How Austin Zelan Scales Businesses with Systems and AI

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Austin Zelen. Now I'm gonna read his bio to make sure I get it right. Austin is an American businessman, an investor, a TEDx speaker, and philanthropist. Throughout his career, he's always focused on productivity and efficiency, finding ways to have more positive impact with his work, and he works with a lot of his clients on that as well. We're going to talk about some of those ways to find productivity and efficiency. This has allowed him to work simultaneously and run multiple successful businesses while pursuing his PhD. and serve on several executive boards. He's got a passion to help others grow and achieve more, and we'll talk about how he does that. He currently coaches students from around the world to increase their impact while decreasing inefficiencies. This proven framework creates general wealth for his students and allows them to take back control of their time. This has allowed him to shape the investment space, become more efficient and more lucrative for investors. So Austin, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Austin, so Austin, tell us a little bit about how you got here and sort of what your path looked like.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's been quite a journey actually. I did not expect to be here, especially the route that life took me in. But I kind of started my professional career in corporate. So I worked at a startup for a while, then I went to Microsoft. I was doing some consulting for them. And it really opened my eyes to this whole world of like big business because I was consulting for multiple companies. And before Microsoft, I had worked with some fairly large organizations, but I realized that because of like M&A and stuff like that, they could have an environment within their corporation that was like totally like a free-for-all. Like it was the wild, wild west, no structure, nothing at all. And then going to Microsoft was such a relief because They had like figured everything out. They were so well polished. Like there, there wasn't really anything that we were figuring out necessarily. We were just kind of tweaking little things to see if we can make them more efficient and better. And so I realized that there is a possibility to get your business to the point where it just runs and it runs very smoothly. It's like a well-oiled machine. And so that kind of like burned this image in my head of like it's possible to achieve those things if you work hard enough at them and you have Talented people and you have the right team and everything. And that's why they're so, so, so specific on their hiring and all that stuff. So that was a really cool experience for me. However, that also created an environment where I was actually kind of bored in my job because I was like, man, like I do the same exact thing every single day. Like it's not hard. Like it wasn't even challenging. I would say I had maybe one challenging day a month where we had a ton of new data come in. But other than that, I wasn't really working super, super hard. It was a very chill opportunity. And so that got my mind thinking like, man, like maybe, you know, this is kind of boring. Maybe I don't like this after all. Maybe this isn't my dream job like I had thought. And so I started dabbling. I had been dabbling in investing for a few years prior to that, but I really started taking it seriously and like really going all in on a couple investments. And the biggest one for me was actually day trading. I was trading foreign currencies. So eventually built a software that trades automatically. That was my first real business. Started licensing that out. Then I moved on to other investments. And so, you know, I, I kind of created this full-time investor status for myself, and I wanted to protect it. And so my goal was to invest into anything I could possibly find that would protect my status as an investor. That included oil wells, exotic cars. Watches, online stores, crypto mining, real estate, anything from like Airbnb to rent, long-term rentals, multifamily, fix and flips, anything, anything I could possibly find, I tried it. And so over time I realized that those things were great to start with, but the real opportunity was in businesses. And so that's when I began to start multiple businesses myself. I would find talented people to operate them for me. And so, you know, over time I had started multiple businesses and I started to see similarities between them. I realized that you have a good idea, people like it, they start buying it, and at that point it's just a successful project. It's just something that happened to be successful. But once it's successful, you have to cultivate it and kind of add some structure and maturity to the business. And so that really took me on a journey of figuring out what does that even look like? What does it mean to be a CEO? What does it mean to have a successful team? What does it mean need to have the right systems and processes in place because we were nowhere near what Microsoft was doing. So obviously they had figured something out and I'm like, if I could just take 1% of what they're doing and put this in this business, like I could scale this, you know, very, very far. And so that put me on a journey of figuring all those different things out just out of necessity because I didn't want my businesses to fail. And then now I'm at a point where I'm actually consulting others as well. where they're stuck in that same place that I was. And so I've built many of these things myself out of the desire for my business to grow and not die. And now I'm also sharing it with others.

That's great. Well, and what a, what a great full circle of, you know, sort of having that startup experience where there's the excitement and intensity, but then sort of seeing how a really established business like Microsoft, you know, brings those systems into place and creates some stability. And then seeing through a diversity of other businesses the need for that, that's really such an interesting journey and also really resonates well with, you know, sort of the topics that we talk about on this show a lot is, you know, we talk about how systems set you free because they really allow you to, you know, bring your best self every time to every situation so that you're always sort of ensuring that you're doing the best thing possible. It's not a a way that sort of confines you, but instead it's something that sets you free because when you've got a system, then you can iterate on it and then you can get creative and you can bring in other people with their good ideas. But if you don't have a system and it's all just sort of between your ears, then it makes it a lot harder to collaborate.

