Optimize, Automate, Outsource and The Art of Less Doing with Ari Meisel, Nick Sonnenberg, Dean Jackson and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #269

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast, Everybody. It's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish, and.

We are here for a. This is going to be a really good. I love marketing episode because we've got a couple of great guests and the only way that this will not be an amazing episode is if our guests suck. Like, they're just no good. But I seriously doubt that's going to happen. We've got a couple of friends of both of ours. We got. Well, I don't know how big of friends you are with the second person, but we'll find this out, Dean, because I'm friends. So we've got Artie Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg, who have a company together called Doing and how you guys doing?

Doing great, Joe. I like how you frame the interview like an impact filter.

We're doing less. That's how we're doing.

Well, let me. This is going to be the only portion of this episode that I read anything, because if I don't read this, I might make fun of Ari, but I'm going to. So who is Ari Meisel? Okay, so his story starts in 2006, when some unexpected news derailed his booming real estate career. He had Crohn's disease, which is a highly debilitating digestive ail and Crohn's barred Arie from leading a normal life. So he lost weight, energy, and the ability to work regularly. In fact, there were times when he could only work for 60 minutes a day. And so, with a blossoming business to run, Ari knew an hour per day was basically unacceptable. So against the advice of doctors and loved ones, Ari embarked upon an extraordinarily painful journey to cure what medical textbooks consider an incurable disease. And through excruciating amounts of trial and error, Ari not only regained control of his life, but beat this seemingly unbeatable disease and is now symptom free. Less doing, more living, less doing assistance and less doing BPO are the result of Ari's amazing journey back to health, happiness, and well being. And we're going to talk about that stuff. Ari currently lives in New York City, where he spends every ounce of free time with his loving wife, Anna, and their four fantastic kids, Benjamin, Lucas, Sebastian, and little Chloe.

Nick Sonnenberg.

I'll ask you more about you in a minute here, Ari, so just hang tight. So I want to introduce Nick Sonnenberg. He's a serial entrepreneur with a passion for creating companies that positively disrupt the way people live. Nick is the Co founder of Less Doing and the CEO of Calvin App. Before making the jump to the startup technology space, Nick spent more than eight years on Wall street as a high frequency algorithmic trader. I have a hard time with that word. His personal mission is to help busy entrepreneurs and executives optimize their lives in meaningful ways and help them go from idea to execution in as few steps as possible. In addition to his professional interest, Nick is an avid chess player, traveler, and athlete. He was also the youngest ever to graduate from UC Berkeley with a Master's degree in financial engineering. So what did I not say about you guys that everybody needs to know before we get into this? Basically, meaning for people who may not be familiar with you, how do you describe what you do and your company and what your company does?

To put it like Noah's, briefly, I basically say that I help the overwhelmed become more effective. That's sort of what I go with most of the time. And that takes many different forms. So Less Doing originally started as a productivity methodology, and out of that grew a teaching method, a whole way of consulting to individuals mostly. And then when Nick and I partnered up and started the Less Doing Virtual assistants, which we're almost remiss to call it virtual assistants because they're at such a high level. They're more like project manager or even like a chief of staff. And that parlayed into us being able to do business consulting based on all that had been built through Less Doing. So we really helped the overwhelm become more effective.

Awesome.

Awesome.

This reminds me, I'm going to need to take out that Berkeley part from that bio because that's just embarrassing to put that in. But what was the question? Well, basically the only thing to add to that is Ari and I were friends for a long time and this whole virtual assistant business came out of a dinner conversation that we randomly had back last August. We can get more into that story, but this whole company that we've created really just came out of a challenge that we gave to ourselves. Could we do a better job than what's out there in the market? We put this company together in 48 hours with all free tools, zero money raised. I think that will be an interesting thing to discuss during this conversation.

Yeah, I'm going to ask Dean Jackson to frame this because everyone that listens to I love marketing obviously hears all these great ideas, suggestions, business advice, processes, methodology, systems, and then the big question is, well, you know, executing upon it, implementing it, and doing all that stuff. So, Dean, I want you to speak to that And I also want to mention, before we get into all of this, is that, you know, they. The company that they have now was actually. They outsourced the creation of an outsourcing company. That's how it kind of started. And this, I think, will give people that are listening a big paradigm shift. And if you love marketing and you're having challenges actually implementing it, this is why we're doing this particular episode. So, Dean, you recently did a podcast with our good friend Dan Sullivan, and you were talking about it, and I think it's perfect to kind of tell that story.

Dan Sullivan and I just recorded a podcast called the Joy of Procrastination. And one of the things we were talking about was how people just get overwhelmed with all of the options that we have right now. There's so many things. I mean, as entrepreneurs, we've got our big context of why we're doing something, and we're constantly looking. If we're saying on a marketing side, the question might be, well, how can I get more business? So we're looking and exposing ourselves by listening to a podcast like, I love marketing or going to conferences or, you know, exposing yourself to all sorts of possibilities or answers to the question, what can I do to get more business? You could run Facebook campaign. You could write a book. You could do AdWords. You could do all of those things. And once you know what it is that you want to do, this is where we find that people make the decision. It's going to either slow them down or amplify, you know, accelerate their progress. And the decision is they're going to either go down a path of looking for an answer to how do I do this? So they say, I want to run an AdWords campaign. So they have to go down the path of if they choose to kind of find out how to do it, that means they have to listen to, you know, training materials, or they have to find a coach to coach them through it. They have to learn how to do it before they ever get to the point where they can actually do it and get to done. And so all of that takes time, money, and resources. Now, the other choice that people have is instead of going down the side of asking, how do I do something? They can ask themselves the question, who can do that? And if they find the right who, they find somebody who can, who knows who can do something for them, they're done, basically, because the right who brings the how with them. And I think that this is where we're running into just this most amazing period in time right now, where we've got access to connectivity and resources and access to. Forget about artificial intelligence, talking about real intelligence, real people. You've got access to connected resources that we've never had access to before that make finding the right who easy. So if you take that path, this is exactly where a company like Less Doing could come in. So I'm excited about, you know, talking that through here. But even if you take something just like running a Facebook campaign, you know, if. If their is just one person that you could call, you could call Less Doing and say, hey, I'd like to run a Facebook campaign. Is that the kind of thing Ari and Nick that you guys would be the perfect who's for?

