Michelle Thompson: I am super excited to have you here. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. This is Jessica Moyer Bledsoe and she is the CEO of RCN Technologies. And you guys have recently developed a pretty cool app. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah, absolutely. So we are working on developing an app called Pavr, which is an app to integrate directly with your Google calendar so you can manage your time, your team and your tasks all in one location from your Google calendar, specifically.
Michelle Thompson: Ok. So how is that different from other apps. I know there are other tools out there that do kind of the same thing. How’s Pavr a little different and make it better?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah, Pavr is better from any other app because it keeps your information directly on your calendar.
Jessica Bledsoe: So right now, if you’re using something like Trello, which offers a lot of features, you still have to go to Trello and use Trello’s app. So a lot of times what we find is that apps like Trello or something similar sometimes are really difficult for people to set up. They’re hard to remember how to use. It’s also really hard to get your entire team on board with using something unfamiliar to them. Obviously that comes at a price for most apps as well. So with Pavr, we’re going to keep all that information directly on your calendar entry. And it’s an app that you’re already using. We want to live and die by our calendar. And you already know how to use your calendar. Your team already knows how to use the calendar. And a lot of what paver is this or is for managing those kinds of events and meetings that are already on the calendar. So in our mind, let’s just turn the calendar into a database where all that information and now you can start to export data out of your calendar. So what do we really cool features in Pavr is being able to add tags to your meeting and event and tag it.
Jessica Bledsoe: Is it a networking meeting or this is a client meeting? You can even tag it to a specific client and then you be kind of export that data. And we said how much time spent on that category without having to color code or scroll back through your calendar. And just kind of like manually add up the time and then we start to generate the data.
Michelle Thompson: Aside from the calendar. What do you guys do? I saw you’re I.T. company. How do you help small business owners and things like that?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yes. So we are G suite partners, Google Cloud partners, and we are Zapier certified experts. So those are really the two primary things that we focus on with our small business clients, helping them migrate to the cloud and kind of get all their files and information in one place. And then once we kind of have that foundation of G suite in place and they’re familiar with G Mail and Google Calendar and Google Drive and, you know, docs sheets, slides, all those things that come with your Gsuite subscription, then we can really start automating some of their business processes using Zapier, which is an application that kind of connects all of your cloud apps together so that if you put information in one place, you can get the information into another application without having to do a lot of data entry or technical work to make that happen.
Michelle Thompson: Ok. Awesome. And that’s one of the things that we’re super intuned to, are we try to get as many robots to do as much work for us as we possibly can.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah, absolutely. Robots are way cheaper to hire than people. It’s what we always say. And robots rarely fail and they don’t call in sick or need vacation time. They work for you 24/7. So we love robots so that your people can focus on what they are really good at.
Jessica Bledsoe: And so your business can continue to grow without somebody having to spend 10 hours a week just doing data entry type things.
Michelle Thompson: Yeah. And that’s one of the points that, you know, we try to focus on. we do a lot with outsourcing where you can’t you know, it doesn’t make sense to outsource something to a human that a robot could do. Right. Exactly. We tried to integrate the two things that robots can’t do yet. Then we’re able to outsource that to an actual human being. But I absolutely love the fact that you guys do the robot innovation, too. And that’s actually why I was so excited to talk to you about all the cool tools and tricks that you use with those Zapier. So what are the top 10 things that give us the most bang for our buck or give us the most time back using Zapier?
Jessica Bledsoe: Sure. So let me just preface this by saying that a lot of our clients are small businesses. They typically have less than 50 employees, but the bulk of them, I would say, have around 10 to 15 internal staff that are really kind of like running the office operations. So we have manufacturing clients, transportation, hospitality. So they’re in industries where maybe they have workers that aren’t as important to the office infrastructure. But that’s what we’re really focused on is kind of the internal piece that’s helping the rest of the business run.
Michelle Thompson: So you do it with a virtual team, do just as easily.
