How to optimize your business model with digitalization

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Left:

GetMyInvoices: https://www.getmyinvoices.com/
AppSumo: https://appsumo.com/
GoTo Meeting: https://www.goto.com/

Maik Pfingsten Homepage: https://maikpfingsten.de/

Freelance Self-Employed – The Entrepreneur Podcast: https://maikpfingsten.de/podcast/

Introduction

Nice to have you back for another episode of Digital for Productivity. Don’t worry about the background noise. I’m on the road right now. Another interview episode this week, this time with leadership expert Niels Brabant. For those of you who don’t know him yet, I really appreciate him because he’s someone who definitely doesn’t talk in a roundabout way, but speaks clearly and always asks himself the question of how digitalization can be integrated into leadership and management work in companies in a sensible way. And it is precisely at this point in time and on this topic that we once again conducted an exciting interview, which I hope you enjoy and find inspiring. Great to have you with us again for another episode of Digital4Productivity and don’t be surprised if you hear some background noise. I’m on the road.

Another exciting interview episode today, this time with Mike Pfingsten, whose topic of Productized Service is primarily about how to get out of the hamster wheel, how to stop exchanging time for money and instead deliver high-quality results for high-quality fees. He is an inspiration to me and I was very pleased that he invited me to be a guest on his successful podcast, where we also talked about how digitalization can help you optimize your business model.

Have fun and be inspired by this interview.

Mike Pfingsten

In today’s episode of the podcast, we talk about how a simple part of digitalization that usually doesn’t get much attention can set off a chain reaction that makes your entire business processes much more effective. And so today I’m delighted to have a very special person as my guest. He has over 35 years of experience in sales and IT projects up to management level in medium-sized companies and has been passing on his experience to other managers as a personal IT coach since 2010. I am delighted to welcome Thorsten Jekel to the podcast. Hello Thorsten.

Thorsten Jekel

Hello dear Maik and thank you very much for the invitation and your great podcast, which I of course listen to regularly.

Mike Pfingsten

Thank you very much. I’d like to talk to you a bit about one topic. What your absolute profession is, where you come from, and that is the topic of digitalization, especially in the area of small freelance boutiques. You have a lot of experience in this area and I think that’s wonderful because I have someone here who can report on this topic from practical experience. And I’d like to take a closer look. First of all, where do you think small freelance companies stand today when it comes to the whole issue of digitalization? What do you currently see as the So what I perceive and it also coincides with your experience that many freelancers actually go into freelancing, into self-employment, because they want to get out of the hamster wheel and they say: I want to be self-employed, to be able to make my own decisions, to have more freedom, to have more time.

Thorsten Jekel

What do they do? Working independently. And that’s exactly the motto of this podcast, to say that product means services, to come up with a solution somewhere where I say: I create value, but I don’t have to work independently. And what I’ve noticed is that many people simply do a lot of things themselves all the time, things that could be automated with digital tools, for example, to give them more time to be with the customer, because I say I always create value in two things. I create value when I’m with the customer and I create value when I’m working on my company and making sure that I’m even more successful in the future. And that may sound a little abstract at first. Let me illustrate this with a very concrete example. For example, I used to book my monthly accounts myself, i.e. I would get my own software, book them myself and so on. But I studied science, I did an MBA, I used to be an accountant. So I can do that. And that’s also the trap you fall into. I can do something doesn’t mean I have to actually do it myself. So, of course, I fell into the classic trap and said: I’ll do the booking, and it took me a day.

