Automate Your Way to Success: How to Reclaim Time and Scale Your Business with Grant Hushek

Beverly: 0:09Did you know that businesses waste up to 30 percent of their time on repetitive, manual tasks that could easily be automated? That’s hours upon hours every single week spent on things like data entry, follow ups and routine workflows tasks that trust me, drain your productivity and creativity. Today, I am so excited to introduce someone who is doing exactly that. Grant Hushek the founder of GrantBot, process consulting. He’s not just automating processes, he’s automating Possibilities. Grant, welcome to Spark and Ignite Your Marketing.

Grant: 0:47Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for that awesome intro.

Beverly: 0:50I’m a big fan of automation. It’s something in 2024, I started to do more of. And so I am excited about this conversation because I think for solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, this is like a game changer and a game leveler to some of the big guys. We talk a lot about this with our clients and how to streamline and automate those processes that drain you and not drive you and those you put off every single day, the ones that are on the list that you keep pushing and pushing those are the things you need to automate or somehow outsource in some way. This is exciting. I know you’ve had a pretty interesting journey. I know you’re living in Madrid, Spain, which is so cool. Share your story with us. What is your origin story? What was the defining moment that kind of led you right here to this particular business?

Grant: 1:35Yeah, absolutely. There’s a couple of different pieces because you brought up Spain. So I’ll happily talk about a few personal things and then get into the business stuff because as we talked about before there really are no linear paths in this type of world. There I am. I’m in Montreal. I’m doing an internship for a material science company. I studied materials engineering and the first fire alarm in the building that I’m living in 9 a. m. on a Friday. I go outside and I see this woman in a red dress. I promise this all makes sense. I go to work that day and there she is same woman from my apartment building. I go, Hey, my name’s Grant. I think we live in the same building. Nice to meet you. That woman ends up being my wife. Yeah, two years of long distance from Los Angeles to Rome. I moved to Spain to be with her and that’s how I got here. Now on my way to get a visa, I did a master’s program. I worked for a German company and then I ended up getting a job with a us based company that let me stay in Spain. I was the first employee just focused on automation, figuring it out as I go, they gave me requirements. We need to automate this. We need to automate that. And I just kept going. I know that you talked about one of the themes being about persistence for this season. I really want to put out there that there is always this side door opportunity that a lot of people don’t see when they’re just walking by. For me, that side door was, I applied to join Hampton as a member. With a company with no revenue, no funding, pretty much a napkin sketch. And they’re like, no, of course you can’t join us. Followed up for one month, two months. And on the third month, they finally said, do you know anything about Zapier? I said, Nope, but I’ve always wanted to learn. That’s how I got my start completely out of the blue. So how did I get here to this role? I helped a lot of founders in the community. I helped build the community and I got a lot of freelance clients. And that’s what ultimately allowed me to launch my agency full time. And it’s been about nine months of us running full time on the company.

Beverly: 3:28So please tell me that your song is the lady in red.

Grant: 3:32It has to be,

Beverly: 3:33okay. I’m a little over romantic at heart. So bear with me while I go back to that just for one second.

Grant: 3:37Yeah.

Beverly: 3:38It sounds like a couple of things. When I hear you talk about this, there’s two things. You took some opportunities, like you saw this lady, you took an opportunity. And I think a lot of men don’t do that, which is awesome that you did that. Yeah. Cause I don’t think it takes much to woo us. Just talk to us. It’s not that hard. My nine year old has this story where my 19 year old, when he was like 13 to 14, still didn’t have a girlfriend. But my, at that time he was, I don’t know, five, he had a fiance and he was giving him advice and he was like, all you have to do is go up to her and say, I like you. And it was a brilliant advice, but the hardest to take So I think you have a lot of guts and courage in this is to be able to do those things. And to be persistent in your follow up of something that you knew was a possibility for you. One of the things I talk about with my clients is who are the five dream clients you want to work with and start there and be persistent. It doesn’t take much, honestly. Like I created a video one time for somebody I wanted to work with. I said, Hey, here’s the deal. I’ve been following your brand for forever. I think it’s amazing. I want to be a part of your journey. I’m not sure what that looks like, but this is what I do. And I would love to be part of your journey. Can we at least chat? And that day I had a follow up. So it’s not like it has to be this really big deal, right? It’s just persistence. And a genuine desire. Cause you can’t forget that part, that genuine heart that you have, that you wanted to do this thing and what you could do to make that happen. So love that part of your story, Grant, on both sides, the romantic side and the business side. I use some zaps with my team to do some regular automation of Communications it has to go out every Friday. It’s an interesting process and probably like I’m much more creative and not as linear and logical that you need to be you need Be very logical to be an automation person and that takes a very specific kind of brain. So I’m assuming that is you, especially with the engineering background. Totally makes sense to me. But one thing that I read on your profile was that you had special in no code automation, particularly for B2B service businesses. Explain what no code automation is a little bit, and then why specifically for agencies, law firms, accountants, these specific industries, is this a game changer?

