Aaron Fletcher — A 3 Step Framework to Automate Everything

Welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your hosts, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to a new episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

So cheesy every time, man. Today we're here with Aaron Fletcher and he's our first of many guests. So, yeah, Aaron's another local dude from San Diego up in Encinitas. And it's always. It's always a good time hanging out with you, man. It's like a. You're smart as hell, but at the same time, you just got this comedic genius that just like. I don't know, it's just. You never know what's gonna come out of your mouth. So I honestly don't know what to expect with this, this whole podcast.

Neither do I. Is this rated G or.

Nah, bro, it's open. Whatever you want.

Yeah, man. So, yeah, so to preface everything.

Well, your big skill is growing an email list and kind of, you know, creating a nice online following that way. And let's just dive into.

Well, I think before the call, you said something about how you have processes to automate everything in life, didn't you?

Well, yeah, everything. Everything except for weight loss. Yeah. I mean, email lists and kind of automation, the front end of marketing is a core. But as you know, when you're an entrepreneur, you're busier than hell trying to really juggle too much between family and life and home. And the only thing I haven't been able to automate at this point is my fitness. You know, I'm trying to. I'm trying to, like, have midgets on the treadmill or something, but it's just not working out. Yeah, well, there is.

There is an automation tool for that. It's called a lap band.

That's true. That's your secret, Matt. Dang it.

No. I'm pretty fat right now. I'm not healthy at the moment.

Phat is good, man.

Yeah, he's on it. Well, yeah, so we were just talking about, kind of prior to the call, three of us were just chatting about how, you know, with these templates and processes, I mean, that's really what makes or breaks these, you know, our business and what can, like you said, balance with the family. I know you have kids of your own wife, you travel, so how do you do it, man?

Well, you know, there's. There's. As an entrepreneur, you're super busy, super crazy, and there's a three step kind of model I use that I apply to the three parts of your life, which if you think about it. It's your life, your personal life, your family, your business and your relationships. Right. So your life outside of business, things like you have to pay bills, you have to do chores, you have to go grocery shopping, you have your relationships with others, then you have your business. Well, I think, as you know, most of us get like Howard Hughes and we focus all of our energy on our business. And if you don't automate that, then you're not going to have time for your relationships, your health. And you've seen a lot of entrepreneurs start companies and then as soon as they get successful, they get divorced because they forgot about their family, you know?

Yeah. It's almost like someone is trying. You get too wrapped up in your business or whatever that drive is. Actually just wrote a blog post on this this morning. It's appreciating what you have now. But, yeah, system.

Yeah. And I'll tell you, if you guys want, I'll just tell you what the three. The three steps I apply are, and then I can go through an example for maybe a core business thing, give you guys a template or cheat sheet that people can use.

Yeah.

So it's. I use a KAD kind of acronym, and it stands for kill, automate, delegate. And it kind of comes a little bit from the lean startup or getting things done. And it's just my own system. I run this through a filter. So when I'm with my team, and it sounds really super geeky, but if I'm with my family and I'm looking at something that needs to be done, I'll ask myself, can I kill it, automate or dedicate. And I'm not talking about my kids.

Thank you.

Thanks for clarifying. Sure, sure. I mean, if you have three in the olden days, you keep the smartest one, right?

Yeah, that sounds about right.

So kill means a lot of times as entrepreneurs or even in the house, nobody stops or seldom stops and asks and says, hey, should I even be doing this in the first place? And, you know, for example, you know, as entrepreneurs, we collect all this stuff and we're always looking for the next bright, shiny thing. So, you know, most entrepreneurs you talk to, they'll say, yeah, I'm doing, you know, content marketing and some blogging and some Facebook ads, and I've got this, like, new tripwire thing I'm working on and I'm going to write a book. And you have to stop and say, well, wait a minute, you know, which one of those things isn't good enough to where you have to do More than one. You know, you always meet the entrepreneur that has, like, they'll tell you they're doing three different business models and you're. And you're just saying to yourself, yeah, dude, like, you're. You're probably broke.

Right.

And the reason for that is because it takes enough energy to figure out one thing. So kill is the first step. And it makes you. Makes you evaluate what you're doing and say, does, do I need to be doing this in the first place? Does it provide a measurable uptick or value to my business or my life? So, you know, like, why automate something or delegate something if you shouldn't be doing it in the first place? Does that make sense?