Jessica Bledsoe: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’ve worked virtually with several companies, but it’s we’re primarily working with that core office staff to help them with their system. So typically what that looks like, it means that they have or they need a CRM.
Jessica Bledsoe: They’re using those G suite tools that we talked about, primarily G-mail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. And then they might also be using a project management tool like Trello. And as far as like marketing, they may be doing some social media type ads as well. So I just want to say that because of a lot of the things that I have on my kind of list all kind of fall into those categories because it’s a universal need for any small business. You’re going to need that kind of the foundation of things to help you grow your business.
Michelle Thompson: So now we absolutely integrate. That’s what we use. We use the GSuite platform. But then also today, this is really cool. So Basecamp is actually coming out with a free option. So you can have three tasks up to 20 users. Nice. You have like a small business. You know, maybe is’s trying to keep their budget down or whatever. I was really happy to see that the Basecamp does that. Do you guys integrate with Basecamp, too?
Jessica Bledsoe: We have not used basecamp and probably like four years. So I know that is completely different than it was when we were using it.
Jessica Bledsoe: And I’ve actually we’ve not had any clients that have used it either. So it’s changed a lot since the last time that we were in there. But we’ve worked with some similar kind of project client management type things. So keep that in mind as I’m going through my list to is that, you know, I might say pipe drive, which is the CRM that a lot of our clients use. But almost any CRM out there has a Zapier integration. So even if it’s not the one that I’m specifically mentioning, if you have something similar, there’s probably an automation for it as well.
Michelle Thompson: Sure. Also. Well, I’ll try to stop interrupting and let you do your thing.
Jessica Bledsoe: No worries. So probably my favorite zap is the ability to add an attachment from an email directly to a client Google Drive folder.
Jessica Bledsoe: Because how many times have we needed that attachment? But they sent it to us a week ago or six months ago. And now you have to like search your inbox for it. You’re trying to find it. You downloaded it originally, but you have no idea if you downloaded it to your desktop or your Google drive or wherever it is. So if we can just go ahead and extract that attachment and add it directly to their Google Drive client folder, that is such a time saver, because if they’re sending you an attachment, there’s a reason they’re sending it to you. So you’re going to need it eventually. So let’s go ahead and get it in a place where you can easily access it. The only kind of thing there that you have to remember is that you have to save your client folder by the email address that they’re using. So where you might typically store me as Jessica Bledsoe, I need to be Jessica@ElevatebyRCN.com. That way, Zapier can find me and put my attachment in there and Zapier walks you through kind of all these little idiosyncrasies as well in terms of like how to set it up. So it’ll kind of walk you through step by step on what you need to do so that you can get it set up right the first time. The next one would be creating a Trello card from a new email.
Jessica Bledsoe: So a lot of times, again, we get emails from people where they’re asking us to do a task and we try to manage all of our tasks in one place so we can create a new Trello card from an email. The way we have this setup is so that if I apply a filter to that email, then it will automatically add the email as a Trello card because obviously not every single e-mail needs to have a Trello card created for it.
Jessica Bledsoe: Sending emails from G-mail for a new Facebook lead ad. So if you’re running a Facebook lead marketing campaign and someone fills out that kind of web form that you set up. You can go ahead and automate the process of sending them an email so it can be something as simple as like, thank you for submitting your form. Here’s some information or you can go ahead and send them a link to like your calendar to where they could book a follow-up call with you. So it just kind of helps you contact that that lead as soon as they’ve made that initial contact without maybe waiting a day or so before you get around to it, go ahead and automate that so that you continue to stay on top of mind for them and they don’t fall through the cracks or change their mind about wanting to talk to you.
Michelle Thompson: Right. That’s like such a huge gold nugget right there.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah. Because if they submitted that lead ad like they’re excited about it already. So like, let’s not give them 24 hours to change their mind. Right.
Jessica Bledsoe: Go ahead and get in their inbox and take that next step with them. So if you already know what that next step is, go ahead and create a template email that can be sent out as soon as they submit the form in and get that next step going.
