What if 2025 Was Your Year To Do These Things

Mitch: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make Other Successful where we share insight stories and strategies to help you build a better workplace. We got 4 people here. Again, full house. Today, we're talking about next year.

We're we're entering that phase of the year where we're about to hit the holidays. We're about to cross the new year, and it even though it's some arbitrary thing, we feel the need to come up with a new goal, a new mindset, kinda change everything about this year for next year, and hopefully achieve something new. So we're hoping we can lean into that, mindset and help share a couple of things that are on our minds for the things that we help clients with and sort of inspire some action from those of you listening, to to maybe tackle some of these things in the new year. So the the title is what if 2025 was your year 2 So we have a couple different topics that we're gonna cover over the course of this podcast. We're gonna cover having smarter meetings.

We're gonna cover ditching email. It's a crazy idea. And then fixing your business process. So we're gonna kinda start high level and get deeper and deeper over the course of the podcast, but I'm gonna, hand it to Matt. Actually, should we do let's do intros really quick.

For those of you who don't know us, my name's Mitch. I'm one of the partners here. I help with operations and marketing and stuff like that, and happy to to chat today.

Emma: Yeah. And I'm Emma. I'm our delivery lead. Another word for project manager. And I'm gonna be specifically talking today all about meetings because that is the bulk of my position and job.

I have a lot of meetings.

Mitch: Definitely.

Mike: I'm Mike. I'm a partner here at Bulb as well, and I focus my energy on business apps and automation, so business process and all that good stuff.

Matt: Yeah. And Matt Dressel and I am focused on communication collaboration, so, anything to do with Teams and SharePoint and all that good stuff. So, as we move into the topics, the first one we wanna talk about is, smart meetings and what that means and what it might look like again in 2025 if you said, hey. I wanna focus on having smart meetings, meetings that go beyond just a regular meeting and what that might look like. Emma, can you talk a little bit about why that how how somebody might feel that is valuable to them?

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna start it by saying back to our topic of what if 2025 was your year to have better meetings? Doesn't that sound so nice? Like, I feel like everyone you can take a collective, like, sigh of relief to think through having better meetings in the new year.

So for me, what that means is my meetings are productive. They're effective. Everyone knows why we're there, and we're able to have actionable takeaways and actually get stuff done. So you're kind of moving away from the ineffective meeting where it just feels like you're meeting because that's what you think you are supposed to do in, you know, the business world. But you're actually moving your projects forward.

You're moving your work streams forward because of your meetings. I think the topic that's on most people's mind right now in the tech space is AI. And so that's specifically what I wanna talk about here is how can you use AI to have smarter meetings?

Matt: Okay. So not just because when you when you started that, it's like, well, that's a lot about me and doing better meetings, you know, making sure people attend on time and all of that kind of stuff. How would you guys how would bulb digital or how would a technology company help me with that? So you're gonna talk specifically about AI Copilot Yeah. Like those types of things.

Okay.

Emma: And and, you know, I think a lot of it does go hand in hand. I think creating better meetings, does come down to the facilitator, the person organizing it, the person leading it, the participants. But technology, specifically AI, can actually help in all of those areas. So you don't have to take on all of that burden and all that weight yourself as the organizer. Sometimes it is just about learning how to use the tools to take on some of that weight for you.

Mitch: You know, I remember once upon a time when I was like a junior developer, I looked at my calendar and it was wide open except for a couple, like

Emma: Sounds lovely.

Mitch: Touch bases. And I was so jealous of the people that got to go to meetings all the time because it's like, oh, that's important. They're doing bigger things than what I'm doing. And, like, obviously, as the years go by, slowly, like, the calendar starts to fill up. And now I'm in a world where, oh my today, literally, it was meetings back to back to back to back.

Matt: Mhmm.

Mitch: And so making sure that those are effective and I'm getting the most out of them just became way more important because I don't have the time outside of I want as much time outside of those because now they're filling up my calendar. Mhmm. So we wanna capitalize on the time that we're together.

