Rolando Rosas 4:56
days that’s awesome. Keeping Your communications, right is the key. And we’re gonna get into that today. It’s definitely one of those pillars that you want to have in your back pocket framework, whatever word you want to use in order to make your virtual teams hum. Right. So before Dave, before we jump into our three pillars, there’s a person I want to acknowledge and give big props, a friend of the show, and really good person all around DeLaine of Communication Ace, you know, she was helping me out the other day, through some things that I’m researching for a project that we’re doing. And you know, we’ve collaborated with her in with in the past, and that’s one of the beauties of having this type of podcast is that sometimes guests become more than just a guest, you know, you get to collaborate with them on projects, you get to, you know, talk to them and refer things to them, and you learn and she really went out of her way, recently with something that I was struggling with. And, you know, technology wise, is trying to get us this and this and this and this. And that’s why she’s the communication ace, and I want to give big props. Props to DeLaine. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, DeLaine. All right. So our three pillars. So the three pillars that we want to talk about today that are a backbone of our operation, and that we’ve found are key for having a remote team or teams, whether they’re hybrid or fully virtual, like ours, we’ve distilled that down into three distinct areas. The first of which we’re going to jump into is communications and collaborations, those two things are not the same. They may be similar, but not quite the same. So let me give you what the different what is communication and collaboration as it relates to teams, collaboration, and communication. This is the pillar and backbone of seamless interaction within our organization. It encompasses cutting edge tools, and platforms that enable real time messaging, video conferencing, and document sharing, as well as fostering efficient teamwork, regardless of boundaries. And oh, Dave, we’ve got folks that are in different countries that we collaborate with, we communicate with that we share. And some things we do in real time, because we’re all on at the same time, or sometimes we’re not we’re in different time zones, and some folks are up later or earlier. But we still have a way of piecing the work that we’re doing.
Dave Kelly 7:45
Yeah, and we’re able to do it efficiently. You know, I think Long gone are the days where everything is left in your email, right? Like, thank God, we don’t just have to rely on email,
Rolando Rosas 7:56
don’t you email, you know, they’ve, you say email. And I cringe a bit because maybe 10 years ago, I didn’t, maybe I did cringe, maybe not as much as today because things have changed and evolved so much. From when we went when I started this company, or 20 years ago, email was the dominant form to communicate if you weren’t picking up your cell phone. And that weirdly, was kind of a new thing 20 years ago. So email was the thing. And along that, along that if we were to use email and go with that, one of the things that is key. And from early in the early days TOS still today is a platform that we use on a daily basis. That’s a core, this bay area Company was founded in 1998. in Mountain View, California, it is known as Google. And more specifically, we use the Google workspace what used to be called G Suite or Google Suite. And I’m sure with time, that name will keep evolving, because they keep adding new wrinkles, new features, new capabilities. And from going from being just search and sheets, and Docs to its latest iteration, where they’ve actually incorporated the AI into the workspace feature. There’s going to be a huge evolution around how work gets done more efficiently, more rapidly, less mistakes, less errors. And anybody that works in sending communications or or documents back and forth can appreciate what they’re implementing inside. Inside of all these different Docs and Sheets and and meetings as well as Gmail. Now you can have now you have the ability to use AI within Google Chat TPT beat them to it earlier with the plugins but now you can have AI built by Google, help you write an email. And I think that’s a game changer, I think it’s going to put a lot of pressure on open AI and chat GPD, they’re not going to go away. But I certainly think it changes the game for folks that are in the business space is an education space, and then the government space that are real big clients, or medium sized clients of Google.
Dave Kelly 10:23
So I was prompted to try the AI within Gmail, just the other day. I didn’t know that I knew that they were going to be implementing that and letting that run. I didn’t try it myself. So I’m not exactly sure you know how that works or not. But you know, I’ve messed around a little bit with AI with writing emails. It’s difficult sometimes I think to get it within your actual voice and how you would speak because that’s how we want to convey the message. We’re still forming relationships, we’re trying to build trust. So we want the AI if we’re using it to still speak within our own voice, right?
Rolando Rosas 11:00
Absolutely. And I think we’re in inning number one, as it relates for users that are not that the extra large enterprises with 1000s of employees. A lot of these larger enterprises have had AI in the background, or have had AI tools. But when it came to medium, and small businesses, as well, as individual users, these tools weren’t out there. Until open AI ChatGPT came on market, and we’re gonna get to them in a little bit. But they really changed the game. And you know, Google is the granddaddy of all platforms when it when you’re using things with teams are using this remotely or it for sharing. And I think that with time, as we move into the second, third or fourth inning, I think the AI will allow you to write things in your voice. I know that today, ChatGPT allows you to put with the paid version of some instructions around that. So if you wanted to have the tone of Gary Vee, or you wanted to have the tone of writing, like Oprah Winfrey, that can be included on the output of the results of open API’s, ChatGPT. And plus a lot more. They have an enterprise version that allows you to do things where it’s it’s doing some security and safety around your data, and where it’s kept and pulling and pushing it into different places. So we’ll get to ChatGPT in a little bit. But I want to stay on Google because you know what they’ve, besides the Google Docs besides the AI, it allows you today, the plug in so many different things. And no one software, it’s going to do everything for an organization because may have a CRM that’s different. You may have a communications platform that’s different, you may store things somewhere else, you may have a Calendly, or calendar, I hope I’m saying that right? Or a different type of you may use Miro boards, all these different tools that may exist outside of Google now be part of that system, be part of that ecosystem, and all in one place so that you’re not doing a ton of context switching. So that if you’re going back and forth today, between Google and a separate calendar, or Google and zoom, or Google, and RingCentral. All of these things can exist together, all in one place within Google with simple plugins.
Dave Kelly 13:33
And we’ll end with with context switching kind of being a hot topic right now. I think people are realizing you know what, if we can keep people within a single app, it will help them stay focused so that they can do the task at hand, I won’t make up a statistic. It seems that most of the businesses in our space within the SMB space, we use, we use Google workspaces, kind of as our Yeah, that’s like the default. That’s how, you know, that’s how internal teams are communicating. That’s what we’re using for our email. That’s what we’re using for our cloud stuff. It’s easy to use, it’s all there. And it does exactly what we needed to do. And you know, it’s funny to say this, but I feel that because we do have a dispersed Jia, vastly dispersed geographical team of people. Something as simple as Google workspaces, has kind of built our own internal culture built our internal relationships. You know, it’s obviously it’s business, business business, but every now and then you can use that to put in a funny meme, a little gif, you know, some sort of an animation. And it does it kind of helps build some camaraderie, what I really like about it as a differentiator between a differentiator, but from communicating just via email, is you can you can see In the presence of your coworkers, whether or not they’re online, and I think when we’re sending instant messages or DMS through Google, that it’s, it’s more of a conversation like, Hey, if you’re available, here’s a question, can you help shed some light on the subject, whatever it might be. Whereas with emails, I find that a lot of us are, are dedicating a certain period of time within a day to go in and check emails. So again, it’s part of it’s still part of that. What’s that term? I just use the the content
Rolando Rosas 15:37
of the context text switching context and times, say, one time, here we go. 10 times.
Dave Kelly 15:45
But you know, I have learned a long time ago that you know, what was time management, don’t live in your emails, because if you live in your emails, you might, you might just be distracted all day long, I’m probably getting a fresh email every five to 10 minutes. So of course of a day, the people that are communicating with me via email, I believe that they realize that, you know what, we’re not going to get an instant response from Dave. But when we’re doing messaging through Google workspaces, it’s different. It’s like, you know what, this is a quick answer. I can, I can quickly get back to him and you know, whatever it might be. But again, I find a lot of businesses like ours are using this kind of as their as their default communication platform, and collaboration platform,
Rolando Rosas 16:33
no doubt. And Ori, hit me with pro tip numero uno for today. Let’s grab a handful of Chrome to one of the things that I absolutely love about the Google platform, because they have an Android device, I use Android as well. It works so well, when you want to take shortcuts. Let me tell you what I mean, I use my my device on the regular, it’s with me wherever I go. And one small thing that’s made a huge outsize difference is using the voice to text capability. So if somebody’s sending me a chat, or a text message, or an email for that matter, just about any form of thing that gets sent to me as a notification, I can respond using the voice to text feature, it is so much better than it used to be years ago where it made a bunch of errors. Now, it’s really accurate. It works even better if you have a headset with it, because it makes there’s little room for error when your voice is being captured directly by via the microphone. And it saves you from having to be hunched like this Dave. Oh, my God, this is this is all this is an awful thing to do all day long. Let me show you. Because phones and forearms get, you know, and I do work out but I’m my thumb’s would get tired. But so I just have my headset on. I’ll have my headset on. And I will start new do No, no, Dave, you know, did the did the tube, boom. There’s less Ticktick. And I really love that. So if you use your mobile a lot, you try out, give it give yourself the hardest thing about that date is not the tech itself is the habit. If you’re not into your into doing that, very quickly falls out of favor because you don’t do it. But the more you do it, do it one day, do it two, day three, four or five days, and you’ll realize wow, I’m getting more work done. So that’s a pro tip when you’re using Google or any any of the any of the apps for android with Google,
Dave Kelly 18:53
I had someone send me a message using voice to text and in the middle of it had a very strange mistake. And it was because the person that was talking to me was in a noisy area and they weren’t using. They weren’t using a headset, they were just kind of holding it like this. And it had picked up some of the background noise. And it basically got transcribed into something that it was just questionable. I kind of lost the gist of what she was saying to me because of this little error. And I said Listen, are you using a headset when you do that? Because she was apologizing? And she said no. And I was like alright, well said another pro tip. Make sure you’re wearing a headset when you’re using that voice to text.
