From Scaling Too Fast To Building Smarter: Nicky Fairclough on AI, Business Pivots & Founder Freedom

speaker-1: that's the beauty of starting a business. It can be whatever you want it to be. Don't look at Instagram and think, I need to be on my laptop at 5 a.m. I need to sit here until twelve, It doesn't have to be that way.

speaker-0: Hi everyone. This is Carmen Dovad and this is Behind the Founders. Today joining me is Nikki Feraklov. Nikki, welcome. Can you introduce yourself?

speaker-1: Hi everyone, I'm Nikki Faircliff. I am the owner of Cold of Recovery. I also started my I AI consultancy business, Reduce Admin. my introduction into business is probably like most people's. I worked the job I worked for Unilever as one of their automation engineers. I also bought shares in the company r really early on. So when I was around eighteen, I got an apprenticeship there. Around twenty-one, I always knew I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to make Money a sort of a side hustle, maybe some passive income, which I've come to learn as doesn't really exist. So I sold my shares in Unilever after the investing period after four years and then used that money to buy an investment property. So I bought an investment property when I was around 21. This was just before COVID. So I managed to get a really good price on the property. I then refinanced that house to buy another property, and I ended up with two properties, which I was renting out. And I was a landlord and it was great. I was making probably like an extra thousand pounds a month, let's say, on top of my salary. But then I got bored. I got bored and thought, you know what, I need to do something a little bit more drastic or a little bit more, I don't know, fun. So I decided to sell one of those properties and go all in on cold hut recovery. And cold hut recovery, we created wellness studios, which basically we put into a box. And that was born out of. So I also compete in jujitsu. So I was competing at jujitsu. I got injured in the final of my very first tournament and nothing I was doing was was solving this injury. I was resting, I was stretching, and it just wasn't cutting it at all. So I started to use ice baths and saunas. And then with using the ice baths and saunas, I was like ready to get back in the gym again. So I was like, my god, this has worked amazing. Why is no one using this? And then I realized people were using it. They just it was the rich people, people who could afford it, and it felt like wellness was really inaccessible. Felt like you either paid hundreds of pounds per month for a studio, or you had to buy a sauna or an ice bath. this was before the blow up ones, let's say, or even if you could afford the blow up one, they were very low quality. So the idea or the problem I was trying to solve was how do we make luxury recovery affordable to the everyday person? And using my engineering background and my automation background, I created the automated recovery huts, which then became Cold Hut Recovery. That was around Three years ago. So well, no, four years ago where I came up with the idea. We had our first build within six months. So again, I've sold a house for this. I've pretty much banked that this is gonna be the winner. I've sold my house, we've got this pod of money. I've given it all to this guy to build these containers. And then we spent a lot of it on marketing. I had no idea what I'm doing. By the way, this is like fresh. I've I'm a landlord or I'm a I'm still just working a job. put my money into this and it comes to Like again, s this is six months before launch. My fiance is also pregnant. We've just moved house. So managing all this stuff.

speaker-0: And then a lot of balls to juggle, yeah.

speaker-1: Close each other, yeah. And it gets to the launch day, or what I say is gonna be the launch day, 'cause the the the berth is in a month. And we're like, right, I need to get launched before the baby gets here because I won't have the headspace once the baby's here. I need to get launched, need to have the problems, need to get someone in to start running this thing, 'cause it's again, it's just me. I've got this shipping container with an ice bathroom on inside and it's outside the gym i in Rain Hill. And the day of the launch, I can't make this up, the day after the launch. So I've just opened up the hook for the first time. We've been building software in the background. We've tested everything. My fiance goes into hospital for an emergency C section. Because my my daughter Sunday, she has a has SVT, which we managed to pick up. So we launch, and on the same day, I'm in hospital answering customer inquiries. So the

speaker-0: In time.

speaker-1: Yeah, like so this time where I'm supposed to be there for my family, I'm answering these calls and I'm like, you know, you couldn't make this up, bro. So I the opportunity again, I'm more of an opportunist. So the opportunity was Yeah, I've now I'm an hour in hospital and I'm answering all these customer complaints because one of our the software actually glitched as well on the s at the same time and we ended up charging one of the customers a little bit more than we should have and he's kicking off on the phone, but my fiance she's in recovery and there's a baby who's in I in in in Skaboo, which is like the the advanced obs unit for babies, and I'm like, Fucking hell, what do we go to here? sorry, where was I going on this? And then so you have the open bra so Instagram starts popping off because obviously social media's been a massive growth level for us. And on the launch day when people start posting, another gym I was a scene and my phone's popping off saying, can we have one? Can we have one? Can we have one? So then it opened up this whole it was getting what it was like it was like exhausting because what's happening, but we're also really excited because it that I was getting so much interest in the product that we had launched. And then from from there we had another I think what was it? Another two units. So just from that day, we secured another two locations for our for our units for cultured recovery. we then again some of the money that I had saved up and some of the money that I put in from the houses, we put into building out these units and we built the Altringham location as well as the Lichfield location and we opened up two more studios.