Emma: Yeah. And I think some of the ways, that you can make your meetings more effective, Mike and I actually just did a retro on one of our projects and we reflected on this, is making sure every meeting you have has an objective declared, has a really clear purpose, and has a really clear agenda. And then as you're moving through meeting to meeting, week to week, between those meetings, you're declaring what actions are expected to be done and then you're following up on those. How can tools help with this is probably the the next question. 2 things that I would mention.

1 is Loop and the second is Copilot. So using Copilot to help you, as you're having meetings, recap what was talked about in that meeting and you can actually ask Copilot, hey, what should the agenda be for my next meeting? And it will provide you with agenda items. You can read through those and declare those for the next, gathering, but I'm getting sick of saying the word meeting. So I'm trying to think of other words.

But then the other side of it is using Loop to capture everything. I sort of see Loop as my digital notebook and that's where I put the thoughts that Copilot gives me, so that I can go from yeah.

Mitch: You know, it's interesting. We're aft right after this, actually, we're prepping for a webinar where the topic is smart meetings and how to have them. And by the time this comes out, you know, we pass that. Maybe we'll do another one. We'll we'll put a link, down below where you can learn more.

But the thing that comes to mind was little tips like that where I I'm I got some of your slides together and Mhmm. The tip was putting or in the Copilot asking for the agenda for the next meeting, like, while you're still in the meeting or while you're ending the meeting where you're already, way ahead because you're you're just taking information that already exists and putting it somewhere so that you don't have to later and everyone is ready to use it later.

Emma: And it and it can really be simple. Like, I have a pre meeting and a post meeting checklist. So little things that I have, like, 4 or 5 things on both of those and, like you said, I can share those out afterward or if you come to my webinar, you'll learn them. Just little things of even pre meeting. Are you checking your Outlook calendar to track what attendees have responded?

You know, has everyone confirmed that they're coming? Have you followed up with those who haven't confirmed that they're coming? These are really simple and, you know, basic meeting type etiquette. But I think getting those correct or even using the tool, using Outlook in that way, I think we forget that we're able to do that, and then put a reminder in a task list to remind yourself to follow-up with those people. Again, taking the burden off yourself to remember every little thing and trying to put that into the tool to remind you.

Matt: Mhmm. Yeah. It's about make trying to make yourself more present in the meeting Yes. Using tools. So it's enabling you to focus on those other things.

Mike: So I really love this topic because I think it has extremely high potential to improve not only an individual's ability to be effective,

Emma: but

Mike: if you're able to figure out how to adopt this culturally across an organization and get everyone using the these tools effectively in this way Yeah. It can have just a a massive impact on the man hours that are spent coordinating meetings and figuring out follow ups and tasks and agendas and all of that kind of stuff, And it's all right there in the tools.

Emma: So the one thing I would be remiss if I didn't mention, the other thing that I've been doing a lot in my recent meetings is always having a planner board or a task list in a loop, which is somewhat similar to a planner board in a sense. Always having that open while you're in the meeting and then assigning tasks as things are going getting tasked out. You know, so and so said they were gonna do this. Write what the task is. Assign it to them.

They're gonna get an email. Microsoft will do that for you on, hey. You know, you've been assigned this task, and then you don't even need to do the work of following up with that person, immediately because they already have that. They know that you're holding them accountable to it.

Matt: And when you go to the next meeting, before the next meeting, you can check progress. How many people have completed their stuff? What's the updates on that? Yeah. And you can kinda save a little bit of time that you would usually say, hey.

You know, everybody you know, what's the latest and greatest on every little thing?

Emma: Right.

Matt: Yeah. Anything else on that?

Emma: No. I I would just say, you know, using the Copilot recap feature is also a a favorite of mine. Part of my post meeting checklist I always go through, recap the meeting. That's all within Teams. You can use Teams Premium for that as well.

And then pasting that again somewhere that everyone else can can see the recap. So those are some of my top tips on having Smart Meetings. It has really increased, my joy of meetings being able to use all these tools because it takes some of that busy work and that burden off

Mike: of you.

Emma: Yeah.