It's perfect. And I love how it's measurable as well.

Yeah. I feel like I've killed a lot of things over the last. Like, Joe and I both have killed a lot of things over the last couple months now.

It's true.

Yep. I've killed a lot of my hobbies and friendships. No, I'm just kidding. But. So that's the first thing. The second thing is then automate. So how do I use tools or systems or technology to replicate the outcome that normally I was doing or. Or another person was doing? And as you know, and I'm gonna walk you through kind of a framework maybe for, you know, that I've used in my business, but now it's crazy what you can automate. From your calendar to your sales to your lead gen, to your marketing to your fulfillment to your billing, to your collections. There's probably not a business process that you can't in part or in whole. Automate.

Right, Totally agreed.

And that's probably the focus of your podcast and the focus of a lot of the why you guys are successful. Cause you figured out, wow, this Internet marketing thing is really cool. And now we have ways to. Where we hardly have to do anything or talk to anybody if we do it right.

Totally. That's the goal.

Yeah. The goal is to never have any human interaction.

And then delegate. And I'm going to speak to that is that that's a form of automation. And you still have to be looking at leverage. But now this is really. This is a huge aha moment for me. And it was hard for my wife to buy into this, and it was hard for me to buy into it from a business perspective. And that is looking at the opportunity cost of doing anything. And what I mean by that is if somebody else did this, I would actually make money instead of lose money. So for example, I heard a episode of I Love Marketing. Geez. Three or four years ago, and Dean Jackson, he gave the scenario, he said, hey, you know, I wake up and there's a bottle of water that my assistant puts next to the bed. I go to the golf course. And while I'm at the golf course, somebody picks up my car and gets it detailed and maintenanced. And then by the time I'm done golfing, they bring back my car. And I was like, back then, I was like, dude, you must be super rich. How stupid is that? How lazy is that? Right?

But then I realized when I'm looking at my own life, things just need to happen. There's shopping, there's cleaning, there's daycare. There's all these different things that have to happen in life. And if you're doing a $10 an hour task and you automate that and you're worth $100 an hour, you just made $90 an hour by automating it, by giving it to someone else. Right.

You're in profit.

Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't. It doesn't. It's counterintuitive. If you have a scarcity mindset, you're thinking like, I'm a new entrepreneur, I need to save money. Save money. But if you're only able to focus on your business for three or four hours a day because you have all this other stuff, and not to mention within your business, which we'll talk about, that's the main framework I want to cover. But, you know, you have to put yourself in the right setting, in the right state to be able to perform. And I didn't want to do any of that stuff. I didn't want to. I felt like, hey, we're starting a new business. I can't hire house cleaner, I can't hire gardeners. I can't hire, you know, all these different tasks. And it goes without saying, if you're passionate about something, then do it. I mean, if you like brewing beer, if you love. You know, sometimes there's. It sounds really weird, but it's therapeutic to do something physical in life if you're always in front of the computer. So if I like gardening, I'm not gonna automate that because I'm getting an roi.

Yeah, it's that personal roi. It's that fulfillment.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

That's why I love to whittle, you know, little. And sell stuff at the flea market. And I'm just kidding.

I was like, is there a story that we don't know about Aaron. I like it.

Yeah. I mean, my ukulele lessons, I'm never gonna automate that because I love it. Yeah.

Oh, you play ukulele too? Oh, it's the funnest instrument. Sidetracked. Go ahead.

We should get the band back together. But, but so then now I look at, you know, within business and I. And if you look at the life cycle of your business, if you, if you've killed all the things you shouldn't be doing, you're focused on what you're good at, you're focused on what produces the best roi. You've automated with technology, which I can talk about the kind of a funnel framework for that. Then you've delegated, you've leveraged others. So here's a privileged example. In a business, there's, you know, if you look at the constraints that people have in their business, it's usually trading time for money in some sort of another. It's usually you got too many sales calls. And think about before the Internet, you're making outbound calls, you're bothering, you're bothering people, disrupting people, and maybe one out of a thousand will like return your call and you're spending, you know, so you go make. I remember like I would make 50 calls every day and I'd probably talk to six or seven people, maybe have one good prospect. So now with online marketing, you can get 100 or 1000 good prospects and you automate all that prospecting. Right, right, right. Well then, so finding leads. So I use the first step of any business is getting in front of the right people. So if you're business to consumer, you can do things like paid advertising, content marketing. But for B2C, which is my general focus, you know, coaches, consultants, agencies, I use tools like Zen Prospect or leadfuse and what those are, it's a tool where you can actually go and find people that are likely to be your customers and prospect to them in an ethical non spam way. You know, using email and you know, kind of filling the top of your funnel with people that are raising their hand.

