Paul: 0:29

Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers. This week, I'm joined by fantastic James Martin, who's Managing Director of Gain More Solutions, and a seasoned business growth expert with over 20 years of experience in helping SMEs increase sales and improve profits. James is known as the SME wizard. I love that. I love that. I'm the bank did LinkedIn. Hi. James specializes in using structured processes, including AI to optimize business operations and drive significant revenue growth. He's got an impressive track record, including growing businesses by over 100 million pounds in just seven years. And it's super passionate about empowering business owners to retire rich by building robust, sustainable companies. It sounds like the dream. James, thanks for coming along to be a guest.

James: 1:17

Thanks for the invite, really appreciate it.

Paul: 1:20

Awesome. First off, I have to say, I love the detail in your background. It's very easy to understand more about who you are and your upbringing and where you belong in the world. I like hats off. A lot of people are scared to do that. Do you want to just as a bit of an icebreaker for the audience and bear in mind that some of the audience will be listening rather than watching. Do you want to talk us through a couple of the elements that are behind you and why you've got those there? Sorry to throw you a curve ball straight away.

James: 1:45

No, it's fine. So a lot of the work I do is on Zoom. It's on, it's remote. So actually you get to see behind people and yes, they have fake backgrounds, stuff like that. This is my little cabin, as it were and I want it to be inspirational. Now it's a bit weird. So on one side for your audio listeners, I've got, there's Muhammad Ali, which says impossible is nothing. And it's motivation. I guess it's somewhat subliminal and that people are seeing that and seeing this around me. And there's another post that says behind me, it's not over when you lose, it's over when you quit because we all feel those struggles as business owners. And do we give up? And it's, if you give up, then you lose. But you don't lose if you just keep going. I do get some comments about my rights shoulder, which has my Only Fools and Horses. Cause some would say I'm an entrepreneur and is Del Boy the archetypal entrepreneur that we want to aspire to be? Probably not, but actually he never gave up. So there is that element and There you'll see lots of monkeys and that, and for me, monkeys are, again, sounds a bit weird, but in the business world, we keep getting thrown monkeys, and when I deal with my clients, they say, I've got this problem, how do I help, and I don't really want the monkey, so I'll try and find a solution to throw it back at them. So there are some reference points here, But that's me, this is as authentic as it can be.

Paul: 3:09

I remember the first time I read the One Minute Manager book and came across the idea of monkeys being sat on your back and it was, we all rolled our eyes when we got told to read this book and we got given it by our regional director and we all read the book. And I think I was probably the only one that read it cover to cover and then read it again, because actually it was transformational for me. It was really important. If you haven't read that book and, or you're not familiar with the concept, go and research it. Cause a hundred percent, once you understand that analogy, it is really helpful for working through the challenges that you have. Bring it back to your personal journey then, James. Without putting too fine a point on it, your business journey really started in a week of huge trauma. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that and how those challenges shape your approach to helping other business owners? Yeah,