Mitch: I feel like I have to mention Microsoft, all they're talking about right now is Copilot. So this feels like we are, like, drinking the Kool Aid and being like, this is the greatest thing is, in this particular case, it is super

Matt: Helpful. Helpful. Like, it is It is probably the lowest fruit that you can get Yeah. Using Copilot in this way is the easiest, most broad reaching way that you can get value from getting a Copilot license or a Teams premium license as you said.

Mitch: Yep. Yeah. So we're not just, like, riding some coattails on

Matt: the pricing side. Copilot is, like, I don't know that everybody needs it.

Mike: But

Emma: Well, and to be totally candid, I don't know a meeting I've been in with you guys that we haven't copiloted in the last Several months. Yes. Months it's been. So it's like we're we're not just saying like, oh, you should go try to use it. Like, we actually use it for every single

Mike: one of

Emma: our meetings. We we see so much value in it. So we're walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Yeah.

Mitch: Yeah. So what what what if 2025 was their year to do smart meetings? What would that look like?

Emma: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it is adopting an experimental mindset. I think using AI, you have to see it as, alright. I'm going to experiment with this. I'm gonna see what works for me.

I'm going to try out prompts. AI is sometimes only as good as the prompts you're putting into it. Microsoft does have Copilot Labs, which is a website that kinda helps you figure out some good prompts to use. But, yeah, just take an experimental mindset. Obviously, get the license.

I think that would be the the first step. Yeah. And then just moving forward of, okay, how do how am I using it in my meetings? Am I asking it to give me tasks? Am I getting recaps?

Am I getting agendas? What am I using it for? Where do I get the most value?

Mitch: Mhmm. And I I like your concepts of like, this is very type a, lists of things to do, checklists Yeah. Before the meeting, after the meeting. Like, if you do not have those, create some. Try it out.

See how it works.

Emma: Yeah. So that way you're not reinventing every time you you get together and you gather. You're not trying to think through, what did I do last week? You know, just write it down. Make make some notes for yourself and make some more repeatable processes.

And, again, Loop is a great tool for jotting that kind of thing down.

Matt: So that kinda closes off, about smart meetings. The next topic is ditching email. It's something that we've talked about as an organization for a long period of time. It's something we've evangelized across the board. It's something internally, you know, we have kind of embraced, and it's something that we, you know, none of us really have a lot of internal emails that are going on.

So, Mitch, if you wanna talk a little bit about, like, what is that if someone were to say, I wanna be there. I wanna be where you guys are related to that. How what would that look like? How would they get there?

Mitch: Yeah. That that kinda reminds me of what Emma was just saying and, like, we have been doing this for months. In all of these cases, everything that we're talking about are things that we literally do that we have seen fruits from. So Yes. We're talking from some from firsthand experience.

Emma: Mhmm.

Mitch: But we send no emails to each other at all. Right? Like, wild.

Emma: I love it. It's like dun dun dun.

Mitch: Yeah. And for the most part, it's really great. So the concept of ditching email to a lot of people sounds crazy because that is like their lifeblood. They live in their inbox. They want to get to inbox 0 every day, and that feels like a huge accomplishment.

But there are challenges when it comes to email and what it does for internal organization communication. And it is not where you wanna be. That's what that's what we're sharing at least. We think what you should be doing is communicating in a space that is organizational in nature where your back and forth is happening in a shared space that then other people can contribute or have visibility into or swap out if someone, you know, leaves and you have to hire someone new. It it creates this this life of this knowledge outside of just you and this other person.

Because what we've figured out is if you're using email or in person communication, which has its place, it's not never gonna be used, like, especially external. You're gonna be emailing people. But when you do that, what you're relying on is you're creating knowledge in one person's brain and another person's brain. And in order for that to be spread and shared with someone, it relies on that person to then go spread that to other people, and then those go spread it to other people. It can work, but it definitely doesn't feel efficient, and it's easy for things things to get missed along the way.

So we're big proponents of saying for internal communication, you should ditch email as soon as possible. You should lean on a tool like Teams or Slack. We use Slack. We're probably gonna switch to Teams soon. But leaning on those tools is way better and and really allows us to create that knowledge hub in a central place.

