Episode 054 - Cure The Cancer Of Two-Minute Tasks

There's two approaches you can take. On the one hand, you, you put automation in place that drives the behavior you want the people in the business to have. So, for instance, let's say you generate a new inquiry online. You want to make sure that that person is called within 2 hours of that inquiry coming in. Your system creates the task and the notification that, hey, here's a new inquiry, they need a call, and it's a assigned to someone to make that call, which then also allows you the ability to track.

Welcome to this episode of the Content Amplification Podcast. I'm Shaun. I'm joined with Jodi. We have a special guest today and we're going to be talking on a topic that I think every business owner struggles with. Now, if you've ever said to yourself, you know what, I can do that, it's only going to take 2 minutes, you may be fooling yourself. And today's guest, Peter de Villiers, is here to talk about this cancer that is infecting business owners with these 2-minute tasks. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Thanks for having me, Shaun.

So tell us a bit more about what you mean by the cancer of the 2-minute tasks.

Yeah, it's, it's really phrased that way because of how insidious and very often unseen the, the, the 2-minute tasks are. The impact is felt by the business, and it makes it much harder for a business to scale than it necessarily needs to be. But it's really just like you said in the intro, it's like, I can do this, it'll only take 2-minute tasks. And it's because we approach those and we think they exist in isolation that we we're not aware of the impact. But if you then look at it and you say, well, okay, I'm doing 10 of those a day, or I'm doing 20 of those a day, I've got 5 people on my team, it's being done 5 days a week, all of a sudden it just becomes this enormous resource hole in the business where people are spending time doing things that either don't need to be done or can be done with automation, which then might actually eliminate some of the things we're doing. But we're so busy just sort of head down getting stuff done that we don't take the time to actually identify those and eliminate them.

Now, I'm curious, how did you come up with, with focusing on this specific idea and solving for it?

Um, I think it comes from, I've got, um, a lot of experience in business automation, and one thing I notice is business owners get overwhelmed quite easily because they think about business automation in two things. It's either email marketing automation, which is one form of it, or they think of it, well, if I want to automate my business, I have to automate my entire business. Whereas the way I look at it is you can, you can get massive gains by just starting and looking at small things that you can identify in the business that you or someone on your team has to do repetitively that can be done reliably by a system, or by having a system you might eliminate it. And it's just trying to break it down into small chunks that business owners can approach without getting that sense of overwhelm of, well, my business is too complex, I couldn't possibly automate my business.

Absolutely. Now, what would be, I guess, some examples of the common things that people would be doing that are eating up a lot of this time? Just things that you've come into to see in your research and even in your own business that you could automate.

Yes. Yeah. So, one example might be just simply entering customer details. Excuse me. So let's say, for instance, we do online lead generation, and that generates— if there's a web form, it might generate an email to someone in the business to say, ah, here's a new inquiry. Now, at that point, that information lives as an email. You and I both know ideally that information should go straight into a CRM system. So just by having that little piece of automation, it means every inquiry is immediately put into the database and can be managed that way. Then there's obviously several steps in managing a new lead, some of which can be automated. Either the communication can be automated or at least just the creation of a task for someone to take a manual action and make a phone call, whatever that needs to be. But then at some point, those leads become customers. Invoices need to be generated for work done or quotes. And at that point, it's someone in the accounts department who then takes that information and enters it into the accounting software. Now, all of that sounds completely reasonable, and there would be millions and millions of businesses who run like that, but a much better solution is that when an inquiry comes in, it goes straight into the CRM, it's managed in the CRM as an opportunity, and when it reaches, let's say for instance, the stage of a quote needs to be generated, that automatically then fires all the relevant information into the accounting platform of choice. And at that point, a quote can be generated, and that solves a couple of things. One, we don't have to keep entering the same information. So let's look at this without any automation. Could be I receive an email saying there's a new inquiry from the website. I then manually enter that into a spreadsheet or a database of some sort somewhere, and then I manage it. And when it does become a quote opportunity, someone manually types it into the accounting software. Now, all that work can be eliminated through very basic automation. And it's taking away aspects of people's day-to-day work, which I'd say anyone you hire is overqualified to do. And it doesn't really brighten anyone's day to just be passing information from one piece of software to another when it can be fully automated and is therefore also likely to be a lot more accurate.

Yeah. So obviously there are pretty standard automations that every business can have, but how can a business identify information or 2-minute tasks that can be automated specifically for them?