Thorsten Jekel

It now takes me an hour to do the whole thing because, for example … My credit cards are like that, I need eight pages long, always some kind of middling little shit. And there’s a tool, some of you may know it. It’s called GetMyInvoices. And with GetMyInvoices, I enter all the portals, like Amazon, like Deutsche Bahn, like Lufthansa, like EasyJet and whatnot. It automatically pulls all the documents and blows them into my accounting system and I no longer have to deal with this individual data. And you’ve known me for a long time. I usually answer longer than the question, but hopefully I also answer the question by saying that I realize that most freelancers, most self-employed people do far too many things themselves that either other people could do or that machines could do more intelligently. So that’s my perception. Again, the positive thing is that there is simply a lot of potential. If 99% were to exploit all the possibilities now, there wouldn’t be that many possibilities left. I think there is still a lot of potential where we can simply get out of the hamster wheel.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, that’s a very important topic, because I remember it from my old engineering days when it was all about tools. One situation, I don’t know to what extent you’ve had similar experiences. It was usually something along the lines of: Yes, we’ll buy an expert tool now and use it to solve all our problems. And that’s something I believe, especially when it comes to digitalization. We are not yet at the automation stage. It’s just that we’ve finally created a process that no longer runs physically. I’d like to talk to you a bit about that. What’s your experience? The topic of the tool and actually the process and, above all, an aspect that I see again and again and where I always attach great importance. There’s this very famous saying: Sorry, my choice of words, but if I digitize a shitty process, then I have a digitized shitty process.

Thorsten Jekel

I even go a little further.

Mike Pfingsten

Okay.

Thorsten Jekel

This is the former head of Telefonica, who is always quoted as saying this. I’ll even go one better. I say that if you digitize a shitty analogue process, you not only have a shitty digitizing process, but you have an even shittier digital process. Most of the time, we are worse organized in the digital world than in the analogue world. Let me give you a very concrete example of something that is tangible. If you, as a listener, come home tonight, a private household, then I suspect that when you open your letterbox, you won’t necessarily find 3-4-6-8 letters – half of which are open – flying at you. In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily take out a letter that’s already been opened, put it in and say: I’ll take it upstairs with me, I’ll get to it now, tear open two or three more, put them back and practically stuff 3-4-6-7 letters back in again. So if your neighbor saw that, you’d wonder what kind of weed you’ve been smoking and where you get that cool shit. So, what do I see in inboxes in digital form? And that’s where I was again the other day when I accompanied this one. I always like to ask anonymously: who offers more in terms of emails in the inbox?

Thorsten Jekel

So last month I had the absolute peak with 18,789 emails in my inbox. Nobody would put that many e-mails in a mailbox because we often have self-limiting systems in the analog world, which we don’t have in the digital world. So the other day I saw a beautiful picture on Facebook, vacation photos, 1987, 36 pictures, eight were beautiful. So those of you who have been young for a while, like us, know that there used to be 36 pictures and you had to think five times about how many films you could take on vacation. And you thought six times about whether to press the button or not, because at some point the films were limited. Today, you make a series of ten and hit it straight away. And you know when I photograph a group of three, one of them always pulls a face. So that means you always need three attempts until all three look good in the photo. That’s normal. You used to think long and hard about the photos that were bad and then, when you picked them up, you sorted them out. Why did you do that? Because most of the time you don’t have to pay for them and then you can say: well, you’ve sorted them out again.

Thorsten Jekel

So that means money was sometimes the lever, but most of them didn’t capture bad photos. Nowadays, if I take three photos of the group and I look at which one turned out well, I delete the other two straight away. And nobody has this discipline anymore, because you’re not directly forced to do it and I regularly get calls saying: Oh, my iCloud storage is full, my iPhone is full, and it’s not just a shitty analog process, it’s an even shittier digital process. I’ll add one more aspect, namely: Fool with a tool is still a fool. In other words, I’ve always had this saying: First turn on the brain, then the technology. And that’s true of many things. I was recently at a conference where a colleague had an iPhone 8 or 9, which is a very old iPhone. I had a 13 and he asked: “Gosh, do you want to take photos? Unlike me, he’s a really good photographer. I said: Let’s do the following: You take a few photos with your old carrot, I’ll take a few photos with my iPhone and I’ll bet my ass that your photos will be better.

Thorsten Jekel

And that was the case, even though he had the much weaker device, the photos turned out much better because he has a photographic eye. And when it comes to tools, the first thing you always have to ask yourself is: What goal do I want to achieve with it? To say: Do I want to become faster? Do I want to save costs? Do I want to serve the customer better with it? Then digitalization makes sense and then think about it: Which tool? And then you have to ask yourself, for example: Is it cross-platform? So I can use it on all the systems I have today. And even the listeners, I’ll say Martin Sänger, for example, he listens here too, like our dear friend. Martin is just a complete fool. So I say he only works with Apple devices, because he says, I say, this weird Windhoff stuff, I can’t do anything with it. Yes, only today Apple is perhaps the right system. But he also works with Exchange because he knows that if he switches to Android in five or six years’ time, he can also use his Exchange. And that’s always a cross-platform issue, and of course I’m also a big fan of trying out new shit from time to time.

