Navigating the Digital Transformation with Kieran Gilmurray

The key bit then becomes, okay, how do I position myself to use the technology to augment other skills that I have to allow me to continue to add value in the marketplace? Now that I'm free to do something else, what is it? There's something else that I can do that earns an economic return.

Hey everybody, this is Jeff Duden, CEO of Homefront Brands with the on the Homefront podcast again. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it counts. So if this sounds like you reach out to me, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. I will be looking for you here. And today we are very excited to have Kieran Gilmurray with us here today. And Kieran is a, he is a digital expert that's going to be speaking to us about that. He's a five time global award winner, 25 plus years of experience in intelligent automation, data analytics and social media. He also does executive coaching. He graduated from Queen's University of Belfast. He's got a master's in computer science and Business administration as well as two sons. And he has used digital technology, intelligent automation and data analytics, social media and robotics, process automation to transform businesses. And on his LinkedIn profile, he is the robot whisperer. So I welcome the Robo Whisperer with us today. Kieran, nice to have you on.

Excellent to be here. Excellent. Really looking forward to this.

Jeff, I'll tell you how I'd love to start and I'm fascinated because I've done obviously the research of you online, but would you just care to share your background and your story, Go back as far as you're comfortable, kind of tell us who you are.

Yeah, look, we're all products of our upbringing, aren't we? And I was brought up in a very small town in Northern Ireland. And that in itself, Jeff, leads you to very what I would describe as narrow perspective. You know, everything that's within 17 kilometers is the globe. And I don't know what it was inside me, but there was something that I wanted to travel and I wanted to get out of Northern Ireland, remember when I was growing up, so I've been on the planet 50 plus years. Northern Ireland wasn't the place that it Was today a lot of violence, a lot of bombs and everything else that was pushing me out, but also the wanderlust, the desire to see more in the world. This is almost pre Internet times, if anybody can remember those things. And my first taste of that was heading off on what we call a peace studies trip with a local school. Then studied in Manchester for three years, which, wow, opened up my eyes. And the school in this, the town I was brought up and had 15,000 people. Manchester, all of a sudden there was 30,000 students. What an eye opener. From that into teaching. Lived abroad, lived in Athens, lived in Hungary. Taught kids from all over the world. Some of the kids in the summer schools I taught, their pocket money was more than the entire wage bill of the kids there. But see, when you start to meet some kids that can speak five languages, have a worldview, and you're actually learning from people that are 6, 10, whatever, years younger than you, my goodness. Decided I better go back and get an education. Ended up in Queens, Belfast, doing my masters, got a master's and got a wife out of that one as well. My wife was on the same course. So I recommend going to Queens. We want one, both or the other. And then started out in my career doing computer science. It really started to take off, you know, 1990s onwards. And it offered it an option, Jeff, that I wouldn't have had other places when I was growing up. You were a doctor, you were a postman, you were whatever, you know, you had choices, but they weren't global like we have today. And all of a sudden I got into computers and then started to travel the world from my desk. Even at that stage with dial up modems and then the Internet and then all sorts. Did a whole host of things. Computer science, operations, data analytics. I ran toward the things that make me happy. And I say, we have a limited amount of time on this planet. You may as well do things that excite and delight you rather than sit there going through mishap after mishap. And over those years, what I learned is a very small but very simple lesson. And that was teaching myself that, you know, either I had a positive mindset or I didn't. And it was up to me to choose whether I looked forward or I looked backwards. I choose to look forward. I do not want to regret a day on this planet. Whatever time we've got, we're blessed. We've no choice. If I want something to happen, I will make it happen. If I sit there and complain and decide the world's horrible place, guess what? It will come true. And I say this to everyone. If you think you can, you can. If you think you can't believe it or not, you're also right. So here we are today. Having worked for people and made them hundreds of millions over the last couple of years, I decided, look, there has to be more than this. I have to run my own business. I have to do something that just brings me joy and see getting to meet folks across the globe, work with them everywhere from Romania to LA to Boston to San Francisco, down to Italy, across to Belgium. I have the time of my life just spending time talking, having fun, coaching, building digital solutions or whatever else. The world's a chocolate box and you can go in and pick what you want as long as you're willing to take that first step forward.

Man, there is, there is so many truth bombs in what you just said. I love and I dig the attitude so much. You can make anything you want out of yourself. You know, you can make a decision today, you can have the start of a different life tomorrow. And you just gotta realize that time is our most valuable asset. And we, it's, it's an exhaustible resource. Only have so much of it and anything you waste, I mean, if you waste today, you'll, you never get it back.

