AdviceTech Podcast #3 – Microsoft 365 – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the XY AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And this week, we’re gonna deep dive into the width and breadth of Microsoft 365. And joining me here today is a podcast host a meat smoker, a Go Pro skier and a Queensland reds rugby union fan. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Tom Freer.

Tom Freer
Thank you. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Oh, that’s a fair intro. I didn’t know I did half of that stuff. You’ve done the ones and I’ve dug them out of you Nice. Can’t hide on social media.

Peita Diamantidis
Oh, no. Yeah, how glad? I’m so glad that I didn’t grow up in my late teens and 20s when social media existed.

Tom Freer
No, I wouldn’t be here today, I’m sure correct.

Peita Diamantidis
Now, I’m really keen to sort of dive into all things Microsoft, but I did sort of want to get to know you better via use you as a user of technology first. So tell me what is your most used emoji? Do you use emojis?

Tom Freer
I do use emojis and it depends on what mood I’m in but it’s the thumbs up gets gets everything that’s that’s pretty much the the one. There are some other ones that do tend to go in there when not in the right mood. But that’s alright.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s quite a now that I think about it. That’s quite an Aussie bloke thing. Right? I mean, I’m sure internationally. Yeah, they go.

Unknown Speaker
That’s when you put that question to me. I was looking through my phone I had I do a lot of thumbs ups. And it’s just it could be for anything. It’s Thanks. Hello, whatever.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s generically acceptable. I love it. That’s right. That’s right. Now if you had to delete all but three apps from your smartphone, you could only have three, which ones would you keep

Tom Freer
off? Definitely the phone because I do prefer to talk. Chat gets used a lot. So surprisingly WhatsApp. Because I actually use a lot of WhatsApp, which is which is good. Okay. And if if I really pulled it down to running the business, it would be Microsoft teams teams. Okay. So they’re probably the three that I live in the most.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, and on your phone, not just not just you know, your desktop or anything like that you’re using.

Tom Freer
So, yeah, I can do all of that, which is great. So keep in contact, keep across what’s going on just the way we’ve got things structured, but yet they’re the three. So are

Peita Diamantidis
you one of those dreaded people that dial into a team meeting from your car and it’s wobbly and you give everybody carsickness?

Tom Freer
Well, I’ve been known to do that. Yes, yep. The phone set up in the car yet. Straps where people can be anywhere and they have the green screen behind them. I don’t know if you’ve seen that on. It’s pretty funny. Yeah. That’s not me. No, no. And that’s why I’m in the office today. So it’s alright.

Peita Diamantidis
Well, and that’s not me too, because I end up running into something. I can’t do two things at once. So I can’t be out and about Well, talking on a team meeting. That’s not gonna work. It’s funny

Tom Freer
some of that stuff.

Peita Diamantidis
All right, so let’s sort of dive into Microsoft and 365. And I’m actually really interested in this discussion because like I mentioned before we started the recording. We on in our advice business some years ago made the decision to go to G Suite. And so but I was an avid user of them Microsoft, prior to that, and in fact, years ago was an analyst, so I was heavily into Excel back then I was one of those sort of full on hardcore users of Excel. So let’s sort of take a step back and you know, stick with us listeners, because we are going to have to go to the basics first, and then we’re going to dive in. So Microsoft 365 has is in that silly productivity category, right? I don’t know what they mean by productivity, because that implies that every other app not in that category is not productive. So I quote, understand why we call it that.

Tom Freer
It’s a Productivity Suite is what Microsoft loves to call it.

Peita Diamantidis
Right? Right, exactly. I mean, I guess that’s a good thing. If it’s gonna give us a jolt of productivity. That’s awesome. But that’s sort of the core is then you know, your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, what an outlook, is that sort of the core parts of?

Tom Freer
Yeah, so if we go sort of look at the the framework, Microsoft 365, is their cloud version of essentially emails where it started? Yeah. So prior to the the big boom, around cloud, people would have email servers in their office, running Microsoft Exchange. Now Microsoft then went right, we’re going to move that to the cloud. And we’re going to call it what I think they called a business productivity suite. Originally, the pause, I think, was the technical term, and then it changed office 365. And that’s where we’ve got email in the cloud. And we do have our Word, Excel, PowerPoint, those common apps that we use. Now, they’re the ones that everyone’s familiar with, and have been familiar with forever. Right? The whatever version of Windows you’d have in office 97, office 2003, whatever it was, it’s now just called Office 365.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, office 365. Now, you mentioned something actually there, because I just wanted to jump back on it. Because there may be some listeners here who haven’t recognized this as an evolution. Is there any reason really, that that a business should have their email servers still sort of local rather than in the cloud? Is there any reason somebody should do that? No,

Tom Freer
I can’t really local, we’ve we do still have clients who do have it running locally. And that’s not a not a technical decision. It’s barely even a business decision. It’s really around. We’re just not ready to move. Okay. And particularly for larger organizations, we see that so but for for the small and mid market. There, there is no reason no value to

Peita Diamantidis
Hosein security or anything like that. That’s any different, okay,

Tom Freer
because you’re more risk having it on on site, then you would be in the cloud.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, well, that’s probably a surprise for some people, right? Because it feels like you can put a wall around it when it’s local. When so

Tom Freer
there is that there’s that physical element that you could put a wall around it. But if you if you really look at it, from a technical perspective, the amount of money and investment it would take for you to implement the security controls that Microsoft do out of the box, right? On your own system, because you wouldn’t do it because it’s too costly. Whereas going to the cloud, we have multi factor authentication straight out of the box. It’s there. Yeah. Yeah. Dan secured. That’s a that’s a whole additional implementation, if you’re trying to do that yourself.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. Okay, so that’s really good insight. Before we sort of dive into the more of the beyond the ones we just mentioned, I did want to ask a couple of things. So I mean, is access still something that people use? I remember Microsoft, you know, Ms. Access database. So you were okay. So but is it unlikely? It’s, is it the sort of thing that somebody who hasn’t used it should look at? Or is it an older, okay, it’s an older, sort of

Tom Freer
a legacy thing there that, okay. But there are still people that use it, they’ll upgrade it and continue to do but it’s generally been something that’s been done back in the day, and it’s just continued to evolve the new version, but with where the other platforms and products are now you, there’d be a very unusual need to have or want to use access.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And I guess that’s part of what the challenge that Microsoft faces is, I mean, they are in most machines globally, so. So they are dealing with every evolution of user. And so they can’t just willy nilly go, nope, not doing that anymore, because they are anymore, because they truly are, you know, I mean, schools that might have had a machine that’s 10 years old, or, you know, like all sorts of places. Yeah,

