Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:40
Anything else for the email that you recommend? I’ve tested things like superhuman before. It just. And maybe it’s better now, but it eliminated some of my hotkey functions. And so that was a deal breaker for me. You know. Right. But I know people like that. I don’t know if there are any other inbox or email tools that you like.
Corey Ganim: 13:05
Yeah. So, really, my default is SaneBox. Superhuman is a good one, too. I haven’t messed with Superhuman myself, but I know a lot of people who speak really highly of it. But other than that, I mean, just having the like the Claude Chrome extension on your browser, right?
Having that up and running while you’re in your email inbox. A lot of times, Claude can just kind of jump in and draft emails or sort things accordingly. So that’s another workaround. If you’re already a Claude user.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:31
Love it. What other ones? Just in general, I don’t know any of your use cases. You’ve gone into businesses, and you recommend that you use it personally.
Corey Ganim: 13:41
Yeah. So there are quite a few. Right. So, it really depends on what industry you’re in. So, like if you’re a content creator like me, one of my big pain points for the longest time has been creating YouTube thumbnails. Right? I used to pay. In fact, up until about a month ago, I would pay a thumbnail designer $50 per thumbnail to design thumbnails, right? Which is pretty expensive. But I mean, the going rate for a thumbnail is 30 to $50 per thumbnail. So I found a tool called ThumbnailMaker.ai, and it’s $20 a month, and you get 20 credits per month, basically 20 thumbnails per month.
And I don’t know if Jeremy, if you’ve ever tried to generate a thumbnail using like ChatGPT or even Nano Banana Pro, but it’s just it just doesn’t do a good job. This particular AI tool does a very good job. I can give it a one-sentence description of my video, and it’ll make a really good thumbnail. In fact, I started using it two weeks ago. I put out two videos, and the most recent one was my number one of ten, and the other one was number two of ten. And my click-through rate has more than doubled, which is directly attributable to the thumbnail. So, like this one tool alone, if you are a YouTube creator, or if you ever need to make custom thumbnails, it is very much worth it and has personally paid me an ROI within two weeks.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:04
I love it, and I forgot what the book is called. Corey, maybe you’ll remember there is a book that I listened to on Audible that one of the co-authors is Mr. Beast. Right? And he talks in that book about it’s game like the thumbnail is one of, if not the most important thing in, you know, we’re talking someone who gets billions and billions of views on his YouTube. So that’s a great one.
Corey Ganim: 15:30
Yep. Yeah. And for anybody listening, if you’re on YouTube or you’ve had a channel before, I mean that’s the game is its title and thumbnail. That’s 80% of it. And it’s really, it’s like, can I get somebody to click on my video more often than normal? Like that’s what it comes down to. So this tool really does a good job of that in my opinion. Very awesome.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:50
What other ones?
Corey Ganim: 15:52
So it’s funny, I’m just scrolling through my AI bookmark folder on Chrome, and I’m just kind of going down the list. Yeah. Go ahead. So another great one is called the Gamma app. Now, if you’re like me and you have no design eye at all and you’re just terrible at making slideshows, you know, anytime I make a PowerPoint, it’s just like bullet points on a white background, that’s all.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:17
I’m the worst.
Corey Ganim: 16:18
Yeah. Me too. So.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:20
Gamma, you do not want me doing this? Yeah. It looks like a third grader did it right.
Corey Ganim: 16:25
I’m the same way. And so what gamma does and does a really good job of is creating AI, basically AI-generated documents and slideshows. So something that I like to do now is I will actually go into Claude and kind of brain dump my thoughts, like if I have to put together a slideshow, I’ll go into Claude and just brain dump my thoughts, like, hey, this is what I want to talk about. These are some of the key points I want to hit on and just kind of give it my brain dump, and then I’ll have it turn that brain dump into just a Google doc, and then I will feed that Google doc to Gamma. And Gamma will turn that into a really like what I think is very polished, very good-looking slides or documents. Right? So I mean, I’ve created like ten, 15, 20 slide presentations using that exact workflow that I just mentioned in like 10 to 15 minutes, like completed, done, sent to the event with Gamma. Like that’s how easy it makes it, and it looks really good, and it’s on brand.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:28
Awesome. Yeah, I know we don’t have lots of time to go through everyone individually, but if there are a couple of others that you want to just shout out to. Before we wrap up, I will. It’s funny, Corey, you say that because when I had Nicole Donley on, and she shared her AI tools, and literally we just went to her resources page on her website and just scrolled through, and I’m like, okay, just rattle off. And this is if people are watching the video. I think we have it in the special mentions here. Maybe you’ll geek out on this list too.
Corey Ganim: 17:58
Oh yeah, she’s got a bunch.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:59
It was just like we just went through, and like, okay, so you know, hey, Jeremy, I mean, people can kind of check them out on their own, but what are a few more of your favorites?