Michelle Thompson: Awesome.
Jessica Bledsoe: So kind of in that same line is to send an email for a new Google form submission.
Jessica Bledsoe: So if you have someone that is submitting a Google form or even a type form, really any sort of form, you can go ahead and trigger a zap to send them an email. Upon submitting that form submission. So we have a client who she helps people write books for their businesses. So like a business book authors. And she has a couple of different forms on her Web site and based on the form that they fill out. She has different information that she wants to send them. So if she receives a form submission for a potential new author, then they get an email that lays out exactly like what the next steps are as far as getting a time on her calendar. They can go ahead and submit like a first draft of their book or their book cover. Things like that. So it really kind of just like I said, it gets into those next steps without you having to be the one to take the action, because we can get just so caught up in our day to day that our inboxes get out of control.
Jessica Bledsoe: Email is one of the easiest things that you can automate right off the bat, because that’s where you spend so much of your time. And if you do get out of your inbox a little bit, you’ll get so much more time that you didn’t even realize you were spending because you like, oh, it’s an email, it takes me a minute to send it.
Jessica Bledsoe: But if you’re doing that fifteen times a day and then it’s not just the time it takes to send it, it’s the time it takes to get back into the task you were working on before you sent that email as well. So all those little things really do add up, especially over the course of a year, or if you have a large team in place or even a small team on that. Fifteen minutes multiplied by five.
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Michelle Thompson: That’s such a huge thing. I know Tim Ferriss talks about only checking his email twice a day, basically once in the morning and once in the early afternoon. And I said, oh, my gosh, there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that. Right. But then once I implemented it, it was amazing how much time you got back. And then if you were to add in, you know, the robot. So you don’t even have to deal with your inbox? Yeah, that’s just absolutely amazing.
Michelle Thompson: You don’t think about how much brain bandwidth you’re wasting by going back and forth, you know, because you’re thinking about this topic and then, oh, that email pops up and then it takes five minutes to go back and think about that topic and you got get back in the zone. You know, copywriting or whatever you were doing. Totally on board with that.
Jessica Bledsoe: This has absolutely nothing to do with Zapier, but I actually turned off all the notifications on my phone too, so I no longer get those like email pop-ups. I don’t get any sort of social media alerts just because I’d be sitting here typing out content and then my phone would vibrate and I’d look over and I’m like, oh, what is what does that email say?
Jessica Bledsoe: And before you know it, I’ve lost an entire hour because now I’m fully in my inbox and I’m like, oh, well, this will only take me a minute. This only takes me a minute. This will only take me a minute. And then my day is gone. And I didn’t I never actually accomplish the task that I set out to do. So anytime those time you can minimize those distractions. It’s going to make your life a lot easier when it comes to actually checking things off your to-do list.
Michelle Thompson: Awesome. Awesome. Love it.
Jessica Bledsoe: So Google Calendar, those creating events from a Google form submission is something that has worked really well for a number of people.
Jessica Bledsoe: But specifically, I work out of a co-working space a couple days a week and there are I mean, I would say probably two dozen different businesses that are in and out of that space. And we have a primary calendar that everyone has access to. And they were having to email the director of operations anytime they had any sort of event, and she would have to manually add it to the calendar. And now we can we just have a forum on the website that everyone can fill out with an event that they have that they’re hosting and it automatically gets added to that kind of master calendar event. So when you have someone like your director of operations who’s having to take out of time, out of her day to add five different calendar entries, that’s just not a great use of her time.
Michelle Thompson: That’s not very efficient.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah. And I mean, there’s obviously there’s always gonna be things that robots can’t do, that it does require a human to step in and fill that gap. But if it’s something a robot can do. Go ahead and let the robot do it. Sometimes it’s hard for us to like release control, a lot of it. And usually maybe you’re not like super trustworthy of technology. But what we love about both Google and Zapier is that I mean, these are tools that have been around for a really long time now. They’re tested. They’re secure.