Tom Freer
I mean, we can walk into an organization and find a machine in the corner that’s still running the oldest version of Windows I’ve ever seen, because there’s this one application that someone built in 1995 on an Access database. They just haven’t decided or haven’t been able to or haven’t had the want to move it or change it.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And look, I should have I should have explained listeners that Tom is Tom owns when tech, your tech Yep. And we take as a consulting fantastic consulting firm that based in Brisbane, but works nationally with businesses to assist with all things it and things like we’re going to be talking about today. So he isn’t from within Microsoft. And what I loved about that is that we can have these debates we can really be quite frank about what works, what doesn’t and the evolution because cuz I think lots of us with these, these tools that we almost forget a software, I mean, I think we almost forget their apps and tools that we choose. They’re just on our machine. And so we just turn it on, there we go. I think we sort of, you know, having a deep discussion about this as important. Now, the other one that I actually hadn’t seen before, once it can, because haven’t used it for a while, is published. And for the two seconds I looked, is that sort of halfway between Word and PowerPoint, like is it as

Tom Freer
no publisher is probably more along the lines of like an Adobe Photoshop, not Photoshop, Illustrator, and things like that. Okay, so creating marketing brochures and bits and pieces don’t see it heavily use some people still use it. Most people are probably if they’re into that heavy duty, marketing side of things, they’re using something like Adobe, the Adobe suite,

Peita Diamantidis
and even for a small business, you know, I mean, we use Canva a lot for that stuff. All that sort of stuff is so much available. It’s so flexible, and so many templates love a good template.

Tom Freer
Yeah, I don’t have to get lost in that place. Right. It’s fun.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s my equivalent of doom scrolling on social media as I just dive in. And have fun with this, Derek. So then, okay, so that’s the call. And then just to create the picture, then we have all the rest, you know, teams, OneDrive forms, plan, our OneNote, or a down flow, power, automate booking, SharePoint, right? So there’s all these other things around it. And most of those, then like an add on as in a sort of subscriber extra, how does that work?

Tom Freer
So most people are probably paying for it already. So when you buy your Microsoft 365, subscription, there’s different versions, basic, I mean, in this market, and for the listeners, you’re probably using business basic Business Standard, or Business Premium. Yep. Now, I don’t know how deep you want me to go on, though, essentially. But essentially, you’ve got your business basic, which is more of the cloud only sort of offer, right? So you don’t get the desktop applications with your business basics and don’t get the full version of Word and Excel, you use everything in the browser, okay, which is probably closely more closely aligned with like the Google G Suite sort of approach. where everything’s online, you’re not really using any local apps and things like that. Business Standard gives you then all the cloud functionality, and it gives you the desktop apps, what everyone’s familiar with the full version of Word, Excel, Outlook, all the bits that go with it. And then Business Premium really then has all of that plus, it’s got a whole security suite wrapped around it, which is really important where we are today. Yes. Now within all of those, you get access to email, OneDrive, teams, planner. What else do we say OneNote you get access to pep forms as in their bookings is in standard and premium.

Peita Diamantidis
So the automation one flow or power automate, whatever that is flow

Tom Freer
and power automate are in in all of those. And there are, but there are then additions to that to do more advanced things can can touch on that give you a taste of everything. Yeah. And probably the big one that’s included that no, not many people really leverage is SharePoint. Okay? Being in there, and that’s, that’s a really cool piece to the whole online productivity. And then building your automation out from there, that becomes the core of all your data.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. Okay. So it’s almost Is it almost like the blanket over the all of them that sort of can see

Tom Freer
it that way? So things like where you would typically have files stored on a file server, or in Dropbox or on OneDrive? Yeah. That’s SharePoint becomes that repository for all of that data. Yeah. It becomes your intranet. You can have your your news and your posts and all the bits up there. You can have feeds and weather and whatnot. But really structured around where where are people going to go to find the information they need to do their job?

Peita Diamantidis
Right. Okay. And so, like, there’s OneDrive and there’s SharePoint, is that either or is it and is,

Tom Freer
it’s it’s all I call it, it’s, I’ll say it’s for a specific needs. So there’s actually three you’ve got one drive, and the way to look at that is one, one person. Okay. Okay. You know, ideally, here’s your personal situational storage. Okay, so OneDrive is great. You put OneDrive. So OneDrive for Business is what’s included in your 365 suite. And just to confuse things market, have Microsoft have OneDrive Personal as well. Okay. Same product, different login, very painful. But for organizations, you’d have OneDrive for Business Yeah, now it’s the if you’re familiar, it’s the little app that you install on your machine and it will sync your data from your PC up to the cloud. In a business scenario, we use it extensively to redirect things like your My Documents go into their your desktop, points to that your pictures and stuff like that. So if your PC ever dies, you just get a new PC put upon all your data coming here, oh, good, okay, and away you go. So that’s, that’s one drive, you can then share out of OneDrive. So, as an as an individual, you can control who you want to give access to data to. So whether it’s someone in the business, whether it’s someone outside, so you control that what you don’t want to be doing is setting up your entire business structure in your business storage in OneDrive.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay? And which I’m bet you see a fair bit of because people must understand what what it is they Yes, the same as a Dropbox for teams or whatever should correct it that way. Okay, so

Tom Freer
is it that way, okay. And it’s not? So what do you got it, it’s because it’s that personal element, one person will set that up, and they’ll set up a structure and then they will share that folder with someone, and it’s up to them to manage that and it gets really, really ugly, really easy. Okay? So that’s a no no, in our in our sort of view, okay? That’s where SharePoint comes into it. Okay. All right. So SharePoint is the share, right? shared with everyone internally, we can create external sharing, we can invite people and we can do all sorts

Peita Diamantidis
of stuff. Okay. So then if you’re in your small business, SharePoint is where all of the business documents Stormfront stuff lives. Whereas the OneDrive might be where it’s almost like it’s the channel or backup from the individuals machine. That might be something that’s personal, but it’s not working document. Yeah.

Tom Freer
You might be working on a on a tender or something. And it’s just you working on it. Yeah, it’s not really need to be visible to everyone. So you’d save that in your OneDrive you work on it, which means you can access it anywhere you want. Yeah, when it’s ready to be published to the wider business, shut up into SharePoint to the client folder, or however you want it structure.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Yeah, look, I think that’s probably really helpful. There’ll be some people listening like football, we’ve been huge, and it’s the wrong way, I’m betting that’s quite common when you go into is because it is hard to look, the language used in tech is hard to begin with. And then you hear a description. And these things sound exactly the same. And it’s like, well, you know, how am I meant to pick what am I,

Tom Freer
this is, this is the real challenge and, and Microsoft, in, in all their genius, they’ve got these awesome tools, but they don’t really give people end users, any sort of real direction around best case scenarios and things like that. So you’ll have scenarios, OneDrive, OneDrive, we can, we can also but then you get into things like teams, and SharePoint teams is built on top of SharePoint, which just adds to the confusion. So but it’s understanding the best use case for your organization. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
perfect. And I’m betting that invariably, there’s some pain in that process. Like invariably, when you make that sort of transition, you’ve probably been using something that’s either personal or a bit restrictive and coping through a whole lot of structure and rules. And then you’d need to transition to really get effectiveness for sharing with a team. And there is some pain in that. But I think, you know, once you do make that change, then I think you know, you’d be stunned people would be stunned how smooth that can make things.

