Stephen: Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you're pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you're even thinking about a business or a career at all. And that is decision making. There's a lot of people out there saying that your life's outcome is a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world and our lives, I would like to introduce you, my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Williams: Thanks for having me, Stephen. It's great to be here.
Stephen: Yeah, thank you so much. And so first of all, let's get a little bit of your background. You're a VP of strategy, Western computer. The name doesn't necessarily clearly state what it is. What is it that you do as VP of strategy?
Greg Williams: Yeah. We're an old company and I like to say that we don't sell computers and we're not really Western that much anymore, but that's our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That's what we do. We're primarily a Microsoft partner. We implement the Microsoft dynamic suite of products for our customers. We support them long-term. The last few years has been their journey in digital transformation.
Stephen: And just so everyone knows what we're talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to?
Greg Williams: ERP is the backbone software of a business accounting inventory control. Sometimes e-commerce. It's really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And CRM, there's two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce that do that for the most part. And it's for your front office, it's your sales team, it's your customer service team, it's your field technicians if you're in the service business, the applications that they use.
Stephen: And in your role as VP of strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses?
Greg Williams: A little bit of both. I'm obviously very focused on our strategy, but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology.
Stephen: Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you're on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general pieces of advice for anyone that's making a decision around their business, whether it be, obviously you talk a lot about the IT, the tech decisions, but people who are starting something up, whether it be a business or even a side project, are making decisions pretty much every day about selecting this tool or that tool.
Greg Williams: I do help out there quite a bit. One of the things I see with founders of startups is that they often don't think holistically about what applications they may need in two or three years from now. They're just plugging holes with what I call point solutions. And before you know it, they're paying 10 different subscriptions. They have Google Docs, they have Slack, they have Zoom, then they may have a HubSpot CRM system, and the list just keeps going, right?
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And none of them really talk to each other that well, if at all. And we're a little biased because we're a Microsoft partner, which is the all-in-one solution. But we do see sometimes serial entrepreneurs come to us and they say, hey, I've been down this path before of being two or three years in business and trying to scale with disparate systems.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Instead of going down that road, I'm going to pay a little more upfront and get on an integrated platform and scale with that.
Stephen: You talk about paying a little bit more upfront. Is there any element of fear or concern, especially around say first-time entrepreneurs or first-time business owners where people don't pay more upfront because they're just still in that mode of, well, is this going to work? Am I ready to pay for this full suite of products given that I haven't gotten too many sales yet?
Greg Williams: Yeah, I think that's probably the fear. And a lot of times they just don't know. They just don't know what small and medium-sized businesses are using. They come from a consumer mindset of what consumers use in their technology every day, and they try to apply that to the small business.
Stephen: Oh, interesting. Because they're still thinking themselves as this is me and my initiative, not that this is a business.
Greg Williams: Exactly. And there's some validity to that because over time we see consumer behavior and applications come into business-to-business applications, right?
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: 10 years ago, e-commerce sites for between businesses did not have reviews on them. Now people are asking for that. Even if it's a business-to-business site where they're selling to other businesses, they want to see reviews and Q&A and a lot of that stuff that you see on consumer websites. All that stuff trickles down into businesses. We were doing Skype calls long before we were doing Teams and Zoom calls.
Stephen: Yeah. And then have you found a balance between say, being too reactive and being too in the moment we need this versus being too long-term and possibly falling into analysis paralysis, that state where people just keep thinking and thinking and thinking and don't do anything?
Greg Williams: You can definitely get into what I call feature poker.
Stephen: Okay.
Greg Williams: Where you are looking at different applications and comparing them purely on the features.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: And what I usually suggest is look at the viability of the vendor and the strength of the platform and weight that in your decision, maybe not as equal to features, but as an important weight.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Because a feature here and there isn't everything, and you may not even use all the features.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: There are companies that make amazing accounting systems with all kinds of features, but they're not hosted properly, they don't have scalability, they don't have geo-redundant backups, they don't have all that stuff that's really important to a business. But you would never think to ask that. You just assume everybody has that.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: Unless you know.