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: yeah. So that was the start of Cold Up Recovery. And it was, I don't know, quite a wild ride, to be honest. It was it's well, what I've come to know is actually quite normal for businesses. The more I get to speak to owners, they tend to be not too distant from or not too far away from my I did like seems like most businesses don't have this straightforward opening that everyone seems to think on social media because you see it and you're like, wow, they just opened the thing. Yeah, but you don't see the the years of graph that went behind her or the problems that go wrong on opening day.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent for sure. You know, it's quite interesting that you mentioned that, right? Like nobody really understands what goes on behind the scenes because from the outside looking in, it's like, this is really exciting. You're building something from scratch, you're building something new, but nobody understands that it takes a lot of resilience, it takes a lot of patience and time to do that. I was in fact speaking with one one of the guests and he was saying that on average, a lot of the businesses it takes three years to really get exposure, to really get You know, to be seen to have the visibility. So you really just have to survive in the next three years and get everything's you're gonna be able to enjoy the fruits that you bear as well, right? So I think it's quite interesting that you mentioned that, right? So I would love to know a little bit more about the different the wellness studios that you have built, right? So at this point until like until now, how many locations or how many wellness studios have you already are you operating currently at the moment and in which cities and locations?

speaker-1: So again, so I'll go back to the we built the three units and then we had them out. And then from that we built another four. So we had a total of seven units and we built them over a two-year period. And one of the big mistakes we made was we didn't account for them all breaking at the same time. So to ourselves, we're gonna open all these units again. We scaled quickly. I'm like, I'm just like a hundred miles per hour at point. I'm like, let's just get them all out there. one of the things that we ran into was also that the level of custom service that we were getting because we now have ten thousand people on our on our customer list who are using our hot star up and down the UK. I didn't account for that. So it's just me and the business. I started this business on my own. I had no again, no knowledge really. I had mentors and that's great. But I had no really knowledge of like the hiring process or the staff that I would need to have. I thought, well, I'll just do it when it comes to it. But one of the things we do. As a as a business owner is it gets too much, you're handling too much, so you then you don't have the time to then go back and start hiring someone. But fortunately, again, the the best time to start business was probably when I started the business because it was the advent of AI. So fortunately, I was able to hire a really good personal assistant who would take over the customer service and then put in some AI systems, which are like enabled us to do the basic, let's say, customer responses at at mass, because that was probably taking up the most of our time at that point. But then the bigger issue comes when you've got then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pounds of equipment across the UK, which you can't get to, which you now put in the hands of this partner. So we partner we we partner with gyms, we sold the units and we also rented them out. In every one of those situations, we're responsible for maintaining them. But we haven't got any staff there to maintain it. I just thought it you know just look after it and out of it, but we've learnt recently some of our units to pay for the maintenance on the other ones. So it's like, you know, you think you're doing this great, we're we're growing really quick. The Instagram's going off with all the on all the metrics, we're doing okay. Money's coming in. And all it takes it took was this one oversight I had two years ago to sort of wipe that out. but again it's all about the opportunity. So you take that time and then we go back and we're like right, okay, what did we do that we can do differently this time? And we so we scaled right the way down now and we were sort of looking at the direction where called up wants to go. And we really had to think about what are we actually doing as a business? Are we running wellness studios? Are we renting wellness? Are we renting out equipment? Are we a bloody supplier? Like what are we actually fucking doing here? Because we're trying to do all these ten different things and nothing's getting done very well. I've burnt a hole in my pocket that's big enough to for me to fall through. And I don't even know which direction the business is going in. And you've actually hung at a really like strange time, Carmen. I'm not I'm not gonna lie, because we were lit we're actually at the point we sent the email out two days ago where we are starting to look at pivoting the business and it's it's not a decision that comes lightly, you know. You spent the last well I spent the last three years building up the business to what it is, and then you have to make a difficult decision and you have to admit you've made a mistake, you know, you have to swallow your pride a little and go, What did we do wrong? What can we do better? So we looked at what we were actually doing as a business. And what we were actually doing was helping gym owners launch their own wellness studios. Cause that's what eventually what happened. We've done the bill, we've provided them with a wellness studio, we've given them the marketing, the playbooks, the operations, the booking system, but at the end of the day, these gyms are the ones running it and they're running it pretty profitably. It's only us that don't it who aren't making the money because we can't be there. So it's like, right, okay, we need to completely overhaul the business and go from being like an equipment supplier. We can still obviously do that. We've got the contacts and we've got the bill partners to be able to build these units. But our business now is probably going to shift more into a consultancy business where we give training to gym owners who want to start their own wellness business, but don't have all the knowledge or don't want to make the hundreds of thousands of pounds mistakes that we've made. So we've sent out the same we so we sent out the email en masse today, this morning, actually. It was this morning. At least this morning. And me calendar's just chop full. It's like, well, why didn't they just do this from the start? But I suppose you can't. And that's and my mentors it says this to me. It's like the what you think are mistakes is just lessons. Do you know what I mean? Whatever that money monetary value is that we put into it, that's what I'm paying for the equivalent of a business degree. But it's like a business degree on steroids 'cause you've fit felt it. Yeah. Yeah. In business, some lessons just need to be felt because everyone told me. Everyone's no, don't scale too fast. You know what I mean? This is gonna bring like no, don't that won't happen to me. I can do it better. Do you know what I mean?

