Build a Business That Works Without You: How to Scale, Automate, and Actually Take a Vacation

Jeffro (00:02.938)
What does it really take to build a business that supports your life instead of consuming it? In today’s episode, I’m talking with Andy Seeley, a business growth expert who’s helped thousands of small business owners turn their passions into predictable profit. Andy runs not one, but two agencies, Creatively Disruptive, which works with kids activity centers and Ashworth Strategy, which supports parent focused e-commerce brands. He’s also the brains behind CHI, an AI powered CRM for local business owners.

Andy brings his energy, these systems and a refreshing take on what it means to run a business that actually serves the owner. So if you’ve ever felt stuck in the day to day grind, this one’s for you. Andy, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Andy Seeley (00:41.592)
Thank you, Jeffro, it’s good to see you.

Jeffro (00:44.228)
Yeah, I’m excited to chat with you. And I think we can kick things off with one of your core ideas, which is building a business that works for you and not the other way around. So what does it mean to build a business that serves the owner? And where do most entrepreneurs go get this wrong?

Andy Seeley (00:58.766)
Well, I think a lot of business owners are technicians at heart, right? They start off with having an expertise, a skill set, and then they build a business around that. And what oftentimes ends up happening is that you’re building yourself a job and it’s not a business that serves you, right? To me, a business that serves you, like the definition of a business that serves you is you can go away for two months and come back.

Jeffro (01:03.663)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Seeley (01:28.364)
and the business is better than what it was before you left. Most small businesses can’t do that. There’s a reason why about 85 % of all businesses never sell, right? The owner cannot exit that business because it’s attached to them too tightly. building a business that serves you is basically, as I said, you want to, in every position where your customers are being served, especially, it needs to not involve you. And you need to be running your business, not the business running you, right? Your business not scheduling your day, your business not demanding, hey, you’ve got to be here at this time and do this and do that. That is a job. And a lot of technicians, especially in the trades, definitely in the kids activity center realm, where you’ve got dance schools, swim schools you know, gymnastics centers, karate, you know, a lot of times people who run those kinds of businesses, they’re a gymnastics coach, right? And they’re trying to figure out how do I make money, you know, and do the thing that I love? Well, the only real great way to do it is probably to start a business doing it, because otherwise you’re going to be doing it part-time. Or, you know, a dance teacher or, you know, martial arts person or whatever. And they start these businesses. Now, the tech, the…trade side of things we see maybe a little bit different, it’s different from about the same, right? They start a business and they just start adding parts to it. Maybe they’re working for themselves, doing work and taking jobs on, and then they add an office person, then they add a couple of helpers to go out there, a couple of laborers, and all of a sudden you’ve got a business, right? That’s why a lot of trades oftentimes partnerships, They’re a partnership or a sole proprietorship. They’re not even set up as a corporation or a business or an LLC. lot of times they, because it just, this business kind of happens rather than being planned, if that makes sense.

Jeffro (03:38.338)
Right. So when someone comes to you who is a technician, they’re just like, hey, I’m not making money. How can I create this business that you’re talking about? How long in your experience? know it’s going to vary depending on the business, like saying, okay, you need to do these things. That’s one thing. And then actually implementing them and getting to the other side where you can go on a vacation and have it still grow without you. How long does that take and kind of what, what goes into that?

Andy Seeley (04:05.646)
I think it can be quite quick, but typically it takes a long time, right? And the reason why I say that it’s more about the person. Let’s say you’re a plumber and you have built this little business and it started off with you doing some plumbing jobs and then you got the help and all of a sudden you got like 10 employees and blah, blah, blah, blah. You run around on your cell phone, people are still calling you on your cell phone all over the place.

Andy Seeley (04:35.4)
What we see a lot of times is there’s a thing, have you ever heard Jeffery of Founders Syndrome?

Jeffro (04:42.261)
Yeah, of different names.

