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You’re Pulling the Wrong Lever: The 3 Levers That Multiply Growth · The ROI Online Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: AI made simple.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Live.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: The first of October.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen years ago.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I started ROI online.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen years of building a business, taking care of clients, building a team, and couldn't have done it without employees, couldn't have done it, done it without um folks that bought into the vision and what we're doing and came on board, learned the system, learned the software, learned all the things that we do, and then uh represented us successfully over the years.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: 14 years, that's a long time.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: But when I think about what it took to get a business started then and what it takes to get a business started today, it's two very different things.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those is a clear expectation of the team that you're building.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that you're positioned successfully for the future.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So today's title is You're Pulling Wrong Lever, the three levers that multiply growth.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've been working with some of my clients, and uh, one of the things that we do is we uh place dedicated virtual assistants with our valuable clients, and we give them a way to have someone more embedded in their organization that specializes in what they do.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that it takes is that you have to create a job description.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you think about what is what is the problem or the bottlenecks that you're wanting to resolve when you bring on a dedicated virtual assistant.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, the exercise is you take the existing legacy job descriptions.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about the folks that I used to hire 14 years ago and who I would hire today, it's a very different.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: They need to have different skills, they need to have an understanding of artificial intelligence, they need to have an understanding of software and more online than it than ever before.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they need to understand automation and business processes now, because you know, most of the work that we do is helping our clients run their businesses better, and that's via automation, that's via software, that's with artificial intelligence, workflows, it's all these come together.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you look at that, let's say that you uh hired someone, I don't know, a couple of years ago, you hired them and you had a job description, and that's who you attracted.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you were to take that job description and expand it or uh look at each responsibility or the expectation of the responsibility of that employee that they're going to handle, well, they're in what I see as of there's three layers in that job description.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And at the moment at this moment in time, there's a discussion of a one person billion dollar business that that is an actual realistic expectation that you one person utilizing automation, artificial intelligence, and a few other specifics, that you could have a one person billion dollar business.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you if you think about that, what would it take?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: That that would take a very unique situation at this moment in time, but if you think about the thinking behind that and you think about your business, you could ask yourself, hey, wait a minute, what is it that I'm I'm uh creating a um stress?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm only leaning on one lever when there's other two other levers that I could lean on and two other expectations that I didn't know I had.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: These are expectations that maybe uh six months ago, maybe a year, that you you could actually think these weren't available, but they are now.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: They are absolutely now.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So these three seats that uh when I see a a job description, my eyes start to see A, there's uh what I call the human aspect.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you you've got uh strategy and judgment, core value proposition, and I your customer profile focus.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so this person knows your business, knows your customers, knows your all these uh details that it takes time that takes a tenured employee to really seed in and know the details and the backstory of what's going on.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But they're expected to handle a lot of tasks that actually could be uh delegated to what we call a lever two, the virtual assistant.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is someone that can handle those more repetitive, more they're necessary and valuable, but they don't need the uh your human, your your high-value employee, they don't need necessarily demand that they can be offloaded to someone that's trained, has clear expectations.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, they need to have an understanding of the relationships, but and there's some messy situations or unique uh uh factors in this that you can't just automate away.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so these are tasks requiring taste and human flexibility, taste being judgment, and then the lever three is the AI assistant or automation.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is where you can infinitely scale a layer of all those tasks that your your your high-value employee is pulling the weight at the moment, and so what that's what we're gonna talk about.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if you you're getting value from these, you know, that who am I talking to?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking to the folks that have to run organizations, have to lead organizations, build a team, run a business, start a business.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is who I'm talking to, and I'm here to help you.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so, if you're getting value out of this, these are every Thursday, like, subscribe, that helps me out.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there's more to come.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Been doing this for a while.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, this is a legacy trap.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a trap based on if we're trying to apply the same things to our business today that we did a year or two ago, then we're in a trap.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're not building for the future.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: The future guarantees high disruption, different expectations from customers, from your employees, from the products that you you deliver.