speaker-0: Yeah, to prove them wrong.

speaker-1: Yeah, to prove the wrong, maybe. Yeah, but then also like, the right, you know what I mean? That's the thing. And I think that's another thing that stings, you know. You don't at the end, I don't like the word haters because you don't I don't truthfully in business I've never had any. Do you know what I mean? Everyone says that you're gonna have all these people. I don't I I don't think that's true. I think that depends what your circle is, but the real problem with them is the right until until they're not, aren't they? You know, like, that that idea is bad, he's bad at business, and it's like, well, the right, you know, we haven't proved anything yet and The beauty is though, I only have to be right once and then they can never say it again. So that's where we're at with cold hut. but then again, looking at the opportunity, which you I think you've always got to do, is I spent that much time developing AI systems, I realized that I've actually developed a skill within myself, which is being able to systemise business processes but also implement them at scale with AI. So still working for Unilever, I had the opportunity to run their AI strategy and also implement some of these AI systems, which helped us as a small business, but also can scale up to businesses that are doing tens of billions of pounds per year. And that's when I started showing some of the let's say the the AI workflows or the agents that I'd built for Cold Hook. We had one that would go through our database of leads and say, All right, these ones are a bit still warm, you know, these you haven't spoken to these for a while and you can really use it to like sort of reignite your customer base. But I also used it for our customer service. So one of the again talking about growth within called recovery and what helped us convert leads into paying customers is is easily met many chats and this is an off the shelf tool this is an off the shelf tool which you don't have to be technical to set up don't get me wrong it then you need to be like you need to be a bit sales nav like you need to be a bit sales trained to be able to have the right copy to the right emotional triggers. All of our inquiries are coming through Instagram and again at the start it's me replying like yeah you can book a session of this you can you can book a session You can download the brochure at this link and it's like it took me probably a day to set up and the whole business just ran on autopilot because we had the booking system, we had all the brochures, we had that we had all the sales copy, we had everything we needed. It was just about distributing it in a way when people wanted it. Because people when people are DMing you, they're the highest intent, they want the thing you have right now. So how do you convert that to a sale? It's well give them the thing they want a lot quicker. And with a many chat automation, if you've got a direct book a session link here and here's all the things you need to bring. You you just sell them like that. And I think that's the best way. And the same for high tickets. So we were selling the units as well. And we we using that as exact system, we got 70k extra in skep in sales. And it's like it's just so obvious. But when you show that to people who aren't let's say AI native, it's it's like, whoa, I can do this. And these are people with like 10 million pound plus businesses. And the same tools that help me unlock 70,000 pounds in my own like small business enterprise that's like a million pounds plus and it's and it's just about looking at that opportunity and that's why i decided to go into the ai consultant business i have got all the knowledge i've got all the skills we've proved it small scale we've proved it enterprise level it's right right okay now we just need to niche down into an industry and given everything that's going on with my daughter and a bit of personal background it's like healthcare seems to be the obvious one they're so admin heavy There's no one in there who's willing to pull the trigger to say, let's get AI in here. And also I don't think they have the internal skills. There's no CTO in the NHS. Do you know what I mean? Or they're not definitely not acting like they are. So I've got again looking at opportunity and you get a bit lucky in business. I had a direct contact with someone who was in the NHS and we've started building AI custom AI tools for them straight away. And y it's like showing them it's like I know it's like going back in time a thousand years and showing the Romans, but the an iPhone, do know what I mean? Like, whoa, this is crazy. But it unlocks so

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah.