Yeah, so absolutely. Dean. I think that's a very good way of saying that you need the right tool for the job, basically. And the truth is that we're in. I think that we're in a state of our economy where execution is a commodity. And what I mean is that. Thank you. What I mean is that you can get a. If you have to screw a screw into the wall, you can get a screwdriver and you can use your hand and you can do it and take as long as that might take and maybe stub the wall a couple times or possibly hurt your wrist, or you can get an 18 volt cordless DeWalt screwdriver and get it done properly. They both accomplish the same result eventually. So that is the way that I see this Now. Execution is a commodity, but getting it done the right way, the best way, the most effective way, and thinking about it strategically so that the person issuing the task doesn't have to think about it again or worry about knowing what they don't know is where we differentiate ourselves.

You know, we've been talking about this whole idea of ideas versus execution is ideas are where the. In the end. I've been reading and listening a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning and the future of where things are going. And Ari just hit it on the head that execution of anything is really becoming a commodity. If there's any known thing that needs to be done, it's a commodity.

Yeah, exactly. And one thing, like, it's just our motto as a company, we want people to be able to do things that they either get pleasure out of doing or is using their unique ability. And if it's not, if they don't get pleasure or if it doesn't tap into their unique ability. For instance, Joe, your unique ability is you're a marketing genius. You are A thought leader, content creator. You setting up a Facebook ads account is not tapping into your unique ability, right? So something like that, you should find someone else to do it. And like, that's where we see our added value. We're allowing people to better leverage themselves by offloading stuff that they shouldn't be doing. And then in a lot of cases, we try to automate it for them too, so that they don't even have to keep paying for a virtual assistant to do things that it'll just be reoccurring automatically with zero error, zero risk of a mess up, infinitely scalable and you know, like a one time cost and then, you know, set it and forget it.

I think one thing that we're going to have to overcome that's kind of a limitation is that our entire frame of delegation is basically biased towards delegating things that are of lesser value than what we do. That we're so conditioned to say, well, we delegate the lower dollar value things. But I think that we're in a situation where your imagination can create an idea that you don't have any idea how to make happen and you can delegate up instead of delegating down. And that's really where if, you know, somebody like Less Doing is able to, you know, find the best people in certain categories to execute things, it's such a, a time savings, you know, it opens up a whole new world for us to really bring in things that we don't even know how to do.

Let me say this too before, because we're saying this term less doing. And you know, Ari wrote a book called Less Doing and a lot of people may not even understand, although we've talked about this company, Less Doing, and we're saying it as a phrase and they're thinking, is this a methodology? Is this a method?

And we've even had Ari on the. We've had Ari on the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Episode. Yeah, yeah.

So let me ask you guys first and then we'll get into some specific questions. What is less doing and how can it help, you know, make the people listening, the entrepreneurs lives easier and more effective? Like what? What is it?

Yeah. So it is a methodology. It's a completely, it's a completely unique methodology that I created originally, basically, as well, as you said, through my overcoming my struggle with Crohn's. And essentially the way that that happened was that I recognized pretty quickly that stress was a big component of that. And somehow I came up with the way to deal with the stress was to systematically create a Better way of time management. I believe, and I still believe that the antidote to stress is control. So less doing, the overarching framework is that I, I. And now we show people how to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in their lives and their businesses in order to be more effective. And the way that that took shape was in the form of nine different fundamentals to the system. Everything from how you brain dump and manage running errands or actually not running them, organization, customization, and even wellness. In the original book, which was called Less Doing, More Living, and the most recent book, which just came out a month ago, is called the Art of Less Doing. And it's a little bit more of a philosophical look at how we get in the right mindset to be productive. Because just as Dean said, a lot of people delegate incorrectly. And the reason that the methodology has you optimize, automate, outsource is because a lot of people try to outsource first. And the problem with that is that you don't make yourself go through the steps of making a problem more efficient. You're just putting it in somebody else's lap. And that usually makes it less efficient because it's just like sweeping the dart under the rug. It doesn't actually get rid of the problem, it just pushes it onto somebody else. And in a lot of cases, especially now, those problems don't need to be resolved by people. When I originally got into this kind of work, I used to say on stage that we can automate things now that six months ago a person had to do. And when I give those talks today, the phrase is we can automate things now that a month ago a person had to do. The rate that technology has changed is just astounding.

I think also historically, less doing was more geared towards personal. Like the first two books was more of a how, you know, how can you as a person reduce your stress, live a better life, get to inbox zero, you know, improve your life. And now what we're, I mean, that's still, that's still what less doing is about. But now what we're doing with the assistance and the new stuff that we're doing is really focusing it towards businesses. And how can we take these concepts and make businesses be more effective?

Where do entrepreneurs mess up the most when it comes to productivity? I mean, is this a mindset thing? Is this a skill thing? It seems that people do not seem to operate in ways that make their lives easier. There's all kinds of tools and tech. It's Funny, I look at all the apps that are designed to make our lives easier and add different options and stuff. And I think so much of how people operate, complexity is just getting more and more complex and more confusing and more overwhelming. And so where do people mess up?

