The Exit Engine Podcast Episode 40: Meet Reuben Shears

Welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast, episode 40. What was the thing about systems and the back office of stuff and that kind of thing that kind of started— that turned you on? What's the thing that gets you going in the morning like that?

Yeah, I mean, for me it's gonna be implementing simplicity into my service delivery, right? Because the amount of clients that I've worked with, you often find that some people aren't as technically skilled as others, and therefore I had to alter the service in that manner for it to be extremely easy for them to receive the deliverables of the service and work with me. So it's changing my mind, right? That's how I'd answer it, right?

Yeah, no, it's interesting because again, I think that where you are playing right now is a spot that we are coming across Like a lot in our—

in what we're—

okay. And so, you know, I think it's fascinating that this is all kind of like serendipity and all kind of coming together. And I think obviously the place we are in history, you know, where we are in the state of the internet, you know, social media, you know, all that stuff, right? Makes a huge difference because we've got so many different ways now of being able— of things that we have to track. Right? Things that we have to kind of put together, the ability for us to be able to put information together, right? To analyze it instantly, to kind of come up with insight, right? How do we drive our— how do we use these systems to drive our businesses, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so when we're trying to sell a business or when you've got a business that you're trying to grow in order to place it on a trajectory for exit, The systems become like one of the first things that we want to look at, right? Because what are systems bringing us? Efficiency, right? Being able to bring us insight potentially, right? Being able to help manage our time, right? And that kind of thing. And so I think one of the reasons that we're excited to have Ruben Shears on today, and just FYI, our guest today, welcome to the Welcome to the podcast, John. We're right in it right now. Here we go.

Yo, what's happening?

We're excited today because we got this Reuben Shears. And Reuben Shears has a company called Optimally. And Optimally does a lot of really cool kind of back office work, putting systems together, kind of putting together systems, you know, from disparate places, building automations and things like that that really help, especially online service-based businesses be able to actually scale, right?

And, and, and, and, you know, full disclosure, we are one of Ruben's partners, right? We are partnered with Ruben. He helps us, uh, be more efficient and, and connect the various systems that, you know, he's consulted on us with and working with him on, on going with certain, uh, systems because they are able to be connected with things like Zapier and those other things. So, so Ruben, I guess when you think of like process and, you know, do you, when you work with other clients, right? Because I know how you work with us. When you work with other clients, is it like a, is it to understand their process in order to align the systems or just, just can you walk us through like what your discovery calls look like or, or how you first start engaging with clients and customers?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's extremely important when working with someone new to be able to fundamentally understand what their problems actually are in their business, right? And being able to identify those pain points initially when I'm on a call with them is the thing that instigates what we actually talk about and what we decide to automate in the business. So for example, with you guys, right, it's simply a case of being able to track metrics and sales metrics and marketing metrics on the backend so that we know what decisions to make. Not only does it save you time, but it allows you to make informed decisions.

No question about it. I mean, it's helped tremendously. I mean, the ability to be— and again, an insight. And I think everything's moving fast, right? The reality is that, you know, the world moves a lot faster than it did even 20 years ago, right? Certainly faster than it did when John and I started working 30 years ago, right? Like, the ability to be able to, you know, we were talking about this this morning. When we used to do new business before and the whole thing, everything was about like reaching out to people or using There used to be this book called the Red Book, okay? And it was basically a book of all the advertising agencies in the country and all their clients. And they would do these updates like once a quarter or whatever about who was there, who was reviewing, and things like that. And so that's what you used as a new business development tool, right? Information that was like 3 months old at best, right?

Yeah.

And your ability to be able to go out and you had to talk to people and you had to up the phone and you— and most of the, you know, stuff came from referrals because that was the easiest way, you know, to make new business connections. Today, we've got a whole— we've got 70,000 different, you know, potential ways of being able to drive clients, right? We've got, we've got all kinds of things. We've got phone calls, we've got, we've got, you know, cold email. You've got AI out there doing content and stuff like that. What is the— what are you, what are you seeing right now in terms of the, the, the need for— the need for this stuff must be just going out of going gangbusters, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And it is. And the reason is basically exactly what you said, Jo, really. It's the fact that things move so fast now. You know, you've got all these pieces of data coming in so regularly about your sales and your marketing and delivery that you actually don't have time to manually track them because you'll just drown in the amount of things that you've got to track, right? So if you don't automate that sort of thing where you've got basically a robot doing it for you, then it's never going to get tracked at all. And there's a saying, what's tracked is improved. So you need to be tracking all your metrics. It allows you to make those decisions. So yeah, we've got quite a lot of demand for this sort of stuff and I'm happy that I'm in that niche because I can't be replaced. It's something that's fundamental to business.

No, it really is. And it's fundamental to growth. And I think that optimizing your growth and your ability to scale is the key, right? And so when you're a business starting out and That's going to be a different situation than when you're more of a more mature business that you've moved through things. It's much harder for older businesses to kind of re— you know, re— uh, you know, retrofit this stuff.

Yeah, re-engineer stuff, right? Because they have systems and tools that have been in place, and it's my sense of it is it's much easier from my corporate past when you have to replace a system. Yeah, you have to replace the system and all those things that are component parts, but man, it's like managing contracts and seeing all the different users when you have— I mean, I had a system that was— that we had to replace. It was a learning management system with 10,000 users. And it's like, man, to replace all those use cases for 10,000 users and all the wacky use cases you had no idea was going on, it must be— not to have a green field, but like when you're replacing stuff, Ruben, like how do you manage that sort of transition for the client? Or do you not— you're not usually doing that?

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, half of the process really is about mapping out what we actually need to do, right? So if they have, you know, 1,000 users on a certain software, then those things need to be planned on how you're going to transition them. Ideally, we want to work around what they've currently got and optimize it. That's the idea. But yeah, those changes, those changes can be complicated. I work with SMEs, so small and medium-sized enterprises, so it makes it a little bit easier. on that side of things because the teams that I work with might be anywhere between kind of 5 and 20 employees. That's what the systems are optimized for. So, so yeah.