Corey Ganim: 18:09
Yeah. And so one thing I’ll preface this by saying too. Right. Like obviously, I’ve got, we could go on for hours on tools. So if folks want not only a tool list, but one that’s tailored to their current level of AI mastery, they can go to returnmytime.com/quiz. And if you take that quiz and if you right there, if you just click, like the get your free AI action plan. So it’s like a 5 or 6-question quiz. Based on your answers, will actually send you a tailored resource that’s like, hey, you know, you’re an AI practitioner. So these are some tools that are going to help you versus if you were like brand new, it’d be a different set of tools, right? So they can go, yeah, yeah, returnmytime.com/quiz to get those. But another, let’s see if we have time for maybe one more. Another one that I really enjoy is called NoteGPT. So NoteGPT and what’s cool about GPT is that you can give it a YouTube video link or, you know, you can give it a link to just about any video or podcast resource. And what it’ll do is it will actually, I think it’s NoteGPT,io, Jeremy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:20
Okay. Everything’s so similar now.
Corey Ganim: 19:22
I know there’s like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:24
I know I don’t know recently, obviously, there was like a claw bot or whatever, and that’s too close. And so when you go to it, it redirects to I forgot what it’s called now. Like open something.
Corey Ganim: 19:34
Open Claw.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:35
Open Claw. Right. And so, I mistakenly shared something. I typed in what they did, and it was like there was still a website there, and it was a different tool.
Corey Ganim: 19:45
So it’s either.io or.com or.co.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:48
So this one’s dot. Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy.
Corey Ganim: 19:51
Yeah. So the one that I’m mentioning, I’m pretty sure, is not GPT io. And so what does that looks? Yeah. Yeah, there it is. So, as I said, you can plug in the link to a YouTube video or a podcast, and it’ll summarize that video for you. It’ll generate the transcript. And what’s cool is it almost turns itself into like ChatGPT for that specific video. So there’s been plenty of times in the past where I will watch like a two-hour, say, like a masterclass video, and then a week later I’m like, oh, like, what did he say in that video about XYZ topic? And what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to go back and rewatch that full two hours and look for the point that I missed. I would just plug the link into NoteGPT and be like, hey, what did Jeremy say about AI tools in that video? And then it’ll just give me the answer based on the, you know, the transcript. So that’s a really cool one for just making content consumption a lot quicker.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:46
Love it. So Corey, I just want to encourage people. People can check out that quiz. They can go to returnmytime.comreturnmytiime.com/quiz. Any other places we should have people check out?
Corey Ganim: 20:58
No, I tell them just go there, right? returnmytiime.com/quiz. That’s going to give you that kind of tailored action plan that you can then implement as you please.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:07
Love it. Thanks, Corey. Thanks, everyone.
Corey Ganim: 21:09
Thank you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:10
All right. This is a great people, great resources episode. Paul Feith. I love Paul. We’re both in Chicago, and I want people to check it out at paulgregorymedia.com. Paul, we’ll start off this is we’re going to talk about how he geeks out on tech tools and software. And so we’re going to get into that. But before we do, Paul, talk about your company and what you do is you do that. I’m going to pull up the website.
Paul Feith: 21:37
Yeah, we’re a Midwestern digital marketing agency. We specialize in the nonprofit world. So nonprofit organizations, mission-driven organizations, or sometimes they call them purpose-driven organizations. We follow that up with our unique certification, where certified B Corporation and people in planet verified social enterprise. And we just have a lot of fun, you know, if we’re going to do marketing, let’s try to make the world a better place, and let’s give it a reason to get up in the morning, I guess, is the big thing. And I’ve been a tech nerd for, well, since my early adult life. So I started out at Playboy Enterprises, of all companies, being in charge of their new media division. And if you can imagine what.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:18
A big difference between Playboy and nonprofits.
Paul Feith: 22:21
It is that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:23
Should be the title of this from Playboy to nonprofit.
Paul Feith: 22:26
Although Playboy has been acting like a nonprofit lately. Yeah, if you can imagine yourself in 1996 or 95, even, and what the web looked like and who the players were, and you know, evaluating vendors with their I mean, I would be presented with this software as a service and internet browser add-ons and plugins with puppets and strings. This is how they would present them to us. So, big players like EMC squared, which you know of course is huge in the industry. But they all wanted to work with Playboy. So I was in a very unique position of implementing new technology that had never been heard of before.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:12
What did you do there at Playboy?
Paul Feith: 23:14
Well, I was in charge of their new media division, so shifting everything from traditional formats to the digital world. So one of my first jobs was in charge of taking all the slides from the cold rooms. They were stored in temperature-controlled cold rooms, and they had to be digitized. So decades and decades of digitization, creating the massive website, doing coast-to-coast webcasts. I actually worked with Mark Cuban back when he had Audionet in Texas, and we did a coast-to-coast webcast in New York and LA that was simulcasted on the internet. And back then, you know, if you were lucky enough, you had ISDN.
Not a lot of people had broadband like they do today. So we had a technology that if the the bandwidth wasn’t enough, we would reduce the quality of the video but still keep it smooth as opposed to choppy. But we had cameras in each location, so if you could imagine 10,000 users pointing the camera and zooming in and panning and there was 10,000 users doing it, all you see in the cameras, it’s just fluttering all over the place because it remembers the position from each IP address. It was really cool technology that we got into.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:25
You were obviously an early adopter in technology. So, talking about today, what maybe tech stack? What are some of your favorite software tools? What are you using now?
