[05:11] For the folks who are going to listen to our conversation and maybe don’t yet know who you are, let’s start there. Who are you and what do you do? 

• Thank you, thank you for having me. Oh, my name is Joe Cury. I do authority marketing. I help people get really online reputation super fast and super cool. Basically, it’s like Amazon reviews. Basically, we do online Amazon reviews for personal brands. I always tell people to explain facets like, “Imagine that you have a product that has 50,000 reviews, and there are five stars, and you have another product have two stars and three reviews. Which one will you buy?” Everybody will get the 50,000 reviews, right? That’s what I build online for people. Online reputation, fast as heck, so people buy from you faster. 

[06:07] Just name a client, maybe you don’t have to go into detail. Let’s give an example of a client that you work with and then just try to be as brief as you can just so the audience can wrap their mind around it with what it is that you do.

• Well, something super weird and cool. For example, I have a client that he owns a car dealership in New York. Basically, we position him as the number one car dealership in New York, on social media: LinkedIn, and Instagram. He has now 300,000 followers and the cool thing now is not only that he’s selling more cars, it’s like apps. People that sell to car dealerships are coming to him for him to be the face of their brands. 

When he started working with me two years ago, he was making 250,000 dollars a year. Now, he’s making $4 million a year in two years. That’s like fucking, or pardon my French, like 17x his income or 16x his income in two years by leveraging the power of social media in the right way. Basically, reaching out to people that have thousands of your clients as customers. Basically, “Hey, let’s partner up. I have this thing, and you have this superpower. Let’s join powers and let’s do with some money too.” It’s working really cool so I’m super happy for that.

[07:37] Here’s what we’re going to talk about today. You had a fairly significant, at least as I understand it, transformation in your business as a result of starting to use Flowster software. I’d like to help the audience to understand all the ways that improving your processes has made your life better, easier, less stress, more vacations, more profits, etcetera. Let’s go back like before Flowster. You have this service business where you have to do stuff for your clients and it’s a lot of the same stuff over, and over, and over for client, after client, after client. It’s not you doing all the work. You’ve got a team underneath. Talk to me about how many people are on the team, first of all?

• Right now, we have 18 people. 

[08:31] 18, Okay. Before you discovered Flowster, how did you manage all of the moving parts of your business so that the ball didn’t get dropped? 

• The ball was getting dropped. I was going nuts. I used to have a restaurant. Our restaurant is different, way different than when you have an online marketing agency. At one point, I had 52 employees. I didn’t have Flowster. It was crazy. I had to figure out, to train these people every day, sometimes. My job, it was to become a live video for them to teach them like, “Hey, you have to do this, this, and this.” A lot of mistakes. I even was working… I think that you were a client at some point. 

It was like fucking up, and that’s when I started using Flowster, when you became a client because you teach me. You showed me that thing. I was like, “Holy moly. If I do this on an app, I won’t have to be on top of these 50 people. They already have the training. They already have the guidance and step by step. Right now, at that point, when I was working with you, I hired a full-time person just to get my trainings and chop it up, and put it on Flowster, and put the descriptions.

[10:12] We’ll get to that in a minute. Back then, if I remember correctly, I know for sure because I was a client you’re using, I think monday.com, right? Which is project management software. Really designed for managing processes. It’s probably very good for managing projects. But in your business, a process is just, it’s the known sequence of events or steps that you need to do for this client and the next one. Because you were kind of bastardizing project management software, it sounds like it didn’t work very well. 

• The clients were firing me, and that’s the bottom line. I was trying to do my best. I was up at 11 and 12 pm trying to figure out shit. “Hey, this problem, this little issue with this client,” and in a world like, I was really stressed out. I couldn’t handle it. I had two options: Either I figure this thing out super fast or I’ll close this thing because I need to be a person also and have a life. I could get in amongst five clients and I will lose five clients. I lost you because of that. Because my processes weren’t on a point that I could serve a lot of people. 

[11:42] Yeah and you’re right. That’s why you lost me. 

• Yeah, it’s okay. I was doing my best with what I know. 

