Automation has been around forever. From email sequences to chatbots, businesses have been using it to save time and scale—but let’s be honest, a lot of it has felt… clunky. And now, with AI in the mix, people are more skeptical than ever.
For entrepreneurs, automation can feel like a double-edged sword. On one hand, we know it’s necessary to grow, free up our time, and keep things running smoothly. But on the other hand, no one wants their customers to feel like they’re just getting canned responses or being shuffled through a soulless system. We’ve all been on the receiving end of bad automation—where you’re screaming “talk to a human!” into the phone or getting stuck in an endless loop of generic emails. And that’s exactly what we want to avoid in our own businesses.
But here’s the thing: automation isn’t the problem—it’s how it’s built. The real question is: How do we create systems that don’t just feel personal, but actually are personal? Systems that make people feel seen, understood, and taken care of—even when we’re not the ones manually handling every interaction.
That’s why I’ve invited my friend Paul Sokol on the call today. Paul has been designing automation systems for years, helping businesses scale while delivering an incredible customer experience. He knows exactly how to create systems that aren’t just efficient, but actually build trust, loyalty, and connection. So, if you want to scale your business without losing the personal touch, this one’s for you.
Links mentioned:
- How to Automate Like a Pro: https://lp.paulsokol.me/automate-like-a-pro-free-mini-course.html
How to connect with Paul:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/voyicks
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/voyicks
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/voyicks
Watch The Live Call
Full Transcript
Misty Kortes (00:02.056)
Alrighty, hello, hello and welcome. Okay, so automation has been around for literally ever, it feels like, from email sequences to chat bots, know, businesses have been using this to save time and to scale their businesses. But a lot of the time, it feels like our automations fall a little flat, right? And now you add AI into the mix and
people are more skeptical now than ever. So for entrepreneurs, automation can feel like a double-edged sword. On one hand, we know that it’s necessary to grow. It helps us free up our time and it keeps our businesses running smoothly. But on the other hand, no one wants their customers to feel like we’re just handing them canned responses or…
or that they’re being shuffled through a soulless system. And so we’ve all been on the receiving end of a bad automation and it makes you kind of like want to scream, I just want to talk to a human, right? And so that’s exactly what we want to avoid in our own businesses. But here’s the thing, a lot of people blame the automation, but the automation is not the problem. It’s actually how it was built.
And the real question is, is how do we create systems that don’t just feel personal, because you hear that all the time, but they actually are personal. And so that people can feel seen, they can feel understood, and they feel taken care of. And even though it is manual and it’s automated, it will feel like it’s not. And that’s why I invited my friend, Paul Sokol.
On the call today, Paul has been designing automation systems for literally years, helping businesses scale while delivering an incredible customer experience. And he knows exactly how to create systems that aren’t just efficient, but they actually build trust, loyalty, and real connection with your people. So if you want to scale your business without actually losing the personal touch, he calls it making automated experiences as good as you are.
Misty Kortes (02:20.57)
then this one is for you. So Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (02:25.454)
Hi, how’s it going Misty? It’s good to see you. Yeah, it feels like I have been doing this forever. Did you know that I started using Infusionsoft in 2008 in grad school?
Misty Kortes (02:35.469)
wow, no I did not.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (02:37.272)
Yeah, so it’s been quite some time and then of course I’ve been helping all sorts of people since then.
Misty Kortes (02:44.26)
Yeah. And we met, gosh, it’s been, it’s been years. It’s probably been at least. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you were, you were at Keeper and Fusionsoft at the time when I first started my business. And I remember you walking around with your lab coat on and being the mad scientist of, of marketing automation. And I love that. So, all right.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (02:48.782)
I was thinking about it. It’s probably been at least a decade.
Misty Kortes (03:09.838)
I know we’ve got a lot to cover, a lot of ground to cover. So I want to start us off with kind of like the basics. You know, when we talk about automation in business, let’s start with like, what does that actually mean? And why is it so important for us as business owners and entrepreneurs?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (03:27.854)
So I think at a 10,000 foot view, automation is important because there’s only so much of us to go around and it allows us to do more. And if you do it right without sacrificing the experience, think of restaurants as a good analogy. So like a fry cooker, right? Could you sit and chop up every single potato into fries and then like throw them in the fryer? Sure you could. Or you can just have a bag of frozen pre-cut fries, right?
Misty Kortes (03:46.684)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (03:56.526)
That’s the idea behind automation. Could you do it manually every time? Sure, but there’s way more need and demand on you and your team’s time to do that. And so that’s why you have to use automation. Could we hop in a horse-drawn carriage and drive out of town? Sure, it’s just better to use a car. It’s a lot faster.
Misty Kortes (04:15.034)
Yeah. Well, and you know, I think that most entrepreneurs are now on the bandwagon of, okay, I get it. Like there is only so much of me to go around. I need to scale this so that I can grow and I don’t have to do every single task. So let’s, let’s dive into the conversation around why are, are so many automated experiences so robotic and so disconnected.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (04:43.96)
So I believe we see robotic automations that are disconnected from the front lines because not enough consideration is given towards what’s actually happening. It’s tunnel vision. You look at, hey, I’m going to go ahead and send this email or maybe this series of emails. But we don’t think about what happens before this point to get them to there. We don’t think about what
Misty Kortes (04:56.838)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (05:12.898)
happened before that point to get them to there and then more importantly what needs to happen next. That’s something that gets overlooked a lot and so when you’re looking at things in a vacuum you’re going to go ahead and be very transactional and robotic about it. And then another thing too is people aren’t super clear of their own writing and their own voice and they’ll try and go ahead and delegate that to know some kind of a copywriter or whatnot but
Misty Kortes (05:19.676)
Got it.