Andy Seeley (04:43.214)
Right. So Founder’s Syndrome, for those that aren’t as familiar with it, founders tend to find it very hard to let go of things, very hard to let go of power. They founded this business. I’m the boss. Hey, I’m the catalyst of why this entity exists. And they find it very hard to let go. Right. So part of the speed really comes down to how quickly can you feel comfortable letting go of things. And when I’ve consulted with business owners in these kind of situations, one of the techniques that I do, and I highly recommend any of your viewers to do this, is get a spreadsheet. Write down all the tasks that you do in a day, in a week, in a month, right? And then you go back to it and then you put a dollar sign beside it, right? One dollar sign is a low dollar thing, so it’s maybe worth $10 an hour. $2 signs might be worth $25, $3 signs $50, $4 signs up to $5 signs which might be worth $250, $500 an hour. You go through all of the things that if you were going to get someone else to do them, how much would you be paying and you do that? You’d be surprised how many things most of all businesses owners are doing with one or two dollar signs. Those are absolutely things that need to be given to somebody else to do and let go of that power. And probably you can give it away and actually somebody is going to be better at it than you are at it. Typically, I always look at it as a business owner, my hourly rate is $500 an hour. So if I can find somebody for less than $500 an hour to do something, I’m going to find that person and have them do it. And a lot of it is, I guess my superpower, we’re going through a whole thing with all of our staff, where we’re recording videos of our staff and asking what their superpowers are and blah blah blah. It’s a content program that we’re putting together to help show what kind of company we are. But my superpower in reality is extreme laziness. When I say extreme laziness, people say, well, you’re not really that lazy. I would much rather be swimming in the pool with my son. I’d much rather be traveling the world.

Jeffro (06:53.621)
Hey

Andy Seeley (07:04.174)
I’d much rather be spending time with family and friends than working on the business, right? And that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy working on the business, but I do have things that are of higher priority than working, right? But knowing that and understanding that really allows me to go, do I really, should I be doing this? Do I really need to be doing this? is there somebody on my team who could be doing it better? And getting to that point of letting go.

Jeffro (07:15.158)
Yeah, it’s priorities.

Andy Seeley (07:33.454)
And going through all the things that you have to do each day and really rating those as to, I better off hiring somebody else to do this? Or should I be giving this to a team member? Is a really good process to really kickstart that off. And ultimately, I always come down to there’s a number of things as a CEO that only you really can do, that you can’t hire somebody else to do it, right?

Those are the things that you need to be spending time on because if you’re not, they’re not getting done, right? If you’re busy executing and servicing customers, which is not a bad thing to be thinking about, the CEO stuff probably isn’t getting done, which means that your company is floundering, typically.

Jeffro (08:21.515)
Well, I like the way that you kind of position that whole thing because it’s really about letting go of that ego, right? Okay, maybe somebody can’t do it quite as good as me, but they could still probably do a good job. Maybe they could do it better, right? Or not being greedy, like, I want to keep every dollar in this business. And you’re actually, by doing this and letting go of some stuff, you’re actually being true to the priorities you say you have. Because a lot of people say, my family is my priority. But then if you look at their calendar, it doesn’t reflect that.

So by actually handing stuff off, you’re allowing your priorities to take their proper position in your life.

Andy Seeley (08:55.886)
Exactly. And you said something, Jeff Rowe, just before we got on, which is you have a goal to get rid of bad websites from the planet. A lot of those bad websites are made by people that cannot let go. The sole proprietors, owners of businesses, and they’re like, I’ll just build this myself. And they build them themselves. And really, they need to be hiring Jeff Rowe and his team to get this website right, not building it themselves.

Jeffro (09:02.75)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Seeley (09:25.134)
And the cost and the expertise that you can bring to the table is so superior than anything that they could do. And the last opportunity that, hey, I’m in control. This is my baby. I’m going to build this website thinking, I like to be in control of everything. How much money are they possibly losing by having a substandard first experience that a client’s having with your business by coming to your website? We all know websites now is that first introduction, right?