Jessica Bledsoe: They are more than willing to go over step by step with you exactly how everything works. And we’re always happy to do the same with our clients, too, to kind of give you that peace of mind. But I would say honestly, 100 percent of the time, by the time we’re done, our clients are like, how did we ever work before? You know, like we are so much more efficient now. How were we ever even getting anything done before we deploy these robots into our business to do some of these things for us?
Jessica Bledsoe: So it’s really no different.
Michelle Thompson: Yeah, for sure. Once you start using over you, you realize how much free time you can, you know, implement it. You’re like, oh, what else can I offload?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. We do have clients that like once we finish a project, they’re like, give me like a week and I’m going to come back with another list of things. It gets your wheels spinning, thinking what am I doing every day or multiple times a day because that’s usually a pretty good indication of something that can be automated.
Jessica Bledsoe: If you’re having to do it over and over and over again, there’s probably a way to automate it at least 50 percent of the way so that people take back even just a portion of your time and doing that task.
Jessica Bledsoe: Awesome. Let’s see where I was at here. So the next one will be to create a new CRM deal for Facebook lead ad some kind of in that same regard. If someone fills out your Facebook lead ad… Let’s go ahead and get them into your CRM pipeline.
Jessica Bledsoe: Pipe drive is the one that we use. So I’ve specifically used it for that.
Jessica Bledsoe: But I know there are so many different CRM’s and almost all of them that I’ve found have been integrated there.
Jessica Bledsoe: So let’s get them into your pipeline so that you know what your next steps. Are you going to sign it to a different member on your team, if that’s what it takes.
Jessica Bledsoe: But let’s just eliminate the need of getting it out of Facebook and into your CRM, because if it stays on Facebook, they’re probably going to get forgotten about at some point.
Michelle Thompson: So just out of curiosity, why did you pick that CRM over all the options out there?
Jessica Bledsoe: It’s easy to use so many CRM or just bloated with so many features that you really don’t need. You’re not going to use it, but you’re paying for them anyway. And what we really love about Pipedrive is it’s very affordable and it just has exactly what you need. And it also kind of has that kind of can band process where you can move your deals through stages. And it also has built-in automation with Pipedrive.
Jessica Bledsoe: If you move it into another stage, it can automatically send out an email based on the stage that it’s in.
Michelle Thompson: So it doesn’t integrate with your email provider or it’s its own email provider?
Jessica Bledsoe: It does integrate with your email provider.
Jessica Bledsoe: So it integrates really nicely with G suite so you can keep all of your emails so that you know that potential client or that client inside of the CRM and you can trigger those emails. It has a built-in scheduling tool similar to like Calendly. So you can integrate that. It has really nice web forms that can be embedded on your Web site, but it doesn’t have a lot of the stuff that you don’t need. And those are the places where we find where people get really overwhelmed with trying to implement a new technology in their business as they go into it with the best of intentions, but then you look at it, you’re like, what do I need? How do I set it up?
Jessica Bledsoe: How do I integrate it with the other tools that I’m using? And they just get really overwhelmed. And so they end up paying for something that they’re not using or they’re only using halfway.
Jessica Bledsoe: With Pipedrive we found that it really gives you just exactly what you need and really nothing else, which is perfectly fine with us.
Michelle Thompson: That’s awesome. In fact, one of the things that we talk a lot about around here is to keep it simple, sweetheart.
Jessica Bledsoe: Sweetheart is way better than stupid.
Michelle Thompson: You know, if you could just keep it simple. So many people try to do everything and it’s just like you said, it’s just overwhelming. There’s like, oh, my gosh, all this stuff, you know, and you don’t need it. You know, you never get what it needs to do and get out. So, yeah.
Jessica Bledsoe: And if you need it to do something that it doesn’t do, that’s where something like Zapier could come in. You know, we could always kind of build upon that. But let’s just pay for and use what we need and not waste our time or money on things that we don’t. So I get it now that I’m developing an app from a developer standpoint where you have the ability to add all of these features and you’re like, well, I could do this and I could do this and I could do this.