Misty Kortes (05:36.389)
Mmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (05:42.614)
It’s very hard if you don’t even know how you talk yourself to convey that to somebody and then have that somebody sound like you.
Misty Kortes (05:50.737)
I find that weird too because we’ve written a lot of emails over the years and it is so true. We communicate as human beings in a certain way. And I remember early on when I was first writing, I’d never considered myself a great writer. I just wrote how I spoke. And so oftentimes when I would write, it wasn’t grammatically correct.
But I had so many people email me and say, Missy, I love your reading your blogs. And I can absolutely tell when I, when I read it, it’s you, because I, I, I just use the words I use if I was talking to you as a human being. So I find that weird that we struggle with that. Why do you, why do you think that is? Like, why do we have a hard time finding our voice?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (06:39.406)
I feel like there’s some kind of a disconnect between manually writing an email or manually sending a text or something like that and then programming that into a system that’s gonna send a thousand emails, it’s gonna send a thousand texts. But there is no difference. I believe that automation is all about relationships at scale. So whatever you would do manually for one person, that’s what you automate.
Misty Kortes (07:05.402)
Yes.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (07:05.665)
And that’s where you run into the robotic issues is where you automate things you would never actually do. And so to your question about finding your voice, at least for the small business types of people that we work with, they have their voice and they talk like you’re talking to a friend or you’re sending an email to your mom or something like that, right? Somebody that’s really close to you. And that’s usually the voice that you want to use. And so
Misty Kortes (07:11.597)
Mmm, yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (07:33.56)
Conveying that to somebody else who might be a professional writer is very hard sometimes because we have certain words that we use and ways that we talk about stuff and little analogies and Even little little fun things that we say all the time. That’s just part of who we are and our brand But you can put that into your automations if you are very clear on Why exactly is this email going out? What happened before them? What’s happening after it?
Misty Kortes (07:40.109)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (08:02.806)
and then you write from that context.
Misty Kortes (08:05.284)
Yeah, if you’re new to email marketing or new to writing, it’s always helpful to think about that perfect ideal customer, one single human being, whether you’ve worked with that person before, or if you’re brand new in business, the person that you hope to work with. And oftentimes I find that a lot of entrepreneurs when we start our business, we’re usually serving the person that we used to be.
or that we currently are and we’re only a few steps ahead of ourselves. And so it makes it easier when you think about like writing, if you’re only writing to one person and you said that, like you’re, you’re not automating to thousands of people or you know, however many you’re, you’re trying to reach. You’re just talking to that one single person. And if you write to that person, it’s going to be a lot more personal and relatable.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (08:57.902)
Absolutely. People don’t want to feel like a number. They don’t want to seem like they’re just some machine in a cog, even though they might be. Maybe you’re doing a massive launch and you got 50,000 people on your list. That’s 50,000 individual relationships. And that’s 50,000 real life humans. And that’s another thing, especially when working with databases and stuff, that it’s very easy to just look at a list of like 100 people and just treat it like a number, treat it like a data point.
and forget that behind every single one of that, those names and emails, that’s a real person with hopes and fears and dreams and challenges and where they want to go. And you have to respect that. And so talking about bad automation, I also think that’s part of it too, is that there’s not a lot of respect for doing this thing at scale, just treating people like a meat grinder and throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks. But
Misty Kortes (09:47.196)
Mm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (09:55.2)
You shouldn’t do it like that because then you’re just gonna it’s not gonna do what you’re looking expecting to do You’re gonna get a bunch of out that you’re gonna not build a relationship. You’re gonna be the exact opposite You’re just gonna be that butthead that shows up and People don’t like that and again, it’s about talking to you to your target audience here. I just said butthead I like swearing but I know that that’s not necessarily part of your brand and your target audience So I’m not gonna and you got to be really aware of that
Misty Kortes (10:20.444)
Yeah. Well, little do you know, I swear like a sailor, but I usually try to refrain when I’m, you know, doing it at scale. But anyway, every once in a while, I can’t help myself in my, in my opinion, they’re just adjectives. So.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (10:29.378)
Yeah, yes.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (10:37.102)
And the less you swear the more poignant they are too. If you never drop an F-bomb and then all of sudden you’re like, you know what? Fuck this. People are like, whoa! They never swear and then they lean in and listen real hard.
Misty Kortes (10:40.538)
Right?
Misty Kortes (10:46.118)
Well, wait a minute, where’d that come from?
Right? Absolutely. So no, I love that. And you know, I tend to work with the entrepreneurs that are brand new in business. They’re just getting started. And so this is a good conversation for them to hear because it’s probably the first time they’re hearing this. okay. So if someone is starting out to integrate automation into their business, you know, where do they begin? What do you do? I know you have a process, so I want to dive into that.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (11:13.998)
So yeah, let’s go ahead and talk about it. So it all starts with understanding, and I’ve spoken about this for years, maybe you’ve even seen it, this idea of the business stack is what I call it. And it’s a theory and a model that has been proven time and time again, no matter if you’re a one person thing or if you’re like a giant global corporation like Disney. And it’s a customer centric model. So your customer receives your offer, whether that’s product or services,
And each offer has its own distinct customer journey of the marketing, the sales, or the fulfillment. Right. And then you have the operations, which is specifically, how do you market? How do you sell? How do you fulfill it? how do you fulfill? So when we’re talking about automation, it’s kind of straddling those layers of like the experience and the operations, because the tool is how are you doing it? And then of course, what they experience is that. And then underneath that usually.