Matt: Yeah. So great. We know what we wanna do. What are some individual things, something that somebody could do tomorrow

Mitch: Yeah.

Matt: That would help them try to get there?

Mitch: Yeah. So it depends on your role a little bit. If you oversee a team, one of the things I talk about in my total communication reset course is if you own a team and you have purview over those that team and you can say, hey, team, we're gonna try this thing. What I would say is delegate. Fig figure out who is involved in that process and say, hey, team.

We're going to set up this different way of of talking. We're gonna say, for 30 days, we're gonna be communicating in these channels, and we're gonna stand this up and see how it feels. And we're gonna be checking in along the way, seeing what works, what doesn't work, and then be able to make a decision on, is this the way to go? That's like in the context of your own team. If you have higher purview than that, then you can maybe have a little bit more authority over multiple teams.

That's a bigger engagement. That's that's a big, move and a lot of culture to change. On the far end of the spectrum, if you only have purview over yourself, it's a different game. You can influence other people to meet you where you are. This is maybe a a nice way to say it.

Mhmm. So if you at least have a a Teams chat or or somewhere similar that you can say, hey, so and so, in an email, the best place to reach me is over here. And, hopefully, you're not the only one. You can kind of lead alongside other people who believe this is a a good direction to go and slowly get buy in by sort of redirecting conversations into those areas.

Matt: So real example, you know, we're a part of larger teams that do stuff, and, you know, we champion this way of working, but we're working within a part larger organization that maybe is more focused on email. And we have a conversation with, you know, the person that's we directly work with and say, hey. We wanna we wanna leverage this tool. We wanna get there. We know that you're not super familiar with it, but do you give me permission to help move that way?

They say yes. You know, we start working there. And when there are emails, we say, hey. This is where it's gonna go. And because we've had that conversation with the our leader, you know, my leader, and they've said, yep.

This is what we're doing. When I do that, other people are like, oh, yeah. Like, yep. That's where I'm supposed to be. Mhmm.

And they start working there. And it is true that, you know, the best way to do that stuff is to lead by example because Mhmm. When you're putting content there, you're creating a repository and peep that people wanna start joining with. So Mhmm. That's just a real example that really it's taken years to really get to where we are right now with that particular customer in this particular group.

But, so it's not a a night or, you know, one time thing or, you know, it's not gonna change overnight, but, it's that's the way to do it.

Mitch: That's one of the the most challenging things. Your question to me was, how can you make progress tomorrow? And while, yes, there are things you can tactically do to make progress tomorrow, the hardest pill to swallow is, like, this is a a lifestyle. This is not a pain pill that you can just pop and feel the relief of. It's something that you will feel the benefits of a month later, 2 months later, and think, oh my gosh, I can't believe we did it any other way.

That's not saying you can't start to feel some of that soon. Because we've had some clients where, you know, within the context of a couple weeks, they said, oh, let's do this in this channel instead. And they said, instead of 20 or 30 emails going back and forth, we just had one channel and it Yep. Was way better.

Matt: So this is the perfect example of one of our customers. Actually, we were talking with them and gathering information, and they said, yeah. We're we're interested in using Teams to do this because over the summer, we had a a big emergency thing happen. And Mhmm. We all started using Teams because it was email was going crazy, and we needed to use this other thing.

So we started using it. It was great. Everybody loved it. Well, then why didn't you just keep doing it? Because we didn't wasn't

Emma: Wasn't structured the right way or

Matt: do it. Yeah. We didn't we we and it and that's what I'm calling out there is really that that mindset is the thing you can do tomorrow, which is to say, we as an organization are gonna get better at this. I am I as an individual, am gonna get better at this because it takes that shift in mindset to recognize, oh, it was better, and we should do something to keep that going. If you don't, the natural pull is to go back to the comfortable the thing that everybody's done forever and ever.

The you know, that's what's gonna be comfortable for everyone on a team because not everybody's gonna be perfect. It's not that's not the type of thing that you can just turn on and turn off. So Yeah.