speaker-1: it just unlocks so much for them. And it's again, that's I feel like I've gone off on a tangent a little bit here, but that's the power of AI, but also the power of being able to look in at yourself and your business and look at the right metrics and think right what's actually working, what's not. And sometimes just swatch crowd and say, my idea was a great cold hook, great idea, amazing idea. You know what, on paper, perfect. But great ideas don't make great businesses. Great businesses make great businesses. And if you try and ru and you don't run your business like a business, then you you end up with no money. And you have to end up doing what we're doing, we're just pivoting.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I like what you mentioned, right? That you through your experience working, you know, in cold hot recovery, especially in the social media aspects, you know, the services, using many chat automation. I've also used that myself. So I really get that it's it really does optimize a lot in terms of like providing the services, designing the architecture of the flows to be able to respond faster, increase efficiency with the products and sales, and then for you to take all of that. And then build something else, especially within healthcare AI and everything like that. So that itself was when Reduce Admin was brought to light. So tell listeners a little bit about Reduce Admin and everything.

speaker-1: So reduce admin, I think the w if we look at, I can't remember who said it, there's a very famous, famous entrepreneur. And he I feel embarrassed that I don't know this, but you say when you look at your business, the functions you want to replace first is admin. You want to get admin out of the way first. So I was like, right, what what are people looking for? What are people struggling with who who are trying to put AI in the business? They're not searching how to put AI in my business. They're searching things like how do I reduce my admin load? My admin teams overworked. I'm hiring too much admin staff or I don't know the they're not they're not searching generic AI and think because people are mostly problem focused rather than solution focused. So it's like reduce admin, it just helps me appear on the on the on the SEO rankings and also reduce admin then becomes we have a and one of the things we again we got wrong and I I like to learn from Cold Hut is I think stupidly simple beats intellectual. intellectually complex and I want to reduce admin, what do we do? We reduce admin. How do we do it with AI? Who's our market? Healthcare. And it's just dead simple. And if you can boil everything down to one product, one solution, one deliverable, one ICP, one customer avatar, everything else downstream just becomes really easy. And especially if you pick a niche which no one's captured yet because everyone's a little bit too scared. And as we've found out from the start of this, this call, I'm just a bit blissfully ignorant when it comes to how hard things are gonna be. We go into that niche, but a niche where the outcome isn't just monetary, isn't just monetary. If we if we do what we want to do at Reduce Admin and we do help reduce the administration load in the NHS or in a healthcare setting, by contrast we're helping people, re real people, save lives potentially, do you know I mean and this is how I like like you have to have a vision so big that it you can get people behind it. And that includes yourself as a founder. If I get up every day, like what we're doing today, I'm like, well, you know, someone's heard their arm and they want to re like recover every a cold up recovery. I'm like, all right, okay. Whereas if I get up in the morning, like, what we're doing today, we're reducing NHS waiting times. How are we doing that? because we're gonna remove the admin load for the for the front house staff and we're gonna reduce the admin load for the primary primary care physicians and now they can see two people instead of one per day. And I think that's where we want to get to with reduce admin obviously again taking the learnings we're starting very small we're targeting one subcontractor within h NHS reduce their admin low by up to eighty percent which is what we're targeted to do okay and then go again use that case study take on some more people take on the delivery and then just grow but grow slowly again so any advice out there to

speaker-0: Learn from cold hard recovery to implement reduce admin. Okay. Yeah.

speaker-1: You've got you've got to, and I think that's it. One grow slow. Grow slow. Because I I I think Alex Hall knows he says best, th there's an illusion of rushing, because if you try and rush something, you don't ever get it right and you don't actually know you don't actually get anywhere. Whereas if you go slow, it doesn't seem like it at the time, but you that compounding that compound effect starts to creep in where it's like, Right, I got this one and I got it right, and we've got it documented and we've got the systems in place. We've got the money models right, we've got this right, we've got this legal, we didn't fall into this trap. Okay, let's do two. Than for and it's exponential and that's where I have to again calm down a little bit because you can probably tell by the way I'm talking to you, I need to be going a hundred miles per hour and just take my time, deliver and just deliver value at every single step. That's again another thing we do. We d are just unreasonable value to the customer. If I change anything, it's an email. It's just to let you know we changed this, we changed that, we've put we've added this feature in, what you think of this, really want your feedback. Hi, nothing's happened today because of XYZ, just checking in. It's Friday. I think people what you can never ups upset someone over over communicating, but I've found under communication has killed killed relationships and business deals more than anything else so far in the business.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would actually yeah, I would yeah, there's actually two things that came at the top of my head. So I feel like, you know, a lot of times there is like this misconception that it's in order for a business to be successful, you gotta grow quickly, get as many clients as possible, grow and expand as quickly as possible. But oftentimes it's often overlook that, you know, it's all about like quality over quantity. And I feel like we are now in this day and age, especially now with AI being like hot topic, that, you know, we are living in a very, very fast-paced world. So there is this need to keep up and catch up and grow and be very quick and start things really quickly on a quick scale as well. That actually sometimes it's okay to slow things down to really Have all the foundation built out as well. And I want to go back to what you were talking a little bit about AI and efficiency and everything like that. So you could I could see that you have really thought of how to make the most out of integrating AI into your day-to-day business. Do you still feel like there are some aspects, whether it's at cold head recovery or reduced admin work, they are manual or inefficient?