Jessica Bledsoe: But at the end of the day, like I keep coming back to like, no, like this is this is the thing that I set out to build and I want to build it this way for a reason. And so lets at least get that out there into the hands of our customers before we start adding on features that they may or may not even want. So when we launched the app, which is kind of TBD, because we’re on Google’s timeline a little bit. But when we launch, we’re actually only launching with one feature. And that’s the ability to tag your calendar entries because, in our market research, we found that that was the thing that people were asking for over and over and over again. So we’re going to launch with just that feature and then kind of do some customer surveys to see exactly what they want next.
Jessica Bledsoe: So we have in our mind what we want to do with it, but that’s totally subject to change based on what our users actually need. But that was the one thing that we knew for certain we wanted to launch with.
Michelle Thompson: And that’s huge being able to tag something and then be able to search by the tag. That’s awesome.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah. It’s almost like so it’s almost like, why doesn’t this exist already? Which to me, like those are the best ideas, because if you’re if you find something that you don’t understand why it doesn’t exist and then you can be the one to build it, like that’s such a really cool opportunity.
Jessica Bledsoe: So absolutely. So I’m really excited about the launch of the app, obviously, but it’s been a process. In looking at it from a developer standpoint and not a user standpoint, because that’s what I’ve I’ve always been a user. I’ve never been to a developer in the sense of actually creating my own app. So I understand how they can add all those features because it seems like it’s something that should be done. We have to real ourselves in all the time from not over complicating things.
Michelle Thompson: Yeah. Absolutely.
Jessica Bledsoe: Ok. Back to my list. So the next one would be to collect new. Typeform responses as rows on Google Sheets.
Jessica Bledsoe: I love Google forms because it automatically does that for you, it will add your responses to Google Sheets, but I get that Google forms are not as pretty as typeforms. And so if you are somebody who just will not give up your typeform and lieu of Google Forms, then that kind of solves that problem. We can at least get it into the spreadsheet. Once it’s into the Google sheet, and that’s really when we can again start looking at the data, data is so important to us, but it should be important to everyone because data is really how you can make better decisions about the growth of your company and how things are going. And if you don’t have the data, you’re really just taking a guess. An educated guess. But it’s still just kind of a guess without the data to back it all up.
Michelle Thompson: The numbers. You’re absolutely right.
Jessica Bledsoe: So if you’re not willing to give up your pretty typeforms then you can at least create a zap that will get it into the sheet where you can start using that Zap.
Michelle Thompson: At least 70 percent of my clients are going to be ecstatic that they don’t have to give up their pretty form.
Jessica Bledsoe: I get it. I mean, it is prettier. I keep hoping that Google will redo the forms interface, but it doesn’t look like that will have any time soon.
Michelle Thompson: I give it to you for free. So…
Jessica Bledsoe: Exactly.
Jessica Bledsoe: You can’t really look a gift horse in the mouth or whatever that saying is.
Jessica Bledsoe: My next tip would be to use the add new subscriber from form submission. So if you are leveraging an email list and you don’t have something in place to get every single email address that comes your way into your email manager, this is a really good way to do that.
Jessica Bledsoe: If you’re not utilizing like the lead forms and things that they go ahead and give you, if you’d rather use the forms that you already have, then you can go ahead and set up a zap to add them into your mailing list. So we use Mailer Lite. I know that it can be done pretty simply with Mailer Lite. But I know that constant contact and Mailchimp and Convertkit and all those other ones are out there too.
Michelle Thompson: I run into Infusionsoft and Drip a lot.
Jessica Bledsoe: I’ve actually not heard of Drip, but I have heard of Infusionsoft.