Mitch: And I think that's part of the reason why we're talking about this in the the scale of a year where it's saying, what if

Matt: It won't get better.

Mitch: Course of a year

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: You could have no emails by the end of the year. It's crazy. The the only other thing that I'll tack on is, one of the first lessons I teach in in the course is about setting an objective. All of this is not worth anything. If you're saying, I'm happy with email.

We're getting along just fine. We're making money. Woo hoo. Let's keep it going. Please do not upset the apple cart, like, if you're good with everything.

But if you feel overwhelmed when you come to your inbox, if you feel like things are hard to keep track of and hard to collaborate on and and know where things are in their different life cycles across all the different people, and you have trouble with new people coming on board and needing to relay information to them, that's where it's worth investigating. Yeah. But set that objective first.

Emma: So I wanna paint a picture of what 2025 could look like if you ditch Gmail. Kind of a simple thought exercise. So if you're thinking about email and you're thinking as emails are coming in and if you're someone who gets a lot of emails, which I know most of us business professionals get a ton of email in a day, every single ping has the same weight. It's the same email after email after email. There's no organization done, before that email comes in.

It all just gets dropped right into one bucket. Mhmm. So think about if you ditch email and you move to what we're talking about, topic based communication on a digital platform like Teams or Slack, that organization will be done for you. So you'll be able to glance at your list of different teams or channels, and you'll be able to see, oh, there is a new message in an important channel that I should check. That's an important message.

There's something going on in that project. I'm on that project. It matters to me. Oh, someone posted in this other channel that has to do with our office location. Not as important.

I'll get back to that in a little bit. Mentally, the load that that takes off of your brain is immense. If you don't have to think the same thoughts about every single notification because it's already organized for you in these topics, I think that to me is one of the greatest benefits of ditching email.

Mitch: That's one of the I was trying to articulate it a while back which is like that moment of deciding does not exist in your email inbox unless you have, like, crazy rules set up to organize things for you.

Emma: And if you're that person, you're part of the problem.

Mitch: Last note, what if someone is really like, I want to do this and do it fast, we did just put together a new service, which is a team communication boot camp where you can have us come in and actually enact these things and lay it out and get that pilot phase started with with your team. That is something that we do. Yep. So if it, if it's not the course where I kinda walk you through some self, you you do it yourself, we're happy to to help with any of that stuff too.

Matt: But yeah, you can

Mitch: do but you can do it in 2025. I believe in you.

Matt: You can. 100%. Okay. So that closes off the email, getting rid of email, ditching internal communication via email. Let's move on to our last topic for today, and that is fixing your business process.

So if you have a business process that is currently in Excel or maybe in handwritten things or maybe in person communication that's going on, and you're struggling with, you know, maybe people leaving or people swapping out and being able to kinda make that efficient and and it's holding your organization back, what can we do, Mike? What like, where where should we start? What what can we expect to get out of it if we focus on this type of improvement?

Mike: So the place I think I wanna start, would be to frame what some of the problems actually look like for people. So, when you think about business process and it being messy or not ideal, you mentioned one which is, are you running your business out of Excel? Right? Do you have a spreadsheet that's like the master spreadsheet that, you know, it's got all of the project information in it, and you look at that every day to figure out where things are at? That's one scenario.

Do you have 1 or 2 people who are spending a day a week copy and pasting from one system to maybe another system, an external system or something like that? Those are some pretty strong indicators that you have a process that can be improved.

Matt: And when you say that, you don't mean I use Excel to analyze some stuff every once in a while. That's not what you're talking about. You're talking about if I created this Excel Street and if it went away tomorrow, the business would grind to a halt. No one would be able to do anything. We wouldn't be able to make it anything happen.

Same thing with the with what you're talking about with the business process being you know, having having somebody, go have a conversation with somebody or or do other work. It's it's business critical. It is a fundamental part of your business.

Mike: Yeah. So it has something to do with either getting paid or paying someone. Right? Like, that's an easy way to look at that. So if you're tracking customer orders in a spreadsheet, you probably shouldn't be.

