It's great to see everyone networking. Um, I want to give a big shout out to Moshi Klein for sponsoring this event. Um, he is the expert in low code and in business processes. As we we're going to hear, they are one and the same. You can't separate one from another. Um, and he has a big challenge tonight because we have a very diverse crowd. Um, we have developer um people and we have business people who try to walk a fine line and provide value for both. Um, but big thank you to Moshi and Moshi, the mic is yours. Okay. Uh, good evening. Um, kind of humbled and pleasure to be here tonight. Looking around the room like David mentioned that we have your business owners, uh, IT MSP providers, have low code developers, full stack developers, somewhere we have a wide variety of people to improve businesses. Are my mentors. Some are collaborators. Some are me. And there's one thing that we keep on experience, especially the people that are in the development of whatever it would be low code, regular code, whatever it would be, that people call you each and every day and tell you, I need Salesforce, I need Monday, I need AI, I need some kind of system, some kind of solution. And if you ask them why, they'll tell you, I spoke to my friend. He's in a similar industry and that's what they use. I put a poll on a WhatsApp group and everybody said that if you're a dox Y and Z, you have to use it. I asked my brother-in-law, who was in this industry 5 years ago, and that's what they used. And there's for a while, I had this thought in my inside me that you should always prioritize process before system. You should know your why before you get into any of the details. But an interesting thing happened to me 10 months ago, when I started doing my consulting on my own. A friend of mine referred a family member of his to me. So I reached out. Our referrals are great for business. We had a great uh, great uh, full discovery. Sent the deposit, sent the contract. Sorry. Signed the dotted line. The only thing she asked me was, come down to my office and meet me in person. So I don't know if people are who do the kind of consulting that I do, would say you always meet in person, you never meet in person. I didn't even have any experience to go about that. So I met her in person. When I got to the office, the business owner, Mr. Spe, passed me in. We woke up a flight of steps and we go into this uh, this uh, I would say a room the side of this room, sheer workspace, open cubicles and some private offices. And it was pretty interesting to see that no one is at was at their desk. Um, was like dust on the printer, um, office supplies on people's desks, and I couldn't understand if people aren't coming in to work today, or is it a day off, or is this some kind of haunted office that people are using for conferences? When I got into the conference, with another three people waiting there for me, my the my curiosity got the best of me and I asked the business owner says, "Freed, what's going on over here? You're in business for 7 years. 2023, we made $2.5 million. We spoke on the phone, two Zoom calls, Google Meets, and sound. You have a very big operation. What's going on?" So she tells me that we're good at what we did. They provided a great service. They lost two of their biggest clients because they were all over the place. They kept offering different services. They were basically the the mom and pop shop that sold a different kind of bagel every day of the week. They lost those two big clients because they needed a certain amount of service. They had to let a big part of their team go. And what they're focusing now on is to document their processes, operationalize their business, and then hire for those roles. And it clicked, it clicked with me, it resonated with me very deeply that you don't start with people, and you don't start with tools. You try to start with your clarity, your purpose, and a business, what the business actually needs out of whatever system or software you're going to you're going to use. Um, in this room, I look around. I see what's probably the best talent when it comes to deploying Monday, Air Table, Salesforce, Zapier, Hopspot, whatever the tool would be. And we're all we all see, I would say, in a daily or weekly base, or maybe twice a day, where clients or business owners, business operators are looking for the shiniest thing on the shelf. They look they see tools, whatever it would be, if it would be a full stack or it be a no code solution, as the manager is going to change their business, that's going to provide a solution. They resist doing the work, the intentional work, answering the questions of what does the business do, and what are your functions, and what do you need out of it. The the truth is that if it's not documented, you can't automate it. If your process is broken and you put it in a software, the software, whatever it would be, will inherit whatever whatever broken process you put into it. And what happens 11 times out of 10, is that the the the the issues, the the problems that are going to come out of that, let's call it exponentialize, whatever the word is, um, broken process is going to happen a lot bigger at a lot bigger cost to the business. Um, full stack developers could definitely attest to this, when they come into a new project that they get one list of or one sentence or one voice note needs and wants. Everything has the same priority and everything has the same due date as yesterday and try to understand what's the difference between what the business actually needs and what the