Rolando Rosas 19:36
Absolutely. I we have somebody else that concurs with you in that right.
Dave Kelly 19:42
Little charm. Hey, he
Rolando Rosas 19:45
agrees with you on that man. It is it is some powerful stuff. So now let’s go into let’s continue talking about the communications and collaborations aspect. You know we If we can’t do without this next thing that I’m going to talk about it is, it is like the rudder on the boat. This company was founded in 1999, in Belmont, California, U. S. A. And as a pioneer of the VoIP world, it really came on the scene 99, Dave 1999, seems like 50 years ago. But nine, they came out with their platform. And for us, when we were looking Oh, we were looking for a way to improve how we communicated both internally and externally. This platform was a standout at the time, because VoIP was still at an infant stage back in the early 2000s. And so it gave us the capability to communicate internally. And also externally, and not having to have a physical phone system inside an office, which was the predominant way to communicate, if you wanted a communications system, you had to go buy it, own it, you had to keep it, you had to maintain it, you had to upgrade it, you had to do all that. They came, they were, you know, they were out in front with Voice over IP. And that’s Ring Central RingCentral today is not what it was back then when we started. But it’s evolved now to be a full blown platform with video. Ai with video, which we use all the time to record all of our meetings, full blown transcript, SMS, which by the way, is awesome, because when clients call you, or you call clients, it’ll say Global Teck?. Or it will say the name of the company, one their caller ID, as well as text messaging. So not if if you replace an employee or you get new employees, it represents your brand, rather than your personal phone. And you can keep both of those two things separate, which, as you start growing, you’re going to find the need, okay, maybe I need call logs, I need recordings I need now I want recordings of videos in as well as I want a summary of that video. And with the AI they’ve implemented in the background, it takes care of all those meet, no need for meeting notes anymore. It’s a thing of the past, you can notes. But why do that, again, it’s about being efficient. It’s about being as fast as you can be. And it’s about having that information at your fingertips. And it does that and checks off all those boxes, you need to be successful with remote teams.
Dave Kelly 22:51
Tie, it’s a huge game changer. I find one of the one of the things that I love of RingCentral. And I could I could probably name 50 different things. But one of the things that I love about RingCentral is it stops the the back and forth. Voicemail tag games, you know what I have RingCentral on my laptop, but I’m not always in my physical office. Sometimes I’m working somewhere else. Sometimes I just leave my my office. I also have RingCentral app on my telephone. So you know if I leave my office on the third floor, and now I’m in the first floor of my home and I get an inbound telephone call. I don’t have to run back to the office. I don’t have to let that go to voicemail. It’s right there on my time. All of my devices will ring at once. So I’m able to take up take that telephone call. go about my business. Not have to take a voicemail not have to call that back. I think that’s fantastic.
Rolando Rosas 23:47
Another that’s a that’s a Wow, isn’t that right? What? What?
Dave Kelly 23:53
Why I got one else for you a little John. Yeah. Sometimes when I sometimes when I am taking notes. So this happened just the other day we had a client that I asked him for his telephone number, so that I could get back to him. Or maybe it was his email, I forget it was one of the other. And whatever I wrote down. When I went to that’s what it was I was an email. I sent him an email and a bounced right back to me. So I tried the email a different way. And I was frustrated with myself because I couldn’t take out the note that I had taken. And I realized all of our calls are recorded so I was able to go back into the recording. Again, it’s right there so easy to access. Listen to the phone call. Fast forward to the part where you gave me the email address. Oh, it was.net not.com So I was able to follow back up with the customer. So it just saved us a little bit of hassle. Definitely a frustrated customers turned into a happy customer. All because of RingCentral. So it’s one of how long would you say been? We’ve been using the RingCentral platform alando
Rolando Rosas 24:57
easily 10 years? Yeah. That’s nice, easily 10 years. So it’s a Yeah, right around 10 years. And then,
Dave Kelly 25:08
as that, as you had mentioned earlier, the beautiful thing about Google workspaces is that it plugs right in. So if I send or you send, if anyone in our team were to send out a meeting on our calendar, we can bring that right into the RingCentral. Right, and
Rolando Rosas 25:25
it’s there, it’s inside the calendar. So every invite can go out. And it’s there so that the person getting the invite, joins the video meeting, without having to fish around for an email for that. And that’s also the other beauty of Google Calendar is that you can integrate other communications platforms. So we have teams zoom, and RingCentral integrated, because clients, some are on teams, you know, and especially when you’re talking large organizations, the people that are working there, use teams, and what I’ve found to be very useful. If you speak the language of the company you’re dealing with, whether they’re suppliers or colleagues or customers, if you’re using the system that they do, they’re more likely to more easily accept the invite more easily get on the meeting. And in today’s world, where seconds count, you may not your shop may not be a team shop, your organization may not be a team’s shop, but having that ability to have it in Google Calendar. So that a potential client that is using teams makes their life easier. Right. And that lends itself to less friction, which is going to get you that first, second or even third step down the road when it comes to these clients and communicating with them. Yes, sir. So RingCentral, absolutely key to success. Have no we have zero problems in recommending it. And if you’re looking to use something like that in your organization, we’d be glad to help you out and finding the best plan or plans that they have. So that you can get started with RingCentral as well.
Dave Kelly 27:11
And Rolando, the last part of our communication and collaboration pillar. Now this is a tool that you recommended to me years ago. I use it every day, I use it a couple of times a week, it is a huge game saver. Why don’t you tell us about loom
Rolando Rosas 27:30
this company was founded in 2015. In San Francisco, seems like a lot of these companies are from the Bay Area they are it’s crazy that so many are born there or headquartered there now. But this loom when it came out, also was game changing in that I could record a video easily, that’s the word easily, and then easily share it. Because people do that. Do things at different hours. And you have sometimes a need to be able to explain things with a video, whether you’re talking about product, you’re working on a project, or communicating externally with somebody that is collaborating. And doing that in a two minute video allows you to avoid endless email back and forth. And one of the rules that I have in internally is, if it’s going to take more than three sentences to communicate an idea, say it on video, because you’re going to save yourself, as well as the person you’re communicating with a lot of frustration, because in video, you can see you can show you can also show docs, now you can have a screen sharing where you’re showing exactly what the issue could be an A we’ve used it extensively with support teams. So for Amazon, for example, there’s, for those that work with Amazon on Amazon support issues, you know that it is not an easy thing to do, it should, but it’s not always easy. And so being able to have a one to two minute video on here’s the problem. I click here, here, here, and boom, it all falls apart. Or I need you to see this. This is what I’m talking about. Let me circle it in the screenshare. It says a whole lot of frustration, because now whenever they share it internally, or forward that to an internal team, it avoids on that side of the equation going back and forth. And now your trouble ticket takes a week or two or even longer. And so having something like loom is game changing, for speeding up support issues, speeding up the collaboration, removing errors in communication. And for that loom is one of those platforms that we have internally for in our tech stack.
