Welcome to Reservations. Today we are talking about Automation and Marketing with Luis Rivera. He is going to share with us some of the things to help us with our business.
What does Automation do for our Business?
Hey, we’re still in Kentucky. I’m Jeff Harrison with Reservations. If this is the first time you’ve ever joined Reservations, I demand that you go back and look at some of these because it’s chock-full of things that will make your business better because Reservations is all about giving you strategies, tactics that you can implement, as soon as you turn this off, and make your business better. Today is no different. I’m joined by, well he’s just a brain. His whole t-shirts just say a brain, right? And he laid some things on us about automation. Most of the time when a business is struggling, it’s because it got too many irons in the fire. The man or woman running that business can’t get it all done. This guy is a genius with a capital G when it comes to automation.
I want to welcome, Luis Rivera. Thank you so much. So tell me a little about that. You know, it’s like you drop some bombs on us. We’re in Kentucky. I’m, I’m out of the area. Actually, I think it was in Cincinnati highway where this actually went down, but they’re right next to each other just to cross the river, I understand. So you did a presentation on automation that absolutely, I mean all of a sudden thing and wow, you know, that’ll do the work of several of our assistance and it’s just pressing a button. Tell us what this whole thing about automation means to you and how it can help the average viewer out there that owns a restaurant or a small business.
Automation Saves Time
Whenever I encounter a problem, I’ll try to identify things even with clients and I’ll ask why are you doing it that way. Because the first process for me is I’m trying to understand what are they trying to do and why. Okay, and then I try to figure out quickly in my brain can parts of this or all of this be automated because, at the end of the day, automation, the most important thing about automation is to save time. That’s the reason why we do it. So we take those repetitive tasks that we do and we just give it to a computer and you do it. Instead of having a human do it.
So that’s really the first thing that goes to my mind when it comes to a problem and I’m trying to automate it, like is there a reason why you’re doing it manually or which items so of this process can be automated. So I, I typically call it my lowest common denominator. What do these things have in common, how can I tie them together and how can automate these processes.
That’s super cool what we’re talking about. This is what it caught me, gang, we do tons of videos every day. We push out at least two to three videos a day, whether it’s live or recorded. Once it’s recorded, we’ll push it over to our VA or virtual assistant and she’ll take it from there and do some work. Well, you put something on an overhead that just like that, I’m like, oh my God, tell us a little bit about.
Identify Your Common Denominator
It was like wait a minute, I only have to do this one thing now and it will do like nine things before I actually have a chance to log off of my computer. Can you share it? Like how did that all go down?
So that came about like I said, I was trying to identify a problem of me doing that, that same thing. So if I shoot a video, okay, so now I got to put it on YouTube, I have to put it on Facebook, I have to put it in all these platforms. I figure, okay, so how can I do this? So I put it in one place and it just automatically gets disseminated to all these places that I wanted to go. So I started jotting things down and again went through the lowest common denominator. What do I need for that? Well, all I really need is the actual video which has the video name and then I need the tags, right? And then I need a description because the description, that’s where you can drop the links and do whatever else you want. So in reality, at the lowest common denominator that I needed was just a video name, the tags, and the description.
Automation Does Everything For You
With that, I can take that information and I can say now, okay, I have this video and put it on YouTube. I already have all the information. I can take the same thing, go to my Facebook page automatically and post it out. Everything’s there. I can do the same thing in, for example, even Twitter, Twitter doesn’t really have videos, but I can go ahead and link a video to Twitter and other platforms. Even my WordPress blog, well I can take that video and publish it to my WordPress with the description. Boom, brand new post and that’s all done from one operation of you dropping that video and having the tags and description in the automation take over and does everything else for you.
I think for you so long, as business owners we think automation is saying, okay, well I’ll just have Harry do that or have Mary do that. You’re saying this is just, you put that information in there and then once it’s there, it’s like, now you have these little, and these little-automated things happening without engaging Mary or Bill or John, right? Right, exactly. So basically there are two types of automation. There’s the machine based automation which is computer does. And then there’s the human-automation which would be like a VA or somebody like that. So you take those items off your plate, here you go, you do it. So it’s technically automated, but it’s automated by another human not yourself.