And what do you, when you're, when you're doing those sort of, you know, adding those systems for people and configuring like a whole process or a whole set of systems, what's sort of the biggest challenge that you typically deal with or a few of the biggest challenges that you're, that you're encountering when working with your clients?

That's a good question. I think for my clients, it takes a little bit of time to get used to using AI so regularly and stuff like that. Once they get fully trained on it, and that's part of our process as well, allowing them and their team to actually learn the entire system themselves, and once they've got that, they're fine, right? But I think initially it's a bit of a shock to the system to fundamentally use AI in the business because you hear those buzzwords going around all the time, AI and automation, and you You literally hear it so often, but until you're fully, fully using it in the business, you don't really understand what it means to actually have it. And that's the change.

The ability to scale, right, is a— there's a point at which you have to have stuff in place in order to scale it, right? And so your process, I know, is again about mapping out what business processes we want to have and what we already, what's already existing and how we tie in and how we tie systems together and things like that to achieve the goals that we want to achieve. But the reality is also is that there are so many other things about the business that could hold you back in that way. What, what do you come across and how do you kind of handle, you know, the bottlenecks, the leaders that are too close to businesses, the, you know, all the things that kind of can affect the scale or the ability to scale?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, so from scaling my own business, right, I know, you know, a lot of the bottlenecks that are going to come along. So initially you're going to have marketing problems, then you're going to have sales problems, then you have delivery problems, right? The idea really is to be proactive rather than reactive, right? So don't, you know, build these systems after you've seen that problem occur, but try and predict which ones are going to happen. And that's what I've got very, very good at because, you know, most service-based businesses are exactly the same in the sense that they're going to experience the same problems. So I install those systems Just a little bit before they happen and then, you know, they can actually scale with no problem because it's, they like, for example, you, Joe, we've already got the CRM and the delivery systems ready to go so that, you know, when you, when we blast even more clients through the system, then, you know, you're not gonna have any problems. Scaling's gonna be a lot easier.

Yeah, exactly. So the reality is getting your backend, you know, you gotta get your, all that stuff ready so that scale can happen.

Preparation.

Yeah.

It's all about preparation, right?

It's like building a highway, right? So when you're building a highway, you don't wanna build the highway for, the 5 cars, the first 5 cars. You need to build the highway for the 100,000 cars that you anticipate will be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly.

Yeah. The, um, the— give us some background. I know that you kind of came a little bit from like the landing page kind of website design kind of area and stuff like that. Um, personally for you, and again, as a business owner yourself and everything else, what are the challenges that you, that you've had in scaling your own business?

I think there's a series of problems that you have when you start your own business, right? So when I had my, the web design element of the agency, the first thing, like I said, was not generating enough booked calls, right? So I had to come up with some system that's gonna be able to book me appointments and then get them. And then there came a point where I was booking, you know, 30, 35 calls a month. So for me at the age of what, 19, that was pretty good for me because, you know, Even if I had a close rate of 10% or something, I'd be making a lot of money. So that's what was happening. But the next problem I experienced and the natural one that you'd think would happen is that I was having all these calls, but not all of them were qualified, not all of them were showing up. And I wasn't very good at closing. I wasn't trained on sales, right? So I had these problems that I had to fix. So yeah, being able to optimize for show rates, so the amount of people that are gonna join your call is extremely important. You can do that through your funnel. That's the first thing I fixed. But really, my main next bottleneck was sales. So learning how to speak on a call, dig into the pain points of the ideal client persona, and actually convert that sale. So worked with a sales trainer, and he got me from a close rate of about 10% to about 30%, and that obviously tripled my business. All you've got to do is triple one metric in the business, whether that be book calls, sales, etc., and you literally will triple your entire business. And that's That's what happened overnight for me. So pretty good. So yeah, you just, you end up having bottlenecks like that would be marketing, sales, and then you have so many clients you don't know what to do. And then you have to build delivery systems to optimize for that and productize your service.

Right.

So it's identifying the bottlenecks/problems and then sort of discreetly and specifically working on that one problem, right? Sales, bringing in someone to help you and then solving that problem and moving on to the next.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because otherwise you put yourself in a position where you have to learn these things yourself, like over multiple years. And then, you know, you've wasted so much time that you could have just— the business could have been moving, but you were just— you had that ego where you didn't want to work with someone else that knew what they were doing. And then, yeah.

It's so funny that you learned that at— when you were very young, because it took me way longer than you to learn that message. Because I figured like, hey, like I could, you know, you know, to use an analogy in the kitchen, like when you screw up a recipe or screw up something, Yeah, you screwed up once, like, you hope that's not on Thanksgiving or a major holiday or something. Like, it's refreshing to hear that, you know, you go out and you find expert— you find subject matter experts who know something they can help you with. And I just, I wish I had learned that as early as you did, frankly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a key piece. I mean, it really is. And of course, look, as we said before, the world is a completely different place than when John and I were starting out too. Like, the reality is that technology alone, you know, I mean, obviously it's the biggest, biggest technological advances in human history have all happened really mostly in the last 50 years. So, you know, the idea of it's hard to keep up. And I think another thing that you rightly bring up with the idea is that the problem with the bottleneck, you being the bottleneck of learning this stuff as the owner, is that, or even anybody on your team, frankly, right?

Mm-hmm.

The fact that it's going to take a long time to get good at it.

Yeah.