Dave Kelly 29:48
Yep. You know, like you said, if you if you’re trying to explain something on your on a website or on a project, whatever it might be, you can share your screen you can record all that together, I’ll tell you the old school way of doing that was screenshots. So you’re making multiple screenshots. You may or may not have been naming those files appropriately. So the person that you’re sending it to has four files that just say the word screenshot number 123, whatever it might be, and it was harder to communicate with screenshots. That’s old school, that is yesterday. And I’ll tell you the value for the dollar. Alonzo loom is where it’s at. It’s very inexpensive, saves a ton of time,
Rolando Rosas 30:35
and also integrates into multiple platforms, so that you can reduce and overuse that word. Again, they’ve context switching. If you could reduce people going, jumping in and out of applications, you’ve saved yourself and your organization, tons of time and money. So loom does interoperate or integrate to things like clique up things like Slack, and a whole bunch of other apps as well, so that you don’t have to spend time going back and forth as much. Alright, Dave, let’s continue this discussion, and we’re going to jump into pillar number two.
Dave Kelly 31:16
All right, well, I know so as we dig a little bit deeper into our software stack, we’re going to come into our second pillar that we call project management. This is our project management pillar project management. I’ll tie in a an our tech driven world is all about smart planning, task tracking, and of course, resource allocation, our software stack that we’re going to talk about, it’s a robust, it’s a, it provides robust solutions, to ensure that our projects are executed with precision from initial ideation to final delivery, enhancing productivity, and of course, most importantly, meeting meeting deadlines. So we’re gonna get into this right now, you won’t believe you won’t believe how helpful this next application is. It’s called clickup. You know, click ups, an interesting, interesting organization. The company was founded in 2017. In San Diego, California, where they say it never gets above 76 degrees most awful place. Beautiful place. Shout out. I got I got some family that’s out there. I love visiting
Rolando Rosas 32:32
down the air area. Dave, friend of the show, Tim Ash lives in San Diego.
Dave Kelly 32:38
I didn’t know Tim Ash actually had full time residency. I see every time I see him. He is in somewhere new.
Rolando Rosas 32:47
He was just in Brazil. So if you don’t follow Tim, and you want to just nerd out on what is he called neuro neuroscience, like a neuro psychology around marketing. Boy, he is the guy to follow on that he’s got some very interests, storytelling and how that works in the brain and autowired. So big props. Let’s do this. Big props to
Dave Kelly 33:13
the mash, author of Primal Brain, we’ll put some links below. So you guys can check it out. I don’t know how many languages he has this written in. But I know it’s, it’s more than one. Yeah, shout out, shout out to Tim ash. You know, so let’s let’s dive in quickly with the first application here is clickup. So you won’t believe what clickup can do for you. So instead of having, instead of keeping all of your information, you know, stored an email, Slack or chat, you can take your team of one or many within a place where you can kind of keep all of your projects together. It’s essential for business, it’s essential for hours, that are involved with planning, managing and executing goals. You know, the huge emphasis here is on the execution part.
Rolando Rosas 34:06
Absolutely. You know, and that’s where a lot of projects fall down. And Dave Eno, never loved the word project management, you know, that. It just seems, oh, it just doesn’t. Because there’s so much that happens. I would really label that this is me my feeling, it should just be called Task Management. Because every project has many things going on. And there are things that are quite projects, let’s just say they’re not projects, they’re tasks. They’re things that you do, or actions that are required, because somebody did something else. And that in itself is not quite a project, but it’s a task. So if a customer tries to get in touch with us, or a patient tries to get communicate with you, or you get a notification or an alert, that in itself is not a project but those are tasks that can be tracked, they can be managed, they can organize your time and day and weeks and months, just because some action occurred. Now in the classical sense of project management, they, yeah, you may have a product launch team, you may have a engineering team, and they have a sub task or tasks that they’re trying to accomplish. But I would wrap all these other things that are operational in nature, into task management, or what is classically called Project Management. And clickup is a beast of a platform that can do way more than when we started working on it. And about two years ago, it really was kind of intimidating. And sure, probably not for somebody that’s got just one or two people under management. It’s really designed for different departments, as well as different teams. And those teams within themselves can be comprised of two or three people. But if you’ve got multiple teams, this is perfect. Because now we can keep all those teams, especially if they’re all working towards a goal. And they all have a separate piece of the pie. It keeps all of those teams together, working towards that common goal. Rather than having bits of information on email over here, having something else in Slack, having something else over here where other people can’t give visibility that are part of a project. And so it rolls all of these things up into one thing. You know, Dave, if we were going to give a pro tip, there’s a couple that I wanted to give out, I think we’re on pro tip, numero dos, Ori, here comes a Pro tip. Pro tip numero dos. If you use clickup, and haven’t discovered the power of forms, what they call forms, this little trick will simplify so many things, you can create a form inside of clickup. And if you have another team member, or somebody in another department, where you’re trying to, let’s say create tickets or want to put something that can be tracked, as well as emails that may come into that project, or that task, you can make this very simple form three or four fields, rather than the whole list of tasks, your teammate or colleague or even department will get that form or that information, they can then fill in that information with whatever gaps that are necessary, according to that team, and whatever those goals are going to be. Now, the other part about this is that you can also put information that is normally put into this form, let’s say it’s ticket taking complaints, whatever it is, you can put that on autopilot as well, we recently uncovered a way to get emails into that task. So inside of clickup, there is a virtual email for every task. And so if you have an external communications, that also need to be part of this task, it can be lumped into that and you can use that virtual email as part of your CC so you’re communicating with a customer or a patient or a colleague, this then every time that email is generated that virtual email as long as it isn’t this CC goes funneling right back to that task. But Dave, this is the part that I like more. Let me tell you what, one of our, our I just you know, I don’t even want to say his name because I don’t want people to pluck them out of our organization. Our our internal programmer, developer slash designer, uncovered a way to make my life easier, and I think a lot of people and I’m going to dish up, or it give me pro tip numero Tres, grande full A pro tip. I don’t like emails, I really don’t, I’m just gonna put that out there. I have grown to like, the instant communication, the seamless ability to talk and be on video with other people since we’ve really you know, that’s really kind of at the base of our organization. There’s a way for you to stop reading every email and moving that into clickup for the folks that need to so we get regular notifications, whether it’s on Amazon, or other apps like helium 10. And this could apply to any app, and you have one app that needs to talk to another that information isn’t shared cleanly a lot of times and sometimes not at all. There’s no way for app A to talk to be and you’re in the middle. And you’re the one that’s doing the back and forth, because it comes on email or some other medium. Well, did you know that with clickup, you can take things that are in your inbox today, have those funneled back to the appropriate person using the form that I talked about or others, and then that gets filled in automatically for the person receiving it inside of clickup. So again, email for in my case, email came in that email then gets pushed to another app that we’re going to talk about in a little bit. And that app, Zapier pulls that information, and sends it off into clickup. In a way that’s formatted for the intended person who is normally responsible for that information, or has to take the action, instead of me having to go and click up and fill in that form, decide what needs to be done. And then you know, somehow that will happen. But this is like a magical thing. I don’t have to read every email anymore. We already have established this type of email information regularly goes to Person X. And but in order to get to Person X, we want to put it in click up. So it’s tracked this manage, we can do follow up and all kinds of other things. I don’t have to go into click up and type in every single time, it does it for me, saves me at least 20 minutes, if not more, every time I get some of these emails that pertain to me that I’ve been the one trying to decide on what to do. And throughout the day, I would say it saves me on average about one hour a day. That’s so if so if you have Dave, I know, we just started doing this right and our our guy started helping me with this. And we’re rolling out more of these types of, say things that we can put on autopilot, I can just free up my day not having to read every single email. Some are more important than others, but some require me to have an input in it. And this just gives me so much more time a day. And I know that we’re just scratching the surface on this with this type of way of extracting information from email to get things from one app to another, then to the appropriate person that needs to take action on it without that other person because then you know what they’ve That saves me an hour saves them at least 10 to 15 minutes filling out the clickup thing on the task that they would do. So you think about for me about 15 to 20 minutes on that task, that other person 15 You know no more, if you’re in the keyboard economy, Dave, there’s a lot of ways to cut down the num number of times you got to pick this, this guy up or type in. And because that’s just to me, it’s like wasted time, if I’ve got to let my fingers keep typing a bit, there’s other tasks that I could do that are higher ROI and they’ll get excited here talking about this I’m getting I’m like losing my words,
Dave Kelly 43:09
feature just came out, right. So newer features just new, newly discovered.