Paul Feith: 24:34
Yeah, just to put context around it, I owned a Vic 20 computer back in the day when they were out in their prime. So I was always into computers and tech. Our tech stack and our agency are up to 2000. I was a Microsoft fanboy, loved everything about Microsoft back when Bill Gates was running it after he left, I just didn’t. And to this day, I just don’t like the software. I don’t like Microsoft Office 365. I think it’s horrible, especially on a Mac and still buggy to this day. Somebody introduced me to Google Workplace, as it’s called Now, and it took me a year to finally, like, love it. And Now it’s just like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:15
I don’t use Microsoft. You don’t use it like Co-Pilot or at all. Okay.
Paul Feith: 25:19
At all.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:20
No. So it’s all Google Suite type of stuff.
Paul Feith: 25:22
It’s entirely Google Suite. Yeah. For for that for the office stuff. Yeah, for Word documents spreadsheet. And now with Google Gemini tightly integrated into that. It’s I’m extremely happy with that particular stack. I was also a big fan of Slack, and I still use it in a lot of organizations that I partner with. But when we were looking at cost-cutting measures in 2024 or 2025, we thought, you know, Google Workplace has the same thing. Google Chat is just the same as Slack. It’s got, or it had some quirks to it. Now it’s so tightly integrated into email and into Documents and Gemini that I can’t imagine going back to Slack for our internal communications.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:08
What about from a project management perspective? What do you use?
Paul Feith: 26:12
Yeah, so we kind of reevaluate that every year. We love and have always used Trello, and I wouldn’t even call it project management, even though it can.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:24
Think it is.
Paul Feith: 26:25
Yeah, it’s more task management, I would say, than anything else, but it’s grown in the last 5 or 6 years to be more of a project management tool. The Kanban view is probably the most popular view that they have, but they also do all the Gantt views and calendar view, everything like that. So they’ve grown up. We kept looking at other tools like ClickUp, and you know, Monday and Asana, all the regular suspects with ClickUp being like the the end all be all. And it is ClickUp would be the one we would graduate to. It’s just that it takes so much time to put into it what you want to get out of it. That I said to my team and myself included, if we don’t, until we can take full advantage of Trello, we’re not going anywhere.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:11
Because we’re not working. If it’s working, it doesn’t matter. You know, we’re not putting.
Paul Feith: 27:15
In any walls. And it’s, and it really is like butter. It’s like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:19
Trello. I have a Trello. We use ClickUp, but when we we were heavy users of Asana, and then we were bumping up against like Asana wasn’t great. And maybe it’s changed with you using forms. You use a lot of form fills for clients and internally, and asana was not great at that, and we were bumping up into that as a bottleneck for us. And so we looked at Monday and ClickUp and we went with ClickUp. But like you said, if it were Trello is super easy and simple, I use it, I still use it for for different things, just because it’s easy to launch different boards and things like that. So sure, I love that.
Paul Feith: 28:01
We don’t do a lot of forms, but when we do, I when we do, when we, we don’t do a lot of forms, but when we do, we choose Jotform. Jotform forms are our our favorite tool.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:11
Jotform I, the founder of Jotform on the podcast, actually. Oh really? We helped them with their podcast as well. So yeah, Jotform is great and I think I forgot what he said Paul. But like he I’m going to butcher it. But it was something like they grew to like 25 million users or I’m not sure how many users they have now, but it’s it’s pretty significant and it’s very I know a lot of healthcare companies use it because it’s a very HIPAA compliant. There’s a lot of privacy built into Jotform, which is important for a lot of people. So yeah, I also use Jotform too.
Paul Feith: 28:47
Yeah. Great story. He has to starting as just a single developer. And it was a team of three for the longest time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:53
Yep. Yeah over 25 million users. I’m looking it up now. Yeah.
Paul Feith: 28:57
Well they just celebrated their anniversary. If you’re on an email chain you would have gotten that probably yesterday.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:03
Nice. What else are there any, like different AI tools that you’re experimenting with or other things?
Paul Feith: 29:10
Love Gemini for just about everything. So we use that probably the most.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:17
How do you use it?
Paul Feith: 29:19
Mostly, you know, we have templated proposal processes. We use better proposals for that. But that whole beginning preamble. And then why is it best to, you know, where do we gel with your company? We find sometimes that’s the yeah. That customization piece, you know, I think really helps in Gemini really speeds things up there evaluating PDFs, long PDFs, especially RFPs.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:47
You could throw it in a Gemini, give it some direction and it helps.
Paul Feith: 29:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we don’t answer RFPs. But on the rare occasion that we do or we want to look at it or forward it to somebody, we’ll get the skinny from Gemini on any long document that we need to really kind of get through and tabulate or cross-reference or whatever. Gemini’s been great for probably all of that. And plus, just as an executive, I use Gemini just to write emails. Actually, one of my favorites that have been over the last five months is Fyxer. Believe it or not.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:21
Yeah, yeah, I like I mean, I experimented with Fyxer too.
Paul Feith: 30:24
So I subscribed and.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:27
I’m curious what you thought of it, but yeah, now I love it.
