Digital Growth with Greg Birch and Tyler Horsley

Chris Hood (00:00):
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Digital Growth refers to the strategic expansion of an organization’s digital presence and capabilities, leveraging technology, data, and digital marketing to drive business success in 2021. Partly influenced by the pandemic businesses that embraced digital witness significant growth with 69% of buyers expecting companies to meet their personal needs with technology. As an example, for Domino’s Pizza, 70% of their total sales were generated through digital channels. Joining me today is Greg Birch, president of Delta Financial and Tyler Horsley, c e o at Nuclear Networking to discuss how we can leverage technology for both professional and personal growth. To support the show, visit chris hood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media, or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.

Voice Over (01:04):
Connecting access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hood digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.

Chris Hood (01:36):
Let’s get right into it and discuss why digital growth is so essential and meet our guest. Greg, would you mind introducing yourself?

Greg Birch (01:43):
First off, Chris, thanks for having us on the podcast. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. My name’s Greg, Greg Birch, and real quick summation, I’m a prior army officer, spent 11 years in the Army got out, became an entrepreneur, got an insurance, and was a 10 99 sales agent. Worked my way through sales to owning my own independent marketing organization or I m O, which is Delta Financial. Just over a year old now and I’m also a personal coach.

Chris Hood (02:12):
Great Tyler.

Tyler Horsley (02:13):
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you again for having me on. And really interesting background. I actually come from federal intelligence, worked for two different government agencies, so maybe there’s something there.

Greg Birch (02:24):
I was a military intelligence officer, which is great. Really?

Tyler Horsley (02:26):
Yeah. , that’s great. Yeah, I, I was a federal officer, came out of intelligence, started an organization, nuclear networking in Denver. Actually built that and then sold that to a private equity firm, but focused on bottom line business growth through digital.

Chris Hood (02:41):
It’s wonderful to have both of you and yes, you both have very similar backgrounds, which is actually why I matched you two together. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about this concept around digital growth. And we teased that it can be both from a professional perspective or even a personal perspective. So what is the starting point to grow digitally?

Greg Birch (03:04):
Honestly, it’s just getting a digital footprint. In the era that we’re in today, it’s so much about social media and platforms and, and I mean LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. Now that that’s where people are looking, it’s where people get most of their information, to be honest, is, is from those social media platforms. Even starting small to where you can build a footprint. Cuz what it, what it ends up being is it’s a, it’s like your digital business card. It’s your digital reputation of, of who you are and what you stand for. And getting a feel for what it’s like to, to post. There’s a lot of businesses out there that, that just don’t post. And they don’t utilize those platforms effectively cuz they don’t know how. And the best way to start is to just schedule it. Just start, start off small to start off with one post a week or one post a month, right? And order to get content out there. And as you get accustomed to it, increase and increase and increase and get to where you’re posting, you know, from once a month to once a week, from once a week to twice or three times a week. And, and keep a consistent schedule because over time you’re gonna be building a platform of an audience of people that are looking to your brand, to the information that you’re putting out. And they’re looking for that for you to be reliable in what you’re posting

Tyler Horsley (04:23):
To build on. Greg, this, this will be more complimentary than maybe even you anticipated, but one of the things that having run what I’d call traffic driving services, right? S e o s E M, all these acronyms everybody talks about, one of the biggest keys to pair with that is, is ripping off Simon Sinek shamelessly, but asking the why. So it’s like any business owner listening to this, imagine that you, you get your way, you have the best presence, you have the, the best amount of traffic going to your site right now, and none of them are converting. And so some of the questions we kind of ask individuals too. And, and this goes with building audiences and reputation. What is your core differentiator, right? Some people don’t even get into social and, and audience building because it’s overwhelming. Others may not think they have a chance.

(05:07):
But moving back into kind of like niche areas of expertise, we help people kind of answer the question. I, I like to challenge ’em to think about if you were in an audience with 50,000 prospects next to 10 competitors and you only had 10 seconds to tell me why I should choose you, what would you say? And I think those types of thought processes to Greg’s point getting started and starting to build the audience scheduling that out, right? Because you probably wear a million hats if you’re a standard entrepreneur. And then really thinking about what are your core differentiators and, and why would someone choose you versus the, the 10 other people online behind you.