[11:54] To summarize, you were working ridiculous hours. You felt the burden of training. Everybody was constantly on you. You were constantly making more training videos. You were using monday. Things were falling through the cracks. You had way too much churn in your client roster, and you weren’t taking any vacations. It just kind of sucked, basically. 

• Yeah. I was a slave to my business, yes. 

[12:19] Okay. All right. Now, let’s transition to the discovery of Flowster. I showed it to you on one of our calls. What happened in your head when I first started showing our work? 

• Well, it was weird because, I don’t know if you remember, on that call, I said, “Holy moly. I really need this thing fast.” Because I had a bunch of videos trying to train my people, but it was all over the place. Maybe I did a video three months ago and now, I have a new person in the same position, and I don’t have a clue where that video is. 

[13:12] Or the video is now out of date. You’ve got to…

• Exactly. Now, I was seeing how you break it down because also, my trainings were an hour long. Heck, like, “If we change one step, when we upgrade something, how I’m going to change it on that hour-long video?” I want for me to upgrade our training. It took me maybe a year because I don’t want to do another hour-long training to change this thing. Things have changed. There are things that my team changed themselves because something is not working, and they have to fix it. It’s not in their framing. How the heck am I going to do it?

It was so crazy that when you showed me, it wasn’t only the Flowster thing. It’s also the mentality, the mindset of doing little step-by-steps, and super, super simple and stupid so anybody can do it. If something is not working and you have to replace something, you just go in 30 seconds and you replace that little step. You don’t have to replace an hour or two of training. You replaced any segments. That was a life-changer for me.

[14:34] I’ve told many people this. The video-based training makes it easy for the trainer initially because they can just share their screen, record the video. “Here’s how you do this thing.” But that’s when the problems start to occur. Because as you just described, over time, you get more and more and more of these videos so they’re all over the place. Some of them are 10, 15, 20 minutes long, an hour-long as you described. Now, they get out of date, and you end up with this huge pile of disorganized content, and it makes the learning experience for the recipient awful. Because, one, nobody can remember every single detail of an hour of video, even 10 minutes of video. It’s too much. Nobody can remember that. 

Then, they’re working their way through your hour-long video. They get to a point in the video where it no longer matches what their experience is because the interface of somebody else’s software changed. Now they’re like, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” They say, “Hey, Joe. This video is no longer current.” You’re looking at it, it’s an hour-long, and you’re like, “Okay, I don’t want to reshoot that thing. That’s going to take me an hour to edit it, blah, blah, blah.” It made keeping your processes up to date. Well, tell me if I put words in your mouth, but a holy f-ing nightmare. 

• Yeah, 100%. No, no. It is what it is. 

[16:03] Whereas with Flowster, what I showed you and what I’ve told many people is, “Hey, if you realize that…” And your staff couldn’t update your videos because they believe that… 

• Yeah. That’s the thing. Now, it’s 100 times easier because, “Okay, maybe I do a 20-minute training because not everybody is as structured.” This personality that I’m on, I like to talk. I like to be with people. I like to sell. But I’m not a structure. I’m not the most structured dude you’ll meet. Basically for me, what is working right now is I do the 20-minute training but I hire a super structured person that he goes and chop the video in one minute, 30 seconds, 15 seconds. If I’m talking about something that she can’t crop out and not even put it, I will put it on steps on Flowster and he’s like, “Okay, yeah. Step number 1: 30 seconds, click here, move this thing.” And then she transcribed the later 30-second video. Okay, put the screenshots inside of Flowster.

Now, I can onboard, sometimes… Well, at that point, I was onboarding two, three new people a week, at some point. I didn’t have to do anything. Basically, “Hey, this is the onboarding process. Go through all the checkboxes on Flowster. When you’re done, let’s have a call.” It’s like, “Wow.” It’s another level. I’m really grateful to have that conversation with you because you changed the way I do stuff in my business. You gave me my life back. You gave me time.