Rolando Rosas 43:14
For us, it’s newly discovered, because look, the more productive and the more efficient you can be as an organization, that’s more profits in in your pocket. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want more dollars and cents in your pocket, you want more revenue, you want to squeeze out every dollar, you gotta find a way to cut down those tasks that people spend time every day doing, that can be put on autopilot, and so much of that a lot of things that require a keyboard. If you work in the keyboard economy, there’s a lot that can be extracted, so that most of the thinking doing analyzing can be left to the human. Rather than just typing stuff in all day long.
Dave Kelly 43:56
Listen, if someone was trying to sell me, anything that could save me and my team an hour a day, I would be hard pressed to not want to explore that deeper. So with clickup. Again, if you’re running the team, you need some project management software, it’s certainly something that you need to explore. Lorenzo it sounds like you might be teaching a master class with clickup Pretty soon.
Rolando Rosas 44:18
Yes, I have to get our our guy, let’s call him G. G, you know who you are big props, big props to the mastermind of all things coding, and was able to provide this and now we’re gonna roll this out more and more within the organization. As as it’s been a huge time saver for a few of the folks that we’ve tested this app with so I’m sure if you’re listening to this, it will also save you a ton of time as well as your teams. Now imagine, imagine if we rolled this out 1015 2030 people all in the organization, if everybody said is an hour a day, that’s 30 hours? Yeah, over a week, 150 hours over the course of a of a month, under 50 times for 600 hours that would have been spent on typing. Now it’s done and it’s done, it’s done for you. And that, by the way, is not even without using ChatGPT. That’s, that can do something. So we’re gonna jump into that in a minute. So, but Dave, yeah, I’m pumped. I’m pumped, pumped pumped about this, because we’re just scratching the surface.
Dave Kelly 45:33
Sure. Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s not necessarily the full automation, but it’s that mundane task of entering from overheat from the email into clickup. That’s the boring, that’s the boring part of the fun
Rolando Rosas 45:48
tasks is to be paid $100,000 a year to spend a lot of time and read, I’m trying to remember why I read it, that a lot of our day, if you’re in the keyboard economy, like you and I are like something like 40% of our day is just the keyboard and typing and reading emails. And let’s try to get that from 40 down to 10 MB, so that we can then spend that extra 30 actually working on the project actually executing like you’re talking about it, because that is where projects fall apart. I worked at Altria, which is was known as Philip Morris. So the big conglomerate, international largest tobacco company in the world, their thing, the thing that was the mantra inside of the organization, was execution, execution, execution execution. And that’s why we’re that’s one of the reasons why a lot of the brands that they own are either one or two in the category. And it’s been that way for years, because it’s the DNA, it’s execute, execute, execute, so things don’t fall through the cracks, things don’t fall apart. And there’s a consistent flow of Project, Project iteration, design, sales, marketing, and it’s an executing on all of those plans all the way from beginning all the way through the end, right and click up can help do that I you know, I wouldn’t have believed that I would not have believed that. Because we weren’t, we weren’t using it. We weren’t doing anything with it. But I can see how a lot less is falling through the cracks by by keeping everybody on task. So task management is the word that I would use. And looking at this from a holistic sample of rather than just project like product launching and listings and different things like that.
Dave Kelly 47:40
Well, you know, we’re gonna move into this next pieces of software that we use within our project management pillar. In this application, this is called Air table. It’s similar to click up in a way. Air table, this company was founded back in 2012, also a West Coast organization. They’re actually founded in San Francisco, California, Bay Area, baby. Lot, man, so many organizations out there in California. What do we what do we like most about air table?
Rolando Rosas 48:19
This is big for our media efforts. So social media, content writing, video creation, video, it doesn’t do the video editing, but helps with the phases of the video process, the different phases of the the content creation process. It also acts as a database for a lot of that, keeping those things the status of what these things are. And the other thing is that it can be integrated with other apps, so that you can push and pull for example, you can integrate ChatGPT into it. So if you want to have some content creation, or you want to write things, and you want to use ChatGPT aka Eddie, we call it Eddie around here, Eddie can perform these tasks inside of air table. So if you’re trying to keep written content in here so that other folks in the organization can use and reuse it, whether they be translations from English to Spanish or English to another language or another language into English. This does this very well. Lastly, Dave, big, big on time saving. And so it can put other tasks into autopilot as well. So you can create notifications. So let’s say you finish, you finish something, it gets handed off to me for review, I review it, I update it, and I change the status to ready for publication. And now it goes back to another team member who distributes the content so it also helps with content distribution. So you can, it can act as your central hub for everything content creation. And we’re just, you know, we don’t use it for some of the other aspects with for content creation, social media distribution, right, the process of getting content from A to Z delivered and put into the right places. It absolutely is like a sheets on steroids. So Google Sheets is good. But it has its limitations. This allows you to do things in more graphical, in a more graphical manner, like graphics and images and things like that, that is, is is not well executed on Google Sheets, right. So that’s kind of what it’s for. Using it as a database repository, a hub and a workflow. Engine is I would call it,
Dave Kelly 50:50
one of the things I really like about air table was you can, you can change the views. So we all have different tasks that are assigned to us. If you wanted to see a filtered view of tasks where I just want to see myself and someone else on my team just want to see where we are with different projects, you can, you can quickly build a filter, decide the view that you want to or the layer that you want it to come down at, and have a real easy way to see kind of where you’re at. So you can kind of measure easily measure where you are against your goals. You know, we had a meeting recently, and the question came up it was how many finished projects I won’t be too specific. But how many projects did we finish for whatever the goal may might have been, we have to do 100 of these projects this year, we want to get 100 completed. And without a lot of effort, you can quickly see here we are on tat we are on track to meet or exceed our goals. And you know, the the other helpful part with within clickup Sorry, the other helpful part with an air table is when you have this, we have a large team. When you’re when you’re making comments, everything is kind of there’s a history with every comment. There’s a history with every kind of move of a project where it goes from, you know, step ABC. So we know kind of the last time somebody touched it, and we can see the challenge or any notes that that person might have had, so that we can go back we can manage it, fix the problem if there is one and then get the task completed.
Rolando Rosas 52:32
It’s great for that, because there’s no like, oh, that person or I never got that. Alright, so that you commented two weeks on it. So you looked at something, right. So it’s a way to also keep folks accountable on what their role is within different tasks or one task. You know what I do love something about airtable that I want to give as a pro tip, so are we what are we are Numero cinco numero sace number, quatro, numero quatro, we are okay, give me another pro tip, here comes a pro tip
if you’re somebody that has ideas, and you want a centralized place to keep those ideas, and you want to do it in a very easy way, there’s a ton of things you could have tried a bunch myself, I found air table to be wonderful. Let me tell you why. Air table as a very good mobile app, and I have this device, this smartphone with me just about everywhere I go. And one of the most difficult things that you could do is try to keep all those tasks in one place in a coherent manner. With dates and everything. The air table app is my best friend when it comes to the ideas like all of a sudden I’m somewhere and inspiration hit me, or why we should do this, or we should do that, or something we haven’t tried. Easy, it opens up, it opens up the tab that I need. And within our table, you can make it as complex as you want. But I love the fact that you also make it very simple and very easy. And for me, I just click it, it goes right to where I need it, I just click the plus sign. And I literally talk and it takes and it’s in there it’s in the spreadsheet and now the rest of the team can see that idea. easily they can all go there and and all the ideas are there and I can go back and filter and sort based on on on the on the note that I put in there. But I love the fact of how easy it is to use on the mobile app and the fact that you can share those super easily and that at any time you can come back and look for it with the different fields if it’s a video idea or or a podcast idea, or a work idea, anything that can be used, it’s there easily. Again, it’s all about removing friction. And for me, it removes the friction from using other note taking type of things, task related things that aren’t so much of the projects that are operational in nature that our ops folks use something different. But when it comes to this, I absolutely love it. So check out the airtable app if you haven’t used it before.
Dave Kelly 55:30
So Rolando, so you’re so what you’re sharing is that it’s also somewhat of a brainstorming tool for you. Absolutely, Ross, I should say, because kind of throw it out there. You have, we don’t all have to get together, everyone can kind of read it. It’ll turn into gears a little bit. And then when we do all come together, we can reference it, discuss it. And it’s not lost on a like you said it’s not lost on just a no piece of paper on or a piece of paper. Yes,
Rolando Rosas 55:57
yes, no, it’s in once you try it, and you you get yourself in a pattern of just doing it, it just becomes second nature. And that’s really the most difficult thing with any of these apps. Any application any platform is, is the I haven’t used it fact, or I’m not familiar with it, or I’m scared to use it. Once you take the first, second and third time in use in that way. It just becomes like this is where I gotta I gotta put this down. Right. And so I reach for it. In seconds I have it in because the smartphone is almost always with most people. Anything that can allow you to put your ideas into here will eventually gain better traction than if you know you’re writing in on a piece of paper. And it’s sometimes you know, it’s redundant. I’ll just put something on the note. Because that’s it. But I almost always go back here. Because I know I can go back and oh, I yeah, I had that idea what? Oh, it’s pretty awesome.