Tom Freer
Just amazing. And you did say it what you said there, it’s the pain in the change. And it’s not so much the technical element of taking it from one spot to the other. That’s yeah, that’s neither here nor there. That’s that’s a process we go through. It’s the it’s the users. I used to always do it this way. And this is the way I want to do it. Yeah, well, we’re not doing it that way anymore. This is how we’re going to do it. And more importantly, this is why we’re going to do it this way as

Peita Diamantidis
well. And I’m betting like, in the in the coaching and sort of speaking I’ve done in in not so much in tech space, that sort of process, you know, it’s just getting efficient and things like that. I find it’s the business leader. That’s the worst one often they’re the ones that can’t let go of the old way.

Tom Freer
Yeah, that’s yes. That’s That’s very true. It’s

Peita Diamantidis
good. We’ll do that for everything. Everybody in the team do it this way. But I’m still going to do it that way of doing it this way. No,

Tom Freer
that’s exactly, yeah. And you’ve got to go in. But I think the key thing people get stuck on in some of these projects as well is they think they have to get it right from day one. Now, particularly with SharePoint and teams and Microsoft in that. It’s designed to be fluid. Yeah. So the way we work with our clients is very much right, let’s, let’s go through a process, understand where your data currently sits and how its structured. This is what it can look like in SharePoint. This is where we will put things and how it works. But if it’s not right on day one, or you use it for three months, and you need any go, that’s not we can smooth it. Yeah, it’s up in the cloud. Now we can shuffle it, we can change it, we can adapt. And that’s, that’s the beauty of it. Yeah, it is. It’s designed to do that.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think the thing about the cloud that will I see that most people don’t take advantage to have is the whole linking direct from one thing to another. So you might be in your CRM and you’re dealing with a particular client while in you know, in the sort of more manual way, then you try to find something you’d sent to the client previously or work done and you go and you sub folder subfolder dig down, find the thing, you know, whereas I mean We’ve now got links direct from the CRM to that CLIENTS folder, click straightening bad. Exactly, and that, and those things sounds small, but you do that 40 times a day. So anything, you know, that can get you back a few minutes multiplied by 40, I think makes a bit and I’m betting that a lot of what happens once people really get on top of the Microsoft sort of suite of tools is they can really get multiple minutes everywhere. Well,

Tom Freer
I’ll give you a huge example of what we see is that you’re working on a proposal, for example, or an advice document or something like that. You’re working on it, you need someone in your team to review that, what most people will do is I’ll attach that file to an email, they’ll send that file over an email, and someone will open that file, they’ll make changes in that file, they’ll send back that copy, you’ve then got to work out which copy they made and update those. Imagine doing that with three 410 People like it’s sustained versions of it, put it in SharePoint in one location, everyone works on the same file, everyone’s working in the same file at the same time, and we can actually see who’s making what changes on the on the fly. The amount of time that saves is, is amazing. Yeah. And that’s just one little thing by not sending an email, or when you send the email, you send a link instead of the file.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And I think the other sort of mindset, then that that often needs to change too, is lots of people use email as their to do list. So they wait for somebody to email them something. And it’s good to do that, instead of that, right? Instead of having that either in your CRM or elsewhere, where that’s what drives what you do in the day. And that’s where handover, you know, might happen, that sort of thing. They do this whole email backwards and forwards. I mean, it’s crazy, right? It’s,

Tom Freer
but again, we look at, we look at this tools are plenty, I mean, we’ve got all these off the shelf, other products, we could use asana and Monday, and it’s huge. We’ve got it in Microsoft will do 80% of a lot of those tools.

Peita Diamantidis
Well, now I had that I had that noted down, why don’t we dive into that a second while we’re while we’re on the top jumping all over the shop. So we have Yes, sorry, listeners will get their promise. So Microsoft Planner, is this project upgraded the old Microsoft,

Tom Freer
it’s it’s project cut down. Okay.

Peita Diamantidis
So project was pretty horribilis to be fair

Tom Freer
project is a massive, massive tool, and it takes a lot to get it to work well. Very few organizations, particularly in financial services, and accounting would would have really any value within using Microsoft Project. Whereas planner, on the other hand, it’s a very simply structured task management system for your team. Okay. Think of it. I don’t know if people have used Asana where you got your buckets of the of tasks. Yeah, exactly the same concept. We create a bucket or we create a plan. Yep, we create a bucket, we invite whoever we invite our team into that plan. Yeah. And then we can start assigning tasks and creating tasks and scheduling tasks and, and all that it will send reminders, we can add notes, we can link to files that are all over our Microsoft, okay, that then can actually flow into your Outlook. So you have a view in Outlook for all of your to do items across your outlook, personal tasks, and your planter toss and all this sort of stuff. So starts to tie it all together.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Nice. And so is that the sort of place then that you might do something like a deal pipeline, you know, something that’s sort of that business? Yeah.

Tom Freer
Yep. So we’ve seen people use it as a very basic CRM or deal pipeline in that sense. Yeah, suspect, discovery, Rob unquoted closed, and they just drag their tasks through it that way, works works well for that,

Peita Diamantidis
because it’s something that was so that work in progress. So you know, that sort of thing that’s transitioning, and just keeping an eye on that, as a team, you know, when the team meeting, let’s take a look. It’s not something that’s necessarily easy to do, and most of our tools and advice, so, you know, something that could help have that picture. And keep that momentum. I think it’s hard when you’re, when you’re handling multiple sort of demands, how do you keep that momentum with things? So that’s interesting, okay.

Tom Freer
Anything like that is quite good. And then yeah, as you say, use it, use it in your weekly meetings, your daily stand ups, those type of things, and it’s it’s visual, everyone can see it, you can integrate it into your Microsoft team. So it becomes that that point as well. And it’s just visible.

Peita Diamantidis
And that’s probably something most of us don’t do enough of, we’re trying to retrain ourselves and our team is, is instead of having, having meeting, you know, via teams, or whatever video version thing you use, and then after somebody’s, you know, assigning tasks or somebody’s doing whatever. Now, we now any meeting we have internally, we have those things shared or if people are viewing it, and we’re live adding things, you know, we’re just at the end of the meeting. It’s all done. It’s assigned, walk away. Exactly. So I think, you know, those sort of things can make a big difference too. All right. So we sort of went ran down a rabbit hole a little there. I Do want to just sort of get your take? And, you know, this might be a hard question. Do you see certain businesses being more likely to be Microsoft versus, say, G Suite? Or not? Or like, is there any sort of lean? I mean, I guess, just from my take, Microsoft has got much closer to, to where Jason, you know, now that they’re in the cloud, and they’re doing all these things that are into, you know, interacting and connected, it’s sort of probably more similar than they were, you know, some time ago, and I’m betting that the search, therefore that sort of general search through all your stuff is easier in Microsoft than it used to be. Is that fair?

