The Future of Business Operations: Navigating AI, Software, and Operational Efficiency

Welcome to the Blitz Growth Podcast. Listen in to learn how founders, entrepreneurs, and creators build and scale their businesses online. Let's get started. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Blitz Growth.

Super excited to have an amazing guest for you here today. We're going to learn a ton about B2B operations, coaching, training, and making your 2024 the best year yet. We love efficiency. So today we have Stanko here, Very interesting because he's in the content creation, B2B niche, focusing on the less sexy side of operations, which is essential.

But a lot of people kind of overlook this or don't really focus on it, which is a shame because it does make or break a lot of these businesses. And it will make a huge difference if you have a streamlined operation versus a clunky one. So today we're going to chat with Stenko about how he works with individuals and teams to achieve high levels of performance and also their digital transformations. You know, everybody's wanting to make a better 2024 version of themselves.

So excited to jump in. Senko, nice to have you. Thank you for having me, mate. Appreciate it.

I really love your show, man. So really looking forward to having this chat today. So hopefully I can give some value back to your listeners. You'll easily be able to, don't you worry.

Got a very impressive background. So starting out, you know, for people who haven't kind of Googled you yet, But just give us a quick two-second reel of, you know, how do you introduce yourself? What do you say you do? What do you say kind of like how do you say you can help people when you first meet them at maybe an event, dinner, hanging out, whatever it may be?

Funnily enough, when I meet people and they ask me what I do, my first thing is I just say I just do stuff because it's so broad and complex that sometimes I get caught up in trying to explain it in a really sort of refined way, I guess essentially I help people get shit done. And that comes down to sort of setting up an operation and running it essentially and putting in the right pillars in place to make sure that the certain cogs are working. So yeah, that's it. That's in a nutshell.

Obviously there's more in-depth things to that, but yeah. Yeah, no, I love that. That's probably one of the best lines we've had actually. How do you help people?

I just help people get shit done. Well, that's it. i think often we sort of complicate it and sort of really refine it like i help this do that by this but you know essentially at the end of the day we just want to move the needle you know whatever that means in whatever industry it is it's just essentially like i said get shit done so yeah no super interesting because you know i know we haven't quick chat about this but operations is in absolutely everything you can't avoid operations for those listening operations is essentially how things work in your business um is it a million different text messages going back and forth or do you have a streamlined system in place to check the boxes get stuff done and Senka how do you kind of help brands do this or where do you feel like you make the biggest impact when you're working with other brands or individuals stepping in and helping them with this process what's usually broken and what are you usually fixing I think usually look any business whether it's going good or bad has an operation in place that operation might be really clunky it might be messy it might be disjointed you know i guess the key to a good operation is making sure that it's systematic it's automated as much as possible it's streamlined to the right people at the right touch points you know there's a certain stages or milestone stages that are hit at each point and then that sort of triggers the next point and the next point and what i find with a lot of people is operations is just holding a million things at the same time and trying to juggle them at once and that's where sort of people tend to not have the ability to scale or to move forward or to really have an effective operation whereas the moment they sort of start to put some things down and take control of certain aspects and maybe delegate some tasks to other people things start to run smoother and things start to operate a little bit better and yeah so there's a lot of that and I think that I think that awareness of knowing that an operation has certain elements to it is the first start of making a streamlined operation effective so got it and then you know at the start obviously everybody has to do everything themselves um it's very hard to obviously hire people day one or delegate day one when you're the only one doing everything um what are some key signs that you see when you're like okay this person should really be delegating this or hiring someone to do this um you know you've probably seen it a million times what do you feel like the main indicators are that you know someone should see when they're like oh no i should be delegating this or i should be doing uh giving this someone else to do i think look in reality when someone starts a business you know they're obviously going to be doing things on their own for for a while right i think whether what happens is entrepreneurs who do start their own business tend to do everything at the same time and there's a thing there's a there's a really sort of bad stigma around people thinking that their multitasking is actually effective and it's working.

Whereas in reality, your brain can't focus on more than one task at once. So essentially, if you've got five tasks at once, you're actually doing none of them effectively because your brain is, you know, it's sort of going one from the other. You sort of really have to learn to, and this is what I tell my clients a lot, is sort of just set their day and time block things. So if you've got five things that you have to do in your business, If you've got five hats that you have to wear, time block it.

Say from 9 to 10, you are operations. From 10 to 11, you're an accountant. From 11 to so on, you're sales. And I think if you really start to walk in those shoes of that role at a certain period, that sort of teaches you to really get things done a lot quicker.