Grant: 5:49No code automation means that we’re obviously not going to be worried about any coding languages, your Python, SQL those big scary ones. I personally tell people I’m allergic to coding. I have tried three languages. They don’t like me. I don’t like them. Doesn’t click. But I do have that kind of logical step by step brain. So when I discovered Zapier, I was like, this makes a ton of sense. So I can help break down the easy way to think about an automation is. I’ve got a few frameworks there, but that’s no code automation in a nutshell. You can just point and click and connect systems. It’s awesome. That’s Zapier And then why these B2B services? In B2B services, you have a lot of humans copying and pasting, moving data around, sending regular communication, things that have processes. We call them standard operating procedures, SOPs, right? That’s how you scale a business in a human focused business. But for me and my core belief in that of the team is that these copy and pasting actions should not be what humans are working on in 2025.

Beverly: 6:52No.

Grant: 6:52We all have creative talent. We all have things that we enjoy. There’s work that lights us up. And so if we can get rid of all of that copying and pasting bog down data transfer. Then we can actually do that big, beautiful task that’s been on your to do list for two weeks. We can do that today because we’re not getting slowed down so much. So that’s why our slogan is applying modern technology, so humans continue innovating. We believe that the human is the critical thinker.

Beverly: 7:18When I started my business as an accidental entrepreneur Grant, I didn’t have a plan and I just learned as I went. So I just started figuring things out. My first hire was a bookkeeper cause I was like, I don’t want to do that. But, there are so many things that you don’t think about as an entrepreneur that you have to figure out. You have to figure out onboarding for a client, you have to figure out onboarding for team members, you have to figure out billing and payroll and all these things that are not complicated, but they require a lot of attention in some ways. But what I found happened to me, and I don’t think I’m alone, Is as you grow, you have more tools and you have more systems and you have more processes and those tools and those systems, those processes don’t talk to each other and I have found automation does and, correct me if I’m wrong here is it connects all of that together. So it works more seamlessly for you as opposed to you working for it in some way.

Grant: 8:09A hundred percent. And the other thing is that once you know your client onboarding and people are really happy with it, then that’s our opportunity to say, let’s just make them all like this. What if they all happen this way? That’s where we take your SOP and we automate it and everyone becomes happy and you don’t have to do that stuff anymore. It’s amazing.

Beverly: 8:25My word this year is simplification. Streamlining. That is my word for 2025. Last year was all about clarity. This year is all about simplification and streamlining. And next year I hope to be scale. That’s like the way it’s building. So I have a lot of processes. I have a lot of systems. I’m very systems focused. It’s always how I’ve been. If as a solopreneur, you want to duplicate yourself, you need systems and processes. You need SOPs so that when you are not there, they can still run without you. This is one of my biggest secrets. When you are doing your things, loom them, and then throw the transcript into chat and ask it to create an SOP. Now you have a video and you’ve written SOP to get started. You can obviously make it a little bit better and refine it, but. Just to get started as you’re doing your tasks every day, record it so that you can get a VA so that you can hire someone else so that you can do these things to grow. Otherwise you will never be able to get what’s out of your head out to the world. And I think every single entrepreneur that we’ve worked with, they didn’t start the business to do a bunch of systems and processes. They did it to help somebody, to serve other people. So by getting bogged down. With all these systems and processes, you essentially become drained of the thing you were supposed to do in this world. And one of the things that we know is a lot of people get a little bit overwhelmed with marketing, is we want to free up your time. To do more of the things that you love and to magnify the impact that you can make in this world. Automation to me speaks right in that language of wheelhouse, of how do we simplify your business so that you can do more of the thing that you love and magnify the impact that you are supposed to make in this world. So I guess I ask this question then to you, how do you awaken your brand magic? How do you step really into your purpose and magnify the impact that you can make?