speaker-1: Of course, made every single thing. Maybe out maybe market research is the only thing that we haven't, or and I I have alluded to this on on another podcast, I think as well, one of the things I don't want to give up completely, which I did and then come back, was customer service and customer ticketing. And I think the reason is for this, you end up losing that sort of gut feeling that you get. So if I when I was first out of called recovery, I read everything. Every single email come through, and this is thousands of emails, by the way. Every single one that come through, I was reading and I felt it like human to human. I'm like, I don't like that they've they've experienced that. I want to fix that. Let me put something in. Let's invest some more money here. Let's invest some more money there. Let's inv let's change the equipment. Whereas when I give it to AI, they were resolving what I thought they were getting resolved. Cause I was Yeah, well, they're getting the response down to like a minute. They must be happy. But then a few weeks later, you sort of lose that intuitive feel you get what of your customers. and what they actually want. And you there's no no amount of AI or data concatenation you can do or like a data analysis you can do to to get that back. So customer service I now have give completely to my VA and she handles it all and then I'll do spot checks. So I'll go through like I'll spend on dead Saturday I'll spend me Saturday evening, let's say, and I'll just look at like the the whatever's come through and try and just get a gut feel of where it's like there, especially being so with code up being so distant away from them. It is very difficult to get that sort of it look at like even if you look at your T, like that sort of vibe, you know, it's like handing off your ones of ones with your with your staff to to AI. Well, how do you know if he's pissed off? Do you know what I mean?

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah, do you know if you if I have a have I just said to my let's say I said to my VA now, she's got a set of tasks to do. I always ask how she's doing. I really care. But if I then hand that off to AI and then she leaves four weeks later, I'm left in the dirt. She do you know what I mean? It's because all because I didn't spend the extra hour or so needed a week to catch up. And I think that's where I don't see it. I am very pro AI. I spend a lot of time I'm I'm a big nerd, by the way. I would go so deep onto the technical side of AI and engine I'm as an engineer, it's Something that I've always been interested in. I'm very, very pro AI and AI optimistic. And as I I may as well wear a shirt saying I love AI on. But there is elements of business and elements of life which it just doesn't belong in. Doing the donkey work is what it should be doing. Doing the donkey work, the repetitive task which needs to be absolutely correct over and over again. But it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be it shouldn't be customer facing. I don't think so. Especially not as a small business. I at enterprise level of course you're gonna need some level of like AI agent who then can root and filter some things.

speaker-0: Thank you.

speaker-1: it's a small business, you should you should be answering them customer inquiries or at least hiring for it.

speaker-0: Yeah, definitely for sure. I mean, I can say also like from a personal experience and also like what I've heard speaking with other business owners who are also like working in the field of like healthcare AI that they find that as soon as like a customer comes in, asks questions and they find out it's it's replied by like an AI chatbot, AI agent, they disappear because they're like we rather communicate or with a human, you know, an actual human who can really understand because there's a lot of limitations to that, you know, like some of the the the answers are all generated or they're all like AI prompt and everything like that. So it's it it just goes to show that, you know, like AI can't necessarily replace everything or it's it's more of a supplement rather than something that you should totally like re substitute over.

speaker-1: It it's true and like a little bit deep a little bit deeper than than that as well. If you do hand over AI, especially for like let's say making decisions in your business or if you're struggling with a complex problem. It doesn't even have to be in b in business. If you're struggling with a complex problem, you're just like, AI, you like children's strategy how what should I do here? You remember that little that edge that sharpness in your brain where like you need to be making decisions on the fly quickly and you get i it's felt like there's a term coined AI atrophy. And you're starting to get it. And then you've got AI apathy, which is alluding to more what we're talking about, where customers will notice it's AI. They're not idiots. Do you know what I Your customers aren't idiots at all. They they will send AI out, like I believe sniffer dog. They hate it. They don't want anything to do with it. And especially when it's something where they're in they've got a problem, their emotional state, regardless of what's actually gone on. Usually when customers are reaching out, it's n it's and it's usually for a complaint. And then They they're in an emotional state where that's probably the biggest problem they've had today. That's probably the biggest problem they've had all week. And then you reply with like some generic AI thing which misses things and misses the emotional charge then

speaker-0: Frustration for the clients even more. Yeah.

speaker-1: I exactly and you could you might have been able to resell that customer, you might have been able to apologise, offer a refund, offer a a token, a voucher, whatever you could done. But then they're gone. They're just gone to AI and you'll never get that lead back. And no amount of retargeting campaigns will get that lead back because you'll just be known as the the company that palmed them off to AI.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense as well. Yeah. So obviously you can see that there are some, you know, limitations when it comes, especially when it's about client facing interactions and everything like that. Okay. Nikki, tell me a little bit more about your team setup, you know, because you did mention, you know, you have like some VA supporting you. are they all remotely based? How many the team? Can you hear me?