Yeah. And even if you're thinking about like hiring and stuff like that, that was a big one for us because every time I would lose an employee, like they, you know, moved to another company or something like that, or we had to terminate them, like I would be so nervous. I'm like, man, like, who's gonna be able to do their job? But at the end of the day, I realized that it was just a system. If I had everything documented and there was a set process of what this person did and how they did it, hiring is no longer a problem. I just find another person who can do that job and they have all the material in front of them and there's no interruption of business.

That's right.

So yeah, stuff like that. And it's like in every part of the business you have these things set up and it's just a matter of like Protecting yourself, really.

Yeah, that's true. Well, and one of the complaints that we hear from folks a lot is I don't have time to document my business. I'm too busy running my business to document my business. And so one of the tricks that we do is we'll oftentimes sort of like use a systemologist. And that's not my phrase. That comes from the book Systemology and Dave Jennings out of Australia. Great book, great approach. But he'll use like, and we have adopted this, like a systemologist that'll just sort of watch what someone does. And kind of document, well, you, you do this, and, and here's sort of the key success criteria for it. You do this and you do this, and then give that back to them and then just have them edit it. So in a really short amount of time, you can document a process for someone without having to interrupt them, and then they can, in a really short period of time, look at that documentation and tweak it a little bit. And then now you've got a process that you can run with.

Right.

That, that really sort of makes it a lot faster.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's something that I actually had to outsource as well because I was so busy running my business, multiple businesses at that point. So I literally just hired consultants to come in and just like shadow me. I'm like, I don't even know what I do. Like, can you just figure it out?

Right.

You know, and like document everything that I do and what can be delegated and stuff like that. And then it like, it clicked finally. I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. So yeah, so we actually offer that service now for people too. It's funny, like you don't know what you don't know. It's like, that's right, you really just don't even see it until it's done for you and then you're like, oh, that makes sense.

Well, so I know you've had a lot of success working with companies, you know, kind of going from this great idea to that next stage. So maybe they're, you know, a few million in revenue, but they gotta get to that next stage. I'm curious, do you see like You know, some common trends or common themes of like, what are those big aha moments or some of those maybe blockers that exist or ways to unblock that? What are some of the sort of takeaways and lessons you've learned from your experience doing that with so many companies?

Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing is that these people, most of these people accidentally stumbled upon success. So it's like they came up with a product or service and it like accidentally took off and they weren't really expecting it. So they weren't building for success. They were just kind of seeing if it works. And that's kind of the root of the whole problem because then you have to kind of like backtrack and rebuild everything. And a lot of times they don't even have like a CRM, proper CRM that works for them. They don't have an ad strategy, like they don't know what the next step is. And then all of these, sometimes they have lifestyle creep as well, by the way.

Sure.

They start spending a lot of that money that they should be reinvesting. But if They have that money still, and they're reinvesting into the business. The best thing that they can reinvest in is building some structure around what they do. So a system, a team, beginning to delegate some of those things that are really moving the needle for them. But it's really tough when you're kind of in that range between three and five million because you need all the tools and systems and team that a ten million dollar business needs, but you're not there revenue-wise. So it's very hard to pay for those things. So you're kind of like. Penny pinching through that valley of death is what we call it, where most businesses die. And then if you manage to make it to $10 million in revenue, you're kind of like, you're, you're pretty good. Like, that's the point where you could potentially even hire a CEO to run the business for you so you don't have to. You have enough money to pay for all the tools and softwares and support that you need. And it just becomes a whole different ballgame. So for us, it's a matter of How do we get from here to $10 million as fast as possible? And so that is usually a focus on the things that are driving the most revenue while not outpacing our ability to fulfill, because if you scale it too fast and you're not able to fulfill, then the business still dies anyways. So it's kind of like a balance between those 2 things. And what I found is that a focus on the core offering of the business, whether it's a product or a service, really is instrumental at that time because if you start expanding into too many products, you know, you're doing like $3, $4 million, you're like, oh yeah, we should launch this and that and that. Like you start distracting yourself and you have all these additional expenses in different areas that really start adding up. So in my opinion, it's the best for the business to just focus on that one thing that's a revenue driver and find a way to sell more of that one thing. And so that's really what it comes down to. And I think that many businesses, if they just did that and they mastered that one thing, they could get to $10 million faster than they think. And then that's the time to expand.