That's pretty cool.

I like that. Yeah. Have you guys heard of Zen Prospect?

I've never heard of it, no.

No, neither have I.

It's pretty ninja. Like I listened to an interview with a guy that started Drip and then sold it to Clay Collins at LeadPages. Basically what they did is outbound email and they went after everyone that used a certain, certain tool like Infusionsoft or HubSpot and they said, Hey, I noticed you're using Infusionsoft. We created something that's easier to use and a little bit less expensive. If you wanna see a demo, let me know. And basically, you know, you can find people that use a certain technology. So I can go after everyone that uses Constant Contact or I can go after people that are on LinkedIn that say they're consultants and I can just say, hey, you know, very soft, not hardcore, but the point is I'm automating that conversation starter.

Love it. Yeah.

If I, and if I can't use a tool that does it, then, okay, I go to the delegate. I can automate human power. I can say, I'm gonna have a VA, go on LinkedIn and create connections with all the people that are influencers or potential clients and just say, hey, great to connect. Let me know if I could help you. And I could start conversations, you know, three or 400 of those a day instead of me sitting around trying to do that. Right.

And I love how you have, because Automate comes before delegate. So like you said, try to, try to pretty much cover your bases with software or some automation tool. If that doesn't work or doubled up with some delegation there.

Yeah. I would imagine in most scenarios it's going to be slightly cheaper to Automate than delegate.

Yeah. Let me put one warning or one cautionary kind of point there is that people sometimes get overzealous with that and they ruin. You have to use it kind of like hot sauce. You have to use it with restraint.

Don't say that to Joe.

I sweat every time. I just never know my limit. So teach me.

You have to delegate what happens after.

Got it. That's why Matt's here. Yeah.

So, yeah, Matt made up the mess. So people are trying to use automation tools for stuff like, you know, social media. Like they'll, they'll go and use, you know, whatever, Hootsuite, Edgar, whatever, and they'll. You'll have a post going out every hour that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't build a conversation. No one's answering the questions. So if you automate something that should be, that has valuable human interaction, you have to be careful with it. Right. Do it tastefully.

Now, when you do your outreach, sort of emails, are they automated emails or are you just getting contact details and they're actually personalized emails?

No, for the outbound, the first contact is a very soft automated email. It's a sequence. Zen Prospect is a tool that works really well for that where you can just say, hey, but it doesn't have sales copy, it's not pitchy, it's not spammy. A lot of people don't know that. B2C email doesn't fall under can spam if you do it in a compliant way. If you don't do bulk emails, if you do one off emails. Basically the software uses individualized emails, but it does automatically, if that makes sense.

That's nice. Basically what we're doing here is automation's getting the ball moving. Yeah. And then from there, either you or one of your team members are picking it up from there.

Yeah. I want to dive deeper into the delegate, but I'm actually really stuck on the Zen, the Prospector tool. I'm just curious how, how do they get that, that data? Do you even know?

Yeah, so. So if you listen to. I think it was a mixergy episode that you can maybe reference, actually. He probably makes people pay for it now. Bastard. Yeah, but, but it was the, the founder of Drip and he used a different tool called LeadFuse and basically.

It required two different tools. You had to go to something called Datanize and find. You can find users that use a certain software or technology. You can say, I want everyone that uses. Not everyone, but a large percentage of people that use something like Constant Contact or that are listed as consultants. But Zen Prospect does it all in one kind of app. And what they do is they just authenticate using LinkedIn and websites and other social sites and they kind of verify email addresses. Smart. This is crazy. I mean, I can look at the numbers, but I was getting a higher open rate than my normal opted in list.