Grant: 10:18At my wedding, my friend said that I was the, seven year old that didn’t ask or didn’t say he wanted to be a firefighter and astronaut. He said, this is my 20 year plan. So I’ve been known to be a planner for a little while, but I tried to start up ideas before this, I tried other things and I realized when I discovered what an agency was, and it really was a discovery. I thought every freelancer, just hit their magic hourly rate and work was always coming. And they were like, this is the best thing ever. I was 24 when I learned that. So two years ago, and it blew my mind. I was like, this is amazing. And to get back to your question of like, how do I let my personal brand and, let that flourish, I tried two different business models. And the thing that I realized that I didn’t like about them was that I wasn’t impacting the customer slash client. What I Grant was doing was not impacting the client. And I reflected on that and I realized that I love service, like servicing people, exactly. And the reason it connected was because one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had was being a food runner in a restaurant. I wasn’t even taking the orders. I was just bringing the food to the people and I loved it. And so when I put that together, I was like, I love just taking care of people, making them feel at home. I love hosting people in my house. How can I do that in a business setting that takes advantage of my unique skills and automation in AI? It’s a service agency And so that is where in all of my calls, all of my client relationships, I tell people my reputation means absolutely everything to me. So if you feel like you’re not being Taking care of, you feel like the pricing is not working for you. Let’s just have that conversation because I want you to feel silly, not telling your friends about GrantBot because of how good a service it is. I want you to feel like you’re disrespecting them by not sharing GrantBot. That’s my bar.

Beverly: 12:11I love the phrase I feel like you’re disrespecting them by not telling them. Even as an entrepreneur, it’s not selling if you’re really serving. And you are disrespecting people if you’re not having those conversations because you actually have something that can help them. I use the word unicorn like confidence. I want you to have unicorn like confidence when you’re talking about what you’re doing, because unicorns have no shame, right? I want you to make the business decisions with that as well. With that clarity, that focus, that amount of confidence, knowing that you’re making the best decision that’s right for your customer, for you, right for your business. So it sounds like, you’re young and I don’t mean that in a patronizing way. I’ve been in business for 13 years. You’re young as an entrepreneur, I’ll say. However even in two years, I’m sure you’ve experienced challenges things that made you zig a little, can you share some of those key challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them?

Grant: 13:02Yeah, I think one of the big ones that every service provider has to think about really anyone that’s starting a business is like, what do I offer? And for who And originally coming out of the gate, I thought, okay I’m going to offer 10 automations, period. It’s 10 automations per month, right? And when you talk to someone, they’re like, what’s an automation? I go it’s like when you connect, DocuSign, when a contract gets signed to your CRM or Google sheet, right? It’s an automation. And then I was like, okay some of our automations take three or four days to build just one. And some of them take 30 minutes. So how do I structure that and how do I communicate that? And to who, how do I limit the creativity and the customization? And it took about eight months for me to figure out that people don’t care about the automation itself. They care about the outcome. And for me, when I hit, when I turned that corner, it was, okay, we’re going to take three months. If we’re going to do something custom and the first month is going to be all about design. The second month is going to be us building it. And the third month is going to be training. And I will price it at a point where I’m confident we’ll come out okay financially. But we’re going to deliver the whole system, right? That’s going to be the improvement. So you’re going to walk away from this experience with a perfect project management system with documentation and training and all that stuff. You’re going to come away with really good CRM reporting. So you know how many leads you have, right? I don’t care what we have to do on the backend to get it done. We’re going to get it done. Don’t worry about it. That’s the outcome you’re going to get. And at that point, that’s when people started going yeah, that makes sense. Let’s have another conversation. That was probably the biggest zigzag that I had to figure out in order to arrive where I am now, which is I’ve got clients that are happy. I’ve got some leads cause they know what we’re doing. I know what we’re doing. It’s a much better feeling.