Jeffro (09:55.058)
Yeah.

Andy Seeley (09:55.462)
And that’s a really good example of kind of like priority things that maybe, maybe that’s a $3 thing that is a little bit more expensive, but you definitely shouldn’t be doing it. It’s not $500 an hour.

Jeffro (10:10.153)
Right, websites are interesting too because people, a lot of people don’t see the value in paying more for that better website, right? They just see the dollar signs and they’re like, okay, I can do that myself, right? But think back to like food, you know, can you cook your own fancy meal at home? Like you could try to make your own beef Wellington. How’s it going to turn out? Like, sure, you did it, great, you made beef Wellington. But you could also go have Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant cook it for you, you’re going to pay a lot more for it, but it’s going to be way better than yours, right? And that’s the goal of the thing. So you might as well look at it that way. Like pay somebody who’s going to get the result that you want for a website is so central to all your marketing. So you need to get it right.

Andy Seeley (10:53.582)
I always look at it this way. Beef Wellington is a really good example because the preparation, the time it takes to actually make a Beef Wellington is way longer. I love Beef Wellingtons by the way. know when you go to Vegas and you go to his pub and you have the Beef Wellington? It’s so good. But making one Beef Wellington, because it’s like a roll, right? It takes hours, hours to make it, right? I get on a list, I turn up, get in there.

Jeffro (11:06.077)
Yeah.

Jeffro (11:15.145)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Seeley (11:21.944)
They turn their tables really fast in that place. I’m in and out in an hour and I’m gone and I’ve had a wonderful meal. Sure, I’ve had a little bit extra for it, but it’s the time. So the amount of time that I might spend on, like if I’m not a good web developer, and I think I’m going to just do it myself to save myself money, not only have I lost maybe the sales of people that look at it go, jeez, this doesn’t seem like a really great well organized business, but also maybe you spend a week doing it, right? Like a week in real hours, like 40 hours to do it, where you and your team might put together something amazing in half the time. Or let’s say it takes a month to get it done because you’ve got lots of things happening. During that month, I can be working on other stuff. I can use that whole week that I would have spent trying to build a website poorly on things that I can actually make more money out of it. I can do more things for it. And that is the big thing when it comes to that goal of working towards having a business that runs itself. Get people who are better than you at all the different things that you need done. Look at the value of the things that they’re bringing. Is it something that you have to be involved in and try to get out of those things and get really expert? So doesn’t mean you don’t bother with it.

If I was hiring you to do my website, I’m still involved. You’re still sending through approvals. I’m still talking to you. We’re still having conversations. I’m just having my input of what I want. And then I’m able to go off and do the other work that I need to do, which actually will help me pay for the website. So yeah, there you go. Bring it all the way around.

Jeffro (13:09.961)
Full circle there. So here’s the question. What would you say to the business owner who says, all right, I get that. I know I need to hand stuff off, but there’s not enough money in the business right now for me to pay someone. And they feel stuck, like they’re in a cycle and they can’t get out of it. What’s your recommendation for them?

Andy Seeley (13:26.941)
So a couple of things I would go through with that is actually look at the marketing. Why do you not have enough business? We have a lot in the kids activity center around, hear that a lot, right? So I can’t make enough, I don’t make enough money, I can’t hire enough staff because I’m not making enough money to do it. Oftentimes that is because they’re not doing any marketing, right? It’s usually always the case. Two, they’re scared of losing customers. So they don’t want to raise prices, they don’t want to charge what they should be charging. So they’ve got no demand and they’re scared of raising prices, which, you because they’re scared of people leaving, which typically means you’re in a deficiency kind of mindset, which means that you’re trying to charge as little as possible. And that tends to be the answer, right? It’s like, yeah. So what I always say to them, and it might sound self-serving, but is you need to be getting, you need to be bringing that demand up.

Jeffro (14:12.219)
doesn’t scale. Yeah.