You, you will not. I heard a beautiful story this morning, Jeff, by the way, believe it, on Instagram. And the chap was sitting on screen going, if I gave you a million dollars, would you be happy? And the two guests would, of course I'd be happy. Said, if I gave you $10 million, would you be deliriously happy? Of course I'd be deliriously happy. And said, what if I gave you 10 million, but it was your last day on Earth, would you take it? And I went, no, of course I wouldn't. What would you do? I'd do this and this and this. And then he said, truce, bomb. Why don't you do that every day if your life's worth 10 million? Yeah, I love that. Loved it.

That's brilliant. You know, there's a real hot topic right now that I know that you are well positioned to talk about, and that is all of this AI coming into your space, everything that we do. Robotics. I'll tell you what, interestingly enough, you know, I'm in the franchise business and a lot of new and emerging concepts cross my path. From a franchise perspective. There is a Bobo Tea shop that is 100% robotics. There is a new market, like a small thousand square foot little convenience Store, you can make yourself salads and everything like that. That's got 200 cameras in it and it's 100% automated. So now you've got all of these commerce and these retail type things using AI, using the technology of the day, you know, really eliminating staff. I mean that's kind of what's behind it, is to give a more consistent experience and, and to do it at less cost over time. But as we talk about that, what are the impact areas that you see in your business? But why don't you tell us a little bit about your business today?

Yeah, look, my business is a consulting based business. So I do two, three different things. So one is getting companies brand awareness. So I do a lot of stuff around LinkedIn events, event hosting, advising companies how to set things up to get leads into the business. My second one's executive coaching because I love bringing people, bringing them on a journey, unblocking them from where they currently are. And largely this is the most wonderful thing. Very often it's not finance, it's not anything like that, it's not capability, it's just literally mindset as you mentioned a moment ago, Jeff, and to see someone come out of that, I can't do it too. I can do it from the world's a very small place to the world's the most open place. That brings me joy, helping business leaders and technology companies and executives teams do that. And as you mentioned, the third thing is around this digital, the world of digital transformation where everything's changing. You've mentioned a couple there, which is convenience stores changing. I see it all the time, I see it every place. What you would almost see and without exaggeration to a degree, 100 years ago, tractors took people off the fields and moved them into factories and moved them into towns. Now the great news is that again looked like lots and lots of people lost their jobs and they did and they had to reskill. But ultimately it created more jobs. Like the tractors required maintenance and mechanics and everything else and fuel and tire manufacturers and metal work and everything else. The brain power that was then freed from the field, that could go into factories and offices, created new careers and new ways of working and new growth. What you're now seeing with technologies like and you'll have seen chatgpt Bard. These are known as generative AI or large language models. In other words, huge amounts of data, trains and analytics that can do things that almost seem human. Like so if I type in and go look, pretend you're a McKinsey expert and what I want you to write is I want you to write me a business plan for a franchise that does A, B and C. But I want you to do it in a way that addresses this particular market. It'll go and do it. Now, to go out and pay McKinsey to do that same thing would cost you more than $10, let's just say, and that's an example, you want social media posts written, it can do it. You want graphics done, it'll do it. You want a business plan written, it will do it. Now when you start to look at all those things, you my goodness, what jobs cannot be impacted because years ago everybody seen in factories and shops, well, don't worry, I'm okay. I'm in an office, don't worry. I'm an architect or a consultant or a web designer or something else. Now you're starting to see AI and data analytics and automation really impacting the office environment. That's what I mean by tractors come in and move people off the field. Now you're about to see AI coming in and moving or removing people out of the office or removing large chunks of their role. The key bit then becomes, okay, how do I position myself to use the technology to augment other skills that I have to allow me to continue to add value in the marketplace or change roles where, yes, my current role has been impacted by AI, but now that I'm free to do something else, what is it? Something else that I can do that earns an economic return. But we are seeing massive impacts. And the odd part is everybody's got really excited because I described ChatGPT and Bard and all the others as an iPhone moment. In other words, these models have been around for years, as has phone technology, as has apps on a phone. You'll remember BlackBerry's whatever else. But what has happened is now, through a user interface, be that variable typed camera or image, it's now become accessible, much like the iPhone suddenly made everything accessible. And therefore now people are going, wow, this is so new and fresh. It's not at old, but now what we're going to see is the iPhone moment for automation in factories, in offices, in convenience stores and in offices. And darn, that's going to have an impact. It really, really well. And I don't think we're ready for it.