speaker-1: Sorry, Paul, may I just close out for a second?

speaker-0: That's all right, no worries at all. I'm just gonna pick right back up with the with the question that I just asked. Okay. So Nikki, let's talk a little bit about your operational and team setup. You did mention that you have a couple of VA supporting you, also some personal assistant helping you out. could you walk us through your team setup? How many people are based? Where are they based?

speaker-1: So my team at Code Recovery is myself and my VA. That's it. That's it. And that's and everything else is AI. So again, the VA will cust will handle the customer service and she'll handle so I tend to handle like managing the partners and making sure they're okay. But then all the maintenance is done by AI scheduling or the marketing we have is AI. but then sometimes you need again in in marketing, you want to be able to engage with the community on Instagram. So I'll just go on it a few times. the team's purposely small. Again, alluding to what I was saying before, we want to be as simple as possible. What can we do to provide value with the minimum amount of investment or input or hiring? we With and again with Reduc Admin, it's just myself adjunct. That's completely just me. And then anything that we would usually hire for hire for, let's say, and we try and automate first. So I think we look at we look at the hiring process the same way we'd look at if we were to put an AI tool in. So we'd start with the problem. What is the problem we're actually trying to solve? And when you come into hiring, it's like, well, what am I trying to hire for? And let's say it was a podcast. And we're trying to hire for a podcast and you want a research system. you want a research system, you want someone who's gonna book in the calls. It's like I would first then look at all the tasks they need to be able to do. And you should do this anyway, because if you are gonna hire, you're gonna need to SOP, you're gonna need to give them the let's say that what their contract they're with, what what are their deliverables, write that out and then I would just probably go through and say, Can we automate all of this? And I would look at it that way first and say, Can we automate this? Can we use an AI tool? What are the risks? So I tend to use I call it the Morty method to a point because I love Rick and Morty. I don't know if you've heard of Rick and Morty.

speaker-0: Yeah, I've heard of Rick and Morty, yeah, yeah.

speaker-1: brick and morty and the way we look at problems and hiring is for money. So how much does it cost and how much is it gonna cost for hiring? opportunity. So if we put this automation in, if we hire here, what's the opportunity? Can we 10x the business? Can we five X the business with the opportunity? Or what are the risks? So risk of doing the automation, risk of hiring. So this would be okay, we could have a data breach. If we hire someone we need to train them and that's gonna cost like know two three thousand pounds in FTE equivalent the risks of not doing it so if we don't get a person in here, do we need someone with specific expertise? And for the automation, could it be if this data isn't right, we're gonna get sued? T time. So how much time is it actually cost? How much time is this tight task actually taken? Is it going to take someone's full time job? Does the is it going to save us an hour here? Is it going to save 10 hours here? It that all depends. And then effort. So is the F does the effort of putting an automation in w outweigh the effort of just hiring someone. So for example, if we needed a full AI, or not even an AI, say if we needed a full application building for or a custom CRM just to fulfill these tasks that we've outset for this role, then we would probably just hire instead. And that's what we need to do with the VA.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. No, that's definitely a very thoughtful process and thoughtful approach, you know, to assess, you know, the risks. Can the processes be automated? If no, what would the responsibilities be if you were to look for additional support as well? And I think that's a very thoughtful process as well, as you mentioned, right? To be able to ensure that it is sustainable, small scaled, and also like for you to be able to achieve your certain goals and targets and business outputs as well. So with your VA, where's your VA based? How did you find this person?

speaker-1: So she's based in the Philippines. She's amazing. She's absolutely amazing. I I I hope she watches this because she's the best thing that's ever happened.

speaker-0: Just special shout out.

speaker-1: Yes, shout out to Lennon. she's based in the Philippines, and we found her on online jobs.ph. Okay. So we put advert out again. This is during like the scaling phase of cold recovery. And this is when I decided when I was using AI to do my customer servicing, I was like, right, this this isn't working. I'm losing the on ground. Fielber also as a founder, I can't be in the inbox all day. It just it just can't happen. I need to let something go here. So we decided to go with trying to find someone a a virtual assistant from the Philippines. As I heard they're really good. And that that was completely true. So one of my friends, Joe, he sort of guided me through how to do it as he had done it before for his agency. And we had sort of wrote the one of the things we did was we wrote again the scope of works, the or let's say the job application. But then put something at the bottom which says when you apply for this, make sure you put ice in the in the subject, just to make sure they were actually reading through it and like acting as a secondary filter. So immediately if the if someone didn't put ice in the subject when they were applying to us, we'd just sort of scrap it. But we just with hiring, I treated it as if I was hiring a full-time employee, because again, they're gonna they're gonna be. So we hired really slow. One of the pieces of ice I actually did say you was hire slow, fire fast. And we I think we had like twenty interviews until we landed on Lennon and she absolutely just blew us out of water with the with the interview process. I think and it's really highly skilled as well. I'm really highly skilled. And I think what you have to do as a founder, as a business owner, or even in any business function, is be able to do what we've just mentioned here and break down the tasks that they're gonna do into either SOPs or repeatable processes. I I did video guides for everything I needed Lennon to do. I wrote I just made a video guide. of me doing it. I was already doing the tasks. Open up Loom, open up OBS Studio, make a quick video, talk through it. And that way you can you don't have to be bet there babysitting and you can hand them these tasks.