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's chaos, everything's changing.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're only leaning on the one lever that we've always leaned on, then you're you're not you're not setting yourself up for success.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, the math of human effort is broken.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we're expecting our employees to do everything, to to notice all sorts of trends and all these patterns and to know their data, know all the information about the business when that is changing on a daily basis.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a fair expectation.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: We can have an expectation that they're good with our clients, they're good with our customers, they're good with customer service, they um they know these things, they have insight, they can read, you know, facial expressions.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of things going on that they can do really well, but they don't need to do everything, they don't need to be doing all the you know the spreadsheets, etc.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: You could put your best people where they're in front.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I used to think I worked for companies and I was in sales, and it used to make me make me really question like, what's going on?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm supposed to go out and in front of someone who's interested, my close rate's very high.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the expectation that I would go and prospect and talk to talk to a lot of people who didn't care, weren't interested, were focused on a different problem.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was wasting my time.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And imagine, imagine if all my time was spent in front of someone who cared, then the benefit for the company would have been way higher.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there was this expectation of prospecting and going out, and and you had to, you know, be able to kiss a lot of frogs before you found a princess, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Or a prince.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so what does that create?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Creates burnout, and that those same situations are happening with your valuable employees.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're they're fighting the feeling of burnout because they're getting taxed and pulled down into minutiae that they wish they could offload, they wish they could delegate.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, you need to throw them a lifeline.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so the hidden arsenal that's sitting in plain sight is there are two levers now that you need to consider that that just can free up and totally change the your expectations of what you can accomplish.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: You want to go faster, but you don't want to overload your existing people, but you can go faster, you can do more, you can pay attention and deliver a better customer experience if you could think about exploding your existing legacy job descriptions.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're not wanting to replace your people, we're wanting to give them leverage.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And where we want to approach the future of work with the proper expectations and release ourselves of the past things that are putting these invisible barriers in front of us because we're not thinking about it appropriately.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so let's let's think about these three seats and how they compound to really deliver and be at an extreme competitive advantage.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: You think about, you know, we're talking about these details and these examples, but this is going through the minds of your competitors, and they're going to have the same resistance.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to be slow to explore this because it's just human nature to continue trying to solve the problem the way you always have, what you know.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody trusts what they know, everybody's uh has anxiety about what they don't know, and that's why we're here.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: So think about your in-house leader.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you could free them up and solely dedicate them to your core value proposition, your perfect customer profiles, you know, they have a lot of insight, they have a lot of value, they have a lot of things that they would love to test and try, but they don't have time on that because they're busy doing other things that aren't letting them freeing them up to hang out in this area.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so they have deep business experience and strategic judgment.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine if they could be creative and think about hey, you know, we've always approached this problem.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've always wanted to do this, but I just had didn't have the time to explore it because I got to turn that report in.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have to go and check in inventory, I have to do all these other things that could be delegated.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, this is your most expensive lever.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I like to say that your employees, you know, people have a problem when they think about investing in crypto.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, crypto's dangerous, it's too volatile.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin, uh no way, it's up and down.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I I would never do that.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's too volatile.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, most people don't realize it, they're running their business.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: The most volatile asset that they have that they're investing in it's their employees.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Their employees can can decide to quit, they can move on, they can uh get sick, that you know, they have life things going on with their life.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's just a lot of unknowns that exist in that, and yet it's your most expensive investment, it's your most expensive lever.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm arguing here is that you need to protect their bandwidth at all cost.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what does that mean?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: How can I help you?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: How can I offload a bunch of tasks that uh drag you down and keep you out of your best area?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where what one of the things that revolutionized my business was virtual assistants.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I realized that I could actually hire three highly engaged, highly uh qualified assistants, virtual assistants for the price of one employee that totally revolutionized my business.