Greg Birch (05:43):
I want to jump on that cuz you said some things that got me spurred. So I love that you, that you referenced Simon Sinek, by the way, that guy is my spirit animal. But to talk more about the kneeing down is, it’s incredibly important to understand who your target market is. I think a lot of times businesses when they start doing, they start doing posting or any kind of marketing in any sense, digitally. They think about marketing to the mass and they wanna market to everybody. And that’s the biggest mistake that you could make because if your message doesn’t hit to a specific market, it’ll hits to nobody. And so there’s something that’s called the law of diffusion of innovation that Seth Goden talks about. And, and what it is, it’s, it’s basically like every single market has a niche. And those niche, if you look at the law diffusion innovation, how it works, the first 10 to 12% of the people that you’re speaking to, those people are your early innovators and your early adopters.

(06:33):
Those are the people that are your raving fans. And, and that’s who you’re marketing to. And so it do the homework on the front end to understand who are you speaking to, and think about it like this. Your message, your digital message, your marketing is, is the key, the client is the luck, okay? Too often we’re trying to create the key without even understanding what the lock is. And now we’re just trying to stick that key into every single lock and to see if it fits. And that’s what happens when you try to, when you try to message to a broad audience, when you understand the, the actual market, your niche, you understand the lock, and then you craft the key to the lock that you’re going to, so that that message hits it’s impactful and it hits exactly they’re going to, they’re gonna spread the message for you because you provide an undeniable service. They will get you into the mass market just by word of mouth.

Chris Hood (07:26):
You know, as entrepreneurs, I think sometimes we have a clear picture of what that is. But as organizations grow, I tend to see that these questions and services are being handed off to people who may not have the relevancy or may not be able to translate that into effective content to be able to help accelerate growth. Where’s the balance? At, at what point in time should somebody just keep doing it themselves or hire somebody to help them do it?

Tyler Horsley (07:58):
So I basically put together a white paper on this and, and certainly I, I’m gonna come off as biased, but having started at just traffic only and then developing business growth kind of from end to end, including sales automation and more, I can tell you as an employer, you get what you pay for. And I can also tell you that if you want niche expertise in marketing, those, you know, at the time of this recording, 80, a hundred, 150, $200,000 people, most entrepreneurs, depending on their stage of company, that’s not economically viable to, to hire that. And so it’s, in my personal experience that hiring fractional teams or, or working with, you know, experts in, in a specific niche, fractionally is far more cost efficient. And so to your question of when do you hand that off, when do you bring it in-house, et cetera I’m almost an advocate for, you know, and there’s certain deliverables obviously content creation and company voice, which I’m, I’m hesitant to say that you should outsource those things unless you know, your agency knows you really, really well. But a lot of the execution work economically advantageous to outsource to, to people who do this for a living, they’re always on top of, you know, cutting edge technology.

Greg Birch (09:10):
When, when you phrase the question, there’s two, I see two sides of this. The first side is if you are outsourcing it within your organization, like your organization grows so large and you’re outsourcing to somebody else in your organization or delegating it down, okay? The importance here is that you, you have a, a good company culture and you have good core values. And those core values are something that are spoken about that are understood at every single company meeting. So everyone has the same voice so that when you do delegate it, they understand exactly what the intent is. It comes down to like the basic tenants of owning a business and is having a company vision, a mission, and a, and a core values. And if you don’t have those written out and you’re not speaking them and hiring and firing by them, then I, I’ll be surprised that you got to a medium or large size business to be honest.

(10:03):
But when you get to the medium large size business, if you’re looking at like outsourcing, like Tyler was just saying, you know, I, I’ll tell a quick story is, is when I first started in insurance, all kinds of lead vendors, right, lead vendors that will provide all kinds of leads. And some of the best leads are the ones that are, that are highly specialized to a specific niche, right? So the, the, there’ll be lead vendors that will, that will promote and, and market for you, that will create a, a video sales letter letter funnel for you, and we’ll do everything for you, and then you just get the leads. And so I’ve tried those services because I didn’t know, I didn’t know how to build a website, I didn’t know how to create an ad, I didn’t know how to do any of that. And so the performance that I was getting was not up to par with what I knew, what people were doing VSLs.