Tom Freer
Yeah, it’s getting there a little bit. I mean, Google were obviously the leader to it. They’re the ones that came out with that that whole suite from from the beginning. And Microsoft were playing a lot of catch up. And, and to be perfectly fair, it really comes down to a personal preference. Yeah. And it normally is driven by by leadership and the owners. In that sense. I like Microsoft, I like Microsoft, or I like Google. Yes, that’s really it. However, when when you look at it a bit wider, you’ve got to look at team structure, team dynamics, the the people in your team, what what have they used? Yeah, when you look at it, most people will turn on Outlook Word, Excel, and can start right then and there and know exactly how to use it and get around. Yeah, and be effective in their job. If you’re going from Microsoft to Google, it’s a significant change in the way you do things. And if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to go all in as well. Oh, yeah. There’s no, there’s no point going, I’m just gonna move my email and my Docs over to here. But I’m still want everyone to use Word, Excel PowerPoint. You’re now paying for two subscriptions as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it just and it lets people hang back. We learned that the hard way. You’ve just you’ve got to sort of effectively turn off the other. No, yep. Nobody, you know, and I think there is one of the challenge will or challenges, but one of the considerations in financial advice, of course, is, you know, we’re numbers that’s finance. And so, you know, Google Sheets is never going to be anywhere near excel in terms of true depth of spreadsheet. And so, you know, in a business, if you really go hardcore Excel, you like if you that numbers geek, yeah, Google Sheets will never give you that it’s not designed to. Now to be fair, I would argue that 99.99% of Excel users never use any of that stuff. So it’s fine. You know, they think, you know, a spreadsheet is literally just lines, you know, it’s a page with lines on it. And boxes. I think that’s what a spreadsheet isn’t. So that’s great. You know, I think then Excel and Google Sheets, I mean, they’re the same, you know, it does the same thing. But for a sort of hardcore advanced user, you just won’t be able to do what you do all of that mounting.

Tom Freer
And all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Look, and I think I think there’s been a sort of point where, as I say, Google started that process. And they were they were they designed their whole platform to be fully online. Yeah. Whereas Microsoft history has all been local. Yes. There his history. Yeah. So Microsoft has sort of come in the other way. But what Microsoft have done, in my opinion, and I’m a little bit biased, because I do like Microsoft do exceptionally well is that it’s, it’s now one, it doesn’t matter. Like, I can run my full version of Word. But all my data is in the cloud in real time. So it doesn’t doesn’t matter. And I can get the full experience that I’m used to. If I really just want to check something really quickly, I can use the online version of Word, I can go through and review a file really fast. Or if I need to do some editing and insert, I just open up in Word and away I go. Yeah. And that’s the same, same for Outlook as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so that’s, that’s a fundamental difference, though, isn’t it is that the local version of this is has more juice. So yeah, he has more juice, more functionality, more things. Whereas the online version is sort of for convenience. It’s a Yeah, a quick look, a little bit of an edit, maybe, but it’s not designed for sitting next getting

Tom Freer
better, but it’s not I personally wouldn’t see anyone really sitting in it day to day. Yeah. Okay, trying to create proposals and all that sort of stuff. Yep. Review, edit, quick updates, that sort of stuff. Perfect.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, awesome. Now, one of the things I did want to sort of ask is, you know, there’ll be advisors listening to this, there’ll be business owners, but also all of the support team. And I guess I had a question when you go into businesses, and you’re sort of tidying them up and getting them into shape? Do you find that there’s members of the team that could really benefit with some more training and tools that maybe people don’t expect that they would use? Or do you find, like, there’s admin teams that never have had Excel training? Or, you know, that sort of thing? Is this something that people could really sort of lift their game on that might enhance the whole business?

Tom Freer
Yeah, look, I think it’s, I think that the first part is, is the awareness piece around? Does everyone know what’s available to them? Does everyone know what’s there? Because the amount of times will go in and people are using this tool using zoom, but they’re paying for it. They’ve already got tiny little things like this. They might be Calendly is another one. Everyone uses Calendly. To do your well. You can do bookings now like it’s exhausted Yeah, it’s little things like that. And they’re not big. But you look at an organization, three 410 1520 people and I need to license Calendly. So we can all be effective. All that’s another subscription. Yeah, if we made a little bit of an awareness, and people are a little bit aware about the tools, and Microsoft are horrible at letting people know what they’ve actually got access to right? Click your little button. If you if you’re familiar with anyone who’s familiar with your portal.office.com, you’ve got your little nine buttons up the top left, when you click that you’ve just got this list of apps that you can that you can use, okay. But unless you really know what they are, so the first thing back to the question is awareness. Yep. If we can make make your teams aware of what’s available, yeah. Because then what they will do instinctively. And that just happens, I’ll just have a bit of a tinker with this. And once they start to understand the capabilities, that’s where they go, actually, you know, what, could we do this with it? Can we do this, we’ve got a whole lot of ideas for organizations that you can do. But it’s got to be driven internally, otherwise, it doesn’t get adopted. And that’s, that’s a key thing. We say, we can come in and go, we’re going to automate this process for you. And they go, Oh, hang on, oh, that’s not going to work. It doesn’t work for us, automation doesn’t work. Well, how about you play with this for a little bit? And actually, you know, we really cool out if we automate this aircraft, well, let’s, let’s go and do that. So it’s, it’s a little bit there, I think the awareness piece. And Microsoft do have some, some some good online resources about that, and stuff like that. Even the the how tos and things like that they help is pretty good within Microsoft for the deep dive stuff. Yeah, but to your point, hardcore Excel training. I mean, that’s, that’s just gonna be if someone is really into that. Yeah, whole word training. Yeah, most of it is there. And it’s quite intuitive.

Peita Diamantidis
It is. What’s interesting, though, I do find is, even in these core ones, you know, and let’s, let’s use Outlook as an example. This is something that people I mean, literally live in, you know, like, it’s the first thing opened, last thing closed. And you spend more time with that look, than you do your partner. I mean, really so true. So it’s a whole lot of time. But I think a lot of people are really using these things at surface level. I mean, you know, filters and automatic responses and automatic archives for stuff, you know, I always just archive that we’ll set up a filter that automatically archives that, you know, those, I think there’s some extra curiosity required of people to really amp up their usage of these tools.

