EP 67: How to Modernize Your Business to Sell at Maximum Value, with Jason Beutler, RoboSource

Ed Mysogland  0:00  
to business owners likely will have only one shot to sell a business. Most don't understand what drives value and how buyers look at a business. Until now, Welcome to the How to sell a business podcast where every week we talk to the subject matter experts, advisors, and those around the deal table about how to sell at maximum value. Every business will go to sell one day, it's only a matter of when we're glad you're here. The podcast starts now. On today's podcast, I had the opportunity to interview Jason Buehler of Robo source. He, I've known him for a while he's a friend. And we've known each other through an organization called Truth at work. So I know him professionally as well as personally and I can tell you, he is probably one of the smartest people I've ever, ever plowed into. And so today we're going to be talking about automation. And what that means for a seller to sell the company or a buyer that may be buying the company and how to maximize that in that investment. He talked a lot about you know where to identify those opportunities to to automate the business. So I am certain that you will get a lot from this episode. So enjoy my conversation with Jason Buehler of Robo sores. Welcome to another episode of the how to sell a business podcast. I'm your host, Ed Mysogland. I help business owners identify what creates value in their companies. So that one day that they can sell at maximum value. Today, I have a good buddy of mine, Jason Buehler from Robo source. So Jason, tell us a little bit about Robo source. And not too long, because I got lots of questions for you.

Jason Beutler  2:07  
So Robo source is a process automation company, we basically help businesses automate mundane, repetitive tasks within their business to maximize their time and get their people working on things that are more important strategic to the business.

Ed Mysogland  2:23  
Well, as I was saying, when we first got started, you know, there's so much here, and I guess I'm looking First, define automation for everybody.

Jason Beutler  2:38  
So automation is essentially taking the work out of a human's hands. So letting the computer do the task that needs to be accomplished. So it can be simple things, such as one of our clients, puts invoices into QuickBooks, and they need to classify those invoices by salesperson. So instead of having a human go through and classify that the computer automates that process and does that for them.

Ed Mysogland  3:07  
Okay, so, so from the from the standpoint of that automation, because like I was telling you, I was beating up on one of our guys here today on you and I had an opportunity to work together and I couldn't sell it to my partners, it just they were just they were just fearful of of what this meant to the business and the risk associated with it. So where we ended up with was offshoring a lot of what we were talking about with automation. So so I know, like Zapier and if this if this then that I and and then you have your custom work. And then in our case, you know, offshoring. It seems it's that kind of the the lifecycle of automation that okay, I, I'm scared to automate. So I'm going to hire somebody at a lower cost. And then I'm going to back into automation, because at least I think that is our trajectory. You know what I mean?

Jason Beutler  4:17  
Good. And I would say a lot of lot of companies are doing that. So let's talk specifically about the different kinds of automation. So there are three specific kinds. And then Robo source does all of them. But but so let's just start with first we've got the traditional software. So traditional software is what we've been doing since like the 50s, right? It's building software that manages data and processes and helps you sort of automate the day to day. That's where the warehouse systems the ERP is all of those came about, that was a form of automation and it's still something that's done a lot today. Okay. The second in more recent form of automation that's come about are these low code and no code tools. The tools that you talked about the Zapier is the if this than that the Microsoft make or how automate platforms, those tools are essentially drag and drop, so that you don't have to have any concept on how to code. But you can still kind of automate and building they operate off of triggers. So if something happens in one system, it will trigger this automation to happen and do something from there. So you could say, watch an inbox for an incoming email and trigger it to do something for you. Again, though, the last form of automation is what's referred to as robotic process automation. And that's a very new technology that's come about where essentially, you can mimic clicking on a desktop the way that a human would click on the desktop. So if a human can click on buttons and move around on a website, or an application, you now can write a software bot that will automate that for you. So I say all of that to say, in answering your question around, how do we have these conversations? And what's the trajectory of adopting automation is most people already are adopting automation in some way, shape, or form, because they're using software as a traditional form of software. It's an area that they feel comfortable, because we spent the last 20 years looking at it. And dealing with that kind of automation, where people get uncomfortable as when they see it doing when they see the bot clicking on the buttons for a human. That's when they start to think ooh, what is the where humans making decisions that are that I would be uncomfortable having a bot make a decision. And the problem is, most people don't know that. They don't know the decisions that are being made. That a human's being made when they're clicking those buttons. And as a result, they get a little bit uncomfortable. And so that's really where I start and those conversations is digging into what are the real decisions that are being made when you're clicking these buttons?

