Automating Your Business w/ Rich Schnitzel

If you're an online business owner, or just an extremely busy person for that matter, you should be using automations. In this day and age, we have access to so many tools and resources that help automate our lives and our businesses so that we can spend more time doing the things that we really want to do. And if you are a business owner, you can be working more on your business rather than in it by the simple use of automations. But so many people don't use those tools and they end up just running themselves into the ground, especially if you are a business owner. And if you're an online business owner and you've been working hard at really growing your business, either now or at some point, things are going to start happening. Money is going to start flowing into your life and you're going to really have that business. And if you are not prepared to scale that business, you are going to fall short and you're going to burn yourself out and not be able to keep up with the business. So if your business blew up right now with whatever systems you have in place, would you be able to be comfortable to be able to walk away and be able to handle that growth? If not, then this lesson is going to be huge for you because we're going to go over the principles of automation. So today I'm bringing in an expert in automation, and we're going to go over just that. I recently had a conversation with a man named Rich Schnitzel. Now, Rich owns a done-for-you automation company where he works with six-figure entrepreneurs to help them scale to seven figures and beyond. He's helping these entrepreneurs level up their business with the use of technology and automations. Now, Rich and I decided to cover the principles of automation in this conversation that we recorded for you, and the reason we're going over the principles is because you could have all the different tools to help you automate your online business, or just your life in general, but if you don't understand the rules that go into effective automation, then you're gonna fall short. You're gonna end up causing more of a headache than doing what automations are supposed to do, which is take the weight off of you, put it onto your robot army that's gonna help you complete the tasks that you need to get completed. Now if you're really serious about increasing your productivity, getting more done with less effort and energy and time, then I highly recommend that you download the Performance and Productivity Planner. This planner is gonna help you pinpoint your most important task for the day, the one thing that you need to be focusing on, and then eliminate all the distractions that you have that could potentially show up throughout your day. There's a morning plan, an evening review, and a way for you to track your progress over time so that you can actually improve your performance and productivity. To get your planner, just go to jamesallencoaching.com/planner, or you can click the link in the description of this episode. With all that being said, let's dive into the principles of automation.

Rich, how you doing, man?

I am doing amazing. Thanks for having me on.

Oh yeah, dude, great to have you here. Where are you, where are you coming in from?

Uh, from Connecticut.

Connecticut, awesome.

Yeah, East Coast, U.S.

Kind of curious, what got you into automations?

I did not start off doing business automation. I have a background in mechanical engineering. It's how I started my career, being a field engineer, sales engineer, project manager, heavy in the engineering world. But I've also been a lifelong nerd and the IT person for my family ever since I can remember. If there's a computer problem, everybody comes to me and asks me questions. Hey, you know, what's this? How do I get this fixed? And that was kind of like my passion. I started out with Facebook Messenger bots because I was looking for something to start off with and Messenger bots. I just thought they were really cool. I started about 3 years ago. They were just starting to become a thing. I thought it was a really cool new technology. Like, oh, okay, cool. I'm energized about this. Why don't I try it? Realized really early on that I am terrible at writing copy. Uh, as an engineer, everything comes out like a bullet point. It's very clean and precise, but it doesn't have a marketing flow to it. But what I was good at was taking an idea of a workflow that I wanted to create and building the backend technology to run that and create a really cool experience for somebody that was interacting with my, my bot and somebody else would see it and go, wow, that's really awesome. How did you make that happen? And I'd be like, oh yeah, I did this, this, you know, connected that, did that. There's a decision here. And they go, okay, that's amazing. No idea what you just said. Can you build that for me? I'm like, yeah, sure. That's awesome. I, that's the part that I really enjoyed. You can write the copy for it, do whatever the heck you want it. And I'll build the backend. I'll build the automation. I started doing that more and more. And because I was doing this one piece of their business, The next conversation would always be, okay, you did a great job on this. Now I'm also thinking about trying to do this other thing over here that I want to automate. Can you do that as well? And be like, yeah, okay, well, let me take a look at it. And having those conversations and taking a step back and going, okay, what did I, what did I enjoy? What part of this was I really good at? Just led me to this, the space of having these conversations with entrepreneurs about, you know, okay, this is what I'm doing in my business. This is what I know needs to happen. And I think I can automate it, but I don't really know because that would require me jumping down a rabbit hole. To gain all the understanding I need to really make this happen. But I could have a really top-level conversation with them and go, yeah, okay, I get where you're going. This is what we can build. And the outcome of what they expected was the outcome of what I was actually providing to them. So there was a, a really great connection between their perfect vision and then what they actually get to use at the end of the day.

