The Founder's Trap: Mark Skalla on Why Marketing Growth Breaks Operations

Mark Skalla: 0:00

It feels good to be the hero, right? It feels good to save the day. It feels good to come in and provide something that you know nobody else can do. And I now believe wholeheartedly that it’s those same processes and systems that actually give me my freedom and give other founders their freedom. Worst for founders to do is to throw a person at it. You have one of two problems. Either you’re not growing fast enough that things are breaking or you’re growing so fast that things are breaking and either one that I can help with. Of your 100%, but they do it all the time they never miss is far better than you spending your time at 100%. You’re not accountable for the process. You’re accountable for the outcome. Welcome to Digital Dominance.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 0:38

On this podcast, I bring you expert tactics and tools to help you turn your online presence into your biggest sales asset. If you want someone on your team to help you navigate the world of digital marketing, head over to frobro .com. What if the marketing that got you here is the same force that’s quietly breaking your operations. Marc Scolle sees that pattern every week. He’s the founder of Fulcrum Fractional and the Amazon bestselling author of The Leverage Point. After building and exiting a seven figure digital agency and running marketing for thousands of clients, he watched great campaigns expose weak systems, broken processes, and a founder stuck in every seat. Now as a fractional COO and CMO, he installs what he calls the Fulcrum Blueprint. So founder-led service businesses can scale without all that chaos. So in the next 25 minutes or so, Mark’s going to help us unpack the founder’s trap, why marketing growth and operational breakdowns often travel together, and how leadership accountability has to change as you grow with, you know, specific things that a service business owner changes that you guys can make this week. So, Mark, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Mark Skalla: 1:42

Thank you very much for having me on the show, Jeffro.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 1:44

Absolutely. Now, Mark, you built and edited a seven-figure digital marketing agency. What did you learn from that experience?

Mark Skalla: 1:52

I learned that I didn’t have any of the answers that I’m now providing to other founders, which is quite hilarious to me.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 1:58

So you’ve figured out these lessons in retrospect, looking back in hindsight, is that what you’re saying?

Mark Skalla: 2:04

Indeed, correct. What I think my biggest takeaway from running my agency was I often associated more processes, more rules, more guidelines, more systems as something that took away my freedom as someone who ran an agency. And I now believe wholeheartedly that it’s those same processes and systems that actually give me my freedom and give other founders their freedom. And it’s that switch in mindset that I wish I had known earlier in my career, but some educations we have to pay for somewhat time, some with money, some with blood, sweat and tears. And I think that’s why I got so excited and switched and pivoted from my marketing background into getting into ops is because I wanted to help other founders realize that, hey, you don’t have to be the answer to everything. Sure, when you’re starting a business, you’re often the answer. You’re the one doing things because we don’t have enough money to support a payroll, to have somebody else do it. But as we grow our businesses, it doesn’t matter what business that you’re in, we’re often not setting it up in a way that’s going to provide us freedom, whether that’s financially, whether that’s time, whether that’s capability and what we’re focused on. And that’s what I love being able to impart to other founders.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 3:17

I mean, it sounds like you just described the founders trap, right? Where the founder is initially doing everything and then the company grows and they keep trying to do everything.

Mark Skalla: 3:26

That’s exactly correct. And that’s it in a nutshell, right? There’s some psychology, if we ever want to go down that path, and I’m happy to talk about that. It feels good to be the hero, right? It feels good to save the day. It feels good to come in and provide something that you know nobody else can do, but that’s often what’s keeping founders from doing the thing that they’re either really great at or that the business really needs them to do. And as we grow, each person we add to an organization, that creates more complexity. We’ve got to worry about handoffs from one department to another, accountability on, hey, who made sure that it crossed this line successfully and did we document that? And do we have visibility on that as founders? And all of those things start falling into exactly right what you said the founder trap which is we’ve just been doing it this way for so long that’s how the system works but it doesn’t mean that’s how it needs to work in order for businesses to grow.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 4:20

So obviously I were hinting at how great marketing can expose weak systems but it’s an indirect effect right so can you share a specific example where maybe a campaign worked well and then in some ways it made the business worse because the cracks were exposed?