That's super smart. So I think it's in Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm where he talks about, you know, that a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of businesses, especially in fast-moving innovative space, They, you know, they, they have an idea and they, they build against that and, and their idea people. And so they see another idea in another, you know, sort of adjacent space. They wanna move into that, or they see another niche that they wanna move into. And, and so they, they struggle to sort of lock themselves down. But he uses a really great criteria that, that I've deployed a lot, which is, you know, define your, your niche tightly enough that it is you know, big enough to support your business, but also pretty tight. And then you don't move out of providing sort of that product or solution or service to that niche until you're winning 80% of the deals in a year that come up for that niche and the way you've defined the market for your product. That's when you have the sort of permission that you've established your beachhead there and you can expand out into other what he calls like bowling pin strategy of, you know, next door niches or next door products or next door services so that you can really start to grow and expand without that distraction.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a, that's a great way to think about it because, you know, as long as you master that core offering, whatever it might be, then is the time to, because like your customers, they need other services. They're gonna go, if not to you, they're gonna go to somebody else to buy that exact thing. And if it's closely related to what you're doing, you have a ton of benefit with your existing team and your processes and maybe even like supply chain depending on what it is to be able to fulfill that in a much more affordable way than somebody who's just creating a company to do that one thing.

Yeah, that vertical integration really creates a lot of opportunity. So you talked about, you know, companies at this stage, you know, they're competing against the $10 million companies that have all the tools. But maybe they're a $5 million company, and so it's harder for them to afford all the tools. One of the things that, you know, is a big, you know, buzz in the, in the space right now is to use whether it's automation or artificial intelligence or some of these tools to sort of, you know, maximize efficiency and effectiveness. And I know you've spent some time working with companies about, you know, how do they attack AI, and I expect expect that automation is also part of that piece because those things are oftentimes conflated when they're really kind of separate things. But talk to us a little bit about how you guide companies through thinking about, man, should I be bringing in AI or automation? Or if so, how and where? And where are the opportunities that exist? Yeah.

So firstly, I think everybody should be using AI because right now we're in a very sensitive position with artificial intelligence. And what I mean by that is I think most companies who will not implement AI in some way within the next 3 to 5 years, they're just gonna be out of business. And if not within 3 to 5 years, then maybe 10 max, because it's not that they didn't implement AI, it's that their competitors did and they're gonna be able to do all of the same exact things at a much more affordable cost. And if it doesn't happen overnight, like those costs are just gonna be brought down so low for their competitors that they're They're basically just gonna squeeze them out of the market. And so—

I agree with you. I do wanna like get a little bit, get a little bit controversial. So the flip side to that argument is, yeah, but the quality will be so low that there will always be people who want the premium offering and are willing to pay a premium for it. And if I'm not using AI and my competitor is, Their quality is gonna be down and mine's gonna be higher. Let's talk about that viewpoint. How, what would your comeback be to that point of view? Yeah.