So I'm interested to know how you coaching your executive clients in this. So, and here's what I'm getting after. If we just say, well, we're going to let our marketing vendors and our other Vendors incorporate this technology and we're, you know, we're not going to do it ourselves. Well, then they're going to be getting a benefit, they're going to be getting an efficiency from using those tools and then they're going to sell us those services maybe at the same price they were selling them before. So is it incumbent upon us now to go a little bit deeper into our vendor chain and say, well, you know, we're paying somebody to do this. Every business has to really figure out where AI can impact its business because, or you're just going to be late to the game and you're going to be, you know, letting other people get the efficiencies and you know, your prices aren't going to come down or you're not going to get the full benefit. It's almost like you just gave everybody, every business owner and every business a toolkit that they can all actually really use without a whole lot of education or training you have.

And such a brilliant point, really well made. So you can do it for, use it for a couple of reasons. You know, one is, and yes, I always recommend you understand your supply chain and your value chain and every part of it, but ultimately, you know, a lot of people are paying for service. They don't think how it's been delivered. It's always interesting when you pull back the curtain that it's maybe not as handcrafted and bespoked that you, you thought this marketing artisan was actually delivering for you at the best, but those companies that embrace it, suddenly when you think about it, let's walk through an example to design a media campaign for you. I can get the machine to do it and I don't have to hire someone at an expensive wage to sit there and build out a particular marketing plan or even the content that I want that suddenly becomes SEO optimized, really rich. I can say, look, what I want you to do is pretend I'm a YouTuber. I've got a million of an audience and my audience is digital transformation. I want to speak directly to CFOs and CTOs and I want you to write me some content that's pretty clear that a 5 year old could understand it that's going to get me these particular clients. Before I would have had to hire marketing specialists with lots and lots of years to do that or a multitude. Now I just need one or two and they can augment their task and schedules to produce more of that at higher quality and get it out at more volume. So if I'M a really clever company actually. I might keep the same team that I've got. But now I'm going to your point. Go after other businesses with higher quality work at higher volume. I might be able to charge them slightly less than the competition, but my margin, your revenue will be through the roof. So what I'm sitting there is just as you're describing, you've come up with a example. But if you actually, you know, spend a little bit of time, LinkedIn, any other website, whatever, all of a sudden you can see a thousand one things. So let's walk through tonight. 20 years ago you and I would had a fly to be in the same place, get into a TV studio, get a sound engineer, a camera engineer, a producer, a production manager, whatever else to get this done. Now we produce this online, we'll video edit it, probably using a tool that probably cost about $20, $50 a month, that's got AI in it. It's probably got, you know, distracting sound in the background removal. It'll thank God. Just remember Jeff, just make me look prettier than current. It'll tart us up that nice little bit. And then you'll probably cut it up using other tooling that suddenly can add images and content all around of it, around it. And all of a sudden you're a content studio, you're a PR company, you're an ad agency all in the one thing. You put that into your system, you know, you can start to look at some of the digital and the analytics, you can start to get, you know, the chatgpt or Bard or whatever else to market that, to media, that to write the content that to publish that. You can get your accounts done. Your accounts can be quite clever and do forward forecasting and everything else. You know, I'm just giving small examples where automation come in to the building where all of a sudden I can augment that and then it can start to make recommendations around your franchise or business. Some of the clients you should be going after, the customer lifetime value of the clients that you got, the clients that you should be targeting, the bad debt clients that you should be avoiding. And for some that's going to be frightening because all of a sudden, wow, that that's all there. That's been there for years folks. It's just now to your point, Jeff suddenly becomes so highly usable that anybody can do it. But if I'm a company gain, I'm not going out for a rather expensive graduate. I can hire people with less skills, less training and less expense to do this and my more expensive staff who maybe have that, what I describe as finishing diem in place or ready to go, they can use the tools to suddenly create more value for more customers so that MrP suddenly looks like a very different value proposition. There's a thing that I say at the moment, Jeff, and I don't hope. I never wish for any company to go out of business because people are putting their heart and their soul and their money and their relatives money in it. We've all done that. But there is something called digital Darwinism happening beneath our feet at the moment. And if we don't embrace digital and we don't change a bit like the dinosaurs, we're going to be in trouble.

Digital Darwinism. I don't care about this podcast. This is a coaching session for me. I took so many nuggets from what you just said. I feel like I've been just one step ahead of natural selection my whole life. But digital Darwinism is, is a brilliant way to look at this. You know, I'm reviewing a business plan. I have a meeting in the morning with an executive and they're asking for seven additional headcount, you know, and 23 and probably another eight or 10 and 24. And it's a big part of our business. There's not one AI person on there, but I don't know that there is an AI person. So do we just hire the people that we hire and then we make them use these tools and figure it out, or are there is there AI people out there that already have a competency in these tools? Like how would you advise somebody like me to hire?