Right? And, and in the meantime, the world is passing you by. Right? And, and not only that, but other things are happening. I mean, I get an AI newsletter every day. Okay? And every day, every day, every day, there are 40 new AI tools that are out there. So not that they're all good. I'm not making a judgment call on whether they're, you know, on whether they're good or not. I'm just judging it on the amount. Right? And so One of the things that's easy to happen, and I wonder what your opinion is on this, is that people tend to get themselves tied up in knots, right? And what I liked about your approach is that you, even with me, were like, dude, chill out, right? One step at a time, right? You got to do this first, and then you're going to do this, and then you're going to do this, right? And what I— John and I were also talking about this earlier today. One of the things that you said to me that I, I, I have to like think about and actually like purposely lean into is the notion that what you said was, don't worry about the, the, the pro— like the, don't worry about like the platform.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Worry right now about how you get people there.

And can you, can you explain, like, can you explain what you meant by that, Ruben? Because I know, I think I know what I know, or I think I know what I think it meant. But I want to hear from your perspective, like what did you mean when you told Jo that specific thing about don't worry about the platform, worry about gathering people to get people to hear?

Well, I guess you guys brought me in for optimization of revenue, right? To scale the business up. So if we're looking at the order of ways things should be done in that case, then we should be optimizing for people to come through the funnel and actually pay you, right? Rather than kind of optimizing the product. And I guess, I mean, a lot of people say it like a first-time entrepreneur focuses on product and a second time focuses on marketing. And that's the, I think that's the notion of it. So yeah, the reason behind it is just get things through the door because the more clients you have, the more you can kind of iterate your product and test it anyway because you've got more people using it. So you can make the product better that way rather than kind of just estimating what they might think the product is gonna be. Sure. So that's one point as well.

I think the fear for people, and again, for people like us of a certain age too, is that, you know, it is, it is, it is backwards to what we have been trained to do, right?

Yeah, yeah.

In the old days, when you were at a TV spot going out, you know, you know, whatever, and it was going to go, you know, when we were doing advertising, you know, I was at, you know, as a copywriter, and you're putting the ad together, the whole thing. But boy, you better make sure that everything that happened at the store and all that stuff was ready Because the idea was that you were going to get a shit ton of calls, right?

Um, the Field of Dreams thing, right? If you build it, they will come, right?

And you don't—

you've never seen this movie, Reuben, but there's a movie called Field of Dreams, and it's like they build this stadium in the middle of Iowa, and like, no, if you build it, they will come. People will come to see the stadium. And that's— that was our concern, right?

It's like, if you—

if you do this thing, if you advertise this product, you need to have it built fully functional because they will come.

Yeah.

And that's just a holdover from, you know, from the old days. But the key thing here is let the market tell you what they want, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it.

Yeah. I mean, the ability is drive people through and they will, believe it or not, when they are in pain, they will stick with— if you got something that they think that you can give them or help, whatever, they will stick with you for like a long time. They will give Exactly.

And in your case specifically, it's especially prominent because you guys are preparing companies to exit, right? So optimizing for that is like one of the most important things you can do. And yeah, it's a very long-term engagement with you guys because you are working with someone maybe 3 to 4 years before they even wanna exit.

Exactly. But I think the idea, but again, this is the fundamental shift and I think that the lesson here for everybody, especially if you have been doing this longer than a decade or so, Is to basically— is to know that, you know, look, you— there are things that, um, the world has changed, okay? And that the way that we get— we have the ability to test, optimize, and scale, okay? And that was hard to do. That took years and years and years and years to do 20, 30, 40 years ago, right?

Yeah.

Now, because of the technology, it can happen much faster, and you just have to change. The only thing that's stopping us from doing that is the mindset. Right? The ability to be able to put our, our, our, our, you know, not have it have the, you know, the product or the store or the whole thing be exactly ready or whatever, right? And in fact, to purposely not, right?

Yeah.

To allow the, the numbers of people, the sheer volume of— it's like what we, the— we used to, we used to do focus groups, right? We used to, in the old days, we used to go get a bunch of people and put it together and say, hey, what do you think about this? And they would have their meeting and whatever. And that was how you built a business. And again, you're still talking about the time, the time it took. This is like, get these people through here, understand what it is they want, and then build that and then give them the thing that they're doing. Plus they're feeding back on it and giving you stuff. They feel like they're part of it. Like there's a whole other kind of life inside of it, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's just a case of if you've got one person in your, say you run a coaching or consulting program, you've got one person in there and you're, you know, you've built this product that you think is perfect, but you've only got one person to give you feedback as opposed to having an imperfect product but having 100 people in your group, which one do you think is gonna perform better in the long run? It's pretty obvious. And that's the idea behind it. So yeah.

No. And again, we test, optimize, and scale, man. It's what we're saying to everybody with everything now, you know, because it really is. And I ran a marketing analytics company for a couple of years and, you know, I got that was the big thing there was, you know, we were, it was the kind of the beginning of like really being able to measure this stuff. And we were figuring out all kinds of ways, especially in an e-commerce situation of trying to figure out, you know, who's coming in and what do they do and how do we put messaging in front of them automatically, all that stuff, right? But the idea is that, again, because you can do that with Lenovo computers, because Lenovo computers website is getting millions of millions of visitors a day.

Right.

But when you're starting out and you're, uh, you know, you're, uh, like you said, you're a coaching company or whatever, you're like, well, you know, even your website's not getting a lot of traffic, right? You don't even have the ability to be able to get that. You might not even have enough new business calls at the beginning to really get any information out of it.

Yeah, right.

So the, the ability to be able to just put this stuff out there and to put more out than you even need, and more, like you said, the objective is To get more clients than you can handle.

Yeah, exactly. Because you can solve that problem as well. That's just the natural next step.

Yeah.

It's the next problem to solve.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

So, and Reuben, I wanna ask you a little bit about artificial intelligence, right? Because you mentioned it and then I think like everyone understands, you know, ChatGPT and not everybody, but many people are using ChatGPT to like do discrete things on their day, create a whatever, create a spreadsheet.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Create a, yeah.

a script or something like that, or start an email or anything of those things. But like, talk a little bit about how you're using artificial intelligence in, in building the systems and tools for your clients to, to really make it so that this is the way that they run their business and they manage the process of servicing clients.

