Blog

Introduction & Guest Welcome

Brad Banyas:

All right, everybody, welcome back to Play the King, Win the Day. We're really excited today to have a workflow and AI automation guru. And so she's been a three-time SaaS entrepreneur in exit. She's a wonderful lady. So welcome Alane Boyd to the show.

Alane Boyd:

Thanks for having me.

Discovering a Passion for Automation

Brad Banyas:

The industry from a business process automation side. I was really excited to talk to you with all the success you've had. What made you love this space and spend your time and build businesses in it?

Alane Boyd:

I mean, it couldn't have happened more organically. Honestly, I needed to find purpose after I sold my company and I was bored. And I just thought, I sold that company because I didn't have passion for the company that I'd built and I had an opportunity to sell it. And so coming out of that, I thought I was gonna love retired life and I was gonna just, you know, hang out and have fun. Well, it turns out that I think as human beings, we need purpose.

And when I was reflecting on what did I really enjoy about building my company, it was this, it was the automation side. It was building repeatable systems because I was at a point in my company where people were burnt out, they were exhausted. Things just always felt like it should be faster. I saw there was about five different core things I did. And one of them I saw was automation.

Identifying What Can Be Automated

Alane Boyd:

Other companies need that mindset about what could be automated. Cause we get wrapped up in all these things that need to be done. And it's true. They need to be done, but what needs people first and what could be done by a machine.

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, awesome. It's still a good business. I mean, we started a long time ago, previous to OMI, a company in the 90s called Output Solutions.

And we were doing document workflow and automating, you know, document distribution and all this stuff. It was kind of fun because it was kind of like solving a puzzle. What are all the steps that are going on in this process? So I always took a liking to that. And I would say today, even, you know, 30 years later in the business we're in, I mean, most of the work we're doing is a lot of automation, a lot of workflow.

Alane Boyd:

It’s amazing and I agree a thousand percent because I started doing my own automations in 2016 and that's almost 10 years ago. And there's still companies that aren't even doing some basic things and I'm just blown away by how much manual work that they're doing. And it's never even occurred to them that it could be done a different way.

Name Changes & Branding Challenges

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, you get used to it, it's just kind of like this. It's the way we always did it, right? I mean, we did it in Excel spreadsheets and Word spreadsheets. So it's awesome. I think it's an exciting space and I think it's a lot of growth from the business side. There's still a tremendous amount of growth.

So, biggest goal, right? So you guys, you just did a rename recently, right? Why did you decide to rename it?

Alane Boyd:

When I started this company, I didn’t think I was really going to build a company. So I really, my business partner and I were like, let's just start consulting. And that's all it was going to be was us part-time, just giving ourselves something to do. And so we were in this brainstorming session and he's like, okay, well, what are we going to tell people what we do? And I was like, we're going to ask them what their biggest goal is, and we're going to ask them what their biggest obstacle to getting there. And he's like, great, we're going to call that BGBO. I'm like, great. And that's what we named the company. And it turns out that nobody can remember that. Nobody could get it right. And trying to spell that when you're on the phone, trying to tell somebody your email address, was horrible. so then we're like, okay, we make people work day ninjas. So we're going to name it. Workday, we're gonna rename it to Workday Ninja. We didn't have the forethought at the time that there's a company called Workday and everyone thought we were associated with Workday and we don't actually do anything with Workday. So then it was like this new obstacle to come up overcome. And so after a while, like we were just getting, our name got us so confused for people and we went back to our roots and we dropped the biggest obstacle part and we just call it biggest goal.

We named it BGBO... nobody could remember or spell it... then Workday Ninja but people confused us with Workday... finally we dropped to just “Biggest Goal.”

Brad Banyas:

I understand. We had a similar experience with OMI... It's funny because when we started, we were outsource management Inc and our domain was outsource management. So imagine just like you saying from an email perspective, you know, someone typing that out was horrendous. And even from a webpage, it was horrendous. And our clients just started calling us because our logo is OMI.

The Evolution and Potential of AI Agents

Brad Banyas:

What’s exciting you now in AI?