Michelle Thompson: Oh, Drip is awesome. Drip can do a lot of stuff automated that’s really cool.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah, that’s what I love about Mailer Lite, which it seems like most of the email platforms now are building in some automated ways to use it. But it’s I always recommend to it if it’s natively in there. Go ahead and use it. Don’t try to set up Zap for something that already exists, you know. So if it’s something that you’re paying for or that it’s already there, go ahead and try to use the automation that’s built-in. It’s gonna. It’s probably going to work better in the long run anyway. And Zapier’s is not free. I mean it is free to a point, but when you’re at a certain point after so many actions, you start having to pay for it. So it’s not you know, it’s not completely free.
Jessica Bledsoe: So go ahead and take advantage of all the things you can for the apps that you’re already using. And most of them are fortunately starting to build in some of those native automations.
Michelle Thompson: So can I ask a side question about that? Yeah. So I have a lot of colleagues who use instead of using Zapier. They use if this then that (ITTT), which is the free version. Have you been able to play with that at all?
Jessica Bledsoe: So when If this then that (ITTT) and Zapier first emerged, we kind of played around with both of them and we just found that Zapier was just easier to use. And also the way that it helped you set up was easier because also if you can do it yourself, do it yourself. Don’t pay me to do something that you can do yourself. So if I can, like, point you in the direction and you want to try it yourself and absolutely go for that. And we found that for the clients that we were working within. And even now that Zapier was just a little bit better for the guided setups and ways to set it up, and then I don’t remember exactly what it was, but ITTT no longer works with something really important, I can’t remember exactly what it was. But I noticed a couple of months ago that it said the ITTT integration was no longer being supported, and if that had happened to us on Zapier, we would have been scrambling to figure out what we were going to do to replace it.
Michelle Thompson: So yeah, we at the end of the day, I mean, it’s automating so much that the price you pay for Zapier is so minimal considering what you’re getting.
Jessica Bledsoe: If you look at I mean, the way I look at everything now is like, what is my time worth? And then what am I gonna have to pay to eliminate this? And if it’s going to save me even a dollar, then I’m willing to go ahead and do it because it’s that mindspace, too. It’s not just the time. It’s your freeing up your energy and your mind to be able to think about other things and not have to worry so much about all the things that you have to do. So if you could take your to-do list for fifteen items to five items for 40 bucks a month, then yeah. That’s gonna make sense to do right.
Michelle Thompson: Absolutely. Yeah.
Jessica Bledsoe: Ok. So I think we’re on our last two here. So the next one would be to create a new invoice from a Google Sheet row. So this one has some pretty specific applications.
Jessica Bledsoe: But if you’re using QuickBooks. There are several different ways that you can automate your invoicing process. So a lot of times what we’ll find is that QuickBooks is like the last step for people like they know they have use it, but they wait until everything else is done before it actually gets put into Quickbooks.
Michelle Thompson: Right, exactly. It’s because we all hate accounting.
Jessica Bledsoe: Oh, I get it. I have outsourced that piece of it because I hate it so much. So, so, so, so, so much. So I totally get it.
Jessica Bledsoe: I empathize with those people. But if you can automate going ahead and generating that invoice in QuickBooks, let’s go ahead and do that. So one way to do that is if you add it to a Google sheet row because a lot of people do track their income inside of like a spreadsheet. But there are other ways. If you look at the QuickBooks automation on Zapier, it has a list of ways that you can automate things. However, that is one of the premium features. So you do have to be on a paid version to access any kind of QuickBooks integration.
Jessica Bledsoe: But it’s probably going to be cheaper than having to hire a bookkeeper to work full time or even just to come in and clean up your books. I had to have somebody come in and clean up my books every year in my business because I set out with the best of intentions, but I could never actually keep up with it until finally, I was like, you know what? Like, somebody else has got to deal with this because I just clearly I can’t not so. So there are some different automations. You can actually you can create the invoice. You can mark the invoices paid. You can apply it to a specific chart of accounts like there are multiple ways that you can input, you can automate that bookkeeping process. But I will say those are some pretty sophisticated zaps.