That's awesome, man. Yeah. I mean, automations, I use 'em in my own business. You know, just like repeated tasks and things like that. That's kind of like— I mean, I'm very like baseline, I would say, automation and my knowledge behind it, but I still leverage them. And it's awesome because it takes more off of me and my mental energy so I can focus on other things. Kind of curious, though, you work with mostly like service providers, like coaches, consultants, but you can work with like real estate as well. Is that who you primarily work with?

Yeah, a lot of, a lot of coaches, real estate, a lot of online sales. Especially now I've done a lot of work in the past year with people who have an online sales presence and a physical location, trying to marry those two realities together so that you can kind of operate it as one business instead of having these two distinct silos of information that happen independently of each other and then trying to manually converge those together.

Gotcha. So my next question is, what can you and what can't you automate and why?

So we can automate just about everything. What you should automate falls into what I would call a very clear litmus test, right? So automation to me is something happens in your business that necessitates a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen to create an expected outcome, right? That's any business process or workflow that you're doing. If we're going to automate it, the outcome of that end result should have an improved efficiency and an improved efficacy, right? So if efficiency is, does it get done faster 99% of the time, automation is a yes to that question. But efficacy is, is the result of automating this better than if I had done it manually? And so it brings in this, this picture of, am I maintaining the authenticity of how I'm showing up in the, to my client if I'm automating this, right? If I automate my entire sales process and I never talk to them, Yes, it's more efficient. Is the sales process better now because it's completely automated, or do I need to leave in those aspects of a one-on-one call or a custom email to them, or, you know, a check-in halfway through the onboarding process? What are those points in your business that we shouldn't be automating? Because even though we can, if we do, we're fundamentally changing the product that you're providing, creating a net negative for the experience, both for you and for the person that you're serving.

Yeah. I mean, one thing in my, in my own business that I noticed is that when I was onboarding a client, so I use Kajabi as like my tool for a lot of my automation. It's not everything, but it definitely is a big piece of how I run my business. And I was doing a call and it's supposed to be like a 15-minute call because he just signed up. I'm like, yeah, 15 minutes would be perfect. Maybe 10 minutes. We'll decide on like our weekly time. I went through so many things just to teach him and get him up to date on like the different softwares and things that we use. To help them have the best experience possible and get them fully organized with what my offer is. And I was like going through, and that 15-minute call ended up being 45 minutes. And I was like, okay, I've, I've explained this to like 3 different people. I have to automate this. So literally that day, right after that, I took like an hour out. It was maybe 2 hours, but I just made an email. So when someone goes to the offer that I have and they make the investment, whether it's a payment plan or paid in full, it automatically sends them a big email that says, hey, welcome to the program, super happy to have you here. And then it gives them a full rundown. It's 3 steps. And the second step just goes over like quick little Loom videos that I made on how to actually like set up the tools, how to use like Voxer to communicate, or like Tobi is something else that I recommend, you know, and just like give them a quick crash course of like the Trello board that we use. All that stuff. Since then, it's been so much easier. And I just— if people have questions, I say, oh, just go back to the email, you know, and then they can go on, do it. So that for me has been like so big, and it literally took me just a little bit of time.

Yep, perfect example. You know, you're getting rid of that 80-90% of the repeatable workflow, and then when you get on your 15-minute call, you can really focus on the stuff that like, okay, this is an offshoot, this is something different. They still get that intimacy with you. They feel like they're being taken care of. It's really the stuff that needs to come from you and not, as you said, you know, here's a list of all this stuff that you need to do to get ready for working with me. Yeah, they don't need to listen to you jabber on for 30 minutes about that. They can just read it in an email, do it on their own time.