Alane Boyd:

Excited might be an understatement for AI agents. AI agents are incredible. And when AI really started becoming mainstream and people were using it, you they had this idea like, my gosh, it's going to automate my business. I'm going to just use AI for everything. And it was, just, the technology wasn't there. And now with AI agents, like it really is like having a human part of that process and automating full systems.

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, it's insane all that it does. I always tell this story. were working with someone in the government space, can't say who it is, but ⁓ they had a mainframe application and it's been something that they built over the last decade easy, if not more. And ⁓ one of our partners was testing out a new kind of AI code conversion to move it from mainframe to update it.

And it processed like a million lines of code and fixed, basically put it into a new language in like less than a minute. And everyone was just sitting around like, oh my God, the guy goes, you know, that would have taken us like four or five years to write that, right? And it wasn't perfect, but still the jumpstart from, you know, to recreate it in less than a minute, 85 % accuracy was just insane. And at that point I knew I was like, wow, like there really is something like to this that's bigger than, hey, chatGPT, can you give me a new recipe or whatever it is?

Common Misconceptions About AI

Alane Boyd:

I always giggle when people say they’re a “super user” of AI because they use ChatGPT for everything... that’s the most elementary level. And I'm like, wow, like, let me show you this. And completely decrease the amount of work happening between your team, which is really data movement is kind of what I've distilled it down to.

Brad Banyas:

We've had several kind of AI related people on the show. One more research, other two more business. And just what they were doing with identifying pneumonia quicker in remote locations like Africa and stuff by reading the images and all that. It was just a really unique thing. But most people, yeah, it's going to replace search basically. That's what ChatTPT is doing with more context and quicker data.

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, one thing that I find myself saying more often is just because AI said it doesn't mean it's true. And like we have to like backtrack ourselves to when we were kids watching TV commercials and we're like, we saw it on TV. And it's like, okay, you gotta make sure that it's accurate. You gotta make sure that it's truthful. But yeah, like, and like you said, like couldn't get us 85 % of the way there. 85 % of the work is still a lot. Yeah, that's significant. I'm happy sometimes with 20 % savings. But we can get 85 % of the way there? Heck yeah.

Ideal Client Profiles & Industry Niches

Brad Banyas:

What’s a great client for you? What's a good, either business vertical or a size client? What are you guys working on?

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, typically you're looking at, you're not in the startup phase anymore. You're past like some of the initial growing pains and typically around 150 employees. And it's interesting, once you hit 30 employees to 150 employees, I don't see much change outside of the value that they see saving time. Because when you're smaller, the pain points are there, but they're not as maximized.

A lot of times like a team would be around 100 to 150 employees. We have larger corporate clients, but we typically work with their business units. So you're still looking at, you know, these individual units of 100, 150 employees. And the, and I'd be interested to hear, know, with your, your clients, but when we really hone in on the internal operation, automating the processes part where AI can help.

And we don't touch maybe some of the outside pieces, client facing as much pieces. But so every team has operations. And so, you know, for us, like we've, we've really been trying to niche down because at every client, potentially every client in the employee and size range could be a client. But then you kind of start getting into, okay, well, what software are you using? And then you get to be where it's like too many software.

OMI’s Approach vs. Biggest Goal’s Approach

Brad Banyas:

Ours is kind of, we focus more like, we focus more around the major platforms like Microsoft or Salesforce or those type. And that's all, all their components with ERP or finance or CRM or sales marketing, whatever it may be, field services. And then most of that is all kinds of stuff where the customers need workflow within whatever their sales process is, process is or their finance process is. We uncover those because we're implementing that system. That's typically kind of AI we're doing, but we just launched an AI practice. We sat out for about a year to make sure we knew what we were gonna do. And recently we've built several kind of products, I would say life cycle products.

In the AI space and it's been interesting. It's been anything from any money laundering to just simple kind of managing large mass documents that need to be distributed across the world and the easier way to go through kind of that the safety and material and all that stuff.

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, I can do analysis or summary or translations or do you have all the checkpoints that you needed in there before it gets sent to anybody? Yeah, I love that. And I love that the core systems that you're saying is like Salesforce and Microsoft. And we have that kind of trend too where they're micro using monday.com or Asana or ClickUp at their core and then they're using PipeDriver HubSpot as their CRM. Like we have this trend of software platforms that we dabble in and we don't do the Microsoft and Salesforce like you're saying.