Tom Freer
And and it’s hard I mean, well, from from our perspective, where we’re sort of not geared to provide that level of training and stuff. So but there are again, we can provide tools and stuff but but you’re right. Outlook is a great example, with most people use it for email and calendar and tasks, that’s great. But if you just tweak your view a little bit, your calendar, and your tasks become very, very powerful, like the way and I’ve actually gone and done training for this using Outlook more effectively, to manage zero inbox and stuff like that never got to zero inbox, but but some of the tools that came out was just change the view, make your calendar appear here and your tasks appear under there, you can drag your tasks to which day you need to do him and just little things like that has improved productivity. And now when we add that, with Microsoft have now integrated some additional bits from planner, I can click a button in my Outlook. And I can see all my personal tasks that I’ve created in Outlook, I can see all my calendar entries, and I can see all my planner tax from all the plans that we use across the business all in one spot. Awesome. Yeah, just little things like that, where you can start to play and you’ll start to see benefits once you start using multiple tools as well.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think the thing about automation is for people who don’t regularly implemental do it or look for it, it sounds like building this big thing, like automation sounds like a comp like a robot, right? It sounds like a complex thing. Whereas some of the best automation we’ve ever done in the business and repeatedly do is a small thing done over and over again. And you just keep on looking for that. And you’ll just like I said, the you know, there’s the emails from a location that you just keep on archiving. Now, aside from unsubscribing, which is the other option, if you just go, Oh, I just want to save those, then doing something repetitive, you dragging them in, we’ll just make that happen. You know, just make

Tom Freer
it a rule. Right? Exactly. Rules are the simplest form of automation in a business. And it’s perfect.

Peita Diamantidis
You know, and even forwarding, you know, so if you look at your emails, and you go, Oh, that one’s meant to go to that team member, that mode is meant to go to that team member, if you really start looking, it may be the subject line, it may be the email that comes from you could probably use a rule to afford it automatically

Tom Freer
forwarded on. So they’re the most basic personal automation tasks that you can do. Which again, people have to be, I guess, aware and thinking about those things. Otherwise, you know, business you get so busy, you just said doing doing doing doing doing? You’ve got to take that one step back and go, Why am I doing that? Do I need to be doing that and it comes down? I mean, what’s the quadrant thing the important must do those sort of Look at that, do I actually need to be doing this? Or can I create a rule that’s gonna afford it to my PA or my assistant? Or whoever? Yes, to actually do that.

Peita Diamantidis
Exactly. And I think, you know, this is something that does need to come from leadership. So we actually have in our team meetings, there is a, one of the topics or questions we ask is, hey, is this something you’re doing repetitively, that you think you’d you’d like us to look into how we could automate or just making everybody aware that repetition is where automation leaves, you know, like, this

Unknown Speaker
is the correct place to look for it? Is repetition.

Peita Diamantidis
So? So yeah, and that is a mindset thing. I would encourage listeners to, you know, anytime I’m going on, you know, how do I do this? Or is there a good idea? I literally Google the entire question. How do I automate putting an email from here to here, like you like, and there will be YouTube channels entirely dedicated to? It really is. And so you know, people, I don’t know how to do that. Ask the question in Google. And you’ll find there is something step by step there. So good now to, you know, there’s people whose bread and butter is stepping you through this stuff.

Tom Freer
Everyone’s done, that there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. No. It’s just how you bring it together and make it work for you. correct in that sense. And that’s that’s the thing we say as well. It’s not that we’re recreating anything and a lot of the stuff we do. Yeah, it’s just helping people get to that point that they can use it more effectively.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice. Nice. And in terms of sort of ninja stuff, is there anything you’ve seen, or you even suggested for because you know, some hacks that have just immediately delivered value? It could be within those basic sort of core apps? Or it could be adding on others? Is there anything that sort of an automatic Wow, we just find people should do this?

Tom Freer
I think using teams effectively is probably probably a big one. So a lot of people, a lot of people install Microsoft Teams, and they’re probably using it for chat. And one of the things they’re probably finding is that they’ve got data all over the place, and they can’t find it. Right. So it’s just getting that structure, right. So if I was to say anything is look at where your data is, who needs access to it, and then identify the right spot for that. That’s, that’s the key thing. So not everything should live in teams. In fact, nothing that’s corporate should live in teams unless it’s being worked on. Yeah, okay. Okay. It’s been SharePoint, that’s, that’s kind of

Peita Diamantidis
it’s, it’s a channel, it’s a channel.

Tom Freer
It’s a collaboration. That’s exactly what it’s designed for. Okay. And then the other thing is, create those views and add the common stuff that people need to see. So use your teams to bring in your planner, so people don’t have to go somewhere else. Okay? Or, in fact, use your teams to create a plan so people know what they need to do.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. So that’s, that’s almost dashboard style. Is that what you mean? Like,

Tom Freer
bring it in. If you’re familiar with teams, you can create your team. And then you have your tabs, and it’s bringing in the relevant information to that particular team? Yeah. So when they they’ve only got one spot to go to, I can go in here, I can chat to the team, I can collaborate on these documents, and I can find the tasks that I’m working on.

Peita Diamantidis
Awesome. Okay, little things like that. Yeah, perfect. Now, I’ve got let’s talk client facing is there some things in the Microsoft sort of family that can really bring the client closer that can help that level of interaction that you think people might be unaware of?

Tom Freer
Bookings is one yes. So Microsoft bookings gives you the ability to create, whether it’s a product or a service, or a meeting offering, where you can either, and then you can basically what it does is you create it, you say I want this to be available at these times, yep. And then I want to be able to see these people’s calendars in that view. So you publish that then to a client, client and go, I need a meeting. One on One interim kickoff meeting, well, there might be three people in the organization who can do that meeting, we create one product up the front, we integrate these three people within the business, and this will automatically display when they’re available. So the client can book in straightaway, fantastic. Creates the meeting sends the team’s invite does however you want it set up and it’s done in the calendar in a way.

Peita Diamantidis
Automatic. That’s awesome. I mean, we use Calendly. But if it’s not, that’s fantastic. And if that makes sense. Can I ask it as an example of that, if you’ve got say, a financial advisor always has a physical meeting with the paraplanner with them, you know, so it’s like a twofer with each client. Could is is booking smart enough for the client. So the client looks and sees what’s available. But bookings is considered the diary of both the advisor and the planner in that in terms of showing what’s available.

Tom Freer
If it’s the same power plant, you could have them side by side. Yeah, I believe you could, you could probably create a basic flow as well that would allow it to okay, I haven’t looked into it but yeah, it’s also potential Alright,

Peita Diamantidis
so so it really is letting you do and, and you know, letting people choose the time themselves, I’m assuming it probably lets them reschedule if they need to. Reschedule, like all of that.