Yes, Mixture of two things. Depends how quick you want to go to market. Jeff, there are people out there that did data analytics and AI expertise. They growing over the last numbers of years. At one stage there wasn't very many in the market and therefore they could, they could charge a premium and like everything, I expect the same thing with chat, GPT and any of the other tools that are out there. It's the people who can write the prompts to these tools that suddenly makes sense. We'll be able to charge a large quantity of cash for the next period of time until all the YouTube videos and everything else comes out and then you quickly realize how easy they are to use. I adore these tools because of that iPhone moment. In other words, we used the example a moment ago of us creating this production. The amount of time, effort, money, people, equipment, whatever else that we would have had to use it for. Phenomenal Go on with a $20 tool and a $20 edited tool a month. The same thing is happening in every other part. Video production, audio production, business case production, financial forecasting, claims management, image recognition, conversational AI that you can suddenly train to answer questions using voice, using type, it doesn't matter what it is. 24, 7 the intelligence. Every time you ask it a question, it learns and it builds more intelligence. All that is suddenly becoming accessible at what I describe as a low code, no code moment. In other words, it's point, click, drag. Now you may need some sophisticated staff, in other words somebody really well trained to make it sing, but you and I don't need 50, 20, 30 year production engineers to create this. Nor will businesses need to have the same sort of talent to do so many things. So my one is look, I always recommend businesses do something which is understand the market that they're in through trial and error, very much into the agile methodology. Don't have to have perfect data, you got to try things, test constantly, see what the market will take. But part of your strategy has to be digital. I would always tie my digital strategy with my business strategy. And there's a bit of a chicken and an egg there, which is, well, here's the business that I'm in. Well darn, you need to have an AI offer a digital offering and that could be website, app, whatever else it is. You know, a value ladder where you start with maybe a book, a digital book and then you maybe do a hosted webinar where you offer more value, then you move through that value cycle. But your, your digital strategy should be connected to your business strategy. Anybody who's not delivering digitally, gosh, I, I don't know what you're at now. How do you bump start that? Well, hire the expertise, pay for it. You might as well spend 100,000 this year than waste 200,000 trying to work it out yourself. But if you build your people strategy with your digital strategy, with your business strategy, that triangle, then businesses should not be surprised by what's coming down the line. The best people strategy and notice I'm using the word people strategy, not ehr very much understand the business and have spent time understanding the market and are therefore positioning the staff that you require. Not just now, but 18 and 24 months down the line and they're working on a develop or hire strategy. The folks that have the competency and the skills, give them the training, create the career paths, they've got that intellect, they understand the market and the business, they're brilliant, SMEs now augment them with fantastic technology and data and analytics to allow them to craft solutions really quickly. To high. And you mentioned it a moment ago, Jeff, consistent quality. So the product of the service is coming out is just wonderful every single time. But at the same time, you know, also look at the skill gaps that you have. And let's be honest, not everybody can play a piano. I know I certainly can. So some people you might have to change in the business. That can be difficult. But we're here in business to successful businesses to pay people's mortgages, to allow us to grow wealth for everyone. And therefore your higher strategy has to be where's the gaps? And if you find gaps in the moment, go and hire that individual. If it cost you 100, 200,000 a year, trust me, you will get that money back multiple times over. Make the investment, make the decision. If you're not, your competition certainly is investing in all of this technology and getting the knowledge and then the benefit that you're not guessing. So dip your toe in water, dip your toe in fast.

So let me think this through as it comes to people strategy. So we do performance based interviewing. We look for skills, we try to get an indicator that this person is going to be able to have the specific outcome in the job. They've got the skills, they've got the experience, they understand it. We're going to have success. Now, I'm wondering about creativity, I'm wondering about curiosity, I'm wondering about maybe just raw intellect because with these tools, their ability to ask the right question becomes more important. Their ability to, to take it, to expand their thinking to the next level and to the next level and to say, well then what about this? Or I didn't get that query just right because it didn't come back. Exactly. But if I change it this way, I mean, you're really looking for people that want to think. There's people that want to do you need some of those people. And then there's people that really want to think creatively and, you know, have that growth mindset and they're just extremely curious and they get excited and you give those people a tool like this, I mean, they'll build you a kingdom.