Mark Skalla: 4:36

Sure. And I’ll put a caveat on that if you don’t mind, Jeffro. Knowing where your cracks are and knowing where things are breaking doesn’t necessarily make it worse. It actually gives us the information that we need in order to be able to fix the things that have to be fixed in order for us to grow. But here’s a great scenario. And we can go back and there are specific examples in my career where I worked with a client when I was running my agency and the marketing pushed their client acquisition to 5x or 10x in a short period of time. And if you saw 10x the number of leads or 5x the number of clients come in, in two weeks or three weeks, something usually breaks. And usually it’s I don’t have the volume in order to be able to onboard that many customers. I don’t have the capability to deliver my service or my product that quickly. And that starts exposing, okay, let’s look at what systems we have in place that are enabling us to either onboard customers or deliver customers. but really good marketing, which is part of my career, and that’s what I love telling people that I work with, you have one of two problems. Either you’re not growing fast stuff that things are breaking, or you’re growing so fast that things are breaking and either one that I can help with. So when those things start getting exposed, those are the problems that we can usually track back to, there’s not a good process in place. Processes don’t always live on paper. Sometimes they live in people’s heads and sometimes it’s just tribal knowledge, right? Not even one person has the entire process. And that’s okay when we’re starting to grow our business. The number one purpose of a business is to figure out how to survive. And for those first couple of years, and sometimes for some businesses that’s several hundred thousand dollars in revenue or maybe up to a million dollars in revenue, we’re just doing whatever it takes as a founder to make sure that the glue sticks together and the business survives another day, another month, another year. We’re supporting payroll. Our customers and our clients are happy and they’re able to give us what we need to. But when we really start putting that map together and say, hey, at the end of this year or the end of three years, I want to be able to hit this benchmark for profitability or revenue. Well, then we start needing those systems to be able to set us free from what’s holding us back. And marketing will very quickly, marketing or sales, very quickly start exposing where some of those gaps are. Sometimes it’s, I don’t have enough revenue on hand in order to buy the thing that I’m selling and I need to figure out how to be able to switch that. And all right, what’s our process for that? How do we take deliverables from our clients and reinvest it into our inventory? How do we grow that at a scale that’s going to support? So all of that starts coming into ops and systems and processes, and those are the things that start setting founders free by sitting down and saying, hey, let’s look at the biggest problems that we have at achieving our goals and breaking those down to the things that are actually more deliverable. This is all high-level stuff. If you ever want to jump down into a very specific one.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 7:19

Yeah, sure. And one thing that I was imagining while you’re talking about this is, you know, it’s called a trap for a reason Because it’s easy to get stuck there and I would like to hear your thoughts on how to Make that shift and transition because I have the cartoon image in my mind, you know Like working in a factory suddenly the pipes start leaking here and here I’m sticking finger in this one this I’m working the machine with my foot That’s not solving the problem. I’m just trying to stave off the disaster and I like I think a lot of founders are doing that You know jumping to working a hundred hour weeks just to handle the extra influx Rather than stepping back going across to get the the pump or the flex tape or whatever I need to wake up a friend to help me. How do you switch that because you know if you step away? Oh bad things are gonna happen.