Well, so a couple ways. One, I think the biggest thing is proper resource allocation, right? And that's your time where you're a resource. What should you be doing, what should your team be doing? And what's the best use to maximize the total allocation of resources within human capital, labor, or even the tools and services at your disposal? So that's where outsourcing, a lot of things that should be outsourced comes in in order to maximize your resource allocation. And then a common thing that we find within companies really like an overarching theme is people don't know how to communicate properly. And what I mean by that is they don't know how to use email properly to communicate externally with clients, and then they don't use. They don't know how to properly communicate internally. So for that, we recommend a tool called Slack. And then also another thing that people really struggle with is keeping track of projects and proper project management and knowing what your team is working on, prioritizing and keeping that in an organized fashion is really. Those are the two main things that we see. Breakdown.

I would also add to that that I think that a lot of entrepreneurs have a very hard time transferring their vision to someone else. I think it's really hard. And actually it's funny because Nick and I sometimes have that between us. And fortunately we have such a good level of trust that we can allow one another to just sort of go on a path and then we concede at the end. But there are times when I get on a project or Nick gets on a project, and the other one doesn't necessarily see the value or really how it'll work or what will happen. And we have a really good example of that with our internal dashboard. Fortunately, we have a very good partnership. But that's something that I see so often where an entrepreneur wants something, they can have a crystal clear idea of what it's supposed to be, and their team has no idea what they want to do. And then they get frustrated. They're like, that's not what I wanted. I wanted this. And then it's. And then everyone else is wrong because they had a vision. So it's. That's. That's a very common issue.

Also to add on that, another thing is you always, we hear a lot like, oh, well, only I can do this. And they don't realize that actually there's a million other people that can do it maybe even better than you. And you should be doing something else with your, with your time. Right. And even if they, in many, you know, in 99% of cases, even if it's true that they, that they can do it better if someone else can do it 90% as good as you, I mean, people don't, people don't understand that giving up a little bit sometimes overall can save you having a great.

Idea doesn't make you the best copywriter or the best graphic designer.

Right. You know, it's interesting because what you're describing there really fits with what I was saying about once people. The real superpower that if we're going to focus on anything, is to be really great at articulating what we want, to be able to define that. That's really the thing. How is there any tips to kind of simplify that, like to make it easier to, you know, communicate what you want or to document what you want or to, you know, note it? How do you help people go through that process to kind of describe what they want?

Yeah, so it's actually usually it's pretty easy because you can just talk to somebody and ask them about either the things that they do every day. So anything that's repeatable should be a process that can have some automation to it. Or you ask them about the things that just take them a lot of their time. And if they talk about scheduling or about team meetings or whatever it is, if there's something that comes to mind pretty quickly that's taking a lot of their time, and it doesn't seem like it's in line with what their, again, their unique ability is, then that's a pretty good place to start. But the other thing is that you'll have. And this is not just entrepreneurs, but we do see this a lot with entrepreneurs. They try to circumvent the system in a way. So instead of asking for what they actually want, they'll ask for what they think is the first step in getting to what they actually want. And I can give you an example of that, which was that a client of ours wanted us to tell them the best way to record a TV show. And so our assistants got to work on that and they gave him some options. And he got very frustrated and actually called me personally because it was a bunch of wasted time. And I was like, well, what are you trying to record? He said, well, I want to record this football game this weekend. I said, why didn't you ask for that? He said, well, I think I could ask for that. I was like, okay, well, ask for that. So he did. And then they recorded that. It still apparently wasn't what he wanted. And in the end, it turned out that his friend's daughter was singing the national anthem at this particular football game. And the VAs were able to spend three minutes and pull the YouTube clip of that person. So it's like that's what he actually wanted. But what he asked for was, how do I record a TV show? Yeah.

And that's. I think it's part of it is about not getting caught up in the process, but focused on the outcome, I guess. Right. Like, decide that's what a clearly defined. What is. Is the. The outcome like, beyond when it's done to be able to articulate kind of the. The finished product as opposed to, this is the path that I want you to take.

Right, exactly. And the thing is, is we rarely get somebody who says, I want to run a Facebook ads campaign. We'll get the person who says that I have this new product. What's the best way to market it? And then we back it into a sales funnel, and then we can drive traffic to that with Facebook ads. And so it really. The best times are when it starts with the outcome, the end goal, because then we're all striving for the win.

Fantastic. And that's really the skill of the future entrepreneur. I think the more that we really see, just like you said, how quickly things are happening, like a month ago, our capabilities today are even greater than they were a month ago. And we're really starting to grab, you know, tap into this of being able to imagine not just one person doing something, but an entire, like, you know, scalable group of people doing something. It's. It's amazing. Really.

Yeah. I mean, the workforce, like freelancers and the whole remote working is really where everything is going. So there's going to be more and more remote workers and need for virtual contractors or assistants to support all the ideas. I mean, there's never been a time in history where it's easier to start something. So there's more and more of a need for people to support all these ideas.

So. Great.

So you mentioned a couple of things let's talk about, because I want to jump back and forth from actual tools and how they work to actual mindset and philosophies, because I think both of these are important for people to feel most capable. What are Your favorite online tools and how do they basically work? I mean you mentioned Slack Trello, which you'll probably mention again. But let's talk about anything that are just the essential favorite tools of the less doing ninja.

