Decision making is a crucial part of our lives, affecting us regardless of whether we are pursuing our passions, thinking about business, or focusing on our personal lives. Many people believe that the outcome of our lives is the sum of all the decisions we make, which can be a bit overwhelming. How can we improve our decision-making skills to shape the lives we desire?
In this episode, I have Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Computer. Our talk revolves around decision-making in business. Greg emphasizes the importance of evaluating technology vendors and building strong relationships with customers. We also discuss the potential of AI to transform business operations and leverage it to attain work-life balance. Tune in to learn how these insights can enhance your business strategy!
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Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams
Welcome to Action’s 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 kind of 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 in our lives, I would like to introduce you my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer,
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Greg, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Stephen. It’s great to be here.
Yeah. Thank you so much. And so, first of all, let’s get a little bit of your background. So, you’re a VP of Strategy, Western Computer, the name doesn’t necessarily clearly stay what it is, so what is it that you do as VP of Strategy?
Yeah, so 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 so we implement the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products. For our customers, we support them long term. Last few years, it’s been their journey in digital transformation.
And just so everyone knows what we’re talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to?
So ERP is the backbone software of the business, accounting, inventory control, sometimes ecommerce. It’s really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing.
Yeah.
And CRM is, 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 a service business, the applications that they use,
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?
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.
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 piece of advice for anyone that’s making a decision around their business, whether it be, obviously, you talked 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?
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 ten 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?
Yeah.
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 kind of 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. Instead of going down that road, I’m gonna pay a little more upfront and get on an integrated platform and scale with that.”
So, you talked 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 like 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?”
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.
Oh, interesting. Because they’re still thinking themselves as this is me and my initiative, not that this is a business.
Exactly.
And there’s some validity to that because, over time, we see consumer behavior and applications come into business-to-business applications. Share on XSo, ten years ago, ecommerce 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. So, all that stuff trickles down into businesses. We were doing Skype calls long before we were doing Teams and Zoom calls.
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?
You can definitely get into what I call feature poker, where you are looking at different applications and comparing them purely on the features 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. Because a feature here and there isn’t everything, and you may not even use all the features. So, 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 georedundant 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, unless you know.
And so you bring up no georedundant 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 georedundant data, why they want it, how they want it, et cetera. So what’s a way of kind 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 of 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?
Right. So 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 give you a quick example. In our business, we have a lot of European vendors, they have great software applications, especially out of Scandinavia, and they want access to the US market and they come to us to kind of get that access. Some of them are very organized and are like, “Hey, I’m going to set up an office over there, I’m gonna have people, in two years, I expect to have five people, we’re gonna be able to provide tech support, we’re gonna 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.” 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 because they’re on vacation and that’s a cultural difference that we just take for granted, we don’t even think about it.
And then how often are you able to ask those right questions and say, potentially, not to say that there’s a right and wrong, but lead a customer to a better decision, say, like, “Had you not asked this, we probably went this way and it would have caused a lot more hardship.”
Yeah. So, 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 because they don’t want to answer those questions, they want to focus on the cool functionality they just built.
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 were just like saying, “Is this gonna to solve my need? I don’t care that it does this particular thing.”
Yeah. And sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes, if the functionality is very, very compelling, and no one else has and it has huge productivity gains, then you’ll take that risk on a partner that’s startup or less vetted or…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.
Interesting. And so in accounting software, obviously, it’s a very different industry, how much do you take into account like what industry people are in, some of the specifics about the company because, obviously, the reason why there’s multiple solutions, 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?
We always take that into account and we – again, we just look at the vendor viability, just make sure it’s not somewhat one guy in his basement, typically, then we look at what’s their support structure in the United States, do 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.
And one of the functionality hot topics that a lot of people are talking about right now at the time recording in the middle of 2024 is AI. It seems like AI is everywhere and I like to joke trying to remember the last time I went 72 hours without hearing about AI. So, how is that popping in to a lot of these solutions? And what is the, I guess, the current status as well as what people should be thinking about whenever any potential vendor brings up AI?
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. Share on XMicrosoft is already embedded into our products and they have that huge investment in OpenAI. One of the big improvements we saw was bank rec auto matching, matching up transactions with your bank, 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 to someone, it’s 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 of like a proof of concept.
Yeah, for sure.
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 articles to you. This customer’s telling you that 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.
So what do you think AI is going to, I guess, do for like, 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, like whether matching transactions, whether it be even the standard OpenAI use case of like, “I’m gonna 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 kind of a much more minor transition where just some research tasks get offloaded to it?