People that know you, trust you and all that.

Yeah.

Well, you're probably grabbing emails that aren't people's, you know, opt in email, you know, preset designated folder. You know, everybody does that now. Right. They opt in with an email address that they know is going to be their sort of marketing email address that they only check once a week.

Yeah. So the numbers, the numbers we're seeing is like a 74% open rate and 8 to 10% response rate.

Wow.

And I don't get that with. You know, there's a lot of issues with some of the larger CRMs, Infusionsoft and some of the other ones is that so many people are on those servers that there's. I mean, I noticed recently that anyone with a Yahoo address, none of our emails get delivered to from infusionsoft because they're just like, no, this is generally bad stuff because you have so many marketers and spammers sending hundreds of thousands of emails a day.

I had the same thing. It was Yahoo and AOL email addresses, both of them with infusionsoft.

Well, AOL falls in the kill step. You don't want to talk to those people.

Aol. If you have an AOL email address, you're not worth marketing to.

Like GeoCities.

Oh my God. Yeah.

If you have an Angelfire.com email address, you're probably not worth talking to.

Yeah, so that's the old aol. I remember getting the disks in the mail for the new AOL and dialing it in with my modem. That was awesome.

Every month or so I still have people on my list that have uno.com emails.

My God.

So here's. I know you should be the one redirecting the conversation here, but I'll do it anyway.

Yeah, no, it's probably smart.

No, just kidding. So once you have somebody that you use automation for, how do I delegate? Well, if you start a conversation with a lead. For example, Facebook just launched a awesome new product called Messenger Ads, which I'm sure you've seen them.

And there's a tool called ManyChat that basically what you can do is you can advertise where instead of someone clicking on an ad, going to a landing page or a lead ad, it opens up a chat box in Facebook. Now how powerful is that? You could automate those first conversations. You can say, hey, I noticed you, you requested this. Just tell me about your business. Are you a blah, blah or blah? Well, guess what? Then if they respond with a certain keyword, you can automate that conversation. And what happens next? Well, then I want to delegate. You know, I made the mistake when I first launched, what, two and a half, three years ago, kind of a higher end consulting coaching offering. And at first I was like, this is going to be amazing because I filled my calendar with strategy calls with clients and started selling clients. And what I did is I killed the whole business.

Because I hated being on the phone. Like I would literally have 20 or 30 phone calls a week. Right. And I killed it because I hated that. Well, what should I have done? I shouldn't have killed it. I should have delegated it. I should have. I should have. Instead of. Sometimes we try to celebrate being Internet laptop entrepreneurs and we're kind of allergic to quote, unquote business practices like hiring a team. And what I should have done, which I'm doing now this year, is hiring a team of four salespeople. So I don't, I still don't have to be the one doing all those, those filtering or strategy calls. I can still delegate that. So I'm automating the lead gen and delegating the sales process, if that makes sense.

That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I mean, you got to keep the people business people focused. So delegate that and any kind of sales automate as much as possible.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, your, your job as an entrepreneur, once you have proof of concept, is to be managing metrics. And that should be it. You should be looking at numbers and moving levers. Whether it's team campaigns, you should be managing a performance. You know, that's why I loved about kind of being a VP of sales in my day job life was I didn't have to sell shit. I basically walked in the morning and there was a big whiteboard and said, okay, Johnny, you need to sell this much and Sarah, you need to sell this much. And I would check it at lunch and at the end of the day and give people a sandwich if they did it right.

And have you found that in terms of your, even the company as a whole, once you do that, everything just kind of gets a little bit more streamlined, a lot more focused, simpler at the end of the day?

Yeah. And you're really, you're applying that to your operations. The same thing, you know, kill automatedelegate. You're, you're looking at the efficiency of anything from, you know, ordering product to shipping to billing to AR to anything in between. You know, there's tools to automate accounting. There's, you know, you know, there's all kinds of, you know, what's the, There's a great tool price intelligently that automates your collection so you can recover old credit card billing. You know, samcart does that as well. Right. And then so you're getting clients, you're getting in the door, you're selling them well, then it's time to serve your clients. And here's where a lot of people still screw up. A lot of people are doing a good job automating things like ads, selling over a webinar on an automated webinar instead of live. But then you get all these customers and that's when you can leverage and automate that process, if not delegate it. What I mean by that is a lot of times you think you have to do one to one if you're doing coaching or consulting, but you can do one to many. You can actually sell to a group and deliver to a group and coach based on a group.