James: 4:02

I'm quite open about it now. I've got over the pain that it had because it did change me. So before I do that, if I just go back a bit, so I came out of retail and did all of the corporate roles and was an employee and helped grow businesses within a big corporation. And then on the 17th of February 2017 is I remember exactly what I was doing there. I was part of a company where I was an investor, a shareholder, and an employee. And I was a minority shareholder and the business had made some bad decisions and they were things that I didn't subscribe to, but as a minority shareholder, you can't really do too much. You've got to go along with it. And I got a phone call about half past six that night to, and it's one of those, Amazing things, you've probably had it, when the phone goes in the middle of the night, you know it's never going to be good news. And that phone call happened about half past six, and I knew it was a problem. And I answered it, and cut a long story short, the company I was part of went into administration. So all of the investment I put in, all of the salary I hadn't taken, when I did the numbers, it was about 100, 000 that I'd lost. Pretty much on that phone call. So there you have a situation where I've got no job, no income, I've got a mortgage, I've got all the stuff that everyone else has got. And a lot of expertise, but what do I do with it? And that actually was the second worst day of my life. And it sounds quite deep, but 48 hours later my mum was diagnosed with terminal stage 4 cancer with 9 months to live. So going from everything being okay to no job, no life my mum that would effectively end her life that year my dad who was 13 years older, who we then knew would obviously go on some level of decline cause he relied upon her so 48 hours of horror. But do you know what? The business going bust, and this is important I think for anyone who's up against it, the business going bust and that issue. was probably the best thing that ever happened. And it sounds really weird, but actually it gave me the time and focus on mum and she literally nine months to the day passed away. But I then had to find a way and find things that I had to do. So I called in some favours. There's some other stories around that, which I won't go into today, but I had to call in some favours some friends, some previous clients to go and do some consultancy work to try and keep the wheels going. But at that moment, it really changed my approach on business because I'd earned six figure salaries and been really successful. And I was at an age then I'd never had my own business and saw lots of business owners out there, friends and people I knew that were struggling. And they were struggling because they had really good businesses, but didn't know how to actually do it. And I'm sat there going, I've done it, albeit I've done it under a corporate guise, but I could help you. And my whole ethos changed pretty much instantly that I wanted to go and help people and hence GainMore was built and it's gone from strength to strength. I now have several businesses. I help lots of clients to try and achieve their goals and whilst money is a motivator, it's more a motivator that they get their goals. I've helped them, and that really fills my cup. Sounds a bit twee, but it genuinely motivates me now. It,

Paul: 7:20

I can feel the Paul from 10 years ago rolling his eyes at what you said, but the Paul that's sitting here right now really does Appreciate the value in that idea that money isn't the end goal. And I totally understand where you're coming from with that. There's a lot of people that will just brush that off and, yeah, that's fine. But when I'm rich, then I'll not have to worry about X, Y, and Z. And it's true. It does take away concerns and daily worries and no doubt that it does help. But if you're getting rich by doing things that don't motivate you or give you passion, You're not going to be doing it very often. I was talking with a guest just last week last week's episode. Last week, but it'll have gone out before Christmas. He was the last guest before Christmas. So there is a month in the middle. But if you go back and look at Adrian Fulle's episode and Adrian talks about, he had a 20 year history in Hollywood working with some of the biggest celebrities in the world, huge film directors. And he quite honestly states that most of the industry was miserable because they'd achieved the fame that they set out to achieve and come with a pile of baggage along with the riches that they didn't ever understand came with it. And it didn't make them happy. There was nothing they were doing in their day that, that made them feel part of something or passionate and they'd lost their guidance. So I totally get where you're coming from with that. And talk to me a little bit more about getting more solutions then. So you've said that you've went through that horrendous crucible, and I'm sorry that you had to go through that, James, a lot of our guests have. A lot of our guests have gone through a crucible of some sort, come out the other side and come out fighting and swinging much to the Muhammad Ali reference behind you. So why the unique perspective on leveraging AI for gain more? And is it, is it designed to make their business more automated and optimized, or is it actually gained or augmenting them as a business owner? I

James: 9:12

It, several things that there's, we can get into the operational side of how it makes us work better, faster, more efficient. I like the idea of going into a business and working with them and saying, actually, so what is it that you do regularly? Because we do too much automation. But we do it manually. And I don't want to remove people from business because actually you can bring AI in, you can bring automation in to do the things that are done repetitively, arguably better than a human. And actually you can then redeploy that human resource into things that are going to add more value to the business. So it isn't a cost cutting exercise for me. It's about actually Mary or John or Bill or whoever it is would actually add more value by doing things that they want to do in the business but they don't have time because they're forever dealing with invoices or they're forever writing copy and they're all they're doing the things that can be done by an AI engine. And actually, it might not be a case of an AI engine doing all of it. It might just be a first draft in terms of marketing. We can't rely on AI to deliver first hit marketing messages, but it can turn a blank piece of paper into a good first draft that we can cultivate. So actually, it's not about removing people by putting AI in. It's about what AI is out there. How does it deploy in my business? And how does it accelerate? There's a real thing that AI, you could argue AI is there to be used and will reduce the cost, the labour cost of the business. But what's going to happen is if you're not using AI in your business, and we found this ourselves, that if you don't use AI in your business or at least welcome it in, your competitors are. they'll steal the march because they'll be able to go to market quicker or with the newer thing or do things faster or be more efficient or reach more people quicker than you. Hang on a minute. That's just giving you the tool. If we give you the tool and the process, you can deploy that in your business, actually. You can at least be on par with them. And I have to say. In a lot of industries, the bar is very low at the moment, so actually if you integrate it now, you could be first to market, you could lead it, swallow a lot of that, and grow quickly. And that's what the aim of the Game Law is and everything that we do is based around how do we get you to where you need to be as quick as we can.