Those are just necessity. You need those. And I would also add Inbox zero. Knowing how to properly use email effectively and getting to Inbox zero is also a necessity. Outside of that, depending on what business you're in, there's various tools. One of our main tools, two of our main tools that we're using right now that are becoming basically like it's almost become the center. Intercom is this tool Intercom and if you're not using it, we're going to have to show you this tool Joe, because I think you're going to fucking love it. But basically it allows you to chat with people when they come to your website and then automate marketing emails so leads can come in and then you can send automated marketing emails to these leads. You can set like timers on it. So you can send an email, we send a weekly newsletter and then whoever doesn't open it will automatically get it resent X days later. And then you can see profiles on people. I mean it's a really, really big software.

You can make it so that like if somebody visits, if the same person visits your pricing page five times or more, then you pop up with a chat box that offers them a discount because maybe they're just on the edge of that purchase or whatever it is like it's, it's mind blowing and it allows us to share essentially an inbox among our whole team. So we have eight of our team on there, which means that basically 24, 7 we'll have a one minute response to it because one of us will get it. And we have people in 11 time.

Zones and yeah like for support. It's like a shared inbox. So we have everyone in there and they can all respond. And one little trick that we do for all of those that have like two step authentication with like a text phone number, we've set that to a shared company phone number. So now rather than like for instance we use Stripe for payment processing. If someone wants to log into Stripe, they need to get a code that normally would be sent to your cell phone but now it's sent to a company, a company number that everyone that's in Intercom can access. So then we don't have, we're not, there's no bottlenecks. We're always trying to remove bottlenecks from a process so yeah, Intercom is the one outside of that. And then Chargify is another great tool that we're using for processing all the payments. And cool features with Chargify they have dunning, so if a credit card fails, it automatically tries to recharge on some frequency that you can set, you can upgrade, downgrade, create various products. And it has analytics.

That's great.

What would you add to that arsenal?

We also use Toggl for time tracking with all of our. So Toggle is a great tool. T O G G L. And I mean anybody, if you're a freelancer or you work for a company, you can use it. But it allows our assistance to log time to the second and it's specific to the task that they're working on. It's all automated. And then we can tag things so we know a breakdown of how many hours we're spending on copywriting for clients or graphic design or Facebook ads or whatever. And then internal versus external, it gives us really good numbers to go by. And also like for example, our record month last month we did 1500 hours of client work. So that's 1500 hours of work that our clients didn't have to have on their plates. And that's a really great metric for us. So we get that from Toggl, you.

Know, and obviously we use Dropbox and Evernote, but like I'm sure most people have heard of those. Another cool tool that we're using a lot is one called Chart Mogul which gives you deep analytics, which is a layer on top of Chargify so you can see your customer churn net, churn, gross churn graphs and every stat that you could possibly imagine on monthly reoccurring revenue and month over month how much you're growing. So Chart Mogul is a really cool one. Then we're actually building a tool that will come out in the next couple months which is a new project management software which is going to be a hybrid between Trello and Asana. So that will be like a less doing project management software which is going to be really cool.

Wow, that's awesome. So let me ask you guys a question. This is sort of a different topic. At what point does someone outsource or hire another company where it's like one individual versus there's multiple different individuals that can all tap into the account per se versus hiring someone in house? Like I have a COO, I have a CEO, I have various two assistants, I have 12 full time employees doing various stuff. I have dozens of different individuals and outsource companies, including less doing that I utilize. For instance, I'm paying someone to do a lot of all kinds of different aspects of Facebook ads to web design, you name it, in my company. And let's use an example of you're hiring a company to do web design and you've gotten to the point where you're paying them thousands of dollars and you're thinking, you know, we should just bring someone in house to do this. Someone that's right there that we can talk to. How do you make those decisions? And I don't just say this for myself, but for many people listening, I know they.

It's a good question. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, I go through this with genius network members when I'm like, oh, you know, you can get less doing to do this stuff. And they're like, well, you know, we.

Can do it for this.

But in this particular thing, we need someone in house, someone we can go talk to, the same person. I don't want to get ping ponged around the different individuals. This is so important that we have to have someone that owns it, you know, all of those sort of concerns. So I just want to get your guys thoughts on how that. It's more a question about how do you think about this and make decisions.

Well, I'll just say one piece, but I know Ari has more to say on this, but you have to be in the mindset of being able to hire remote workers these days. I mean, what are the odds that you're going to find the best web developer in that one city that you're living in? If you can remove that barrier that you have for yourself, you're opening up a whole world of people. You could hire an amazing person in Poland or in New York or Chicago or whatever. You just, you're limiting yourself so much by saying that the person has to physically be in the office. So yeah, that would be my main argument for it. Of course there are certain tasks that you need someone physically there. And we're not denying that, but it's.

Kind of a false sense of control, isn't it, Nick? I mean, it's kind of a false sense of control that if somebody's right there in the office, I feel like I'm more in control of it.

Yeah, before Nick, go on, let me just throw this and interject it too. I mean, being an entrepreneur is a lonely business for a lot of people. And I'll tell you, a lot of people, it's human companionship. I mean, it's a certain Level of feeling okay when you have other humans around. But I definitely agree with what you're saying, Nick. It's a great point. I mean, if you live in a small rural community and you want to run a very successful, savvy business and you're going to have a website. My most talented people. Not most, it's a mixture. I have amazing talented people that work directly in my office and many people listening to this. They don't have an office. They're all virtual. But one of the very best people that I have that works for me lives in another country. And this person is instrumental to my life and my business. And you know who I'm talking about there.

So, anyway, I totally agree with you on the psychology of it. So I would always recommend having a partner that you trust and really respect and can go through the ups and downs of the business with. You know, but for a lot of these specialist type of things like design or website development or sales funnels, like, you have to get comfortable outsourcing and using freelancers remotely, wouldn't you say?

Yeah. So another thing is, I always think about ramps. You know, ramps, they're like scallions. You ever had one?

What did you call it?