Well, yeah, and if I did it on a call, it would be like information overload. They'd be like, oh my God, right? We just talked. It's like, now they can watch this 2-minute video, this 3-minute video or 5-minute video. So yeah, I mean, that's— that was a huge example of automation in my own life and business. It's helped me so much. And now the 15-minute call can be 10 minutes or 5 minutes and we literally just catch up, say, hey, this is going to be super awesome, get pumped up and excited and decide on what time we're going to do our weekly call. When do you recommend that people should really start thinking about automating in their business?

I always say think about automations from the very beginning. Even if you're just starting out, you can build simple automations and then expand upon them as you get bigger and add more processes. You're never gonna have wasted effort in that beginning, right? Automation is a lot like building with Legos. I can build a 1/32nd scale Eiffel Tower with Legos. That's not one Lego. That is thousands of Legos that are all doing a specific purpose that create this massive structure. So if you're just starting out, you're just focusing on your first couple blocks. Where if you've been in business a while, maybe you have half the structure built already and you're— so it's gonna look very different to people. The key point though is when you actually put an automation live should be when you have a process that has become pretty stable, right? A lot of times when we first do something, it changes a little bit every time because we're never gonna hit the mark 100% the first time we go through something. You're gonna try it once, it's gonna work. And kind of like my experience of building my business, you're going to take a step back and go, okay, cool. This worked really well. We did this. All right. But it was a little rough and I thought this was going to be really helpful, but it didn't make a difference at all. So we probably don't even need to be doing that anymore. Let's add in this other piece. Right. So we play around a little bit with our processes in the beginning, and you don't want to be automating at that point because two things, it removes your connection to the process and you're going to not be seeing those little bits and pieces that can make the difference to optimize it. And as you're changing it, you're just going to be on a Ferris wheel changing the automation, then going back and changing the automation every time. And it's just going to feel like, why am I automating this? Every time it runs, it's broken and I have to go back and fix it. So wait until you've gotten your process done. I'd say get it to about 80% and then start looking at automating the stuff that hasn't changed so that when you do implement it, you actually get the benefit of your automation And then you're freeing yourself up to perfect that last 20% that is the manual component of your workflow.

Yeah, that's awesome. Everything has a learning curve. So even if someone does start, you said like 80% or more, obviously with the process, um, they're going to have to, I imagine, like automate a little bit, maybe come back, kind of like practice it and make adjustments.

Even a well-established client is going to be making changes to their automation every 3 to 6 months. Somewhere in that timeframe, just because of the change of business. Our businesses aren't static. We're always growing. We're always changing the same way that we should always be reassessing other, you know, the financials of our business operations. You're making changes to your sales. Automation falls within that same methodology of at certain periods of time, we need to revisit what we're doing and make tweaks and adjustments and small changes, but Ideally, we're making tweaks, not massive overhauls to the entire system.

What, what would you say are your favorite tools or the tools that you recommend when you start automating a process? Uh, do you have— I know there's like millions and millions of tools always coming out. So do you have like a select little like tool suite that you like to use?

So I do a lot of my mind mapping in a Lucidchart, and then I have a Vibeboard. It's a digital whiteboard. That's a 55-inch whiteboard, and being able to draw out your workflow and see it visually in 3-dimensional space is really important for figuring out what the logical train of information is supposed to look like. So those are kind of the, the planning phases. And then when we go to actually create the automation, as we do a lot of work with Zapier, uh, they've been around for a really long time. Uh, we will occasionally use Integromat. Google Script is another big one. Google pretty much allows you to do everything that you can do with a click of a mouse button through code on their platform. And then they allow you to expand that out to connect with other APIs. And so between those three, we can touch about 95% of what we can build, whether it's preexisting or we're building out a custom API integration for somebody. But that, that takes care of most of it. And then a very rare circumstance, We'll spin something up in like Google Cloud or Amazon AWS. Typically that's where the needs are at such a high level that we want full control over what's going on and what we're building goes into like a lot of rate limits and all of those programs. If you're sending out 1,000 emails a day, a lot of programs are gonna be having a hard time with that. Like if Gmail has a hard limit of 500 emails a day from any email address, if we're starting to go above that, we might offload that into an AWS or Google Cloud or something like that.