Ed Mysogland  6:43  
Yeah, give me give me an example of that. Because and you can, I'm totally transparent. You can you can beat up on us all you want. I mean, when we were talking, I'm sitting here going, I can see it. But am I willing to risk it? You know what I mean? I can see what you're talking about. But am I willing to, to put our, you know, in this case, you know, we were talking about Inbound confidentiality agreements, we get about 1000 1000 a month. And we're using DocuSign, and this and the other and it's like, okay, am I? What's the risk? And how do I how do I understand, you know, what you're talking about, as far as the bot, doing what it does to get to replace, you know, the person that is physically doing it for us now. So how do I get comfortable with that?

Jason Beutler  7:38  
So some of it is just mindset, right? The reason you're comfortable having a human do that is because you trust the humans decision making process. What's interesting is, the bot is going to make the same decision every time. Because it's software. So there are rules going to be defined around that, that are going to have the bot make the same decision. It's just uncomfortable for us, because we're not used to it. And that's the transition that's happening, I think, in the 20s right now, is they're starting to become more and more comfort with the fact that computers can actually make the decisions that humans have been making on issues like what you're dealing with. And so, at the end of the day, those NDAs are vital to your organization in your business. It's like a cornerstone of what you're doing. Having a human click that button gives you a sense of warm fuzzies that, you know, someone had to sit there and make the right decision.

Ed Mysogland  8:31  
You're right. But but at the same time, I mean, after I'm after I hear you say that, like, that is such a I mean, nice guy that's doing it. But you know, I'm sitting here gone. Well, I mean, because I can't remember what the savings was. It was like, I mean, it was probably he's 10 bucks an hour or whatever, doing all the processing. And I can't remember what, what the financial mechanics were, but it was about a 95% savings, I think something like that. And, and so, hearing myself say this, I'm like, Oh, my gosh, yeah. But you're totally right. And, and I just wanted, I wanted to feel better about the decision. Like if there was a problem, that guy was going to call me and I'm afraid with a bot that the whole damn place falls apart before I know it. And right. And so how does that work? You know, how Where's where's the where's the tripwire to prevent my, you know, my infrastructure to fall apart?

Jason Beutler  9:46  
Yeah. So, when looking at automation, one of the first things you want to look at is what happens on the in the, what we call the non happy path, right? What happens in the exception cases. And really, that's where we plan our automations around is, we know that the happy path is going to it's going to work. But what happens when it's not following that. So that's how you build the process. That's where you want to make sure you've got the automation defined. So in this instance, it would have been like, here's the boundaries here, here are the scenarios where if it falls within these boundaries, we're gonna go ahead and send out the NBA because we feel confident that we're, we're operating effectively, if it's outside of this range, either. There's some form of maybe AI decision making we can go through to come to a better decision, or we're going to send it to a human to click the button for us. Okay, because not all automation has to be 100%. Hands off. And I think that's another area that that people don't understand is that you can maybe, you know, the 8020 rule applies here. How much more time would you get? If if we could get rid of 80% of the scenario? And you only have to deal with 20% of it?

Ed Mysogland  10:56  
No, you're right. I mean, you're, you're totally, you're totally right. But at the same time, I'm looking at it from like, in our process, we were the NDA came in, alright, Robo source was going to write the NDA to our CRM. But But that's where it stopped, because we had, you know, 16 people that now have to, you know, whose client does that belong to? And, and that's where the rub was, was, how does the bot know? And now, after I've gotten away from it, you're like, well, simple, you just see whose client was tagged. And you're off to the races? And then it'll, it'll do it for you. So and that leads me to my next question of how, how much of a process can this be automated? I mean, I'm looking at like, I mean, how many steps is a typical automation, you know,

Jason Beutler  12:02  
so we've done automations that are as small as two to three steps, just because they do them in high volume two, we've done automations that have as many as about 400 steps. And so that's more on the mortgage side. And we've also done some work on with a nonprofit of processing incoming transcripts, where they're extracting content out of high school transcript, and putting it into a system and running them through some some approval processes. So those are, those are massive processes that are, you know, very long running and potentially running three, four months even.