They're called ramps. Okay, so this is great. They're R A M P s. It's like a very large scallion. They're only in season, like three or four weeks a year. And at least in New York, every restaurant never heard of it. Okay. They're amazing. And no one has ever. They've never been able to be industrially cultivated. They're only able to be foraged in the wild. If you try to take them out and try to plant them and try to cultivate them, it doesn't work. So I always think about that when I'm thinking about freelancers. Because it's not only a matter of what Nick said is so important, valid. But the other thing is that if you do find somebody remotely or you do find somebody even who lives down the street from your office, they may not be as effective if you bring them into the office. The truth is that human beings, the way we are, and especially with so much information coming at us in all different forms, one of the effects of the. One of the side effects of the fact that we've evolved a little bit slower biologically than we have technologically, is that people tend to find some sort of comfort in some place. And that is where they do their best work, whether that's in a coffee shop with loud music playing on your headphones or in a library in complete silence. We need to be able to do the work where we can, when we can.

And also back to the tool you asked, what are the main tools? Video conferencing is a main tool that we use and we use zoom for video conferencing. So nowadays with such good technology on the video conferencing side, you can really, I mean, it's not the same as literally sitting right next to the person, but it feels a hell of a lot closer than it did before. And also with all the integrations with Slack, which we mentioned, you can just do literally forward slash zoom. And the next thing you know, you're video conferencing with Ari.

You know, it's interesting is we had a situation with our 90 minute book company that we were growing fast and hiring internally in layers. So, you know, that that process requires the functions of, you know, having somebody to work with people to create their outline, do their recording, create their content. Then we get those audios transcribed and that gets edited and then the book cover gets designed and then there's a layout process and putting it into production. And we were hiring, you know, new, duplicating each of those roles, but it was kind of a linear growth. And so what we ended up doing was making the editor one of the editors that we had, turning them into a managing editor and tasking them with finding 10 outsourced editors that we could send to on demand. So instantly it gave us just amazing depth on the things that are the most that capacity constrained. You know, the editing process and the layout process are the two things that really take the most time and create a. We're creating a bottleneck. If we got 10 books at one time with two editors that, you know, they would have to be fifth in line for each of those editors. But now with the outsourced editors, if it takes, you know, one unit of time for the book to go through the editing process, rather than having to wait those five units of time to get to that project, we're able to, you know, seamlessly put it through in the, in just the one unit at a time. And it's been. And we don't have the overhead of having a person on staff where we have to maintain capacity. It gives us flexible capacity for, for working. So I think if that's, if it's a task that is that you could do more of, it might be a good idea to have one person in house who manages that process and have them work with the outsourcers.

That's a perfect example of something that needs to be, that should be outsourced. And you could have just, you know, that's a perfect thing that you could give it just to us and say, hey, do the transcription. Or, you know, you give us the, you give us what you want, then you don't have to go through the hassle of trying to hire those outsourcers because we have, we have people on staff. So we would have just saved you that time of having to find someone. And we do similar stuff like podcast production and automation and transcription and intro natural music and all that.

I think I told Ari that was the thing, because this all happened, this was two years ago before, just before you guys started your process here. But that would have been the perfect answer.

Well, and also just so people aren't listening to this and thinking that their jobs are in jeopardy. A lot of times we do exactly that, Dean, where we end up supporting somebody's in house executive assistant. Because it's amazing how you'll find somebody who's really good at anticipating their boss's every move and knowing what they want to hear, when they want to hear it, but they're not good at booking travel. So basically we end up being a full resource for those people. Because one person doesn't know everything. I don't know everything. Nick doesn't know anything. But we have a team that does know everything.

Yeah.

So like it just helps to reduce the overwhelm if they have a million things to do and you know, you're, you're supporting some high profile boss, you know, they care more about speed and quality than anything else. So if all of a sudden you're an executive assistant that now has access to, you know, over a hundred virtual assistants at their disposal that are all high quality people now instead of them being an assistant, they're kind of like a project manager, managing.

I think that's the sense it's like giving them, having them have. Imagine like, I think that's the thing is imagine equipping your trusted personal assistant with just strapping on access to many more of them with any kind of capabilities. It's fascinating.

It's algorithm scaled.

That's exactly it. That is exactly right. But that was Ari and Ari's laughing. We had a conversation where I shared with him that I really discovered that what my unique ability is creating scale ready algorithms. And you know, that happened when I opened up my mind to the broader definition of algorithm as a recipe that delivers a predictable result, a step by step process instead of just thinking of it as a technical term, I used to always get, you know, comfort myself and say, well, I'm not a tech guy, so I never paid any attention to the word algorithm. But once you figure out how to do something and you document that process, that is an algorithm. And so the, the idea, you know, we talk about, I really firmly believe there's never been a better time to be strong on, on ideas and documenting those ideas into an algorithm that can be scaled. You know, that's what I'm trying to say. That is what you're trying to say.

So if someone were to make a list of like all kinds of different areas of life that they could, they could optimize, they could automate, they could outsource, how should they start making that list? I mean, how does the person start thinking about this? Because one of the things that, you know, I've encountered with. At the last year's Genius Network annual event, we did a half day bonus session with Ari and Nick. And this year we're doing a half day session with Damon John from Shark Tank. And I think you guys, I connected you with Damon, I believe he was on our podcast. No, no, but I mean in terms of Ari helping his whole team with optimizing and. Yeah, that sort of stuff. And so basically, you know, one of the things that, that I see is that, yeah, there's all these things that could be done, but people don't even know how to think about it. And they don't. And when you take them through this whole process, well, here's different things that you can do that you didn't even know that you couldn't do it. What I find is it's all the things that people don't know that they don't know where the gems are and where the opportunities are. So could you give some, you know, some advice for people listening? How do they start determining what they can free themselves up with, how their lives can become easier, how they can do less doing. I mean, what's, what's some approaches here.