Yeah, 100%. So there's 2 segments really that I would use AI. There's for me personally and how I use that in my own daily workflow, and then there's how we integrate into our clients' delivery systems, etc. So the first one in regards to how I use it, I build a lot of custom GPTs for me to use myself. So basically I build a GPT trained on my offer and all of the information of my own business, right? My ICP, my ideal client persona, you know, their pain points, what's my pricing model, what current stage am I at in business, where am I in my personal life as well. And I feed this all into the AI so it has so much context. Every single conversation that I start with it, so that I can just go to it when I wanna make a decision, for example, and just say, you know, what should I do here? And it would just tell me exactly what to do, right? And that's a much more optimized way of using GPTs, right? Because you get what— I can't speak. You get out what you put in. That's literally the idea of AI and prompt engineering. So that's how I use it myself. However, in client flows and stuff, it's a similar concept. We just look at their most time-consuming tasks in their client delivery process and look to optimize those with custom GPTs as well. So in my own process, there is a task mapping element to the process where we need to work out for the client, you know, what is their step-by-step delivery process. If I was to do that one-on-one with the client, it would take tens of hours because they know their business way more than me and there's no point transferring all that knowledge to me.

Sure.

So I built a bot that talks to my client for me back and forth and exports this file at the end of it. with all the tasks and they just send that over to me. So I just upload it into the system, plug it in, do automations, but it saves me a significant amount of time with that. So that's how I use it there. And there's many other ways that I probably can't think of off the top of my head, but—

But the end result of what you just said is you give that back to the client and that maps sort of the process that they have with what? So what is that? What is the chat or what is the bot doing for the client ultimately? Organizing their tasks, saying what's the most time-consuming, or all of the above?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's kind of, it's helping them map out an optimized delivery process with them kind of step by step and having a little conversation with them. And by the end of it, they'll have every single task that needs to happen all the way from onboarding to the final delivery of the product inside their team and, you know, individually so that they know what they need to work on. So a client comes in, they get onboarded, and this massive automation happens inside the system that's predefined because you only have to build it once. And all of those tasks relevant to that client are Assigned to the correct team member, assigned deadlines, et cetera. And that's the idea behind it. So that's the fundamentals of our delivery system and why it works so well, because it's a productized service at the end of the day.

Right.

One of the things that I like about what we've done too, and then one of the things that Ruben added into our thing was that now all these calls are obviously recorded, right? And so we're in a situation now where we use Fathom. There's hundreds of these things out there, but the idea that That you can actually take this phone call, take the transcript of the phone call, take the demeanor of the person on the phone call, take the, you know, the body language of the— I mean, the reality is that there's so much information now that I'm even— that we're even getting out of phone calls we have with people.

Mm-hmm.

To be able to take that stuff, put it in, in, into our system that then reveals the, you know, the highlights of what's going on, matches them up with other calls, and then says, this should be the system you follow. I mean, that was— that would take years and years and years, right, of people working together. And that was if the communication was right. Most, most of the time what you used to find was that there was one guy who was good at something, right? And, you know, and especially in the sales area or something like that, which is, which is gonna, you know, you had those rock star guys who were just so good at being able to get out there.

Yeah.

Right.

And who would use the CRM, who would put stuff into the CRM. We built the CRM at my, one of my old companies, and it was, I mean, frankly, I did some of the work, so I thought it was fantastic, but it was, it was a great system, but no one used it. So the system ultimately was terrible because—

Yeah.

It's like a hugely configured thing within Microsoft Dynamics that I thought was, that we thought were great for people who were sitting at a desk all day, but this was like free, like, smartphone really, like, adoption. So it was really hard to get people to come back to the office at 11 o'clock at night when they've been traveling and log all the calls with their— put all those client calls. So it just became useless.

Right.

That's it. And that's what's made— that's the big change in what we see now, right, is that it's a fundamental shift. And now you can get this stuff done in minutes and not years. And that is actually the difference. Like, it's not minutes versus hours. It's minutes versus, like, months.

Or never, really. Right?

Right. Yeah. Or never.

It's not even a question of, I mean, the timing is wonderful. Like, ChatGPT is amazing to the speed at which it's done, but also the capabilities. Like, none of those things ever would have been possible, like, even without the pandemic, right? If you think about what the pandemic did is, is it gave all, like, this what we're doing now. We're recording a podcast, but we have a video component too. And like, all this stuff before would be held in, in, in person a lot of times, right? We'd be doing a personal recording; we'd all be sitting in the same room. Now this is able to record all this, analyze it, give us a script, all those things that just wouldn't have been possible or wouldn't have been really feasible if we were all in the same room together.

So.

Yeah, no question about it. The whole thing is huge. What are the other, you know, kind of technology, the tools that you're seeing out there that you're finding to be like the most helpful in kind of putting these systems together?

I think on the marketing side, there's a lot of AI stuff coming out in terms of creating automated campaigns on LinkedIn, et cetera, stuff like that where you can even clone your voice, right? To send voice notes. And there's all sorts of stuff like that that's quite new and I think will be promising maybe in the next 6 months. But like you said, one of the best ones I think that we all use now is just being able to have every single call recorded, some summary notes, and being able to go to every single point in the video and chat to a bot that's trained on the context of the call is just extremely powerful. And then not only that, we have that automatically pulled into Notion, into a little database, so you can see all of the calls in one place and see the common trends amongst them. So in theory, if you wanted to build a really, really optimized sales system, then you could You know, mark the best calls that you had and have, you know, a new closer be trained on those and stuff like that. There's really no limit. So, yeah.

These are the 4 calls that resulted in sales and these are the common threads in those 4 calls.

Exactly.

The 2 things that were in all 4 calls across the system that had the client sign up. So.

100%. That's really powerful.