Tom Freer
That’s the hardest thing. I mean, the other little tool that’s built into Outlook as well is called Find time. Right. So bookings allows the client to find a time to get in internally and even with clients, you’ve got an app, have a look at it, it’ll be in your Outlook or if it’s not, you can add it for free. Find time. So you want to book a meeting with six people? Yeah. How hard is your sending around 15 emails, who’s available, what’s going on, you can set up you can click your find time button, and it will allow you to then go through, okay, here are the five meeting slots that I have available. And it will send it out to everyone and go pick which ones are good for you. And it will then work out who’s available when and then it will set the meeting for everyone.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep, I’m very cool staff, like anything, anything that reduces the backwards and forwards, whether it’s on email or phone tag, you know, and trying to coordinate? That’s fantastic. Because that effort to me is idiocy, like it falls into and we do it to that sort of idiotic, not not revenue producing not product. Yes. You know, it’s just crazy talks off. That’s fantastic. I love that time.

Tom Freer
Yeah, it’s a little cool little tool. And then probably the other one that you could start to leverage for for client facing stuff is something like Microsoft forms as a basic Yep, data capture sort of tool might be an onboarding form, and might be an old data collection tool, or whatever it is, yeah, you can create a form, you can make it public. So anyone can then enter it, and it will send you the details. Or you can create a specific form for a specific client, and they have to log in and do that. So okay.

Peita Diamantidis
So that’s probably something that people once again, might be paying for something else, you know, they might have Yeah, I mean, there’s things more or others, what if I

Tom Freer
fall off or something like that? Yeah. Again, it’s it’s basic, but it’s, it’s good. I mean, you can run questions on it, you can capture data, you can do surveys and stuff like that, it could be very basic survey tool, okay, then it captures all that data and gives you a bit of a result of the back end. So there’s that and then then there’s a whole lot of stuff on the other side, that’s more the advanced things where we can create for client portals and all sorts of stuff.

Peita Diamantidis
Right. Okay. Okay. So now, you mentioned back then, flow of flow and power automate the same thing. Are they two different things? They are, okay.

Tom Freer
Platform, okay, power platform. And there’s a bit of branding challenge for Microsoft. But you’ve got power apps, which is creating, essentially creating applications, okay, in your business, okay. Anything you can think of might be a leave request for might be an expense for might be a CRM, it might be. We’ve done Accounts Payable processes, all these sorts of things, you create these apps, and that’s called Power Apps. And then what drives a lot of the automation is then power automate, flow, which is, so if this happens, execute this. Okay, so here’s all that sort of stuff.

Peita Diamantidis
So for those that have heard me banging on about Zapier before, I’m building, very similar. Okay, so that is within Microsoft within the start. So that’s you playing in the house you’re already in? Yeah. And

Tom Freer
it does have external connections as well. Yeah. Okay, connect to external sources and stuff like that. Some of that might be paid licensing additional but but essentially, Power App, and flow is included in your Microsoft license. So if you want to access or save data within your Microsoft suite, you’ve got access to that today. So you could an example we did for an accounting firm, they, they have a team of PAs who worked for the directors, and they were trying to manage their tasks. So we created a central mailbox, everyone send your request to here, the map there, then we created a flow that went when a mail arrives, pull the mail out, work out who it came from, who it needs to get assigned to then create a task and plan for that person, fantastic. Just little like, little fantastic goes through. And now they’ve got that all linked up. So they have a PA team planner, where all the PA team, they just live in that and all their tasks just come through and get allocated and, and whatnot.

Peita Diamantidis
Nice. And thinking about the way you communicate and via, you know, even via certain email address, you know, I mean, most people probably have something like an info ad, but they might use it for lots of different things where you could get a bit creative about one that specifically say for clients so that, you know, when someone comes in, right, you know, get clever about how that’s a sign because it is we do something, right, it’s a struggle when it goes direct to an individual because if they’re on leave, or that, you know, like it can sit in somebody’s inbox, you know, and it’s obviously today, I have overhead as to how that occurs. So that’s actually a bit of a ninja tip there I love what about things like, you know, could you do with flow? Financial Advisors, we get, you know, the economist from one of the banks, or one of the fund managers sends out their monthly economic report, which is an attachment to an email, is that the sort of thing where, okay, when this type of email comes in, rip off that attachment and save it over here. Maybe sent me a task to read it in a week, you know, that sort of thing? It’s like, Yeah, okay. Okay, so all of

Tom Freer
that, all of that all the way through to what are the what are the processes in your business that you do? are you capturing data on a manual form? Are you then scanning that or are you doing something with it? We can use Power Apps and power automate to create that form electronically. So you can capture all that might be an application form, for example. Yeah. So we did this for a client where they were getting clients were sending in application forms manually, yes. And they were, then the client, and then our client would have to then print that out, do something with it, scan it in, send it to someone, it was a nightmare. So we basically changed it. Yeah, the app, the client at the moment still fills in their paper form and sends it through. But it comes into a central location, we pick up that file, we, we save it somewhere, we create a form around it. So we can enter in the additional data we need. Submitted goes to someone for approval, they mark it as approved, and then it gets saved in the document management system. Fabulous. So it’s looking at the you’re taking it next level up, you have your personal stuff we talked about before, what personally can I automate, take it up the next level and look at your business and where things happen? Yeah, is there a manual form that is someone is filling out and waiting to get signed, we have a lot of electronic, make it electronic. And you could then extend that over time to be a client could log into a portal, fill in the form electronically upload whatever they need submitted to you guys, you go through your approval process, you haven’t had to print one thing, you’ve captured all the data, it’s all logged, it’s all audited. And away you go. Yeah, okay, so, but but the one thing I do say to clients is just start with understanding your own process. Yes, yes, most people go, this is how we do it. But we don’t actually know how we do it. We don’t know why we do it that way. It’s just the way we’ve done it. So yeah, the very first step in any of these automation discussions should be let’s physically sit down and document your process, put it on a whiteboard, do something with it, we start here we go, here we go, here we go here. And then you can go within that process. Which part would make sense to add a little bit of automation or some electronic, don’t even try to do the whole thing at once. Just go I want to do this bit?

Peita Diamantidis
Well, and interestingly, you’ve just given me a bit of a light bulb there. I mean, I’m just I’m obsessed, obsessed with like, process diagrams and critical parts and all that sort of stuff. But separating what the process is, but ignoring who does it, just taste is the process, because it’s the process that separates will we often attach the steps to the person, and I think it can restrict the automation, because we assume that person then has to do something and say, hand it over or do whatever, when, if you just described it without attaching the person, you’re like, oh, wait a minute, why are we doing that? You know, we’ve got three steps in there, we don’t need so yeah, so the description that’s separate from the human being and and advisors, I think in advance, we do that a lot. Because the assumption is the, you know, the advisors sort of central to all of that, when they often don’t need to be, you know, they often don’t need to be the first point or, or the last point, you know, it just naturally free

Tom Freer
them up to do what they do. 100% say thing. And that’s that’s the key thing with automation across the business. I mean, a lot of people get defensive around automation, because our but what are these people going to do? Yeah, I can tell you, they’re going to do 400 Other things and that mundane task? Yes. And that’s the thing that people get attached to it. That’s my role. If that’s being automated, what do I do? I’m going to lose my job, I’m going to do that. When we when we talk to clients about automation, it’s not about how many people can replace, it’s about how can we do more with what you’ve got today? How can we free those people up? So you as a business can redirect them into more valuable tasks? Yes, that person should be doing?