And there's a better way if you're tracking people's time in spreadsheets so that they can get paid. Right? There's a problem there too. There's there's so many tools today that you can use to solve those problems in some relatively easy ways. One of the things that we see a lot of people do is they'll fall prey to the the sunk cost calculation.

So if you've been tracking projects or customer information in a spreadsheet for years, Somebody's probably like, the brain trust of the organization has probably worked on that spreadsheet, and they've spent countless hours making that spreadsheet do all kinds of things.

Mitch: Are you speaking from experience?

Mike: I am. I have. I've been there. Like, it's, you know, what?

Mitch: It's been a couple years.

Mike: 8, 10 years ago now. That's where we started. Right? But we didn't have budget for other tools and we were figuring things out. But as time goes on, you keep adding to that process as it exists.

And then when you pick your head up and go, man, I wish I had more time to do this other stuff, but I'm stuck doing that, it's really, really hard thing to put down because you have to do what is perceived to be a lot of work to get out of that trap and because you've invested so much. But it's one of the best things that we've ever done is to move away from the spreadsheet we were using to to pay people. Yep. Right? And so, yeah, it's it can be a whole different world.

Mitch: One thing I wanna mention that sort of sneaks its way into this thing is when we talk about business process, often it can feel like something very technical and very, you know, formulaic. There are things that some people view as project management that are actually processes that we might want to kinda help distinguish. Because I was just talking to someone the other day in our, community our membership community where they are onboarding new customers. They have this this 150 task thing that they need to accomplish when they onboard a new customer. So they're looking at project management tools to do that.

And I was like, that might not be the way to go. Let's let's pause just for a second. You probably can make a project management tool work for that. But what if we thought about this as a process instead? Something that you do the same recurring things over and over and over and over.

And I think that might be just some nuance of of it doesn't have to be a, like, a core business process, but it can be some of those, like, things where maybe you're stumbling on project management things that it's really maybe it's supposed to be in the the process management side.

Mike: And that type of scenario fits that same that same paradigm of, like, paying people. Right? If you run payroll every 2 weeks, that's not a project. That's a process. Right?

We do something every 2 weeks. If you're onboarding customers, you have x amount of customers that you're onboarding, let's say, once a week or once a month, and that's a process. It's a repeated process. So being a recurring action or activity is a strong indicator that probably a project management tool isn't the right thing. Mhmm.

And one of the benefits you get from not treating it like a project is you'll set it up in a way that allows you to spend less time setting it up every time. Mhmm.

Mitch: Right?

Mike: Because it just repeats and it knows how to repeat, as opposed to, Emma, we've got a new customer to onboard. Can you set up all of the tasks? Right? And so you can save yourself a lot of time in that scenario too. So it is important to distinguish that there are those differences in project versus process.

The other thing I'll say about that as well is you have to look at what that process is and really make the determination of whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze because you can spend a lot of money and a lot of time automating something. But if you do it 4 times a year, right, quarterly planning, it might not be a thing that you wanna automate.

Matt: As an example, you know, you talked about setting up customers that could just really be team task management. Right? We have a team and that team, all they do is set up customers or as a main part of their job. I mean, what you really need to do is have better task management for that team and not a process tool or a project tool to manage each individual thing that is happening, to make sure that all of this stuff gets gets done. There's lots of different ways to slice it.

Let's talk about what they can actually do. So we know understand what the problem is. We understand we're talking about, I'm using Excel, and I've got some manual processes. It's important to my business. I'm it's using to pay someone or I'm using it to get paid.

You know, what are some things someone can do? What are the approaches that you would talk to somebody who's looking to try to change this in 2025? Like, hey. I wanna make these things better. What are some things that they should be looking to do?

Mike: Well, there's a lot of new tools in the last 5, 10 years that have made things a lot better. So we do a lot of things in Microsoft 365. We use the Power Platform to do

Mitch: a lot of

Mike: things. A lot of customers that we actually work with have gone from, well, I use Excel to track this process or do this job for my customers. And I think that it can be a better way and we're implementing that process in a PowerApp, for example, or using Power Automate. So it can it can be all the way. It can be like soup to nuts, an app and automation and all of those things.