speaker-0: Yeah, have a really smooth and efficient hand over to yeah.

speaker-1: Exactly, yeah. And then you can start to look at different lip deliverables 'cause ultimately you're a business, you need to have a deliverable. But make sure that the right deliverables as well. Like what are what are they doing? If you say you need to post ten Instagram posts, let's say there needs to be a good business outcome from that. Did those ten lead to one lead, which led to one s like one sale, or what are you doing? 'Cause you don't want to just say, right, I want you to do this, this and this and you go away with it and you're paying however much a month for this person. And then you're looking at your zero at the end of the month being like, Well, where's all the money? And it's because you have to optimise for the wrong thing and you've asked them to do sort of like optimise for the binary ethics, maybe. review that as well. have a process, have a system in place. Maybe it's it also at and a system doesn't need to be this complex thing. It can just be an hour session in your diary every month and it just says review re review the deliverables. And that that that is an example from Cold Hub, by the way, I used we could have a deliverable post ten Instagram posts. Okay, but then they don't get a result. So then it becomes post ten Instagram posts with a CTA to book a session.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm.

speaker-1: That could be like I don't know, two ten selfies of your VA that pop up on your business Instagram. Or if you say I want you to post two reels, eight eight carousels on the carousels, there to be five long, there needs to be five long, you need to leave with an emotional trigger. On the on the second page you need to leave with proof, on the third page you need to leave lead with the results of someone else on the fourth page you need blah blah blah on the final page you need to have a clear one cta fine so you can do that and and on the real it needs to be entertaining and entertaining means it needs to be funny. Being funny in this niche means people tend to find these things funny. And again you need it's I go on all day, you know what I mean you could do that. But you I think just telling your team or telling your VA to make 10 posts just isn't gonna cause it. You need to

speaker-0: All the specifics are need to be included. Yeah.

speaker-1: And tr and train them and coach them as well at the end of the day, like you especially with cold, it's a new business. Yeah, do you know what I mean? There's things that I'm learning every day, which I then need to pass on to to learn. Like they I thought was like this, but they don't actually like this. And I think that's how it needs to be. And sometimes I can and sometimes you have to look again. Life gets in the way. I've got two daughters, two daughters and one of them's always in that hospital. So it's difficult to keep up on keep on top of it, but y don't let it slipped, don't let the ball slip, do you know what I And that's that's where again where we're at with call it recovery and where we're at with hiring. And I think we're gonna go even slower on the hiring for reduce admin because we're gonna be hiring for a more technical role. So over the next few weeks potentially we're gonna be looking at hiring someone who's gonna do delivery. But they also need to be able to interact with clients in a professional manner. not like the way the like the way I do, but it in a way which keeps them engaged and also

speaker-0: Okay. Okay, so basically right now for you, one of the takeaways that you had is of course hiring, growing in a small scale by taking all the lessons that you've learned in cold recovery. And then now you're looking to look for someone more technical, but at the same time, somebody who's also like, you know, has a lot of client-facing client interaction as well. for a reduced admin, you said, or for reduced

speaker-1: Maybe something.

speaker-0: admin. Okay, that makes sense as well. and do you feel like As of now, even though you're in like a small you know, you'd have all the support with AI and you have your VA as well. Do you feel like at this time now, do you if there was anything else that you'd feel like, I would love to delegate immediately for support, what would that look like?

speaker-1: Marketing for sure. Marketing, I think. But also not again, marketing's a very broad term, isn't it? W it would be more so the the create like the creation. Again, I because you can see AI generated content off a mile away. As a founder, you know you need to be creating content, especially if you wanna if you're you if you're in like a services business like the AI consultancy is, you need to be doing educational content because that's gonna act as your top of funnel. But then the posting on Instagram becomes or the editing, that's where I think I would need to get like it because editing is again taking up so much of my time. And I'm like, what am I doing? Am I am I a video editor or am I a founder of a business? So this needs to be Yeah.

speaker-0: Kind of overlapping, clashing a little bit.