Mark Skalla: 8:06

That’s a really good point and and I’ll say what even more What’s worse for founders to do is to throw a person at it because throwing a person is a temporary relief But it’s our very first instinct. I’m gonna hire an executive assistant I’m going to hire some sort of project manager. I’m going to hire some sales manager or marketing manager, and we haven’t actually fixed the real problem that’s underlying. So I’m going to use a word that I cringe at myself, and I know that all of your listeners are going to say, that doesn’t sound very fun, but there’s so much meaning behind it. It starts with something simple that I call a time audit. It’s just, let’s talk about how many hours a week are you working, Jeff? Everybody knows that. Everyone I’ve ever worked with knows, I’m working 60 hours a week, I’m working 80, I’m working 100. Some of those really crazy people are working over 100 hours a week. And I say, okay, so we’ve got a number. Let’s start looking into the data behind that number. Let’s start breaking down. How does your, let’s call it 60 or 70 hours a week, how does that break down? And we start categorizing the kind of tasks that we’re doing, right? What kind of tasks are we spending our week on? First we can put them in a bucket of firefighting. I have no idea what’s going to come up, but if I spend three or four hours of my day of firefighting, whatever issues are coming up, that’s going to be something that we’ll dive into a little bit later. But all right, so we spend half of our our time every day firefighting. What else are we doing? I’ll have to review invoices that are either later behind from customers that haven’t paid or have to approve proposals that are going out because I want to make sure that it’s done correctly. What we’re doing is we’re getting a very factual outline of how founders are spending their time. And usually there’s three things that we can do with every single one of those buckets. We can delegate it to somebody else. And you can delegate it one of two ways. You can delegate it by telling someone, this is how I do it. Or you can delegate it by writing an SOP and someone has a structure on how to do something. You can just delete it and say, I’ve actually just been doing this, but I’m not sure that it brings any value to the company, to my life, to the business. It’s just something I’ve always been done and there’s usually 10 or 15% of tasks that sit on founders plate that we’ve been doing just because we’ve always been doing it, but it doesn’t actually provide value. We’re just not going to do it anymore. And that can be scary, but more often than not, when we delete the things that don’t need to be done, we’re freeing up time and bandwidth, et cetera. So it starts with that very simple accountability. How much time are you working? And let’s start putting that time into buckets on what it is that we’re doing with our time. And even if we don’t know, it usually only takes, I’d say, 20 or 30 minutes of real conversation and honesty to be able to figure out, hey, here’s my hours and here’s where I’m spending it. And you’ll usually find in that exercise one or two things that, man, if I could get this off my plate, that’s like 15, 20 plus hours a week that I’m spending on that. And those are the gems where we start trying to build in systems, automation, processes, accountability, and that other very good metric, which is KPI. How do we measure success for this? How do we know if this is being done if we decide it to somebody else? So that’s a big fear as a founder. And I know that fear because I’ve had it many times before in my career. If I give this to somebody else, how do I know that they’re doing it the way that I would do it? And I’m going to leave a very powerful gem that somebody said to me, if you did this task, whatever it might be at 100%. You’re just perfect at it. You’ve been doing it forever. Nobody can do it at 100%, but you can. And you teach somebody to do it and they are only 80% as good as you are. Somebody doing a task, 80% of your 100%, but they do it all the time and they never miss, is far better than you spending your time at 100%. That makes sense.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 11:51

Absolutely. I mean, a lot of this sounds like Dan Martell, you know, doing the time calendar audit and that 80% is done by somebody else is 100% awesome. So I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap there if people have heard of what he’s saying and what you’re saying. So I want to hear more about the core idea behind Leverage Point, why you decided it needed to be a book and kind of take us through some of the different, like there’s modules, right? How this actually breaks down and how you tackle this stuff because I like the structure that you’ve given to your Fulcrum Blueprint. I was wondering if you could walk through the different modules for us.