Look, the reality is that, again, we don't wanna turn this into a ChatGPT ad, but I mean, at the end of the day, you know, the AI in general and the whole thing has been incredibly helpful. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's stupidly helpful. And at the same time, I, you know, we, you find yourself starting to develop a relationship with it. Yeah, I mean, to a degree, right? When you use it every day the way that we do, and, and, and I use, and I literally use it for everything. I check myself. Do you ask its opinion?

Do you ask please, Joe? Do you use the word please?

I use please and thank you.

Yeah.

Say this is— I say you're amazing, you know. I say something like— I don't know, I don't know if it makes a difference or not, but they say it does. I don't know. But again, at the end of the day, it's about— it's, it's, it sounds like when you, when you really start to understand what it can do for you, okay? And even if it's helping you, or, you know, at the end of the day, that all it's doing is helping you organize thoughts you already have or whatever, okay? At the end of the day, your ability— it's not just about the thinking part, It's about then the doing part. And the, the, to be able to put those 2 things together, right, is what, is what's changed, actually what's changing the, the, the face of the entire world. Because I can give it an idea, I can, I can have it play around with that idea, I can say, have it take the 3 best things that came out of the last 4 posts or whatever, put it together, and then put it together. And then would you like me to write an article? Would you like me to— give you a new job? Would you like me to find you someone to marry? Like, whatever. I mean, at the end of the day, it's almost that— that's the— that's almost to that level, right?

Yeah.

There's no excuse for not using it. There's no excuse for not using it. I came— I had— I had— I did have a conversation with a marketing agency yesterday, new business call, and how terrible AI is and, you know, it's never good and the whole thing. I have to do all the writing because all the AI is terrible. And I'm just going, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. It's not terrible.

It's the—

Yeah, the thing with AI, like I said earlier, is that you get out what you put in. So it's all about prompt engineering. It's how much context you give it to be able to give it to get the right output. That's literally all it is because it's like a machine. So, and I think that any business, honestly, within maybe the next year or 2 that isn't really fundamentally using AI, not just on a surface level, but actually in their systems, is gonna left behind, to be honest.

And that's in their systems. Like, that is a key thing you just said. Yeah, good job.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's the— it's a perfect analogy for the internet, right? So when the internet came out, everyone thought, oh, they'd have an internet department. Like, every company is going to have an— I remember reading this article in probably 1995 and saying, like, every company is going to have an internet department. And a guy came on that knew a lot about the internet. He's like, no, I think it might have been Mark Cuban. He's like, absolutely not. Not— no, no company is going to have an internet department unless you're selling web domains. Every department in your company is going to use the internet to various stages and like to communicate to, you know—

Yeah, tool.

I remember doing like auctions and doing all sorts of things. Those companies were doing auctions at the beginning of the internet. It's like, wow, like this is wild. And it just— internet rippled through every business. And to your point, Ruben, Any company that's not using the internet now is dead. Like, they're no longer in, in business. You cannot do business in this world without having internet, without using the internet in some way, shape, or form. And I think what you're saying is artificial intelligence will be the same way.

Yeah, it is. It's literally the exact same level of inflection point. Like, it is, it's that monumental. So yeah.

Well, what have you learned? So what have you learned about, or, or not learned about, I guess we'll say that for later, but like the The things that are on the cutting edge, like, A, how do you stay on top of the cutting edge? And then what experimentation are you doing with either things in your business? Because I can imagine you change your business first and then change externally to how you serve customers, right?

That's true. Yeah. I think one of the things I'm doing right now, I can just give you an example of something I'm testing at the moment, is those GPCs I was talking about, making them a bit more public. So maybe use them as a lead magnet, et cetera. So all of my knowledge that I have on certain subjects, instead of reserving that kind of Not only for just my own content, but just for clients is actually compiling that into a GPT and using it as a lead magnet. So people can put their details in, put their name and their email in and get access to this GPT that I've built. And yeah, that's an example of like something that I'm hoping that is gonna be quite good because I don't think anyone's doing that right now and I think it's gonna be quite powerful. So we'll see how that goes. But yeah.

And then plug time, where if someone wanted to sort of play with that, is that externally available now or could someone go?

Yeah, very, very soon. So on my LinkedIn, so Reuben Shares, it will just be the link in my bio and you can just go there. But yeah, should be good. It's very, very almost done. So cool. Yeah.

Getting back to, again, you know, a lot of our clients obviously and our listeners here are people that are in, you know, are thinking about in that transition point, right? Where, or an inflection point, right? Where I can grow I can, as we say, there's a Clash song, right? Should I stay or should I go? And this, uh, the thing is, what we're saying is that should I, you know, should I sell or should I grow, right? Yeah, yeah, the idea about, about being at this crossroads and all that stuff, when the system thing becomes a big question there because—

Yeah, it does.

Right? Because one of the things that, that we're, we're, we're trying to figure out is that how can you grow efficiently and, and, and how can you accelerate that growth? Right? So, questions are often around time. They're often around energy levels of the owner and stuff like that in terms of their ability to be able to want to move forward or whatever. And often what it is that they just need to see a path, right? That's part of it. But that path will include, you know, again, this is some— the— if you've had a business for 10 years and you've neglected all this back office stuff, right now you're kind of in a little bit of a predicament. How do you handle clients that are in that stage in terms of like the— a lot of it is a kind of significant kind of like mindset shift for someone who's been doing this. Like it's an old dog and a new trick.

No, it is exactly. And that's actually why they get to that inflection point anyway when they're kind of deciding the crossroad really is how you said it is like when they have to decide to— well, they're just making a choice really. It's because they've been so used to being so integrated into the business personally that they really, they have a choice. So they literally either stay in there or they systemize, right? So you can either sell your business at the point where you're just kind of really bored of being in it like personally and you don't have any systems in place or you take it to the next level and you realize that that's through systems and that's the way to do it. You really have that choice. And I would say there's no limit to how far you can take it with systems. You can get yourself out of the business and you can just— You can scale the business so quickly. It's unbelievable. So yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of things right now, the whole thing, especially if you're a service business, right? Because I mean, I think again, whether you're a consultant again, and I think one of the things that we have found, we get a lot of questions about, or are people kind of investigating is, can I take this lifestyle business I have and can I now turn it into a larger, more scalable business that would be attractive to a buyer?