Ed Mysogland  12:40  
Okay, so. So, the bot, you just said, a bot is scanning a transcript and extracting the paragraph, what are they extracting?

Jason Beutler  12:53  
It's extracting the semester, the class and the grade, as well as the grade point average, what school they went to,

Ed Mysogland  12:59  
I got it, I got it. So, but it's not like reading the the like the essay, you know, and and pulling. No, I got I got, I was like, Oh my gosh, yeah. All right. So one of the biggest reasons I wanted you on here was, you know, we have the the baby boomers that are looking to sell businesses then and there, you hear it all the time. And the challenge we have is a lot is coming from the other side, the buyers are looking at it on, hey, I want to really well operated business. But at the same time, I got to figure out not only how I get my money back from the acquisition, but how do I grow this? How do I end and they're finding good companies, and that's part of the problem. When I say problem, that's part of the challenge is from the buy side, it's like, okay, I want a really good company. But at the same time, I don't want it I'm trying to elongate a business that is perhaps on the mature side of the company, lifecycle. From the seller side, I'm sitting here saying okay, if I have enough runway, I want to put some of this in so I so so I can maximize not only the earnings, presale, but also it's already set up for the next guy. So I mean, how if you can look at it both ways. Well, you from my standpoint, I think I would look at it from the buyer standpoint, when I'm looking at a business, how do I look at automation? Are there industries that are ripe for it? Are there process processes that you know this is low lying fruit that you can have immediate value impact?

Jason Beutler  14:55  
Yeah, talking to that specifically, I have a client that ended up selling their business In the industry they were in. And the reason being is they it was a PE firm that was coming in and looking to buy something in their industry. And because we'd been working with them, their overhead was 35% less than their competitors share to got, they got sucked up as a result of it. And then he had a pretty good exit. So it is something that's, that's have a lot of value, right. And you can create scenarios, where the automation is actually a differentiator. I think, you know, from the from the buy standpoint, the things that I would be looking for are places where there is human repetitive action. I mean, at the end of the day, computers are going to be better at that, like, computers are really good at doing repetitive tasks. That's that's what they're trained to do. And so if we're seeing things where people are taking paper and keying it into systems, or people are coming to key in two or three different systems, which is common, I run into that probably three or four times a week, where we've got to put it into our inventory system, our CRM and our ERP in some way, shape or form or finance system. So we're literally putting the same client in three different places, those are areas where you're gonna see a lot of automation opportunities. Show up very quickly, and you're gonna save quite a bit of time and money off of

Ed Mysogland  16:16  
that. So So then it begs the question, the question, what, what do I deploy? Like, for example, I'm like, I am a Mac guy, I have TextExpander, I've got little this thing called Hazel that moves my files and stuff like that. When When does it? When do you say, You know what, I need? Custom? I need somebody to come in evaluate, and, like, build this thing out, as opposed to, you know, I think I'm gonna try this Zapier thing. I'm gonna click on it, and here's my trigger. And, you know, here's the next step. But it's just one, you know, one step. So how do I? How do I, I don't wanna say, work with someone like you. But how do I know? What I don't know? Because truly, most people don't have no clue about this stuff.

Jason Beutler  17:19  
Yeah. So tools like Zapier are extremely powerful. And they do make it available for individuals who don't understand necessarily all the intricate behind the scenes workings of a computer, to be able to do some basic automations. It's when you start to get into the more complex decision making processes that you're probably going to want to bring in somebody who understands automation is the intersection between data, business and software, you've got to understand data analytics, which gets you into artificial intelligence, you got to understand how to build software, because at the end of the day, computer is going to operate a different way than a human would operate. And understanding how that works. Makes sense. But if you don't understand business, then automation is just gonna be a waste of your time. So you're at that intersection point. I would say if you're looking, if you're doing automation, and you're getting to the point where you're like, wow, there are acronyms coming up that I don't know what they mean, things like oh off things like API's, like they're starting to show up, because I'm trying to do more complicated things. That's when you probably want to bring in somebody who's been there.