Mark Skalla: 12:27

So the Fulcrum Blueprint is me taking my knowledge about how I work with clients. Absolutely. It’s going through a lot of these practical exercises that are repeatable for me when I work with clients because not everybody’s ready to work with a fractional, right? And I understood that when I started my fractional company. And I said, well, Mark, if everyone’s not willing and ready to work with a fractional yet, you’ve got to have a framework and some tools and some exercises that founders would be able to get benefit from. That then later, expertise might open up the opportunity for someone who’s done this before to actually help. So that’s what the Fulcrum Blueprint was built around, giving you these exercises like a time audit and saying, here’s how you can in 30 minutes, reclaim 10 or 15% of your time every week, if you sit down and do the exercise honestly, and it talks to you about how to categorize where you’re spending your hours. Then it starts talking about the very next step. Like once I have in my hours and I understand where I’m spending my time, then what do I do with this information mark? And then you work on something that’s very simple, right? The delegate, delete or keep, right? Sometimes we look at tasks and they need to be on our desk. They need to be something that we’re actually personally doing. But it helps us understand the priorities of where can I save some time? Where can I get some responsibilities off my desk and off my plate? And it uses about probably 15 different exercises like that as you’re going through. How if I hand off a task, how do I create the right SOP? How do I know that somebody else is doing the things that need to be done? How do I set up a dashboard so that someone’s reporting the right KPI to show me, not they’re doing their work, but the actual outputs being done of what I need to be doing. And then in the later modules, there’s five of them in the Fulcrum Blueprint. The later modules, we talk a little bit higher level about things like, are we teaching the people who are usually our managers or if we are at a size where we have a leadership team, are we teaching people how we make our decisions? Because that is a big part of as we’re growing as organizations, if we’re not teaching people on our staff that are making decisions for us, like our managers and our leadership team, how we make decisions, well, guess what? But you’re always going to be in that seat of five people or 15 people or 30 people running to you saying, Jeff, I don’t know how to do this because we handed off the responsibility of doing the work. We never imparted to them. This is how I make a decision on what’s good or bad. But when we do that, magic happens in our organization. People understand this is what good looks like. This is what bad looks like. And I know that he’s looking at it through that lens. People start making decisions exactly like you teach them to. Now, that’s a little bit later in the process, but all of these things that are trying to help build up that repertoire of, can I build a business that if I walked away from for two months, the business would run. People that are accountable for the processes know the processes. They know how to report on what’s being done in a meaningful way and not just throwing a number on a scorecard. And they know how decisions are made. So shoot, Jeff, I was not here today. I have to make the decision because a client’s very upset or proposal has to go out today. this is the key framing that I’ve been taught to. Now I’m able to do this in an act. And some things, yeah, as founders, we’re going to keep off their plate and do that. But for the most part, that’s exactly what the blueprint is.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 15:43

Got it. Mark in a bottle. All right. So I was asking about, you know, you offer module two for free to listeners. Now, I was curious why it’s module two instead of module one. What’s in that module?

Mark Skalla: 15:54

Module two actually gives some real work that founders can do and get some value out of. Module 1 is a lot about mindset framing and moving founders into the direction that I understand I’m going to have to do some things that might be a little bit uncomfortable, right? I’m going to have to let go of some things that I’ve been doing that I feel like I can only do. And there’s less exercises in module 1 that I think provide immediately value than there are module 2, which is why I said, you know what? I’d like to offer something for free. I don’t usually present very many clients that I even have the Fulcrum Blueprint. That’s something that I mostly provide to them after we’ve been working for 90 days. And I say, hey, you know what? I follow a structure just like I’m trying to install for your business. And we filled all of this stuff out through our work together. Now you have almost a core blueprint for your business of all the work that we’ve been doing. And here’s some exercises if you want to repeat them, because as businesses grow, nothing’s really static. The problems that we solve this year, or today, or this month, They’re going to repeat themselves in a different disguise in the future. And it’s learning the skill sets as a founder of, aha, I have this tool on how to address this. I feel my time slipping away. I went from 40 hours back to 60 hours. Let me figure out how to do that tool and that exercise again that I learned with Mark when we’re working together, or we still are, and be able to go back and claim that time. I’ve got a new employee and something’s not handing off properly between sales and operations or marketing sales, or wherever that might be, delivery and actually execution. Those are the tools that you can use on a regular basis as the business continues to grow because the problems that we have as founders this year or next year are not going to be the same ones that hopefully after growth five years from now, but they’re often solved with the same skill set, the same tools, the same exercises.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 17:45

Got it. So for somebody who’s listening that maybe runs a clinic or home services company or something. What’s a common process breakdown that you see between maybe a million dollars that works and three million dollars that hurts?

