Business Automation with Pace Ellsworth

Come on Bob Leffler. This is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong and powerful pace, Ellsworth pace. Are you ready to do this?

Pace Ellsworth 0:19
Yes, I’m ready. All right, let’s

george grombacher 0:21
let’s go pace is the founder and CEO of nucleus there. He is an entrepreneur with a passion for bringing web and mobile business ideas to life he is turning world class ideas into apps. paced, tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

Pace Ellsworth 0:39
Well, I’m a father of three, my partner we live in, in Chicago area, so just just southwest the city and it, it’s, it’s great. We’ve been here for about a year we used to live in in Arizona for a while seems like a weird move. Most people say but but you know, to be with family, especially especially recently, it’s been phenomenal. And especially working from home again, is actually beneficial, I love it. And then what I what I do is nucleus, I built this for the purpose of you know, making a sustainable future for myself and for other people with the company. And and the biggest thing I’m focusing on there is automation. Is there something that I’m doing or other other companies are doing that they don’t need to be doing anymore, because there’s a way around it. And that could save their company to bring them above water. So they stop treading water. That’s that’s really the goal of nucleus is to kind of get people to a place where they they’re automated, and then they can focus on the future.

george grombacher 1:47
Nice. Well, I think that that’s an incredible mission. And when I hear automation, I imagine that that’s different today than it was a week ago and different certainly than it was 10 years ago. Right? How fast is automation changing?

Pace Ellsworth 2:04
Well, it’s it’s amazing to see, we had a very interesting conversation, even just the other day with one of our clients that they help, they help help the flower industry like floral arrangements and florists, mom and pop shops. And just thinking about they were they were detailing one specific process where some of their they do marketing campaigns, one of the marketing campaigns is to, you know, send, or, rather, it’s to not send the marketing campaign out, in cases where people are prepping flowers for condolences. So they need to be very careful about the messages that are get gets sent out. And so they have put in some processes to safeguard against, you know, some automated emails going out, depending on the, the the message. And so I was, you know, we were talking about how they can improve that and using like, advanced AI practices, and then things like that. So yeah, it’s a very fast moving industry, with cryptocurrency and, and all this all this stuff that gets thrown at people that they don’t know what to do with. I think probably one of the most ever present thing since the dawn of the Internet has just been privacy and security. And that is constantly changing inside of that industry. But most people don’t know much about it. all they hear is that, you know, this information was hacked, that information was hacked. And so one of the things to focus on with the right, software company, the right technology partner, is just to make sure that your stuff is safe, because that’s your lifeblood, so many so many businesses run on the internet, they don’t really realize what game they’re playing and how much of their stuff is dependent upon technology, and how vulnerable they could they could be. And so just safety first is one of the biggest things that that we run into.

george grombacher 4:01
Dan, I appreciate that. Fascinating. So it’s almost to the point of if you can dream it, you can make it happen kind of a thing.

Pace Ellsworth 4:10
Oh, for sure. There, we really can make just about anything happen. We talked about whether people should do a native mobile app in the App Store or they just have a website that has the same functionality or most of the same functionalities because they’re not the same but but there are pros and cons to each approach. And then what can you do with it you can you can make a new tool for your staff to automate some process that normally takes them 30 minutes each time. You could take it down down to two minutes or or zero minutes if you could just completely automated away. Or you could build some new tool for your customers. Some some site or page or applet or something that would give them more transparency or have more options, more freedom with your products and services and so that that, in turn could greatly increase the size of your audience, or keep people in the door, or get them off the sidewalk down sitting inside your your location, basically. So that’s, that’s really what what it comes down to is, if you can dream it, and we can help you dream it. And that’s, that’s the biggest part.

george grombacher 5:23
How do you? Well, I, you’re the founder and CEO. So how are you spending your time? I mean, I imagine that it’s a function of there’s constantly new stuff flowing at you from technology changes and crypto light, like you mentioned in security threats and security, ways to protect. So how do you balance like new information coming in versus just working and managing,