(10:50):
And finally, I just, I just bit the bull and I, I drug my feet on this for two years before I finally just said, screw it, I’m doing it myself. And I, I hesitated all that time. It really only took me a, about a four solid focused hours to learn how to create a website and how to do this myself. The benefit about that is that if you do it when you’re small, is now I know how to create it appropriately. So now what I’m looking, when I, when I’ve gotten larger and I want another company to do it for me, I know what I’m looking for. I know what’s a good product and I know exactly how to hire the right person to get the right job. And, and then I can also spot check it a lot better because I’ve done the work.

(11:35):
So I would highly recommend, you know, I really, if you’re a medium sized business or smaller, if you don’t know how to do it and you’re just outsourcing it, I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t know the intricacies of the ins and outs of every single step in the process and how to do it, because you don’t know what good looks like, the person that knows your business is you, the person that knows your clientele is you the business owner. So being intricately involved in that process is, I think is pivotal and important.

Chris Hood (12:03):
How do we grow personally to help our business evolve and be successful? And that improvement process, we can call it continuous improvement of ourselves, continuous improvement of our business, those are elements that you should be considering when looking at these areas of growth within your own organization. Right?

Tyler Horsley (12:22):
Yeah, earlier you were speaking you’re familiar with EOS and Traction, right? So it’s like, that’s like hitting it right on the head. And just highest and best s you know, accountabilities, hiring and firing on, on values, personal work. I’d say just one thing from an experience share standpoint, maybe both of our shared experiences there, there’s company vision and kind of the, the business growth aspect of it. But from a personnel perspective, back to values, there’s the core values. They make fun of this in EOS as well. It’s like integrity and, and all these things. It’s like that was Enron’s, you know, one of Enron’s values. So that doesn’t dictate who you are and kind of the lifeblood of your company or the D n A, but just from a personal growth perspective, I’ve, I’ve experienced a lot more business growth by doing personal work on myself.

(13:14):
What’s underneath that? Yes, even getting back into the past and what’s happened and kind of like how, how that shows up in my business life. Because most entrepreneurs, we are more risk tolerant. We’re crazy people and we’re willing to put everything and go all in. And one of those interesting things is if somebody were trying to warn you I don’t know that I’d see the warning because I like to run into fires and not away from them. And so figuring out kind of how I tick and, and how I work and kind of brokenness that’s under that too. Because sometimes our biggest strengths or our biggest weaknesses kind of helps better refine not only company vision, but helps, has helped me better work with even staff and, and to Greg’s point, hiring better, like for those specific roles in your highest and best needs. And yeah, that’s been most advantageous, which typically isn’t in business books, you know, doing that kind of work.

Greg Birch (14:08):
The way I see this is if you’re at a business owner, I don’t care what your business is at any industry, you have to be good at two things as be good at sales, you have to be good at leadership. Cuz both of those have to do around influence and sales very much is a personal development atmosphere. Okay. The, I think personal development is extremely important. And on both the sales and leadership side, for me, what I found was when I first started in insurance I, I suffered with a lot of issues. A lot of you know, high highs, low lows, massive depression at times. And then I get super excited cuz I get some massive sales. And I, I was riding this rollercoaster and in my personal life I was blowing money, I was drinking a lot, I was going out and doing these crazy things and my business was not growing the way I wanted it to grow.

(15:03):
And I didn’t know, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Then when I started working on personal development, and it wasn’t because of business, it was because of a personal issue that happened to me and I was like, you know what? I think I’m the problem here cuz it’s, it’s the same relationship problem that kept happening to me that I started working on myself and I started doing daily disciplines, simple things, working out, eating right, removed alcohol, drinking water every day, like drinking a amount of water, reading a professional book every day. It transformed not only me personally and physically, but it transformed me, my mentally and it also transformed my business. I started selling at a much higher level. And it wasn’t because I learned these new sales tactics is because I was a better person. I was more genuine, I was authentic. When I, when I spoke with clients, that translated to more people coming to me and saying, how are you doing this?