business doesn't need. At Clinico, primarily what we focus on is on the process and the operation side before you get into all those technology and tools. And what we found to be very helpful is to start with what does the business do? And we asked three very specific questions. What specific problem? What specific solution to what specific people? When a business has a wide variety of services or products, trying to have one kind of soft software to encapsulate all their operation becomes very very complicated. So just so you know from the get-go, what do they provide, to whom they provide, and how they provide it. Um, the second thing we actually don't go into a full market analysis and try to challenge them. Is it a good idea? Is it not a good idea? Charge more, charge less. It's not what we're here for. for to understand in a very basic level what the business does at its best to know how to service to serve them better. The second thing we do is we go into a full full on process mapping hunt. Um, some businesses were successful that come from large ERPs to do um process mining. Has everyone, anyone anyone done process mining? Process mining is essentially where you take large sets of data from ERPs and you literally backwards plan where all those actions and triggers happen and it's very interesting what you put into the right source to see where someone will literally tell you that no, this is not way we do it. And those saucers tell a very different story. So it doesn't matter if you do something as complicated as that, or you take just a pack of sticky notes and you start putting them on the table and ask the client, okay, where are we starting today? And they're going to say, when we get an order. And the most valuable question in those conversations is, what happens next? And as you ask the question in the first conversation, it might take an hour or two. You'll take a picture. You go into Mirror, Whimsical, whatever it would be. You start organizing it and you'll tell the client, let's go to another call. You'll maybe have 65% of their information. But in that first conversation, they wouldn't be able to get past a certain point. And it's very interesting to see that even once you have the flowchart, you have the swim lane chart. If you use Rec, Scip, whatever it would be. Something that's a bit more technical is value stream mapping, which is of more of a six sigma tool, which really identifies to you what the inputs and the outputs are for each process and what the value add and non-value added weight times are for processes. Because sometimes it when maybe you implement monday.com on a small business or ClickUp, it might not be that exciting to look at. But if you want to have a very very good view, a very good understanding what the business does and how they do it, it's something worth watching two or three YouTube videos and checking it out. Once you have that map, whatever it would be, if it's a piece of paper or it's a it's digital, you should try to challenge it. What happens is, especially for myself, when you work with a business for four or five hours looking at the same flowchart, moving around some triangles, tiles, and diamonds, you start getting biased to your own thoughts, and you start skipping or you're not you're not seeing the same thing. So, getting a different consultant, getting someone from the client's team to take a look at it, that that extra set of eyes is really what um is really what helps. Um, three months ago, I came to visit a client in the Mimmora area that does custom creative uh creations in the in the promotional industry. And he has a he had a nice, very nice, large warehouse. And I picked up two coffees at Hav Java. And we walk in and in from the parking lot from my car to the door. He tells me, "No, guy design." And for myself, I'm like, I'm not going to tell him right now in his face, but I think it's a bit premature in the conversation to talk about any solution when I don't know what the problem is all about. So, we went into the conference room, was literally like a sucker table. We pushed off all the samples, all the invoices, all the receipts, took a very simple pad of old-fashioned sticky notes and went through a hour, hour and a half conversation. And during that hour, hour and a half, he started calling in the guy who runs this machine and that machine and the girl that runs this smart, sweet setup that someone did for him five years ago. And very interesting to see where people were saying, "No, that's not how it works." And he's like, "But it should work this way." It's a very interesting experiment to do. And even if you don't want to do it to your clients because you feel you're not good at it, it's worth doing for your own operation, for your own business, just to do it to the wall, the wall behind your desk. Um, without implementing any very expensive softwares or shifting around bringing in a warehouse consultant. He gave up half of his warehouse and he was able able to deliver 10% faster on his orders before getting any crazy, any any exciting stuff into it. Once you have that that flowchart, whatever it would be, I might step on some people's toes, but I'm going to say that um especially you that there is most probably no good reason to start off with custom software, right? So see in today's in today's market, there are so many um tried tried tried and true and tested low code off-the-shelf off-the-shelf solutions, and you have industry specific solutions that you could literally deploy in weeks or months versus months and years. And someone might