Brad Banyas:

I think it's just the market size. Obviously HubSpot's moving up in that CRM space, but it's just the market side, the complexity. Small businesses do use Salesforce. It's kind of a pain. If you can't customize it, maybe you're better off with a smaller system. And those smaller, HubSpot's not small anymore, but it was better suited for that. SMB space and you know we like those kind of bigger CRMs because they have to connect to other you know applications ERP where you get into the digital transformation space so those like you know as a PS firm or an application firm, those are the people that how we get paid the smaller businesses still have the same problems they're just not scaled to the size of the bigger organization.

Building, Delivering, and Maintaining AI Agents

Brad Banyas:

Are you developing your own agents as a SaaS?

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, so we build them typically, we're big fans of using like innate and something to build it in that way. We're not custom coding everything and reinvent reinventing the wheel. So we have we do custom agents off of that platform. But we also like we looked at the most common agents we build and we have 42 common ones. Creating slide decks, case studies from marketing materials, generating proposals. There's some that every company needs something like that, because they're having to recreate it. So we looked at how many we were recreating for companies, and so we have 42. And then there's some like, some of our larger clients, we're building out, know, rag systems, these huge databases. So there's definitely customizing to them, but then there's some that's like, hey, like, this is an agent and you have this problem. It's been, you're taking, you know, eight hours to create a proposal or one proposal we did was a 60 page long proposal with a strategic analysis in there. And I'm like, wow, this is a lot of upfront work before they're a client. But, you know, so we're, we're, we've got some that we're still customizing them because a proposal generation has similar steps, but the software you use, your proposal, you know, makeup of what you have in there is all different.

So we're still customizing. And then we do it on a subscription basis while we're building. And then we have a support maintenance package. And that's the piece that I don't think people understand is that there is a maintenance piece to this. It's not, it's just like building software. It's not build it and let it, let it go. You know, there's errors that come in or you need to update to the newest AI model or an API went down and you need to check it or an API change.

And so we have support packages because most of the clients I'm finding and wondering if you do the same is that building AI agents is so new. People aren't trained on how to do this. so we are, yeah. So if they were left to themselves to figure it out, their system would be down longer with them trying to figure out how to fix it.

Security Considerations in AI Implementation

Brad Banyas:

People think it’s cheap and easy... but there’s also security. You're taking like snippets of business, like a proposal or something that everyone can do. And if you can quickly deliver that and people consume that, it, a subscription to it, it's fine. mean, there still is, people think there's still going to be a lot of money to create a very sophisticated agent. Something that's working across multiple data sources and then there's security and there's other things, right? There's the public where, by the way, if you have free chat, chat, GPT, they're taking your data and learning and that's going into a bigger database versus it being secure. It says some comp proposal, maybe that's not a big deal or maybe it's not, or maybe it is, I don't know. But I think there's more to it. I think everyone thinks AI is going to be, yeah, I'm just going to try and code something. Okay, well that might work for you and that might be possible, but it just depends what you're trying to do from an outcome and a security perspective as well.

Alane Boyd:

I get a kick out of, I do a lot of speaking engagements on AI and automation and always people bring up like, well, what about security and is my data secure? And, but there you're using the free model and you're clearly not concerned.

Entrepreneurial Burnout and Recovery

Brad Banyas:

It's not sick. But you know, that's okay. That's why people like yourself and that you've been successful in your business. you know, for certain, you know, people appreciate that. By the way, you don't want to do that. You know, and here's why you don't. So that's, that's incredible. So, so how long have you been back at it with the biggest goal? How long have you been back in the game per se?

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, I would say probably. I sold the company at very end of 2018, dabbled. 2022, I started. So there's a period of time, even though I needed purpose, I wasn't healed from the amount of stress that I carry from building that company. And so I had to have something I could do in my own time while also healing from chronic stress. I I developed autoimmune disease from chronic stress that I had to, it took me two years to heal from after I sold. And it was just like a lot of rest, lot of like understanding my boundaries and not putting myself into doing too much. But so I had to really slow down and in my life and before, like I was so far burnt out that I couldn't really take my company to like, to be a real company. I had to consult for a while until I was like, okay I can do this again.