Beverly: 14:50Nice. So what is one aspect of your business strategy that has evolved the most?

Grant: 14:55I definitely need to impact the client experience, and be able to jump in anywhere and make something right. I think knowing that I can jump in and make anyone happy by saying Hey I’m going to work all day Saturday until this thing is at least into a suitable position. That’s been really important on the kind of like the total business timeline. And inside of this business, particularly, I’m really focused on slowing myself down to get the process right internally before I marketed a ton, try to automate I don’t want to stress the system too much until I know that we’ve got something that can be somewhat repeatable. The team knows what they’re doing. You might see those dollar signs popping up where people are like, yeah, I want that. I want that. You go, great. Let’s say yes to everyone. And then you are underwater reputation takes a hit and you’re screwed.

Beverly: 15:48For 10 years, I said yes to every single client and I figured it all out, but I was miserable doing it. And my team was miserable Everyone was stressed. When you find your lane Grant and where you’re really solidly good. That’s when business becomes really fun and becomes scalable. That’s the clarity key That’s that focus key. You don’t have to be everything to everyone be the thing for the group of people you want to serve.

Grant: 16:14It took eight months, nine months for me. Some people it takes longer. Some people it takes shorter For the people listening, it’s not a overnight thing. It’s not a one year. It’s a process and you got to struggle through it. And when you do, you feel like you’re turning the corner, but good Lord, it’s a struggle.

Beverly: 16:31Like a year from now, Grant, when we talk, you probably will have different level of clarity, right? So that is a maturity in entrepreneurship as you do it more. And as you find your lane and it feels good and you have successes, it confirms where you’re at, but marketing for me, like business is never static. You just don’t finish it and be like, okay, I’m done. It’s never like that. Being an entrepreneur is constantly growing and evolving and changing. What’s the next thing. So you can’t just build it and be done even on your website. It’s never just done. It’s organic and has a life As you become, as you find your voice and find your place. Your messaging has to tweak with it. As I become more clear on my messaging and how I really help my customers that can evolve as well. It doesn’t change. I love that it took you eight, nine months. Gosh, you like are way ahead of the curve Grant. Can you share a success story? Give me an example of somebody that you helped and what life was like before and what it was like after what that process was like.

Grant: 17:30We recently helped a law firm that was having a lot of issues with their kind of custom invoicing. Some companies have very detailed invoicing. Some have monthly subscriptions. But the law firm, you got to track time. You might have a monthly retainer. You might have project based. So they were just struggling with all sorts of invoicing problems. We did as we went in the 1st month, really understood the business, asked all the questions and then visualized the whole invoicing flow and the way that they run their client engagements. So what do you need to see? What do you want to track? How are you going to be Clocking in, clocking out, all those different things. Then we started to, in the second month, build that MVP tool, make it a custom solution as they saw it, as they played with it, they gave feedback, put all the buttons in the right place. Make sure the colors are good. And then after about a month or two of them being in the system, they had reduced their time spent on invoicing every month by 85%. And that was just because on the first of the month, all those time entries got surfaced to the top as nice little line items, everything was totaled. The right rates were applied to the right clients. And that satisfaction, obviously for us is fantastic. It feels great, but for them, they can focus on their clients. Seven hours for invoicing is not just the time spent. It’s also the billable hours. Cause they are billed hourly and for the average entrepreneur, that’s an hour, a free hour can go in so many different directions. It could just go to a nap and we need that.

Beverly: 19:02You talk about seven hours. What I could do with seven hours, Grant. Like the amount of productivity that could be made in that. Okay. So let’s dive into marketing for a minute. I want to talk about mistakes. What’s the biggest mistake you made with marketing? And what did you learn from it? How did you grow from it?

Grant: 19:17Biggest mistake from marketing? Honestly, because I’m so early in this journey, I don’t have a great answer because I didn’t really do any marketing up until recently So maybe the mistake is not doing anything on LinkedIn. Maybe the answer is that I just didn’t do anything, but to be honest, like we really stayed away from all sorts of marketing and relied on network and popping into different LinkedIn threads and tweet threads and saying, Hey, I’ve got a solution. Do you need help? And that got us to where we are now. So now we’re really focused on. Being more present on LinkedIn, social media channels, et cetera.