100%. 100%. And that's what the tool is doing. A bit like the tractor, it's providing the grunt. Now the creativity comes up. I look at businesses in this way now and basically digital has made things go quicker. Our brains are quite linear. They're 100,000 years old, they ain't getting any better. Our brains are moving like that. What's happening is technology is driving at an accelerated rate. So then there's this gap in the middle. The only thing we can do in my mind is to close it using technology. So let it do the hard work. Augment brilliant individuals. So I now want creatives. I talk about something called fast it. Jeff. So if you're familiar with the fast fashion industry, what was built was I needed a particular amount of fashion. I knew I was only going to wear it for a small period of time. It served its purpose, it was fashionable for an amount of time. Technology and business is almost getting like that because it moves at such an accelerated pace, because the technology is moving at a pace and allowing businesses to move at a pace to find the niches, to move into markets at rapid pace, grab the profits and exit. Not that we're talking about using robotics and AI and generative AI and large language models to come in like fast fashion, but fast IT building solutions allowing us to extract value and then move on to the next market that does not require a fixed mindset with an individual who can do that today, tomorrow, 18 months time, 24 months time at 36 months time, that requires mindset agility. So to your description about the creatives. Yes, please look for that. Don't look for the robots, humans, in other words, the robots definitely in some individuals get the technology to do that, augment that with a genius creative and let the two of them work together to suddenly create a two plus two equals seven. No longer five because the AI is providing the five and the humans still the two, unfortunately.

What an incredible world you're painting. You're creating a world where negative progress is one of the biggest dissatisfiers in life. And you're describing a world in which somebody can come into work, use these tools and just, it's like, what's that game that the kids play where they build the blocks? Minecraft. That's it. You know, and now we're giving them these tools to where the progress that they could make on a daily basis is, is so much more than they could have before. And the satisfaction level is going to be higher for people that are just creating all of this, all of this great stuff so fast without having to say, well, I want to create this campaign now. I'm going to spend the next eight hours creating this campaign. You know, that's, that's a little bit slow, right? And you know, maybe it's done in 30 minutes or it's done in an hour and you've deployed it and you've got your first set of analytics and you're tweaking it and you know, describing that kind of work satisfaction utopia. How would you counterbalance that? And in terms of like, what are some of the unintended consequences that are going to come from this? Because anytime that there is a fast moving stream, there is always things in it. There's an eddy where sand gathers. Sometimes it creates a hole that you can fall into. I mean anytime that there's this type of dynamic change inside of a thing, there's, there's going to be consequences that maybe people didn't see. Do you see anything right now that, that people should be paying very close attention to?

You know, I do. I see a lot of it. And not unexpected Jeff as well, because a lot of these things you use the word unintentional now there's always people going to be using something for a nefarious purpose. It doesn't matter what it was horse 100 years ago, it was a gun designed to protect. It was, you know, a male message. Whatever it was, it's a telephone scam. So there's always someone that's going to use the technology for naughty stuff. And, and that's not the case of as you might see in some newspapers, that the Internet was invented and suddenly crime happened. No, there's, there's been something always. So things that can be used for greatness can also be used for, for not greatness, to put it a mad way. And I don't think the right people don't set out to do things wrong. But you have seen, and let's talk about for a moment ethics in AI. So let's take a very rudimentary example. Quite often based on historical, whatever recruitment methods, whoever went into technology tended to be male dominant. And what happened was they designed for example, at one stage HR systems that selected the best candidates based on a profile of answers, based on what they programmed into the system and what you know, you will code. And no criticism to them. This was their upbringing. They weren't aware of diversity, neurodiversity or anything else in the workplace that we're now learning. And therefore none of their models actually had that inbuilt. So guess what happened. Males who were programming computer systems to hire people that looked like them suddenly create the conditions where more males were hired and then females or they were suddenly discriminated from a workplace. Unintended bias, but we now know that. So that's countered if you look at some of the election scandals where folks have attempted to manipulate people's thinking. Well, that's been around for years, Deception's been around for decades. Now all of a sudden technology companies are starting to identify the patterns and the trends and these things happening, so they're fixing them. There is the challenge of suddenly believing everything that you see because it comes out of one of these models. But as someone wise once said, you're right, the computer can't be wrong, but the idiot who put the information into the computer can. And therefore what I recommend is get the technology, but at least understand how it was constructed. You don't need to understand the bits and bytes and look at the silicon and meet the data scientist. But I just say, look, great computer programs or applications should be designed with security by default so you're not exposing people's data or private information or whatever, credit card information to criminals. And they should be built with ethics by design, right from the very bottom. Thankfully, as an industry, the technology space is learning more. I still think there's a way to go. This should not put people off. The best technology is the best SME that you can possibly get and train and recruit and build into a, a wonderful entrepreneurial, spirited organization and the best technology to augment that individual. Those things together with an understanding of how it all works can make far better decisions than someone who is an either or. They've got a great SME or great tech, but not the combination. It's definitely a combination of both. So understand the tech, understand the market, bring the two things together with the data and the automation to augment and inform, then make the decision and you come up with a great point earlier on, you can suddenly do something and analyze the results within 30 minutes. That's so key in any role in any job plan. Do check, act, just keep that cycle and just keep a close eye on everything that's happening. You know, I love technology and what it can do. There are problems with it. Those should not put you off. It's all about understanding and constantly progressing whilst keeping an eye over your shoulder.