Lessons Learned from Selling a Company

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, entrepreneurship is not for the lighthearted. It's really not because you know, you but someone told me one time like, you expect every employee to care as much as you do or, you know, that goal or that purpose and the reality of the world is, I you can be a good leader, you be a good communicator. Some people just want to go home and turn it off and like that was the hardest thing as a young entrepreneur that I like. Aren't you excited like can't you not sleep for 24 hours and drink coffee and whatever? Let's go. And you're like, my wife and I kind of go, it's not their business and you can't expect them to, and that's frustrating as an entrepreneur because you see the opportunity, you believe in what you're doing, but some people.

You have to be mentally prepared for a lot of gobbledygook getting into it.

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, yeah. you know, managing people and it doesn't matter how many, you might have the most wonderful team, you're still having to manage people. And at one point, it gets to be a lot while you're also trying to, you know, have a vision and grow your company and making sure your team has that vision, especially your exec team to carry it through and you have the right leadership. So I carried a lot for too long and selling had its own stresses and the handoff between, you know, I had a period of time that I had to stay on for the transition. And that is really, that was hard.

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, I've heard that. We sold a company in 2010 or something. luckily, it was a very big company, so they didn't really care about us at this point in our technology. And I'm kind of grateful because that story you just said, every entrepreneur, every person that sells a business and they have some period that they have to stay on, they're like, it's the worst. Because you know you don't have any control over what's really going to happen at this point.

Well, you know the good news is, is you made it, you're stronger, you're back at it, you're doing the things you love to do and that's great. There's always a re-kickstart and move on. I think it's amazing. What you guys are doing to me is like, it makes a lot of sense and people are gonna need help in any kind of automation or workflow. It's not.

The Competitive Advantage of AI-Driven Startups

Alane Boyd:

Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate you. mean, the other day I was like, I'm living my best life. there's just a happiness about finding the right purpose that you should do and coming out of that. if I hadn't had that experience, I wouldn't know what I know now, you know, to do this. And two, like you're saying is this technology isn't going away. companies, what we're seeing companies now that are startups that are starting off without the people debt and the operational debt and they're kicking off using AI agents and building with AI and they can move so

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, it's really, I mean, to be honest with you, it's kind of a giant killer. If you've ever developed products, which you have, it's a pain and it's a long time and it takes a lot of reiterations and your market feedback and whatever. And I even see today our ability to quickly prototype something, like prototype it, make sure 100%. I mean, it might've gone from nine months down to... 30 days, right? And that's amazing because some of the time it's the money and then if you make a mistake or you're, we didn't think of that, right? Well, if you're nine months in, can't turn the ship around, change everything. So it's amazing what was.

Rapid Prototyping and Product Development with AI

Alane Boyd:

So we have one of our developers part-time had an idea to build this site. It's called clientportals.com. it's a client portal that sits on top of monday.com, ClickUp, and Asana. Because what happens is you're in this, you're managing client projects within your work management tool as you should, but then clients want to know their status. So you're doing double work. So one of our developers part-time said, hey, I've got this idea to build this and he built it in his free time in three months, we went from idea to market with paying customers with a full platform with three main integrations. Like that to me, like when you ask like what I get excited about, like that because I've built three software platforms outside of that one that would have taken 18 months to do.

Brad Banyas:

I mean, if you can learn how to use agents or even eventually get to the point where you can kind of build an agent, right? There's no telling what you can do.

The Role of Humans in the AI Era

Brad Banyas:

You still have to sell and market...

Alane Boyd:

That's not changing. That is not. And that's we still need humans. People are like, is I gonna take my job? I'm like, well, if you're just doing data movement, maybe, but you have other skills. You can do other things. We still need people.

Brad Banyas:

Absolutely, Yeah, I don't think it's gonna replace us. But it's interesting. I think it's, right now it's moving so fast. It's moving so fast and so many things coming at like you and I are in this business. So we try to keep up with it and understand what's going on, but no one's going to keep up with it. But everyday people, they don't have a clue. And they don't care. They're doing their job or whatever they're doing. And I think we all think in the tech space that everyone just gets this and they don't. And that's why there'll be places for you and me and other people for a long time.