Paul: 11:33

think the thing that probably sits at the top of people's mind right now when they hear the word AI, because there are so many people abusing AI to be lazy, And, you know what? People are crying out, right? I get guests on all the time saying, Oh stop doing it. Stop doing it. Do you know what? Keep doing it, people. Keep doing it. I love you for doing it because it makes my life so easy for those of us that can use it properly and don't use it as an end point, exactly to you said, James. It's very easy to stand out. But I guess there's a concern for a lot of business owners who don't want to be tarred with the AI brush because it has such a negative connotation already. Is that fair? Is that something you come up against?

James: 12:14

Yeah, I think there is. I think it's an educational thing. I think what happens is people look at AI and they see chatGPT and that's AI and it's not. It's so much broader than that. And there are people out there creating businesses and creating an industry on automation. I've got contacts. I've got guys that I work with regularly who will, they've created something from nothing where they've got, they'll go into a business and they'll say show us your processes. They'll implement a process. They'll use online cloud based tools and instantly. They're taking hours out of the business just on the basis that they've understood the business owner's processes and put it in. And they probably haven't even used chatGPT, or if they have, it's somewhere in the background. We've got to get over this whole thing of that it's a bad thing. It's going to take over the world. And actually it's all based around creating content because it's not, it's still not clever enough. To beat a human in my mind. But actually, it will give me, it's like a 100 metre race for me. If I'm racing against Usain Bolt, cause Usain Bolt is quicker than me, believe it or not, I know it's hard to believe, but he will be quicker than me. But actually, if I had something that would start me at 50 metres, and he's got to start on the blocks, I think that there's a chance I might get somewhere near the finish line around the same time as he would. Why wouldn't I use that?

Paul: 13:37

Yeah, I, yeah, and we've had a couple of guests on the show that, that sit in that same sort of mindset. So for me, I spoke with Todd Capone way back when we first started the show and Todd's amazing. He's a global speaker on sales enablement and leadership. And one of the things he talks about a lot is how we ruined all the great sales tools that came out. So when phone calls became something that we could do, initially they were lauded as being brilliant, but people were worried about it. And eventually they had to bring in the anti, in America, they have the ICANN law that stops you from cold calling people. Same with email. When it first got sent in, it was a university educational idea. Brilliant, great. And then it wasn't long before somebody decided they could send bulk emails and ruin it for everyone. And the same with AI, but the point to note is that phone calls haven't gone away. Emails haven't gone away. We've just had to legislate for their use to make them more palatable for the majority of us. I'm not quite convinced we've got that right yet, but an AI is going to be in the same vein. It's not going away anytime soon, but it is there for the long run, and we need to understand how we can use it. And, so something that I'm keen to understand is, AI can be quite a broad word. Topic and terminology for people, and you're right, like a lot of people associate it with chatGPT and language models. What are some examples of everyday use cases of AI and automation that you see most commonly benefit in business owners? To give them an idea of what it is they could be thinking about, cause I bet there's loads of business owners out there who don't even know what could be automated, right?