Absolutely. The point you made is that there's going to be people that are going to do nefarious things and that's going to accelerate because greed drives behavior and they're, you know, a lot of times the less than positively intentioned people are the ones that find tools and exploit those things. So. And then also too, I mean, I think you kind of implied that there's big things in society that can be impacted by sentiment. I mean, social media has the ability to influence sentiment and put you in an echo chamber of just what you've said, what you've showed them you want more of. So that's going to accelerate more. So it's going to be harder for us to get out of our own echo chambers and get maybe alternative views or unbiased stuff. So what you're saying is the toilet bowl of the Internet is going to be sucking us down even harder and faster and we are going to have to swim to get out of it. I mean, the waterfall is just going to be coming.

It literally, as you're describing, as a waterfall you can swim off. The good thing, though is, and again, it's use technology to counter technology, if that makes sense. Technology is making things faster. Fantastic. Why don't I get technology that will make me faster? Technology is creating an overwhelming amount of data. Fantastic. Why don't we get the technology to make sense of the data and provide me with direction and insight? You know, technology, as you mentioned it, for example, in social media, we're conscious that is trying to feed us stuff that keeps us on the platform to advertise us, advertise to us even more. So now we've got that level of consciousness, we can use technology for good. So the funny thing is, and I laugh at this, years ago, the first time Google Earth came out, we all looked in our own back garden. You know, there's my house when we. The ability to walk down the street in Cairo, where the pharaohs walked thousands of years ago, we could have visited the Parthenon that's on the mountain where gods were worshiped. But we look at our own back garden. I think the key thing is suddenly to recognize the things that could be used against us, but actually educate ourselves on those and then get out of our own toilet bowl, our own minds and like everything, you know, I am a massive fan of tech, but I'm also a massive fan of picking up a physical book, going to the beach and going for a walk and getting yourself out of this toilet bowl, because otherwise you would end up spinning. Your head will spin and you'll not be able to swim at all. You'll just drown underneath the sea of it.

Oh, yeah, I know. You've got two. How old are your kids?

One's 18, one's about to be 16. So they're in this world where everything's possible for them.

Yeah, I mean, I've got three children, they're a little bit older. We've been on these great vacations and I'm looking At the Ocean on a 10 mile bridge down in the Keys. And, and they're all looking at their phones and I'm just like, what's probably looking at the picture of an ocean, right? It's like, what are you, what are you doing? It's right there, but we get, we get trapped in it. Well, I tell you, this is just awesome. I would love to hear a little bit about your book. It's kind of got a Dr. Seuss title to it. It's the A A to Z of Organizational Digital Transformation. It's fascinating. If you, if you look through the table of contents, there is something that starts with. It is literally the A to Z of Organizational Digital Transportation. So why did you write the book? And it just came out recently, correct?

It did not that many months ago. I wrote the book out of desire and frustration. I need to explain both. I've always wanted to write a book and there's a book in everyone, there truly is. But I don't know if I had actually the belief in myself, Jeff, that do I have something actually valuable to say? And that took a while to get over that. And it was largely by writing on LinkedIn and constantly putting articles out and watching people's feedback that suddenly went, well, actually, I have got a perspective and everybody does. It just takes that moment for you to put it out there. It could be anything and everything. What you've got is valuable. That's the first thing. The second thing was frustration. I watched in my space, I describe it as not a nice Robin Hood. It was the one person who was in front of the person in front of the bear knew a little bit more than everyone else. But the amount that they were extracting from small business people was absolutely phenomenal. That's just not fair. So I thought, right, why don't I use the content I'd written on LinkedIn? Over 160, 70 articles. Why don't I use the connections that I've got? And like, as everything you know, your net worth is your network. I picked out 80 people at all levels of an organization and I started to write and I wrote to them and said, would you put in a piece of wisdom for free? It's kind of like crowdsourcing, the wisdom of the crowd. I make no money out of the book, by the way. The money that the book returns actually goes to charity, which is, that's my passion as well. But I thought, well, this isn't fair. Why don't I go out and get the best people that I know in my Network. Why don't I get them to contribute to the book and why don't I literally create the A to Z so that someone who is sitting there going, I don't understand what digital transformation is. Okay, D done. I don't understand what a robot or a digital worker is. Okay, there you go. I don't know what slack is. All of the terms that you will come across that you will need on a very practical, non theoretical basis. Too many theory books out there, but something highly practicable. You know that someone has been in your space before. It's probably cost them 10,000 hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make mistakes, to gain the knowledge, to suddenly have the wisdom. That wisdom is in this book. There are decades and decades and decades of some of the best people in the world and their knowledge sitting there available for whatever it is, $10 on Kindle. And now all of a sudden they're in front of the person who's in front of the bear chasing after them as well. And at a low cost, thank goodness. So now it's affordable for business folks who just need to know this area and everybody needs to know this area.