Jessica Bledsoe: So I would get comfortable with Zapier and the different paths that things can take and the different kind of triggers that will set off things before you jump into something like automating something as important as your bookkeeping because you want to make sure that all that is 100 percent.
Michelle Thompson: So let’s say you have subscribers here who are listening to this and they’re like, hey, this is awesome. And you know what? I want the done for you version. Jess, I just want to hire you and have you do it for me. How do they hire you and what does it cost ballpark? What do you guys charge? How can they get in contact with you?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah.
Jessica Bledsoe: So if you go to our Web site, which is ElevatebyRCN.com, there is a schedule your discovery session button that you can click and fill out. So we always start with the free discovery session, which is where you just kind of brain dump on us all the things that you’re doing that maybe you don’t want to do, and we’ll figure out if it’s possible to automate it or not. And then we’ll kind of come back to you with a plan of action.
Jessica Bledsoe: And that really does vary. I mean, we’ve had, you know, a client that I’m working with right now. She already had all her processes in place. They just weren’t automated. But she had step by step. This is how I do stuff. If you can come in with that, we can get that done pretty quickly, I think her project was like twenty-five hundred dollars. But we’ve had companies that we’ve been working with for three years now and they’ve paid us well over eighty thousand dollars at this point. So it really does vary based on the size of your business, how many people are you’re working with?
Jessica Bledsoe: And then also how well you already know the systems that you’re using, because a lot of time what we’ll find is that we might have to spend 20 to 40 hours just helping you document what your process is before we can actually start to automate any of that process.
Michelle Thompson: Awesome. OK, so ready for a fun question?
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah.
Michelle Thompson: All right. If you could put one thing on a billboard, what would it be and why?
Jessica Bledsoe: If I could put anything on a billboard, it would be www.getpavr.com. Obviously I would put it up there because we are we will be launching within the first quarter of the year and we are collecting potential beta users on the Web site right now.
Jessica Bledsoe: So if your Google calendar user and you want to start taking control of the time that’s on your calendar, I definitely would. I would put that on every board billboard in every city and in the United States.
Michelle Thompson: You stole my thunder, that’s what I was going to tell everybody to go to your Web site and sign up for the beta.
Michelle Thompson: OK, so who would you say was the most influential in your business development?
Jessica Bledsoe: Who honestly, that would have to be my business coach. So we worked with this is ours. We’re working on our eighth year in business and about two years in we hired a business coach. And honestly, it wasn’t a great experience. I didn’t really come away with very much. But I did come away with the fact that having somebody hold me accountable was really important for me.
Jessica Bledsoe: And that was the one thing that that coach did. So when I was looking for another business coach, I kind of knew exactly what I was looking for, what didn’t work in that with that previous coach and what I was looking for. So when we found a business coach and I say we because my husband’s my business partner, so we did these coaching sessions together. And he also ended up being like our marriage counselor, too, because it’s really hard to work with your husband. But that he coached us for almost four years and he’s still a mentor that I touch base with. And if ever I get to the same point in my business, I would have would absolutely go back to him, because there was a point in our business in 2016 where, I mean, honestly, the business was kind of burnt to the ground. We kind of put all of our eggs in one client basket and that client got so big that they decided it would be more cost-effective for them to bring all of their I.T. in-house. And we just about lost it all because we had not planned for that and we had not saved for that.
Jessica Bledsoe: And so I even after we let go, we had to let go of all of our employees. We let go of our office. We reduced the amount. Well, I mean, we weren’t really we were only paying ourselves when there was money. But we always paid that business coach, because we knew without him there would not be a business if we didn’t figure out what we needed to do. So he was definitely instrumental in turning our business into what it is now because it did not look like this when we first started.
Michelle Thompson: That’s awesome. So do we get a name or are you keeping him all to yourself?
Oh, sure. No, his name is Brian Help! Rezone coaching is the name of his coaching program. LetsRezone.com. I absolutely would encourage anyone to reach out to him. I will say that his coaching practice has shifted a little bit right now. He’s primarily focused on coaching like high executive leaders in things like corporations. He’s not working so much with small business owners like us. I always like to say that he just keeps me around because I’m such a success story for him.