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, a human being. And, and I think, yeah, in advice, I think we’ve gone through a period, I mean, you know, the heavy legislation, change, change, change, change, change form this, you know, all that sort of stuff. And so I think we could mistake what we do as just lots of paper and forms. And the truth is not a single member of our team should just be that. And so taking on this sort of action and empowering them that if we can free you up and and sometimes that is about the leadership pitch. If we free you up from this, we can get you also to do this, you’ve got to paint that picture, what would be the next thing, you know, what might they be designing, creating, adding value to reaching out for, you know, whatever that might be. And, you know, for us, any of this stuff just means we can take longer to chat to the client, we can do random check ins we can. And that’s really free flowing stuff that nobody gets any time to do. Because we’re just, you know, form in sign Hanover like, it’s just

Tom Freer
nice, right? As advisors. I mean, you want to be talking to your clients to understand I mean, it’s a conversation where you learn the most with them. It’s not a form that they fill out. And it’s not this exact conversation about, oh, I just picked that up. Okay, well, yeah, let’s talk about that next, or whatever it is, or I’ll put that in the plan for you and things like that. Yeah, if you’re so time constrained because I’ve got to go fill this form out, do this, get this submitted, blah, blah, blah. It takes away from that and we see it in our business. It’s one of the challenges we want to free our team up to be talking to people from even from a support perspective, right. When we talk to people about the problems they’re having. It’s actually not the issue they’ve rung up about it’s something else. Yes, that’s Generally closing it. So we’ve got to have time for those conversations. Yeah, absolutely.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. So in terms of, you know, the development path going forward, is there anything you’re aware of that’s coming or that they’re enhancing or that, you know, a current sort of user, Microsoft or 365, users should be, you know, waiting for or keeping an eye out for

Tom Freer
know that there’s, there’s nothing that I would say, Yeah, nothing that I’ve seen, it’s but the amount of change and development that continues to come through is immense. It’s huge. I mean, there’s days, we can’t even keep up with the new features that are being released, which is, which is great. It has its own set of challenges about where they change stuff and do things. But I mean, the big areas that the developing are really is around that power, automated Power Apps. Yes, lots and lots of development from Microsoft in that space. Okay, artificial intelligence, machine learning, all these sort of things out of the box. So things like, we can take a PDF file via email, we can put it through an AI tool, which, within Power Apps, and within the platform, which will then go, okay, that’s the invoice number. That’s the client number, that’s the date, put it into this form. So it now becomes electronic. So we can then put that through a process. Wow. So things, they’re all coming. I mean, some of that to now, within that power app platform, there’s tools externally that have always been able to do that, yeah, go buy add ons and stuff. But just within that suite, these are the things that are that are coming, and that I hear that we can start start to leverage.

Peita Diamantidis
And what’s so powerful about this stuff is, you know, if we go 1520 years back, then that was the stuff that only places like the big banks had access to, and they had access to it with a $20 million price tag, your likelihood is huge. Right? development exercise and a small business, well, no chance, you know, whereas now we’re truly, if if you are creative enough, and you ask enough questions, then you have access to top end of town effectiveness and efficiency, like it’s this Yeah, you know, and in fact, probably be able to implement faster and more effectively than a big business can, you know,

Tom Freer
exactly, exactly as a small medium business, you can, you can adapt very, very quickly, and implement these things and change it. And it is that it’s that fail fast approach, you’re going to do stuff that’s not going to work, but just keep doing it because it will work. And you will find the solution. And, and things like that. But as I say it’s, it’s take the time. And again, it’s always about finding that time step back and go, I can the biggest thing I say to clients is what are the three things in your business that give you this shit? swearing? Or what are the three things in the business give you that? Because I can guarantee if you spend even an hour looking at one of them, you will find an efficiency that you can tweak, you can change. But more so you’ll go you know what, if we actually spent a bit more time on it, we can revolutionize how we do. Yes. And that’s that’s not not difficult. It’s just, as you say, asking the right questions, talking to the right people, getting the right team in there pulling the right people from your business in there and go right, let’s sit down. We did do the last week with a client two weeks ago, 90 minute session, there are funds manager Yep, 90 minute session, and we pulled apart their entire lending process and just mapped it out and went right. Okay, we can we can automate three quarters of that now. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve still got a lot of work to develop and do that. But it’s open their eyes and gone. Oh, that person can now be doing that over there. Yes, we can get this extra data captured here, which gives us visibility for that. So it’s all that sort of stuff and identifying

Peita Diamantidis
those deep frustrations, I call them pirate problems, because they are right, so yeah. But identifying those and resolving them as and you’re right, it can just be two or three, the the white that gets lifted off the team, I mean, they will be skipping down the street. Whereas the danger is, as business owners or leaders, we find something else that’s a new shiny thing as a way to chase that and don’t solve the immediate, most painful problem you know, and years back the one I used to say a lot not so much anymore, but was the hideously slow scanner in the office. So this poor person was trying to scan every day hundreds of pages and just you know standing there like like the sloth in that movies or TV or whatever just like scanning waiting and you just upgraded spend a few $100 more and things happen like this and the difference in their outlook and their energy you know so so like you say find those frustrations, and instead of almost avoiding them because we feel like it’s hard to solve those look better creativity maybe some help like somebody from yourself then you probably can really nail them and the team just love it. It’s better than a friggin party. Like they just like you know,

Tom Freer
there’s things that not gonna get sold overnight and that’s fine but if even if you present I plan to the team. Yeah. And you know, I mean, business is hard as hard as it is. And you’re right. It’s the, we’ve got to get stuff done. We’ve got to find the new things. We’ve got to be constantly developing. But we do we leave, we leave these things behind, because I think it’s working. Yeah, it might be painful, but it’s working. But it’s not being efficient. Yes. Yes. And there’s so much and particularly in today’s climate where recruitment is really hard. Yes, that or retain our staff, all these sorts of things. Automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning. These are all things that small businesses can start to look at today, yes, to potentially not even need to employ that next person, right. And because I’ve got someone sitting here already, who could do it, if I free them up,

Peita Diamantidis
and you take, all you’re doing is taking advantage of something you’re already paying for. So yeah, it’s not a new thing. Exactly. So and I love that idea. I like let’s use the tools you’ve already got your heads really get, you know, lean into those and sort of own leverage what you’re