behind the scenes is the people running it to do the operations and the money that pays for everything, right? Those are the seven fundamental parts of any business, matter how big that you are. So with automation, the first thing to be very abundantly clear about is what is the exact product or service we’re focusing on and what part of the customer journey. Is this part of the marketing journey? Is this part of the sales journey? Is it part of the fulfillment journey? And as you do more of this, you may be able to sit down and
Misty Kortes (12:32.368)
Mm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (12:41.538)
from nothing, plan that whole thing out. I always recommend working backwards. I always recommend getting clear on how you’re gonna deliver this thing in the first place period. And then once you’re clear on how that works, it’s a lot easier to back up a little bit and say, okay, what can the sales of this look like? Because you have all of that context of what’s gonna happen once they buy. And then once you have the sales in place, then you back up further upstream.
Misty Kortes (12:52.934)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (13:10.166)
and say, okay, what does the marketing look like? And so when I’m planning automation, it’s usually one of those three parts is the focus. And then you work on the milestones along the way.
Misty Kortes (13:12.603)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (13:23.804)
So I wanna pause for a second because I know in working with entrepreneurs and even I’m talking multimillion dollar businesses. So I recently, I actually closed my agency. I don’t know if you’ve heard that. I closed it last year. Thank you. I planted a garden in Arizona. Like I have more time and it’s just amazing, but I won’t go into that. So, in the agency, we worked with a lot of…
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (13:36.494)
Congratulations.
Misty Kortes (13:51.131)
very large businesses and setting up automations like you. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that from, from entrepreneurs, solopreneur to big businesses, the lines between these, between marketing and sales is really blurred. You know, they don’t understand really truly understand or even maybe they do understand, but they just don’t.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (14:07.726)
100%.
Misty Kortes (14:16.38)
care because what they want to do is they want their marketing to sell. And, and, and they are two separate activities that I, I always love to point out and make sure that I point out because marketing is relational sales is transactional. And you, they, think it’s important that people understand that. Like, what’s your thoughts around that? I say that all the time, so I want to know your thoughts.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (14:34.795)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (14:41.742)
I 100 % agree with what you’re saying. The way that I’ll usually describe it is that marketing is taking somebody from nothing to a face with a name that you can follow up with. Everything. And then sales takes that face with the name and transforms the relationship into a paying customer. And then that’s where the fulfillment starts. And if you do it right, the longest part of the customer journey is fulfillment because that could in theory be the rest of their life.
Misty Kortes (14:52.39)
There you go.
Misty Kortes (15:11.035)
Yes.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (15:11.31)
Um, but I see people collapsing them. Like I said, they want their marketing to sell. Well, you can pre-frame the sales conversation, but marketing is marketing. It’s a completely different skillset to bring people in that are qualified and interested in that raise their hand, the same interested. That’s a completely different skillset to take those people and then now have a conversation about great. Here’s what I have. Here’s what it’ll do for you. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Do you want this? And then handling objections and.
and then making it work or saying, we’re just not for you. And that’s okay.
Misty Kortes (15:45.499)
Yep. And so in understanding that we as entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners, we need to know that we have need separate systems, strategies and processes that we develop for each step in that process. So you need your strategies for marketing. You need your processes and systems for sales.
And then also delivery. think delivery is pretty self-explanatory. Like we don’t struggle with that piece of it. We know how to deliver what we do, but it’s the first two pieces that we struggle, that many entrepreneurs struggle with. So I just, I love that we kind of separate that because when we talk about creating automated experiences, you need to break those up into three separate segments, like Paul said. And yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (16:40.046)
Absolutely.
Misty Kortes (16:40.902)
So I wanna make sure that they get that. All right. So how do you go about doing this? Like what’s your process for doing this?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (16:43.15)
Vroom.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (16:47.278)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So once I’m clear on what’s the product or service we’re selling and what part of the customer journey are we in, then this is the fun and creative part. Then it’s a two-phase process. The first phase is getting clear on the milestones that people experience along the way. And it’s a very simple low-tech thing on purpose. We call it a ball and sick diagram.
where it’s literally just circles connected with little sticks, right? Because the circles are the main moments, the main milestones. And then the sticks connecting them are the various pathways that take somebody from milestone to milestone. So a good analogy that seems to work with people is like a theme park, where you have this space and you got a bunch of rides there, those are all the milestones. And then you have all the sidewalks and the pathways to go from…
Misty Kortes (17:42.341)
Mmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (17:42.99)
Space Mountain to the Haunted Mansion or whatever the case is. And that’s how you can see the general relationship between how is somebody going to go through this? So like a real simple example, very simple example is like the lead magnet idea. And usually, usually there’s only two milestones in there, maybe three. The first milestone is they request it. Okay. I requested lead magnet. The second milestone that a lot of people
forget but when you step back you’re like, yeah, obviously the second milestone is actually redeeming it. Just because somebody says, hey, I’m interested in this thing you have, I’m interested in this video series, this spreadsheet or template or whatever, doesn’t mean they’re actually gonna go ahead and download it or consume it or log into your member site or anything like that. And those are the two key milestones. And then sometimes you’ll have a third milestone after the fact of like, okay, once they’ve redeemed the thing, maybe they…
Misty Kortes (18:16.282)
Mm. Yep.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (18:40.792)
book a call or they request more information to get to really transfer that marketing into a sales conversation. And so you can probably imagine, know, circle with a stick pointing to another circle and a stick, right? That’s, that’s the first phase. And we get super clear on that. And this is where a lot of the conversation will happen because we are kind of creating something from scratch. It’s almost like building a house. Okay. I want to kitchen here. I want to go ahead and let’s have a really cool backyard with this. And then.