Sure. So one of the easiest ways. So I'm, I'm very much anti to do list, like entirely anti to do list, which is a whole topic we could go into later. Or I mean, not later, but in another discussion probably. But most people, at least those who haven't met me or read my book, have a to do list. So take your to do list and consider it done. You know, it's like that kind of thing with us. At least with a lot of services you couldn't do that. But if you look at everything that's on your to do list, I guarantee you, I don't care who you are, listen to this podcast. I guarantee you we can deal with 90% of them right away. And that, that's a, that's a pretty easy one for most, most individuals and even, you know, people who are running a company. But then from a company side of it, you just have to look at the things that are happening more than once. It's that simple. If you do something daily, if you do something weekly, if you do something hourly, that's something that we can probably do for you or make it completely automated. And that could be anything. If you're having a staff meeting every week, we need to talk about it. Not that you shouldn't have one, but it's something that's recurring. There are things that are repetitive. There are efficiencies to be had. If you're doing a weekly sales report or a monthly webinar or a mastermind call with your masterminds, or you're doing events or you are doing payroll, I mean, any of these things that happen with some regularity, we can be involved. Not to say that we can't help the one off project either, but those are the most. That's the low hanging fruit.

Okay, so, okay, so for your anti to do list, you can do most of the things on the list. So where does someone start though? I would think it starts with a list. For instance, oh, I need to buy toilet paper. We need to bake cookies. I mean, there's all kinds of different things that people go about throughout their first off. I would never bake cookies. But Dean, you probably would, right? I mean, you're always talking about cookies and milking cows.

Dean's in real estate. Everyone knows that. That's how you sell a house. The smell of fresh baked cookies.

Well, you should know Dean has a whole marketing analogy. We've probably talked about 10 episodes about leaving cookies out for people and stuff. Versus would you like your cookie?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm not, you know, don't, don't miss misconstrue what I'm saying here. No, but things like, things like that, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that you. Most people wouldn't think, well, I can't outsource this. But you're like, well, as a matter of fact, you can outsource all of it or parts of it and anything that's reoccurring. So that makes sense. So if someone wanted to hire you guys. How do you start with them? I mean, what's the process?

Okay, so we have a pretty extensive onboarding process now. So when somebody goes to lessdoing.com and they sign up to use the VA service, and also we have less doing certified coaches, we have the consulting, we have a bunch of programs. But in a way, all roads lead to virtual assistants because at the end of the day, we want you offloading things and you want to be offloading things. So when somebody does become a VA client, we do a pretty long onboarding call with them and we get through the technical stuff about how to use the platform and the types of tasks that they need us to do really quickly. But then it really turns into like a coaching call. And we're trying to find out what are you doing every day? Like, what are the actions, what are the processes that you're going through? What is your business involve? Who do you need to deal with? What's your team like? It's a really good assessment. I'm really proud of that process because it means that we're getting not the really basic, and we can do all the basic tasks, but it's too easy for somebody to just say, oh, deal with my errands. But we can get. Just as Dean was saying, we can do the really high level stuff because people do still want to delegate the low level stuff. They want to get comfortable with it and ease their way into it. If you want to ease your way into outsourcing, ask somebody to make a dinner reservation for you. That's about as easy as it gets. But if you want to, then have a real impact on your time and your mind, that's when you start thinking, how do I give them the things that I think that I can't give them? And the other thing is that we love getting clients who are kind of like up to the challenge. And it's like, well, can you outsource me? And when we did that workshop at Genius Network, I guess I probably shouldn't say names, but somebody got up and she said that I can't outsource my writing because nobody can get my voice. And my response was, do you usually tell them to do it by writing it to them? And she said, yes. I said, well, that's probably part of the problem because maybe you should be using your voice to tell people how to write in your voice. And it was a big sort of like paradigm shift for her that she doesn't actually have to do a lot of her own writing. And there's ways to test it. And there was a whole lot of big discussion about that. But it doesn't matter how high level you get, there is a way. Now the only question at that point is if you do want to outsource it or not. Because people, people outsource being a parent, they have babysitters, people outsource having physical relationships. I mean we can't. You can outsource anything. Doesn't mean you want to, but you can.

There's a great. Did you guys listen to Tim Ferriss interview with. I think it's Michael o', Brien, the guy from Scorpion.

Yeah.

No. Okay. Did you listen to it? So Scorpion, there's a show on television right now called Scorpion based on this guy's life basically. But he's one of the people who has the highest IQ documented and he's got a collection of geniuses and they have a, you know, a high level like project firm and they're basic directive is any funded need. That's what they do. So any funded need meaning anything that you can imagine and fund, they can figure out how to make it happen. And so that is they do a lot of work with the government and they do a lot of work with really high end corporations. Let's say somebody wants to move their manufacturing process from the United States to Mexico and they don't want any downtime. That would be the directive. And these guys would take that on as a project. Assemble everything, you know, make the whole thing happen. It's a fascinating, fascinating podcast, but that's where I got that idea of delegating up. That's kind of a thing where, you know, it's a new way to train our minds to think about doing things that are not even within our capabilities right now. You know, do things that are even higher.

I mean we. There's a lot of cases that Ari and I both used our service ourselves where the VA's did a better job than we could have done ourselves.

Right.

You know, they have more patience enough so they've called JetBlue and waited on hold and argued with them to get us a credit when the WI fi doesn't work. Now Ari and I wouldn't have had the patience to do that, you know, but the task cost us $5 of their time and we got a hundred dollar credit. Right. So in some cases they can do things or you know, we're not web developers or designers. Like there's things that a lot of times you're reassigning it to someone more qualified than yourself.