So would that be based on, say A group webinar or call monthly or whatever it is.

Yeah. There's a lot of times one of the fastest things, the worst and best problem you can have as a growing business that's reaching scale at a rapid rate. It's like, cool, now I'm so busy I can't take on new customers. My time, I'm saturated. And that's kind of a huge plateau. So if you step back and say, I don't need it, there's actually more benefit to the customer if I can communicate them as a group in a one to many either webinar format or in person meetings. And then they help each other get results as well.

Sure, that's exactly. Matt and I actually had just to put an example out there for you guys listening is that we debated about going the coaching route or going the newsletter route. And Matt brought up because my first indication was like, yeah, let's just do coaching. We could do it in a group setting, do it once a month, follow up, obviously personal.

If we need to, but other than that, we're cool. And then Matt's like, it's just, it's too much, you know, kind of hands on. It's not the automation. Whereas, you know, we move to this newsletter where we can still grab a bunch of people actually way more, and then basically systemize our content and then kind of set expectations of how we, how we communicate.

Yeah, yeah. So you're gonna. So you're not, you're not putting stamps in envelopes or you won't be. You're not, you're having guests and influencers write content. I saw some great guest content in your last newsletter.

Sure.

Which I'm obviously a subscriber and I love looking forward to the next issue, by the way.

Brad, thank you.

And you delegate. So you have, you know, you're delegating content. You had to kill a lot of things in the first place not to do. You're automating, you know, I'm sure you're automating a lot of the processes and distribution and billing and everything else. You're not, you're not, you know, punching in people's credit card numbers every month for the newsletter.

God, no, no, no, no.

I mean, that newsletter for the most part is, you know, we write it, but then everything other than us writing it is pretty much either automated or delegated.

Right. I had a CFO once and it's really relevant to this conversation is that he said, my job as a C level executive is to never do anything twice. And that in it. At first I didn't really understand. I was like 22, you know, and I was just a snot nosed kid and I was like, I was like, now it makes so much sense that if you latch yourself on, as soon as you latch yourself onto a reoccurring task, you're taking yourself out of the game in terms of strategy and speed of execution. You know, you're putting, you're putting just huge weights, ankle weights on yourself when you're trying to be agile as you can. So, you know, I only do the things that I really, really like that are recurring. Like, I love doing group coaching calls with my membership. Why? Because I'm on my toes. I'm learning something new. I'm helping people. I feel really good about it, I look forward to it and that, you know, maybe if I do that every two weeks, it makes me feel great. But I'm not going to be vacuuming, you know, I'm not going to be vacuuming my house every day or every week.

Right. So question. So for folks who might be. Because I struggled with this personally for a long time, that's why we were kind of joking before. But I'm like the hustle of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Matt's more the Flowchart. He's systems and all that stuff. And I'm like striving to be more like Matt. But obviously we need some hustle in this to balance and have the title of the show. But, but the idea is like if someone's struggling to like, if they're doing repetitive stuff, which I did for a long time, making animations for people taking calls like you were. How do they, what's, what's a way that someone can I guess, realize that they're doing that and then shift like, like, is there some strategy?

Yeah, great question Here. Here's what I want you to, I want those people to do, not you. But I know it's really you is, is just write down, forget about what you're doing that's recurring. The first thing you do is write down the top one to three things that are game changers that are gonna be catalysts for exponential growth if it's in your life or if it's your business. Like what, what are the things that really, really matter to you? Is it if the metric is like time spent with your kids or at business? If it's like number of new clients coming in. Right. So you have your core things that really matter. And unfortunately most of our time is spent not doing Those things either in personal or business, right? Does that make sense so far? And then I want you to have, so you have that list on the right. Just make a list. Business, personal, two columns. You know, what are the core things that really matter? It should be less than three. It should be or three or less. It should not be 10 things because you're not clear. You don't have a clear goal or compass in your life. You're just saying, I want to do this and I want to do karate and I want to like start a new business. I want to make beer. Like, yeah, but if you could just say, you know, hey, if I could fulfillment and happiness for me, personally and professionally, look like this. And then I want you on the other side of the paper or another sheet of paper, depending how large your handwriting font is.