Let’s have these bedrooms here next to the garage. That’s the time to really be a visionary and from the creative and then the fun sense there. And then once you’re clear on that, the second phase is storyboarding out what each of the pathways looks like. And it’s taking us over from milestone to milestone. So once someone requests that lead magnet, how do you get them to actually redeem it? And this is now where we get to the ground level.
Misty Kortes (19:28.821)
okay.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (19:40.298)
experience that is going to be supported by automation. So someone requests the lead magnet, cool. Maybe the first thing that I do is I immediately send them an email and I immediately send them a text message. Okay. And then if they do not download the lead magnet right away, maybe three days later in the morning, I’m going to send them a reminder. Hey, don’t forget about this thing. And then if they still don’t do it, then maybe four days after that, which makes it a full week from when they requested it,
send like a final notice like, hey, I don’t want to bug you, last chance, don’t forget to get your thing, right? And that’ll get, probably usually 70 to 80 % of the people that are for real actually interested in what you have, it’ll get them there through that. Because we’re talking about bad automation. Bad automation is you opt in for the lead magnet, you get one email that says, here’s your thing, and then you just started getting hammered with sales messages every single day. But maybe I didn’t even download the thing.
I don’t even know the value they were talking about. How can I talk about the thing you requested in the sales messages if you haven’t even redeemed it yet? And so as far as bad automation, think that’s something else where people will assume too much or they assume the wrong things. Because when you’re writing messaging for automation, you need to be, you need to be a hundred percent explicitly clear on what can you talk to? And also the other side of the coin, what can you absolutely not?
Misty Kortes (20:40.55)
Right.
Misty Kortes (20:55.26)
and
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (21:10.542)
to. And it can be very subtle sometimes. So, like that second reminder email, hey, we know for a fact you did not download this thing because you wouldn’t be receiving this email in the first place. Obviously, you probably wouldn’t want to say it like that. That’s kind like a real big brothery kind of thing. But you can absolutely come from that place of caring and saying, hey, I just wanted to check in. I saw that you requested my
Misty Kortes (21:11.132)
Hmm.
Misty Kortes (21:28.604)
Thank
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (21:38.936)
whatever mini course of how to automate like a pro. So I hadn’t logged in yet. This is great stuff. You’re going to love it. You get all the tools that we use internally. Here’s the link to go ahead and log in. And that’s good automation.
Misty Kortes (21:50.427)
Yep. Well, and even asking, can, I mean, you can even ask, you having trouble logging in? Right? Like.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (21:56.91)
100%. Yes. And that’s another thing I think a lot of people forgive with automation too, is triaging those personal individual touch points. Because yeah, if somebody is having trouble logging in, they’re going to respond, okay, now, let’s say 100 people opted in for this thing, but maybe only two or three from having problems logging in, you can focus on those two or three people now, you have time to do that, your team has the bandwidth to do that. And the other 97 or so people are just going through it.
and they’re okay. They don’t have questions.
Misty Kortes (22:27.962)
Yeah. Yeah, you have to be monitoring it throughout the entire process. So I want to back up again. I always, I always like to do this. so step number one is creating your balls and sticks. As you said, I would call that the blueprint, right? This is the high level blueprint of what, what that process looks like. And then from there, once you have that blueprint, then you storyboard. And what does storyboarding look like?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (22:52.622)
Yes, so storyboarding goes, we talked about the business stack at the beginning, right? So the storyboard covers everything from the customer experience and then what operational experience is needed for it. So let’s use the example of that reminder email three days later. So the customer experiences, you know, a reminder to download it operationally, it’s wait three days, run any day at 8 a.m.
And then the next layer is getting into the messaging of it. Now we’re not writing the entire message, but this is kind of where we’re leaving notes about like, here’s what we want to say, maybe here’s what the call to action is, you that kind of thing. And then this is, and then it starts to get into the operational and the people layer. So once you know the messaging, it’s okay. What tools are we going to use to send this email? So this is like a keep email. And then we get into the people layer of who has the skills.
Misty Kortes (23:21.553)
Got it.
Misty Kortes (23:43.5)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (23:50.478)
to use that tool. Okay, because that could be a huge gap or a huge blind spot. And there’s actually two types of skills. There’s the creative skills and then the technical skills. Because the person that writes the email may not be the same person that loads the email and vice versa, just because I can load an email into Keep doesn’t mean that I can actually write it. And then the very bottom layer is that layer of governance and accountability of who is the owner of that specific asset.
Misty Kortes (24:01.564)
Mm.
Misty Kortes (24:18.939)
Got it.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (24:19.63)
And that’s a fully holistic and that’s just for one asset along the way of the customer journey. And you have that for each email or text or whatever. And when you have a team, it creates one source of truth for exactly what’s being built. It’s like, like you said earlier, it’s like a blueprint for like when you build a house, you have an architect draft up a blueprint. Everybody is using that same one.
technical document, all the electricians, all the framers, all the plumbers, they’re all going off that one same dock so everybody can all run in the same direction.