Paul Feith: 30:30
I have one caveat, but I love it. It puts things into one of ten folders and it answers them. It doesn’t send it out until you until you hit send, because you may want to adjust it a little bit, but it saves me on average 4 to 6 hours a week. And it tells me, you know how it did that. And I just love like, oh, I got this email and then but it checks. It checks for your tone and voice over the last three years of emails. It checks your calendar. It’s integrated in just about everything.
So it answers the emails for you. And I would say 90% of the time I don’t have to touch it and I just hit send. The only caveat, and I’m getting used to this now, is when you get the two factor authentication, where does it go? What folder is it in? And I’m starting to learn now that there’s a notification folder. And it’s always there. And I’m getting used to looking in there really. You know be the first thing I look at when I get the two for stuff. But great, great program and pretty inexpensive to to just even try it out.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:22
Yeah. On the email from Chris, if there’s anything else you use, I use Sanebox which automatically kind of filters things. And I love Gemini combination of Wispr Flow and Gemini. So which allows me, you know, those hot keys so I can hold down like whatever function. And if anyone’s use Wispr Flow, it just is a dictation software. So I open up Gemini inside of Gmail, dictate in with Whisper Flow inside Gemini, and then it cleans up my email and also looks at the previous emails and like, crafts it.
Paul Feith: 31:54
Oh nice. I haven’t heard a Wispr Flow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:55
Oh, it’s I mean they think of it a free version but it’s, it’s it goes across it’s a desktop app. So if you’re like just dictating and a social media channel or email or obviously ChatGPT has a, a voice thing, but but Claude does it. So I use Wispr Flow with Claude just to dictate into Claude. But I did try Fyxer. I spent a lot of time in email. Paul. So if you have any other productivity hacks. I tried Fyxer, I wanted to love it. The issue is it shut off one of my hotkeys, which is my archive key, and I get so many emails a day I need to be able to archive things really quickly. And it shut those my it stopped my it shut down my those hotkeys and so like that was a non-starter for me unfortunately.
Paul Feith: 32:46
Oh of course. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:47
So anyway, so I am looking for like a tool like that that will help with my email. But anything else on the email productivity front that you.
Paul Feith: 32:56
Those, those two Gemini and I used to love. I can’t think of the name of it because it was a weird name, but basically it was a pixel. So you knew when somebody opened the email. So if and when you were ghosted, you were like, no, you you looked at it, you know, there’s a lot.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:13
Of box does SaneBox does do that. It sends it into no reply. So I can check this. No replies to see if someone you know if I need to follow up on anything. Right.
Paul Feith: 33:25
And he looked at it. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:26
Yeah. So that that’s interesting. What else. Any other from a productivity standpoint just in general with business or even personally on your.
Paul Feith: 33:37
Yeah, we track every minute of every hour of every day that we work, whether we bill by the hour or we bill by the project, we still track our time. We find it just a very helpful management tool, especially if you think somebody is getting overwhelmed to to back off, you know, just load balancing things like that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:56
But then there’s certain Things that.
Paul Feith: 33:57
We use, we use Toggl, Toggl without the E. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:03
I was just messaging with one of the people from toggle people love Toggl.
Paul Feith: 34:08
Yeah. Yeah. And so maybe the first thing your listeners are thinking, okay, use this Toggl for time tracking. He uses Trello for project management accounting. We use QuickBooks online.
We always have since we started the business. So that’s going on 20 years, by the way, 20 years celebrating this coming month.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:24
Congrats.
Paul Feith: 34:25
And they’re disparate systems, but we’re not going to see any. I just really don’t see any advantage of using the time tracking built into QuickBooks or doing accounting in Toggl. I just they’re working so well as they are independent.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:39
I yeah, I hear that because like there’s specialization, these companies have specialization. And once it’s because even in ClickUp you’re mentioning the yeah you can use the chat function in Google Suite. ClickUp has a function like slack, but we use slack just because it’s like specific for those things. Could we switch everything over to ClickUp? Probably.
Plac is quick. It’s it’s basically specializes in those kind of conversations. So we use G suite to so we can I mean, there’s so many different tools, but you know, whatever’s quickest and easiest and best I’m I’m all for so because ClickUp also has you can do time tracking and clickup. But we use Hubstaff just because we like the functionality of Hubstaff. So they all have different.
Paul Feith: 35:23
So you’re in that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:24
Same they all have different features that some people like different feature sets. So I totally get that.
Paul Feith: 35:29
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:31
But no this has been great. Any other tool software apps that you use on your phone or desktop that we should it could be Chrome extension that you use.
Paul Feith: 35:41
We love Snagit. It’s one of the best tools for like forever. Yeah, I think of Loom. You know when you want to do a quick video or tutorials. We’re doing that all the time showing clients how to do something. And maybe it’s, you know, how to update a page on their site or, you know, whatever. Or maybe it’s just going over an SEO report, but we like Snagit better. It just has all the same features, but it’s easier to get in and out of, and there’s almost no learning curve on how to use it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:09
And TechSmith, who I think owns Snagit, has been they do ever like I remember using Camtasia when I was first podcasting, like whatever 17 years ago.