Which brings me to this question. I have. What are some unusual places people could use automation or outsourcing in their lives that they may not typically think of?

A lot of things having to do with your physical environment. That's one thing that people don't think of necessarily your home and your office in terms of physical actions that can take place when you get there. In terms of the environment, the temperature, music playing, lighting, all of those kinds of things can be done automatically. I have an automation, for example. We have a second home in Long island in the Hamptons. And when we drive out there, I have a GPS tag basically on an app that when we pass the halfway point, it changes the temperature in our house so that when we get there it's nice and comfortable. So there's a lot of those things in the physical environment. Shopping, you mentioned toilet paper. Like a lot of that kind of stuff can be put on autopilot. Maybe you try new things when you go to the grocery store, but a lot of people have probably 70% of the things in their cupboards are staples, whether it's some kind of a nut butter and dog food and whatever it is. So a lot of those things also could be put on autopilot, for sure. And then processes in your business. So this is a really interesting one for us. There's. There are times when it will seem like we are spending more time and money and effort to create an automation that won't save a lot of time in the short term. I'll give you an example. Is like payroll. It's just interesting how this evolves. When we started the company, Nick was dealing with payroll and it was taking him probably five to six hours a week. Then one of the VAs that started working for us happened to also be a bookkeeper and she took over that role. And since she's a bookkeeper and better at it, was taking her to two to three hours per week. And now Nick has been systematically chipping away at the work that she has to do every week, which is now not all of it, but a lot of it is being done by a couple lines of code that Nick has come up with that saves three minutes here, seven minutes there, 10 minutes there. And eventually we're going to completely automate it. And then it's scalable and then it can be used for other people.

We were using the service for 50% for internal work and 50% external work. As you mentioned at the beginning, we are outsourcing an outsourcing company and through a lot of these automations that we're building for ourselves. And some of the scripts that I'm making now we're down to 37% for internal. So we've chipped away 13% over the last six months. And it's something that we're closely monitoring and keep trying to reduce.

Yeah, that's great.

That's great. We covered this obviously, a little bit. But is there anything else regarding what is the mindset of a productive entrepreneur or business owner? Because at the end of the day, you guys have a service here. We are going to wrap up here in a few minutes. But basically, I want to have you walk people through how to get started, what it costs to outsource, stuff like that. But it begins with the mindset of just simply wanting to be effective. What is the mindset in your experience of a productive entrepreneur or business owner?

For me, it's all about resource allocation, like optimizing your resources, whether it's money, human capital, time, whatever it is, you know, making sure you're using all these resources in the most effective way. And that transcends to, you know, almost everything. You know, for instance, it doesn't make sense for the entire company to be in a meeting about some of the technical things that are going on. Or it doesn't make sense for the whole company to be in a meeting about marketing. You know, the developers don't need to know what's going on in your podcast. So, you know, just keeping those things in mind and making sure that you're using people's time effectively, the money effectively and skillset effectively is, you know, all falls under this concept of proper resource allocation, in my opinion. I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's also a matter of being able to take advantage of. We can help you get rid of your back burner. Basically, any of these projects where you said, I want to do this, but I don't have the time, or I want to do this, but I don't know how that's something that you can really look at us to do.

Gotcha.

You got anything you want?

I was just going to say, yeah, yeah. No, I think that, you know, is it something where people could come to you without the direct of it? Like I think you mentioned earlier, people kind of come and they feel like they have to know exactly how something is going to happen before they can wrap their mind around delegating it. But could somebody come to you and just say, how can I sell more of this course? Or how can I, you know, I've got this course. I want to, I want to find new clients for it. I've got a book that I want to sell. Is that, is that the level enough that somebody could. That you've got the capability to help people figure out what to do if they don't even know what to do?

Exactly. Yes. And for both our clients and even non clients, you know, we get on the phone and we basically have a very extensive process for pulling out of them exactly what we could outsource and what they should be clearing off their plate. So even if you don't have a clear idea, you can book a call with us and one of our certified coaches will sit on the phone with you and literally pull out of you what you're doing on a daily basis that you shouldn't be doing yourself.

I think it's so great.

Give me one or two case studies or examples of people who have utilized less doing really effectively, like just game changing examples. I mean, I could speak of my experience, but I'd rather, you know, we're doing this episode. So people should obviously know I'm a big believer and fan of all of this. But what would be a case study or some example that everyone can relate to?

So, okay, well, so we have one. This client is a big supporter of Multiple Sclerosis foundation and he does the Ms. Walk every year and every year he's got a big mailing list and he raises a whole bunch of money and he'll typically raise, I think the between 30 and $40,000. And this year he gave his process entirely over to us to run and we brought in $80,000 for his walk, which is amazing. I mean, it was his process and then we just let it basically. So that was a pretty straightforward one we've had. Also, again, we really don't want to be replacing people's employees. That's not what we're trying to do. So we've had a couple companies who have brought us in and they have. Well, for one thing, they've completely eliminated email internally. So there's no email communication happening internally. But rather than what would seem like the obvious choice, which would be to fire three or four people whose job roles we replaced, they're able to take advantage of the experience and the relationship that those people had to put them into more useful and effective roles. So that's happened a couple times.

Gotcha.

Okay, that's awesome. That's a great example. So how much does something like less doing really cost? And, and what could it save someone? Because obviously there's a cost to this, but there's also growth, profits, saving money, stress, all that sort of stuff that goes into it. So talk about the cost.