It could also be something as simple as, oh, I didn't realize that there was a connector built into Power BI for that service out there in the cloud. And now I don't have to export data from that service. I can just connect directly to it and the Power BI report is right there for me. Right?

Matt: Mhmm.

Mike: And it's got a refresh schedule and voila. Right? It doesn't take a lot of work to do something like that. So there are a number of different tools that can be used to solve that problem in fairly effective low cost ways.

Mitch: How sorry. How does someone decide what's worth it and what to do first? Like cause what I'm thinking of is we do this for clients all the time where they literally hire us to say, I wanna do these things, but I don't know where to start.

Mike: Yeah.

Mitch: How do you go in there and process what's going on and help lay out what they should do in what order?

Mike: Well, often it's easiest if it's a process that's connected to paying customers. So if it's connected to our customer getting paid by their customers, it can be pretty easy to draw value out of that. Right? Because I can either get paid faster, I can save money on the the work that I'm doing because it happens more efficiently or effectively. I can have a better experience with a customer which adds perceived value to my product.

Right? All those things can be things that are automated and and help improve, and you can draw direct value out of your product, right, and connect it there. That's the easiest scenario. We often also deal with internal processes, so the getting paid side of things. And that's a scenario where we straight up ask questions of our customers, and this is what what we would tell you to do too is, like, well, how much time do I spend copy and pasting every week from those Excel sheets into my payroll system Mhmm.

Right, so that people can get paid. And, you know, you'll often get in that scenario and ask for, like, well, I spend a day a week doing that. Right? That's one person's job a day a week. And if, you know, you you can imagine what that cost man hours wise, you can extrapolate from there.

That person could be doing something much more valuable with that time. Mhmm. And so you measure that against, well, what would it take to automatically get that data from a to b, on a repeated schedule. Right? And so I would look those are the factors that you would take into account.

In some scenarios, there's license cost. But what we found is that once you get to that threshold where you're like, oh, maybe I need to spend money on a premium license, it's usually a nonfactor because you're, hopefully, solving a problem that's big enough to make that a very small part of the equation. So what about talk to me about,

Matt: you know, most most of what we've talked about so far has been, you know, I want this thing to work the way my Excel file works, and I wanna make that thing happen in the new world and add new bells and whistles. Talk about a scenario where it doesn't make sense to do that, but maybe it does make sense to buy a third party tool. Right? You know, we talked to several of our customers about, you know, we use, we've said it before, harvest and forecast for time tracking for ourselves. I just had a conversation with another customer about that kind of tooling because they're like, I wanna do all this stuff with project management stuff, but I also wanna track time.

And I'm like, well, to do that, you have to do this. And they're like, oh my goodness. I have to put time on every task, and I have to, you know, manage it at that level. I just wanna do, like, high level. I just wanna do something a little bit different.

And oftentimes, there are 3rd party tools. So what talk to me about how that might fit in.

Mike: Well, that's one of the, criteria that you should evaluate is, are is there a third party tool that does this thing so much better than I could do it in a generic way that it warrants the expense for that tool. So we use harvest and forecast, for example, to help manage time and forecast projects into the future. But other tools like even QuickBooks, for example, has a feature that allows you to enter time. It actually allows your employees to enter time directly on a mobile app, and so that it feeds right into QuickBooks online, which also has a payroll module. Right?

So if you're paying for all of the right pieces of that thing that you're already using to watch your numbers, that might make the most sense. And so you need to be able to, like, kinda pick your head up a little bit and look around and not try to shoehorn everything into a specific way of doing it or a specific toolset.

Matt: Yeah. Talk to me about that specifically because often what we hear from customers is I tried I looked at that, but it doesn't do this fancy like, even when we do it, when we moved away from our Excel spreadsheet, there's stuff that you can't get out of harvest and forecast by by default. And we had to let go of that a little bit, because it's not core to our business. It doesn't doesn't provide value to our customers necessarily directly

Mike: Right.

Matt: How we get this number in this way. We can deal with that another way.