Paul Feith: 36:19
We loved Camtasia.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:20
Fantasia. I was using Camtasia and it’s like.
Paul Feith: 36:23
Back in the day. Yeah, yeah. And that program has grown to, I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:25
Guess, right.
Paul Feith: 36:27
It still exists. It’s really grown up into a full fledged video editor. I just haven’t had the time to to play around with that. But I do like Snagit because it’s just quick and easy. It’s as quick as easy and easy as loom.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:38
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Feith: 36:39
Is it loom?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:40
Yeah. Loom. Yeah, yeah. I know people love loom as well, but Paul this has been great I appreciate you sharing. People can check out Paul Gregory Media.com.
Also you can check out the Mission Matters podcast, Paul’s podcast. He’s had some amazing people. I think you’ve had people from Make-A-Wish Foundation. What other organizations have you had on the podcast?
Paul Feith: 37:01
Oh, gosh, I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:02
I’m gonna I’m gonna pull it up real quick. Let me see.
Paul Feith: 37:05
Yeah. Make-A-Wish Foundation. I’m sure we’ve got somebody from Habitat for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity. WISH science YMCA, YWCA in Chicago.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:15
Chicago Arts Partnerships.
Paul Feith: 37:17
Giving DuPage.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:19
Yeah. You do a lot of stuff with giving DuPage, right?
Paul Feith: 37:23
Well, I’m.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:23
A board member.
Paul Feith: 37:24
For Kids.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:25
Health Coalition, so he’s got some, like, really cool leaders from nonprofits on the show.
Paul Feith: 37:32
So and even a couple of for profits. So we’ve got some professors from Rutgers. We had a really great conversation about AI and how the students were using AI. But then the teachers were checking the work with AI. So AI checking AI.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:44
How are they using AI? Just with papers and things like.
Paul Feith: 37:48
Yeah. For their papers and their.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:52
Yeah.
Paul Feith: 37:53
Semester reports. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:55
Love it. So check it out. Check out the website. Check out the podcast as well. And we’ll see you next time. Paul, thanks so much.
Paul Feith: 38:03
Thanks for having me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:04
This is part of the Top resources. Top People episode. We’re going to geek out on our favorite tools and software apps. I’m here with Phil Herrington. You can check them out at the TheConnectorCommunity.com. Before we get into all Phil’s favorite apps, tools, software, whatever it is. Phil, just talk about TheConnectorCommunity.com and what you do is you do that. I’m going to pull up the website so people can check it out.
Phil Herrington: 38:27
All right. Well. You know, whenever somebody starts a business, the first thing they want is a customer, right? So a lot of people think networking is a great place to go get customers. And it is. But a lot of people do it incorrectly. They run out there and they meet a ton of people, and they use them as an opportunity to sell their stuff. And what we wanted to create here is think of it like a private, invite only LinkedIn and inner circle of people that are helping you grow your network for you.
And so we like to say we build your network, you build the relationships, and we actually spoon feed you the network by giving you a couple introductions every single week. And so you never have to come to a meeting in our world. We just hand those amazing people to you that we’ve already kind of scrubbed the list, if you will, and met all those awesome people. And then you now get to do strategic partnerships and whatever it is that you want to do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:22
What gave you the idea for this? I’ve never really heard of a networking group with no meetings, so it’s kind of an interesting concept.
Phil Herrington: 39:28
I know right. Well okay, great. So here’s how it works. I’ve been in sales for 40 years. Yes.
When I was eight, I sold World’s Finest chocolate and just kept going. Right. But throughout my years, I never knew networking existed. So 33 of that 40 years was all cold calling. So I had to learn my own systems and everything, right? When I found networking, I treated it just like a cold call. So I’m the guy that went on to do 5001 to ones in eight years, which sounds great, but it doesn’t.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:58
Know if it sounds that great, but.
Phil Herrington: 39:59
Okay, It sounds great for numbers. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:03
Yeah, exactly.
Phil Herrington: 40:04
We weren’t building any deeper relationships, so I read in a book I need to get the name of this book because I shouted out all the time, basically. But I read this book that if you can eliminate a step from an already proven system, you can create a new category. So what I what did I want to eliminate? I eliminated the meeting. So if I can think of this as a done for you networking, if I can meet all the people and then the people that align with our message, which is people before profits, which is really the basics, then they join our network and now you. Now your time is no longer wasted. When you get on meetings with people, you have high quality conversations with people. And that that’s basically it. We’ve eliminated the meeting.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:46
Now I want to know what the book is called. I don’t know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:50
I know there’s Perry Marshall. Perry Marshall has a couple of books. He’s got 80/20 Sales and Marketing. And he talks about the star principle. I don’t know if he has a separate book on that, but I don’t know if it’s from his star principle. Maybe it’s from Richard Koch’s 8020. I don’t know, but I need to know what that book is. I love that which is eliminating the step from that. Yeah. So on the I want to dig into a little bit on what you just said, but let’s talk about maybe some of your favorite books and maybe some of your favorite tools. Are there any favorite books on your on your list?