Mark Skalla: 17:59

A lot of it comes down to first, number one, we add people without changing our internal processes and accountability. Right. And let’s make this really simple. One of the first people that I think most founders will hire is usually an assistant. And then we usually will try and hire somebody that either helps with deliverability, if that’s our pain point, or they’re going to help with generating demand, which is either sales or marketing. The tissue and the sinew that I keep referencing in there is that we’re often better, founder-wise, at documenting a process that we’re familiar with or we’ve done before. The actual sales process or the actual service delivery process or interacting with customers, when we add more people, we’re adding more connectors. Now, I’ve got Larry, Larry, Joe and Bob, but we never really figured out how Larry, Joe and Bob amongst themselves figure out who’s accountable for what. And when Larry does his job, how do I know that he’s handed it off to Bob? And those are the things that usually break between 1 million and 3 million. We’re adding more people, but we’re not evolving our processes. And suddenly accountability starts increasing the gap between being done and being done really well. We’ve We’ve got departments that are following processes that worked at a million dollars and worked at whatever that might be, 100 customers or 1 ,000 customers. But when we grow to 3 million, and that’s 300 customers or 3 ,000 customers, there’s more percentage that are falling in between those cracks. Somebody didn’t follow up. We had something that didn’t fit our criteria and meant to be followed up and it didn’t. We’ve got those extraneous cases of, I’ve got maybe an unhappy or unsatisfied customer. How do I deal with those particular things? Or maybe it’s a payroll thing. Maybe people are starting to pay late and that’s the responsibility of both the accounting team to flag but it’s also the accountability of the sales team to be able to reach out and coordinate and get that person on a payment plan as Companies grow clients grow revenue grows and adding those people That is the biggest problem that I see over and over and over again is where we’re keeping the same processes We’re keeping the same corporate store cards and KPIs that we’re measuring and they’re not accounting for more people being on a team, and that means more communication, more documentation of who’s doing what, et cetera. The next thing on the list that I would also say, if you want a secondary, would be as we continue to grow, we get more information about what works and what doesn’t work. And if we’re not applying that information between figuring out, hey, now that over the last 500 customers in two and a half years or $2 million in revenue going from one to three, We’re not eliminating the things that don’t work and doubling down on the things that do work. That’s going to hit us in most likely the most sensitive area, which is profitability. So by nature, we have to evolve. Our businesses always evolve. Did somebody go back and evolve how we are acquiring customers and how we’re talking to customers and what our marketing and our website said, or are we still collecting those people that we realized over the course of the last $2 million, we don’t really want anymore. We’ve got to edge those out. So taking the information that we learn as founders and as business owners and applying it so that we’re not continuing to attract, we actually modify away. That’s the second biggest difference between that one and three million. And then it gets more complicated between three and five and five and 10, et cetera.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 21:22

Yeah. And something interesting is obviously we have to create processes, right? But I think you also need a process to improve the processes, right? because when you make it the first time, you’re not going to get it right. You’re not going to realize all the things that are in your head that might seem common sense to you, that you didn’t think to put in the list because, well, of course, you would adjust the template if the person had this slight difference. Like, okay, how do we actually find when something does break or go wrong in the future? How do we catch it, update the process and retrain or whatever so that we actually improve over time instead of just, you know, hutter along?