Stephen: And so you bring up geo-redundant backups because that's something that I think most people who don't have that much experience with data, especially big data, probably wouldn't be thinking about something like that. But I think in any business there's going to be something technical that you're maybe not thinking about. I don't think the average person even knows geo-redundant data, why they want it, how they want it, et cetera. What's a way of trying to think through as many of those bases as possible, knowing you're not going to think of every single thing, but think about as many of those as possible without obviously falling into this analysis paralysis where you're spending too much time trying to think of everything.
Greg Williams: Right. I think you just have to ask the questions about the platform and how it's hosted and what the technology backing is, and also how it's supported. I'll give you a quick example. In our business, we have a lot of European vendors that have great software applications, especially out of Scandinavia, and they want access to the US market.
Stephen: Okay.
Greg Williams: And they come to us to get that access. Some of them are very organized and they're like, hey, I'm going to set up an office over there. I'm going to have people. In two years I expect to have five people. We're going to be able to provide tech support. We're going to have boots on the ground to help people in your time zones. Other ones say, hey, we have great software and you can buy it from us, but we're not setting up an office over there and we don't see a need to.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: And our customers won't always pick up on that. They're falling in love with the functionality, but we ask those questions because we know if you're trying to get support from someone in Scandinavia in August, it's really hard, 'cause they're all on vacation.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And that's a cultural difference that we just take for granted. We don't even think about it.
Stephen: And then how often are you able to ask those right questions and say potentially, not to say that there's a right and a wrong, but lead a customer to a better decision? Say, had you not asked this, we probably went this way and it would've caused a lot more hardship.
Greg Williams: Yeah. What we've done is I've put together a vendor grading document of the questions to ask because I can't do it all. Then we have our sales team who's helping customers with these decisions or our support team in some cases, and they're asking those questions of the vendors. And sometimes they're very uncomfortable questions, 'cause they don't want to answer those questions, they want to focus on the cool functionality they just built.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And I've been in a lot of product demos myself where it is they have this cool functionality, and as a customer, as a client, you're just saying, no, is this going to solve my need? I don't care that it does this particular thing.
Greg Williams: Yeah. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes if the functionality is very, very compelling and no one else has it and there's huge productivity gains, then you'll take that risk on a partner that's startup or less vetted.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: But for me, especially in the accounting software world where we're very risk averse, it has to be very compelling to be willing to take a risk.
Stephen: Interesting. And so in accounting software, obviously it's a very different industry. How much do you take into account what industry people are in? Some of the specifics about the company, because obviously the reason why there's a ton of different solutions out there for anything is the fact that there are different types of organizations, different types of companies and different combinations of capabilities work for different people.
Greg Williams: We always take that into account, and again, we just look at the vendor viability, just make sure it's not one guy in his basement typically.
Stephen: Yep.
Greg Williams: Then we look at what's their support structure in the United States so they have legal agreements in the United States, that type of thing. Then we'll start to really look at the functionality and see if it fits or not.
Stephen: And one of the functionality hot topics that a lot of people are talking about right now at the time of recording in the middle of 2024 is AI. It seems like AI is everywhere and everywhere. I like to joke, trying to remember the last time I went 72 hours without hearing about AI.
Greg Williams: Right.
Stephen: How is that popping in to a lot of these solutions and what is, I guess, the current status as well as what people should be thinking about whenever any potential vendor brings up AI?
Greg Williams: Right. Just think about how it's going to impact your everyday life and how it's actually going to be used within the application. Don't just let a salesperson use it as a buzzword. Challenge them a little bit as to what it's actually doing. Microsoft has already embedded into our products 'cause they have that huge investment in OpenAI.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: One of the big improvements we saw was bank rec auto matching, matching up transactions with your bank.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And that was relatively easy for them to deploy, and it's a big time saver. In the whole scheme of things, it's a pretty small piece of functionality, but someone is saving them a few hours every day and that's worth it, right? They also have an example where you can upload a picture in the database and it reads everything in the picture and automatically writes a marketing description. It's probably a little bit less useful. To me, that's more like a proof of concept.
Stephen: Yeah. For sure.