Well, I would agree. And in going through the book, I think you could use it as a very useful reference because you just have so much in here about all of these different things and you might, you could probably skip around. I do have a question about. I ignore your customers. Yeah, tell us, tell us about ignoring your customers.

Yeah, kind of a little bit. I think there's two things. One, never, never ignore your customers.

For all the customers on that. Not it's the other ones. It's not you, it's the other ones.

The other one is this here. Look. A lot of you call a customer and you ask, what do you think of this? And what do you think of that? A lot of business people make this mistake. What? I love it, I love it, I love it. Let me go and build it. And then they go to the customer and say, okay, I built all that. It's going to cost this. Oh well, I didn't realize it was going to cost money. So what I am alluding to is one, never ignore your customers in one half and then do ignore them. Go out and do your market research. A B as to what you were saying earlier on, if you're asking your customer question, the final question is what would you pay for it? And can you sign here to make an order? Because I've seen too many people building digital websites, digital products, building out things for customers that they swore they wanted. And then when it comes to actually signing that check, that check does not get signed.

Right. Where for our audience, could we go where you could use things that you've learned or maybe some people, customers or some of the executive coaching clients that you have. You know, we have entrepreneurs on here, so we have people that are inflection points.

They're.

They're holding no entrepreneurial cards right now. They're maybe in a job and they're, they're looking at giving it a go and they're trying to get sorted with this, with this risk versus reward, how they need to look at it. You know, how would you speak into their journey sitting where you are, looking back, how would you advise people to think about entrepreneurship and what it can do for their life?