Thorsten Jekel

But please always switch on your brain first, then the technology.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, wonderful. You summed it up so well and I had to smile when you quoted it because I know the addition to it. It really rounds things off nicely: A fool with a tool is just a fool, but the tool makes a disaster faster.

Thorsten Jekel

Oh, great. I didn’t know that one yet. It’s great. Absolutely great. May I quote him? It’s great.

Mike Pfingsten

Always a pleasure. It’s great. I didn’t feel it myself, but it came to me years ago and back then in Systems Engineering …

Thorsten Jekel

makes a disaster FASTER. Totally brilliant. And let me tell you, we’re currently dealing with the topic of AI in high potency, where people say, for example: Yes, you can write books with AI. I always get – it’s always so funny to say – I regularly get somewhat unintelligent acquisition requests on LinkedIn and you probably know that too. And then some spacko wrote to me again and said: Jekel, don’t you finally want to write your own expert book with AI? So two experts in one hour. I wrote back: Sorry, somehow you’ve only written nine books yourself. So somehow I’ve probably done something wrong so far. So researching helps in the initial customer approach. And I always have this theme, this image of Michelangelo carving David out of marble. And he was probably once asked, when he was still alive, how did you somehow manage to create this David? He said: It was very simple. I had the image in my head and I only had to say what was superfluous. That’s how it’s often quoted.

Thorsten Jekel

And you could give me the world’s best diamond chisel right now. Not even a Mickey Mouse would come out of such a thing, even if I had the picture of the finished David standing next to me. I simply wouldn’t have the artistic, technical ability to do it that way. On the other hand, if Michelangelo had had a super high-performance diamond chisel back then, there wouldn’t just be one David now, there would probably be hundreds more. So digitalization and especially this topic of AI are all tools where you don’t have two hands, but four to six hands, but it makes the disaster faster. I think that’s great. In other words, if I have six hands that don’t know what to do, then things can go very badly wrong. It’s a multiplier in both a positive and a negative sense and I’ve seen in many companies, especially in the large companies I work for, but also in small companies, that you simply say that IT is just a waste of money. Let me tell you, I now pay a few thousand euros a month for IT licenses, which quickly adds up and doesn’t necessarily always increase productivity to the same extent.

Thorsten Jekel

And you have that both in large companies and in freelance work. I see that again and again. Yes.

Mike Pfingsten

And that actually brings me to another aspect that I always find really exciting and really important: less is more. So for me, that’s another aspect that comes into it, to really sit down and think about it first: What is my approach? What is my process? And that is: What should it look like in the future? And of course it has a connection to the present, because of course, if we have a process in an analog world that ensures that our mailbox is empty at the end of the day or at least – we all know this – we go on vacation, then someone else will make sure that there aren’t suddenly ten letters hanging out. In the analog process, we have this limitation that we have. You can learn and take on a lot. But then to say: What do I really need? And what is the benefit of taking the step you just mentioned afterwards, to see which tools make sense here and where. And that’s something I’m noticing again and again in this whole AI context at the moment. I have various tools, but there is one thing that is the most important of all: Our own brain.

Thorsten Jekel

Yes, I say to myself, before we start with AI, with artificial intelligence, let’s start with common sense. That’s always where I say that’s the number one step, that you have that. And I like the way you think in the sense that I always say that if you introduce a new system, you should at least disconnect an old system for it. So if I say, for example, I’m going to introduce iPads, then I say: Okay, what are you replacing with them? And I’ve accompanied companies like Coca-Cola, for example, 1400 sales representatives, who were totally thrilled that they all got iPads, up to the point where we said, in two months we’ll collect your laptops. That’s when I said: Excuse me? Are you crazy, collecting laptops? To say: Yes, and then there was Ulrich Nehmer, the boss at the time, Viking number one. So Viking number one for two reasons, Dehne. Secondly, he was very straightforward. And he said: Why do you need a PC? And then he says: Yes, I have to fill out this Excel list. Then he says: Will you sell one more crate of Coke if you fill out this Excel spreadsheet?