Pace Ellsworth 5:49
it’s, it can be a challenge, what’s come kind of naturally is that whenever there’s some new problem, something inherent to software development, merely just figuring out how to put a table on a page or something like that, and how to make it sort or, you know, in a certain way, you do need to do a lot of research. So if there’s some higher level meta discussion, some bigger problem to solve, we do a ton of research, and it just comes naturally to look at the options and not just stick with what we know. Because you can’t get just stick with what you know, in this space, everything just changes all the time. And for me, I wear a lot of hats, I do pretty much everything at the company. And gradually, as people get, you know, into place, and and trained on on the right, doing things the right way, then I can kind of step back and let them handle specific projects. So thankfully, we do have a team of six full time in the US and a number of contractors. And they they are handling projects that I don’t have to touch every day. So that’s it, we’re really going in the right direction. And we have a team that can actually take on, you know, large projects.

george grombacher 7:06
Yeah, it’s a kind of a got a little giggle about how you need to automate your own company,

Pace Ellsworth 7:13
right? Yeah, for sure. It is it’s an it’s an ever present challenge, because we’re even running into, since we’re not an enormous company. There’s a there’s a little bit of a catch 22, every single small business goes through where they need to focus in on a specific type of customer in order to grow faster, or grow to the next level. But they also need to kind of take whatever they can get to stay alive. So it’s a it’s something that we’ve gone through multiple times in the course of the past two years. And when we’re kind of at the tail end of one of those phases, like really optimizing the business itself, and working on the business is tough, as opposed to just doing the day to day.

george grombacher 7:59
Yeah, yeah. 1,000%. So how are you? How, I suppose ideally, everybody would recognize that they have a need for improving their business systems, and then they would just come to you and say, Hey, I see this as a problem. How can I help. But that probably doesn’t happen that that that much, it’s more of a function of you need to get people’s attention with the idea of, I bet there’s something going on over there with your business that you can really optimize?

Pace Ellsworth 8:30
I would say, I would say the vast majority it feels the time people come to us because they say I have an idea. And and usually it’s something completely out of the box, something that’s a new project for them. But some but but I think nearly as often it’s it’s a they have brand new ideas, something radically different for their business. When we’re just approaching someone that doesn’t come from they’re not coming to us from that mindset. We try to get to what are the deliverables that they care about? What is your conversion rate? What is your retention rate? You know, what is your profit margin? Are you happy with those numbers? Usually, they don’t know the answer to the first question, what their numbers are. And so we can help them get those numbers. And that that would be the very first project that we could solve. And solve that by just, you know, optimizing the flow, how they deal with their with their clients. And then as far as whether they’re happy with those numbers, you know that if they know them, then most likely the answer is no, they’re not happy with them. There’s something drastically you that we could change to improve their, their efficiency, and that would make a huge difference. And we really want to try to focus on what can we plan to do in the next like 30 to 90 days, so we’re not going to break the bank for them. In what we could build, and they could quickly get a return on investment, and that’s the goal really is they spend $1, they get 10. Back. That’s the real goal. Got it? Well,

george grombacher 10:11
that certainly does make sense. As you’re talking, I was thinking, okay, so I don’t know, I was just sort of thinking that we’re automating mundane tasks away. But it can also be, we’re automating, and making more efficient, the customer experience. So that, yeah, any kinks that are in the hose, we get rid of those. So it’s easy for them to buy, and it’s easy for them to stay a customer and all that.

Pace Ellsworth 10:34
Yeah, so I mean, we’re thinking about things like, right now, if there’s no, if there’s no customer portal, right now, at all, like there’s no place that they can log in and sign in, put their information in, then that means that the business doesn’t really know who their customer is, and they can’t optimize for anything, so that they could, they could have this assumption in their minds. You see this all the time on those, those those very catchy shows, like the Prophet and, and, you know, Hell’s Kitchen, things like that, that they don’t know what their best products and services are the ones that sell the most. And if they knew that, they could cut away things that are not working for them that are that are actually hurting their business. And they could focus on, they could find out exactly what customers they should be working with. It’s those things, it’s just, it’s just improving the relationship between the business and the client, so that we can get them closer to the front door or inside the business. And, and we can, you know, improve that relationship and make more magic happen. So that’s really the, what we’re shooting for is the results, not just not just looking at this process, and kind of a bare metal, mechanical fashion? Got it?

george grombacher 11:54
I think that that makes a lot of sense. And these days, I imagine that the people you run into, they probably have stuff, but it’s all just sort of independently sort of siloed out, and how do I bring all these things together, and then do it securely?