Yeah, I think there's an entrepreneur. Anonymous. There's probably a couple of things I would say, look, if you're not certain about what you want to do, just don't suddenly quit the day job and then waking up on Monday morning and go, what will I do? Because you need an income. If you're in a job that's 40 hours, you have another 40, 50 hours a week, depending how much you want to put into this, to work out, you know, products and services and what people will pay for. And you might not even know that. And what you can do is just look at what you're good at. So I started out by doing writing and executive coaching and then building out products and sets there. The key bit, though, is folks tell people that you're actually doing it, because I see a lot of people starting out now. Where's my clients? Well, actually, have you told people that you do this or do they know you from your day job? Obviously don't impact your day job either on the basis that your employer will wonder why you're not there half the time. But just be willing to put in that effort. I gave myself a year, Jeff, whereas in my day job, and that couldn't be interrupted. That paid the bills, but it allowed me to experiment. So I started with coaching, I started with writing, I started with consultancy. The annoying thing is, or the glorious thing is that people want all of those things and everybody has got things that people want. They can turn it into monetization. You could do anything, you know, be a specialist car mechanic, know about physics, know about cooking, and that way there you can start to test where is the actual demand. The beautiful thing about technology and the Internet is before when you had a business, you might have needed a hundred clients. In your immediate 30 kilometer area. Now you can have a thousand clients spread across the globe, all paying you using online systems at very limited or no cost, selling 247 because the tech's there. So try varieties of things until you find something that a customer is willing to pay for or things and something that you adore because there's no point jumping in and getting money for something you hate. You'll end up resenting doing the work. Okay, so that now sounds easy. People go, okay, but what do I do? I bring through people through my coaching model who turn up and says, look, I don't know what I want to do, but I don't want to be doing this. What is it that I do? And I bring them through a method and model to narrow their thinking. So we start with five columns. Tell me what you like doing. Box number one. You know, I like doing computers. I like doing training. I like doing teaching, I like doing mechanics. Okay, tell me what you don't like doing. Okay, first two boxes, like dislike. Now tell me what you're good at. Because what you might be doing as a day job, what you're actually good at, could be two different things. I could be the world's best mechanic, the world's best wedding photographer, but that might not be my day job. Now tell me what you're not currently good at. And notice what I've said is not that you're not good at. What are you not currently good at? A couple of years ago I wasn't good at digital. So mental note, right? I need to go and pay for myself to go on the course because I own my own performance and I studied digital and I built out a website and I practiced my social media and I tried things. All of a sudden what I wasn't currently good at was something I was good at that translated into something that I really adored. Now tell me the type of market or industry you want to be in. So do you want to be in if you're a very detailed person, Maybe auditing, finance, accounting, financial services. And all of a sudden the big ocean has become a very small part of an ocean where you can fish. Now you've got that start to look at jobs and industries. I'm going to say jobs and industries is twofold. Don't go into a dying industry. I'm not suggesting for a moment that all of the travel industry is dying because you can have niche, all these bespoke, all these, you know, whatever, guided holidays, but there's very few high street chains sitting there. You Walk in and go through a magazine, you know, but go into an industry that's growing. So go to the job websites and the job pages and look at what's coming down the line. AI, data analytics, not stuff that can be easily replaced. And have a look at those industries. Then have a look at the jobs that are in those industries and start to match up the stuff that you like, you're good at, you want to be good at and the type of things where you know you've got the skills and now all of a sudden you've got an idea of where in demand, product or markets or roles or hiring or in industries that are going to grow and you've got a plan. Then though, in your day job, start to experiment by maybe a gaining some of those skills that you need in 18 months time to go for it, building out maybe your own website, your own social, getting your accountant in place, getting some of the invoicing and documents. All these things take forever to build up as assets start to build that business up. So all of a sudden your day job's your entire income. Now all of a sudden actually your own job's 20% of your day income. Your then job is 40% of your income, now it's up to 50. You've built up a bit of reserves and selling and if you're able to earn 50% of your day income by working part time in a job, imagine what it would be like if you had control over your own day and you put 100% of your effort into your own business doing something you're exceptionally good at the door and people are willing to pay you for. So narrow experiment, build and then gradually shift yourself over to be an entrepreneur. What's the worst thing that happens? It doesn't work out. My God. What you have learned is suddenly so valuable to yourself and your next. If you want to go back into employment, you've just learned to run a business.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely brilliant. One of the advices that I have for young people is in university, have a side hustle, laser print parts and sell them on Etsy, make T shirts, sell them somewhere, have a painting, a paintbrush and a pressure washer. You can make so much money, but what do you learn? You have to do the taxes, you got to do payroll, you got to do a little bit of marketing, you got to, you got to pick up the phone, you got to do sales. So you just get a spectrum of these skills and you can do it at the same time while you have A job, I tell you, franchising and what we're in, I mean, that's exactly the message that. That we have is some people are forced out of a job. Some people just want to go whole hog into something. What we do is we. We greatly reduce their risk. We reduce their time to first dollar. So, Kieran, this has been awesome. I have two pages of notes and those aren't questions for you, those are notes for me. So this has been absolutely br and so much fun. I thank you so much for doing it. I got just one more question for you. If you had one sentence to make an impact in someone's life, what would that be?

I'll end as I started, Jeff, which is, if you think you can, you will. And if you think you can't, you won't.

Beautiful. What's next for you? What can we be looking from you in the near future?

I'm going at 100 miles an hour because I'm having so much fun as an entrepreneur. And that's the bit that people don't tell you. When it's all about your thing and your passion and whatever else, every day is a joy. So my next book's coming out in June and middle of writing that which is around decision intelligence, using AI and machine learning and robotics and automation suddenly to help businesses, big, small, whatever businesses make better decisions to allow them to grow in their own way. Folks, I recommend that find something that's your passion. We get a limited time on this earth. I might as well run toward everything that makes me happy and avoid the stuff that doesn't make me happy. The alternative is I don't live the life on my terms and I don't live as rich a life and I'll sit at 70 years old if I even make it to that. Looking back, saying, what if I just had done life?

Well lived, my friend. It's brilliant. How can people reach you?

A couple of methods. Look, I'm on LinkedIn all the time. There's only two of me. One guy in Scotland who I did meet, we met saying, kieran Gilmurray, find me. I'm the one. Digital transformation. He's in finance. Or go to kierengilmurray.com, which is my website that talks about me and all the services that I offer, I will happily help folks. And if that template I described earlier on will help you, Jeff, your audience or whatever else, I'll pop that up online on LinkedIn, wherever it is, make that available for free. I always say, look, if you give, you will get. The world for me is about karma. There's enough there for everyone. If we all help each other that little tiny bit and everybody helps someone else, well, there's billions of it and it's going to make a difference.

There's always enough for good people doing the right things.

100%.

Thank you so much, Kieran, for investing the time with us today. And again, as always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs like Kieran and myself to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering AI infused, enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it counts. So if this sounds like you, reach out to me today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. Thank you.