Right.

Right? Like, that's one of the things that starts to pop up.

Hmm.

I built this thing. It's pretty good. I pull a couple hundred grand out of it, you know, a year, and I have a good living, you know, but it's me and a bunch of people from another, you know, outsourced people from a bunch of, you know, from another country. How do I take that, right? And kind of get that to a level at which I blow it out. And one of the things that we've seen, you know, is actually taking the systems And using that as a platform to roll other companies onto, right, in a roll-up strategy. So one of the ways in which the systems can be used to grow at a stage like that, where you are 10, 15 years into it, and maybe you've got, again, some disparate systems and some things that you've added over time or whatever, but one of the biggest reasons I think that's out there To be able to say, hey, look, we, if you can take this system and really make this system something that provides real value to the, the business or to, and therefore, because it's a consulting business, to any business like it, like this.

Mm-hmm.

You now have the ability to be able to, to go out, get other, other businesses who are like you, roll them onto your platform. Buy them relatively inexpensively, keep the owner stays, and the owner does the job of the, again, the account executive or whatever they end up really kind of being while the systems take over a lot of the management work. And now you're in a situation where you've got something that is much more valuable and you have removed the, all the owners are kind of like removed. The owners are now like just kind of like employees, right? And now you've got an entire system that can actually be where you've taken 4 or 5 or 6 or 10 of these businesses and rolled them onto the system. So the system then becomes the backbone of the business and the backbone of the value of the business moving forward. Makes sense?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that, again, there's another thing to look at when it's like, well, I've already got systems and stuff here and whatever. That's great, but what can you do with those systems to move yourself forward in a growth way, right? That potentially— and that's, that's one strategy, is that it— so if you— the point is that you use someone like Ruben, you grow these systems, you get these systems intact, and now what you're able to do basically is like, is roll other people onto those systems, right? The system becomes the, the, the, the, the system becomes the kind of the product in a way.

Yeah, the platform that you're attracting other people to. Yeah, it makes sense.

Exactly.

And Ruben, what about the learning? Like, right, so I can imagine, again, you're doing testing, you're doing experimentation. What's either the, like, the most surprising thing you've learned or something you've learned that you think that you wanna share with people that is either interesting, surprising, something like that?

I think when you come into business and you're, you know, doing all these different things, whether it be marketing, sales, et cetera, you may think that if you do a certain thing, it will generate a good result. You may just think that in your head, right? Like you think you have an idea of what's gonna work, right?

Sure.

But the main thing that's always stumped me and I finally kind of learned to just accept is that you don't make decisions off kind of what you think is gonna work. You only make decisions off data and the numbers. So for example, I'll give you like a tangible example. I would build like a beautiful website that is really, really nice looking, et cetera. And I would get the data of kind of conversion on those pages. And then on the contrary, I'd build a very, very, very simple funnel that kind of you would describe as looking a little bit crap really, for lack of better words. And that's the thing that converts better. And it's like, I don't like the fact that that's the case, but I just accept it because it's like—

Right.

You've just, that's just what you've got to deal with. And that's one thing in business that I've learned is it's like you don't always know best and you just trust the numbers and nothing else. Just make decisions off Metrics. And that loops perfectly back into why systems are like the main thing to have, is that if you don't have the metrics, you don't make decisions. So get the metrics so you can make them. It's simple.

Yeah, it goes back to—

it goes back to your— you'd much rather have 100 people looking at an imperfect product than looking at a perfect one, right? And also, when is a product really perfect, right?

It never is.

Yeah, it never is.

Work's never really done, right?

You're always doing it. It's always It's always there when you come in in the morning.

So, right, exactly. Yeah.

Interesting.

Um, let's talk about, like, uh, again, like, relationships, um, in terms of, like, business stuff. And I think that one of the, one of the things that, that, that, uh, you know, attracted us, us to you and the whole thing is that you are, you are obviously much, you know, you, you favor the long-term relationship from the short-term kind of, like, you know, win.

Yeah, I do. Yeah, yeah, I do.

It's huge. What, what can you share with, with our audience about, about that kind of mentality and how important it is to kind of keep that into your— integrate that into your business overall?

Yeah. So there's 2 things really. One, I think having longer-term relationships with partners in business is always better anyway because you get used to each other, you know how to work together like we have. But the other reason is that if you build a business that's just completely reliant on payments that just come up front and then you deliver and then that's kind of it. And after 2 months they kind of leave, then you haven't really built a business that is actually ready long-term anyway. You need a sustainable business in the sense that you're gonna get payments regularly, right? So that's why also it's better to have long-term relationships. Those are 2 reasons.

Yeah, I think that you're right. I mean, I think one of the things too is that people can see is that this is what we're telling people now all the time, especially when you're in this growth mode is Start to look how you productize what you're offering, right? And then use the systems to create that kind of productized environment. Yeah. And subscription models, anything you can do to have recurring revenue on a regular basis and all that stuff are things that are going to help your value and your salability and make you attractive to other people. But they're also just good ways of doing the business now, right? Regardless when you're—

Yeah, it's best practice. Exactly. Yeah.

Reuben, so awesome to have you here. I know you got to jump for something else. I want to thank you so much for jumping on here today and talking with us. We've been talking with Reuben Shears. Reuben, shout out and let everybody know where they can find you.

Just Reuben Shears on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever else you want to see it. And then if you want to go to my website, it's optimally.ltd, but that'll also be on those socials as well. But yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. I've enjoyed it. It's been a good chat about AI. Systemization, productization, all that stuff. So yeah, we'll talk again soon.

Absolutely. Thanks, Roo. Appreciate your time, man.

Cheers, guys.