It Makes Things Very Very Simple
So tell us what probably your favorite tools are out there for automation. How they work, you know, just kind of highlight how do they work in and how does somebody find out about it? Okay. So my favorite tool out of all of them is Zapier. I know you know about it and we use it. Some people may have heard of another tool called If-This-Then-That (IFTTT). IFTTT is awesome, but Zapier is like levels and levels of above it. The reason why I like it is because it makes things very, very simple, at least in a technical standpoint for me.
I have a technical background and it works in a way that is just triggers and actions. So, you take one piece of software whatever that is, and that will become the trigger, so if this happens, then do all these steps. The beauty of it is that it’s not as simple as just if this happens, then do this. No, if this happens, do this and do this and do this. So you can have multiple steps that are triggered from one single operation.
It’s just fire gang. I’m telling you I can’t wait to get back home and start implementing some of these things. And really, you know, what you did is you kind of took the cap off of this whole thing of saying, wow, you know what? I’ve owned this Ferrari and I’ve never gotten out of the first year. In fact, I’m still in the garage, right? And I’m thinking, Woo, I’m really moving. You showed us just probably I know, just a little glimmer of what you can do. I mean this guy’s a genius. He’s an expert at this because he asked what? He asks the right questions.
What does Zapier do?
You ask questions to drive you to, hey, how does this happen? Most of the time, when you talk about, YouTube, when you talk about Twitter, or you talk about WordPress blog, those things typically don’t communicate with each other, right? No, no they don’t. And so what role does Zapier play in that? So it’s basically like the road. The simplest way to explain it is that you have a car and you need to get to the gas station, but imagine there’s basically a mountain in the middle. Well, if we tear that down and we build a road that goes from your house to the gas station, that’s what Zapier does. It’s really like the glue. It connects different things that don’t necessarily talk to each other and it takes care of putting them together.
I think when you were explaining it yesterday, I thought, it sounds like if I were traveling all over the world, I have somebody who speaks every language. Yes. So when I say, hey, I want a hot dog and I’m in Russia, somebody can clearly interpret that, right? I can get a hot dog or if I’m in Poland or whatever. I thought that was such a great tool. For me, I think it’s my interpreter. Yeah, absolutely. That was fine because I was going to use that original analogy. I had two little icons talking in different languages, but not that I’m like, hold on, let me kind of simplify this a little bit down because if I put different language translator, but effectively that’s really what it is. Okay.
The Go-To-Guy
First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. This is amazing stuff. And a guarantee, this is only like a spark of what this guy knows. He, it’s like he is the Go-to-Guy. There’s like 50 of us in this mastermind and I guarantee you his phone is going to be blown up because he’s the guy to go to when it comes to automation. He’s a genius. Tell us how we can get to you if somebody’s watching a business owner and I said, wow, that sounds exciting. How do I get to you?
Well, you can reach me, I have facebook.com/luisriveraalive. That’s my page. My company is SuperHeroadsMedia.com, or you can reach me on my cell phone. This is my real phone number 630-688-7776.
Our Goal at Reservations
Our goal at Reservations is to do one thing. It is to provide you with tools and tactics and strategies that will help you run your business more effectively because here’s the stat that drove me to do this. There are about a million restaurants and the United States, 700,000 of those are standalone restaurants. One-third of those will fail in the first year. That’s 233,000 dreams that get crushed. Now, dreams are one thing, financial ruin is another. Right now there’s another third of those are 230, 3000. That struggle. My goal is, how can I get in front of almost a half a million people and help you go from struggling to let go that top one third and love what you do without the struggle.
That’s why you’re here. My name is Jeff Harrison with Reservations. I’m here with a great guy and now a dear friend, Luis Rivera. Luis, thank you so much for joining me. This was awesome. Make sure you make sure you reach out to him. I’ll put his name and information in the details below. He is a genius. What a nice man, very giving. He’s not cheap, but he’s very valuable. Thanks a lot. We’ll see you again next time on reservations for having me.
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