Yeah. So I'd say it starts with every person in the, in the business. A good idea would be to just spend a week noting down perhaps in 15-minute increments. And that sounds quite laborious the first time you might hear it, but just note down every 15 minutes what have you been doing, and then review at the end of the week. And you do this for yourself and for every member of the team to see, well, actually, out of my list of things that I did this week, which of those am I actually uniquely skilled to do and therefore delivering real value, and what of it is just moving pieces around because that's the way we do it here. And then you can say, well, okay, here's a task that we do, and is there a way that we can either automate that task, or if we had automation in the business, might it eliminate that task altogether? So in my initial example, having to enter the information into the accounting platform when it's time to generate a quote, that's only being done because it's not automated. As soon as it's automated, then nobody ever needs to do it again.

Excellent. That makes perfect sense. Now, when we were preparing for this episode, I asked you in our prelim form, you know, what are 3 things that you'd like the audience to take away? And the top one, I can relate to a lot of it there. And you mentioned a book by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths called Algorithms to Live By. And there's a stat in there about being interrupted by 2-minute tasks. I'm not going to give away what the impact time-wise. I'm going to let you have that stage for that. But by being pulled away from what you're working on to do a 2-minute task, how is that impacting you time-wise to get back on track?

Yeah, that feeds massively into our misconception about multitasking, but there's a real cost in task switching. Which when we look at computers, we can completely understand. If you stop doing one task to do another, it's not as if the others can keep running. So what happens in this instance for us as humans is you're focused on a piece of work that you're doing, and then either you interrupt yourself because there's a notification and you quickly need to do something else, or someone knocks on the door and you're briefly interrupted. For a minute, 2 minutes, but it then takes you at least around 17 minutes to get back to the level of focus that you had before the interruption. So that 2-minute task has a sort of half-life decay of 17 minutes. And that's an opportunity for you to not be focused, to start making mistakes on the task that you were— the project that you might have been working on before the interruption. And if you then think, well, okay, how many times a day do you get interrupted? You soon realize you spend a fraction of your time actually doing focused work. And the rest of it is very much just sort of like skimming stones on the water. It's just bouncing around, keeping things afloat, but not actually making real progress.

So how is it that we can avoid these interruptions?

I think for a start, we can turn off as many notifications as possible. So even in our own software, there is in-app notifications. But we built specifically for this reason, we built a feature in called Deep Work, which we've taken the title from the book by Cal Newport. And it's basically just, yes, the system will still generate the notifications for you. But if you say I'm doing deep work for the next hour, then and for the next hour they won't pop up on the screen, just like a do not disturb function. And I think by just understanding how these interruptions and these little tasks affect our day, we can then just chunk them together and schedule things. So for instance, the way I do it for myself is I tend not to have any phone calls in the mornings. And I never have to explain this to anyone. It's just if someone goes onto a diary link to book a call with me, there are only afternoon calls available. And that means that I have uninterrupted focus time in the morning. And having that approach in any business then just allows you to say, well, okay, here's 90 minutes, even if it's just 90 minutes in my day that I know I can get the important stuff done. And then the rest of the time, it's okay, I'm going to be interrupted, but I've allowed for it because I've sort of ring-fenced some of my daily time to the really focused high-level work.

Right. Now, as with anything, there are people who have objections with business automation, and I think one of the common ones is that it takes away the personality or the intimacy of communication with their clients, and they prefer an old-school kind of business model. So how do you handle those objections, and what would you, what would you say to those, those people?

Yeah, so I think firstly, in the right instances, it's completely a valid concern or objection. I'm not advocating for completely taking away the human element in a business, and we all experience it with companies when they do that. It just becomes a nightmare to do business with them. So there's two approaches you can take. On the one hand, you put automation in place that drives the behavior you want the people in the business to have. So for instance, let's say you generate a new inquiry online. You want to make sure that that person is called within 2 hours of that inquiry coming in. Your system creates the task and the notification that, hey, here's a new inquiry, they need a call, and it's assigned to someone to make that call, which then also allows you the ability to track. We've generated so many leads 'So many calls were made. The only reason someone wasn't called is because someone on the team ignored the task and ignored the system.' So in that instance, from the prospect's perspective, they're getting a personal, um, response, but we're using automation to drive what we want the behavior in the business to be. And then there's also a hybrid model you can take further and say, okay, let's say we're in a coaching environment and we want our coaches at the end of every session to send a recap email to, to the person they've just coached. So in that instance, you can make it easy for them to enter comments on the session into the system, and then the system triggers an automated email. But the bulk of the copy in that email is what they've just typed in, so they don't have to go through the the process of creating the email, the appropriate subject line, and everything that goes with that. But they can add their notes in and click Save, and that then triggers an email that contains all the personal information we want in it. But the requirement for that email and ensuring that it's sent and everything that goes along with that is automated. So you can use the automation to drive the personal touch. Perfect.