Yeah, that's like half of that. That was like total nerd talk. I was just like, what is he talking about? I know Zapier. I know. Uh, yeah. And like I said, I use Kajabi for my coaching business and stuff. Cause they provide some pretty cool, um, like if this, then that kind of automations, they make it pretty simple. So, uh, you can definitely see the difference between my level of expertise compared to yours.

Zapier covers 80% of your base. If you're looking to try for some, try and figure something out or looking if something's possible, start with Zapier. They show all their apps on there. They give you the triggers and the actions of what's possible, right? If you're like, oh, can I integrate my Kajabi with my ActiveCampaign? And then I want to send it to Airtable for my database. You can go on Zapier and within a couple minutes, just type in those programs and you're going to see, you know, Kajabi new lead. You're going to see Airtable add to campaign and you're going to see Airtable add new record to a table. Okay, cool. That's, that's pretty much what I was thinking. Okay. This must be possible. And then you can take the dive into actually figuring out how to make that work. But that would be an amazing place to start to figure out what that framework would look like.

Start playing around with Zapier for sure. So Rich, what would you say are like, I don't know, anywhere from 3 to 5, probably I could imagine, of the like main principles that someone should consider if they're going to try and start automating for themselves. Um, with the automation process, you know, what are like the 3 to 5 or so? Cause I feel like that's a reasonable number. Maybe there's more, but like the main principles, like, yeah, that go into when you automate something to think about.