James: 15:43

So one of the, one of the biggest ones is when you're dealing with chatbots on your website. So if you're getting inquiries on your website, someone's possibly sat in your office saying, Oh, we've had an inquiry about this. Let's go and find it. Let's go and respond back to it. An AI can take that because you can connect the chatbot of a customer query. You can then turn that into a the language model. It can then find the resource, create in your tone of voice the response, and send it back. So not only are you removing the need for that resource to be sat there waiting, but it's also a distraction. Cause I would imagine no one, unless you're a massive global organization, and they're using AI as well, you're not gonna have someone employed physically to sit there and wait for that chatbot to be fired up, and then, oh, I need to respond to that. So there's one thing. There are other things, even really simply, One of the biggest issues I have with clients actually trying to scale their business is social proof. So what happens is they'll do a great job and they'll basically close off at the end of that job and they'll go on to the next job and it'll be great. What they haven't done is closed off that engagement with that customer to get some form of reference back, some form of case study or testimonial. Actually, what you can do, and Google likes this, is that when you get a response, if you're an SME and you're using Google You can set it up so that when a review comes in, the chatbot your AI can actually pick that review up, work out what it's saying, cultivate a response back to the sender of that review. So it becomes a dialogue. So what happens with Google is Google turns around and says, actually, you've had a review. That's perfect. Brilliant. But actually, if you've been able to respond to that review, and remember, this is the AI responding, not you, but they're doing it in your tone of voice. Google says, Oh, you're quite active on this. We quite like that. And that will have part action into your algorithm about where you're seen within Google. And actually, all it is setting up so that every review comes in and it's a do it once, it's a do it once. And it will keep running and running and it will just respond. I've seen businesses put this in place and have something in the region of 50 to a hundred dialogues with customers in a matter of days. Whereas they would normally have just said thank you for your review and not even responded to that customer.

Paul: 18:03

Yeah, and I think, I spent some time in the conversation analytics industry and that speed to response is everything. So your point about the chatbot, there's an even deeper point behind that where, I think it's something like if you're talking to a live chat and it takes longer than 60 seconds for a response, customer frustration levels, customer experience, frustration levels go through the roof, experience levels go through the floor, and likelihood to complain is multiplied. If you want to keep. Potentially irate customers from complaining, then you need to get to them quickly and service them quickly. My caveat with that and my learning from that is that when they decide to exit to a human you need to give them an opportunity to do it. Don't try and do the whole thing through AI because that is a horrible loop to be stuck in. What are, if for a business owner that's out there and they're maybe wondering whether they're suitable for automation AI, especially around their sales and marketing, which is obviously where our prime focus here, how can they? What strategies can they implement to help them understand where their savings might be made? What sort of process do you see them go through?

James: 19:12

I think it depends on the size, it depends on the size of the business for me because if you're a one man it's a lot harder but you're doing it all yourself and it's really difficult to go I'm not going to do the thing that I do to spend some time to work out what it is that I do to find some way to solve it. Really I'd be looking at, Marketing content, yeah, because we need to be, we have this view that we're trying to target the 3 percent of people who are ready to buy now. And actually there's 97 percent of people who are somewhere on that journey that some people are ready to explore options. Some people are thinking about it. Some people don't even know that they've got an itch to scratch at the moment. So if we can create marketing material using AI and that can help us, that allows us to fuel the engine. I will be, I'll be looking at saying, actually, do I do repetitive tasks in my business that I don't want to pay someone outside of the business? So is there a way of, from a finance perspective, from a bookkeeping perspective, all of these things, they're not something that you're going to implement. You're going to go into AI and implement it within an hour, but with a little bit of learning, a little bit of education or even using consultants to set ready to go and then you move on, you'll be really surprised how quickly you'll see. Your time back, because I work with clients and it's it's not going to work. Oh, I'll just do it. It will take too long to learn. And it does take a little while and it's not potentially out of the box, but within a week or so they're going, I had Friday off. And I go, what do you mean you had Friday off? Friday I'd have done all of my accounts and this, that and the other, and I don't need to. I get a report on the Friday morning and it's all good. Fantastic. What do you do on Friday? My golf handicap's come down. Great. I'm spending more time with the kids. Great. That's the goal!