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 professors 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. Now, I see AI being the next generation of that, where you, 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’ve pulled it from and here’s how, of those six sources, here’s the four that agree on this topic,” and you would have done that manually with Google searches now or five years ago.
Yeah.
So 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 podcaster like yourself and it looked me up, they 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, truthfully, that’s something I would have spent a couple hours doing myself or ask our marketing team for.
So there is some time savings. Now, I know another hot topic that people talked about recently is work-life balance, or some people prefer 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, the 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?
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 that’s going to take a little more analysis. So it might take less time but more focused time to verify that information is accurate and then it makes sense.
So, what is like the primary thing that people should be adjusting in that sense to the way AI has potential to change the way we access data and the way it could potentially change communication patterns? Because the internet also inherently not only change the data access that you said but also change our communication patterns.
Right. So 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. When you log in any of the AI tools and those large language data models, there’s disclaimers all over the place that the information could be incorrect. And if you remember early on in the in the internet research, people believed that anything they saw on the internet was real 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.
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, kind of thing that we’ve hopefully been trained to do over the last 20 years.
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. Share on XHave you ever had to make a bunch of decisions throughout the day and at the end of the day and you got to make a decision on dinner, you’re just too tired of making decisions to decide what to have for dinner?
And then you end up having Wendy’s or something.
Exactly. And couples argue over this. They’re like, “Well, you decide,” “You decide, “You decide.” So 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.
That reminds me of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wearing the same outfit every day, that’s one less decision they have to make, like 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 gonna wear today?” That’s one less decision.
Yep, and like Warren Buffett has McDonald’s every morning.
Oh, wow.
For breakfast. And if the markets up, he gets an extra hashbrown. If it’s down, he has one hashbrown. So it’s a very simple binary decision for him but it makes them think about how he should act today based on how the market is, yeah.
So 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 kind of really basic algorithm in your head.
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. That’s very important. Otherwise, you’re going to get bombarded with too many inconsequential decisions.
Oh, for sure, yeah.
It’s one of those things that’s harder to execute on than you think.
Oh, for sure. I’ve seen it in action.
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 get to work with them to a point where they feel comfortable enough to kind of make their own decisions. So, 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, because you’re not having to make decisions on the fly.
Now, do you take any stock in the whole idea of having a set of guiding principles that guide the decision? So if you know your top priorities are 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?
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, so kind of 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 so every decision, I’m often thinking how’s is this going to affect our family time together? So, 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?
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 organization are for the quarter or 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 every one?
Yeah, so 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 like I use that vendor selection example, then I have a guideline set of questions they need to think about when they’re vetting a vendor.
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?
In our business, it only makes sense to have fewer vendors the more vendors. It’s less relationships to maintain. Also, if I have – I’ll just use an example of like a credit card processing software, there are ten competing to get into our customer base all the time and a customer may come to me and say, “Hey, I really wanna go with this one because it has X feature that the other ones don’t have,” and that will tell them, “Hey, we have a hundred customers using our preferred vendor, so 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. But if you’re the one customer on something else, then I can’t help you as much. You’re kind of on your own with that relationship.” So that’s just an example of a type of conversation we’ll have.
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 gonna work and how am I gonna manage all my relationships?”
Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
So, relationship management, is this something that can create the same amount of mental exhaustion as what we kind of talked about before, decision fatigue?
It can. I’ll give 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 the Microsoft Dynamics customers, and all of these sales reps for different companies want to meet with me. In fact, the meet is in October, last week, I started getting requests for meetings. 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 can learn something from them, because you can learn something from every person that you meet, but I just don’t have the time. So, 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, we’ll 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.
Yeah, so 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, you’re the potential customer. Is there a best practice right now as far as the best way to kind of approach and meet someone that’s going to be making that buying decision at an organization or is it pretty much everyone making decisions, kind of like how you are saying, “Okay, this is how I need it to go and this is how I need my interactions to be?”
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 so I communicate with other Microsoft people that way. So 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, not just show up and throw off, like we say, show up and want to do a sales pitch.
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.
So, 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’s website and learn on their own and then demonstrate some knowledge ahead of time.
I think you should do that after you get the agreement for the meeting, 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.
Because when I think of a business and how business goes in its operations and everyone has a website and maybe even like a blog or some kind of content, the only people who would really know the ins and outs of that business is someone who has been following the blog, following the YouTube channel for months, if not years.
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. 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.