(15:58):
How did you do this? And I was able to start, that’s how I started my coaching was, was through that was just by helping people to transform their, every area of their life through personal development. And it honestly, it helped me to catapult and launch my, my i m o Delta Financial because I had so many insurance agents that were looking to me for sales expertise. And I was like, I’m not a sales expert. I didn’t, I didn’t study sales at school or anything, I just happened to be one. I I’m doing the reps, I’m doing a lot of sales calls, but two, I just work on myself every day. I read every day I do these daily disciplines that are helping me to be scheduled and re regimented in everything that I do. And that allowed me to, to scale Delta Financial. And what it really comes down to is there’s three levels of leadership, and this is for every single organization is you have to lead yourself effectively first.

(16:48):
That’s the first level leadership. If you can’t lead yourself, you’re not gonna be able to lead others. If you’re currently a business owner and you’re a and you were to honestly rate yourself on one to 10 and how good you are as a leader and you rate yourself as a six, you’re never gonna hire a 7, 8, 9, or 10. It’s just not happening. They’re not gonna follow you cuz you can’t lead them. So how are you gonna grow and expand your business if you’re not leveling yourself up? Once you start, once you start to level yourself up, you will naturally attract people. You, people will naturally be attracted to you cuz you are just that be becoming that natural leader, right? And that’s when you start to impart those skills and those knowledge bases to them. And that’s the second level of leadership is when you start to lead others by attracting the right people. And the third level is when you turn them, when you duplicate yourself into them and they become the same. And that’s how when you really start to blow up and scale is when you can duplicate yourself into another person and they’re doing the same exact things that you’re doing and now they’ve become that leader, they’re doing the same thing. And that’s how you scale and grow your business appropriately. It starts small and it starts slow, but it’s scalable and it’s done right.

Tyler Horsley (17:56):
Yeah, no, you’re, I think you’re spot on too. It’s, that’s one of the biggest traps that I fell into myself. Prior to that we were kind of sprinting. I had a lot of the same lifestyle habits that you did cuz you know, high performer, work hard, play hard, you deserve it, you know, all these types of things. And what, what ends up happening, and I almost wonder if this is worse than than not succeeding, is you do succeed to a certain extent and then you look behind you and figure out I’m the bottleneck. Like I’m doing everything. I’m wearing all these hats I haven’t trained myself or delegated. And to your point, maybe I haven’t grown into the right leader worth following. And so you look back at your, your full-time employees or your contractors and you can’t escape. You’ve just created yourself an 80 hour a week job. And so yeah, just that, that introspective work that you’re alerting to, that’s self-discipline. Notice that Greg didn’t say anything about motivation. Motivation is not discipline. They are two separate things. Motivation ebbs and flows disciplines. If you can be disciplined in those areas, that shows up. And a lot of other areas as well as, you know, some of the obvious, it creates, you know, great mental clarity and helps de-stress. You know, a lot of those positive habits that you communicated certainly go a long way and cascade throughout your organization.

Greg Birch (19:16):
Well, it also, it it also shows up when you have those challenges cuz it it, any business and any any business owners listen to this, you’re gonna have challenging times. Your business is gonna have down times. Your business is gonna be booming. This is just gonna happen. And you have to learn how to operate and still win and dominate whenever you have down times. If you are, if you’re leaning on motivation for that, if you’re leaning on some external extrinsic factor in order to do that, it’s not, you’re not gonna be successful. You’re, you’re going to, you’re gonna ebb and flow with your business. What the discipline does is it allows you to stay even keel. It allows you to stay steady and continue to do the things that are necessary even when you have a bad day. Even when you have all the obstacles and the, the hurdles in your path.

(20:06):
Even when like, if my house could burn down, I’m still gonna get my stuff done. You know what I’m saying? Like you can’t, when you’re a business owner, you can’t beat somebody like that when they’re, when they’re gonna get the job done no matter what. Right? And, and, and make no mistake you have competitors no matter what industry you’re in and there’s people that are looking to, to eat your lunch. And if you’re the guy or gal that is always showing up regardless of how you feel, regardless of what’s going on in your life, regardless of how the business is doing and you’re selling the dream, even when you’re living a nightmare to your team and you’re getting them going and you’re doing everything right, man, like you’re, you’re just, it’s, you’re going to succeed. You’re gonna push past those difficult times and when the good times happen, you’re gonna skyrocket

Chris Hood (20:50):
Beyond the personal disciplines and the leadership principles that we’ve already talked about. What role does technology play in business growth?

