Tiago (3:17)

There are risks associated with automating. I hadn't thought about that specifically or explicitly, which is, hey, you're going to forget about it. So that's part of the good part and it could be, as you said, a negative part at risk. You're not going to look into that as often as. Sure. And I think it happens with both automations and it happened with AI. And I know I have you on my side where someone goes like, oh, I can automate this, I can automate that, I can automate the other thing. You can certainly do same with AI, like oh, AI could do this. You have to pick what's good to automate. Absolutely, definitely.

Richard (3:50)

Because if you don't have those, that kind of hands on view stuff gets away from you. It's just the nature of the thing. I think there's some level of truth in that with regards to delegation, but we'll get into that in a second.

Tiago (4:00)

So I was thinking about automating and I was thinking about probably three things that you need to ask yourself to make sure an X task should be automated. First of all, it's very simple. It needs to be done. So it's not something that we could do. It needs to be done because automated is going to just do. It needs to be done right in a specific standardized way. It has to be done in a timely manner because automation will always be human being timely and then, and I think this goes back to the criterion on whether they should also allocate time to set up the automation. It has to be a task that has to be done frequently because if it's just you have two employees and you have payroll once a month, twice a month, there's probably something better that you could automate that would relieve you of a lot of workload.

Richard (4:44)

Yeah, I mean understanding whether time is being spent is I think something that you've done fantastically well. Again for this client we won't name but like just understanding where their staff has been spending that time because a tremendous, tremendous amount of it was automatable in a productive way that it drags everything forward rather than adding any roadblocks there.

Tiago (5:03)

Yeah. And I think that automation is really connected to delegation, which you just hinted. We're going this way because when you think about the organizational chart and the hierarchy there, when you think about, and I'm calling it lower level team members, but not because it's low what they do, they're vital. It's about like just the vertical hierarchy. Right. So lower level are the ones that can get the most relief out of automations immediately because it's probably who's been assigned the task to manually copy and paste things from one side to the other. You know, hey, or even worse than copy and pasting, I think it's, hey, you should remember three times a day to go into the CRM and check if we have new subscription and then copy and paste information to this checklist.

Richard (5:46)

Yeah.

Tiago (5:47)

Now the moment we automate that for them and that goes immediately into the checklist, it's my most reliable and everything. And they get an automatic notification via Slack that they see and that everyone can see. So it's now like public. We are giving them more time to focus on tasks that really need a human input that cannot be delegated to machines. So I think first of all delegate to the machine. And after that when we say okay, we delegated a lot to the machines and now we think about a again, production team members are being relieved of tasks. You as a manager, in your experience, what's your criteria again to decide? Okay, what can we now delegate from managers into production?

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Richard (7:02)

Sure. So I think one of the core things there is the level of connection to the customer. Like in general terms, if you are again on that hierarchical level higher up, it's probably not going to be a great use of your time talking to customers, even if they are relatively high ticket. So just as an example. So that's something that can be delegated with a structure for actually escalating the stuff that does need to come to someone higher up the totem pole, really. It's a case of understanding what can be safely freed up. Again, as he said, the point of automation, the point of delegation, the point of all of this is to free up valuable time and push that to places where it can be more efficiently used. Like people who are a bit lower down, who are able to run through those little tasks, or not necessarily less important tasks, but less cognitive tasks, I think is possibly a good way to put it. Like stuff that takes less active thought or it needs to be done in a way that's not nowhere near automatic, but not necessarily needing a huge amount of thought, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Tiago (8:07)

So I'm trying to put my, my, myself back in our day to day. Right. And again, usually a founder who's handling a lot of tasks and we're trying to get him or her to delegate, you're looking at what to delegate. So what are the things that don't demand your unique special experience and your forte, let's say, what are the things that you could train someone on? And you allocate a bit of your time into building the training for that and then you add a bit of monitoring cadence to make sure that's been delegated properly.

Richard (8:41)

Sure. I think again, not to keep using the same client as an example for everything, but I think it's a very good example. The owner originally handling basically everything around checking people in for this product that they have. They were handling the actual mechanical side of signing people in for that, getting them registered, sending out notifications like, hey, there's stuff that the information that you've given us doesn't quite match our requirements. So we're going to need you to redo this. It was Taking, as you know extremely well, a tremendous amount of their time. You have automated a huge part of that. You've delegated the pieces that can't be immediately automated. And the person, the owner, now has a lot more thinking free time. I think that really is a criteria. Like, is this something that really has to be done? What's gained by you, the owner, or you, the higher up person, doing it? If it's nothing, then it's almost certainly delegatable. If it's, hey, there's a slight edge, it's a little better when I do it versus when someone else does it. Is that a trainable edge or is that just a question of figuring out how to approach the task? Because I think from your conversations, a lot of that has been now completely passed off. Yes, in a way that today, say it's better. I'm not intimately connected enough to say, is it running better? It's certainly running as well, and it's certainly freeing up that time.

Tiago (10:02)

You have to look as a manager or a founder before delegating all the tasks you're doing right now. If we want to think about kill, then that's a good point to ask yourself, like, before delegating, should we in general be allocating time in general from the company? Could that be killed? But to delegate, make the sort of accountability chart that a visionary founder who's not yet very organized needs, needs to do, which is like, it won't make sense once you write it down is like, okay, I'm doing fulfillment, I'm doing cs, I'm doing finance, I'm doing payroll, I'm doing marketing as well. So list everything you have, look at your team and look at the empty spaces, who you could hire. And then start from the simplest task and probably do a little math where it's like, okay, this task is simple and how many times a week, a day I need to work on this as a founder or a manager, Right. So multiply that and you can start prioritizing which you should be delegating first. And I think you could also combine that with context. Hey, I'm doing things in five departments. Maybe I can focus on just delegating for two departments, building up customer support and building up, let's say marketing, for example. And then I'm also going to relieve myself from that context switching. So two different ways. Just try to relieve yourself from specific context and delegate that. Or try to go about, okay, tasks that are fast, simple, but are done multiple times every day, week. And then you can select those to delegate so any final note regarding automation, delegation and killing tasks?

Richard (11:35)

I think killing, just. Just to have a quick note there, interesting thing there is how easy it is to build up these traditions that don't really need to be followed at all. Like, okay, why am I doing this? Well, I've always done it. Why are we doing this as a company? While we've always done it, it made sense two years ago, it made sense three years ago. I think killing stuff, it really does require in some cases an external perspective or that thinking time. I mean, a lot of the time, again, going back to the exact same client, there are a lot of things now that the owner has this additional time, they've been able to say, okay, well, why were we doing this from the beginning? This doesn't make sense for our. I mean, because if there's no time to answer that, there's probably something to be automated, probably something allocated, and then you can figure out where the rest of the time goes.

Tiago (12:17)

And as you said, it has to do with perspective as well. Either if it's like an outside party, if it's a new employee, probably hire comes fresh, or a consultant, of course you're going to pick Shockwave. And if you got that perspective change from outer perspective, or if you can get more time for you, you'll also get the ability to change the perspective because you have time to think at a different pace and quality and analyze. And then the question, as you said, that's going to come up is going to be, why do this? Okay, Richard, thank you very much. It was a huge pleasure.

Richard (12:49)

It's been a fantastic little show.

Podcast Host (12:51)

I really hope you liked today's episode as much as I liked watching it from the sidelines. These guys are brilliant and I hope you understand why I talk so highly of them on the podcast all the time. We've created for you Shockwaves custom GPT that will help you decide. Do you automate? Do you delegate or do you kill?