Beverly: 19:51Awesome. Sometimes not doing marketing is okay. Especially when you are trying to figure yourself out, don’t just throw good money after bad, right? Be more strategic about that. And then once you are clearer and you have some success stories and things like that to share, then it makes more sense to do that. But hitting the road, whether it’s the internet road of, LinkedIn and communities or in networking events in your community and shaking some hands and kissing babies, you can really build your business, especially at the beginning. So share a fun fact about your business that maybe even your most dedicated clients might not know. Is there a behind the scenes? Like ritual or like talisman or something that might be fun that inspires you or everyone. Just something that’s quirky behind the scenes.

Grant: 20:34I would say the fun one is that the GrantBot name, I just needed something to call the company and the team at Hampton, the company I was working at before, they would call me GrantBot. Cause I was just always like a robot building things out. So that was my nickname. And I said, that’s good enough for them. It’s good enough for the rest of the world.

Beverly: 20:52It’s cute. If your business had a voice, what word or emotion do you think it would embody?

Grant: 20:58Either persistence or service. I don’t know if service is an emotion, but persistence definitely feels like one. I would say that we really care about getting to the answer.

Beverly: 22:20I love that. So what’s a book or a podcast or an entrepreneur that has made a lasting impact on your journey?

Grant: 22:29I’ll give you a book and an entrepreneur. So book would be The Alchemist. That is an awesome story. I, I love it. I love rereading that one. And then the other one on the Entrepreneur, I think Alex Hormozi’s content just feels very genuine. This guy’s done it before in a lot of different areas. He seems really smart. Like he’s got the results. So at that point, if you don’t want to listen on you, but to me, I think he’s got awesome stuff. So I listened to a lot of his content.

Beverly: 22:56Great. What is the worst advice you’ve ever received?

Grant: 23:00I think part of it is it’s trying to put a square peg through a round hole. And in that sense, the pricing model for GrantBot, I get a lot of different opinions about how to price what we do. I hate calling it the worst advice, but like being in a subscription based system for what we do, to me, it sounds like a good idea. Cause it’s so tantalizing of yes, consistent revenue I love it. But at the same time, no one thinks about what we do in that way. So I’m consistently trying to say, yes, it’s just going to be a couple thousand dollars and we’re going to continually build, but people want the outcome. So I just need to listen to that and say, this is the outcome we’re going to deliver and we’re going to do it that way. And I’m still very much in that process of discovery.

Beverly: 23:46Yeah, I think that not everything works for everyone and you got to find what works for you and because it’s a newer service, you have to do a lot of education around it. So that model doesn’t necessarily work for ones that are educating. But if there’s some way that you can compare it to something that’s already, this is my advice. Something that already exists. It’s similar. That’s how you can create the value of the subscription. So I use this analogy when we do our intensive projects, which are Brand Ignites. When you get on a plane, you trust a pilot to get you to where you need to go. You don’t go up there and be like, I want this, and this. Like you just don’t do that. You sit and you trust the process. And I’m asking my clients to trust this process. And so I use that as an example. So if there’s a way to use an analogy to help you. That might be a way to tie it to a more reoccurring revenue. And it might not be monthly. It might be quarterly. There might be a different. Allotment for it. That’s just my suggestion in my two cents there.

Grant: 24:40Yeah. One thing I’ll throw back at you that I think is helpful is. I got the advice of don’t take advice from people who haven’t been where you want to be. And I think that’s an awesome filter. So that was the first thing that came to my head. Cause I’m like, ah, Bad advice doesn’t stand out, but I do remember the people who haven’t been where I want to be. Yep. And so I guess all of that kind of just got thrown to the wayside.

Beverly: 25:02Yeah, that’s great. You’re right. If they haven’t done the thing, that’s why I say compare it to something that has been done. They can be the smartest person, but they may have made widgets versus a service, totally different concept. So We work with a lot of service based businesses, try to find those different service levels. And these are some of the things that we think about when we’re looking at that. You have to filter the things that matter to you. If you listen to everyone, you’d literally be, again, The yes person to every client, everything, and you drive yourself wild, trust me on that. Do you have an unconventional tool or app? It could be Zapier or it could be something that’s on your phone that has become your secret weapon that really is instrumental in your business.