Dave Kelly 56:56
So moving on to the number three app in our second pillar of project management. You understand this one better than most people that I spoke to Rolando so I’m gonna have you take Zapier. So tell us about Zapier.
Rolando Rosas 57:18
This company was founded in 2011. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco, California, USA, if I can channel one of the great announcers of all time, Michael Buffer, you I love how he does in California US survey. If you want magic to happen inside your organization, whether it’s whether it’s an organization of two people, or an organization of 2000 or more. Zapier is the key to getting more work done. You want more work done, you have to have a or something like it. We just happen to use Zapier because it could make magic happen that normally wouldn’t have happened. For example, we were talking about clickup, we were talking about email, and other apps, when one app can’t talk to another. Usually the default is email, an email can clog up and get all kinds of stuff everywhere. But Zapier can take tasks that require brainpower, requires typing, require even communication, and can take multiple steps of things, and shrink that down so that you don’t ever have to touch it again. So it’s like adding an army of workers to your organization. They never get tired. They keep working, they can take on more tasks. And you know what, Dave, the best part about this, it saves money and time to the organization. So at the end of the day, it can create a more profitable scenario for an organization. Because again, if we could take that 40% that spent on the keyboard, reading emails, and the like, reduce that down to about 10% 5%. Now, we have used our most valuable asset which is the brain of every single employee to work on higher level tasks. Our productivity jumps when we do that, so Zapier, let me just tell you, so if you do anything like logistics, anything with management, sales, accounting, shipping, it will remove the friction of these many repetitive and mundane tasks as well as complex tasks. So let me give you another example. We sell on Amazon, and Amazon communicates like there’s no tomorrow. So there’s a ton of alerts because things happen every single friggin day on Amazon. And a lot of these alerts and notifications are sent via email, we use other apps as well, that pull information from Amazon. And so now on one hand, we have Amazon. On the other, we have applications, apps like helium 10. And we also have our project management like, like clickup, it’s able to connect the dots between those three different things that are sometimes in three different places, and sometimes overlap. Because you may get multiple notifications on the same thing, they all come in the email, and then you decide what to do, it will sort all these things out for you, and say, Oh, this is for our compliance officer. Send that to them. Although I’m copied on it, I may not be the one to take the action, it may be somebody else. And they will nicely neatly sorted out and go through 12345, or six, seven steps, get it to the person fill out the form that that person needs. In this case, let’s say its compliance officer, she has the task already filled out for her in click up, she never had to go in and start typing it in and, you know, the done for her. And now she takes the action that she needs and executes on those steps based on what we’ve prefilled out for her. In order to make sure that these steps when it comes to some Compliance Certification, they get taken care of absolutely love it. And we’ve do a whole lot. On the back end with logistics, we allow multiple warehouses, and they’re all their different systems to roll up into our centralized database. And you know what, we get a nice, consistent bit of information from all these different locations, all these different partners, all these different suppliers. So from a logistics standpoint, it is wonderful. I can’t say enough about it. Because it really is the key for scaling an organization you want to scale you want to grow, you want to try to really use those resources. Dave, I think every organization is under pressure to be profitable. And something like 50% of business. According to small business administration, 50% of all businesses go out of business at year number five. Part of that is that it’s very difficult as a startup to manage cashflow. And it’s very difficult depending on the industry to get to profitability. And the key is to get to profitability as quickly as possible. So one way to do that and reduce expenses, is by trying to put as much as you can on autopilot. And depending on your projects, depending on your task, depending on the industry, there’s a lot again, if a lot of work is done on this device, this keyboard, there’s a lot that can be cut out in terms of the fat, I’ll call it fat, because we can cut out a lot of tasks from the people that are valuable to organization so that they can spend more time producing rather than keyboarding. Dave, I’ll call it keyboarding. So Zapier, you can get developers to help you there. There’s all kinds of organizations that that that work around there. We’ve developed our own way of custom apps and things like that. So I highly recommend it. It’s really, it’s got to be in your toolkit. Without it, you’re at a disadvantage as an org, especially if you’re a small business, you want to leg up. You need to have somebody in your organization that is working on your behalf to create these things that can be put on autopilot for you. The more you do it, the sooner you do it, the more profitable you’ll be
Dave Kelly 1:04:01
sort of Rolando with these project management, software applications, that can be somewhat overwhelming to business owners. Where do you suggest they look? First, you can’t look at all of them at the same time. So if you had to start with one, which one would you start with?
Rolando Rosas 1:04:18
You gotta go after the low hanging fruit. Then I’m going to give big props to a friend of mine. Big props to my friend Chad Rubin is doing a heck of a job with his new venture called Profasee. He years ago said, you have to look at what you do on a daily basis. And somehow keep track of either record yourself or making notes. Do that for about a week. And you will find where you’re spending most of your time on. And once you do that, you can dis you Oh, then you have the information because you’re not aware you’re not always aware of your own actions. But once you have a way to look back Knock on the jeez, yeah, I spend like half of my time doing email, the other half on on phone calls, the other half the other 25%. On other things, then you know where to go. And for a lot of people that’s going to be inside your inbox, the inbox is the place to look, I, for me, that’s where I look first, to try to cut down these tasks, then, are there things in other apps that we just can’t get? What if we could get this is always the question. What if we could take this thing and move it over here where we need it? That’s the other piece where some of this magic happens? How can I get this data over from here to here, if you’re asking yourself, and you say, and you’re saying yourself, I wish I could and filled in, I wish I could, you probably could do it right now. And with the help of Zapier, it could help you fill in that blank, I wish I could send a notification every time to my patients. When when these series of events happen 123. And it can be very complex. In some cases, it can be 10 steps, I want this to happen, but only if it’s on Monday. But if it’s on Tuesday, before this time that I want to be in and then I want that to go to it can be as complex as you want it as well, as simple as you want. But the first thing I would do, check that inbox, I guarantee you there are things that you’re getting on a regular basis that require some action, that’s the low hanging fruit. The second part would be the I wish I could allow this to happen over here. And that be connected. That’s the second place to go, where you’re going to then find even more magic, because then you’re going to uncover like, wait a minute, we could do that. What else? What can we work with? Right? Right? What what other things? Are we wasting time on? That something could just do this for us and generate X generate a form, fill out a form fill out a notification, all these other things? And you know, I every year I feel like, why didn’t we know that? Why? Why didn’t somebody tell us that? Why didn’t Why didn’t we do this thing sooner? Right? I feel like it does sometimes like why we’re freaking idiots for not knowing this. But that’s kind of just what happens as you start, you know, asking yourself that question, what else can we do? What else can we do? And that’s that’s really kind of for me? I’m kind of a curious person, I want to know, what else can we do? And I’m always asking, gee, gee, can we do this? Is this possible, and then he’ll come back and tell us, you know, pause, this, this is going to take some time, or this is going to be an hour of art might two hour 10 hours, three days a week, then at some point, you start getting into these really complex projects that take more time that aren’t an hour or two. And then you start making determination, if especially if you’re using an analogy, there’s companies that are do this big props to folks like Data Automation, that that do these types of projects as well. You start determining, is it worth the money? And for us on the larger, more complex projects? It’s all about how fast can we get the ROI to let’s say, a project cost 10k. If we were already spending 10k a month, to do the things that we needed to do, because of this automation or putting these things on autopilot, and one thumb or two, we already make up our money, it’s a no brainer. But then if it’s going to take, let’s say that project or tasks, were about 1k a month, then we know, okay, 10 months, that’s when we’re going to recoup our money. Is there something else that we can get a better bang for our buck? Sooner or faster? If the answer is yes, then we go to that, if not, okay, maybe we lower it in terms of priority to move into the things that are more ROI or better ROI producing, but that’s how I would look at the spectrum. Low hanging fruit in box number two, I wish I could exe and then number three, what are those higher, more complex tasks that may be required 20 steps, and an a lot of and more logic if n if and or statements. Those are then the ones that are all ultimately have a big payout, but also require a little bit more hand holding and a lot more. Well thought out plan in order to get that done. And we’ve done several of those, especially on the logistics side. Never simple, never easy, lots of moving parts. But at the end when we’re finished with those big logistical complex tasks and put those on autopilot, they have big payoffs. So
Dave Kelly 1:09:42
to wrap up our second pillar so for the project management pillar, our software stack clickup airtable, Zapier, a Rolando, you did a great job. Bringing some of these applications into the team. I know it saves us a ton of time helps us be successful. It helps us put out some quality work. I’m glad I’m, I’m very impressed with the people that you’ve worked with in the past. And some of the advice that has been shared back and forth. Without that, we probably wouldn’t have some of the success that we’re having.