Misty Kortes (24:50.3)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (24:57.25)
Absolutely. so this is really, it’s very applicable to when you’re, you know, working with teams, like you said, where there’s multiple people coming in and assisting in the project getting completed. That’s, that’s how I would reframe it as an agency who’s delivered many projects, right? And, following that process is really important, but I also want to speak to the solopreneur and the entrepreneur listening because
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (25:12.846)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Misty Kortes (25:26.99)
you know, they may be thinking, well, it’s not as important for me because I’m the only one doing all the things. Well, yeah, this is somewhat true because as you and I both know, sometimes you’re the one kind of taking the ball into the end zone, taking the project into the end zone and you’re doing all of the steps. But other times you may have to hire someone to assist like a designer, right? Even if, yeah, so,
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (25:54.595)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (25:56.941)
It’s important that you map this out and you get into the habit of mapping it out for a couple of reasons. One reason that comes to mind, I think as entrepreneurs, we tend to think we’re like superheroes, which we are in some respects, but we’re still human. I always use this example. When I was in my twenties, I had four kids. I was pregnant with my fourth actually. My husband was heading out to work. He worked afternoons. It was like midday.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (26:16.162)
person
Misty Kortes (26:25.178)
And he’s pulling out of the driveway and I go running up to the car and I say, Hey, I’m going to paint the house today. The outside of the outside of the house. And he goes, no, you’re not. He’s the realist. I’m the entrepreneur. Like, right. And he goes, no, you’re not. And I said, yes, I am. And he goes, no, you’re not. And I’m like, listen, I just don’t want you to be upset when you come home and the house has been painted and whatever. Right. And so needless to say, he was right.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (26:30.306)
Hahaha
Misty Kortes (26:50.33)
But this is the entrepreneur mind. We think we can literally paint a house with four kids being pregnant in an afternoon because we have unrealistic expectations. The reason why I share this story is because it’s proof of how we’re wired in our brain. I honestly believed I was going to paint that house that day. And I barely even got the paint home in time by the time he got home, right? So when you map these things out, you begin to realize the time.
maybe money and effort that’s gonna go into creating this project. So it helps you create better frames, timelines and frames in terms of how these can be created, when you can actually deploy them and launch them, whatever word you use into the public. What’s your thoughts on that?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (27:39.022)
think that you hit on something really important about getting clear on the timelines and I would say the scope of what it actually takes. Because it’s very easy to think like, oh, this is no big deal, it’s just five emails, da da da. But when you look at it and you’re like, no, I need to build a landing page for the thing, I need to build a thank you page for the thing. I need to go ahead and build the freebie itself. Now I’m gonna go ahead and write five different emails.
Misty Kortes (27:46.587)
Yes!
Misty Kortes (27:58.395)
the resource first, the freebie.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (28:05.91)
And then if I want to have them raise their hand for a sales call, even if it’s something simple, like just click here, I’ll send you a link. Where are they going to go? And they click here to send this link. So it creates that scope. That’s why when I’m working with clients, we always do a plan. Like that’s number one, you’re going to work with us, you’re going to do a plan. If you’re not willing to sit down and do a plan, go somewhere else. You’re not our target, right? You clearly don’t value planning important enough.
And I remember doing a plan with the lady last year. She wanted to do some kind of like, uh, I think like an 18 week coaching program. Right. And so like, great, we’re going to start with the fulfillment. That plan ended up being like 11 pages long. And when we scoped it out, there was like 70 or 80 emails that she needed to write. I don’t believe she understood the true scope of what she was talking about when she said, I’m going to do this thing. And once we laid it out, it was very clear that like.
This is a significant lift and you’re going to be writing emails for a whole week and then some if the only thing you were to do was sit down and just 40 hours a week write emails, right? Which of course we know unless that’s your job, right? You don’t have that dedicated, that dedicated kind of time. And that’s why we plan absolutely everything. Cause most people don’t realize what it takes or we’ll get into the conversation.
Misty Kortes (29:11.085)
Exactly
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (29:26.988)
And they’re like, okay, well, what about this? Or should we do it this way? And then there’s always like one sticking point or more sticking points that they hadn’t really for real thought about and considered. They never really, they just kind of assumed it was going to fall into place. That’s very dangerous to do, especially with automation. Nothing’s going to fall into place. Would you hop on a roller coaster where the engineer is like, well, figure it out. No, you need to make sure.
Misty Kortes (29:45.755)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (29:51.322)
Yep. No.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (29:53.986)
You’re not going too fast so people don’t get hurt that you have breaks in the right place so people ain’t flying out or whatever. The hill’s not too tall to where you’re not going to make it over the top. And then it’s just chaos. It’s very important to plan. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan. Why would you build your business’s house without a plan?
Misty Kortes (30:15.226)
Yeah, because here’s what happened. So a couple of things. One is there’s a quote from Brian Tracy. He says, 10 minutes in preparation will save you hours in execution. And it is a hundred percent true. Like you, you, we, I’m talking to us, we, us, the solopreneurs, the entrepreneurs, we think.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (30:24.206)
100 %
Misty Kortes (30:34.3)
We don’t need to map it out because we know what needs to be done. We know how, you know, we have a kind of gauge, but we have an unrealistic gauge. We already established that you’re all wired like me. You thought you could paint the house too. If you were in the same scenario, you would have done the same thing because we’re all the same. But, but also like here’s what happens. Here’s the, the, the side effect of not mapping this out. Aside from if you’re working with the team, it’s just a cluster like
You’re not going to get the project done. Everybody’s going to blame everyone else for why something didn’t, why something got bottlenecked and why it didn’t get to completion and all that stuff. But as the solopreneur and the entrepreneur, here’s what happens. And this is a sign that you’re not taking that 10 minutes in preparation and you’re not fully executing, which takes time, money, and energy, which is the number one reason why business owners go out of business is because they don’t fully execute things to the finish line. And so they, they, they create what I call half built buildings. When I moved to Arizona,
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (31:22.606)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (31:29.948)
Back in 2010, I remember driving around the valley. I’m from Michigan, a little town in Michigan. So we didn’t have like these huge buildings and a lot of construction and like it’s an old farm town, right? But I come out to Arizona and I see all these massive buildings, half built and then abandoned. And I remember saying to my husband all the time, like, it’s such a shame to see the amount of time, labor, money, resources that went into
building a building halfway and never taking it to the end zone, never finishing it, right? And for whatever reason, the economy was bad at the time, all that stuff, but that’s what we do in our business. We take time, money, and resources away from priorities in our business saying that we’re so busy, we built half built buildings that never get used, and we wonder why our business doesn’t grow and why we’re not moving the needle in our business. So when you don’t plan properly, that’s what happens.