Marketing in the Digital Age

Alane Boyd:

I agree. it's so much, we're all on information overload. Like there's no way to keep up with the tech when you're not in that world, because you still have to run your company and have your expertise. I maybe you're an expert at government contracting and doing something with that. there's, I don't have that expertise. That's not what I do. And so, we all have to, think specialties moving forward is going to be even more like inherent to what we do. Like we have to be specialist because there's so much, like I was thinking about even how marketing has changed. My first business, 2010, like marketing was a website, search SEO and ad spend. There wasn't Facebook marketing yet, you know, like there wasn't an ad platform yet. And now it's like, okay, well you need to be, have a videographer, a designer. Digital designer, you need to be an SEO specialist, paid search specialist. you have, like marketing isn't just this generalist anymore. You have to have specialists in each one. Nobody would do a good job if they're just in general doing marketing for you.

Brad Banyas:

Absolutely, and I think anyone that can start off young, guerrilla marketing or other ways that are unique because it's a pay to play world and I don't care what anyone says that you're going to pay regardless of whether you're doing Facebook. It's a pay to play. Those algorithms are set just to know how much budget you have and just enough to push you. And it's an interesting thing because I was not very much in social media, but our team is educated on me and me on that. And I'm like, wow, this is a racket.

How to Engage with Biggest Goal

Brad Banyas:

How can our audience engage with you?

Alane Boyd:

So for just me in general, connecting with me, I'm very active on LinkedIn, know, love for people to connect with me on there. I'm Alane Boyd. But for as a business, you know, there's a couple of things that I see is people listen and they go, wow, like I love those ideas, but I don't know how, what that means for my company. And so what we developed on our website, so biggest goal dot AI is our website and we have free tools on there.

So you go in and you put in your software platforms and instantly you'll get an email sent to you with 25 AI automation ideas. So that's one of our AI tools that we built for ourselves and that we've trained an AI agent to know what would be able to go in place. So there's 25 automations. We've got ⁓ different free courses that are on there. So as like a very easy, just like, know, how can I even just wrap my head around this is going to our website and go into our free resources. And then working with us, what it looks like is I see two different types of clients. Ones that already know where their pain points are. And they go, man, if I had AI that could automate this, that'd be fantastic. Then what we do is we map out a current state and then we say, okay, here, here and here is what we can automate and with an AI agent.

And then we can go and build a prototype and then make sure it's all working how you like it. And then we can put it live. And then the other type of client is, I don't know what is the priority or the pain point. I just know I have a lot of pain. And so I need your help prioritizing. So what we did is at first we were just putting everybody into our build package, but not everybody was ready to build. So we created some discovery packages. So it's a low entry point with us and we meet with you to help pull out, you know, what's available that's that we could do an AI agent for, where's your pain, and then we can start to prioritize. Then we can go into build.

Final Advice for Business Owners

Brad Banyas:

I think you've done a good job and we're excited to, was first of all, happy to get you on. It's always good to see someone that loves automation and business processes. We're not all this walking around out there in the street. You got to bump into one person every now and then that knows what each other's talking about. So I was excited to have you on and I really appreciate you being here. Anything else you want to say?

Alane Boyd:

I there's not often I get to nerd out with somebody else that understands this, I appreciate it. I think the biggest takeaway for anybody that's listening is to start asking yourself, what doesn't have to be manual? What, you know, if it's new client onboarding and it takes you two hours of manual work, that's work the client doesn't see and doesn't provide value. Could you do that in five minutes? And just start asking the questions is what would it be nice to have automated and just start exploring what that looks like.

Final Thoughts

Brad Banyas:

Yeah, that's good advice. It's really good advice. And I think you'll probably have a list, maybe five or six pages long when you're done. So prioritize the most important one and just start, right? I tell people, just try to start, know, just give it a try. You've been amazing and we're happy to have you on Play the King, Win the Day. And we're happy to watch you guys continue to grow and hopefully support you as well. That's it today. Play the king, win the day. You've listened to Alane Boyd. So with The Biggest Goal, check them out. If you're looking to automate anything, give it a try. As simple as a proposal or something more complex, Biggest Goal is definitely on the case and working hard for you. That's all, folks.