So I, I would say the first one is simplify out what you're doing so that you understand it on base principles. When I'm looking at a business, I simplify a business down to its simplest components of 5 steps, right? You have a sale. Or you have a lead, you have a sale, you onboard them, you deliver the product, and you offboard them, right? So if you're gonna start automating, understand what those steps are and then start to add depth of understanding in those columns. Because what that does is a lot of times in automation, you kind of feel like a kid in a candy store when you're trying to think about your processes and what you can do. And we get pulled away really easily because you go down there your lead funnel, and then all of a sudden you're in sales and then you're really excited about the sale and you're already into onboarding. You're trying to build with too many Lego blocks at the same time. Right? So get your goalposts set so that you can stay within them as you're starting to think about your process. And then once you can understand that, the second principle is don't build this alone, right? Have somebody else that you can show the process to, that you can say, this is the workflow. Did I miss anything? This is, this is what I'm looking at. Just take a look. Let me know if you have any questions about the logic here. Did I miss something foolish? Especially for the business owner, when we start to build this stuff, there are so many things that we do every day, decisions and choices that we're making that we don't recognize as decisions and choices anymore. They're just like putting your foot in front of one another to walk, right? It's second nature to us. We have a really hard time stepping back and realizing that it is a choice to, you know, put your foot in front of the other. Oh, there's a rock. I'm gonna pick it up and put it over the rock, right? We just do that subconsciously. But that is a choice. And that is the same thing in your business. You are doing all of these things every day that make your business what it is, and you won't recognize them. So you need somebody else to come in and help you figure out what those are, because those are the, the key points in an automation that if you forget to think about that or take that into consideration, the automation is going to take a misstep. So have that conversation so that you can pick up those points along the way that we need to be paying attention for to make everything run really smoothly. Right. So we have our top-level view, we have somebody that we're talking to, And now we're really starting to figure out that something occurs, whole bunch of stuff happens, creates an output. When you start building that, similar to knowing your goalposts, start with your trigger, right? We, we need to know that so that we can even start to begin to think about that, but then really define the endpoint that we're trying to get to. Don't try to follow a logical path and end up where we think we're supposed to, because you're either gonna go a little bit short. Or most often we go too far, right? We don't realize that something is the actual output when we go a little bit farther down the line to like, okay, I'm just gonna take it a couple extra steps where really that's a completely different automated process and we need to be linking them. So figure out what your ideal output is so that then you're only worried about connecting those two and we can make the cleanest path between them, right? The, 2 analogies that I use a lot are, one is a lot of times in business, you know, we start running down the highway, we're driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour, and then there's construction, something happens in the business and we need to make a detour around that to keep operating, right? Website goes down, you know, we need to change to a different process, payment processor, whatever it is, something happens and we kind of need to go, oh, okay, let's go around this. And so we can continue operating. Over time, we forget that we made that detour and that just becomes our highway. And we won't realize that unless we go, okay, no, I'm going, trying to go from point A to point B and I'm trying to go as fast as possible. What does that look like? Not, okay, this is what I'm doing now. This is what I'm doing now. This is what I'm doing now. Okay. Now I end up where I think I'm supposed to be. We miss the fact that there's a detour in there and we really need to be catching those so that we don't, we don't continue to have an inefficient process. The other analogy is, it's a little bit more techie, but in computer programming, when we're talking about artificial intelligence, there is a principle where if I tell a computer I want to find a path between point A to point B and it finds the path, the first path it finds, if I don't put any constraints on it, it will assume it's the fastest path and go, okay, I'm done. Because I haven't told it what's going on. I've just said, get to point A to point B the fastest way. And if it gets there and I haven't said, okay, well, point A to point B is 10 miles away and you took 12 miles. Okay, so there's a 2-mile difference between optimal and what I found. Maybe there's a better one. Let me check. I just say get to point A to point B. It goes, okay, I got there. Cool. Let's go. Right? So we need to define where we're going so that we can also be making those kind of logical checks in our brain of, okay, I tried to get a lead to a sale. The lead had the sales page and then they had to go to a different page to click yes. And then they had to go to a different page to accept my terms and then they could pay, pay for my product. Right? Why can't they just go right to the sales and have a payment button right on the next page they get to. A lot less friction. But maybe you got there because of whatever, you know, program changed and you just kind of pieced all these things together. So we were following this path to get as simple as possible. And then I'd say, just so I don't ramble on forever, I'll leave you with the last point, which is treat your automation like an employee. And what I mean by that is if we're adding an employee into our business, There's gonna be a set of steps that we're gonna follow, right? We're gonna figure out what that employee is gonna be responsible for. Then we're gonna go and try and find somebody who can perform those tasks in the way that we want. Once we've found them and we bring them on board, we're not just gonna dump them in their seat and say, okay, get to work. All right, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna work with them to help them understand what our processes are. We're gonna introduce them to the rest of our team so that they know who to go to. You know, James Allen is responsible for this aspect of the business. Rich is responsible for this aspect of the business. This is your corner over here. So you handle this. If you have any questions about these other things, this is where you go to get the information. We have a weekly sales call on Monday morning. It's over Zoom. This is how you get it. This is— these are all the things that we do to operate within our business. Do the same thing with automation. I just talked about trying to figure out what the automation is supposed to do. And then we figure out the programs that are going to best perform those tasks for us. That's that first piece. But the second piece is once you have that automation, Don't just plop it into your business, tell everybody, hey, we got an automation now, a whole bunch of stuff is going to happen. Have fun. There's an aspect of automating our business that is saying, hey, this is the process. This is what's going on. This is why we're doing it. We're trying to take a little bit of load off of your VA, right? So we're trying to take a little bit of load off of you because we're going to be growing over the next 3 months. And we're trying to create some space because I really need you to be doing this task. And I'm gonna be asking a lot more of this from you. So I'm trying to take these couple other things off your, your plate, right? This is what your expectations are coming out of the automation. This is what you can ask it to do. This is the stuff that you're still responsible for that aren't automated, because it's really important to me that you do that personally. You are going to be doing it better. There's, there's a conversation involved in all of this. We don't wanna be doing this again in a, in a vacuum. One of the biggest things that I help people handle is how do I get my VA or my assistant to feel comfortable with the fact that we're talking about possibly automating out 50% of her job with some of these things that we're doing. And I have a, I have a fully manual sales process. She's running crazy and I want to automate all that out. But how do you then present that to her so that she doesn't go, oh my God, are you trying to get rid of me? Am I doing a bad job? You're right. I've been doing this for the past 6 months. You're now telling me it's automated. I don't have to worry about that. What's going on? No, no, no. Right. No, it's, you did that because we had to, but you're really good at this stuff over here and I need you to do more of that. So I'm trying to create space for you to do that, right? There's that conversation there around, this is the thing that we're adding to the business. This is how it works. And this is how all of you on my team can get the most out of this addition. It's a net positive for all of us, not just a positive for me and a negative for all of you because I'm taking away your livelihood.