Yeah. So it’s the equivalent of those AI photos that have someone has three arms or eight fingers. It’s an ad.
Yeah, they’re deep fakes, right?
And I think it’s pretty safe to assume that if someone can recognize that AI wrote something or produced something, it’s probably a turn off as far as making initial sales contact.
Right. I’ve noticed that anything from ChatGPT starts off with, “I hope you are well,” or, “I hope this finds you well.”
Oh, really?
Yes. So if an email starts with, “I hope this finds you well,” I just stop reading.
Oh my. Yeah. It’s kind of like how I know with LinkedIn, there’s that in mail thing that you know who’s like randomly messaged, that probably just went out the same message to 50,000 people with all the same search tags.
Right, yep.
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 kind of right that ship?
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 because 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. So those are great options, but a lot of software vendors, they want two, three years up front. 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.
So 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?
You mean from the from the buyer’s perspective?
Yeah, yeah. So I’m starting a company, and, yeah, I don’t know if this is going to work, but I –
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 percent discount.
Yeah. So you’re saying that 10 percent 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 kind of become a viable business, haven’t reached that point where it’s sustainable.
Yeah, because most companies are not going to let you out of that contract if you’re on tough times. You may think they will but they won’t, yeah.
And do you work with a lot of kind 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?
Yeah, we’re typically working with the companies that have a little bit of traction. They’re typically graduating off of QuickBooks and into our software.
Okay, yeah.
So that’s a lot of our customers. And then we, of course, scale up into larger customers from there. The one main application that we sell, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, is a step up from QuickBooks in terms of capabilities.
What does Business Central do? Is that like the full suite with like I think most people think of like Word and Excel and PowerPoint?
Yeah. So 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.
That makes sense. And so what does that usually do for a business, like when someone graduates, let’s say, from QuickBooks to being able to use Business Central, does that generally save the people working for the company time, energy, stress?
Let’s use a company that has inventory for example. If you’re on 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, so if you are backed by like 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.
So your bread and butter is the people who are transitioning from startup to full-on business.
Yeah, I’d say our – yeah, most of the companies are going to be 10 million or more in revenue.
And then if anyone out there listening is part of a company or started a company that’s reaching that level, heard of this episode, wants to get a hold of you, what would be the best way to have a conversation?
Yeah. So 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 software, deep dive on different topics, blog articles, that type of thing. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. It’s very easy to find, Greg Williams – Western Computer on LinkedIn, and I check my messages there almost every day.
I guess with everyone listening out there, we’re going to make decisions kind of every day in life, we talk about offloading some of those decisions, whether it be deciding ahead of time or delegating them. When someone does have like the really big decisions, say even what demographic do I want to target, something like that, where some of these things could possibly go wrong, or how do I want to set up the business, what systems, what 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?
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. Reaching out to guys like me is how you operationalize that and make it happen in a sustainable way. 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. So, 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.
And would you say that it’s at that point 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 wanna 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?
I think it’s a few things and one is diving down on 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 so 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 kind of prove that to them.
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.
It is, yes.
Yeah, do those tools, how are they used properly?
To me, the beauty of Power BI is showing trending over time. So 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.
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 a certain solution.
Right, and in a lot of businesses, the financial reports lag a couple of months into what’s really happening so it’s important to then see the trends as well.
One final question is coming back to AI and coming back to the life balance, what do you think, 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, like to make sure rather than creating more work some of our technological solutions have done, we actually use it to harness our attention to focus better on what we really want to focus on?
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. 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 followup emails asking the next question back because you explained it better the first time.
So it can cut down on that back-and-forth email thread, which we’ve all been on one that’s led to like 55, 60, even 100 total emails being sent.
Yeah.
Well, that is amazing. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s 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.
Well, thank you for having me today. This was great. I enjoyed my time.
This was wonderful. I’m so thankful you enjoy the conversation. And I would also like to give a quick thank you to everyone out there who tuned in to Action’s Antidotes, whether this is your first time or you have listened 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 kind of really give us decision fatigue to the point where, at the end of the day, you’re just having Wendy’s.
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About Greg Williams
With over two decades of expertise in Distribution, Manufacturing and project-based businesses within the Microsoft Dynamics space, Greg possesses a profound understanding of production processes and a robust technical skill set.
Greg’s professional journey spans multiple roles, including consultant, project manager, sales, and executive positions, contributing significantly to the growth of Western Computer from a small to a large entity. A prominent voice in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, Greg has established his name through diverse roles and valuable contributions.