Thorsten Jekel

And then he says: When the Stottan came, he said: Okay, next one. In other words, it went through and they simply took the opportunity to say: Okay, if we introduce a new system now, what do we no longer need? What do we perhaps also need, and there are always two stages, what do we no longer need at all? And what do I perhaps no longer need to do as an independent contractor and what can someone else do? So that’s another topic, for example, because I always say that this support from man and machine. I am also a solo self-employed person. So that means I’m on my own, my wife is employed by me, she’s a professor and as a professor, because she’s at a university of applied sciences, she doesn’t want to lose contact with the real world, because she says: “Man, I just want 20 years at Siemens. In other words, she still wants to be talking about the real world in ten years’ time and bringing students into great companies. And one day a week she makes sure she’s with customers. So formally, legally, officially, you’re allowed to do that one day a week. So it’s not somehow undercover, it’s completely official and doesn’t matter.

Thorsten Jekel

She’s employed by me and I’ve had a VPA since the start. I’m guessing you’ve heard of VPA, or Virtual Private Assistant. I got the idea from Timothy Farris from The 4-Hour Workweek, one of the books that had a lasting impact on my life and business. In addition to Kopfschleck Kapital by Professor Faltin – you probably also know this topic of reasons from components – there are two books for me where I say, so maybe you can also link it. So if you haven’t read it yet, the 4-hour week and Kopf schägt Kapital. And the third, of course, is Product High Service by Mike. These are the three books you must have read. And that’s where I learned that there is the option of having an assistant since I started, who until recently cost 9 euros an hour. He now costs 11 euros an hour and it’s a German company. I have a German contractual situation, GDPR, and he lives in Eastern Europe. That means he has a significantly lower cost of living in Bulgaria than we have here. He earns more than his wife, who leaves the house in the morning.

Thorsten Jekel

Full-time work is totally happy. I am totally happy. He speaks fluent German and studied in Germany. But the coolest thing is always my assistant, Dr. Džunda, who then gets in touch with you. So there’s no reason not to have an assistant today. He books all my trips for me, he does my charts, he does 80% of my e-mails. So that means I’m a big fan of using “MI” and “AI”, human intelligence and artificial intelligence in the best of both worlds combination.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, yes And what you’re talking about is so incredibly important to really become aware of: What do I really, really need? I know this as a systems engineer who also comes from this whole software context. The difficulty we have is that you can’t touch software, you can’t grasp it in the truest sense of the word. I can still remember this from my active time as a systems engineer: there are the electronics developers, there are the design engineers and then there are the software developers. And they somehow build an ICE door, an ICE, an airplane, a control unit, a coffee meter, whatever. The two groups of electronics and design, i.e. mechanical engineering and electronics, end up with something tangible in their hands. But not the software fraction. When we now push to design system and software architectures, everyone who didn’t have this seventh sense, this antenna, came to be able to read software. I can’t describe it any better than that, to have this feeling for it – they were totally stumped. They couldn’t imagine it, because you can’t print it out. Sure, I can go somewhere and print out the entire code of my software tool or the something that drives around in the control unit or whatever. That doesn’t tell you anything.

Mike Pfingsten

And that is the difficulty. We very quickly get into this digitalization context, into environments where if you don’t have this seventh sense of what software means, what software architectures mean, what processes that run virtually mean, then the danger is super fast, super high that it will be made ultra-complex. Because I don’t have this limitation that you described wonderfully at the beginning, this yes, the mailbox is full. You have to make sure it’s empty again. It’s not. Yes? So, and then I have the situation very quickly. You never do that.

Thorsten Jekel

You never do that. No, of course not. I should do it. I should, you never do. Exactly.

Mike Pfingsten

And then I get started. Then there’s a tool that says: I’ll clear my inbox in five seconds. Then you think: Great, then I’ll buy the tool and throw it in my inbox. But whether the process that then takes place makes sense is another question. That’s another question.

