This month – I’ve been reflecting back to an experience from 2019 that involved my brother, Eric.
Eric used to manage retail sales for all of Eastern Canada for the largest soft drink manufacturer in the world. He was kind of a big deal – and in 20 years managed to break sales records and win a few awards and recognitions. His job allowed him to travel the world and achieve a ton of success and stability at a young age. Eventually – his career had him move to the Montreal head office where he has now been for over a decade.
However, in 2019 – there came a time when he had to make a decision of moving his family again from Montreal to Toronto, or figure out what he was going to do next with his career. I learned of this when I was out visiting in Montreal one evening while watching our Jets beat the Canadians on the television. That evening I made him an offer: “Let me fly you in a few weeks every month and help us manage our sales and grow our team in Winnipeg.” After a few months – he agreed, and we started a six-month adventure of big brother *working for* little brother.
The funny thing is that he took on this new role thinking that he would turn my company around. That we were a struggling little IT firm with no systems and no understanding on how to sell our services. He believed that he was to be our messiah, our saviour and that he could use the same tactics of selling soft drinks to the Walmarts and Superstores of the world and do the same for IT. But what he discovered on day one, was that we a great tool set complimented by fine-tuned processes that allowed us to automate and save our team a lot of time and money. He was blown away by the systems we had in place and at how we were running (what he felt) was a well oiled machine.
Now, don’t get me wrong – it was an amazing six months, and I really enjoyed having spent so much time with my brother sharing my love of business, my clients, and our processes. Unfortunately – the time away from his family and young daughters was too much and didn’t fall in line with our core values, so we eventually agreed that unless he was willing to move back to Winnipeg – he would be best to focus on family and find something in Montreal.
He ended up finding a job back home to manage the global sales for another massive company – and he has been trying very hard to have me fly over there and present to his management team the systems and automations that we have in place at Avenir IT. In fact – he’s been slowly rebuilding their sales process based on what we taught him!
What this experience taught me was that we as smaller, newer businesses have a big advantage. We have access to amazing online tools that we can still implement at a relatively low cost – and train our entire staff relatively quickly. Just because we’re considered a small business – doesn’t mean we can’t be cutting edge! You see, the likely reason why these large corporations are so far behind on times is simply that they’ve never made the investment or understood how the up front costs of automation or implementing a new platform could save them an insane amount of money and see a return of investment in a short period of time. Some of the changes that we have made over the years ended up saving us over $30,000 upfront costs and over 300 hours of saved time per year! And these numbers will only grow every year as we continue to build and grow the business.
It’s funny – I always assumed that all entrepreneurs shared my mind set of always wanting to grow, improve and find new ways of automating or delegating tedious or repetitive tasks in order to spend more time stepping back and working on the business. However – what I found out in recent months when helping other entrepreneurs grow their business – is how many entrepreneurs are still stuck in the day-to-day tasks.
I was asked recently to present to my mastermind group as well as my local chamber on how Avenir IT implemented and uses business automation. Doing these presentations is always eye-opening and really forces you to look back at how these small changes that we implemented made a huge difference over time.
I recorded this presentation, and I am sharing it with you here. The presentation is full of what I hope is great information that can likely help you save your organization tens of thousands of dollars and an insane amount of time. The presentation is full of statistics and information that I hope will be helpful and will help you generate some ideas on how you can start using business automation in your business.