Greg Williams: Because a marketer can write a better description. It is cool to see the capabilities. The other thing that we're seeing is within our customer service applications is where there's really improvements because for example, AI can listen to a phone call and serve up knowledge-based articles to you. This customer's telling you that their Outlook won't start and maybe you should tell them to reboot based on this article. I'm oversimplifying there, but that's a real life scenario that I see huge traction for in the future.
Stephen: What do you think AI is going to, I guess, do for say the average person's life? Because you talk about a lot of time savings seems to be the theme that you're talking about, whether matching transactions, whether it be even the standard OpenAI use case of like, I'm going to search through the entire internet so you don't have to go and look at three pages of results and read six articles and stuff like that. Do you think AI is going to be this fundamental change in the way we work and live the way some people say? Or do you think it's going to be a much more minor transition where just some research tasks get offloaded to it?
Greg Williams: Oh, I think it's going to make a huge change into how we access data. If you think about, I'm old enough to remember pre-internet. The internet was just launching when I was in college. Our professor still made us go to the library and cite encyclopedias or sources using index cards, and then five years later that was gone. It was all internet-based.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Now I see AI being the next generation of that where if you know how to prompt it, you can say, hey, here's the research on this topic and here's the six sources I pulled it from, and of those six sources, here's the four that agree on this topic.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And you would've done that manually with Google searches now or five years ago.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: That's where I see a big improvement. And then also in terms of writing content, it's really going to help people. The other day I used it to ask for a bio on myself to give to a podcast room with yourself, and it looked me up, it wrote a bio, and I said, okay, now make it shorter and focus on this topic, focus on business experience. And it did a great job. Amazing. And traditionally that's something I would've spent a couple hours doing myself or asked our marketing team for.
Stephen: There is some time savings. Now, I know another hot topic that people talk about recently is work-life balance or some people for work-life integration. But one of the things I commonly say is that with no bias toward anyone or any group of people, but one of the reasons why some of the problems we have right now as far as even lower birth rates and stuff like that is related to the fact that maybe 75 years ago for a family to afford a house, it took one member of that family working 40 hours a week. And now same house takes two members of that family, both parents working and oftentimes more than 40 hours a week because of other pressure. With AI automating tasks, AI does not inherently automate away jobs. It automates away tasks is the correction I've heard. Do you see that actually improving work-life balance in the future?
Greg Williams: It could be if you know how to use it and you learn how to do those prompts and learn how to work with a model, learn how to vet the information because AI is just going to automate the mundane tasks, and then it's going to take a little more analysis. It might take less time, but more focused time to verify that information's accurate and then it makes sense.
Stephen: What is the primary thing that people should be adjusting in that sense to the way AI's potential to change the way we access data and the way it could potentially change communication patterns? Because the internet also inherently, not only it changed the data access, like you said, but also change our communication patterns.
Greg Williams: Right. I think one is getting good at verifying the data and checking the sources so you're not passing on AI generated information that could be incorrect.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: When you log in any of the AI tools in those large language data models, there's disclaimers all over the place that the information could be incorrect.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And if you remember early on in the internet research, people believed that anything they saw on the internet was real.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And then we ended up with that whole fake news thing that was very painful. And I think we're on the other side of fake news now, but we're going to have fake AI news for a while and have to get past that.
Stephen: I still every once in a while encounter someone that's just reading something word for word off the internet, and I'm like, hold up. What's the story kind of thing that we've hopefully been trained to do over the last 20 years.
Greg Williams: Going back to when we talked about making decisions, one of the things that's helped me is trying to reduce the amount of decisions in my personal life. Have you ever had to make a bunch of decisions throughout the day and at the end of the day you got to make a decision on dinner, you're just too tired of making decisions to decide what to have for dinner?
Stephen: And then you end up just having Wendy's or something.
Greg Williams: Exactly. And couples argue over this. They're like, well, you decide. You decide. You decide.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: What we'll do a lot of times is we'll just decide and have a calendar for the whole week of what we're going to have for dinner every night. And then that's another decision you don't have to make.