Thorsten Jekel

Exactly. Absolutely. And there are also two or three impulses. And a very specific tip in between: Many of you may work with Outlook as listeners. In Outlook, if you have 18,000 e-mails in your inbox and a few zackwetschte e-mails in there, it’s often like this, you probably all know the Olympic discipline of e-mail ping-pong, so you always say, you write something, you reply again, you write something, you reply again. And if I leave out the emails with attachments for a moment, the last email always contains the status of the entire history. That means you only need the last one. The ones before that are all redundant. This means that if you search, you won’t find one result for a business transaction, but ten results. And the risk of getting the intermediate result and not the final result is even higher if you don’t delete. Because many people always say: I can’t delete because I need it for the traceability of the business transactions, to say: Hey wait a minute, the process risk is much greater if you archive an interim status than if you always archive the last status.

Thorsten Jekel

Since at least they have the discipline, a very specific tip: Right-click on the Outlook inbox folder and then click on the Clean up folder command. Then you can set this again. So you can say, everything that I have marked, I don’t want it to do it, everything that has been changed again. And if you then say: “Shoot, I recently had a customer who had over 8000 emails in their inbox and then after this filling he only had 1000, without losing any information because this is redundant. So that’s the one concrete tip where a lot of people say: wow, and especially if you work with Outlook Exchange or work with Exchange on other systems, it’s cleaned up on all end devices. The second one: I’m a big fan of positive habits. We have a few habits where we say there are pretty old concepts that have somehow stood the test of time, for example breathing. So it’s a pretty old concept, but it has somehow stood the test of time. And I’m guessing that most of you won’t say: I’ll brush my teeth one day and then it’ll have to be enough for the next ten years, but rather our parents drilled it into us relatively strenuously that we should at least brush our teeth in the morning and evening.

Thorsten Jekel

And I can still remember that as a child I thought it was kind of silly to brush my teeth in the beginning. I remember that our daughter didn’t find it that exciting either. So establishing a new habit always takes effort. But at some point, once we’ve established it, I’m guessing none of you will question brushing your teeth in the morning and in the evening. Everyone does it today. And I learned one habit that is a great way to make this topic of decluttering permanent from Tiki Küstenmacher in the book Simplify your life, which he wrote together with Professor Dr. Lothar Seiwert, and that is the minus two rules. To be very specific: I used to move emails to a subfolder, which was always a one-way street, and that was it. What I’ve now got into the habit of doing is moving an email to a subfolder, taking a quick look in this subfolder and making sure that I delete at least two emails from the subfolder. And that always works. I can do the same thing when I move files somewhere. Is there a previous version? Yes, wonderful. I can delete the previous one or two files and then you don’t build up what we always do, but then it actually becomes less.

Thorsten Jekel

And every now and then, after a few months, sometimes even after two years, I sometimes get a call or an email to say: Yekel, I’m on zero, I’ve worked through it. And if you say, I want to go to Inbox Zero, you can say, for example, that you can just move the old inbox, make a new folder, Inbox old. You’ve never had Inbox Zero so quickly. In other words, just move it into the new folder and then you immediately make sure that you have an empty inbox, for example. And every day, when it’s empty, just process one or two more emails, then there will be fewer. Not 20, 30, you can’t do it. You can manage one or two every day without any problems. And if someone says: I still need something, you know where they are. So this topic and in particular, what for? I’m always seen as a bit of a nerd, but I always say that technology should be used so that we have more time to create value for our customers. And if we create value for our customers, then we earn money. And what I learned from you, what I find so brilliant, is simply to build a productized service in such a way that it is highly automated, highly standardized and can be built in the shortest possible time, so that you can bring it to the market yourself in the shortest possible time, so that you need fewer hours and can even deliver a better result to the customer in a shorter time.