Ed Mysogland  18:25  
I got it. So and for, for somebody like me, mixing and matching, like a robo source with my dabbling of Zapier and stuff like that, probably a bad idea. And

Jason Beutler  18:45  
there's some advantage to putting it all into a single location, but there's nothing that's going to keep you from being successful in that environment. So a lot of automations are now operating inside the cloud. And so, and by the cloud, we basically just mean someone else's computer on the internet. So which is really all that that's meaning. So as a result, you can use Zapier to do some of your more basic things. And when you get into what we refer to as Intelligent Automation, or hyper automation, where you're really trying to accelerate some things or make some decisions, you might want to send it off to maybe an Azure with a cognitive services behind the scenes. I just went on geeky people, but you know,

Ed Mysogland  19:24  
I got it. So and again, this isn't an ad for Zapier, even though it sounds like it's more from the standpoint of alright I just I don't know what I don't know. But I know but I read all this and not many people are saying these are the people that will come in, evaluate your process and automate it versus, hey, you know, gain five hours to your day by you Using by using Zapier so I, I'm with you. So so as a, one of the things I was that I was writing about, is, in business valuation, recurring revenue is the pinnacle of, or it's pretty high up on the on the value hierarchy. Conversely, if I look at automation, I am optimizing basically the engine of, of the company. So, so what, where would I, I know, you were saying, you know, you look at, you know, what's a human doing the data entry, and so on and so forth? Where I'm assuming a accounting is right off the bat, that's probably because I heard you mentioned QuickBooks, where Where else should I be looking? Like, let's just take take a manufacturing company? What, where, where am I looking for a manufacturing company?

Jason Beutler  21:10  
Work Orders. So what that work order process look like, how's that coming through? We do a lot with purchase orders. We do a lot on the invoice processing, finance comes up quite often. And specifically, also, when you start getting into like that reconciliations across banks, credit card processing across banks, making sure that you're standardizing all those accounts and everything all lines up, that's a lot of manual work, that can be automated, and those decisions can be made.

Ed Mysogland  21:44  
I got it. I was interviewing a guy that does that optimizes CPA practices. And one of the things that he was saying that was coming down the pike is, is taking a person's tax return, right, scanning it and extracting the tax return for for the next guy to do their analysis. And I mean, I assume the IRS does something like that already, you know, that it gets. So I mean, from a, from a procedural standpoint. So it is it's looking at the image, and it's looking at a particular area, and it's extracting what is in that pixel? I mean, what is that how it does it? I mean?

Jason Beutler  22:42  
So that's hard to explain without getting into the science behind it all. But essentially, yes, that's, that's basically what it's doing is it is looking at the image structure. And that is, it's an array of pixels. So it's an array of colors. And it's looking at those colors, and it's identifying patterns around those. Now, something to note on PDFs is not all PDFs or scans, a lot of PDFs are actually printed. And that's actually a different underlying structure. So if it's a printed PDF from like an application, and you you print it to file that actually has the text embedded in it, and that text is a lot easier to pull out.

Ed Mysogland  23:26  
That's, that's the OCR right in that are no

Jason Beutler  23:29  
OCR is going to do is going to work off of the scanned images, because that's doing optical character recognition. And that's where you're going to take a scan or a picture, and it's going to figure out what the words are. And that's pretty accurate, but it was going to run into some some issues right? Then then I'd say most PDFs that are received these days now are are in QuickBooks, they just hit Print to PDF, and it comes out as a really pretty formatted PDF, that's actually not an image that's actually a text embedded document that you can go behind the scenes and pull that text out directly.

Ed Mysogland  24:01  
Oh, no, I had no idea. So and, and that's how, like your purchase orders how you're able to do it with purchase orders. I get it. Yes. Okay. So. So everybody gets all shook up about employees that, you know, I'm replacing robots, the employees are being replaced by robots. Is is that I mean, I know it's true, but I'm trying to figure out whether or not that's a bad thing. You know?

Jason Beutler  24:38  
Yeah. And one of the thoughts I've had around that recently is on you've got we've had what recently the great resignation, and now we have got quiet quitting. So we've got our workforce saying, I don't want to do things that I don't feel are important. I don't want to work in a place or work on on work that isn't meaningful and impactful. I want I want my day to matter. And, and then we say, okay, let's automate some of the meaningless work and everyone's up in arms about we're replacing jobs. I just I'm not seeing that line up. And I see the workforce basically begging to work on more important things. So why wouldn't we automate away the things that are? Basically, they're already saying they don't want to do?