Stephen: That reminds me of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wearing the same [inaudible 00:19:05] every day. That's one less decision I have to make. Steve Jobs always had that turtleneck sweater, and that was his signature look. And then he never had to wake up in the morning and say, what am I going to wear today? That's one less decision.
Greg Williams: Yep. And Warren Buffett has McDonald's every morning.
Stephen: Oh wow.
Greg Williams: For breakfast. And if the market's up, he gets an extra hash brown. If it's down, he has one hash brown. It's a very simple binary decision for him. But-
Stephen: Interesting.
Greg Williams: It makes him think about how we should act today based on how the market's doing. Yeah.
Stephen: What other methods can people use to reduce the number of decisions they have to make? And also are there certain decisions that people should keep conscious, I would say? Certain decisions where it shouldn't be based on some really basic algorithm in your head?
Greg Williams: If you're in a management position, you should really focus on how you can empower the people that you work with to make decisions.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And also work with them to know what kind of decisions they should come to you with and empower them to know which ones they can make on their own. Otherwise, you're going to get bombarded with too many inconsequential decisions.
Stephen: Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Greg Williams: It's one of those things that's harder to execute on than you think.
Stephen: Oh, for sure. I've seen it in action.
Greg Williams: Yeah. We've all seen micromanagers and no one wants to work for them, but you may have a person you work with that used to work for a micromanager and they have some PTSD from that, and you got to work with them to a point where they feel comfortable enough to make their own decisions.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: From a management standpoint, I think that helps with decision-making. But again, I think planning upfront as much as possible, having a plan helps you make better decisions. And fewer decisions 'cause you're not having to make decisions on the fly.
Stephen: Now, do you take any stock in the whole idea of having a set of guiding principles that guide a decision? If you know your top priorities in life are these four things that whenever some of the more mundane or more day-to-day decisions come in, you can just simply think through how does it help with what I've chosen to prioritize in life?
Greg Williams: From a work standpoint, yes, there's some overriding KPIs and goals that I'm focused on, and I think about how does this decision affect that. Thinking big picture about each decision as I'm making it. And then in my personal life, I guess it's similar, I value time with family quite a bit.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Every decision, I'm often thinking, how is this going to affect our family time together? If my kid wants to join a baseball team on the other side of town, is it worth it or not based upon our overall family time?
Stephen: Interesting. And then speaking of the managers, the ones you're talking about that maybe want a little bit less stress in their lives, and they can do that by empowering their employees to make some more decisions, is there a good way that a manager can walk through with their employees ways to orient those decisions around the KPIs or whatever? By the way, KPI stands for key performance indicators for anyone that doesn't know, and divisions of companies often use that to have clear statements of what the top priorities in the organizations are for the quarter year, whichever. But anyway, is there a way managers can walk through their employees how to use that to make decisions so that they can have those decisions still made effectively without them having to make everyone?
Greg Williams: Yeah. If you align them on the goals and then explain to them how their decisions affect those goals, and then as a group you are held accountable to the goal, then that's typically how I'd recommend doing that. And then there's more details underneath. I use that vendor selection example, then I would have a guideline set of questions they need to think about when they're adding a vendor.
Stephen: And in your biography or list of signature topics provided to me for the podcast, one of the things you say about vendor selections is to be picky. What does that mean when it comes to someone, say evaluating, say you found five vendors and you're looking for which one's the best one?
Greg Williams: In our business, it only makes sense to have fewer vendors than more vendors.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: It's less relationships to maintain. Also, if I have, I'll just use an example of a credit card processing software. There are 10 competing to get into our customer base all the time, and a customer may come to me and say, hey, I really want to go with this one because it has X feature that the other ones don't have.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And I will tell them, hey, we have a hundred customers using our preferred vendor. If you call us up, we can support that. If you have a problem with them, guess what? We have a hundred customers and we can use our leverage to get you what you need.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: But if you're the one customer on something else, then I can't help you as much. You're on your own with that relationship. That's just an example of a type of conversation we'll have.
Stephen: And so you're saying that there's a bunch of situations where you might want to give some pause or say, okay, how is this relationship going to work and how am I going to manage all my relationships?
Greg Williams: Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Stephen: Relationship management, is this something that can create the same amount of mental exhaustion as what we talked about before, decision fatigue?