Rolando Rosas 1:10:15
No. And you know, it isn’t glamorous, there’s nothing glamorous and doing automation or putting things on our pot, it’s nothing glamorous about doing back end projects on clickup, nothing zero. But this next part is a little more of the sexy part, this is more of the glamorous part, this is what people actually see. A lot of times if they’re following us are checking our content out on social media. And that is our third pillar, and that is content creation. So let me tell you how we define content creation. It empowers the team to create captivating, and visually engaging content efficiently. And we use a suite of tools that are for graphic design, video editing, Content Scheduling, and those tools amplify our brand’s presence through the use of storytelling within the digital realm. So that’s how we look at content creation, and one of our pillars in the first company, Dave, that we have to let people know we’ve what what do we do we know right now, where we’re recording this on stream yard. Stream yard is a company that was founded in 2018, in Philadelphia, PA USA. And it does more than just record video, it allows you to do it easily. It allows anybody from the CEO all the way down to the most techie person in the organization, to record video, whether it’s solo, whether it’s with one guest or many guests. And it also allows you to easily stream out live content through multiple channels. And that will for us was really the key at first when we how can we easily stream live to YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, all at the same time. And stream yard was the answer to that. The second thing here is that stream yard is extremely reliable. Now we’ve tried other platforms, a lot of other good ones. But what we found was that the consistency, the uptime availability, along with the ease of use, again, as stress, ease of use here, it gives you the best bang for your buck. So if you are in the company, if you are already in the concentration game, or you’re trying to get into it, it’s relatively inexpensive. As of this recording, the company, the parent company of stream yard, was bought out by RingCentral. So at some point, we may see some changes to stream yard. And hopefully, I’m hoping because we use RingCentral, as well see that integrated into RingCentral in some way, shape or form, I have no idea I’m just speculating. And that way, the RingCentral and stream yard platforms will be unified, and there’d be a way to use and move information between them. That would be gold, because RingCentral has that AI component on the back end for transcription reading and a whole lot of other stuff. So Well, I’m excited to see what happens here with RingCentral in the coming months.
Dave Kelly 1:13:40
You know, you bring up a good point. I, I watch a lot of b2b podcasts. And I tend to find that there’s a lot of folks that are just kind of streaming a Zoom meeting. So when you incorporate something like stream yard, you can just elevate that, elevate that to the next level. Makes it you know, you don’t I don’t think podcast should necessarily look like a just a meeting. You know, and I think I’m pretty sure you and I may have started, you know, in that in that world, you know, kind of just making it, it was just a meeting. That’s just what we had. Were able to kind of break out of that a little bit. But I’m seeing a lot of businesses that are getting into the the live streaming media world content creation, they’re kind of they need to be exposed to some of these other tools like stream yard, because it’s just coming off as a webinar. You know, I think what we’re doing is what we’re trying to accomplish is more than just that webinar shield unlock.
Rolando Rosas 1:14:44
Right and I can’t remember who told us but I love this phrase that video is the new calling card or the new business card. So having video that’s just beyond the zoom type of thing, where it’s just you and a laptop, looking up your nose, you have a better image, whether it’s on the video and audio, like I have this microphone, it just presents your brand in a better light. And if we were to steal Chris Voss is methodology on the last impression being the lasting impression, not so much. First impression is good. He says, First impression is good. But the last impression is the lasting impression. So if the last impression, a client, a patient, a colleague, somebody in another department has a view is what they see on screen. And I’m like, yeah, they’re gonna remember you a little bit Sure, they’re gonna have a little bit better impression, you’re interviewing for a new position a new job, or whatever it is, you are interviewing other guests. We’ve had a lot of guests think that you know, we have some really high production but it’s it’s basically at the at, we do have somebody in the cloud helping us already. He’s, he’s our producer here. And he does a lot of all these wonderful graphics. And this is all within stream yard. So like the pro tips that we’ve had on today and others in putting you would normally in the past and he’s you know, he’s an he’s a video and audio specialist, you really needed a high end system, software that you’d like OBS for those, that you you have a lot of these elements in stream yard. So if you’re using OBS, it’s wonderful does a lot of stuff. But for many people that are scratching and getting into the content game, this is a good entry point. And more than a good point, if it does a lot, probably 90% of what you’re going to need when you’re streaming live, or recording, and then handing that video off in post production to an editor. Alright, so
Dave Kelly 1:16:50
talking about post production. Let’s get into our next, our next app here with our content creation pillar. And this is from this is called Canva Canva. This company was founded in 2012. They’re actually based in Sydney, Australia. Right around the corner, Down Under, down under. Now, Canvas also gone through some changes in the past, but if I was to summarize Canva it’s, it’s where you can get your digital assets, digital assets, right, your your B roll video, your different images. Music Sound Effects? Yeah. Huh, what am I missing?
Rolando Rosas 1:17:45
Well, are things that you would use for posting on social media, just just about anything that whether it’s an infographic, whether it’s a slide deck, there’s a lot that you can do in Canva, that you couldn’t do two or three years ago. And Dave, I will also add something I saw this morning, there’s a new plugin for ChatGPT. That’s a Canva plugin. So you can ask, and you can type it in. Once you have this, you have to have the paid version of ChatGPT right now, now, in order to take advantage of this, and it will bring up you want an image of x, I want you to create a I want an infographic for Black Friday, it will create an infographic or have several. And then a link appears inside of Chachi btw, and it will take you automatically to Canva. So if you want to do further editing, you go straight away. So it’s really seamless. And you can customize it. So Canva can do a lot for organization. I love the simplicity. I know a lot of folks in our team use it for different things. And it just levels up the game, you know whether you’re doing a presentation and using it for slides, or just looking for a very inexpensive way to use multiple media in one app, so that you can then deliver that content over online or to clients or that kind of thing. It’s really, really powerful. Yeah, and what it could do for you.
Dave Kelly 1:19:18
And it’s so much fun, you know, you can really unleash your creativity, you know, using Canva. So Canva has been a very helpful tool for us here at Global Teck. You know, think about it like Adobe Photoshop, but much easier to use, you know, Adobe Photoshop, if you’ve ever used it, it’s very complex software. What we use Canva for here is somewhat of a substitute for Adobe Photoshop. We use it for our social media posts, product images, slideshows, presentation graphics for thumbnails and things like that. It’s a very helpful tool. Our editors use it on a daily basis and I’m not too sure we could be pumping out We don’t, I’m not sure we’d be able to pump out the quality of our content without using a resource like Canva. But after Canva Rolando, now we get to go into the real fun stuff. And that’s our editing software.
Rolando Rosas 1:20:14
This company founded in 2017, San Francisco, California, USA, has revolutionized video and audio editing. Prior to that, you really needed to nerd out and be a photo of a video editor or an audio editor, in order to really dial in the audio to make it sound rich and clear and crisp, you really needed to have years of experience in video editing to get something that looks professional. Well, what the script did, was made editing easy, and fun. Because now you can edit video using the words or the transcript, and it will not destroy anything, it won’t, things won’t crash on you. And you can basically edit it just by reading the transcript, which anybody can do. And it does it in a way where when you’re splicing things or cutting the text out, it’ll make sure that those words, the next words all match in a seamless way. Now, I gotta tell you, Dave, I’ve played around with it in my videos that I’ve made myself. And the more I’ve used it, the more comfortable I’ve got. But that’s been what I like about it. I’m not a video editor, but I can kind of what’s that word, everybody, you can, you can you can portray yourself as a video editor, or I’m trying to think of that where Jesus slipped in my brain. But you can create videos with high impact, that don’t require a lot of knowledge on how to get it done. It can be very simple, very stylish, you can go very deep in there and create a lot of graphics, you can create motion, you can do things now that use AI to clone your voice. So we’ve played around with this. And as you build out a team, and we’ve got a team of folks that all are using the script, there’s things that don’t always require me and you to be on camera, Dave, which is so wild, they can go back in and correct the mistake, we fumble all the time. When it comes to creating video, and the script can make you seem like a genius. Many times, this is one of the best parts about it. You know, when when we talk, we have like a conversation. But when our editors go back in and edit, they can make a long, awkward pause. Go away.