That’s how you know that you’re not planning properly because you started many projects, got halfway through or a quarter of the way through and then realize like Paul just said, yeah, there’s that thing I don’t know how to do. And so I’m just gonna stop. Like I don’t know how to drywall. So we’re just not gonna put drywall up in the building. Okay. Where if you had taken the 10 minutes to prepare, you would have said, okay, I can see we need drywall. So I’m gonna need either learn how-
how to drywall or I’m gonna go find a drywaller, right? But because at the end of the day, if the project needs completed, you have to drywall. You can’t leave the studs exposed, right? We’re using a lot of analogies today, but it’s so true. Yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (32:59.725)
Yep.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (33:08.652)
Yes. Yeah, it is. It is. And there is, think it’s an Abraham Lincoln quote, like if I had eight hours to chop down a tree and spend six sharpening my ax, that’s exactly what the planning does. Because, because when you do this kind of planning, yes, it’s like slowing down to speed up. We might have two to three hours worth of planning just for this one thing, but then we can turn around and get it built within the next day or so.
Misty Kortes (33:20.732)
Same thing, love it.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (33:38.082)
because we know exactly what we’re doing.
Misty Kortes (33:41.135)
Absolutely. And you also know whether or not it’s a priority because when you go through the planning process, all of a sudden you’re like, yeah, I don’t know if I really need this because it’s going to be time, money and energy to put into place. So that’s where it’s going to help you prioritize too. So I think that’s important.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (33:55.842)
Yep.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (34:00.256)
And prioritization, that’s a really good point. When you’re planning, as you do this business thing more, you’ll get a lot better gauge on the difference between a need to have and a nice to have. So looking at like the landing page example, you need to have obviously the asset and you need to have some kind of a form that people sign up for. Do you need to have a video on there or like video testimonials?
Misty Kortes (34:12.816)
Yes.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (34:29.536)
Not necessarily, it’s a nice to have if you can swing it, cool. But that may be one of those things where you’re like, you know what, version two, version one’s better than version none. And in some cases it may not even help with the overall page in general to have testimonials. Maybe it’s just not relevant. But if you’re not good at saying we need to have this or you know what, that’s a nice to have.
You can also get hung up on the planning. That’s something I work with clients on a lot. They’re like, we can do this, we can do this. Okay, well, for version one, let’s just do this because we do need to have that thing in place. These other things are just a nice to have. We don’t have to do that.
Misty Kortes (35:08.272)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (35:13.052)
It’s like the scientific process. When I learned about that, I was actually on one of my kids’ field trips. And, you just said.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (35:18.54)
and
Misty Kortes (35:23.228)
Well, so I was on one of my kids field trips and we were, don’t even remember, we were learning about mountains and I don’t know, stuff in the nature. And they had this graph that was like in a circular motion about the scientific process. And it explained like you come up with an idea, right? Basically. And then your hypothesis and all this other stuff. But what I realized in the scientific process is that it’s circular.
because you’re always coming back around and going through the process again. And what you just said is so key when it comes to implementation of these automations is that version one is gonna be what I call minimally viable, like the basic essentials. Like you talked about testimonials. You may not have testimonials right now. That might be something you need to go get, but in the meantime, you can still launch the campaign without them.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (35:57.047)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (36:21.84)
with the idea of later on, I’m gonna come back to this and I’m going to continue to add more value to the process because I know I have to go out and get those testimonials. I’m not gonna stop building the building. I’m gonna keep building the building. I’m gonna take it to the end zone, but I’m gonna come back and revisit it and then spruce it up a little bit, right? Yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (36:45.006)
Absolutely. All the time. I’ll build something and just use it for years and then for whatever reason, I’ll look at it again or I’ll be explaining, hey, here’s this thing that I use. And I’m always finding things that I’m like, ooh, okay. Well, it’s a version one thing. Like I have a mentoring program and at the end of every call, I have a simple internal form that I fill out that says, you here’s what we did. Here’s your homework items. Here’s what we’re doing our next call, right? And the emails that they get, it’s a very casual, basic sign off.
I’m not really using my main signature that I use, but that’s because I built that. went back and I looked at it. That model got published the first time in September of 2016. I’ve been using it for almost a decade. So a decade ago, I didn’t really have my official email signature. I just needed to get something out. I just needed to have a, you know, have a great day, so cool. And like that was the email. So that’s something I could do for version two to enhance it. But again, talking about priorities and whatnot, I don’t think that’s taking away from
Misty Kortes (37:24.507)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (37:43.63)
That’s very minimally taking away from the experience. There’s way other more important things that I can do to fix. Now, if I was growing a team of people doing this mentoring and coaching, okay, now let’s make sure that everybody has a good professional sign-off. That’s a good time to invest that.