Tyler Horsley (20:59):
The answer to this question, obviously you go on for 45 plus minutes, but one of the things that shows up really quickly to me cuz prior to getting in buying, building, selling companies and, and doing even nuclear networking, I was an SEO guy, so I was a nerd, didn’t really talk to anybody and just we ended up developing tool stacks, like 27 tool stacks, leveraging machine learning. A lot of people are calling it ai, so we had natural language processing prior to even chat G T P and more. But there, my, my forecast is maybe 10 years out people will be investing primarily in strategy and thought partnership and a lot of the execution and the monotony will be automated at some point in time. But from even just examples, so these are pretty obvious, but throwing ’em out there if they haven’t used them yet.

(21:47):
I, I’m a huge fan of natural language processing personally, so chat, g d p four plus, you know, whenever this comes out. But trying to use that as kind of like a, an an oracle or a thought partner around how can I better position myself? And again, this isn’t the be all end all, it takes human oversight and more, but even initial content creation for crawlable content that’ll help seo, we have leveraged that quite a bit. I do that quite a bit. Again, I really want to preface human oversights involved you as the business owner and as the visionary need to make sure that everything that goes out properly represents your organization. But that piece has been pretty impactful. And then one of the other pieces that Greg mentioned earlier briefly, I, I am surprised by the amount of people that aren’t aware of really cost efficient sales automation platforms and, and the benefit of those platforms.

(22:49):
So whether that’s go high level or you know, HubSpot or any of those types of things, it’s like you as a business owner, business owners listening out there, you’re already wearing a lot of these hats and, and you might exercise personal disciplines and try to be doing the right thing at all times. The business will ebb and flow, as Greg mentioned. Your emotions will as well. It’ll feel very bipolar. I really resonate with Greg saying like, I just got a big win and it feel good, and then the next day you have the biggest fire in the world and you’re, you’re down. But some of those other systems, technology, just like self-discipline can, can keep you coasting, if that makes sense or, or keep the momentum for you o on good or bad days. And some of those tasks that you might do may not be your best and highest use. They are not $200 an hour tasks. And, and setting up some of those automations on platforms like go high level, that will automatically follow up with your customer, automatically text them when their appointment’s coming up and like those little pieces can help tremendously.

Greg Birch (23:50):
Just a mirror what Tyler was saying, I agree a hundred percent on, on correctly utilizing a C R M. There’s a lot of really powerful things that you can do at the C R M to where you can even connect it. For instance you know, I had built out a CRM that when I sold a client, I connected it with Printful and as soon as it was connected, it automatically purchased and sent out to the address that was in the file. A calendar or like a a, a notebook or something that was like personalized to that client automatically that was had their name on it and everything as a thank you and stuff like that’s like kind of powerful and important, you know? But that’s just one simple way. There’s a lot of ways that you can, that you can use technology to expand your business.

(24:39):
The biggest thing that I look at is, is marketing and branding. Yeah, I mean you can use Chap g PT for your branding and you can have, if you understand the prompts and you understand how to do the prompts properly and you start to play around with the system, you can really come up with some really unique messages that you would like. Tyler was saying, you need to have some human oversight. This is not a hundred percent solution, it’s more of like an 80% solution, but you can go in and it can help you to do some of the legwork and it just, it it expedites time for you. So you’re not sitting there trying to write at this all yourself, but you’re having a conversation almost with an AI and you’re doing the right prompts. So it’s giving you the information you’re looking for, you do some edits and then you post and you can really start to brand yourself.