Ed Mysogland  25:21  
Wow, that everything you've said, that's probably the most impactful for me? Because that you're exactly right. You know, if you can take take away the mundane, and give them the opportunity to maximize whatever, whether it be creativity or, or whatever. I gotta imagine it'll improve corporate culture. And, and retention. Yeah, that yeah, that was I never looked at it that way. That's a that's a great way to look at it. So I'm trying to determine if I have two businesses, right, and one has automation one has it has people doing it? I'm trying to determine risk. You follow? I'm trying. I mean, you're on one side, on the on the on the automated side, you're saying, Look, I got a I got a bot doing all this. There is no risk, the only risk is it breaking this side, I have people and they do break. They do they make mistakes. But yet, I'm trying to determine if I'm, if I'm the buyer looking at the business. Am I intuitively thinking that the business with people is less risky than the automated one? Yeah, I mean, like, if you have a buyer that shows up. And they see the automation. Am I sitting here going, you know, I think I can I think I think that's a business for me, versus Okay, I got these people. I'm great at managing people. I'm great at, you know, maximizing their efficiency and so on so forth. I mean, what do you say to that? I mean, that's a hard one

Jason Beutler  27:24  
to me. Yeah, it is. And to me, I guess it comes down to how far out you're looking. So if you're looking out just a couple of years, then then yeah, go with what you're comfortable with. But you know, if you look back at history, and let's just take you know, Stutz, Studebaker, duisenberg, they can build cars. But they're not around. Why? Because someone came along and made it more efficient, and figured out how to do things more efficiently than they were able to do things. And eventually it got to the point where competitively they couldn't keep up. And I guess the question I would have is, if you're looking at a business that is primarily people driven, versus one that has a lot of automation driving it, how long are you looking? Because if you're looking at long term, your competitive advantage is going to come with automation. And why is that? It's an asset you own. And it's an asset that's scalable. So if you need to go twice as fast, it's a bot, you literally can push buttons and have it go twice as fast. If you have all of a sudden, you're like, Man, I need to scale way back because recession or something's hit, you can push buttons and scale it way back. You've got flexibility that you wouldn't have with people necessarily. Not to say that the people aren't vital, because there's strategic and relational and things that really only people can do that, that you want to make sure you got the right people doing that. But in terms of the day to day operations, I would say it looks it depends on your on your duration.

Ed Mysogland  28:55  
You know what that's, it's fascinating that you say that, because the holding period for a business is tends to be long, and you talk about getting financing to buy companies, and you're talking about a 10 year amortization. And you look at it if you think about what has transpired in the last 10 years. And I know, I can't remember what the term is about technology, you know, how fast it's changing. But there's

Jason Beutler  29:27  
symbols every seven years.

Ed Mysogland  29:29  
Yeah, that too. You know, so, you know, if I'm a buyer, I mean, you're exactly right. I, I'm just as I look at at business owners, especially the ones that are looking to retire, you know, buyers are evaluating, you know, where are they on that life cycle? And, and I would imagine that there's a lot of businesses that aren't marketable because As of where they're at in the lifecycle, as opposed to, hey, I think I can fix this. Now, I'll tell you, there's some, there's some guys that are rolling up foundries, and these guys are I mean, I, I love watching what they're doing. And, and that's exactly what they're doing. I mean, the boundaries, that that business hasn't changed in decades. And they're coming in and just, you know, retooling it make it more efficient, economies of scale. You know, those are the type of buyers I think, are, are probably, we're gonna see more of over the next now half a decade or so. So, do you need a, like, as a vendor, it's one thing for me to hire you to fix my stuff. It's another thing to have a somebody on site to be I called, I'm seeing more and more chief automation officers? Do I? Do I need that or is an outsourced vendor like yourself? Adequate? You know what I mean?