Dave Kelly 1:22:55
And so wondering where you were gonna go with that, or how long you’re gonna hold it
Rolando Rosas 1:22:59
a lung, or long drawn out things for emphasis. When they go back and post, if they want to take that part out, you can easily take it out because you can go by back by words rather than the video called the video timeline. I just, I’m amazed. And in last, you know the about the script. I love how it really enhances the the audio piece. So if you’re really doing traditional podcasts, like the audio type of podcast, we do those as well as the more video log or vlogs. It just brings out this voice that you can tweak to make it seem richer. If you got background noise that’s distracting, it will cut that down using AI as well. So and again, all of that happens with a click of a button. That’s what’s amazing Dave, I knew really you had to be, you know, an engineer and understand the audio frequencies and the equalizers. You don’t have to do that anymore. Right? And so the fact that this is something that a marketing team can do, in turn could work in this. Somebody that’s outside of the company that you hired, a freelancer could use, you know, a lot of freelancers use Adobe, the more experienced folks but you know, we’ve converted one of our editors to start using this although he had a little resistance is that right? Ori? He was a little a little hesitant to adopt this, but it has a lot of value. Because, you know, in editing, there’s so many steps. Yeah, those first five steps can require a lot of brain work and where to put things were to sort. You know what to cut out. That part of editing can be done so much faster and easier than before.
Dave Kelly 1:24:58
So if you’re so if you’re a business owner Wondering, you’re looking for ways to edit video. And it can be a daunting task for sure. Check out check out these scripts, if you can edit, if you can edit an email, if you can add a text, a Word doc, the you can, you can focus on the messaging within the document itself. So within the words that it’s all typed out for you, when you when you edit that the video syncs up with that. So you can take the so you don’t have to worry about syncing up video and, and the word spoken are the audio. So the video and the audio are always kind of connected, you manipulate the text, the video goes along with it. And it just makes it super simple. And then like you were saying, you can get a lot deeper into that description, you have the ability to add, you know, the fun B roll, the sound effects, text going over, you know, maybe some video there, whatever it might be. But again, if you’re a business, if if you’re in a business, and you may not have access to a full time video editor, you must check out the script, they will blow your mind you will you’ll fall in love with it, you might have a little too much fun with it, you can take projects,
Rolando Rosas 1:26:21
I liked that part there that we showed on screen, the ability to also use this as a screen share. You can record if you so we need other things like loom and dub. And this allows you to take screensharing educational content to the next level instead of you recording just you know, camera and kind of here’s what we do and instructional. This allows you to elevate that whole either instructional videos, educational videos, product videos, things that normally were very complex, you could do it very easily. You could also use this for collaboration. That’s the other part that I like about this Dave. So an editor can go in and do something or you can do a project and you can have a teammate or a colleague or somebody else that is editing come in and put comments on different parts of the video. And you can go back and forth with these. Instead of having to drop something in a Drive and Google Drive or Dropbox folder, right, you can collaborate on the video. So that reduces the amount of time a video needs to get out and published. If you’re
Dave Kelly 1:27:34
messing around with video, and you don’t have the script, you’re missing out, make sure that you check this out
Rolando Rosas 1:27:40
100%. Now, Dave, let’s roll into probably the thing right now that’s consuming more social media posts, air time, and the rest. Let’s jump into AI. Now, this app launched in 2022. In San Diego, California, is what I would say, a revolutionary app, and has changed the face of AI as we know it today. And that is ChatGPT when it came online, it became the fastest growing app ever until it was surpassed by threads in terms of its consumption and the number of users that use the app within a month. Now, why do I think it’s revolutionary and game changing and forever going to change our lives? Because anybody that works again, if you work in the keyboard economy or not, you will be impacted by what generative AI can do and will do in the future. You know, just months ago, we did not have the ability from a generative AI to easily create videos like deep fakes that were really hyper realistic. That’s available today. Yeah. And what ChatGPT has done to the industry. And this is kind of where I’m going with this. It’s changed it. Google had AI, IBM had AI. Microsoft had AI, Amazon had AI, but they really did not unleash it on the public in the hands of the everyday citizen, as well as businesses that are small and medium business that really was kept for the enterprise machine learning. And you really had to pay for because it’s expensive. techy be saying I’m starting this off for free and boy, they were burning through a lot of cash. Microsoft got in and back them and gave them more money. Microsoft put it into their ecosystem. Now Google is doing the same. Amazon’s announced that they’re also IBM is also unleashing Watson, in terms of what it’s going to be doing in the generative AI, metaphysics, data AI, which is really pioneering the deep fakes with the deep Tom Cruise, holy smokes, our whole world has changed. You want to be somebody else, you can be somebody else with AI, but specifically ChatGPT. What we have found, it is great for brainstorming. It is great for helping you write blog. It is great for script writing, as well as generation of ideas. Today, Dave, it doesn’t get everything right 100% of the time. But that’s why a human still needs to be at using this capability is a tool, right? It’s a tool, but it has a way of revolutionising the way you work so that the ideas can flow faster. Reviewing of documents, we’ve done this as well, hey, I want you to review this policy. Where are the where are the pitfalls here? How does this policy apply to our situation? And that’s when you start uncovering some magic with something like ChatGPT, because then you realize, especially if you’re let me give you an example, an Amazon seller, let’s say somebody leaves a bad review a one star review, you can tell ChatGPT, I want you to review the Amazon policy around reviews, and see if this review, this one star review is non compliant with the policy. Now, it can determine that real quickly give you some things around that that this does not violate the Amazon review policy. Or if it does, it gives you the reason why because it can analyze and put the information together. And now you have a valid way of saying according to policy, section one, part two of this review is not compliant with the Amazon review policy. And so now as a seller, if you’re somebody that’s selling in this case, you can submit that to Amazon say, hey, based on section one, that this review is not compliant with the policy. Now you have a greater chance of getting that one star removed, review removed based on solid evidence rather than just I don’t like, right, because there’s a lot of things we don’t like that people post online, but we can’t get that removed, because it’s still compliant with the policy. So Dave, yeah, no, it’s it’s changed that part of the game for us? Oh, for sure. You know, using
Dave Kelly 1:32:49
that using it as a an analytical tool is also been very helpful, right? It’s when we can, so we can take we can you and I have done this. We’ve had sales calls with clients. And we’ve entered those notes into ChatGPT. So we can just analyze the tone, give us some provide us with some strategy, help us really identify the clients, you know, main challenges and what they’re trying to accomplish. So it’s not a cheat code. You know, I think a lot of people think Jack JpT is writing all of your emails for you. And I know that people use it like that, but I think that is just, that’s just grazing the surface, using it as a brainstorming tool. You know, give me 30 ways to say this. Act as this giver, you know, I like what you do Rolando use a provided in table form or whatever it might be. So it’s easier for us to read it. But man it it jumps starts brainstorming sessions, like nothing else we’ve ever tried. You know, because
Rolando Rosas 1:33:59
it the hardest part is step one, you know, we’re gonna, especially when we’re doing ideas in here, give me 10 ideas on how to best create automation. I’m just throwing that out. And it’ll give us two or three didn’t even think about, right. The eight we we already knew. Oh, those seem interesting. Let’s talk about that. So really pulls in ideas that maybe you’re more thinking of something else, Dave. So what I’ve noticed with chatty PT, so chatty, SAP, this is why we call it that looking at me fumbling my words. GPT aka Edie, direct Global Teck Worldwide. It now has an app on the Android store. There’s a limitation there. Right now. You can’t use the plugins. So if you’re a premium or paid user of ChatGPT you really want to take advantage of plugins. I love the plugins. They help with, you know, reading a transcript, reading documents that are on the web and analyzing them. You can’t really do that on the paid version on the Android. But there’s a workaround. If you open up your browser on Android, then create a shortcut on your home screen. Now, you have a way of accessing those plugins. As long as you have those plugins on, if you’ve put it into the your computer on the browser, they’re already there, you can come back, wherever you go traveling on the road at home, wherever, just hit that browser shortcut that’s on your home screen. And now it’ll open up the desktop version. And now you have the ability to access those plugins. And for me, that’s really unlocked. A lot of valuable like I get an idea. I want you to analyze this. But I want you to analyze this document on this website. Clint, you can’t do it in the app version. But in the browser version on your mobile, you can do it because it will access the plugins that are on the back end. So protip use the browser, if you find that the plugins are unavailable inside that. That’s the browser on your mobile. Rolando,
Dave Kelly 1:36:20
I gotta tell you, man, you’ve just started using ChatGPT, it’s been a year, now maybe even a little less than a year. This is going to bring us into the next dimension.