Yeah. And I think with like automation, I don't think you can automate everything, nor should you, especially as like a service-based business, which primarily you enjoy working with because like it's service, you know, and it can't just all be a machine even though you can automate like, oh, a video pops up and it's you. But there's something just about human connection. So yeah, it's like optimizing it. Ari Meisel talks a lot about that with his OAO methodology where it's optimize, outsource, or optimize, automate, automate and outsource in that order. So it's like you first optimize it, then you automate as much as you can and then delegate or outsource the following. So, yep. Really powerful stuff, man. I think it's, I think it's huge. I think everybody should put in more time to automating, like even in our personal lives too, just because like I geek out on productivity and focus and whatnot and the power of the mind and those kinds of pieces, because if you have all these things that you'd have to remember and do. Then you're— it's literally pulling your attention to all these different things rather than just being focused on one task. So with automation, you can take a lot of that unnecessary repeated stuff off your plate so that you and your assistant or your team can really focus on the really important things that actually require a human.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I think we've all experienced the phenomenon of task saturation, right? That, that moment where you're trying to focus on so much and do so much that if somebody goes, hey, what's your name? You kind of go, hold on, I got to finish this. This thought, this thing that I'm doing, and then I'll answer you. They asked your name. You should be able to just like, yep, Rich. Okay.

Yeah.

You can't do that because your brain is so full of all the things, right? And automation is removing that for you, right? To me, automation is a magnifier, right? It magnifies what we're doing. And if we have an optimized process, it's a 10x magnifier to the positive. And it's going to, you know, make you be able to compete on a much higher level and operate at a much higher level than you were previously. Converse is also true. If we don't have an optimized process, if we haven't done our homework to figure out what we want to build, it can be a magnifier to the negative and put a glaring lens on the fact that, you know, you've missed a step in your workflow. So we have to be doing this with, with caution.

100% planning for sure. That's why you have a whiteboard and everything. Got to plan it out. Awesome, dude. Well, we're going to start wrapping up here. Where can people find you and work with you? Because like you mentioned before, as one of your other principles, like have somebody overlook it. It's a great opportunity to work with someone like Rich. Do you provide any kind of like free consultation, anything like that? Or how can people connect with you?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn at Richard Schnitzel Jr. You can send me a direct message on there or you can go to my website, richardschnitzel.com. Schnitzel is S-C-H-N-I-T-Z-E-L. It's spelled exactly like the German food schnitzel. Yeah, on the website there's a link to jump on a 20-minute call with me if you want to chat about what's going on and see if there's a good fit to work together.

Awesome, super cool, man. Any kind of final thoughts for the person listening right now who's like thinking about automating?

I would say, I, I know I threw a lot of information overload out in this episode. I went down a little bit of a technical rabbit hole at one point. Um, and if you're feeling a little overwhelmed, it's okay. Take a deep breath. This is not, this is not something where you need to learn how to build a car. When I'm working with somebody, I'm just teaching you how to drive down the highway, right? I want you to be able to drive the car down the highway, understand what's going on, know what the gas pedal and the brake pedal is. I don't want you to be able to go home and change your oil and, you know, put new tires on and diagnose what that what that weird squeak in the back right corner is, right? That's my job. So take this as an understanding of what's possible with automation, but understand that you don't have to be, you know, an expert and a, you know, premier mechanic to understand this and get the maximum benefit for your business out of it.

Yeah. So whoever's listening, automate as soon as you can. Keep it simple. Uh, you can try using Zapier and stuff like that, or if you use Kajabi, they have tons of automations. Biggest thing is if you can just take some time out, 20 minutes, meet up with Rich and have him at least, you know, point you in the right direction, or you guys start working together and he will be your mechanic and simplify the entire business, make it run smoothly. Cool, man. Thank you so much for being here, spending the time. Really information overload, but it was awesome because it's a replay. You know, people can watch it as much as they want. Very value-packed. So thank you so much, Rich.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Yeah. So for the audience, take what you learned here, get out there and get automating. We'll see you in the next one.