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they were able to handle things that were high-leverage, middle layer, you know, that require being a real human being.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: You can't offload this to a robot at the moment, so they can help you own the messy situations and the messy middle and that require relationships and judgment and backstory.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: They can be very, very helpful.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Very it's like it's an amazing amount of additional focus, attention, uh, strategy can come in from these virtual assistants supporting your key team, your key customers.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so they their ability is to instantly pivot when a static checklist would fail.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: They can they can add judgment, what's often referred to as taste in this conversation.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they operate at a fraction of the cost of a human seat serving as a shield that keeps your leaders out of the weeds.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you included, and then the AI assist.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is automation.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, now we're starting to see the agentic conversation come in.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: You'll you'll see recently uh Muse and Dots and the other.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: What are these?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: These are AI personal assistance, basically.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And now you'll see this everywhere.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's a way to bring in software, uh, automation and artificial intelligence and upload it with your context, and it can start handling details that you don't have time for, that your team doesn't have time for, that your virtual assistants know don't, you don't need to be wasting their time on it.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a third lever, and it's a compounding lever.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we're thinking about these job descriptions, the the you know, your modern arsenal blueprint is your human seat, the core value, your you know, it has the highest investment, strategic judgment.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is your this is a lever that you need to protect, you need to uh facilitate and empower.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then you bring in virtual assistants to handle the messy metal that are at a fraction of the cost, and they bring in judgment and a lot of it's a lever, it's another lever of uh uh creates exponential um output in your organization, and and it helps honor your core leaders, and then when you bring in artificial intelligence, assistance, agentic support for your the both of these team members, for all your team members, then these repeatable chores, these the cost is at near zero.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine, imagine the compounding effect of releasing your verse virtual assistants to be even more valuable and powerful.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: You see how that compounds.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this is also uh one of the things that I could just see in my, you know, in this 14th year, year 10 or so, I was seeing that I was maxing out of my team talent, maxing out the number of accounts that we could serve.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a way to scale, there wasn't a way to grow profits without bringing on more people.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Each new customer required another 0.7 employees, and that just wasn't scalable.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: But then when I started to add the virtual assistant factor into my organization, then we started to not need as many customers, but our profitability started to grow.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we started being more effective and more profitable, and then here we are now with the AI assistants supporting all of them.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: The quality of our work has is significantly different than it was 14 years ago, or 10 years ago, or five years ago.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a totally different thing, a totally different value offer because if I needed that, guess what my clients need?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: They need the same thinking, they need the same automation, they need the same levers, and that's what we do.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so that growth stops equaling pain, and it starts to grow your profitability and to grow your capabilities.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't need to guess at how to split this up, just simply need to organize.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can take a Gemini notebook, I talk about that all the time, but imagine opening up a notebook, creating a new one, and putting in your job description, and then all the contacts around that position, that responsibility, your company, and asking it to break up that.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you can generate your leverage, your blueprint, your leverage blueprint in just seconds.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: So just take that outdated, outdated legacy job description, one of your key roles, and upload it directly on a Gemini notebook and add a few raw notes about what this person actually does all day.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then the prompt, just go review this legacy job description and my notes.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Break this role down into three distinct categories: the human seat, strategy and judgment, the virtual assistant, messy relationship-driven task, and the AI assistant, repeatable software-driven chores.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And boom, it's going to put it out.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, where does this all lead?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: It just says that look, you've got you've got two levers that can totally revolutionize your business, increase your profitability, and increase your effective output, increase your customer experience.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of things here that can come into play when you realize you have these two levers that have been kind of there sitting there.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't know, maybe you didn't have proper expectations, but that's what we're talking about today is you do, you have a way, you totally change your business.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: AI made simple.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Some of this is making sense.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Scan that QR code, connect with me, and let's talk about what's it look like getting a virtual assistant in your organization?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: What's it look like getting agentic AI memory models detailed?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: All right, AI Made Simple.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Steve Arnold My Brown, and that's a wrap.