I would really hit sales really hard. I'd, uh, try to thin down the sales team quite a bit. Um, because, you know, five really intelligent sales guys that know how to use clay are way more valuable than 20 stars and members and AI's, right? Yeah, those five guys are going to smash that whole, like, 30% by far. Um, so sales processes is huge. Also making sure there's a huge inbound flow of leads instead of outbound because it's a lot easier on everybody involved. Sure. Um, you know, they're already sold before they hop on the meeting. You know, it's going to be a good relationship. Yeah. Um, I'd say filtering of clients is a big thing. Making sure you don't get crappy clients. I think it's just as important to vet the client as much as it is for the client to vet you. You want to make sure that the relationship is valuable for both parties. I want to make sure that I can provide value to you. And if I can't provide value to you, then great. I'm going to try to find someone who can. And if I can't, that's fine. It's better if we don't work together, because I don't want to end up down the road with you. No problem. So just defining who your ideal client is and getting rid of all the all the other noise, that is huge. So that's where I would really start out with like that when it comes to to jumping in on that situation. I like that the front end producing revenue, good, solid, high quality opportunities that bring on, you know, clients are going to be long term value. Yeah. And then and then the back end of serving them and supporting them. You know funny you say a lot. It's a lot of overhead for a lot of companies is true. But it should be a higher overhead for some companies. Some companies are not paying attention to their customers and they need to have more customer support. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I find that that, uh, the better you make the onboarding process, the better. The more cozy you make. The, uh, the whole fulfillment process as a whole that's going to have three, four acts, you know, the amount of referrals you get and then all ten of the business. And if you stick to your bread and butter and understand that, like, you don't need to be HubSpot, you don't have to do ten different services. If you're really good at this thing, it's better to cut all the rest. Just do that. You're like, really good at Stack Services up on that, but you don't need to to go wide. You can go. Yeah. Going why? It's good for testing out when you're first starting out, stuff like that. But once you find what's working, stick to that thing. That's right. Yeah, that's really good advice. Hey, this has been great and I appreciate all your insights. I think this is so timely for people that are, you know, dabbling in AI, trying to automate some things. People have, you know, antiquated systems. So thanks a lot. No, I appreciate being on. Um, and yeah, thanks a lot as well. Yeah. So if people want to, you know, want to send people your way, how do we get in touch with you? Yeah, you can go to horizon dev. Um, easy to remember. Uh, that's our website. And then on there, we also have a YouTube that I've been working really hard on posting a lot of videos. So if you guys want to start doing this DIY and kind of check out some of the stuff that's possible, I'll be posting videos there regularly. Um, and if you want to reach out, just, you know, all the contact info is there and you can always talk to me on LinkedIn too, if you have questions. You know, I'm always happy to answer for free, so love it. Super valuable. Thank you so much. And, uh, we'll have to have you back. All right. I appreciate it, man. All right. Thanks a lot.