Well, we're not unique in that. I feel like we're one of those things where it's not a cost, it's an investment. And the money put into us, you should get back tenfold in some way or another, whether that's more time with your family or better growth in your revenue. So the service is. There's two parts. So it's $129 a month, which is basically our subscription fee. And one of the things that that covers is unlimited outsourcing, coaching. So it's exactly what Nick was saying. We'll get on the phone with a client anytime and go through what's not working, what processes they don't like, and how to best attack something. And those are not billable. Those are just a limited service that we offer our clients. And then we charge $40 per hour and we bill by the second, and we're completely transparent about it. The clients see the exact same time reports that we see. So with that, you can get anything done. And now we do have over 100 specialists working with us. And specialists can be anything from a really amazing sales funnel person to an unbelievable copywriter. And those are quoted separately as separate projects. And we get approval from clients that do those.

And then outside of that, we do the private consulting.

Right. And then we also. Yeah, so we do private consulting also. And those workshops, we really like to do those in person, with a team, as much as possible. And those are either one or two day workshops that we tend to do.

Well, let's go back to the $40 an hour fee because there will be some people saying, well, you know, I can't afford $40 an hour for someone. And what you have found that you could be paying a $10 an hour employee more money than a $40 per hour based on how effective they are and what you actually have them doing based on how they're billed. Because most of the time you're going to pay someone by the hour if they're being productive or they're just on payroll and you got them booked working 9 to 5. So explain the economics of that.

Well, first of all, you have to think, how much is your time worth? Is it more or less than the 40 an hour? In most cases, your time is worth way more than 40 an hour. So that's the first thing to think about. But also, when you're working with us, you're Getting the expertise of all these tools that we train, all the virtual assistants. And so I'll give you an example, Joe, if you give us the task to call Delta Airlines and patch you into a call when you get to a live person. Yeah, that's going. That would take a normal assistant, I don't know, 10 minutes.

Five.

Five to 10 minutes to get to that live person to patch you in. Right. Maybe even more. That's something for sure you shouldn't be doing. So you should use some form of an assistant. It's not a good use of your time with us. We might bill you 10 seconds because we will use a tool called LucyPhone, which automatically will call us back when they get to a live person, and then we'll just patch you in. So it's $40 an hour. But we're so effective and efficient with the, with what we can do in an hour, a normal assistant couldn't do in five hours or 10 hours. So that's, you know, that's the economics of it.

Okay, so what you just said there, like, summarizes it. You know, what we can do with a forty dollar system, most people can't do for five hours. That sort of makes it seem quite the bargain.

Let me ask you guys, do you ever get people that. Do you ever get people that sign up and pay for the service and then not do anything for months?

Other than you?

Other than me, Exactly. That's what's happening.

Of course they do. I mean, you know what, you can pontificate all day long, ideas versus execution. You're just a lazy bastard, just admit it. And you're lucky you freaking know me. I mean, it's just, you know, I always have to say that. Yeah, Dean, you know, he's the smart one here, but I'm the hustler. So, you know, that's. That's how this works.

And quality is something that we take extremely seriously. We only want to be. We are, and we want to stay the premium service out there. So we offer the best customer support you could possibly ask for. If anytime someone's upset or doesn't understand why something took a long time, we deeply investigate it. And if there was any issue, we credit them.

But, but to really answer your question too, Dean, we're really data driven. And that is one of the things that we look at all the time is how long it's been since a client has used us. And me personally, I want to keep that to under a month for all clients. Right? But you know, we have stragglers and you're not the only one. But that's like, that's like my hit list every day where I'm looking at, you know, oh, this person hasn't service in two months. Let me find out why. The good news about that is that we have such a. I feel like we have such a great and almost intimate relationship with our clients that I can look at that list of, you know, 200 clients and see that someone hasn't used it in two months and say, oh, I know that she's on a road trip across the country and that's why she isn't using us right now, because we know those things.

Oh, it's a good example of that tool Intercom I mentioned before. We can automate, we can create automate and rules for sending emails to people. If any client hasn't used the service for X days or weeks, send them an email and if it's, ya know, send a different email or send a text or whatever it is, we're literally trying to automate that. That example that you just mentioned, right?

Yeah, totally.

They have a backstage, you know, app Dean, called Don't Wake Sleeping Dogs that reminds them not to like, you know, someone that's just gonna automatically give them money. Just don't poke the hornet's nest, let them do their thing. How do people sign up for this? Give all the details, everything and I want to let everyone know that we'll put a link on ilovemarketing.com so that you can find anything in the show notes that Ari and Nick want us to put there that will be helpful. We will go ahead and do that. So make sure you do that. But how do people sign up with you guys?

Okay, so just go to lessdoing.com it's L E S-S-O-I N G.com assistance. To sign up you can just go to lessdoing.com also but lessdoing.com assistance. And when you sign up, if you mention that you heard about us on I Love Marketing, you will be added to a list to get a advanced copy to our new book that's coming out before anyone's going to have it.

Oh great.

There you go. There you go. So any final words of advice, inspiration, insults, you know, whatever that you would like to share before we wrap.

Work on your unique value and try to figure out a way to only do things that give you pleasure or utilize your unique ability.

Awesome. There we go.

That's it. Top that. Ari, you got anything else?

Yeah, I would just say that if you're thinking that you're the only one who can do it, don't. It's just. Even if it was true, it's very limited thinking.

Yes. Yeah.

Stop that immediately if you're thinking like that. Well, great. So thank you, guys. As always, very, very useful tips and suggestions and recommendations. So to all of our listeners, there you go. This is one more capability that you now have. The question is, use it. And so while it's fresh on your mind, go to their site. Say it one more time. The link to the site.

Less doing.com assistance.

Okay, cool.

Awesome.

Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Ari and Dean. Dean, try to be cool.