Mark Skalla: 21:59

So I’ll give you a magical short bullet point for any founders that’s listening that started doing documentation. And they’re realizing just like you said, documentation has a shelf life, right? If we write an SOP, it’s not always going to be the same SOP. And if it is, we’re actually probably not helping ourselves. And that comes down to accountability as we’re expressing it to our leaders. And I’m going to talk specifically about founders when they start having leaders. And they can just be managers. They don’t have to be executives. but it matters even more if you’re starting to build an executive team. And that’s enabling people to not just be in charge of, here’s the SOP and doing this as part of your job, we make them in charge of the outcome. The reason we have an SOP in place is to teach somebody how to do something. But I’m going to give that to you as a framework employee number one, let’s call him John. John, I’m going to give you the framework. This is the process that works. I want you to be responsible for the outcome. Clients need to have their product or service delivered on within X number of days. And I want client satisfaction scores if we’re sending those out and asking for testimonials, which we should. I want those to be at four and a half stars. Now we’re starting to craft a vernacular with our team And so, you know, you’re not accountable for the process. You’re accountable for the outcome. And what you’ll realize is that good leaders start evolving the process because they realize, well, now I’ve got everyone’s using AI. Now I’ve got Claude and I’ve got Chat GPT and I’ve got Gemini. I don’t have to do it the way that you were doing it three years ago, old man boss. I’m going to do it a faster way. That’s great. Every quarter, we update processes to make sure that something is written. That way, if employee number one, I’m going to do it faster. I used to say got hit by a bus, but that seems pretty negative, weren’t they? It’s employee number one wins the lottery and decides he’s going to go work somewhere else. We have a quarterly timestamp of saying, well, we know that this was updated no longer than last quarter. And that’s part of quarterly reviews. I sit down and I say, let’s make sure that we’re doing quarterly reviews. That’s our chance to check in of saying, how are we involved the process? Because you’re not responsible for performing the process. I could pay a low level person to do that. You’re on my leadership team. You’re a manager. the process needs to evolve. What have we done this last quarter in order to evolve that? That’s where we start the conversations when quarterly everyone raises their hand and says, I’d like a pay bump. All right, let’s talk about how the process has evolved the last three months with you owning the output of the process. And when we start building that leadership mindset in our managers or our executive team, it’s quantitative how much people will go and they’ll take something you were convinced three years ago when you were doing it, it took a week. Well, they’re getting it done in four hours now. And you’re like, well, if that’s the process that works and that’s what we’re using, I’m glad I made them responsible for the output. And those things show up in the quarterly conversations and they show up on dashboards. When we build good dashboards, and that’s kind of like, if we’re going back to the Fulcrum Blueprint, that’s usually stuff I talk about after working with a couple of months, we start working on scorecards and KPIs and we wanna make sure Well, they, they. Well, not somebody that’s very valuable. We need people to do the work, but what we want is to elevate the people that are understanding the work saying, I actually think there’s a faster way to do this or there’s a better way to do this. So there’s a way to do this and this at the same time. That’s when our processes start really evolving. And that’s how we ensure that they do is by making our employees accountable for the output and figuring out how to measure that. Then they start evolving all on their own and we just touch on it every quarter and say, very valuable, we need to work, is to elevate our understanding the of work saying, there’s Everything fits together.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 25:45

Right, now that makes a lot of sense. And yes, more stuff’s out of your hands. You won’t know every detail. And that’s the point because you can’t know everything as you grow. So that’s a feature, not a bug. I’m also glad you mentioned AI and automation in there and there do use those as tools. And for the past few years, that’s been the majority use case of AI is making things go faster. But now as we’re starting to have AI agents, now this will be probably the last thing we touched on today, curious to hear your thoughts because people are starting to use agents as employees effectively, right, as a virtual executive assistant, or even doing some fulfillment if they’re a web developer or there are certain roles that can be very virtualized and handled. Do you feel that those AI agents can take on ownership of the outcome like you’ve described? Or do you have to manage them differently than you would a person?