And essentially, that's really creating your own system. It's a formal system that works. And yeah, so biggest thing from that is not to mix and mix roles within the time because, you know, people fall over and I've seen it over and over again. Yeah, I'm actually a big advocate of time blocking.

I do a lot of it. And I also even put reoccurring events in my calendar. So it like you know every Monday from 11 to 12 is sales or every Thursday from you know two to three is HR or something or like at least following up And then in a notes section I also add what I supposed to be doing a lot of the time in that hour Because otherwise I'll get to it and be like, ah, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing right now. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you spend 10, 20 minutes trying to figure out what you're doing. And then by the time you figure out what you're doing, time has passed. You know what I mean?

And it's sort of that really starts to compound over time. And, you know, if you look at the end result, it affects the bottom line and that's your results, whether that's money or clients or how many funds on seats or whatever you want to call it. It really does affect the result. So, yeah.

So, what about the method? Yeah, super interesting way to handle that. And then, so once you're doing that, what point do you feel like someone should be delegating it to someone else? so you know you're eventually going to run out of hours in the day if you're wearing too many hats and the the tasks or responsibilities for each time block is getting too big um what's your advice to people who are kind of in that middle range of you know they they're getting some traction they haven't really hired anybody yet um maybe they're doing coaching or course creation or you know they're running a software company or an e-commerce company yeah what's some common things that you see in people who are you know holding on to a task for too long versus delegating in yeah um so with that so i'm a big believer in focusing on your strengths and sort of sticking to them uh you know i think everyone has the ability to learn things example uh you'll have a doctor or a um dermal doctor injectable does injectables um but they've got a social media account and then they run their social media account they sit there and in between clients they'll write their copy put up a post to do some tag and that kind of stuff and you can tell that in that window of them doing that social media that their strength is actually dermal sorry being a dermal clinic being a dermal doctor right so i think at that point you need to look at evaluate what are you doing you know in terms of your time how much time are you spending on certain tasks and then start to sort of test it out give it to someone um maybe do a trial you know jump on upwork or things like that hire a consultant for really cheap that can help you sort of take the first step and take something off your plate so that you can focus on what it is that you actually do the money making of the business so yeah yeah i kind of do remember the first time i hired someone else was just to help me because yeah bandwidth i just couldn't get everything done in a day and so i was like okay let's hire someone to do the lower level tasks that i'm doing or the tasks are less impactful um but yeah definitely leaning into your strength because that's what people are paying you for they're paying you for the thing that you're an expert in and i do feel like software and technology has also helped out a lot like that's automated a lot of these kind of tasks that you would kind of maybe have delegated to some more general kind of virtual assistant or admin at one point i feel like software has made a big impact how are you seeing companies um you know use software to help either streamline process and operations um you know what tools or what software or what technology do you feel like making the best improvements before and after once implemented i think software's come a long way and i think especially in the last five years there's been a lot of integration with um ai or sort of certain sort of tools that sort of help a functioning operation sort of move along.

And I think what's happened is businesses have really started to implement that and integrate that into their everyday to day, like, you know, from a lead generation point of view to a sales call, to a sales closure, and let's just say, example, production. If there's a manufacturing company, you know, they'll automate the production lines. the timeline that it takes the dispatch and then the whole retention part post sale you know there's i guess it's getting smarter and smarter to the point where we realistically don't really need humans to do as much as we needed to in the past and i think what it's scary what it really comes down to yeah uh what it's really coming down to and it's going to come down to even more is um having the human there as the personal touch the rest is done software so yeah i mean it's a really sort of broad topic but um i think if you don't have some sort of software and you're doing everything on paper on book i think you're really behind it it's something that you should really consider whether it's from a small business owner just using trello for is it for an example and having all your accounts or customers in a certain board or whether it's a big enterprise and and and you know implementing something like salesforce there's benefits to it so they're really dependent on the size of the operation and the level that they want to go to.

Interesting. Yeah, I love that. And then for your 2024 predictions, how do you feel AI and software is going to impact the operation side of these? Like, obviously, operations is how all these businesses move and how everybody gets stuff done.

You know, what do you think 2024 holds for, you know, I suppose, yeah, there's organizational software tools. where do you think they're going do you think you know jobs are going to be replaced here I know there's like assistants virtual assistants all that sort of stuff what's your prediction on 2024 on where kind of like software and SaaS for operations is going to go I think with AI 2023 was a really big year on AI and sort of just taking a storm but I think my prediction and I guess you know this is just my opinion I think 2024 the dust has or will settle a little bit more And people will start to realize that AI isn't necessarily as useful in certain parts as it has been portrayed to be.