Greg Williams: It can. I gave you an example. I get pursued by a lot of salespeople, and I go to a few conferences a year, and one of them is in October. It's the Microsoft Dynamics Summit, the Nationwide conference for all the Microsoft Dynamics customers. And all of these sales reps for different companies want to meet with me. In fact, the meetings in October, last week I started getting requests for meetings.
Stephen: Oh wow.
Greg Williams: And what happens there is the good ones ask in advance and are very respectful of your time and frame the meeting in a way that they can help me. And the bad ones grab me in the hallway literally and say, hey, I need 15 minutes to show you what we have. I don't like to reject people, and I wish I could give all these people all the time to show me their product, and I am sure I could learn something from them 'cause you can learn something from every person that you meet.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: But I just don't have the time. That's an example where I just have to tell them, hey, I am here to meet with customers. That's my first priority. Certain vendors I am able to make time for based upon our relationship, and the rest of you will have to have a Teams or Zoom meeting a few weeks later. And so that's an example of how I manage relationships as a buyer because I don't want to just outright reject or ignore, but I'm also limited time.
Stephen: Yeah. You have to prioritize. And probably a lot of people out there listening are thinking about getting their own businesses started and how to get your own business, which involves having to approach decision-makers because they're on the other side, that you are the potential customer. Is there a best practice right now as far as the best way to approach and meet someone that's going to be making that buying decision at an organization? Or is it pretty much everyone making decisions how you are saying, okay, this is how I need it to go and this is how I need my interactions to be?
Greg Williams: In terms of the method of outreach, I've seen more on LinkedIn than anywhere else lately. That's okay. It doesn't fill up my email inbox. I don't have to answer a call, and I do go out on LinkedIn every other day or every day and check my messages there and see what's going on. Microsoft likes to communicate on LinkedIn obviously because they own it. I communicate with a lot of the Microsoft people that way.
Stephen: Yep.
Greg Williams: That's been a good way in terms of the outreach and then the messaging that I see is trying to find some type of shared interest or a way that they can help us.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: Not just show up and throw up, like we say, show up and want to do a sales pitch.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: It's got to be, hey, I want to learn more about your business and see if there's any way we can work together. Personally, for me, that's a great message. It's exploratory and it's also saying, I want to learn about your business, which everyone likes to tell more about their business. And some may even say, hey, we may have some customers in common, or we may have some referrals we can give you. And that, of course is really powerful too.
Stephen: You're saying it's better to say, I'd like to learn more about your business than to do what I think some people try to do, which is go on a business website and learn on their own and then demonstrate some knowledge ahead of time.
Greg Williams: I think you should do that after you get the agreement for the meeting.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And maybe a little bit upfront. It can't hurt to over-prepare and do some research, but to pretend that you learned something based upon what you're reading on the website is probably a mistake.
Stephen: Because when I think of a business and how a business goes and its operations and everyone has a website and maybe even a blog or some content, the only people who would really know the ins and outs of that business is someone who's been following the blog, following the YouTube channel for months if not years.
Greg Williams: Yeah. I've seen some bad AI tools there lately where people are using AI to scrape your website and send a marketing email to you blind.
Stephen: Oh my.
Greg Williams: And they often have incorrect data in them. There's some good data in there, but you could tell it's written by AI and you can tell that there's some inaccuracies in there.
Stephen: Yeah. It's the equivalent of those AI photos that someone has three arms or eight fingers.
Greg Williams: Yeah.
Stephen: It's an AI photo, right?
Greg Williams: Yeah. They're deep fakes., right?
Stephen: And I think it's pretty safe to assume that if someone can recognize that AI wrote something or produce something, it's probably a turnoff as far as making initial sales contact.
Greg Williams: Right. I've noticed that anything from ChatGPT starts off with, I hope you are well, or I hope this finds you well.
Stephen: Oh, really?
Greg Williams: Yes. If an email starts with, I hope this finds you well, I just stop reading.
Stephen: Oh my. Yeah. It's like how I know with LinkedIn, there's that email thing that it was randomly message that probably just went out the same message to 50,000 people with all the same search tags.