So, well, first of all, in theory, I agree with you because the idea is correct. I still think there's gonna be like a micro segment of the market that is gonna just want personal service. I know I would pay for it. So I understand that. But I think that it's a bit of a misconception that the quality would be down. For example, I have attorney clients, who basically the first draft of everything they're doing for you is now no longer done by somebody within the office. Yeah, it's not somebody spending 10 hours researching and doing all this. It's done in milliseconds using AI. So their cost there is down. Now, does an attorney still review it? Yes. So the quality control is still there. They're still reviewing and polishing up. So AI is not perfect. So you can't just like fully rely on AI. But if you're filling in the gaps on things that take a lot of time, or maybe are expensive to do and you can quickly make 80% of the progress, the other 20% can really be like mastered to polish that up. And quite frankly, nobody would even know it's AI because you have that final human touch done. So yeah, I mean, I think it could be both ways. I do think that there are gonna be some people, but they're really gonna have to offer like an exceptional level of service for somebody to wanna pay because It, I think pretty soon it's gonna be indistinguishable, first of all. But if somebody really, really wants to like come meet you in person or something, I guess it depends on something like that. Like for example, if I was gonna go buy a car, I wouldn't wanna buy it from AI. I would go buy it from a person that I trust and that I always buy my cars from. So stuff like that, I think there's, there's still gonna be opportunity for sure. But yeah, when it comes to implementation of AI, I think businesses, the biggest problem that I see is that businesses don't even know where to start. They're like, whoa, where do I use it? Well, it kind of depends on your business. So there's a few criteria that we look at, but for the most part, I think the idea of AI being implemented into a business is, I think, a little bit misunderstood. We're not replacing entire departments. We're not like firing your whole sales team to just use AI. Like we're not firing your marketing department, we're supplementing. So what we do is kind of like an AI audit of a business and we look at all the things that they're doing well and then we find the little gaps where we're like, if we just plugged in this AI tool here, you could get this work done, you know, 20% faster or 30% faster, or it's gonna be less expensive. Or instead of having 10 marketing people create graphics for you, you could have AI do the work of 9 of them and then one person puts the final touches on it. So stuff like that is where we make the company more efficient. So we look at 3 things. Number one, increasing the efficiency and the revenue of that business. Secondly, reducing the expenses. And then thirdly, it has to focus on one of their core products. So if they're, you know, a furniture manufacturing company, we're not, we're not giving them AI that does something totally opposite like lawn care or something. So we want it to be focused on their core product, not a subcategory of something that they kind of offer sometimes. It has to be focused on their core offering because again, our goal is to get them to that $10, $15, $20 million mark as fast as possible. So we try to center everything around that. that core offering that they have. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of a misconception. And, you know, like I said, we're in a very sensitive time right now. We had all the pioneers in AI go. It's, you kind of have like this pocket of profitability in, I think, any new technology. So you have the pioneers, they go first, they usually lose money, they usually get hurt, they get it wrong, their stuff doesn't work. And then you have the early adopters who are like, oh, okay, their stuff is beginning to work. Now it's time to start using it because it's like 80-90% of the way there. And then you have the people like way at the back who aren't gonna use it for the next like 3 years and they're like, oh wait, maybe we should be using AI. So you don't wanna be the pioneer usually. You don't wanna be the trailer at the back. You kind of wanna be that early adopter where it's like, it's early enough to make a ton of money with this because not everybody's using it. But you also don't wanna like go too late because obviously the profits trail off.

So yeah, great insight, and thanks for letting me kind of throw you a curveball on that conversation. But totally agree with your answer there, and I love that sort of 3 criteria of increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, focusing on the core aspect of the business. Great way to think about it. And one of the things that, you know, we just always advise folks is it's not a silver bullet. There's not like some magical AI solution that's gonna change your business. And it comes back to the thing we were talking about earlier, which is you gotta build systems and then you can improve that system by maybe bringing in a new data source or bringing in a new technology. Maybe that technology is automation or AI or something along those lines. But it's building that system first and then you look for the places to plug in those tools.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So Tell us about something that's on the horizon for you that you're excited about. What are you working on today, Austin?

I've just been for the past few years just focused on consulting businesses. So usually I find an operator that I trust and a product that is of extremely high value. So our investment thesis, if you will, isn't super complicated. It's really 2 things, an operator that is competent and that I trust and a product that has a tremendous amount of value. And the problem is that usually these people don't have a ton of business experience and they don't have the systems in place and they don't know how to use AI and they don't know how to do all these things. But because I was forced to use them in my businesses, I've kind of had to learn them. And so now it's pretty easy for me to come into a business and be like, oh, like all you need is like this, this and that. And here are the people that I use for it. So I've kind of become like a business hub if you will, to connect people to people in my network and the vendors that I've used and the systems and the tools. And usually we build some custom stuff too. So that's been very, very exciting for me. So I see my next few years as continuing to focus on that and continuing to consult different businesses. And the more I do it, the more exciting it is for me because I'm not, I've kind of escaped that whole Like our business is so efficient that I do the exact same thing every day. Like it's always a new day, it's always a new business, it's always a new thing that I get to work on and help them get better. And so I think that the most exciting thing about this is I've done B2C businesses, I know what it's like, but I enjoy working B2B because that person has gone over that mindset hump where they've realized what it truly means to be an entrepreneur, how difficult it can be, And they've latched on to some sort of dream that they have. And if I can be a small part in helping them achieve that dream, that just is very fulfilling for me. So I enjoy that. Um, and I like that they're taking it seriously because it's literally their business. So it's like a sense of responsibility that they have. And I know that they're not here to mess around and waste my time or their time.

That's great. So for our audience that's been listening and really jiving with everything you were saying, and, you know, they're at this place where they've got the great idea, but they don't know how to get these systems in place. How can they get in touch with you, Austin?

Yeah, the best way is kind of probably social media. So my Instagram, it's @AustinZelan, A-U-S-T-I-N Z-E-L-A-N. I kind of use it as my digital business card. And yeah, that's the best way to see where I'm speaking and stuff like that.

Awesome. Well, Austin, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. I really enjoyed our conversation. I'm sure our audience got a lot out of it.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Alright, thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.