Peter, this is, this is pure gold. And what we're going to do, you mentioned the system, we're going to talk about your system just after a break. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come right back and we're going to get into talking about Makanta and everything that that can do for people.

Cool.

Hi, Shaun Whynacht here, the co-host of this podcast as well as the founder of Blue KAL Marketing. You know, every year we work with hundreds of business owners to help them develop their marketing programs and their brands. And the one thing that we have consistently found is that people want to be able to do it themselves over and over again in their business. So we have developed, and we're extremely excited about this, our Brand Plus Marketing program. Over the course of 12 months, an entire year, you get every season, every holiday, every month, where we're going to be working together to develop your foundations, develop and strengthen your offers, develop your systems, figure out what marketing strategies are going to work for your business to actually grow and implement, and then lastly, we're going to help you launch those. In this program, we're extremely excited about this, and if you want to find out more about it, please go to BlueCowTraining.com and you can find out all the information there. Now let's get back to this episode. All right, welcome back. We are talking to Peter DeVilliers about the 2-minute tasks that have been kind of, you know, just a cancer in your business by eating up a lot of time. And we talked in the first part about why that is, you know, some strategies on overcoming those interruptions. And Peter's been talking about a system and features in a system. That system that he represents, that he has built, is called Makanta. Peter, tell us what Makanta is. It's a CRM, I know that much, but tell our listeners what it can do and what makes it unique.

Yeah, so, um, you're right, it is a CRM, but it's, it's really a a no-code tool that allows you to build a custom CRM for your business.

Quite often business owners end up shoehorning their business into a system that someone else has created based on what they know about that type of business or that industry. And our approach is, well, rather than changing your business to fit the software that you're using, we allow you to change the software to meet the requirements of your business. And this includes everything, including you, you set up the data structure, the interface, everything like that. It's all no-code, so you don't have to worry about getting developers involved or anything. But it just means that when you log into the system that you've created for your business, it represents your business. So all the data points and information that you want.

And then in the back of the system is a very powerful automation engine.

That works basically on an if this, then that model. So the way I like to describe it to clients is if you can describe the scenario to the person sitting next to you in the office, then you can create it in Macanta because you just need to be able to, let's for example say, if there is a new inquiry via the website, call them within 2 hours.

Well, you can tell Macanta that that is what you want to have happen so that New inquiry comes in, task is created with a deadline and a reminder and all of that around it. And then one key thing that makes Macanter unique in the sort of CRM space is generally CRM systems are contact-centric. There is a contact, a human who goes through a campaign and sits behind timers and whatever needs to be there. The approach we've taken is that generally, a contact, there is information you have that isn't specific just to that contact, but there are other people involved in the process, in the project, in the opportunity, um, that needs to be managed as well. And because we have those relationships between the data pieces, the data objects, and the contacts, you can drive different automation depending on what my relationship is to that data object.

Now, I mean, just hearing you talk about these features, obviously, you know, you're, you're pulling out features that, you know, are weaknesses of other systems. So it just leads me to, to feel that, you know, you've spent a lot of time in, in researching and using other systems to actually build this solution that kind of, you know, amplifies what people have, uh, you know, didn't like about other systems and give them a solution for that. How did Macanta come to be, and kind of what's the history of this product?

Yeah, so, um, Macanta actually started as an add-on for Infusionsoft, and it was a way— and, um, a co-founder at the time who has since left the business, Peter Daly Dixon, he started Macanta as this add-on for Infusionsoft to solve two main problems. The one is this one-to-many relationship. So for example, I'm a vet you're my customer, but you have two pets. Therefore, I need to be able to drive automation and everything based on the two pets, but to one customer. So that side, but then also to simplify the interface. So what Macanta allows you to do is, depending on your role in the business, what you see on the interface when you log in is different because you see what you need to see to do your job. So that started as an add-on for Infusionsoft. Um, Pete showed it to me very early on, and at the time I was working with Infusionsoft doing implementations, and I got very excited about it and started running with it. And then in 2019, late 2018, early 2019, we sort of decided, well, we're sharing so many customers, we may as well be in the same boat. So we started focusing, and then we realized late in 2019, we, we accepted that the problem we're solving is not an Infusionsoft problem, it's a business problem. So we then abstracted away from Infusionsoft and launched as Macanta as a standalone platform in February 2020. So coming up for 18 months as completely standalone, and we still have— we've got a full Open REST API. We've got a Zapier integration, so we still have customers who link it to their email marketing platform of choice, and the, the business process automation is driven by Macanthal because our, our focus is very much on automating and running the business of the business rather than the marketing of the business.