Paul: 20:54

Yeah. And I think that's a fair shout to make, right? There is a big thing of using AI to free ourselves, augmenting ourselves to be able to do more things, to be able to do more marketing, to be able to do more sales, to be able to do more client work, or whatever. And that's cool, that has it's place, but don't forget that sometimes you can free up enough time to actually just enjoy your life a bit more. And I'm a big advocate that I don't work Fridays. Don't work Fridays. I choose to sometimes. I choose to work a couple of hours here and there, but it's rare. And Fridays are my day off. I run two businesses in four days. To your point, I automate the shit out of everything. Everything is automated. My wife's finding that out now. She's come to help me in the business and she's Oh, okay, I get it. I think there are some business owners out there who are technologically quite literate, right? And I class myself in that board. I get a new tool. I'm ADHD, hyper focus on it. I will be up till three in the morning, figuring out the fine end of how to use all of the integrations, automations on that immediately. And I've had people come back to me and say, do you know what? I consult on this. And I've learned these skills over five years, and you're where I am. You've used it for one night. How is that possible? I don't brag about that. That's a, it's a natural talent. It's part of who I am. I use that to my abilities, but there are plenty of people out there who don't. And I'd imagine the idea of automating something just really turns them off. Is that kind of the point where they need to have a conversation with somebody? And how does that service even work? I can't even get my head around how I would pay someone for automation work. So what, how does the service pricing work even?

James: 22:29

It depends on the specifics of the requirements. What I would do with my clients, I'd say, I've got a couple of developers that are not in the UK, but they are experts in this. And what we will do is we would look at the business and actually see what you could and what you should, because sometimes people want to automate everything and you go actually, not right now, it may be in time, not because the facility is not there, but actually, we can't do everything. And we've got to make the money work. And we've got to make the actual process work. So explore what it is that you want to do. And then you can do one of probably three things. One is you could learn to do it yourself. Fantastic. That's a time and probably not a cash investment, but a time investment. Secondly, is you can go and use a third party and bring them in on as a setter upper, as I would call it. They come in. This is what we want to do. Project based. We do it. We hand it back to you. And on you go. There's normally some level of ongoing mechanics to that or you partner, and then you get to a point where you, they become your outsourced arm, and they're there to not just do the things that you ask them to, but for them to interrogate your business and go, you do realize we could do that as well, and that as well, and it wouldn't cost you anything, and the cost savings are here. And sometimes, Clients for me fall into one of two sectors. One of those that are dipping their toe in the water because they're still nervous and there's a bit of hand holding. And then I think the others fall into the same category as you, sir, where all of a sudden it's give me everything. I can take everything and I want to learn everything. Yeah. And I'm in that second category. I'm probably similar to you. I will get a new process toy. I've got a new toy coming from America in the next few weeks, which I'm excited about. And that's going to effectively AI my life. Don't tell my other half, but that's what's going to happen. But the idea around that is I want to remove. A lot of the stuff. So calls like this, I will use this AI tool to record my life. And it will then report back to me and say to me, you lost time here. You lost, and I'm losing time at my age that I want to use for the right reasons. And if it can tell me that actually, if you did this through AI, you'd get this amount of time back to do other stuff. It's a no brainer.

Paul: 24:43

It's like the Stephen Bartlett analogy of gambling chips, right? You've only got so many chips. You've got so many chips for the rest of the days of your life and you can choose how to spend them. But once they're gone. And you can do things with those chips that give you more chips and you can do things that lose you chips. You can't brute force it. I like that. I like that. To circle back round then, to the market and side of things then, James. What's, as a business owner, with your business owner's hat on, what's one market and practice or strategy, tactic, whatever, that really grinds your gears at the moment, that a lot of people are using and you wish they wouldn't?