However, I do think that there's going to be a lot of implementation and testing around this year, seeing what works and what doesn't. And, you know, there will be a time where jobs will be made redundant, but new jobs will be born also from that, you know, which is the exciting part. So I guess rather than looking at how many jobs are going to lose, it's more about how many jobs can we make, you know, to grow the business even further. I said there could be more sales that we hire or more, you know, account managers on the road that we hire as opposed to your admin people who are just sitting there closing leads example So yeah the future is bright i think it exciting i think it is what we make it you know and that that my prediction for 2024 interesting yeah do you feel like uh you know you got to embrace the technology and test it and find out ways to improve your output versus finding ways that it's going to replace you because you know everybody's replaceable everybody will get replaced at some point in their life it's the difference is who pivots and adopts that and then makes themselves more valuable or those who just you know accept that hey my job's been replaced yeah and you know one thing you just said it's sort of adapting to the ai is is already making you more valuable than the person who does it so that's the key point is you know just to be open to it just to be open to change open to learning new things and sort of look at ai and all the little bits and pieces that are coming out and put it through a sifter you know if whatever you sift through whatever stage is obviously helpful for you and whatever doesn't isn't so i think part of it is really being open to it and having the the mindset of a growth growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset is going to help you become more valuable as an employee business owner or whatever you are yeah yeah no super interesting okay let's uh switch gears over to coaching agency side of things so there is this huge market of b2b which doesn't necessarily get as much you know coverage as maybe b2c so business to business everybody business to consumer so b2b side of things you do a lot of the coaching you have an agency that helps with operations you know how are you really creating or acquiring customers for your coaching or your agency there are you using content are you you know what are you sort of doing there to create the interest that's big enough for them to say hey i want to either get coaching from you or i want to hire your system or your team to help me improve this problem so so i come from an operational background working for an aggregator for about 12 years and running their operations, sort of group operations and project management.

In the last two years, I've gone on my own and sort of started my agency in the same field. And just, thank you. And just dealing with different people in different markets and different niches, you know, rather than having the one market, so which was finance back then. The way that I find business to business, what you said, I think business to business ultimately is business to a customer anyway, because at the end of the day, in the business, the person making the decision is a person, not essentially the business itself.

So it's always business to individuals. And I think working with individuals and, you know, helping them achieve operations is really sort of where everything's at at the moment. And people do need help. People look for help.

and the way that I've been gaining traction and getting a bit more clients to be honest with you for me it's been a lot of it is word of mouth a lot of this has been sort of referral um focused as well I think results speak for themselves and I think you know sometimes we get caught up in social media and what people say online and all that kind of stuff but I think ultimately it comes down to the nitty-gritty work and so far um I have a small you know team I think it's been good because it's just referral based and that's sort of where I'm at at the moment so yeah I think everybody listening should think about I know a lot of people decide to go like business to consumer but everybody listening should think about like hey does my skill set apply to b2b or as you're saying like uh you know business individual but really the majority being like are you servicing a company or are you servicing an individual as a whole and then the other thing to think of is like hey should i be there's like three real three prongs here should i be a coach and should i be doing one-to-one coaching with someone should i be creating a course and doing one-to-many which is you know low involvement or should i be creating a team and making an agency because i do think all three can be very successful very profitable um it's very hard to do all three i think yeah um how do you differentiate between people who you do coaching with or people who you bring on to kind of like the agency?

So it depends on the size of the project and the size of the problem, I guess. Really, you know, a lot of times my clients that I work with really want someone in-house to help them get into it, get into the work and just sort of really paint a picture inside internally, see what can be pulled apart, what can't. You know, sort of working in the business and just sort of spending a bit of time with them and their team and just having an understanding of how everything works and then building it from that way.

But then on that side, you might have people who are just stuck at a certain point. And I think that's where coaching comes in. It's people who are stuck and want to work with someone who's either A, has done something like that in the past and can help them get there faster. Or two, has the ability or the knowledge behind them to really scale them and push them forward, propel them to another level.

And yeah, I hope that answers that question. but um yeah no definitely definitely does i think um yeah it is case-to-case basis and then it's clever that you sort of have both options for people so you can take that coaching one-on-one client if you know they already have a team or they're already maybe a little bit further along i feel like usually the bigger companies want coaching and the small to medium size usually want done for you um so it's nice that you have those two options um okay coming into some common mistakes you see with operations so when you're working with maybe smaller teams and they're kind of just getting started or the the tool software or business is just getting off the ground what are some common mistakes people make in their operations setup common mistakes is um people they have the wrong people in the wrong roles that's number one and i think that comes a lot of time especially small businesses that grow to a certain point they start obviously with a small group of people and then that person grows with them and then they sort of just start wearing different hats in the business where they're not necessarily either trained for it skilled for it or right for it essentially and what it does is it gets caught in a limbo where the business doesn't really move forward as progressively as it could be um purely due to the fact that the person running it doesn have the skill set to move it forward that number one um number two is having multiple people wearing multiple hats i think like i said earlier you know you can multitask but what a lot of people do is they give let's say they've got three four staff they'll give them five six different tasks tasks or responsibilities to do and then you know natural people also get flustered and they don't perform very well which which again affects the end result the bottom line of the business.