Grant: 25:42Yeah, I would say we built this automation that turns meeting transcripts into content ideas. And as someone who really struggles with the blank page, if I get a draft, I can put it to exactly the way I would write it, but I just need to get to that draft. And what I realized is that all my calls, people are pulling out these dynamic answers out of me. Those are the roots. And so I take all those roots and I turn those into content drafts and then I go and edit them and that is really the shining light in our content marketing.

Beverly: 26:09That’s so good. That’s a great tip, Grant. I love that. How do you keep your entrepreneurial spirit alive?

Grant: 26:16Oh man, I have a notepad on my phone for all the ideas I want to start. And I tell people about them. Once I get to know people, I’ll tell them about all the other ideas I want to start. But being in a business day to day in the trenches, trying to figure things out, that’s the entrepreneurial spirit to keep you going. I got all these ideas. I need to have a place to keep them in like whenever I get low one day, I’m just like, I got other options, but this is the main one.

Beverly: 26:40What are the three most important ingredients for your recipe for success?

Grant: 26:44Recurring theme definitely persistence needs to be. You need to have someone that you can talk to you. There’s so much up and down in this journey. I’m very grateful for my wife and being on calls with people like you and whether it’s on a podcast or just people I meet on LinkedIn. And then I think the last one is putting people on the team in roles where their curiosity drives them, not revenue or income. Obviously, income is important and everything, but I really look for how can I put this person who has unique skills in a role that’s going to draw curiosity will drive them to the answer, not the fact that there’s a client asking.

Beverly: 27:23So are those your three core values?

Grant: 27:26Those are not. We actually don’t have like good set core values. We did an exercise on it. And I just think that we’re too small right now. At least I haven’t put enough team culture behind core values yet.

Beverly: 27:38But that might be a great place to start. I think it’s a challenging question because even if I had to answer it, I would struggle just a little bit. When you’re looking back and even now, is there a moment that you realize that your business is successful, or is there a moment in the future that you’ll know that’s the bar with which you will define success?

Grant: 27:56Man, that is so hard. That is so hard. Because it’s so easy to say when we’re making this amount of revenue, we’ll be successful. But at the end of the day, you hear enough rich people talk about what amount of money makes them happy. It’s never the top line number. It’s is my family taken care of? Am I taking care of, can I eat? Is my rent covered all the basics? I will consider the business a success when I am completely removed from all of the different stages of the fulfillment and sales and marketing, right? If I can build the machine and at one point I can just exit and float on top to me, that would be success. There’s a revenue number that’s going to pay for all those salaries. Yep. There’s going to be a revenue number that’s going to pay for the marketing that turns the machine. But like when I can just go, I’m going to take a step back. I can take a three week vacation or a month vacation. That’s an even better one. If I could take a month vacation and there’s someone else that’s making sure the wheels keep turning, that would be success.

Beverly: 28:57That’s a great measure of success and it’s different for everyone. Like you said, like it could be a revenue. It could be a certain product development, like when something’s completely developed and out there. There’s so many different measures of success. I talk about this a lot in the podcast that. Entrepreneurs are notorious for moving the goalposts, and that we never sit in our wins and we never truly celebrate these levels of success that are so critical and important to the process. Recently, I had a very similar experience. I was on another podcast and that podcast reached top 2 percent of all podcasts globally on iHeartRadio. And the person sent me a note saying I’ve never had a podcast do this. This is amazing. This is great. And I was like, okay, great. And I sent it to my podcast, like the podcast editor, my assistant, Michell and Lizzie. And I was like, Oh, just so you know, we did this. This is great. And when I talked to the podcast host again later, cause we are doing a series. She was like, that is freaking amazing. And I was like, I should have probably sat in that a little longer than I did. And it’s not that I want to like gloat or any of those things, but these are all the moments that matter that like help feed our soul of where do it’s the confirmation of we’re in our purpose. I’m really proud of that statistic, but I just think, Oh, it’s a statistic. I’m more about the service. Like I want the person connection. So it’s like a check Mark for me and not necessarily something that I really wanted to sit in for a minute, but she took the minute to really made sure I understood that was a very powerful thing that I had done with her. And I was just grateful that she gave me that minute of. You do realize like that doesn’t happen. That’s a pretty big deal, Beverly And I was like, wow. I hadn’t really thought about that, but thank you. Those little measurements of success are important and not to like, just shoo them off, when you get done with them. So to sit and really appreciate, we just did an exercise as a team looking back at 2024 and all the things we’ve accomplished, how much further we are from last year, looking at the goals that we had and where we are and all the progress that was made. And that felt really good to the team. To really sit in that progress, we all work remotely. So we don’t sit next to each other. And that was a time for us to really sit in that. And it was huge for the team to realize how much we’d accomplished. Is there one area of your business that you had to learn the most about? Finance, HR, leadership, operations, marketing?