Write down what you're doing. And I want you to break, I want you to look at, just chronicle your day from a business and personal perspective. Like, okay, I did this for this much time. Then I went to work and went to the gym for a while and then I created some content. I looked at my Facebook ads for an hour and a half, got frustrated, went and got a sandwich. And just write down all the things that you're doing and I want you to keep track of the time. Okay, So I spent 20 minutes on this, 30 minutes on that. Business and personal. Now I want you to think about what is the cost of those things so you can quantify that. If you simply divide your income by your time, everyone has an, a real kind of median hourly rate. It's not usually what we think it is because sometimes we work 24 hours. But even if you say you're awake for, you know, 16 hours, whatever, divide that non sleeping time by your income. So you're going to realize that if you took, you know, if you're spending four hours a week doing something that's costing you, you know, $250, that it's not supporting your goals, which is the third step. You take everything you're doing and how much time you're spending in the cost of it, and you map it over the things that really matter. I remember I was meeting with, with a board of investors at a startup in Silicon Valley and they were talking about their marketing goals and their product development goals, and then they talked about their kind of their revenue goals. And I was like, dude, the stuff you're spending your time on doesn't have, no, has no direct correlation with your revenue goals. In other words, like, we're going to do this huge new product. It's going to be awesome. People are going to go through this wizard and blah, blah, blah, and it's going to take like six months to build. And I was like, yeah, but that's not going to generate customers. So if I take the thing that really matters, like client acquisition or, you know, reaching 10,000 members in my membership, like, that's where I want to be. And if I have a number, a personal goal, you know, say I want to make $2 million next year and I want to have. I want to have, you know, 40% of my time to spend with my family. Right. That's my. Everything falls under. Everything else falls on those two things. Well, if I'm doing a bunch of crap that doesn't support those goals, guess what I'm gonna do? It goes back to the beginning of the conversation.

That's right.

Kill it, automate it, or delegate it.

Dude, that's awesome. And that pretty much just encompasses everything we just spoke about is that example right there. And that's something that I will listen back to this once we get it all edited. And I'm gonna exercise, you know, I'm gonna print off a little. Maybe we'll even include it for everyone here.

Yeah, well, we're just at about time right now, but we do want to keep chatting with you for a couple minutes and whatever we chat about after this, we'll kind of put in the members area for Evergreen Profit subscribers. But where can people go and find out more about you, learn more from you, and get an idea of what you're doing?

Yeah, the best place is to go to fletchermethod.com they can, you know, sign up for a workshop or any. There's a whole bunch of free content that they can sign up for and just kind of start to learn how to use these concepts and get a lot more leverage out of their business and their life.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for hanging out and joining us. Is there any sort of last minute questions, Joe, you wanted to ask?

I mean, that nailed it right there. Do you actually have a worksheet like what you just described, that exercise?

I can find one. Yeah. I have an older version I can update. I'm glad to give you guys a framework for the show notes if you guys want to.

That'd be super cool.

That'd be awesome. Yeah. And if you're an Evergreen profits subscriber, our last month's issue, the January issue, we actually had a worksheet that sort of helps you prioritize what you're working on in your business as well. Not quite from the same automate, delegate or kill standpoint that Aaron's talking about, but it's a lot of the same.

Kind of very similar. It's for goal setting, more or less for the year.

Yeah.

Yeah, Brad. Yeah. Thanks, Aaron.

No worries. My pleasure. I really appreciate what you guys are doing.

All right, man. Talk soon.

See ya. Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Now, if you don't know already, myself and my partner, Joe Fear, every single week we put together this killer weekly newsletter that's completely free. If you go to the Weekly Prophet.com you can get on this weekly newsletter. And what we do with this newsletter is we scour the Internet. We read every piece of content, listen to blog post, check out new software and tools, and we distill down the best of the best into a weekly newsletter and deliver it directly to your inbox every single week. So head over to theweeklyprofit.com and make sure you're signed up to receive that weekly newsletter. You're going to love it. Thanks so much again for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We'll see you in the next one.

Sam.