[18:01] To be clear, I’ll make sure everyone understands. You still record a video that says, “Here’s how you do this thing.” But now, rather than saying to your employees, “Watch this video,” you have someone on your team that converts that video into a checklist within Flowster that’s broken down into 17, 18, 57 steps, whatever. Now, your employees aren’t watching videos, they’re looking at screenshots of the stuff you covered in the video when you created it initially. It’s no more painful for you to create your content for them to copy. Now, your team is converting that content into mostly pictures and texts and so forth.

• They add also that 30-second video. They chop the video into 17 pieces and they put the later video on top. The coolest part is that she’s trained now to whenever we have a change in the process, she can go and record her screen and do the screenshots and replace that single step. Or if I find out something and we have to fix something, I go and do it. Before, it was like, “Holy moly.” I could procrastinate for three months on changing the process because it was too painful for me. Now, it’s like, “Okay, you really don’t have three minutes to update these things? Don’t have the bigger other problem?” 

[19:37] Yeah, so now you hit the edit button, you replace the screenshot, type some new words, hit the update button, and literally, in sometimes 30 seconds to three minutes, you’re done. You’re going to have no reason to procrastinate. Let’s talk about the impacts on your team. Now, your team is smaller now than it was before but that’s also because you really radically changed your business model to do more group coaching and teaching versus the service work.

• Yeah, I’m doing more money with a third of the team and it’s because it’s also more short-term.

[20:16] What’s it like for your staff? What kind of things, like when you’re hiring new employees and you’re onboarding them and you’re putting them in Flowster and you’re assigning workflows to them, what kind of feedback do you get from them now? Or the amount of questions that you get now versus the old way? 

• Well, I’m going to tell you something weird. I got one of my high school friends. He lost his job through COVID. He’s an engineer and he was in Dominica. I’m from Dominican Republic and I said, “Dude, I don’t know. You can work with me but okay, let’s go. I don’t have the time to teach you, literally. You’re my friend and I love you but I literally won’t be able to teach you.” I gave him access to a couple workflows in Flowster and he was blown away. He was like, “Holy crap. Dude, you have these things super organized now. I’m blown away. I could do that I will never think that I could do just because it’s so easy and simple in Flowster. I have no clue. I’m an engineer, civil engineer. It’s all related 100% to marketing. I have no skills around marketing.” He was like, “Wow.” That’s the day that I said, “Thank you.” 

[21:43] I love hearing that. Now, In Flowster, there is a marketplace where we have hundreds and hundreds of pre-made templates for all sorts of standard operating procedures. Now, you can create your stuff from scratch. Or if you don’t like creating stuff from scratch, you can go into the marketplace, and you can grab templates, and then you can use them as they are, or you can customize them. Whatever you want to do. Have you, in your business, because your business is a very unique business, have you had to create all your stuff from scratch? Or have you been able to make use of what’s within the marketplace? 

• No, because my thing is super unique. I haven’t used this Flowster. 

[22:26] Okay. For the folks that are listening, if you feel that that’s you, you think, “Well, Flowster sounds great but my business is really super unique and so maybe I’m not going to find any of these pre-made templates. I don’t have time to make the templates.” I want to let you know that we do have internally, we call it an SOP concierge service where basically, we make them for you. You could do it like Joe does and just do a screen capture for 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, or whatever and you just send our team that raw content. For a fixed fee, we will convert it all into Flowster templates for you so that that burden does not fall on you. Then, you also don’t have to rely on the marketplace. If you sign up at Flowster, you want to know more about that, you just get in touch. You can email support@flowster.app and they will direct you to the right place. 

• Yeah, for the people that is listening, dude, Flowster is the cheapest tool in the market for the ROI that it brings back. It’s crazy. Maybe I’m paying, I don’t even know how much I pay on Flowster a month because I don’t pay for maybe for like a year or so. I don’t have, no clue but it’s, whatever the pricing is, but it’s like I know that every month, because I have Flowster, I’m saving me at least five to ten grand minimum. I know that I’m paying way less in Flowster so that’s why I don’t even look at how much I’m paying. I have no clue there. 