As a past worker for Infusionsoft, I'm sure you know that there's a lot of onboarding options to kind of get familiar with the, the software and be able to learn the campaign builder and those sorts of things, even with key partners like Shaun and I. But so how does that onboarding process work for, for your system?

Yeah, so you've got different options. You can sign up for Macounter, and then there's nearly 100 videos now of how to do very specific tasks and a bit of explaining as to in what order you really want to do things. And that's— you can run with it. It's designed that you can do everything yourself if you choose to do that. We do have a couple of partners at the moment who we can put people in touch with to do the implementation for them, who don't not only work with Macanta but know all the ancillary systems and that as well, so they can do integrations where required. And then we also have the option if someone wants to, they can just contact us directly. At minimum, we can have a lengthy conversation about, well, discussing your business. This is the data structure we recommend and this is how you go about it. And then if it's suitable, then we can also in-house do the implementations and additional integrations that you might need.

Excellent. I mean, this sounds like a really great solution. Now, I got two things that I want to talk about on the website. The first thing that also stands out to me is when I clicked on pricing right now, you know, historically when you, when you go to a CRM or any, any software system, you click on pricing, there's like a tier chart and everything. You guys aren't that way. You've got this all of Makanta all of the time. One single pricing. Why did you go about doing it that way?

Primarily from our own personal frustration with the way software is priced, because invariably what happens— and, and we tried the three-tier thing, but we found putting the tiers together is completely arbitrary and there's no basis for it. So we would put stuff in a tier, and then you think, well, yes, but that means I can't do that. And so if I want to do one other thing then all of a sudden I have to upgrade the tier and, and go that way. So we just decided to go with, well, the best thing we can do for our customers is for them to have Macanta as a whole. And a bit behind the curtain, whether you have access to all of Macanta or 40% of Macanta or 80% of Macanta, the incremental additional cost for us is so negligible as far as maintaining a Macanta account is concerned that we don't really see any valid reason for having the tiers. And therefore it's just one price and you get all of Macanta and whatever we come up with to add to it. Our aim is certainly to stick to that model.

I love that model. I mean, that's, you know, it's really, you know, cut and dry as to what you're gonna going to pay when you go into it.

So, so Peter, why don't you tell us about the Pledge 1% program?

Yeah, so that's something that we decided quite early on in the business. So we currently, our pledge is for our revenue. So we have a pledge that 1% of our revenue we will donate to good causes. And what we're specifically doing is we're not waiting until we're a $100 million company to do that. We do it on a weekly basis, the money is allocated, and for us we do our allocations through an organization called B1G1, which is buy one give one. So all our revenue generated, 1% of that then goes to either literacy education for Talit girls in India, disadvantaged children, or we do mosquito nets for families in Kenya, I believe it is. And it just, it's just done on our recurring revenue. So there's actually emails going out to the customer thanking them every month when their subscription renews to just say you've donated so many mosquito nets or so many hours of literacy education. And it has a very interesting impact on all of us in the business. Where, yes, we are focused on growing the business and growing the revenue, but to a large extent, I want to get that 1% to be bigger, not in percentage terms, but just the actual value of it. And we're just about to reach our first 1,000 impacts, which is how the donations are counted, next week. So it's, it's, it's just a nice thing to be able to do.

I love it, and congratulations on hitting that milestone. So Peter, we've identified a problem that's facing a lot of business owners with that 2-minute tasks. We talked about ways to overcome that and your tool, and more so even overcoming the limitations of traditional CRMs of what you can do with Macanta. How can people get access to this? I know you have an option to create a free free account, tell people about your website and where they can find you.

Yeah. So you can find us at mccantascrm.com and you can sign up for a free account there. And it's a full, full functioning free account. The only point at which we will ask you for card details is if you want to add additional users. So you can, you can keep the account, you can configure it until it's right for you. It's only when you add your team into it that you start paying. And then also there's a contact form obviously on the website, but you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm quite easy to track down and happy to have a conversation there. And just to highlight on the pricing as well, our pricing model is not that you sign up for a number of seats. It is on a per-user basis, but it's specifically on a per active user basis. So if someone doesn't log in for a billing cycle, then you don't pay for that user. So if someone goes off on maternity leave or a sabbatical or anything like that, just because they are registered in your account as a user doesn't mean you keep paying for them. It's only if they log in within a billing cycle.

I love that you've automated the billing part of scaling it in there. I mean, that's awesome. Awesome. So Peter, thank you so much for spending your time with us today and telling us all about this. We'll definitely put the links to Macanta CRM in there, and then you've also authored a couple other books. We'll put those in the show notes as well where people can pick those up on Amazon. So again, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.

No, thank you, and I hope some of this has been useful to your listeners.