Misty Kortes (38:01.358)
Yep, yep. So let’s bring it back around to creating good automations, right? So let’s give them a few pro tips on how do we make things good, even though we need to start small so we can fully execute, right? Like we’ve been talking about. You need to have a minimally viable, but does minimally viable mean that it can be good or is that not good? You know what I mean?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (38:28.792)
So it’s all about relationships at scale. And so I think one big takeaway when you’re planning your automation is to think about the timing more than you probably should. Like really does it make sense? So something that’s very common that I do is when somebody downloads a lead magnet or logs into the thing or whatever, 23 hours later, I’ll send the follow up that says, hey, what do you think about this thing? Right? That’s not an arbitrary number. Think about it.
if you’re doing businessy stuff and it’s noon and you download some ebook at noon, guess what? I wanna show up at 11 a.m. the next day because I know that’s when you’re active, okay? What if you’re a night owl? What if you’re downloading stuff at 2 a.m. in the morning? I don’t care, I’m not gonna judge you that the information’s still the information. So okay, cool, I’m gonna show up at 1 a.m. the next day and say what did you think about it? Because I know that statistically,
That’s the highest likelihood you’re going to be there in front of your inbox and you’ll pay attention to it. So really think about the timing.
Misty Kortes (39:33.905)
Yes. Well, yeah. And when you talk about timing, so when we talk about good automation, right, you got to, so I work with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are very, we want things yesterday, right? I just know that’s how we’re wired. And so knowing that about my customer, one of the things that I implemented is if you’re, so number one, you talked about a login. So if you have a place where they have to log in to access something,
make the login process easy. Like, that’s a great experience. That’s what makes automation good. That’s part of making it good is making it easy, right, to access. Number two, so the other thing that I started implementing is following up with someone when they did have to log in 30 minutes after they signed up, if they didn’t log in, following up with them saying, hey, are you having a problem logging in? Because I wanna…
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (40:13.74)
Yes.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (40:30.189)
Yep.
Misty Kortes (40:31.642)
be there even if it is midnight or 2 a.m. in the morning or 8 a.m. the next day or whatever. I want to be there immediately because I know how frustrating it can be. You’re in work mode, you sign up for something and then all of a sudden you didn’t get the email or you couldn’t log in or something happens and then you’re frustrated. You’re good. You know, you’re frustrated. So part of that good automation is just making sure things work.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (40:51.146)
come on. Yes. Buddy.
Misty Kortes (41:01.082)
the way they should, that you’re following up, you’re providing the support that you can, you know, when they need it the most. So yeah, any other tips for making things good? Obviously, we know our communication needs to be speaking to one person. Our timing needs to be relevant.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (41:09.624)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (41:16.398)
Needs to make sense. Yeah, exactly. One thing that an exercise that I’ll have people go through is treating it like it’s a follow-up like with their friend. Like if they’re not sure what the timing is, thinking about how do you do it if you’re like, you know, talking to one of your friends. So let’s say that it’s, what’s today? Today’s Wednesday? Yeah. So let’s say I’m having a party next Wednesday.
And I text you today or I send you email, hey Misty, you’re gonna come to my party on Wednesday. And then I’m not gonna bug you the next day immediately, necessarily. Maybe I’ll wait a couple of days and then later in the afternoon I’m like, I haven’t heard from Misty yet. know, Saturday morning, hey Misty, you coming to my party. And then it’s the day before the party and I’m getting all the prep ready and it’s the morning and I’m like, I still don’t know if Misty’s gonna show up. So let me go ahead and.
Misty Kortes (41:55.29)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (42:11.406)
change it up and say, are going to show up at parties tomorrow? That can give us a help with the timing. Another thing is going multi-channel as well. So just because you’ve been emailing somebody, that doesn’t mean you can’t break it up every once in a while with a text message. Or if you’re texting them, break it up with an email. Another thing with good automation is making sure that you still have to do things manually sometimes. There’s just
Misty Kortes (42:20.592)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (42:28.07)
Yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (42:39.118)
no way around it. Even like with roller coasters, it’s fully automated. There’s still a human there in front of a control panel, making sure all the lights and all the stuff’s good before they hit that button and go send people off, right? Because if not, the results can literally be disastrous. Like it could be fatal if that wasn’t there. So sometimes you must have humans involved in the process. So get really good at discerning and figuring out what’s something that we have to have a human involved in. And so, uh,
A good example is like when an email hard bounces. You send an email, it comes back, it’s not deliverable. You need to go get a better email or just check up and see what’s going on. That’s a really great use case for, okay, go ahead and spit out a task that says this person’s email bounced, but then make it easy to go back into the machine. Don’t just say, their email is bad. Go ahead and get a good one. Give them a mechanism to start the machine up again. Give them a button to start the ride up again. Hey, once you get a good email,
go fill out this internal form and that’ll go ahead and do whatever stuff you need to do under the hood. Cause there’s things you have to do as a person that you can’t sometimes or even for governance too. So like when people book an appointment, I have the system spit out a task the morning of that says, this person has a call. Make sure you follow up with them. And usually I’m pretty good about that. And sometimes I’m not.
And so then that’ll remind me either that day or like the next day, oh yeah, I did a call with Misty yesterday. Let me make sure I go ahead and follow up with it.
Misty Kortes (44:11.844)
Yep. I love that. And the fact that you brought up the multi-channel, think that’s important. One of the strategies that we’ve been implementing over the last few years is, you know, chat bots. And so a couple of things is one, when it is an automated system, it’s okay to say, hey, this is a, I call mine a Misty bot. Like this is the Misty bot. This isn’t real Misty. Just so that you know, like we’re setting the right expectations again.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (44:39.885)
I’m out.