Cheers. This is what is amazing about the systems, John, is that the idea that right now the stuff that we can do that we couldn't, that you had to spend, I mean, we were building website businesses back in the early 2000s, the whole thing. And these systems cost hundreds of thousands Well, yeah, and like, we—

when I got to one of my companies, my old jobs in 2012, they said that the guy— I remember in the initial meeting, he's like, oh, we have something called an API. And honestly, I had heard of APIs before, but I had no idea. It was kind of like, you know, Kuala Lumpur. Like, I knew it existed, and I knew it was in like a country far, far away, but I knew nothing about it. And that was like an API. And when I understood what an API could do, an application programming interface, and the way that it could basically unbundle the functionality of a product and provide that functionality to another product.

Yeah.

And as an example, we had a lead management system and we could feed the leads into a CRM system of anyone's choice. And really, it was one-to-many, right? Like, we had this system that That as long as a developer or a team of agents wanted to pay for the cost it took to program the API, we could give them an API key and they could pull all their leads in. And that was like a revelation to us to say, like, A, this is an incredible technology, and B, like, it doesn't cost me anything, right?

Right.

Like, I built the technology, we built the technology, we built the software developer kit and give it to everyone else and they could do whatever they want. And it tied them to our product because they had configured something to it. So there's all sorts of benefits. And I remember explaining to our CEO that, like, why we should do this. And he looked at me and he was like, yeah, we should totally do this. Like, meaning give it out to as many people as possible to tie them long-term to, A, the franchise, and B, the product that the franchise was providing to them. So it was just amazing.

No, and again, I think, look, that basic premise, right, is really the key to, in a lot of ways, to kind of sustainable growth. The ability to be able to, and just in general, the ability for people to be able to identify those hooks, right? Like an API. It's like, it's a matter of what's the thing that I can give you on a repeatable basis, right? What's the thing that I can— and by the way, it's not just me giving it to you, right? It's like, again, it's about How come I, how can I systematize delivering this stuff to you on a regular basis?

I was just going to say the word systematize, right? The, the, the things you're doing manually, right? Should, you should really be documenting what you're doing in your business every day on like manual stuff that you're doing. And that should be systematized. If you're doing that in service of delivering your service or product to your client, really think about using AI and other technologies to deliver that. Like an example, like, right, onboarding. Right? We had an onboarding system at my old company that was sort of automatic, but now with all these systems and tools, it's like, no, when someone finishes X, they can get Y in their inbox. And then when they finish Y and they need to do Z, then all these things can be delivered to them just in time when they're doing it. And these tools like Zapier and all these other integration tools can bounce things between different databases. And I'm describing it wrong and very poorly. But like, there's all these ways to, again, as Jo said, systematize a process to take you out of it because A, you've got other things to do, and B, it's really not a higher-order task. It's automating manual tasks to a degree.

And even if there's like, there are things too where it's a matter of just, you know, you don't have to have the whole thing end-to-end happen without you looking at it, right? If you've got like a fear about, oh my God, look, look. Not everything that ChatGPT writes in the whole thing is exactly the way you want it. Okay? I won't call it wrong. I will call it an interpretation. But the reality is that, again, it may not be what you want, exactly what you want it to be in your mind. So, you know, you can— the system then, the design has the stuff developed in ChatGPT, puts them into a file that alerts you the file is there, and that you go and you look through the stuff that it wrote. And then you can say, hey, this one's good. Move it, move it to the next file, move it to the upload file.

Post it, post this on LinkedIn. Exactly.

Post it and push the, you know, basically, so you, so you're in there monitoring it, push the button, right? But that's a heck of a lot easier than doing the entire thing end to end, end to end, right? And writing, coming up with the stuff and writing the thing and putting them all out and putting it in a format and then showing it and getting an approval, whatever you've got. There are devices now, marketing thing, where you can have it be sent and looked at by 6 people in a row and get managers to sign off on it and people to, until it gets to the CEO. I mean, all of this stuff, using things like Notion, all kinds of tools out there will allow you to do it. It's crazy what's happening. And I think that what I love about what Ruben's doing, and I think, again, what's so important for our audience to know is you need to be taking advantage of this stuff now in order to be able to do a bit to create the efficiencies that the new buyer is going to want to see. Because the new buyer knows this stuff is out there. They're going to— they're— when they're examining your business, they're going to look at it and go, where are your systems, right? They're going to say, how do you do this? Wow, it's a big manual process. Now, they're going to be businesses, they're going to be acquirers out there, they're going to be perfect. We've got a system, right? And we just roll you onto stuff, onto—

Right.

That's fine. But if you're looking for growth yourself and then potentially looking to acquire yourself and looking to optimize your value and saleability of your company in that way and accelerate that growth over time, then the systems thing is a must-do. It's just, there's no way around it. And you're gonna lose, not only you're gonna lose value and saleability, but you're gonna potentially lose your business by not being able to actually have this stuff in place.

Yeah. And the way I've said this before, but in the way that I think about businesses and when we go into them or when you're starting them is like, there's 3 basic components, right? It's It's the people you have, it's the products or services you sell, and it's the process you have to bridge the gap between those 2 things, right? The process is the thing that bridges the gap between your customers and your products and your products and your customers. And to the extent that you have that process written down, automatic, and you have people that are improving that through technology, through system enhancements, through a document that's written that you can— where you can skip Step 6 and combine step 5 and step 6 or wherever it lives, to the extent that you can have that automated or systematized, as Jo said earlier, like, man, you're ahead of the game because a lot of companies have really good products and really good people, but really terrible processes. And there's— I'm not going to name any, but you can think of those out there. And a lot of people are the exact opposite. They have wonderful systems, wonderful products, And bad people. You know, if you have—

Not the right people, right? Yeah. Right. And that's—

3, it's amazing. You have an amazing company.