James: 25:17

So I take a lot of my clients through what I call the 4M process, which is, I stand here with Business Growth Formula, which is, which underpins my 4M process. And that's, that takes money, mechanics, marketing and then multiply. And I won't go into the details of that. But what we find is that when we work with clients, they want the money. They want to know what it is they want the money and they go straight to the marketing. When you say about the whole marketing, it's no. You need to go back a step. What grinds my gears is when I talk about, talk to clients and they go, we've done this marketing and it doesn't work. And I go, okay, why didn't it work? And I know exactly what the answer is before they tell me. And they say maybe we use the wrong font or the wrong color, or maybe the wrong message. And it's did you actually know what you were trying to achieve in the first place? And at that point, there's normally a deathly pause, and it's a case of, let's go back a stage, yeah? Who are you up against? Who are you trying to target? Why you? What are you trying to say? And it's, for me, I use an analogy here. It's a, marketing is like having a gun and some bullets. The gun is the strategy, the bullets are the tactics. You need both together to get to the end result. But in the worst case scenario, if I've just got the gun, i. e. the strategy, I can still throw it at someone. So at least I've got something. There's no point throwing bullets because they're not going to land. And that's the thing that I would say, I would always think the Stephen Covey of that start with the end in mind is key here. What are we trying to achieve? How much are we willing to invest? Who are we trying to talk to? What are we trying to say? What is it we're trying to position ourselves as better than the market? Because actually, I'll say this one thing. When it comes to a situation where any market, this is going to sound weird, There is no such thing as competition in the eyes of the consumer. Now that sounds bonkers, but I can prove it. So anyone who's listening or watching this, I would imagine that you have, you live in a town or a city or a village, and you go shopping in a supermarket. In that town or village or city, there will be a Sainsbury's, an Asda, a Tesco, an Audi, a Lidl, a Waitrose, a Morrisons, you name it. But you choose to shop in one of them for your main shop, even though all of them could probably fulfill your needs. And the chances are you drive past a couple of them to shop in the one that you actually shop in. Because you as a prospect, as a customer, you don't see competition, alternatives. And that's what we need to get to. We are out there competing with the alternatives for the customer market. And once we know that, actually we need to position ourselves as being the right solution, the best solution for the audience we want to talk to. I'll get off my I'll get, off my soapbox at that point.

Paul: 28:08

I love it. I love the passion. You can see that's something that you clearly talk a lot about and it shows through the conversation. what's one thing that you wish business owners would adopt more often?

James: 28:17

I wish there'd be more in the sweeping generalization, but I wish they'd enjoy numbers more. And we should actually look at their numbers more because they're a scary thing. And actually we work with clients and we can actually work out in some cases how you can get more money and more profit with less customers and less revenue. That sounds bonkers because we're taught in schools that for something to go up, something else has to go up. And actually that's not always true. But actually what happens is we have a situation where business owners generally are very creative. They like the thing they do, the operation. They don't like the numbers. Yeah, as long as there's enough money in the bank at the end of the month, we're okay. And actually our numbers are done by our accountants. Our accountants look after that. Actually, if we knew our numbers better, we'd know how much we could spend, what our pricing could be, where we could move the market, how much we could dominate the market by our investment strategy. There's too many businesses out there who are not achieving the goals they want because they're scared of knowing their own numbers.

Paul: 29:16

Fascinating insights. I like it. Thank you very much for those thoughts, James. I really appreciate the conversation we've had today. If anybody's listening along and they want to find out a bit more either about you or about the business, how can they best reach you?

James: 29:29

So the website would be gainmoresolutions. com. Obviously all the details are on there. There's contact details there. More than happy for people to reach out directly to me, which is James at gainmoresolutions. com or LinkedIn's always a great place. Yeah. Go and search for me. Yes, it is James Martin, the SME wizard. That was given to me as a moniker by someone else, but yeah, go and search me LinkedIn. I put a load of content out there to try and help people.

Paul: 29:53

I got the Banksy of LinkedIn by a former marketing head in my old business and it stuck. I at the time, took it because, She'd said it tongue in cheek and I don't think she expected me to take it. And I absolutely lived it for a year and a half until I finally took it off by choice, at which point she never mentioned it again. It's great fun. Thanks for your time, James, and thank you at home for watching along. I hope you've gotten loads of actionable ideas from James conversation. Please do reach out to him if you think there's anything there that he could help you with, or you just want to know a bit more. And we will see you next week for our second episode of the new year. Bye bye.