Pace Ellsworth 12:10
Yeah, I would say, I’m not sure if it depends on how fast they grow. But very often, if a business is growing very quickly, it’s because they just use tools that were out of the box and services that are ready to start up. And they supplement that with just some very low skill, quick solution. As a result, we see a lot things where a company is using eight different systems, they’re paying through the nose on a monthly basis for technology, where they could spend, in some cases, they could build a custom solution for less than the cost of what they’re spending every month on the technology and the people to support that technology inside their company. So they could they could essentially redirect all of those resources. And own there and even go further improve the quality of the of the data and everything. Since the system data would all be together. It wouldn’t need to move and be stuck between these different siloed systems. If we can build something like that, for them that that that just, it really changes the game. It’s it’s it’s like doing a it’s like moving, you know, your house and picking something that works for your family since your family has changed.

george grombacher 13:32
Yeah, and that certainly does make sense. And that’s one of those win wins that

Pace Ellsworth 13:37
yeah, that we hear about right? That’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s a, we’re, it’s it’s sometimes tough to like put the time into thinking about what needs to change there. But just like, if you’re doing therapy, you really kind of need to open up all the closets and look at the nitty gritty and be open and honest about it in order to find out what’s wrong. Got it?

george grombacher 14:03
Do you have an average kind of average engagement time? Or maybe just walk us through the process of how that therapy session works? Where we open everything up? Check it all out?

Pace Ellsworth 14:14
Yeah, thanks. It’ll depend a lot on the size of the project. Sometimes a business only needs a few small things changed. And that will make a big difference. And so it can be one conversation to say, Great, we’re gonna do this list of 10 things. We’ll send you an invoice and we’ll get started and we’ll get that done real quick. So, sometimes, yeah, sometimes the planning is only a few hours. I would say normally, it’ll take a few days. It’ll take a few sessions to identify what’s wrong, and then further time to research into their systems after we get access, do an audit, and then come back with a statement bit of work for some longer term phased approach. And then, you know, we get that work done in over the course of, like I said, one to three months, one to four months or something. And then we plan the next phase and go from there. So sometimes we stopped working with the company after a month. But but pretty often will be will be available as a technology partner, especially for building something new that’s going to serve them for the for the future.

george grombacher 15:28
That makes sense. Well, pace, people are ready for difference making tip, what do you have for them?

Pace Ellsworth 15:35
I would say, what’s gonna make a big difference is realize that that technology as a whole is like just another employee in your business. And you often spend a lot on on your payroll, you often spend a lot on the right people. So you might, you should be willing to consider spending the right amount on your technology in order to make it to make sure that it’s serving you, because you don’t normally keep people on if they’re hurting the company. But often we see businesses keeping the same technology for 510 years, even though the world has changed around them. And it’s, you know, that doesn’t work anymore.

george grombacher 16:20
Well, I think that is great stuff that definitely gets Come on. It’s a cool way to think about that in a really, really appropriate way to think about it the way that we do business these days, obviously. So technology focus for the majority. And so why not? Like why would you treat it as as, as important Lee as it really is,

Pace Ellsworth 16:40
especially in the world of AI assistants and things like that we really are kind of treating technology as as a an operating, you know, thinking machine. So,

george grombacher 16:49
yeah. Well, post thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? And how can they engage with you and nucleus,

Pace Ellsworth 16:56
they can go to our website and just go book a strategy session with us. And that’s nucleus with an eye and you see li us calm, and that’d be the best place.

george grombacher 17:08
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did, showcase your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to nucleus.com That’s nuclius.com Click book, a strategy session and find out if there’s opportunities for you to optimize, automate, make life easier, better, more efficient, all of those things. Thanks, kid pace. Thank you. Thank you. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai