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Tales from the PROS is hosted by Michael Georgiou, Co-Founder, and Eric Lawrence, Director of Growth at Imaginovation, an award-winning app and software development company. Each episode dives into honest, unscripted conversations, hard-earned lessons, and educational insight into how to help bridge the gap between technology and people.
If you’re a founder, exec, or innovator trying to navigate the tech world without getting burned, this podcast is your no-BS roadmap. Through real talk, personal stories, and insights from the front lines, you’ll pick up smarter ways to build software, steer clear of common mistakes, and choose the right partners in a crowded, often confusing space.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, driving digital change at a larger company, or just love keeping up with tech innovation, Tales from the PROS brings you straight-shooting advice and inspiration without the fluff.
Michael Georgiou (00:44)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros. I'm your host, Michael Georgiou, joined by my co-host, Eric Lawrence. Today, we're gonna talk about something that we've been really helping a lot of businesses navigate lately, actually the past several years, which is automation. Not in the buzzword or AI powered or plug this and that and make profit kind of way, but kind of in the real practical sense.
How do you know when it's time to automate the processes and systems in your business? What does smart automation look like? What does software automation look like? And what mistakes should you avoid so you don't end up wasting time, resources, or budget? We're going to share some patterns and experiences we've seen firsthand, including real examples of companies that automated the right way through software and applications and some that didn't. So let's jump in today. Hey, everyone.
talk about this today and Eric man how you do today.
Eric Lawrence (01:45)
Doing great. Yeah. Looking forward to talking about all things automation.
Michael Georgiou (01:50)
Let's do it, man. Let's get kind of a business geek mode here. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (01:53)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. When it, when it comes to automation, it's, it's an interesting topic because, usually like you don't realize this until you're at a trade show. But when you start talking with people, they don't even realize that there are things that they could do to automate their business until you start to really dive deep into it. And you start asking questions and being like, wait, you waste this much time doing this.
They're like, well, I never really realized that there was an option to automate it. So I think it's one part there are people out there that probably realize it needs to be done. But then there are some people that have no idea that what could be automated can be.
Michael Georgiou (02:22)
Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah. We've seen so many times, right, where it's like businesses, especially older ones, I've noticed, Eric, like construction companies, right? And even kind of like these contractor type companies, like contracting companies and, you know, like logistics supply chain. Healthcare, I feel now is a lot more automated with at least healthcare tech companies, but
with even hospitals, they require a lot of automation, but kind of in the sense like with these industries that they're so old school, right? Where they do things very manually, like entering data in a spreadsheet, right? Where it requires so much freaking time and money and people to do it. I I can't even imagine, man, like for me to just sit there to manually enter things into a system and it's...
It's crazy to think about that now. would think like, that's not possible. There's no way companies are doing it, but there's many companies, organizations, nonprofits that are doing it all the time. And that's just one example, right? Where there's just so many repetitive, repetitiveness and kind of manual labor, manual tasks that are being done that really can just be completely transformed and digitized and automated. Whether it's using a
Eric Lawrence (03:38)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (03:53)
a third party tool or system, or it's even a customized software solution that can really just improve their whole process and system.
Eric Lawrence (04:02)
Yeah, I get a little bit of PTSD because I think back to when I was interning over at Duke Health, this was many years ago. One of the things that I had to do was stare at a spreadsheet that was about, you know, 5,000 line items and make sure that the data matched what their ⁓ written down records were. that was something, again, way back. But I would venture to say that many companies still do things that are like that.
Michael Georgiou (04:10)
yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (04:29)
And I think it actually leads us into the conversation of what are signs where business might be ready. I think you mentioned the first one, which is that data entry, doing compliance or, or, you know, approvals are slowing things down. That's a really obvious sign, but I feel like there are a few more. Maybe we can go back and forth and talk about which ones we see. I would say that's the first one, but I would say probably like the most obvious one is.
when a company just has manual repetitive processes that are eating up time. And it could be just one employee here. Oftentimes when we hear from somebody that's reaching out to us, it impacts at least five to 10 employees and they can start to really put the ROI behind. If we could save our employees this amount of hours per week and we're paying them this much, we know that we can get a return after a year or so.
Michael Georgiou (05:22)
Yeah, yeah. And I would say another sign that we've kind of seen where they might be ready for automation. mean, now with AI, everyone, in my opinion, everyone's kind of, everyone needs to have automation, right? But that's not the reality of it. Every business is different. Some companies are so massive, man, that they, you know, there's so much red tape, kind of like even government agencies that were well,
well aware of, which we've worked with before, that not only have manual processes that are kind of clunky, they take so much time up and they really need to be efficient and just kind of digitize and automated. But I think also where organizations and companies are growing very rapidly and kind of the ops side of it, the operations can't keep up, right? And if the operations can't keep up,
I'm not saying software automation or automation is going to completely just revitalize it and fix everything up. I'm not saying that, but I do think that's a part of the solution. When you're trying to scale and you're growing quickly, you need to make sure that people, internally are not spending time on things that really is taking away their focus from actually growing the business instead of...
you know, doing things that are just kind of time wasters. I'm not sure how else to say it, you know.
Eric Lawrence (06:43)
Yeah, you bring, you bring up a good point. It's
usually a sign when you can confidently say our marketing and sales are in a great place. maybe our, our services and products are in a great place. Our HR seems to be in a great place. Operations is lagging behind operations. I would say is one of the number one places where automation is going to play a key part and going hand in hand with just like the, your team's growing, but your operations can't keep up.
I would say a lot of times companies kind of like bolt on different products as they grow where they say, Hey HR, we want to handle this. for sales, we have this CRM that we use and, they have all these different systems, but as they grow in the systems, what ends up happening is that, you know, you have disconnected systems and duplicated work. And that's when you get what many describe as kind of a rat's nest of,
technology and oftentimes it's just a matter of like, how can we get these things to start communicating with each other? Because we're having to waste time pulling information from this area, bringing it over, making sense of it into this other area. And it just ends up wasting a lot of employees time.
Michael Georgiou (07:53)
Yeah, that's definitely another sign I would say for sure, right? Yeah, disconnected systems, too many systems kind of not talking to each other, too many tools. Yeah, that is for sure I think a sign where something needs to be done, right? Because the thing is, right, I mean, we've seen it even just like with our company, every company goes through it, we're using so many different tools and sometimes you just gotta look.
You got to really review, audit your own business, your own operations, right? And look at all the tools, all the different systems and platforms that you're using, and they all add up. They compound very, very quickly, especially if you're growing. And things just get incredibly clunky, disorganized, noisy within the company. Expenses drastically rise, right, overhead. And those are just a couple of problems that
that organizations have experienced and are currently experiencing where a solution needs to be created. Something needs to be done to kind of at least have certain systems talk to each other if that's what needs to be done. It depends on the context of the situation or maybe based on how you review your own business, maybe removing some systems and then automating others.
There's just, think a lot of things that are in play there, but yeah, definitely. think that's a really big sign. Also, I mean, you mentioned data entry compliance. That's a big one, I think as well. When you are efficient in your organization, you can be more compliant. We've built HIPAA compliant systems, right? Where an app needs to abide by certain policies and procedures.
right, in terms of like healthcare data. And if all that is messed up, if all that is not messed up, if all of that is like disorganized in different kind of platforms and different tools, it's difficult to become compliant. And we've seen that before where some like healthcare startups, for example, they cannot become HIPAA compliant or they can't get like some sort of certification.
in the healthcare space because they're not efficient, because certain things are not talking to each other and there's a risk of security, safety within the data, right? And there can be major flaws. So that's also a big thing. And I would say last big major kind of sign I would say is making sure that you can compete in the marketplace. Right now, the...
the most competitive companies that are growing, a lot of their operations are automated. And that's something I think that we've seen as well.
Eric Lawrence (10:36)
Yeah, it's if in the book, the laws of influence, which is by Robert Cialdini, one of the things that it says is people are motivated by two things, either accomplishing gold medals, if they're running a race or running from German shepherds. And I would say that, that, that last one, which is they've noticed a competitor is just getting ahead. You know, you're, getting chased by that German shepherd there. It's usually the companies that are lagging behind where they say we've lost a competitive edge.
Michael Georgiou (10:42)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (11:05)
We need to find a way to become more effective because all of our clients were just losing market share.
Michael Georgiou (11:12)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not for sure. Yeah. You got to compete in today's market, man, especially now with AI and things are just really crazy right now. I read somewhere online that the last 12 months, believe, it's not exact quote, but from what I read from many different sources is that from the last 12 to 18 months, there's been a...
insanely high surge of tools available, right? With AI, some without, but like basically like automation tools and just tools in general that sometimes can make it even harder to automate your business because you keep adding new tools, right? To do something and then it creates in a sense less automation in your business. So you just got to be very intentional, I think with, well intentional and strategic and you got to
really plan accordingly, right? With the right people, whether it's with your team or you're outsourcing the help or whatever you're doing, you need to just be intentional and plan accordingly in terms of how you really want to automate. And I think, you know, that goes into like kind of the next part of this episode, Eric, is, you know, it's good that we can kind of talk about like maybe like a roadmap or
I would call it like a readiness playbook is what we called it. The practical automation readiness playbook. It's kind of wordy, but it's all right. But you know, the first step to really, you know, I think to help people out there, you know, to figure out what they need to do first is the first step is identify the biggest operational friction points or pain points in their business, right? Auditing your business and thinking about
Like what are the exact problems in the business? the places that are creating too much work or overwork or parts in the company that are creating friction or like barriers to entry within the business that really can be automated. I think that's an important step is that first step.
Eric Lawrence (13:15)
Yeah, critical. And this all feeds into the, like you mentioned, the practical automation readiness playbook, which it's a mouthful, but that was brought apart because our team has basically broke it down to a science. call it ops flow where, to be able to figure out where you can improve your business, you have to start with that audit and going from step one to step two, which, know, once you have identified those
big operational friction points or pain points. That's when you can start to define what better looks like for your business. So if you're thinking about it, is that a matter of time savings? Are we looking at fewer errors? Are we saving on reducing several tools or are there resource savings? It can mean a number of things, but you have to first define what better looks like.
Michael Georgiou (13:44)
to be.
Yep, yep, yep, Yeah, and that leads into the third step, is auditing your current systems and workflows, which in a way, I mean, it kind of coincides a little bit with step one, but step one, just to be clear with everyone, right, step one is more about understanding and pinpointing where the challenges are in your business. Because if you don't know what the challenges and the pain points are, then you can't really create a plan. You're not gonna know what areas to tackle, right?
So it kind of create, you really need to look within your business, have like self-awareness, self-business awareness in a sense, within your people and your entire operation for this third step and understand like what are all the tools, list out all the tools that are doing this function or doing that. you know, not just tools, but also workflows that you currently have, whether they're manual or not, list all those out kind of
you know, put that on, you know, not paper, but like kind of put it in a, a, in a document that you can track, right. understanding your existing workflows and then also like just the systems in place that you have in your business and the processes. So once you can break all that up, then you can really understand like, Hey, do we do, can we even support automation or not? Or do we need to, you know,
create automation from scratch. That's the thing. got to really be able to audit yourselves, audit your business to determine if and when and how you need automation within your business. Because most likely you do, you just need to pinpoint in the right direction, the right place.
Eric Lawrence (15:41)
Yeah. Yeah. And you definitely need to get feedback from your team. And that kind of leads into the next step, which is a step forward would be to bring your team into the process and understand from them. What do they actually need? because from somebody who's more at an executive level, they could be benefiting from automation very differently from somebody who's actually on the ground floor, dealing with kind of the trench work, so to speak. So.
Michael Georgiou (15:47)
Yes, huge.
Eric Lawrence (16:08)
I think being able to loop everybody, whether it's bottom of the organization to the top, all the stakeholders that are involved in your processes and your systems, getting their feedback is going to be critical.
Michael Georgiou (16:19)
Yeah, and I think it's important to not feel overwhelmed in a sense. I mean, it's gonna happen when your business is in a sense disorganized or it's clunky or there's just so much going on. mean, most businesses do, especially if you're growing. In fact, when you're growing and you're scaling your organization, for those that know out there, it's actually harder. It's really difficult because that's when you need to
put your kind of business hat on, operations hat is a better word, and really kind of figure out what a plan looks like. And a good stepping stone for that could be creating like a kind of like a small like pilot, a high valued pilot, I'll call it a project or.
Yeah, maybe or even a product, whether that's a tool that you're going to leverage or you're building something from scratch, like a custom piece of software, right? That's going to help to automate maybe a small piece of your business instead of everything, because that's going to be very expensive. And it's going to take a long time to do. Some organizations need it, but some don't. So it's good to start small with that kind of pilot project. And then you can kind of determine what type of ROI you're expecting to receive from that.
automation project or that kind of piece of automation within your business. And, you know, if that's something that's going to help you generate more revenue, or is it going to save resource time, or is it just going to save time within your organization, or is it going to make you more efficient or organized? It kind of depends on what your goals are. But yeah, you need to determine what kind of ROI is going to be received from that.
Eric Lawrence (17:54)
Yeah.
It's a lot like the 80-20 rule, right? Where maybe 20 % of the work is going to yield 80 % of the results. What are those high yield, low risk, low effort areas that you can start with first to pilot?
Michael Georgiou (18:12)
Yeah, yeah, no, agreed. Yeah, and I think just really the last step of this kind of, I would say high level playbook, because we don't have the time to kind of go into too much detail, but the last step would really just be to choose the right type of partner or hiring a specialist for your organization, right? It's not always about just outsourcing it to a third party vendor, but you can always hire someone internally.
Eric Lawrence (18:14)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (18:38)
as a contractor full time to help you with this kind of this kind of process auditing systems auditing efficiency expert automation expert so to speak and determining what what the right solution is and who's going to actually plan it and strategize and implement it put it into action execute it.
Eric Lawrence (18:58)
Exactly. And we've, we've seen this time and time again. I think a good example recently of, of somebody who's been through this with us, there's, there's actually a company that's local to where we are, in Raleigh, North Carolina, ⁓ where they distribute all sorts of solar products. And when they first got in touch with us, you know, they had been growing as a business, like we were mentioning before, where, know, all aspects of the business were doing really well, but the
Michael Georgiou (19:11)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (19:24)
the operations were lagging behind. ⁓ What they were essentially doing that was slowing them down because everybody has different use cases. For them specifically, they had thousands of SKUs, thousands of products within their warehouse, and they were running everything, running all of their inventory management through spreadsheets. And while they had run a bunch of macros to make it about as detailed and complex as possible,
Michael Georgiou (19:26)
Right, right, yep.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (19:51)
what they were
running into was that because it was spreadsheets and there were so many items and so many transactions and movements that were happening, the system would like crash and it would be incredibly slow. So what they needed that we ended up building for them was their own order management system where they could basically get all of that data, all of that information off of spreadsheets into their own platform that's cloud-based.
and have all of that integrate with their scanners that the workers and the warehouses are using. And when we were able to kind of take everything off of spreadsheets, what ends up happening is that you're now not having to wait for your technology to catch up. You can move as fast as the guys on the ground floor and everything just flows a lot smooth.
Michael Georgiou (20:35)
Yeah, no, that's a great example, man. And I know what client you're talking about. yeah, mean, if you look at kind of with their business, right, they're, like you said, they're a solar, kind of logistics supply chain as well, pretty much. The pain points that they had were really internally, and I don't mean like, it wasn't like the main reason for them to do this was because of revenue. It was that they were growing.
Like we mentioned before, they were growing and still are growing and scaling, but they were running inefficiently and wasting time and money. And they needed a good, clear, concise, seamless process through a solution, a digital solution that was going to basically solve these problems for them, which therefore does impact not only their employees, but their customers. So it's kind of has a...
like an indirect impact on their revenue as well, in a positive way, of course. Another example I can think of is, and I can name this client, we've been working with them for like seven, no, what am saying? Eight or nine years now, contractor score. And I remember when Glenn, the owner, came to us years ago, and now he's the nicest guy in the world, such a nice guy. He...
He was basically had the same issue where he was trying to give like these quotes to contractors, subcontractors through his business. But in order to do that, he had like, I think it was like hundreds of algorithms, mathematical algorithms that him and his team built through spreadsheets, kind of the same thing, right? And it was, it was just very tedious. it was.
difficult to just update because there was so much going on and it was just hard to scale and grow. So he made the right decision by really just automating and digitizing it, which we helped him with that for the last eight or so years. And basically he's relying on this to generate revenue for his entire business. So it's kind of like companies will do automation, whether it's for an internal need.
or an external need, which everything is connected, right, as we know, but it's kind of like that internal versus external, which is pretty cool. It's like, what impact are you trying to actually get and how do you get it? In order for you to determine how you get it, you gotta look at the what, you gotta look at the why, right? So it's, all those things are very critical pieces.
Eric Lawrence (23:06)
Absolutely. And I think that segues into our next section. Well, which is, you know, what are, what are some of the most common roadblocks that people face when it comes to this and how do you beat them? The most common being we don't have the budget. I feel like we hear that very, very often, which I think when you're handling that there's, there's a lot of ways to handle it. Right. At the end of the day, there needs to be the ROI that you can prove to say,
Michael Georgiou (23:22)
Yeah. yeah.
Eric Lawrence (23:33)
If we were to do this, this is the sort of impact it would make by freeing up our time, our resources, and we could see it potentially paying for itself and then some by this particular date. But I think going even a little bit further into something actionable, like try a phased pilot automation approach and just test what that potential ROI with, you know, the time and resource savings and possible new revenue, what that could be.
So you don't have to build everything all at once. We had mentioned this before in the 80-20 rule, you can pilot things out and you can start on those big impact areas first, especially if you're kind of hearing that internally of just the, don't have the budget.
Michael Georgiou (24:09)
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a big, a big one, right? It's, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing because it's sometimes it's like, when you don't have something built yet, like when you don't have automation in your business, it's sometimes it's difficult for these like older stakeholders. Let's just say when we, think everyone knows what I'm talking about. Like when, when you're dealing with like
kind of stakeholders or executives that are more used to these kind of old processes, manual processes, it's difficult for them to understand what ROI could look like when you automate something. But I think we all know that you really need to automate a lot of your business because who wants to sit there to do data entry, for example, or, you know, I mean, it's just, it's the best way to go.
Yeah. mean, another, another, roadblock that we kind of touched on earlier was that, you know, the organizations can kind of pinpoint if their processes are cluttered, or if they're kind of disorganized or if there's like systems that are too many systems that are not talking to each other, that could be a big, big roadblock where it's kind of like connected to that sign that we talked about, right. Which tells you, Hey,
we need to really do something about this, you know, and figure out, you know, where automation is needed and how it's needed and when it's needed and how it's going to impact our business. And, you know, a third roadblock, Eric, that we've seen is that it's cool. It's like we've seen this many times where people are really worried now with AI about being replaced.
so it's like, don't let that fear, right? Or that stress potentially, kind of get in the way of you not doing anything about it. You know, you can't let that fear hold you back from improving your business and making it more efficient.
Eric Lawrence (26:22)
Yeah. And when it comes to AI, I do want to say for a lot of the people out there that are scared about like the impact that AI is going to have on their own job, like that's, that's very real. And I'm here to validate that, you know, AI, who knows where it's going to take us in the next five years or so. I do get the sense that a lot of jobs will be replaced by it, but I think that there's this misconception that AI and automation are the same thing.
Michael Georgiou (26:39)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (26:48)
where there's a little bit of a crossover, but they're different enough where automation really is more about anything that you're wasting your time doing. That's very menial. That just takes up time. It's like busy work. That's what the automation is essentially replacing so that you in your own role can focus on more of the high impact areas that require a lot of human thought that really require kind of the human touch.
Michael Georgiou (27:17)
Yeah, yeah, I know for sure. Yeah, AI is, it's exciting, but it's scary, you know? Yeah, I think we need to use it to our advantage. And, you know, a part of that is automation because AI, like you said, they kind of go hand in hand. It depends on the context, right? Not all of AI is automation. It depends on what you're trying to do, what you're trying to achieve. But yeah, AI is definitely a part of it. So it's important to,
to develop that skill, have someone within your company that is learning it, they're understanding it, because when you are ready to automate things within your business, AI can definitely help. So, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (28:00)
Yeah. And what I would say, just kind of the last common roadblock that we run into, it's just a matter of people say to us, we don't know where to start. And that goes back to the list that we provided first, which is, just kind of understand what are the roadblocks that you're running into. and then that's, that's kind of the point where, you know, if you need to provide an audit to figure out where those kind of hurdles are within your operations and your organizations, that's.
that's where to start. think when I hear somebody say we don't know where to start, to me that signals that there's probably, it's kind of like where there's smoke, there's fire. That means that you're overwhelmed by all the things that aren't working for you. So it just is a matter of like, if you can't figure it out yourself, find an expert to sit down with and unpack it with you.
Michael Georgiou (28:48)
Yeah, yeah, I know for sure. you need to know really kind of like how to figure out where to start, right? I mean, the key is to start, you know, and that does block a lot of people. It's this kind of change, you know. We're all sometimes afraid of change, but change is good. It can be very, very powerful, but it depends on the type of change. That's why...
Eric Lawrence (28:59)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (29:11)
You need to do your research, like you said, and plan accordingly, prepare and have the right people, whether it's internally or externally within your organization to help you figure out what the problems are and kind of the automation solutions to fix them. we've seen it, it makes a massive, massive difference, especially in today's very competitive, digital, crazy, crazy age. So it's kind of something that needs to be done.
Eric Lawrence (29:33)
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to today's sponsor, which is Magic Task. So today's episode is brought to you by Magic Task. It's the only task management app that we actually enjoy using. Most task tools feel heavy and frustrating. Magic Task is different though. It's sleek, intuitive, and surprisingly fun. Whether you're managing a team or just staying on top of your own work, it keeps you focused without getting in the way.
At Imaginovation, it's a daily part of how we run our projects. So check it out at magictask.io and see how enjoyable task management can actually be. So what I want to transition to is just some closing thoughts, Michael. I know we've spoken a bit about automation and really this could be a subject that we could spend hours and hours on. But to kind of get your main takeaways, what would you say those are?
Michael Georgiou (30:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, mean, it's just kind of the big takeaways I would say are to look internally within your business and think about what is sucking up time and money and resources, doing an internal audit. You need to know what your own challenges are in your company, right? Whether it's an established startup, small business, or it's a Fortune 500 company or whatever it is.
every business has issues, operational issues, and people are doing things that are sucking up time and they're doing them manually. And that's where automation, in my opinion, is, is a, needs to really be entered into the kind of that workflow. as a, as a huge example, I would say. So it's really, like I said before, kind of doing that self-awareness check within your business, the operational check and review, document it and.
figure out what needs to be fixed and the how and the why and all those other things are gonna come from that. So that's what I would say, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (31:34)
outside.
Michael Georgiou (31:36)
But everyone, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. This was a great episode. And like we said, we can talk for hours about automation and AI and kind of all these good things. But yeah, I really appreciate everyone listening and yeah, until next time, Michael Georgiou, your host from Tales from the Pros with my co-host, Eric Lawrence. Until next time. Thanks everyone.
Eric Lawrence (31:57)
Take care everyone.