Phil Herrington: 41:22
Yeah. Everything that Benjamin Harding does that he did with Dan Sullivan. So that whole that group of three books, I haven’t got the last one.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:29
The Who Not How I know. Yeah.
Phil Herrington: 41:31
So like it’s like the gain in the gap Who Not How. And. Oh yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:37
10x Scaling. Oh there’s another. Yeah. The Science of Scaling.
Phil Herrington: 41:40
And I haven’t got to The Science of Scaling yet. I’m that’s my next read. It’s good. But those. Oh it is okay. Good. Yeah. So those three were amazing for my thought process. Cool. And so learning how to stop doing things on your own and think of your business at the CEO level even when you get started. Do not do those main mundane tasks if you will, and start hiring those out right away. And now we can. Right? There’s virtual assistants everywhere that we can speed that process up. Stop doing all that stuff. That’s bottlenecking your own business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:12
Any other favorite authors or books on your list?
Phil Herrington: 42:16
I’ll just go. I mean, if it’s a sales book, I’ve probably read it and I read everything at two times speed because I’m looking for just that nugget. I can hang on to that. They think a little bit different. So if it’s a sales or whatever book. But I will say on the personal side, I like post-apocalyptic books. So anything that has to do with the country got shut down and all that type of stuff. I just like that for entertainment.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:38
Any sales books stick out. I know, you know, I don’t know if it’s really considered a sales book, but Predictable Revenue. I had one of the people who I, the CEO of Predictable Revenue, I know Aaron Ross, wrote Predictable Revenue on there. That’s that’s a definitely a good one. Any of the sales ones stick out to you? There’s a SPIN Selling book I think that that’s come up a bunch of times.
Phil Herrington: 43:08
There’s a really good book called The Super Connector, which is what I base a lot of my principles on the connecting about. There’s the sales machine. That was a really good one because it goes deep into like how to create a sales system. So that’s a really good one. Yeah. And then anything of course anything Grant Cardone does. Right. He just gets you all hyped up.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:32
So is this the one you’re talking about? Super Connector superconductors.
Phil Herrington: 43:36
Amazing one. Yeah that’s an amazing book.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:38
And the foreword written by Keith Ferrazzi Never Eat Alone. That’s also a good one too.
Phil Herrington: 43:42
Oh of course yes, yes. What about, interestingly enough, anything to do with MLM stuff is always great for training, right? Because Eric Worre does some amazing books on like no. Is that yes is no or something like that I can’t remember, Eric. Sorry, but anything that he does is great because it’s a great training ground for real sales. So cold calling and things of that nature.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:07
Yeah. I’ll, I’ll pull up Eric where I see is Worre correct. I’ll look up his books but but that gets into some of the tools because you were talking about you use some tools for productivity. Why don’t you start there.
Phil Herrington: 44:22
Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for that. So I have dyslexia and ADHD at the same time. So when ChatGPT came along I started thinking, well, I just start using it to speed everything up for me so I don’t use it for a ton of building. Like people are really getting into the, the, you know, the, the guys that are really into coding and all that. But what I do is I dictate everything inside of there, and it writes my emails for me so I can speed that process up. I actually wrote my first custom ChatGPT kind of fun where after I come off a meeting, I can take my fathom notes or the AI notes, drop it in and it’ll actually create the emails because we give people two strategic introductions after every call, so it speeds up that process.
But things I can speed up again. I’m all about systems thinking and systems and then eliminating, you know, whatever. Now and then I’ll throw another thing out. I’ve been playing around with in ChatGPT, if you create a project and let’s say you bought somebody a program. So I bought this guy’s coaching program. I threw all his material in there, and now it’s like he’s talking to me and I never need to go back and do coaching with the guy, because that’s what’s crazy about AI. As old salespeople, we have to catch up and be like, oh, this is happening lightning fast, like so. Anyway, so I like talk to it every morning, like, okay, so what what am I what are we thinking here? And what would Victor say about this? And what would Victor say about this. And so it’s pretty crazy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:51
So it sounds like a few things there, Phil, Fathom. You use Fathom AI. What do you use as far as. Is there a certain dictation? I mean, I know I use whisper flow from dictation standpoint to dictate anywhere on my desktop. I don’t know if there’s dictation thing you use or, you know, something that reads it to you or any software you’re using on the computer.
Phil Herrington: 46:11
Yeah. So I use the there’s a Chrome extension. There’s a what is the extension called? It’s called read aloud a speech to text. I use that to read everything to me. And then if I want to know what a video, a transcript for a video, I just upload it to loom, right. It’ll give you the transcript. So you don’t need another, another software to translate stuff. And then I’ll have it. Just tell me what’s going on inside ChatGPT. Right. So things like that is really sped up a number of things for me. So every time I go to send something out, I always read it first. Right? Because ChatGPT can be offer weird, but I can like create that email, be reading it to me and move on to the next thing in my brain before I send that email out. So speeding things up that way.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:00
No, I appreciate you sharing that because sometimes I forget to explore Chrome extensions, right? You know, one of the Chrome extensions I have is I just again, I just type something into Chrome, the Chrome extension thing, it’s video speed controller. There’s a bunch out there, but like it basically anything is audio video on any website on my computer. I can move it up to a thousand times speed, right? Because with YouTube it only goes two times.