So the operational cog doesn't move as smoothly as it should. And back to what I said earlier, you know, people in these situations, they sometimes do grow. Like the marketing might work. They get a whole bunch of leads.

The, you know, customer growth is there, but then the operational side and the retention side falls apart because the internal isn't right. Yeah. Yeah. it is very hard to balance all of that flow like all those deliverables kind of like the acquisition the maintenance and then the ltv growth or lifetime value growth or retention um no i agree with you and then for you like putting your words into practice um at what point did you think oh i should start hiring people to build out an agency because i think there are a lot of people in this field where they have a skill set or they can do something people are hiring them for this skill and then they're getting stuck should i start an agency and grow out a team should i just keep taking on more and more work or should i get rid of my smaller customers and take on only the bigger ones um what was the tipping point for you when you were like okay i need to hire some people to help me out do this so from from the start um again again i've done operations for a very long time and i sort of had that mindset of learning how to delegate and give things to the right people so that I can focus on certain things.

I've done that from the start, even from day one of the agency. I've delegated or outsourced certain tasks that take too much of my time, like the web development, some of the SEO, the marketing for clients, or some of the design works and all that kind of stuff. All that stuff, I've got a team that I work through, and they sort of help me move the needle with all these little tasks so that I can focus on the bigger picture and really sort of zooming out, bird's eye view, right, this needs to go here, this needs to go there, and so on.

So, yeah, I'm big on that. And I think if I wasn't big on that, I wouldn't be as far into this as I am today. Yeah, okay. So you're still following the kind of like the skill set model where it's like do what you're good at, delegate the rest pretty much.

Got it. And then how did you find with cash flow being like, okay, like it's always a chicken or the egg sort of situation with a lot of people it's like okay do i pay to hire and outsource this to but possibly lose money in the short term or do i kind of like do it myself try and get by for as long as possible so i get some profit and then start paying for the extra help what's your thought process on that one uh look i think everyone is in a different position and i think the important thing is to understand that and i I think sometimes, yes, there is a cash flow issue or a stage where you might have to keep a bit of funds to retain them for later.

And I think at that point, you really have to look at, okay, what do you need to get done? What are the top five things that you have to do? And what are the things that can wait for later? And I think once you've identified those things, then you really sort of - I do a lot of pros and cons lists.

If I do this, what's the reason? What's the good reason? What's the bad reason for it? And I think that really helps me determine what decision I'm going to make for each point.

Cash flow, yeah. Cash flow, you know, it's a funny one. You have to spend money to make money. And that's the reality in today's age, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. And how much money that is, you know, depending on everyone. Yeah.

No, sometimes spending money to make money works out. Sometimes it doesn't. You got to keep learning. and i think the mindset to switch around that is rather than seeing it as an expense especially marketing you're going to start looking at it looking at it as an investment you know what am i you know building planting certain seeds that are going to come back to you later down the track and that's the important part and funnily enough just on that a lot of people i would say 90 of people still think that marketing is a is an expense not an investment and you know that's where a lot of people sort of are lagging and not sort of really getting on on on on the train with everything you know what i mean so it's really important to start thinking about that for those that are listening is really start to put some money into some sort of marketing and in particular seo for your online business yeah i feel yeah all all prongs require some effort and some money to get started but yeah definitely looking at the one two five and ten year model will change the way that you spend your money for sure um yeah you look at more long-term strategies um awesome um thank you i don't want to take up too much of your time um but i do want to leave with everybody knowing where they can find out more about you um you know about your coaching stuff about your agency and how you help with operations maybe some content or advice or value that you kind of give out to everybody um let us know where we can find you i'm pretty much on most socials uh search stanko perich um linkedin in particular and also on instagram um yeah just reach out to me if you have any questions i'm happy to help or you know awesome if you need any advice i'm also also there so just give me a message will do i will chuck all those in the show notes and everybody hopefully you learned a little bit about operations when to delegate or not delegate, let us know if you do have any questions from this episode.

And thank you so much for the time. Awesome. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me.

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