Misty Kortes (44:40.756)
But then also allowing them at any time, if you actually want to talk to a human, click here. So it notifies our team so that we can jump in and spark a real human to human conversation. So giving them that ability. But the thing I love about chatbots, what you talked about in the multi-channel, is that chatbots allow you to meet them where they’re at on social, engage with them in Messenger.
So that’s one channel that you can now communicate with them. Ask for their email, ask for their phone number if it’s part of the process, right? So if you do happen to get a bad email, cause how do you fix a bad email if you don’t have their phone number? How do you fix a bad email if you can’t reach them on social? If you have no other way to reach them but the bad email, you’re dead in the water and you might as well just delete the contact because you can’t do anything with that, right? So having that multi-channel app,
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (45:35.256)
Mm-hmm.
Misty Kortes (45:37.661)
creates good automated systems so that you have a way to follow up with those individuals if you need to. I just wanted to bring that up because I don’t think a lot of people realize when you’re we want to make it easy for them but you also if you truly want to help that person you’ve got to have more than one way to communicate with them.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (46:02.19)
Yeah. And it’s just like a real person. Like if I already email you and it came back, I’d send you a message on Facebook, hey Misty, sent you email and bounce back. Is your email still the, and then we’d be like, oh yeah, it is. My inbox is full or, hey, no, I switched jobs. Here’s my new one or, know, whatever the case is. And that also shows people that you care. Cause people don’t want to feel like they’re a number just being pushed through a meat grinder. When you do those individual things, that does more for the relationship than you could possibly know.
because now people are feeling listened to, cared for, and loved, which you should. And if you’re not doing any of that, you may want to go further up and re-evaluate why you’re in business in the first place. And if that’s not your personality type, go hire somebody that does care. So good automation. We talked about timing. We talked about finding where does the human need to touch the machine. We talked about just the messaging of it.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (47:02.734)
I mean that and then of course planning you know we talked at in excess but planning is very helpful to get things out the door quickly I’m sure as soon as we’re done. I’m gonna have like three other ideas. I’m like
Misty Kortes (47:16.788)
It’s okay. I think you’ve given us enough to think about it for sure. I hope that you know those that are listening in are are there’s their wheels are spinning about rethinking the way that they’re approaching. You know like you said starting with the planning making sure that they’re prepared and understand like we need to take this project to the end zone so we need to make sure that we take the time to plan it out. See who needs to participate in this to helping it get
fully completed. you’re a solopreneur and you need extra help, then finding that extra help or finding that extra training if you need to. And then, know, writing to that one single person, I think that’s really important. That in itself can create a really great experience for people. Write as if you were talking to your perfect ideal customer one-on-one. When you do that,
it sets the tone for the whole relationship right from the beginning. So I think that’s really important. then I love your balls and sticks in the storyboarding. That’s part of that planning process. I really love that idea of that approach to planning. any last minute tips before we kind of wrap up? I know you have a free gift, which we’re going to share with them here in a moment, but anything else that you want to share?
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (48:21.058)
Yeah.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (48:41.688)
like to say that when you do automation right, people aren’t going to be sure that you did anything at all. And so really try to get to this. It’s like a good magic trick. When you do it, people aren’t going to know what happened. They’re just going to know that they were amazed. And so when you’re with your automation, it shouldn’t feel automated. And it should even sometimes be to the point where people cannot tell if it was automated or not because it’s so relevant. And it really speaks to where they’re at specifically.
Misty Kortes (48:47.153)
Mmm.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (49:10.42)
in whatever part of their journey that they’re at.
Misty Kortes (49:13.532)
I love that. I love that. So Paul, this has been really good. I know we could go on. You know, when it comes to marketing, there’s a lot of little intricacies that we can dive into, but you know, I think you’ve given us enough today, which is amazing. Thank you so much. So you’ve got a free gift. Tell us, you know, what it is and where they can get it.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (49:35.222)
Yeah, so it’s called How to Automate like a Pro. It’s a free mini course and it goes, it’s a deep dive into this exact planning methodology that we talked about today. So not only the ball and the stick diagrams and the storyboarding, but we also talk about the messaging part of it and even, you know, what I like to call the special effects. So if we’re talking about like integrations or things between that, what’s super exciting about this is that I think it’s only about two hours worth of video content. So it’s pretty quick.
You know, not really wasting time just getting right to it. But we also give you the exact same tools that we use internally here at B Pro. So you’re going to get a copy of, you’re going to get training on how to do the bondstick diagrams with Google draw. You’re going to get a copy of the planning tool that we use as well as our messaging tool as well, which has all of the information that you would need to write an email or a text message. Cause there there’s information like who is it going to, who is it?
from. What’s the subject line? These are all things that can easily get looked over and it can just prevent you from executing quickly. So that’s what you’ll go ahead and get.
Misty Kortes (50:43.426)
awesome. I’ll make sure that I link to that resource in the show notes. Also, I’m going to link to Paul Solso’s channel so that way you can connect with him there. Yeah, so I just want to thank you again for joining us today and sharing your expertise and knowledge. I know that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs, you you and I have been in this industry for a long time and sometimes it can feel like everybody knows about it.
But everybody doesn’t know about it. And there’s new entrepreneurs, you know, entering our space every single day. And so we’re kind of speaking to them today as well and introducing this to them. So thank you. I appreciate that.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (51:11.55)
No.
Paul Sokol | Be Pro (51:26.434)
Thanks for having me. I love this stuff. I could talk about it all day.
Misty Kortes (51:29.976)
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for tuning in. And with that, I’ll see you all again next week. Have a great week. Bye.