Andy Seeley (14:23.862)
So your suppliers here and your demand is here. It allows you to raise prices. It allows you to be able to do, you know, bring in people to help. Right. But typically in my experience, people that say, Hey, I can’t afford to hire anybody. They’re actually not doing anything to get customers in. Well, they’re doing very little to get customers in. Or if they are, they’re knocking on doors themselves because they’re doing too much themselves. Right. There is this transition period, which is a little bit difficult, which is where some businesses fail and some businesses really struggle to bite through it. And there is a period between where you’re transitioning from being a contractor, an individual, to being a business. And that can be a difficult thing to navigate, but it almost always is based on pricing is incorrect, demand is low.

and doing nothing about fixing those.

Jeffro (15:25.522)
That makes sense. And I’ve seen that too, but you put that into words very well. think people will connect with that. Now, since we’re talking about this and kind of feeling overwhelmed and getting your time back, I wanted to talk about your CRM, CHI, because that’s an AI powered tool that can help you get some of your time and sanity back while you’re trying to ramp up marketing or anything. So can you tell us a little bit about how that works?

Andy Seeley (15:46.99)
Yeah, so Kai kind of came from, you know, a lot of conversations, especially with kids activity centers. We have a few other, we have about 110 clients and we’ve had local banks, we’ve had roofing companies and so forth, but I would say 95 % of our clients are kids activity centers. And, you know, Where that came from was knowing that when a lead or when you’re doing marketing and you get an inquiry, responding very quickly is critical, right? So there’s a lot of data that shows if you don’t respond within the first, sorry, if you do respond within the first five minutes of a lead coming in, you got a 400 % bigger chance of that person becoming a customer that spends money with you. So responding very quickly is critical, right? Now that means, and that’s 24 seven, so.

What we also see is a lot of leads, especially in the kids activity center realm, we see a lot of leads come through and you probably see this with the trades as well. A lot of leads coming through on the weekends, a lot of leads coming through at night because people are sitting down from the couch, not happy with the deck that they’re looking at outside or maybe they’re sitting in the deck at the end of the day or whatever. And they’re looking at it and going, I’m not happy with this. they’re going through and they see your ad pop up because they’re checking Facebook or whatever or Instagram and those leads come through at say nine o’clock at night on a Sunday. Oftentimes with a small business, that lead is not being addressed until the morning the next day. Most times what Kai does is actually responds to it like within 30 seconds of that person reaching out and saying, hey, I’m interested. And it actually has a very regular conversation. So it feels very, it’s not an automated message. It’s like, Hey, you know,

You can name it. Hey, it’s Jeff Rowe reaching out to you to see what we can do to, you know, get you on to the books and you showed an interest, whatever you want. could actually, but it has a regular conversation to the point that we actually had a client of ours actually in Riverside, California, who has a big powerhouse gymnastics gym and they use Kai. They called it Julie, right? So Kai is called Julie there.

Andy Seeley (18:05.758)
Julie was having a conversation with a grandma that was signing up her son, sorry, her grandson to ninja classes, right? Ninja gymnastics classes. And Julie and this grandma was having such a good little conversation that the grandma started sending photos of her family to Julie. And Julie was responding with, how lovely, this is so nice, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, Julie gets the grandma signed up to come in and walk through the door.

And the grandma said, yeah, the grandma says, I’m so excited to meet you, Julie. It was such a lovely conversation. And Julie says, you know what? I would love, and we literally have this written, we actually made it into an ad. I’d love to be able to meet you, but I’m not real, so I won’t be able to. But one of the team will be able to meet with you. And the grandma was like, Hannah, what? So that, and Julie actually had a conversation. I’m an AI, I’m not actually a real person, but I’m very happy that you’re going to come in and meet

Jeffro (18:36.365)
She wants to meet Julie, right?

Jeffro (18:57.541)
Ha ha ha.