Thorsten Jekel

And what you have also demonstrated is that you can even sell something like this in the next step, because as a freelancer, many people say yes: I can’t sell my business. Yes, I can sell a productized service. And that’s where digitalization helps, because I say: Okay, if I’ve set it up so neatly that someone doesn’t have to try out 35 tools, but has exactly the tools where you have precisely timed the process for creating your productized service, that’s a value that you can sell.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, you’re absolutely right. And that’s what I always say: it’s worth the work. And I think to myself: What is my star recipe? What is my ideal process, especially in the value stream? Where we create value for our customers, but where our money comes in at the end of the day, of course, and then to take the step and say: Okay, once that’s clear, once I’ve worked through it manually two, three, four times with the first orders from the customer, to say: Now there are options. And that’s the exciting thing, and I think that’s why, from my point of view, it’s getting better and better: now I know how to deliver highly professional services at boutique level from my point of view. That is often our aspiration as freelancers. And then I can go and say: At this point I need a tool that doesn’t cover this task, this step, this topic, and I know my requirements for the tool and can go and say: I want exactly that. Because that’s another side effect that people don’t always have on their radar. If I buy a tool first and then think about my implementation, I automatically buy into the generic process of the tool provider.

Thorsten Jekel

That’s right. Are you right? Totally good point to see that too.

Mike Pfingsten

This is absolutely not our ideal process in 99% of cases. That means I start to bend myself for the tool. And then I’m either no longer effective or no longer efficient or both in the end. In other words, I don’t just have this problem, as you put it so well. I mean, when we digitize an analogue process, it usually gets worse because it becomes more chaotic or there are no more boundaries, but we also have this inherent, implicit process that is in the tool provider, because they won’t go and say: Hey, you’re a ten-man tax firm, you’re a five-man engineering firm, you’re a solopreneur or something like that. He will say: What is the average of all customers who use this tool and what will the process look like that everyone could reasonably cover. And that’s what they end up doing. Absolutely.

Thorsten Jekel

I’m 90% with you and I’m happy to say something about the other 10%. Gladly. In fact, I’m 90% with you. I also like this balanced scorecard model, which is a further development of Kaplan and Norton’s strategy map. An old concept. I wrote my MBA master’s thesis on it in 1999. And the idea is that you say, in the past, I practically only ever looked at financial key figures through the rear-view mirror: what are my figures from last year? And the idea of the Balanced Scorecard was revolutionary at the time in that it said, I’m also looking at other perspectives, namely I’m looking at the customer perspectives. What are the key features there? I look at the process perspective, I look at the development perspective and I have even more … I don’t look through the rear-view mirror, but also through the windshield and to the left and right. They developed this further, I think, and then it became really cool that they said, okay, I have such a logical sequence, such a cascading, that they say, okay, you first ask yourself the question: What financial goals do I want to achieve, ideally to earn the best possible return on my invested capital?

Thorsten Jekel

To say, this is how I’m going to go public or I’m going to do the same thing. In order to achieve these financial goals, what customer goals do I need to achieve? In other words, which customers do I want to reach with which offers? Ideally, in order to provide these productized services, what processes do I need to have in place? And to have these processes in place: How do I have to develop my systems and myself and my employees to be able to map the whole thing? And in 90% of all cases, you should also think through this from top to bottom. And now I’ll say something about the 10%. For example, there is now a new tool image in the context of AI. There is a new development, for example a tool with Behuman, where I have the option of hyper-personalizing videos. In other words, I can say I’m going to make a video that I record and say: Hi, it’s great that you were there for these podcasts when you were at this conference. We know each other from tapp, tapp, tapp and here and here I have an offer. In the past, if I wanted to send this out to 400 people, I’m often at conferences, I either had to make a completely individual video 400 times or I had to speak 400 times dear Maik, dear Martin, dear Thomas. Nobody did it, because you’re stupid. So now you can say, as with newsletters, you can upload the CSV file and I’ll just say I’ll record the video once and then you’ll get it: Hi, Mike, hi. So it’s completely hyper-personalized. In other words, I can see that there’s a new system. And then I think to myself: Hey, wait a minute, what process can I optimize with this? Do I take the process of individual video creation, where I needed a lot of time today or where I didn’t do it at all? How can I use it to communicate better with my customers and earn more money through this hyper-personalization? So sometimes and a very specific tip that I like to share with you, subscribe to AppSumo‘s newsletter. Absumo is a platform, you probably know it. You can buy lifetime deals for programs there, where you usually get lifetime access for three months’ fees for the middle edition, so you save a lot of money if you really use the tools. And they always make short videos where you are introduced to these tools. And I’m 90% with you, or I’m 100% with you, that you should never take a predefined process, let’s say, but always think from the strategic side.