Jessica Bledsoe: If you are someone who’s leading a team and you’re unsure of that leadership role and maybe you’re just an executive in your own company than he is. He’s absolutely incredible. I would recommend him to anyone.
Michelle Thompson: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for the tip.
Michelle Thompson: What is the best book that you’ve most recently read?
Jessica Bledsoe: That would be “You Are a Bad Ass at Making Money” by Jen Sincero.
Jessica Bledsoe: I’ve actually read it twice now and 2019 for me was the year of getting control of my money, and I didn’t realize how much my money mindset played a part in that. And so that her book, which is kind of like an introduction and I’ve gone a lot farther than that, but I love the way that she breaks it down and there’s some kind of like. Journaling prompts and things that you can do in there. So if ever I feel like I need a little reset, I kind of go back to that book and work our way through it again.
Michelle Thompson: Nice. That’s awesome. I have for the non-business personal side. You know, there’s like I kind of went through the whole Dave Ramsey things, the envelope system and all that.
Jessica Bledsoe: Right here, I have my envelope binder in my desk with me.
Michelle Thompson: I do it. But it’s so guilty. I’m like, oh man, what do I have left for the month.
Jessica Bledsoe: Apparently I have to like visually see my money to understand if it exists or not.
Michelle Thompson: Well it’s just so easy to just use your debit card.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah. The bank is an imaginary place and a debit card is like imaginary money.
Michelle Thompson: Exactly. Yeah, but I did. I actually ran into a book that was kind of like the Dave Ramsey envelope system, but for business, it’s called Profit First.
Jessica Bledsoe: I’ve heard of it but, I’ve not read it yet.
Michelle Thompson: So I haven’t read it either. It came in the mail yesterday so we’ll see how that goes. But kind of the same deal it does like an envelope system. Super awesome.
Michelle Thompson: So as a thank you to you for your time and willingness to do this. I wanted to give you something. And I’m sure you probably actually already an expert at this, but it’s the best way I know how to give back to you. So I would like to give you a copy of our signature online coaching series, which is running on autopilot. And what it does is it goes through and you obviously already know the robot side to automate all that, but it goes through how to train an interview and be able to outsource your tasks for minimal costs. So after this recording, I will go ahead, shoot that over to you that you can find it on runningonautopilot.co and hopefully that will be an awesome Christmas present. And you might get some value out of that because you have just dropped a ton of value for us. So I really, really, really appreciate that.
Jessica Bledsoe: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that as well, because as good as we are at deploying robots, I would love to be able to outsource some of these human tasks. And I’m just such a like in person person that I haven’t figured out exactly how to navigate hiring someone who’s not going to sit down at a desk with me.
Michelle Thompson: So it’s so much easier than you think. And you go through that course and you’ll be an expert by January. So thank you. So I’ll send that over.
Michelle Thompson: Thank you so much for your time and knowledge. I know our subscribers are absolutely gonna love this. So everybody who is listening to this. Don’t forget to go to getpaver.com It’s PAVR.com. Right?
Jessica Bledsoe: Getpavr.com
Jessica Bledsoe: So yeah. Please go and sign up for that list. We’ll let you know as soon as we’re live. We were accepted into a program with Google that kind of changed the way that we’re approaching this.
Jessica Bledsoe: But either way get on that list, we’ll let you know and we would love to have your feedback if nothing else. So so please, please sign up.
Jessica Bledsoe: All right. So if everybody absolutely loves this, do we get to do this again?
Michelle Thompson: Oh, yes, absolutely. I look forward to it. Not if when.
Michelle Thompson: All right. Great. Jess, thank you so much for your time. This was awesome. I really, really appreciate all your insight. And I hope you guys have a very Merry Christmas and an awesome, awesome 2020 coming up.
Jessica Bledsoe: Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day. OK. Bye.
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