That's exactly right. And that's a great, simple way to look at your own company right now. Is that right? Do you have one of the— are you missing, are you deficient in one of those 3 areas? Because that's the thing that's going to make it. And remember, look at yourself too, because again, you may be the deficient one. Right? And the idea— and again, not to not to make it negative, but the idea is that we all have strengths and weaknesses. And, you know, and your strengths and your weaknesses may be holding your company back. And as Ruben pointed out, you know, you want to make sure you get the help in there. Well, right.

The best question in business school that, you know, I'll save people a lot of money instead of going to business school. I paid for it. But the best question I got was, when there's a problem, How much of it is you? And if you think about that, you know, you think about the problem that you're— oh, there's a problem in my business. There's a problem with the product. There's a problem with this. Well, if you think— if it's a pie, right? Are you— and the problem's a pie. Are you 20% of the problem? Are you 30% of the problem? Are you 90% of the problem? Right. And you have to be honest with yourself when you say that. But when that— when the professor said that, it was like a light went off in my head and I was like, my gosh, like this. This takes some sort of self-awareness.

Oh yeah.

But it also is a great question to ask.

But I think what we find too is that the self-awareness of people is there, like, in a way, because they start talking to us. Like, they want to know. They've got questions. They want to know what they can do. Like, they are aware that there is something there. And again, sometimes they just don't know what it is. Like, but I think, again, it's an incredibly helpful thing just to point point out that, look, there, there are these 3, you know, it's like the 3 branches of government that are supposed to be kind of equal and, and helping each other, you know, whatever, which of course we're not seeing that happen right now.

We're not going to go into politics on this podcast.

Right. But the idea is that just in general, the idea is that you've got these 3 areas and they're supposed to be interoperable. And the more that they work together and, and all that stuff to inform each other, right, the better off they are.

It's a great analogy for business and the people, product, and process. Um, also what Ruben was talking about earlier, right? Ruben Ruben is an expert. I can attest to that. I respect him greatly and the way that he thinks about things and the way that he thinks about systematizing processes and tying things together, right? His ultimate goal in a lot of his engagements, in my sense, is to make things easier for every business owner that he works with. In essence, he's doing that. He's making things easier, more efficient.

And more efficient. And I think, again, the idea is that we can win more Okay, if we've got better information, if we are able to look at that information, I mean, the thing that stops people from doing stuff is human bandwidth. You know, that, that is that, that, that and the will, right? Or because I've got some kind of limiting belief about something. You know, that woman I talked to the other day, she's got this thing. She's like, I don't— I write better than ChatGPT. Okay, well, look, you probably do, right? But the question is whether or not that's an efficient way of doing something. Right. And whether you're holding on to some kind of belief you have about how it's supposed to work. Well, this doesn't really— this won't be effective if I didn't sweat and toil over it. Believe me, I've been there. I've been a copywriter. I have been there at 4 o'clock in the morning with nothing.

Well, think of how much gas you'd save if we all still rode horses, right? I mean, all the money that I spend on gas, there's always an upside. I'd replace that with hay and think of how much more money I would save if I did that. I mean, that's That's sort of the thing.

But I wouldn't get there, but it would take me 4 days to get to the corner store and I wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, that's the trade-off, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it is. But the idea is that we're living in a— the bottom line here, guys, is that we're living in an environment right now and living in a time where all this is possible, right? And if you are not taking advantage of these systems and you're not out there trying to find these efficiencies, then then selling your business is going to be much harder.

Yeah.

Just, and your ability to be able to take this seriously and be able to examine what is it that I can do, especially when you are already profitable. And I gotta point this out, you know, look, there's, it's one thing as a startup to come out and kind of like, again, we talked a lot today about testing and optimization because that happens a lot when you are new and you're learning how to do something and you're trying to figure out how can I have this business You know, and you're trying to learn from your customers and you want to build the— you don't want to build the tool until you want to build an iterator over time as you get information and hard data and stuff like that. That's all, you know, important and good. But I think that that's when you are an advanced business, right? The ability to put these systems into place becomes much harder because you've got legacy stuff, you've got process built in, in terms of just human interaction and what the human beings and the things do in their process. And you've got, and you've got probably clients and things are used to getting the thing a certain way and all that stuff. So change in that aspect is hard.

Yeah.

Right.

And if, again, and if you're, if you're thinking about contemplating making these changes, thinking about how you can use artificial intelligence in your business, reach out to Ruben Shears, S-H-E-A-R-S, on LinkedIn. If you have a question, we can certainly connect you to him. You can send us a note at info@myexitengine.com if you have questions about anything we've covered today in the podcast. If anything, if you want to think about selling your business, if you want to grow your business, that's one of the interesting things that our clients are coming to us with is, sure, we get a lot of our clients say, hey, I want to sell my business in 3 years. But oftentimes, and Jo's noticed this in some of his calls recently, is, man, Many companies who want to sell need to grow the business first. And, you know, if you're one of those businesses, if you're one of those people, get in touch, info@myexitengine.com. Uh, you can listen to the podcast, obviously you're listening to it, but, uh, that's podcast@myexitengine.com. Get in touch with us if you have any questions about anything with Ruben or anything we've spoken about that you want to talk further about.

Absolutely. And you'll find us all over LinkedIn. We're out, we're on there every day. We're answering people's questions. We're, you know, we're, we're up there. So the idea here is guys, the parting shot today is systems are everything in terms of, you know, creating these efficiencies in your business. And whether you're a young company or an old company, you need to be able to be taking advantage of this stuff. We're happy to help. We obviously are in touch with people all the time. We've got a huge network. Ruben is just one example of people that can help you in all these areas and achieve that kind of— help to achieve your increase of your value and saleability as a company, which is really what— And exit one day, exit the business on your own terms. And that's what this is all about, right? So thanks again for, uh, for being on the podcast, John. Thank you. Another, another great, uh, another great podcast, uh, episode. Um, we'll talk to you later. Thanks everybody, have a great day.

Thanks, Joe.