And I like to go like three times and or 2.7, depending how quickly the person’s talking. So video speed control or just go on Chrome extension. I like the read aloud one. That’s cool.
Phil Herrington: 47:44
Any other thanks for that one. The speed up thing, because I always go to two times speed. Like I just did some training right before this meeting and a podcast I’m going to go on. And he had these instructional videos. They’re all five minutes long and I hate when videos over five minutes, so I speed up to two times speed, but I can I could probably hear it at 3 or 4 times speed. Right? I just need the information.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:04
You’re used to two times. You could probably just do like an audible. I’m at 2.7 typically and but YouTube yeah is that restriction. So the one I use I think if you just type in a Chrome extension is video speed control. But you could just type in speed up video and there’s probably like ten of them and you just hover over the video or audio and it it allows you to granularly just increase the speed in any video. Right?
Phil Herrington: 48:31
I love that okay. I’m using that one. Thank you. Yeah. Another thing I do to lock in all of my passwords I love keeper just switch. Just recently switched computers and that makes it super simple. I don’t have to remember my passwords you know love it. Yeah. So keepers amazing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:46
Any other like yeah, so I people recommend Keeper, I use LastPass.
Phil Herrington: 48:52
I think they’re very I think they’re very similar. I was just already on keeper when I found the other one.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:56
Any other chrome extensions? The other one I use is one tab. If anyone uses one tab, you know, it’s like, I feel like right now I’m looking at Phil, you know, 50 different tabs, like all over my computer. So if I want to like refresh my computer, I can click one tab and it just condenses all of them and saves them. And so I can go back, you know, because sometimes I just have tabs up because I don’t want to lose lose them somewhere.
Phil Herrington: 49:24
Oh right right right right right right right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:26
One Tab will just boom, you know, just condense it into all the links in One Tab. So that’s kind of a cool one. Any other extensions on Chrome extension.
Phil Herrington: 49:38
Oh if you want to jump to to thinking about LinkedIn here for a second because you mentioned you’re on LinkedIn, I don’t know if you’re familiar with. Shoot. What is that tool? It’s. Oh, darn. It is my most trusted.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:54
What is it?
Phil Herrington: 49:55
My most trusted.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:56
Okay.
Phil Herrington: 49:57
So if you go to my most trusted in an extension. And then what? What they do is a lot of groups or communities will white label this for their group. But it’s a really cool tool because you take all of, let’s say, you know, 5000 people. Well, the ones you actually know, you bring it into your trusted circle and then you ask for introductions from all of their inner circle.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:19
That’s cool.
Phil Herrington: 50:20
Oh, oh my gosh, it’s powerful. Because who’s not going to get it’s it’s actually the, the the basis of our entire business asking for introductions. We’ve learned how to monetize introductions by just asking because your network will give you introductions, but they won’t necessarily send you a sale. So I love this tool for that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:38
That’s really.
Phil Herrington: 50:38
Cool.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:39
Yeah, yeah, I’ll bring it in. This is 1 to 1 by the way. One Tab free. So sweet. Yeah.
Even better.
Phil Herrington: 50:47
Right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:49
And then what about, you know, you run communities. You have a lot of, you know, people that you network with. What do you use to help manage the communities and memberships and everything like that?
Phil Herrington: 51:01
Oh, yeah. So Nolodex. There’s a gentleman that created his own networking group and put a bunch of money into Nolodex Joe and you know his last name, I forgot it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:16
Yep. I’ll pull it up. He was actually a guest on the podcast, so. Yeah.
Phil Herrington: 51:19
Perfect. Okay, okay, I pulled that up. So what a lot of people don’t know is he has a networking group, but he licensed a software to other communities. We chose to use it because it helps us keep track of all the introductions we do for people. And then also when people are ready to pay their referral fees, which everybody pays, referral fees are they should Then, right? Get free. Free sales. Then they it pays it out right through that system. So we really like it for that. And our and our big goal is to get to a million members in the end of 2030. And this can scale with us. So I really, really like that software. Nolodex is a good software.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:05
So talk about best practices with referral fees. Right. You just mentioned everyone should pay referral fees. How do you best communicate that to someone. And then what are some of the best practices around referral fees?Because, you know, a lot of times this comes up when I’m talking to people and some people have programs, some people don’t best practices.
Phil Herrington: 52:28
I think everybody I see a lot of people just start at 10%, right? Because why would you not think of it this way? I always like to say it’s free money, because if someone makes an introduction to you or send you a send you a client, would you would you rather take 90% of something you didn’t have to work for? And if you switch it around that way, then people are like, oh, duh, of course I would. But they it gets a little complicated to set these things up right.
What system do I use? Whatever.
But to begin with, just keep it simple. I pay 10%. You know, tell them what your program is. If they’re going to get 500 bucks, they’re going to they’re going to pay a little bit more attention to saying, oh, this would be a good introduction. Right. So and then like I said, our our system makes it super simple. Once you’ve done that deal you just click and do it. So but yeah. And I’m a big believer in that I’ve paid referral fees or I used to call them bird dog fees back in the day. Right. Give you 50 or 100 bucks to send me to a client. Why not. Right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:24
So any other softwares you’re using on the computer? I know you have a user of ChatGPT. It could be apps on your phone as well. What is the. You know, maybe your tech stack look like.