Rolando Rosas 1:36:31
This is this is we are for it. Look, I just heard recently, somebody on one of the business channels talk about, you know, we had the internet that revolutionize things, people now can communicate and see things instantly. We had the PC or laptop that everybody could take home, which was basically your computer that was sitting in the office, you could take it home with you. We’ve had the smartphone revolution, specially with the iPhone changed the game. This is the next thing. Ay ay ay AI in the form of generative ai ai in the form of machine learning. And when all of these tools come together, I think for us, what I’m really excited in looking at in the future is then the predictive models for machine learning and generative AI. And what will happen if I do this? And then how does that project itself into the future like giving me probability of events that could happen based on x? Because as a business person, if I have in front of CIA does this all the time? What are the probabilities of x? So based on that, then what’s the intelligence? And what are all these different things, and then they take action missions around some of those things. That’s what I am really looking forward to. That is that will be available in the fingertips of business people, decision makers, so that you can make the best informed decision on all these trillions of data points, rather than just a blip. Here’s a notification that notification a notification alone doesn’t give me anything. But if you can start filling in the blanks with probabilities of what is going to happen or what isn’t going to happen. Now I can make more informed decisions quicker. And that is exciting to me. I want to be able to make decisions quicker, and place the chips sooner than my competitors. And if I can do that, I’m going to win most of the time. Pretty cool Rolando. Yes, I’m just this is interesting time to be alive. for so many reasons. There’s a lot that we can be sad about. Because there’s a lot to be sad about. But I think for a lot of people, this can be a way to you know, whether it’s a side hustle when you’re using ChatGPT or AI for that matter. You can grow this into this from side hustle to a business and what is about to be unleashed. From the generative side. It can also help businesses like ours, be more efficient, be more lean, help with productivity, help like a worker like we use ChatGPT like a junior business analyst. He is also semi coder, he provides code he shemale it it provides a way to get to the fight to get to the finish line faster. That’s the way I would say if I’m because I’m a sports guy. How can I get to the finish line faster? It gets you there much quicker than the rest. So for those that don’t adopt ChatGPT or some form of AI into their workflows into their business practices. You’re going to find yourself not as close to the finish line as those that are using it because they’re getting there a lot quicker.
Dave Kelly 1:40:03
I’m wondering if the sports betting community is using ChatGPT some of the new the newest version of that to kind of help predict who might, who might, you know, just sporting sporting outcomes, game outcomes?
Rolando Rosas 1:40:16
Well, that’s, that’s, I mean, you look at what eight, I don’t know what they use. But you take a look at the just just on face value the face of the commercials for like AWS and the NFL, you know, this has a 10% probability of being a touchdown, if it’s 30 yards out in this, this receiver, those types of numbers and statistics, they’re out there. It’s just a matter of using them. And I would place a bet that Vegas and other booking places are using some form of that to maximize their dollars.
Dave Kelly 1:40:50
I wouldn’t be surprised that you know what we’re like, everyone’s using it a little bit differently. Everyone’s talking about it. I love when I’m hearing conversations when two people come together from different organizations, and they’re sharing how they, how they use it. And I’m telling you, it’s if you don’t if you’ve only used it for certain things, talk to other people that use it, find out how they’re how they’re using it, check out a lot of the content that’s out there, we’ve done some content, we’ll probably have to do a deep dive within ChatGPT at some point, yeah, it’s just the most amazing tool to come along since since the smartphone
Rolando Rosas 1:41:29
since 100% 100%. Big props to open AI for taking that risk, because it was a big gamble to give this away for free. And now they’ve you know, have a premium version. Nobody wants to give anything away for free. If you’re in business, you don’t know you’re in it to make money and to make profit. And it’s looking like they’re here to stay. Big props to them. So let’s do a recap. Dave on the pillars, right. pillar number one, we talked about communications and collaboration, they’re not the same thing. So when it comes to collaboration and communication, our favorite go to tools are Google workspace part of the Google family RingCentral, which is an all in one platform for communications, video, audio, text messaging, artificial intelligence in the back taking notes for you. And loom loom is great for recording videos that you need to send, as well as comments. It does some editing, and also has a little bit of a transcript capability in there. But it’s a great an easy, again, easy tool that anybody can use, whether you’re a pro video, or somebody that is really afraid to get on camera loom will help you create very easy videos. Dave, you want to take a stab at number two?
Dave Kelly 1:42:57
Yep. So our second our second pillar in our software stack is for project management. We’re using clickup Air table and Zapier. So clickup is for task management, working within teams working with our team to communicate where we are with certain projects, as is airtable you know a way where we use an air table more on the some of the database, our like our media database with air table, so that we’re able to kind of keep track of where we’re where we’re at with different projects, who has the next task to complete this particular project. And then of course, Zapier being somewhat of the glue that’s holding a lot of this together.
Rolando Rosas 1:43:45
Yes, indeed. And our third pillar is our content creation pillar, where we use a platform like stream yard to record our videos to do our podcast interviews, and, and more. Because it’s so easy to use and very reliable. And that’s the key easy and reliable, that puts you into the driver’s seat. Along with that we use Canva to support our graphics, our infographics that we create, we create thumbnails, their product images and lifestyle images, we use Canva. Again, another common theme here, ease, anybody could do this, and they can jump in and start creating graphic and digital assets for you inside of Canva. Next is D script. The script is again another easy to use video editing tool. You don’t need to be an expert you don’t need hours of going through and taking courses. You can jump in and start doing it and start editing videos in a way that’s never been done before using words as the way to edit them video as well as audio. Lastly, ChatGPT bring in the anchor leg on this text deck. Within our content creation is ChatGPT. It was really hard to put it in here because it’s it fits many checkboxes not just in the content creation, but in the business and operations aspect of things as well. It’s terrific for brainstorming, it’s terrific for analyzing documents. It’s terrific for giving you summaries. And it’s also terrific, we’ve been uncovering different ways to use it from a business intelligence aspect that allows you to walk into meetings with information at your fingertips that you would have normally not been able to recognize. So it’s really good at pattern recognition. In those initial meetings, negotiations, you have some information that rather than walking in cold with zero information, so Chechi b t, aka Edie as we call them around here, he’s Qi Qi, whatever it wants to be, is here to stay, I highly encourage anybody that not scratching the surface to get started, because you will be left behind all your competitors will be closer to the finish line. Because AI is where the future is at. Dave, did we miss anything else? On this podcast episode about the tech stack? That’s worth noting,
Dave Kelly 1:46:30
I don’t believe so Rolando, listen, thank you so much for sharing this special the our special sauce here. You’ve done a great job selecting some of these applications for us helping our team become more successful, so that global tech can shine and be a be our industry
Rolando Rosas 1:46:48
leader. Well, thank you, I and I wanted to share this after being in business and being global tech for over 20 years. I’d love to see other small business other other folks getting their side hustle and turning those to real businesses. Turn those probabilities of stead of being a 50% success rate at the five years making that 75 or 85%. And I think some of these tools can help you increase your odds of being more successful than the current odds that the Small Business Administration has. Because a lot of these tools are folks starting up, they don’t know where they should go. And at least, if this could give you a pointing in the right direction, so that you’re using these tools in your enterprise or in your Small Business. This should help you be more successful. And that’s what we want to do is help other businesses be more successful at what they do. So if you want to nerd out a little more, maybe you want to hear more in depth about what are some other business strategies that can make you successful, or that can give you a leg up. We know right now that hybrid and remote working is hot. It is a hot topic. And we have a lot more videos on this in our Circuitloops website as well as wherever you consume your podcasts. We’ve got series on remote work with guests like Steve Cadigan and Barbie Brewer, and Rachel Cottam. All of these folks have provided valuable insight with information, research and data that can help you get going on the remote work or establish successful programs around them. So Dave, and I will join you in those episodes and we will see you next time.
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