Andy Seeley (19:04.238)
team, you’re to really enjoy them. And the grandma ended up saying, you know what, this experience of signing up was so cool and interesting. I’m really looking forward to coming in and meeting the team behind this, you and the AI. So the AI basically, you know, communicated with the grandma, built rapport, built a connection, took her information, scheduled her in on a Google calendar for her to come through the door and actually explained hey, I’m not actually a real person, but I’m sure the team will be happy to meet with you. And the grandma was just overwhelmed and delighted by that, which is a word that I like to use a lot is technology now is to such a level that we can actually start working on delighting people, which is the opposite to anger in people, because that also affects things like reviews and comments and referrals and memory and people feeling, you know, touched by stuff, right? Being delighted. In a world where there is very little delight and then oftentimes we’re feeling a little bit under the weather. It’s kind of an exciting thing, right?

Jeffro (20:14.146)
Yeah. And I think we’re going through growing pains in a lot of areas with all this change in technology, because some people are claiming they can do stuff like this, but they’re still using like a decision tree where it’s just like, they had a positive reply. Say this, check our knowledge base. like, it’s just, those are the ones that frustrate you. But based on the example you gave us, like this is agentic AI. It’s acting as a person or an agent in a role and it’s connected to the calendar. So it can actually sign the person up and get the next steps in motion. And so we’re going to see a lot more of that in other roles too. And that’s just going to kind of be the trend. So I think it’s important that business owners realize this is happening now. It’s possible now, and you need to start embracing it.

Andy Seeley (20:55.8)
And I think in the lead gen business, and especially in the markets and the industries that we serve, Jephro, I think it’s really, really important because a lot of times these businesses, I mean, well, a lot of times they have no CRM at all, but oftentimes, at least in the kids activity center realm, they do actually have a CRM, which is basically a class management system, right? Those are great for people that have engaged with your business and our customers, right?

And lot of businesses have CRMs for people that become customers. Very few businesses have CRMs for people that aren’t customers yet or have just shown a little bit of interest. And the beauty of CHI especially is no matter how that person responds to you, will capture that data, connect it with a profile, and it’ll slowly build kind of like this profile arc of this client. So it’ll be able to say, hey, when Jeffero reaches out to us, He’s reached out to us via Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and text. And all of that will be surrounding you. And then it will look at it and go, but Jeffery really does respond and like to talk through text. He’s not so good on these other things, even though he’s reached out to us on those things. And it will pick those things that you are much more likely to respond to. We have a system called the Amplify method. It’s our marketing system. And basically the, the, the amplify method works around, marketing where the client is promoted to reach out to, sorry, the prospect is, is promoted to reach out to our client in the way that they feel most comfortable. Because we did a lot of research about seven years ago, just before COVID. And what we found is a person is about 300 % more likely to become a customer if they’re communicating the way they’re most comfortable communicating with you, right? So a lot back seven years ago, a lot of times with lead gen, what you would see would be companies forcing people into filling out a form, right? And sending a lead in, you know, an interest. But what we found is if you can see an ad and you can see, I can call, I can text, I can message, I can email, or I can fill out a form, and I get to choose much, much higher.

Andy Seeley (23:19.062)
likelihood of getting a lead and much lower costs of that lead. And then obviously when you’ve got the CRM behind that, know, being able to handle all those different methods of people communicating rather than somebody having to manage all of those different parts, it kind of becomes that hub that allows it to be, to turn into a real powerful engine. And that’s what we’re seeing now. Now, three, three years ago, we didn’t have that the CHI and the AI that are similar to it are really revolutionizing that lead generation model.

Jeffro (23:52.887)
Yeah, and I think I’m excited about that. And I hope other people are too, because on the one hand, they’re like, worried that somebody is going to get replaced. But if this becomes accessible, more affordable, then why would you not want that? So I think it’s a great thing.

Andy Seeley (24:05.772)
Yeah, yeah, I think with small business and especially in the trades, not there’s no one doing that. It’s it’s the guy running around in his white truck with his cell phone trying to stay on top of it. And he’s missing opportunity after opportunity, especially those guys that spend quite a lot of money with things like Angie’s List, where Angie’s List, you you go to Angie’s List and you sign up for it. You’re getting a lead. There’s four other competitors that are getting that same lead. You’re not you’re buying a shared lead, not not a a you only.