Thorsten Jekel

But sometimes there are new technological things where you say: Hey, I want to use technology today to enable optimizations that were not possible until recently, where I can either create a better service, where I can create more value for the customer or I can optimize my service provision again, because in my view AI offers, so many make these videos in other languages and so on, all gimmicks. But it gets interesting when I say that I can use it to hyper-personalize, I can use it to scale into markets where I can’t get into at all, as a hyper-personnel, for scaling. Wonderful. And that’s the 10% where I say you should also take a look at what new tools are available. But for 90%, please do it the other way around and then look for a tool.

Mike Pfingsten

Exactly. And one point that you just said is incredibly important, and that is to further develop the existing process, to optimize it, to take this tool and say: Okay, I now have my process from the initial meeting, for example the initial meeting, and then there is an offer and I would like to have this individual video: Hello Dr. Müller. Nice that we have spoken to each other. I have the corresponding offer for you here again. And yes, in the project and service we have the nice shame that we have an offer that is also standardized, where we only have to theoretically exchange the address. And that in turn means that I could do exactly the same thing and say: Hello Mr. Müller, Dr. Müller, this is what it looks like.

Thorsten Jekel

And that’s cool, of course. I have a standard offer and can still customize it. So that’s where text to video makes sense, for example, where I can even say in extreme cases that I have a standard module that goes into my areas. So I’m always a friend of identifying AI-generated content anyway, because that’s simply an ethical question. Because I work with the topic of digitization, it is of course another topic where I say, walk your talk, but I also think it’s good that way. And you can also go down another level. So I don’t know if you know services like BOM BOM, DAP or HiPPO Video. So I think they’re extremely great. The ability to record a video quickly, even on your smartphone. So when I get a request, I also travel a lot as a speaker: what do people want? They just want to get a personal impression of me, because they book the guy, they have 200 sales representatives here. They don’t want the guy to be unable to get three straight sentences out. In other words, they want to get a feel for how high the risk is that he’s a douche?

Thorsten Jekel

What do I do? Video helps. I often do it from my hotel room on my iPhone. I say: Dear Bosch team, I’ve just received a request from my speaker management team for the conference in January. I understand that this and this are the topics. I find that super exciting. My ideas for presentation titles would be this and this. That would be the core content. Let’s talk under the video, you’ll find the button. You can book an appointment for a briefing call right there. Click on it right away and then we’ll get to know it even better. 99% conversion rate. So because people say: Hey, wait a minute. First, they were the fastest to respond first. Secondly, they were the only one who answered in the video, who did it personally. And of course, if you have a productized service where you say you’re going to put out 100 products every day somehow, then it gets a little difficult. But I don’t send out 100 advance requests every day. So you always have to look at the number of hits. And I’m guessing that you have customers with you who have Productized Services, who perhaps have a higher number of orders. It will no longer make sense.

Thorsten Jekel

And there are perhaps some who say: I only have three or four a month, then you can turn this loop accordingly.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, and then you have the big advantage, and I did that once years ago with a customer, Total Hidden Champion. The managing director approached me and I sent him a video in which I explained how we proceed via a screencast. It had several levels of This is simple on the one hand, it’s asynchronous. He could watch it when he had time as the managing director of this small, fine company with, I think, 4-5,000 employees. You know, they’re not sitting there waiting for the finger to drop. So, the other thing is, most of us, as much as we have standardized on the projects as a service, on our offers and so on, it is and often remains a highly complex expert service that requires explanation. And it’s easier to visualize with a video like this and then I’m with you. I can see the person acting and I can perhaps see a visualization that complements this to make it much clearer: Okay, is this what I need? Is this person in the video someone who can just talk it out and also like this? Great. And I sent it to him at the time, to him and his division manager.

Mike Pfingsten

Then the two of them looked at it, independently of each other, probably spoke to each other again and then came up to me in the next Zoom call – at that time it was still a go-to-meeting – and said: Great.

Thorsten Jekel

I just did it this morning, go-to-meeting. Yes.

Mike Pfingsten

That still exists. Yes, back then.

Thorsten Jekel

This still exists in the banking sector.

Mike Pfingsten

Yes, I think so. Exactly. And as I said, it’s great. The customers think it’s great and I don’t have mega WDR TV studio quality. It has to be clean.