Jason Beutler  31:08  
Yeah, I would say, right, now, you're not going to find a lot of people that are going to be qualified to be a chief automation officer. It's a relatively new concept. And it is going to be a unique skill set, as we talked earlier about that blend between data analytics and AI, having software development, background and process orientation, but also having enough business acumen to know how to automate and run the run the business. So what I find works best is to take the AI and software component and outsource that, but keep the business acumen in house. So take a subject matter expert, somebody operationally that understands what's going on and partner them with somebody like like us, that can provide the technical oversight and the technical aspects. Most businesses will have some form of technology on staff but not necessarily the automation technology. And these days, you don't need it to be in house, you can leave that outsourced. Personally, I think you'll be better served that way. Because you'll you'll be able to get some economies of scale off of that. But so with a partnership between your in house, subject matter expert and outsourced or out, or consultative help on the technology front, I think you can accomplish the technology and the support of it in a very effective manner without having to go bring in a chief automation officer, which is frankly, gonna increase all your infrastructure costs as well.

Ed Mysogland  32:40  
Again, it well. So I'm certain every buyer that is listening to this is going to say, what are the industries that are right for me to go target? You know, and, and you said, you know, those that are heavy and paper? But are you seeing? Yep. Are there any particular businesses or industries or the types of businesses that I know you said paper heavy, but any industries that come to mind that if I'm a buyer, you know, cuz you may be a buyer, Jason, you know, so, you know, where, where are you looking to, to buy?

Jason Beutler  33:24  
Right now, the clients I'm running into the most often, our insurance mortgage is actually coming up all the time. Right now. I'm running into mortgage applications and mortgage underwriting almost daily, on that front. So those are two areas that I'm heading off in banking is starting to show up a lot more, though they do have more of a kind of their internal systems that they're able to run on the other one, I'm hitting his health care, Healthcare Billing. It is it is a wild wild west out there. And the opportunity to standardize and automate on that is huge.

Ed Mysogland  34:05  
I also heard HOAs so that was, that was one that kind of caught me by surprise. I didn't think of that. In my research for our talk, any, it seems as though a lot of people anything that has an application like like a, like an application, whether, you know, some use Google Forms and that will bring it in others you know, you know, especially like apartments, and you know, when somebody comes in and actually fills out an application those are our our, you know, our candidates. You know, we talked a little bit about manufacturing CPAs are definitely trying to automate. Yeah, so that's that's really interesting. So you said something earlier about you own, you own the this process? Alright? Does it have to be updated? How to Add? What's the security? How do I protect it? Like, like, whatever open source? All right? You know, that's open to the world, right? So right, I have this proprietary, I engage you I have a proprietary process. How do I protect that? And is it really mine? Or is it yours.

Jason Beutler  35:35  
So the process is yours. That being said, it is implemented inside of a piece of software. So most of these, these tools nowadays are built inside of tools you'll heard are things called like UiPath, blue prism, Microsoft Power automate Logic Apps, there's a whole series of these tools that you will implement the software, implement the automation inside of. So while the process is your intellectual property, and how it executes is specific to you, it is somewhat proprietary to the software that it's been built inside of. That being said, you could take that software, implement it another location and move that process into that and have no trouble at all running it. So just to make sure we're clear on that security, that is a challenge. Now, there's different kinds, as we talked about the different kinds of automation, right, the low code, no code, the traditional software in the RPA RPA security, which is the desktop automation, that's a little more straightforward, because it's literally logging in like a human one. So it's the same security that you have, if you put a username and password in and navigate a site or navigate an application, that's the way the software bots gonna go. So you can control the security the same way you would on a user. When you get into the traditional software, and some of the low code stuff, security gets to be pretty challenging. There are what are referred to as application programming interfaces or API's, those have a series of security, they're called tokens. You use tools like oh auth, which is open authentication, to integrate with them all. If you're starting to get into a lot of that, you probably want to call a software guy, because you're getting into some pretty low level security type of things. But those are all built into these tools these days. So you're not having to figure that necessarily figure it out, you just have to know how to implement it.