Jeffro (24:23.747)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Seeley (24:36.086)
So usually the guy who wins, the guy who responds the fastest. You need to have the AI to actually get that over the line.

Jeffro (24:44.449)
Yeah. It’s just amazing. There are so many opportunities here. And I really hope people listening are excited about trying some of this stuff. And I will say, it’s good if you’re brand new. Yes, do it manually first so you understand the process. And that way, when you’re setting up your AI, you can help train it and give it guidelines so that it is a good experience for the customer and doesn’t end up being like one of those ones we talked about earlier that’s very stilted and awkward. But yeah, once you get a handle on it.

Andy Seeley (25:11.63)
And I think you just said something really, really, really important. We have clients who love our AI. Like most of our clients love our AI. We’ve had a couple of clients that don’t, right? I’ll be honest with you. And those are always people that don’t put any effort into it, right? And I always say to them, and I say to all of our clients now, and it seems to be resonating because we don’t get this very often anymore. It did happen at the beginning. I’m like, well, when you hire a person,

Jeffro (25:13.175)
then you can ramp it up with AI.

Andy Seeley (25:41.358)
like a flesh and bone person, do you train them? Do you teach them anything or do they just have to slip in and know everything? Right? There’s this fallacy and I think this is where people kind of like don’t quite get it. There’s this fallacy that you you buy an AI or you buy a service like that and it just works out of the box and it should be working perfectly. The reality is you’ve got to train it. And you did say, you mentioned that you’ve got to train it because your business is slightly different little idiosyncrasies that are important to you. There’s all sorts of different things that have to be done to make sure that it’s operating in the best way for you and your business. We always say to people, if you get an AI, work really hard on training it, put loads of effort into it, maybe even more so than you would if you had a human. Because once you’ve got it right, it works 24-7 consistently at that high level and you don’t actually have to put a lot of time into it. does take a little couple of months right up front, but once you’ve got it down, it’s magic.

Jeffro (26:45.068)
Totally worth it. Well, we’re coming up on the end of our time here. So I’m going to start wrapping us up, Andy. I really appreciate you being on the show. It’s always refreshing to hear from someone who’s walked the walk, built a business with intention, you’re actively implementing AI into your business. And a lot of people talk about it, but you’re doing it. So guys, if you’re listening and you want to connect with Andy or learn more about Creatively Disruptive and Ashworth Strategy, check out the links in the show notes. And while you’re there, you can grab a free demo of CHI, especially if you’re ready to get out of the weeds, get back into growth mode, hand that off so you can free yourself up a little bit. All right, I got one last question for you, Andy. If you could whisper one piece of advice into the ear of every small business owner the moment they decide to go all in, what would that be?

Andy Seeley (27:28.12)
Value your time. Put a value on your time and be serious about it. If you really, truly value your time and you build a team around that as kind of like a guiding light, what will end up happening is your ship. You’ll spend more time looking at where you want to take your ship or your business, which is, let’s use the analogy of a ship.

You’ll spend more time charting the course of where you want to go rather than running around, swabbing the decks and pulling up the sails. So value your time and look to where you want to go. And if you do that, you’re going to make much better decisions. You’re still going to have failures. There’s still going to be problems, but you’ll have a much stronger chance of having some real good success.

Jeffro (28:15.872)
Awesome, I fully agree, great advice. And I always need to be reminded of that too, because it’s easy to get sucked back into things. We all do. So thanks again, Andy. If you guys found this episode helpful, please take a few seconds, leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It really helps us reach more business owners who want to dominate online without burning out. Well, that’s it for now. Thanks again, Andy, and we’ll see you all next time.

Andy Seeley (28:20.846)
All right, we’ll get it, we’ll get it.

Andy Seeley (28:37.272)
Thank you.