Mike: Yep. Well, and that's exactly what we've done, right, is we, gave up the core of what we were doing in that spreadsheet and handed it off to another system that does that stuff very well. And in the years subsequent to that, we've rebuilt some of the things that we cared about in other ways. Right? We're able to integrate directly with the data that comes out of harvest and pull it into our own reporting platform and do all kinds of fun calculations on it that aren't in an Excel spreadsheet.

Right? And that make it more accessible to everyone who needs to be in the know. And it just happens automatically. Every time we had a customer, we don't have to go in there and monkey with data. Right?

Matt: Mhmm. Yeah.

Emma: The other thing I wanna bring back, you guys are talking a lot about, like, technical side of business process, but sometimes people think business process is, well, first I send an approval email to so and so, and it's got the file version 12 on it, and then so and so sends it version 13 to so and so. You know, sometimes people can think of that as that's our process to get approval on a spreadsheet or on a document. Sometimes simple processes like that can be completely fixed by just turning more to digital collaboration communication tools. So if you're listening and you're thinking, okay, I have a lot of processes that involve, yeah, emailing back and forth or just, you know, meeting about certain things, digital tools can sometimes just relieve you of some of those processes. And to Mitch's point earlier, we we had talked with a client who, yeah, used to just have a really messy, process when they were closing on a deal and they switched to using Planner and Teams to talk about those things, removed all the email, and the whole process went smoother.

And they were like, I can't imagine going back to the way we were doing it before. So sometimes it's not even building this intense Power App tool or something like that. It is just communicating and collaborating now.

Mike: Just as simple as digital signatures.

Emma: Yeah. Sure.

Mike: Right? Like closing a contract out, like, send a digital signature request to somebody. So you're still

Matt: my son thunder a little bit. Oh. What I wanna talk about is the concept of putting all these things together. Right? So when you think about when we think about all these things together, if you were this next year to work and get get meetings to be better, have smart meetings, and you were able to ditch email much like you're talking about.

Stop sending files back and forth. Use loop in your meetings, which means that you're storing files probably in SharePoint and you're doing these other things. And when you're doing your your emails, you have that in teams. And so I can find all that information. And so now I don't need to have my big spreadsheet that tells me the current status of this thing because I can go somewhere else and it's just automatically there.

Right? And then when I really do have a core process that I do wanna make, you know, really super, as you mentioned, is super technical, super difficult, super challenging, but it's super valuable to the business. And I do implement something else. When you stack all these things together, you're gonna see a huge transformation in your organization. And for us, these are kind of core tenants of what it means to have a modern organization, a modern business.

And it's it's really something that, you know, they do stack, and they do they doing one of these simple things like getting rid of email and making smart meetings. What you currently think is a process that needs to get improved also and becomes something that is a nonissue. It just works. It's just okay the way it is. It doesn't have to be anything more.

You don't have to buy a third party tool. You don't have to, you know, build anything. And so I think that's the the the takeaway that I'm taking from what you guys are saying, which is, you know, you know, each one of these things, they're difficult. They're long as you mentioned, and and you mentioned it's it's not something that's gonna happen immediately tomorrow. But if you spend the next year working on even one of these, it's gonna start to build that that foundation where you can just continue to progress and progress and make this better over time.

So I'm looking forward to what people can do. Yeah.

Mitch: It's really interesting you had that that line of thinking because I had the same one. I was I was gonna ask us to reflect on these are all individual things, and we're we're posing them as individual things. But what if in 2025, you did all 3?

Matt: Yeah. I don't know. Or at least work that

Mitch: 100 of them.

Matt: Right? Like work work on all of them a little bit. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Cool.

Mitch: Go do it. Yeah. You can do it.

Emma: 2025. It's your year.

Matt: Yeah.

Mitch: Think that's all we got.

Matt: I think that's it. Yeah. Thanks everybody for your time. And, like we've said before, we'll have some resources in the description of this podcast and, reach us reach out out to us. I don't know if I'm supposed to say something else, but whatever.

Mitch: Nope. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll see you next time.

Emma: See you.