Ed Mysogland  37:29  
So so I'm, I'm a consumer, and I sit here and go. Alright, exactly. What does Robo source do for me? What does a guy like? Jason? Do? Yeah. It's been protected. Yeah. So it's, it's designed. Alright, so I know you're designing it. I know. I don't know what why I'm talking for you. So let me turn it over to you. So why, what what is Jason doing in my, in my world, what do you do and for me,

Jason Beutler  38:03  
so first and foremost, is we've built a ton of these, so we understand the pitfalls. So when we sit down to work with our process with you, we're gonna essentially know how to make this process operate. And we'll build from that standpoint, second is build it. Most of our clients do not know how to build out software, they don't know the appropriate ways, the best way to build that automation. So with our architects, in our experience, we build that out for you. So not only do them, we plan out how it should look, we build it for you, and then we support it, meaning, you don't have to worry about it at all, we just take care of it, we actually will specifically give you an app that shows you real time what your software bot is doing. And if anything breaks, we're looking at it. So we're writing software and tools to handle all those scenarios. You said earlier, where it's like, I want to know this thing broke before it breaks, like I want to know I want to be ahead of it. Sure we're doing all of that. That's that's the monitoring and systems that we put in place. And that's the platform that we're building out, is to make sure that all that is safe and secure and that somebody is looking at it. We can catch the anomalies before they happen. If something breaks, we got it fixed as quickly as we can to keep your business up and running. So that's what we're doing on that front is we're essentially providing automation as a service for you. So you don't have to know anything about how to automate. You just have to know that you've got something that you want automated. And we'll take that take it from there.

Ed Mysogland  39:25  
And, and if I'm not mistaken, your how you get paid is based on the automate the the event, right? The right Correct.

Jason Beutler  39:36  
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, similar to electricity, we scale by usage. Okay,

Ed Mysogland  39:43  
I guess. So have you have you done any studies on the ROI to this stuff? I know you you probably have so. So what kind of ROI should someone expect by by doing it?

Jason Beutler  40:00  
So the ROI that we've seen, let's kind of break down how the costs look, typically, there's an upfront cost that comes into building out the process in some way, shape or form. Similar to if you were to onboard somebody, you're gonna have an upfront training cost, right? Right, getting up to speed, you're gonna have that same type of cost with getting the software built or getting the automation built. After that, then there is sort of the monthly recurring usage based fees that come out of it, what we've seen is we're saving anywhere between 35 and 50%. From a from a human, on that monthly recurring level, depending upon the automation, it can get as high as like 80 90%. But conservatively, we're seeing in between 35 and 50. So given that what I see across most of my clients is about a six month payback period, six to nine months at the most in year one. But remember, that includes the implementation fee. So by year two, your savings are 10 are phenomenal. And so we're seeing in the second year, you're often spending a quarter of what you were the year before.

Ed Mysogland  41:08  
I got it. All right. I want to be sensitive to your time. So at the end of every episode, I always ask, what's the one piece of advice that that you could give our listeners that would make the most immediate impact on their business? Go ahead, I dare you to say automate.

Jason Beutler  41:30  
I mean, along those along those lines, though, right, I guess I would say busy as the new broke. So when you're broke, you don't have enough money to focus on and to put towards the things you should let alone the things you want to do. Same is true when you're busy. So if you're busy, you don't have enough time to focus on the things you should be focusing on, let alone the things that you want to be focusing on. And you really only have two options. You can delegate and you can automate. Those are your only two options in order to get your time back. And really at the end of the day times the resource we're managing as business owners and business leaders. So I guess automation is a new thing you need to learn it, it's half your solution. It's half the possible solutions that are out there. And I think that's an important aspect and something to think about

Ed Mysogland  42:22  
that. Yeah, you're exactly right. I'm and I and I really appreciate how how you look at that, that it really, this is, this is not so much about cost is it is about time, you know, I get it. So what's the best way that we can find you?

Jason Beutler  42:46  
Website Robo source.us, you can always email me Jason dot Butler at Robo source.us. And, and then my phone number as well.

Ed Mysogland  42:59  
And we'll have that we'll have all of that in the show notes. So, okay, great. Super easy. All right. Oh, buddy. Well, you know, thanks for taking the time I you know, I know, I know, this is the future. And I know we I've been following along for quite some time about, you know, buyers and what's what's inducing them to buy businesses. And so you know, I'm so grateful for your generosity. Spend some time with us today and talk about how how we can make businesses either more marketable or post sale, how to how to maximize the buy. So thanks so much for hanging out with me.

Jason Beutler  43:43  
Hey, it was fun. I appreciate it. And I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Ed Mysogland  43:47  
Sounds good. Thanks, buddy.