You know you have ChatGPT. What else?
Phil Herrington: 53:38
One thing I do, my wife thinks it’s funny. I never turn off the memory on my texts. That I do. I have texts going back six years because there’s always sales opportunities in there, right? And so I never want to lose that, that text thread because I might go back to it. That’s one thing I some people clear it out like she’s an admin. So she clears out her text. And I found it the other day and I’m like, what are you doing? But that makes sense. She’s not doing sales. I keep all of my emails because for the same reason, because you just never know when there was going to be an introduction you need to look up or whatever. Shoot my phone. Let’s see if there’s anything else. I use the circle app because I’m part of speakeasy and that’s really good. I like that, of course, I use go high level and I really I like using their app. So she since they upgraded it, it’s really good. Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s about it. I mean there’s some other personal stuff, but I can’t think of any other business ones that I use at this point.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 54:44
Yeah. I mean, actually, I just thank you for pointing that out. Phil, I want to give a shout out to Eric Berman and Speakeasy. That’s actually how we met as well. And and before that, I’ve never used circle, and I find it to be kind of a cool app and platform.
Phil Herrington: 54:59
Yeah. And some people can do it terribly because I’ve joined other communities. He set it up very well. Yeah. So he did a really good job with that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 55:08
So Go HighLevel. Another good one. People can check out the episode I did with the founder of Go HighLevel on the podcast. That was a good one. And you know, some of the stuff that they do over there as well. Anything from like managing emails or anything, any other software you’re using from from the business side.
Phil Herrington: 55:29
I did like that Fyxer AI. It’s spelled with a Y. It did a really good job of starting to categorize all my emails and it’ll actually start to reply. And then it learns over a period of time how you want to reply. So you can almost go in there and read the email real quick and then, you know, kick the email out. Which reminds me, I think I’m going to sign up for that again, because I had on my old email and I’m going to put on my new email real, just real quick. On the personal side, I always like to start my day with the Bible verse, right? So they got a nice two minute version in there. You can watch a little video about what the verse of the day is, and we should always start the right way. Right. But now that’s I think that’s all I got. I mean, I could look through here, but I think that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 56:13
That actually has come up a few times as well as well as Fyxer come up. I actually tried Fyxer . I wanted to love it, except it shut off some of my hotkeys for my email. So then that was essential for me. But but otherwise people are saying they like it. So if you don’t use the hotkeys, it probably would work for you. For me, I need those hotkeys to like archive things and respond.
Phil Herrington: 56:35
Tell us about those hot keys. I don’t know what that is.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 56:37
What’s that? Oh, it’s just like, you know, from a productivity standpoint. You know, you probably get tons of emails. You know, I think I get 500, 1000 emails. So, you know, I have it set up so that if I hit e it archives it, you know, a replies all r, so I don’t use the mouse at all.
Really. If I’m in the email, I can just use, you know, the specific shortcut keys that allows me to get through quickly. Right? And I obviously have a side panel, you know, set up in email so that I don’t have to click through, open it up.
Like, I don’t know, sometimes it’s just stuff for me, Phil, that’s natural. And I was looking at, you know, like my wife’s email at one point and she was like, pull it up. I’m like, you don’t have a sidebar. So you can pre read your emails because you have to click on the email and it pops up. I mean, I use Google Suite, so it depends what people use. But you know, it has to pop up every email you have to read. It’s like no I just have the side panel. I scan it if I don’t need to respond, I archive it with an E, you know? So it’s just makes me get through emails really quickly, right?
Phil Herrington: 57:37
Wow. Gotcha. Gotcha. So, like, I need a video on that because that I can kind of see it, but. And they say that to, you know, another productivity tip is to watch someone work.
Because they’ll they’ll do things that they’re not telling you. And then.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 57:51
Oh, sure, 100%.
Phil Herrington: 57:52
I didn’t know that did that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 57:54
Actually, that’s a good point. Another software one of my favorites is Sweet Process. We use Sweet Process from like to document all our standard operating procedures SOPs. So because like you said, if someone walks you through it on a video, they may be if they tell you, they may be skipping steps, you don’t even see where they’re going. So we’ll use that to I think we have over 600 SOPs inside of what we do, just to make sure it’s, you know, everyone can kind of do things in a standardized fashion.
Phil Herrington: 58:25
Oh yeah. And so speaking of that, the SOP stuff I use Loom to record anything I want my VA to do. Then I take the transcript, drop it in GPT, GPT, and tell it to make me an SOP. Of course, read it over. But I never have her come back because we do a video and ask me more questions. So if you’re having challenges communicating with your VA, then always use a video. Loom is 18 bucks a month. I mean, have it on your computer record. Go or whatever you want to use. But getting them a video is very, very they love that. By the way, everybody that I do that with loves it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 59:01
Love it. So first of all thank you. Thanks for sharing the tool software. Everyone can check out theconnectorcommunity.com to learn more and we’ll see you next time. Phil thanks so much.