Greg Williams: Right. Yep.
Stephen: And then what happens if someone does select the wrong vendor? What's the general process and what's the level of pain that they must endure to write that ship?
Greg Williams: Well, it depends. I mean, sometimes it can be very painful. What happens sometimes with our customer base is they select the wrong vendor and they still expect us to clean it up. 'Cause we have the ability to do it more than they do. We don't say I told you so, but they know it. And we have to work through that process to either make it work or switch them to something else. I think on that subject, companies should be very careful with contract terms and long-term contracts. One of the things I like about Microsoft is they'll even go monthly if you want. They don't even require a year. And you can start off monthly and then switch to a year or switch to three years for some price protection. Those are great options, but a lot of software vendors, they want two, three years upfront, and I understand why they want that, but if they're not proven and you haven't worked with them before, you should be very careful there.
Stephen: If someone's in a situation where you're starting a business and worried about what your sales prospects are going to be going forward, not sure where it's going to go, and not ready to sign this lengthy two to three year contract, but need to get started somewhere, what's the best thing that someone that's dipping in the water that doesn't know if it's going to be viable can do?
Greg Williams: Do you mean from the buyer's perspective?
Stephen: Yeah, yeah.
Greg Williams: Okay.
Stephen: I'm starting a company and yeah, I don't know if this is going to work, but I [inaudible 00:32:28].
Greg Williams: Right. I mean, I would focus on month to month or annual contracts for everything. You don't want to be in a position where you have three-year contracts because you got a 10% discount.
Stephen: Yeah. You're saying that 10% extra charge to stay month to month or six month to six month or whatever it is, worth paying in the situation where you haven't become a viable business, haven't reached that point where it's sustainable.
Greg Williams: Yeah. Because most companies are not going to let you out of that contract if you're on tough times.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: You may think they will, but they won't. Yeah.
Stephen: And do you work with a lot of startup type companies or do you tend to work with companies that have gotten a little bit of traction and gotten to Series A, B, C and stuff?
Greg Williams: Yeah, we're typically working with the companies that have a little bit of traction.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: They're typically graduating off of QuickBooks and into our software.
Stephen: Okay. Yeah.
Greg Williams: That's a lot of our customers. And then we of course scale up into larger customers from there.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: The one main application that we sell, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, is a step up from QuickBooks in terms of capabilities.
Stephen: What does Business Central do? Is that the full suite with, I think most people think of Word and Excel and PowerPoint?
Greg Williams: Yeah. It's not that, it's accounting, it's inventory control, it's project job costing, sales tax collection, financial statement generation. It shows up alongside all your Office applications in the same suite, but it's your accounting application.
Stephen: That makes sense. And so what does that usually do for a business, when someone graduates I'll say from QuickBooks to being able to use Business Central, does that generally save the people working for the company time, energy, stress?
Greg Williams: Let's use a company that has inventory for example. If you're on a QuickBooks, you're going to have to buy some type of add-on solution to do inventory tracking. And then they're not going to communicate that well, and you're going to be dealing with two different vendors, and it's only going to scale so high for you in terms of features. And then if you go up a level and Microsoft's not the only solution there, there's NetSuite, there's Sage, we have competitors. But as you go up a level, you tend to start getting more of that stuff in the box and just included from the vendor. And then you also will get more robust financial statements. If you are backed by a private equity firm or some type of investor, in a lot of cases, they'll want you to get off of QuickBooks and onto a bigger solution so your numbers are more auditable.
Stephen: Your bread and butter is the people who are transitioning from startup to full-on business?
Greg Williams: Yeah. I'd say most of the companies are going to be 10 million or more in revenue.
Stephen: And then if anyone out there listening is part of a company or started a company that's reaching that level, heard this episode, wants to get a hold of you, what would be the best way to have a conversation?
Greg Williams: Yeah. The best way is go to westerncomputer.com and we have a lot of self-service content out there where you can see demonstrations of the software, deep dive on different topics, blog articles, that type of thing. You could also reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's very easy to find Greg Williams and Western Computer on LinkedIn, and I check my messages there almost every day.