(25:23):
It makes it a lot easier to do your, your social media content, your branding content that’s gonna, what you’re putting out to the world and how you want your business to be seen. And then aside from that is like in the insurance industry, we’re looking at technology that’s gonna change life insurance with a specific system that we’re look, that we’re building and paying into that does complete automatic instantaneous underwriting without any human underwriter and it does it automatically. And what it’s doing is it’s actually reducing the cost of the insurance policies for people. So it’s actually gonna be cheaper for most people. And we’ve been working this for three years now since, since since about when covid started, when, when, when they started working it. And we’re starting to come out with these now proprietary products. But what that does is now we have these proprietary products with big name insurance carriers with technology that we’ve created. No one, one, no one else has. Now we’re able to expand and get more agents that wanna work with us because of that. So using finding unique ways to, to put into technology that’s, and, and every industry is gonna be different. That’s just one example that we’re using in the insurance industry. But ultimately when I, I I look at digital marketing when I, or I look at digital marketing and branding when it comes to using technology the most,

Chris Hood (26:50):
You know, the human oversight piece of it, there’s a picture going around the internet right now from I think a high school student who submitted a paper and it’s gotten graded and at the top of it it says as a AI text-based service like chat, g p t, the student clearly just copied everything and added it into his paper, including the prompts. So it just shows you that there has to still be some type of editing going on. But as you’re talking about insurance and the development of new technologies that you’re looking at are the introduction of technologies into the insurance industry. You know, there’s a lot of conversations out there by a lot of different business people on this simple concept, every company as a technology company. But I think each of us today is definitely bombarded by technologies everywhere. Is there a balance?

Greg Birch (27:47):
I think people are getting more comfortable with it, to be honest. I do, I do. There’s something that’s very unique when it, when you do things in person, like in-person events, conferences, stuff like that, there’s just like a magic in the air that you get more value out of it. You know, I still like to do events with my company in person, not just over zoom and try to do like one a quarter, even if it’s something small where I go to where a hub of where, cuz I’ve ages across the nation where I go out to where a hub where there’s a lot of agents there and I can go and visit and then we can just say, Hey, if you’re in the area, come out and visit and, and do something in person. It gives people something to look forward to.

(28:29):
But, but also it’s, it’s just, it breaks up the monotony of always being on Zoom and doing zoom meetings for everything, right? I’ve heard that when it comes to, when it comes to marketing or the, the specific industries that brick and mortars are doing better right now that brick and mortars are getting more, and I think it has more to do with the socioeconomic political status than anything. And, and they’re, they’re putting less money towards just buying stuff online or going shopping online with like Amazon or Walmart or whatever it may be, but they’re going more to like the mom and pop brick and mortars and those are starting to increase right now,

Tyler Horsley (29:05):
I think high end, like 30,000 foot view. Certainly technology can be used as a tool, but I think it’s a huge pendulum, right? So it swings back in what people we’re still people, right? And so moving from just a transactional culture to relational and any business owners listening out there, like thinking through your branding, how do you position yourself and, and the public eye and, and using all these automation opportunities and some of the tools we’ve talked about on the show, those are great, but you can’t automate vulnerability. You can’t automate relationship and you can’t automate that that piece that should be intentional. And so I think maybe , you know, it, it it moves quick and there’s a lot of things that you can do, but I think always checking back in and it’s like, am I automating the core relationship? And if the answer is yes, that’s something that I’d pulled back, but certainly a lot of the monotony, you know, if it’s something that that doesn’t really involve the human nature piece, I would try to automate as much of that as you can.

Chris Hood (30:08):
I wrote a blog piece a couple of months ago I think called Artificial Relationship Management. Basically we’re moving into a world where AI is taking over a lot of the relationship management pieces, chat bots that are designed to help elevate the support you, you might have, but all it’s doing is creating frustrations and it’s deteriorating those relationships that we’re talking about. And I think the point of meeting in person and still being able to manage those relationships without the technology is going to be critical even in an age of technology, still going to have to manage some form of personal relationships with your consumer base or else it’s going to deteriorate to a point where you’re just going to lose business.