speaker-1: Yeah. And I think that's where I would my my time's being spent. And I think it's probably again I don't I'm not too sure on others, but probably not too dissimilar from other founders who are also using content of the top of funnel that unless they've got a team already. I think most small businesses won't have a team, but that's definitely mine. Creating content and editing that content.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense as well. For sure, for sure. That's obviously like especially takes up a lot of your time and you also want to be able to use the time to prioritize, you know, the business growth and everything for both for both business reduce admin and cold hut recovery too, as well. and okay. So your VA, is she supporting both of the businesses or just like cold hut recovery?

speaker-1: Hold her for now, but we are gonna transition her over it her into reduced admin as well. Because she's just that yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there will be a little bit of overlap there. just the more managed inbox because the volume's so much less with B2B with the let's say B2B higher higher ticket stuff. With cold hook, we had loads of low tickets, so the volume is really high, but then the what the money we're making was l low, let's say our lifetime value of a customer was so much lower than what we're making now. So the inbox doesn't really need a dedicated manager right now, the same way Cold Hut does. And that would again that would be my advice to newfounders if you're gonna sell something, sell high ticket and sell less volume. High volume ticket isn't as good as high ticket, low volume. In my person haven't done both right now. I can tell you which business is less stressful already.

speaker-0: Yeah, of course. It's always looking at it in a very holistic way as well. Okay. So I mean, we already started to discuss a little bit about this as well, but I would just like to open up you know, this question again. And you know, especially as we're coming to a close in this podcast, like if if there was anything else that you want to share that's really important for the listeners out there considering to start like a business, what would that be? I mean, you mentioned a few, but

speaker-1: The yeah, and this is a s this is gonna resonate more with the family, the family men or the family women. Let's say structure your business around your life. Don't structure your life around your business because you'll just burn out and you'll have nothing left. So and what that means is when you're looking to start your business or when you're looking to look how your business operates, because that's the the beauty of starting a business. It can be whatever you want it to be. It can work however you want it to work. Don't look at Instagram and think, I need to be on my laptop at 5 a.m. I need to sit here until twelve, twelve p.m. It doesn't have to be that way. Don't get me wrong, some people can do that and thrive. But it's like, well, what do I want for my life? I want to get I don't mind getting up early. So I'll get up at seven o'clock. I want to spend some time with my daughters. I want to then want to go to work. I then want to finish work. I spend some more time with my daughters. And then I've got a few passion projects I want work on after work. So it's like, okay, how do I create a business that meets those needs? So it's like then working backwards. Okay, how many hours a day do I want to work? Let's say six hours like six hours a day. Okay, but then how much do money do I want to make? I want to make this. So realistically, I need to be making this per hour. And you can do it that way. But if you do it the other way, where it's like you structure where you're like, I've got 10 calls today and that means I can't see my family. It's like, well, why are you even starting this business? Why start when you're not actually getting the outcome that you wanted? And there's gonna be times, and again, this I I don't want to go off too much in time. Don't be wrong, this isn't to say That's gonna be it 100% of the time. There's gonna be times when shit goes wrong and you're like, sorry, baby, I need to go, I need to go down here, I need to go fix this, or an opportunity comes in at midnight, and you're like, Well, I can't miss this opportunity. I'm gonna have to go down to XYZ place and and I'll have this meeting. And there's gonna be those times, and that's fine. But don't don't make your life business unless that's what makes you happy. If you look at it and say, Right, my life, I want that to be business, then that's fine. You know, then do that. But if you're if you've got a family, Or if you've got hobbies that you want to do or you're an athlete and you want to be able to train still and you start a business that's gonna eat all of your time and you structure it in a way, not hiring, for example, in a way where you all your time is gonna be taken up by mini tasks and you're just gonna burn out and you're just gonna get fed up with business, which I pretty much did with Cold Up a few years in, and you y you're not gonna wanna do it, you have no motivation and it's so much easier to and you wanna have less money because you know what I mean. The ironic thing is you have less money. Because you're so burnt out, you're doing all the wrong stuff, you have no time for growth, you end up with less money. Whereas if you swap it round the which I which I'm doing with called at recovery and the re w restructuring called at recovery and starting reduce admin, I'm like, Well, the the the money used to take me six weeks of solid effort to do I can make in a few hours of AI implementation. It's like all right, okay, it's just dead obvious in hindsight. Do you know what I No, obviously hindsight's twenty twenty, but Build your life and build your business around your life. Don't build your life around your business.

speaker-0: Yeah, very powerful. And that can be done what I've heard a lot is that a lot of business owners, they work 80 hours a week and then they have limited time outside of their business or with their family. And so I think what you shared is a very refreshing perspective that it can be done. It is possible to maintain. your work, your life outside of your business as well. So Nikki, thank you so much again for coming on to behind the founders. Be sure to stay tuned for the next episode and see you next time.