[24:04] Don’t worry. After this interview, I’ll go in and 10x the extra pricing for you so you can pay more. I want to back up because what you said sounds pretty hyperbole. “I’m saving 5 to 10,000 dollars a month.” People are gonna think, “Oh, Joe’s just transparent.” 

• Dude, my charm on clients, a client claimed me between 2500 to 10 grand a month and I was losing at least two clients a month. I was getting three and losing two. I was growing but I was losing clients. That’s already 10 grand there just because my process weren’t on point. Also hiring new people, me having to spend my own time. If I make 40 grand a month for example, my time, my working hour is what? Like 2, 300 bucks. If I have to spend that time teaching somebody or telling somebody, “Hey, do this, do this, do this,” I’m basically losing that money with that person. It’s already on a flow. Being super conservative, 10 grand a month is what Flowster is saving me. 

[25:18] If you think about it from that perspective, it is believable. Let’s say that the average person’s time, the average business owner’s time is what we’ll call 250 bucks an hour. If they’re doing a lot of the training themselves, now, let’s say it takes 10 hours, conservatively. 10 hours to onboard an employee, that’s 2500 bucks on their time. 

• It’s not only the onboarding. It’s the everyday processes because now, a problem come to me, I fix it, and I fix it also on Flowster. Now, the problem don’t come to me again or shouldn’t. Before, I could have the same freaking problem 17 times in a week. I’m so overwhelmed that I don’t even know where to start. It’s not 10 hours. Now you have an extra 17 hours of overwhelming me being at 11 pm in my computer trying to solve something, that if I did it in the right way at the beginning, I wouldn’t have. 

[26:27] What would you say… There’s probably some people listening to this who are thinking, “Oh it sounds good but changing, it’s a lot of work.” Or maybe they don’t even have anything in place now. “I don’t have all those templates and I’d have to make them all. It just seems like so much work.” If that was your friend running their business, wherever it was and they were kind of drowning like you were before, what would you tell them? 

• Well, you have the superpower of cloning yourself. We also, business owners, or me at least, I complain a lot like, “Holy crap. If I don’t do this myself, nobody will do it well.” Now, I don’t have to cry for that much because I just have to focus on doing it well once and record it. I send that video to my employee and she has to chop it down and put it on Flowster and that’s it. It’s like your life is going to, at least for me, I don’t know how you have your business, but my business was a mess because I’m not super structured. I thought that it was going to be more complicated by having all of these SOPs and weird crap but it’s totally the opposite. 

It’s so simple that you can just dive down and write, figure out which flow are you trying to find to solve something, and you just go 30 seconds and you fix it, instead of having the same issue every week, 10 times the same problem. I used to have the same issue 10, 15 times in a week. I’m trying to fix it but in my mind, it’s like, “This guy is an idiot.” 

It’s not that my employee was an idiot. It was that my process to teach them, it wasn’t as structured and easy for them. Sometimes, we go say I’m angry maybe at them. I was doing the training fast. I was saying, “Dude, you are so bad, whatever. You have to do this this way.” Instead of just putting on a video step-by-step before. Now, they come to me with a problem and I say, “Okay, did you go to Flowster and checked that out and see step-by-step?” 

Now, it’s cool because when they do something wrong, we go both together to Flowster. We say, “Okay, let’s watch this 32-second video, and let’s see if you did it that way.” If they did it that way and didn’t work, it’s okay. I’ll have to replace that 32-second video. But if they didn’t, they will have problems right away with me. Because they probably have to go first to Flowster before coming to me or before coming to their manager.

[29:42] Flowster, you can put all sorts of content. Joe mentions videos a lot. You can absolutely embed videos in Flowster. I’m actually not a big fan of embedding videos in Flowster. In all of our SOPs, it’s just pictures and words. Pictures and words and checkboxes and all this stuff because even a 32… I mean I can take a new screenshot, make some new red arrows and not have to shoot a 30-second video. Then, I don’t have to have anybody watching a 30-second video or a 60-second video. Flowster gives you the flexibility of putting your content in whatever way you would like. Don’t think it’s just a video library. I like to describe it to people as though it’s on checklists on steroids because there’s all this interactivity, and you can assign workflows and get new dates and so forth. 