Grant: 31:14I would say sales. Sales is the gift that keeps on giving because obviously it helps you close deals, but sales is everywhere. It’s negotiating with a vendor. It is talking with your team. It’s trying to get someone to join your team. I got this advice when I was leaving my old company is to focus on sales and get a sales trainer. And I did, and it helped a lot, but I think that is an ax that can never be sharp enough. And so always can get better and train that muscle better.

Beverly: 31:38Yeah. Okay. So that is the end of the lightning round. You’ve survived Grant. So I have a magic wand. Okay. And for those of my listeners, it is sparkly. It almost looks a little bit like Glinda’s wand from wicked. But I use it for us to go back in time. It’s like a time machine. We’re going to back in time Grant and we’re going to go to The 18 year old Grant before he went to college when he was just graduating from high school, and we’re going to give him a piece of advice. What advice are we going to give that Grant?

Grant: 32:07If the opportunity makes you excited go as hard as you can at it. That’s led me to where I am today. And I’m on a very unconventional path, so I followed that advice, but I would hit that home a thousand times over.

Beverly: 32:19You would lean harder and do it. I’m going to wave the magic wand and we’re going to go forward to your eulogy. And it’s, years and years and years down the road. I want you to share with me what people will say about your impact.

Grant: 32:32I hope that they’ll say that I was just as fun to be around in a business setting, as well as around the dinner table. And everyone that interacted with me thinks about it with a smile.

Beverly: 32:44Very nice Okay. Wave in the magic wand one last time. We’re going back into present time. I would love for you to give one piece of actionable advice. If you give one piece of actionable advice for someone who’s listening today, who might be struggling a little bit. That could either help them in any direction of their business. What advice would you give?

Grant: 33:05First things first, talk to someone and just get it off your chest, get it out in the open, put some sunlight on it. Then after that, you probably know more people than you think that have been there before and ask for help, right? If it was an automation question, reach out to me. I’m happy to help. And, we can talk over email, get on a call. You got marketing question, talk to Beverly. But I think that at the day, we all have resources. You have more resources at your disposal than you think. So just try to go one layer outside of what you might be used to. And seek help. There’s definitely no shame in asking for help. And I am a big advocate of reaching out.

Beverly: 33:43Great advice, Grant. So before we go, please share with our listeners where they can learn more about you and about GrantBot and your business.

Grant: 33:52Yeah, absolutely. So LinkedIn is probably the best place for me. I’m the only Grant Hushek there. Grant Bot is Grant, my name, B O T all one word, dot co. That’s our website. Actually, that automation I talked about with transcripts and content that’s on our website for free. So if you throw a transcript on our website. You’ll get three LinkedIn posts, so you can give that a shot. And from there that’s more than enough. I’m starting a newsletter soon and hopefully a podcast. So we’re going to keep pushing pace, but yeah, LinkedIn website. Happy to help.

Beverly: 34:23Love it. Grant, thank you so much for being here and sharing your incredible journey where you are today. I think so much of what you’ve said will resonate and People will connect with because they’ve been in the same place. To all of our listeners, I really hope you found today’s conversation as inspiring as I did. Stay tuned for more inspiring conversations and actionable tips on future episodes of the Spark and Ignite Your Marketing Podcast. Until next time, keep sparking and igniting.