Mark Skalla: 26:40

AI is going to be incredibly interesting to watch over the next five to 10 years because we’re just starting to get, I think from my experience and the people that I’ve worked with, the first or last three years, we’ll call it the first three years of wide AI adoption, people were using AI as just a replacement for Google, right? They were very conversational interactive. I’m going to go and I’m going to ask Claude a question. I’m going to go on out. I’m going to ask ChatGPT a question. It’s going to give me an answer. It might be a complex series of questions and it gives me a report or a template or generates a series of documents, but it was very one-to-one. I’m going to ask, you’re going to deliver. And that wasn’t scalable. And now we’re all getting very familiar with AI agents. AI agents are, it’s an art, right? In order to be able to craft the right amount of information, the right amount of, this is what I want you to do, not this, not this. We’re all learning as a culture on how to get better at doing those sorts of things, but you do need some guidance in order to work with AI. My advice to most people that are trying to use it is absolutely use it, but use it with the understanding that you’re the expert. This is still a tool. I don’t know that we can go give a hammer and say, Hey, Mr. Hammer, I want you to go build a house yet. We’re not there yet. Not with AI, not with automation. And I’ve worked on some pretty complicated automations. I’m not a sidelines guy. I’ve worked with innate in deep into Anthropic’s database on how to be able to create these multiple agent projects so that we’re communicating with different personalities, different objectives. But even then, I think it was within the last couple of days, Anthropic just said, you’re right. In our last model update, we have put in a piece of code that intentionally short changes the work that you’re asking it to do. And it owns it when you say, wait a minute, I asked you to do these 10 things you did eight of them. It’s like, yeah, you’re totally right. We don’t know why anthropic put that in, but we know that AI is still not doing all of the things that we ask it to do. So it does need guidance. What I’d suggest for any business is don’t fall on the sidelines and not use it. But we want to use it with the same thing that we’re doing everything else in our business with guidelines. How can we make this enhance what we’re currently doing and get better thinking, better processes, and obviously get some sort of, I don’t want to say oversight isn’t big brothers watching you, use the same accounts if you can for your entire organization. You would be shocked at how many people aren’t doing that. They say, you know what, if you expense a ChatGPT or a Claude account, we’ll reimburse you. You’ve got 15 employees, you’ve got 15 accounts, but you have no idea what people are working on. If you have the same account, you can actually go and ask Jim and I or GPT, what are some operational gaps that I’m missing as the founder, that we could be able to dial in from all of the different accounts that people are using it for. What are some common conversations that people are asking from a customer perspective that I can improve my FAQs, that I can create an agent chatbot or voice AI that I can start addressing this information. Aggregate the information in a single place and you’ll find that you’re usually five to 10X ahead of your competitors because right now we’ve got just a whole bunch of information that’s scattered everywhere. We’re not leveraging it as a business. If you think, how can I get all the information that people are using AI for in my business in one central location, the amount of gleamed, oh, I didn’t even know that people were asking this 15 times a week. I should probably be able to answer that for my customers up front. Well, I should be able to answer that for my employees up front. That kind of thing really is going to provide a lot of leverage. But AI is awesome. I love it. It’s just not perfect. And we’re all learning kind of business owners and a society, how do I use this tool? I think of it as the escalator in the air. Yeah. It’ll get you to where you’re going faster, even walking at the same speed. You’ve just got to be smart about how you’re using it. It doesn’t have all the answers. It’s 100% fallible. I’ve seen people make huge mistakes when it comes to like, I’m going to give it all my accounting information and it’s going to try and manage our books. And it says, oh yeah, you’re right. I completely ignored those five accounts because then you’re like, whoa, I made decisions based It’s not my quarterly. We’ve got to use a grain of salt. We’ve got to be smart about it because we’re the intelligent ones here. But AI is absolutely an excellent tool for almost any business. I haven’t seen a business that hasn’t been able to leverage it. OK.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 31:01

Well, I appreciate that. I think that makes a lot of sense, using the grain of salt. But thank you for coming on the show today, Mark. This has really been a good breakdown, I think, for listeners who are running their own businesses, maybe who have felt like they’re stuck in that founder’s trap. And hopefully this gives them some language that a lot of people might feel it, but couldn’t diagnose. And so this can help them actually start auditing their calendar, look at things they could delegate and all of that. So if people, if you guys listening walk away with one thing, hopefully it’s to stop pouring fuel on a system that still needs you as the founder in every seat. So try to find the Leverage Point and then build a structure that lets the business run without you at the center of everything. Right. You’re not going to go on vacation tomorrow for six weeks, but make steps in that direction. Mark, where can listeners find you and get your book and get that free module too?

Mark Skalla: 31:54

You can find the book on Amazon and if you don’t read and you like listening to other books like me, it’s on audible as well. Just look for either my name or the Leverage Point, you’ll find it. I don’t think there’s any other books name that. If you want the module too, just go to fulcrumfractional .to with the number, not the letter spelled out, and you’ll find module two just there as a download for you.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 32:11

Awesome. Well, listeners, this week, pick one place where you’re still the bottleneck, whether that’s scheduling, quoting, whatever it is, write it down, write down what would have to be true for that to run without you. And that could be your first level point. But thanks again for listening to Digital Dominance. Please subscribe, leave us your view and take care. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening to Digital Dominance. If you enjoyed this episode, would you do me a big favor and leave a review? It really helps more service business owners discover Remember the show, fix their websites, and grow their businesses the right way.