The other thing that I wanted to mention just so people really understand, I produce a podcast. I’ve been producing it for a decade now and over the years, our podcast production processes become increasingly complex because we do more and more stuff. It’s about 127 steps long. Just imagine that Carla, who manages the show on my team, and would she believe, and she’s only been with us, I don’t know if I remember now, six, eight months, something like that. It was pretty effortless for us to bring Carla up to speed because the checklists has 127 steps. Each individual step is super detailed in the instructions. 

Over even during her tenure here, she’s discovered ways to improve efficiency and make changes to the SLP template and so forth. It really just for me, being a podcast host, all I do is talk on the microphone. That’s it. Then, it goes to the team and then they have all the 127 steps get divided up amongst the various people. It’s always the same people doing the same steps because that’s how processes are designed. 

I say this because if in your, I know in everyone’s business, that might not be a podcast, but in everyone who’s listening to this who has a business, you have a metaphor equivalent of a podcast. You have a thing that you’re doing. You probably have many things that you’re doing over and over and over and over again. You’re doing a lot of it yourself and you’d be amazed at how much of it you can delegate to somebody else if you do what I’ve done and what Joe has done, and simply take the time to document the process once so that you don’t ever have to do it again. 

I love to say having great SOPs will set you free and it really will because now you’re not the one that has all the knowledge in your head. You’ve made the knowledge easily shareable across your entire organization, no matter where in the world they’re located. 

Joe, before we close out, this has been a really fun interview for me. Obviously, being a founder, I love nothing more than hearing how our software has profoundly, it sounds like, changed the lives, not just the business, but the life of one of our customers. That brings me a great deal of joy and if you’re listening to the audio-only version of this, you can’t see Joe and I smiling in this moment, but it’s really awesome. For anyone who’s kind of still sitting on the fence about whether they’re useful or not, just putting the effort into creating documented processes for the business so the team can rely on processes instead of relying on memory. Is there any parting bits of advice, Joe, that you would want to give them? 

• Well, pardon my French again, don’t be an idiot and just use Flowster. 

[33:43] Are you being paid to say any of this stuff? 

• No. Dude, it gave me time back, a lot of time. The thing is you cannot understand this was one of my biggest frustrations because heck, I can’t stand explaining the same thing 17 times. That gets me angry like anything else. You can slap my face and I won’t get that angry as explaining the same thing to the same person 10 times. That gets me really angry, really angry. Now, the thing that got me the most angry is not there. 

Now, if somebody is messing up, either they are messing up because they are not going through the flow or I messed up on the video so I don’t have a reason to get angry. It’s like, “Okay, let’s figure out what’s going on,” and that’s it. Now, I don’t have to explain the same thing. It’s like “Okay, this clip, the scene.” Or, “go to this here.” And I kind of get angry with myself for not explaining something well so I have to reshoot or redo that 30 seconds. I will do it. It won’t take me a year to do it. It’s like 30 freaking seconds. Just go and do it. 

[35:11] Yeah, absolutely. Alright, Joe. Well, it’s been a pleasure to catch up with you. For anyone who’s listening who’s interested in building their influence, how do they get in touch with you? 

• They can go to my Instagram. That’s the fastest way. Joe Cury or personalbrandssecrets.com. They can see hundreds, well, less than hundred, but like a hundred testimonials there from 5000-word companies like people that have done 100 million dollars online, they are building their authority online with us. And we have a bunch of people happily vouching for us. They can go there and check it out. 

[35:37] All right. Wonderful, Joe. Thanks so much for making some time to chat with me. Don’t hang up. I want to talk to you after we end the recording.

• Alright. Cool, cool. 

Thank you so very much for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I would love it if you would leave a five-star rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app. To get to the show notes for today’s episode, just go to brightideas.co/376. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you in the next episode soon. Take care. Bye bye. 

Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Podcast. Check us out on the web at brightideas.co. Alright, show’s over. I’m tired.