argue, but they really really have something. They really have a need. They really have the budget. They really do need a custom solution. There's a few things. Number one, you want your solution to meet where your client is at. Most businesses, even they do have the budget, they don't have the resources, the manpower to actually adopt and implement custom software the right way. You're talking about speed and affordability, which usually those two things just to keep your client's expectations somewhat manageable. And it's, I would say, more flexible than scalable. Um, sometimes when you go from zero to hero, um, you still want to use low code software software. And where I used it, it was for a company in Williamsburg that did local law compliance. I don't know if anyone's familiar with local law compliance, New York City. Any building within 25,000 square feet has to be compliant with, I think, four or five different local laws, all related to greenhouse emissions, carbon emissions, whatever it is. So, anyone who owns any owner, any developer who has a few of such such buildings doesn't want to have their own responsibility. So they contract a company that takes responsibility to be compliant with those buildings. Those companies inspect, they remedy anything to be compliant. And if God forbid if they they're not compliant, they take responsibility on the fines. So that's that's a nice part of it. This this business actually tried implementing a very flash ERP, shall not be named in this room at this time. And um they spent a quarter of a million dollars in less than nine months with nothing nothing to show for it. I'm not going to say that the software is at fault. It could just be that so I'm sure anyone who does my line of work that your client doesn't let you do your right due diligence to to service them the right way. Um, they went back to the good old-fashioned Google Sheets. And at that point, a deadline came for a lot of these local laws and they needed to provide visibility for their clients or else they would have to take the the bill of those fines. So I told them in the end, you must probably need or ERP or a modular ERP, whatever it would be, something that we can't help you with. What we can help you is we can prepare you for whoever is going to implement that implemented the right way. We took a simple tool like monday.com and we took one department at a time in a very high level documented and operationalized them. They spent on monday.com, I think it was 12 or $15,000, which is a lot of money, but their their success for their ERP was only to thank that they took a baby step in the middle. So, even if you're someone that does primarily work with full stack with with full full stack development new products, you might consider with larger companies to take a baby step going from zero to hero to use something like that. There's something that I like to think about when thinking about um what I like to use with clients. When you think about anything monday.com, ClickUp, Jira, whatever it would be is the octopus analogy. So, especially if you use the no code, the low code platforms, it's not it's not going to encapsulate your emails. It's not going to encapsulate your QuickBooks. You're going to have secondary or auxiliary business tools that you're still going to need to use. So, think of monday.com or whatever it would be, the mushy brain in the middle of the octopus that you have surrounding all these different tools that you use and think of something like make or Zapier that are the tentacles that go from monday.com to whatever the the tool is. Um, what what we have successfully done, I'm sure Sky and Penguin also have done in the low code world, where you can actually take from five people having a log into expensive software that the business needs to have only one just for the API to be connected and for the information to come back and forth. Um, also an exciting thing with vibe coding, I don't know if people are excited about it or not, but with vibe coding, low coders or someone like me, a no coder, could actually add a lot of JSON code tools and flex them beyond their off-the-shelf capabilities. So, there's a lot that could be done and there's a lot that is going to keep on happening in the low code, no code world. And it's not too hard to learn. Just for all the full stack developers, please come down one little bit. You'll see your jobs will come a lot a lot easier. All I want to finish off here is for the business owners, stop chasing the shiny tools. Stop believing that you need more. You only need is you need better. For the people like me in the room, we should think of business process then tools. Before you click, try to document. Before you automate, validate, and before you do, you build blueprint. It's worth doing the the let's call it the less glamorous, less exciting work of thinking process business before getting into tools. That usually pushes the needle a lot further than trying to jump in and building forms, whatever um forms or drop downs or features it would be. I would like to thank David Dovet for putting together this uh this event. It's it's my first one and my my plan for the day was to come learn, find my next collaborator to make my client's business better. And then she and Baruch Hashem so far the people I've met here, definitely I've learned a lot. For the people who don't know, my phone is on record in my pocket. When I come home, the transfer is going with the Chad GPT and I'm going to get a lot of good ideas. So watch what you tell me. Thank you so much.