Thorsten Jekel

I always say relevance before frippery. That means it simply has to be relevant and always least tech possible. As little technology as possible, but no less, please. So let me say, in front of a noisy street, let me say, having an iPhone on the other side of the road, the sound is simply exhausting. That means, of course, and now I’m here in the office today, I also have a good microphone. Of course, when I’m on the road, I don’t have it with me, so the quality is a bit worse, but even then I have a decent headset. So yesterday I just gave a seminar from driving in a car. My wife drove in the front and I gave a video for Mal2 on the subject of video training for an hour on the subject of taking photos and making videos with the iPhone and iPad. Of course, the standard wasn’t the same as here, but relevance before mistakes, highly relevant information and, as a supplement, if you say, for example, that you do something like this more often via video and notice that you are individualized at the beginning or at the end, in the middle you always tell the same thing, then it’s also an idea to say you have a setting where you maybe once …

Thorsten Jekel

I often wear this light blue jacket with a blue turtleneck. So then you just put on the same outfit that you have in the middle section, which you record once, the exact same setting and just do the opening credits once, do the closing credits once. And you can also solve this intelligently by saying: “Oh, I have to get something for you for a moment. Then I go out of the picture and practically have the middle part so that I practically run back into the picture. Then you don’t notice such cuts. That means, because there’s always the question: Ah, you can see the cuts, to say: Yes, you just have to build it intelligently, to say: Oh, just a moment, I’ll get something for you again. So you practically get out and then you practically jump back into the middle section. So you can solve that intelligently, because if you keep telling the same thing in the middle, then you would rightly say again: Hey, wait a minute, you have to optimize the machine so that you standardize the things you do over and over again. And that can be done in a human-like way, for example, where I can say, I have the front part, the back part, and I can build it accordingly with AI.

Thorsten Jekel

That means I only have to go to the studio once, I have the same clothes, everything, even in the AI, and that’s where AI makes sense, so that I can say I can hyper-personalize without having to work more independently. And that’s exactly why I’m such a fan of your idea of Product Heist Service, to say: Man, how can I not just talk about value-based pricing, which for me is a precursor to this idea, but how can I make it even more consistent? How can I make it even more consistent, build a product that I can then also structure the star chef recipe, as you put it so well, so that I can reproduce it for myself with as little effort as possible? And I always find that so exciting, as you always said in the podcast, when you sold your business, I think you had somehow planned a certain transition phase and after a short time Danny, who bought the business from you, said: “So, don’t get on my channel here. I already know how it works.

Mike Pfingsten

And that’s the beauty of it: you can hand over a Geistesleist business because you have exactly that. You have the star chef recipe, you have the documentation of the star chef recipe and, on the other hand, the person who takes over the whole thing can jump straight in and get started and doesn’t have to think about how it works and ask three questions. Perfect. Thorsten? Where can we find you on the net?

Thorsten Jekel

The good thing about my name is that Peter Müller would be more difficult. Thorsten Jekel is relatively easy. So Thorsten with T-H, J-E-K-E-L. So that’s simply Digital for productivity with the 4, because that’s what it’s all about, you can also find me as a podcast. We also link the whole thing on LinkedIn, if you search for Thorsten Jekel, you’ll also find me. So if you have any questions there, who has what. I also have a free, one-hour Zoom Susprechstunde once a month. Maybe we can also link to that. So if you have technical questions, the next one is on December 1. If you listen to the episode after December 1st, which is in January, that’s the next one. So there’s a link on the page that always shows the last date. You can ask me questions about the I can’t ask you anything.

Mike Pfingsten

Wonderful, Thorsten. I’m really glad you were there. For those of you who are sitting in the car, jogging, walking the dog or whatever, we’ll link it all for you. Have a look there. I can recommend what Thorsten is doing. I can highly recommend that you just take a look. And if you have any questions, feel free to contact him. On that note, thank you very much, Thorsten, for being there.

Thorsten Jekel

Thank you, dear Mike. First of all, good luck to everyone and to you too. Bye bye.

Speaker 3

This was another episode of Digital for Productivity, the podcast for productive digitalization. And always remember: Switch on the brain first, then the technology. Yours, Thorsten Jekel.

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