Stephen: I guess with everyone listening out there, we're going to make decisions every day in life. You talk about offloading some of those decisions, whether it be deciding ahead of time or delegating them. When someone does have the really big decision, say even what demographic do I want to target? Something like that where there's some of these things could possibly go wrong, or how do I want to set up the business? What systems, what different ideology do I want to use and stuff like that. Is there common pitfalls that you see that you would just advise people to avoid?
Greg Williams: That's the beauty of entrepreneurs is they have those visions of where there's white space in the market and how to attack it.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: Reaching out to guys like me is how you operationalize that and make it happen in a sustainable way. And we always say grow without adding people. One of the things I'll often tell business decision makers is, if you think software solutions are expensive, try hiring people to do it.
Stephen: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: That's often an area where you see a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs that are really good at starting the business, they're amazing at starting that business and finding that white space and getting a foothold, but then they really struggle with getting to the next level in terms of the right management structure and the right reports and that type of thing.
Stephen: And would you say that it's at that point in the business where you're truly making that vision happen? Because someone will come in, they'll have a vision, and they'll know, I want to have this impact. I want to serve this type of client with this solution, and you'll get a customer, you'll get another couple customers, but is it the operationalizing that you're talking about when that vision actually becomes a reality?
Greg Williams: I think it's a few things, and one is diving down to the numbers and seeing where you're making money, and then doubling down on those areas. Where a lot of times entrepreneurs, they're so used to making payroll that they just want to chase every dollar out there.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: You have to put the numbers in front of them and say, hey, here's where the margins and market is. Let's move in that direction. And that takes good financial reporting in order to prove that to them.
Stephen: And then do the other business intelligence tools, first of all, I don't know if Power BI is part of that package that you sell.
Greg Williams: It is, yes.
Stephen: Yeah. How are they used properly?
Greg Williams: To me, the beauty of Power BI is showing trending over time. You can look at a financial statement and it shows you how you did this quarter and how you did a year ago, but Power BI can give you a graph of how it's going up and down over time, and you can spot trends in that data. And not just over time, but then across customer segments. But it's visual and gives you a better dashboard for viewing comparative data.
Stephen: Mm-hmm. And yeah, because everything could look good right now, but that trend could show possible vulnerabilities or possible areas where the market is just shifting away from a certain product or certain solution.
Greg Williams: Right. And in a lot of businesses, the financial reports lag a couple months into what's really happening.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: It's important to then see the trends as well.
Stephen: One final question is coming back to the AI and coming back to the life balance, if someone out there is say, mostly concerned with how to achieve better work-life balance or achieve more authentic life, more in line with things, what is the best way we can leverage AI in that particular case to make sure rather than creating more work than our technological solutions have done, we actually use it to harness our attention to focus better on what we really want to focus on?
Greg Williams: Yeah. In my opinion, for the average person right now, using AI for two things. One is to help you in your research tasks, and two is to help you with your communication.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Take one of your emails, have AI rewrite it, and then it's really good at explaining things to people. And you may find that you have fewer follow-up emails asking the next question back because you explained it better the first time.
Stephen: Oh, so it can cut down on that back and forth email thread, which we've all been on one that's led to 55, 60, even a hundred total emails being sent.
Greg Williams: Yeah. When I write an email, I always try to think about, I want to avoid the first email back and get them all the information the first email that I can to save everyone some time, and AI really helps with that.
Stephen: Well, that is amazing. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on Actions Antidotes, really diving into the topic of decision making and what we can do when we're looking for both day-to-day life decisions like what to wear, what to eat, but also the really important business decisions, particularly choosing vendors and being particular about them.
Greg Williams: Well, thank you for having me today. This was great. I enjoyed my time.
Stephen: This was wonderful. I'm so thankful you enjoyed the conversation. And I would also like to give a quick thank you to everyone out there who tuned into Actions Antidotes. Whether this is your first time, whether you listen to a whole bunch of other episodes, hopefully you're inspired. Hopefully you're inspired to find new ways to use our AI as well as new ways to streamline and offload some of the decisions that really give us decision fatigue to the point where at the end of the day, you're just having Wendy's.