Tyler Horsley (30:55):
Yeah, that’s spot on. And and if you don’t, right, if we don’t the competitor as Greg said, who’s, who’s looking to take over your business or eat your lunch, they’re gonna do it. And so it’s like that that can be, and it’s odd because this almost seems to be coming full circle, but that could be a core differentiator for your organization. We are personable, , we actually talk to you. Humans can talk to you and you don’t need to do A, B and C. And especially I would imagine, Greg in the insurance world, I mean it’s like there’s an app I, I know that I comb through, you know, insurance apps and try to do A, b, and C and wanna know what a deductible is before, you know, I make a claim and just all these types of things. But yeah, the human, the human component is, is a huge one that I, I don’t think we should seek to try to automate.

Greg Birch (31:40):
I think if it could be automated by now, would it be for mo Like, like for especially, I’m looking, I’m thinking about my industry, but the, the fact of the matter is, I, I’ve been hearing about having chatbots since I got in the insurance industry back in 2017 of like, oh yeah, this chat bot helps you to sell this. It’s never been effective, it’s never worked. It, people just don’t want it. They’re not gonna, they’re not gonna be okay with it. And so, and plus there’s this, there, there is a level of human interaction needed to understand certain situations. So like when I sit with a client and I’m talking to ’em about their situation and they’re, and I’m asking them all the questions for underwriting to make sure, hey, what’s the best policy to put you with that you could be approved with? And then they, they say, oh, well, you know, I have high blood pressure but I, I don’t really have it because I don’t, I don’t have any medication doctor. Just it said that my high blood, my blood pressure’s blood pretty high. They haven’t prescribed me anything yet. And AI wouldn’t understand that, you know, and AI wouldn’t be able to understand that specific situation. So they would probably get a different rating versus with me and I’m like, okay, well you’re technically not being treated with it, so will AI get there? Maybe potentially, but I don’t know if we as humans are going to be okay with that.

Chris Hood (32:55):
Let’s leave the listeners with a few tips from each of you. One tip for personal growth and one tip for professional growth.

Tyler Horsley (33:03):
A couple tips that I live by, and these are, again, really high level, but good truth. So try to, if you don’t have one already, mentorship is super important. And trying to find a mentor who’s already done what you’re looking to achieve or do this can include kind of, you know, I call it a tribe, but I’ve joined eo. There’s Y P o Vistage, there’s a lot of these different groups with, you know, that kind of, they’re consortiums or they seem to collect high performers or, or people who want to be successful business owners. But that mentorship piece has been really sacred for me. And just to clarify, your mentor should never be a prospect. I just think that that relationship needs to stay separate. You don’t wanna ask your mentor for money. And, and this may not be true, but something that I, I tend to live by as well is there are basically two ways that I’ve learned in life and one is experience and the other is advice. And advice from a good mentor seems to be free and enjoyable and experience seems to be painful and expensive. And so if you can have a good mentor who can help you dodge a lot of the speed bumps that you might hit and and knows your industry, that is probably the best personal and business advice that I could provide.

Greg Birch (34:18):
I like that a lot. I got one tip and it’s for both how you do one thing is how you do all things be exceptional in all that you do. And that means, and, and, and even at the smallest details, the the smallest thing, if you, if you’re in the, if you’re parking in the grocery at the grocery store and you’re in the parking lot and you see a random cart sitting there, go get it and put it back. I don’t care if you put it there or not. Like be exceptional. Be like set the standard. If you start doing it with the small things, you’ll do it with every area of your life. Your team will see it, it will set a standard and they will follow. That’s how you lead appropriately. And it’s, and it’s also gonna help you personally cuz you’re gonna start, you’re not gonna skip out on things. You’re not gonna compromise on the, the promises that you make to yourself. Like, oh, I’m gonna get up early tomorrow to work out so that I can get enough time to get to this business meeting. And then you wake up late cuz you drank the night before and you’re like, well, well I’ll work out later. Then you don’t end up working out. Those things do matter. They affect your subconscious. So how you do one thing is how you do all things live by the, an exceptional standard. It’ll help you personally and in your business.

Chris Hood (35:24):
Thank you both for joining us today, Tyler. Appreciate it.

Tyler Horsley (35:28):
Thank you. I, yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me

Chris Hood (35:31):
And Greg. Thank you.

Greg Birch (35:32):
Thank you Chris. Always a pleasure man.

Chris Hood (35:34):
And of course, thanks to all of you who listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and grow. And if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood show. And please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.