Tom Freer
paying for. It’s, it’s and it’s there, and it’s just unlocking and going through. And yeah, okay, there’s gonna be a cost to go and build it. Sure. But you do it right. And when you structure right, you’re gonna get a return, like you can you can see that very, very quickly. Yeah, well, I’ve just freed up, even if it’s four hours a week, six hours a week for that person, that’s almost a day of extra time, that person could be doing something else, absolutely. weigh that up, I do no need to go and employ another person. Now I can bring on three new clients, because I’ve got an extra day for this person to do stuff. So yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
yeah. So so true. Is there anything you feel we’ve sort of not covered? Or that we should highlight? You know, in the in the world of Microsoft? I mean, I know I’m asking. Well, there’s 427 things. So if we,

Tom Freer
if we go here, here, I look, I think, I think they’re the key things. I think one of the things people we’ve talked about really is your you’re paying for a license, you’ve got a lot more there that that you could leverage. Yeah, there might be some time and effort that you need to put in to turn it on and enable it and things like that. But it’s there, start to just investigate, start to look at it. Take your Microsoft go all in, as we said, if you’re gonna go all in whether it’s G Suite, or Microsoft, whatever it is, go all in in that and commit to it from our what else what else? What else? What else can we do? Yeah. We look at the Microsoft thing because it extends, yeah, we’ve talked a lot about business productivity today. And automation, lots of stuff. Absolutely critical in business. But Microsoft allows us to extend that to security, because that is just as critical, particularly in financial services. Yes, type of things. Absolutely. That you’ve got on your clients is

Peita Diamantidis
incredibly, we’ve got a goal. Absolutely.

Tom Freer
So how are you protecting that? What tools are you using? Well, we’ve got that in the Microsoft suite, you can we can lock all that down. We can protect it, we can we can do all those sorts of things. So

Peita Diamantidis
perfect. All righty. Well, you know what advice explorers if you’d like to find out more about the services that Tom and the wind tech team provides, then we’re going to put the website link in the show notes. We’re also going to add Tom’s LinkedIn details in there as well. So feel free to stalk slash, Jeff, on LinkedIn. But you know, thank you so much for joining us, Tom. I think there’s just so many gems there. That are really the people can just start to research right now, this isn’t about a new thing. This is about using the one you’ve got. So thank you very much for your time.

Tom Freer
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Peita Diamantidis
Wow, we covered a lot. They didn’t wait. So apologies that we’ve been nattering away in your earbuds for a little longer than we really intended. But I honestly felt like there was a lot of gems there that Tom was giving us. Lots of things that prompted. So, you know, I hope that was really valuable. And I’m really curious, you know, if you’re a current user of, you know, Microsoft, the whole gamut, you know, 365, and all the other tools that are related, you know, do you agree or disagree with our discussion on Microsoft, because please share your insights on the x y platform. You know, your fellow advisors and other people in the industry will really benefit from any of those ninja hacks, you’ve done any things you’ve discovered any great wonderful time savers, or truly, you know, effective and efficient things you’ve implemented just using the Microsoft tools. So I would really encourage you to share. Now in terms of sort of my thoughts after that, then this sort of discussion really highlighted for me that we all need to shedule an annual at least annual tech audit. Now this is simply making, you know, a big old list of all of the technology we have in the practice, every single thing we have access to and pay for, and all of the core elements of it, you know, so do you don’t list Microsoft 365, you list all of the underlying tools that are included in that. And then working through that list checking to see whether there’s an overlap, you know, or whether we’re just making things harder than we need to. This actually happened for us with G Suite. Tom mentioned a similar situation. For Microsoft businesses, when we did the audit a couple of years ago, we realized that we had Google meet as part of the G Suite, that’s the video tool will be your meetings tool. But we’re also paying for zoom for the whole team to use. So basically, we pared back, our use of zoom for just major webinars are large online events. So it was just like a one access, and then we utilize Google meet for our team, you know, internal video meetings. So I’d really encourage you to do that tech audit, you’re not just going to discover overlaps, you’re also going to note, you know, I’d encourage you to note down the last time anyone used each of the tools, and invariably, there’s gonna be some little apps or, you know, extra things that you’ve bought, that you simply don’t need anymore, nobody’s using them anymore. So you can get rid of them, and save yourself those dollars. If you’re not sure how to go about the tech ordered, or you’re not sure what what I mean, please feel free to reach out on the XY community platform, and we can chat about it. The other thought that stood out there, that really, in fact, I’m going to go away and implement this immediately in our practice is having a client specific email address or an email address, it could even be, you know, client docs at for your email that clients use to send things in, for example, all that they email specific questions to, or that they, they interact with you so that multiple people can get access to that, and it can be assigned. And I love the fact that somebody could send something in, and then some automation could could strip off the core content, you know, place it in another document or in the CRM or, or saved somewhere and even action beyond that. So just changing the ways that, you know, maybe you’ve got clients that always interact with you as the advisor individually, and you could change that behavior to really ramp up the effectiveness of your service. So that’s something that I’m definitely going to look at. And I’d encourage you also to to maybe do some digging into that cyber element that Tom was talking about of Microsoft, because it is something we all need to be focusing on. Now. You know, it’s only been a few episodes into the advice tech podcast for x, y. But I’ve already had some people reaching out and asking me what I mean, when I say bionic advisor and advice, explorers, and whether you know, it’s the same thing, are they different. So I thought I’d take a second to cover that off. Bionic advisor, for me is an individual that’s really heavily focused on the human part of advice, and then utilizes technology to enhance that power or strength. It’s the best combination of the two. Whereas an advice explorer, this isn’t just advisors, right? This is anyone in advice that’s avidly curious about how we can utilize technology to streamline our businesses, our workloads, and enhance the customer experience. And they’re happy to sort of wander into the unknown, a little right and see what might be possible in the future evolution of advice. Exploring is a mindset and it takes some practice. So to help you develop that skill, each week, I’m going to be giving you know, bringing to your attention, just a little app, you know, I’ve come across that sort of tweak my interest, and is worth a bit of a looky loos. So for this week’s curiosity corner, I’d love you to check out brain.fm. And so that’s not only the name of the app, but it’s how you the location on the web, brain dot.fm. And basically, it’s music made for your brain. Now, the brain FM music is all about deep work, and focus. And it’s helped it’s made to sort of help you work better by blending music into the background so that you can sort of focus on what you’re doing distraction free, all while also stimulating your brain with the sort of they call them rhythmic pulses in the music that actually sport support really sustained attention on something. Some some people listen to music, you know, when they’re working. The problem is music by other music, by definition is designed to grab your attention. So it actually makes it harder to think and work even if you don’t realize that’s the case. Whereas you know, brain FM’s functional sort of music is designed from the bottom up to really affect your brain and optimize your performance. So whenever you need to really focus get into some deep work, it might be analysis, it might be knocking off a big task you just want to focus on, I’d encourage you to use brain FM, adding some noise cancelling headphones. And honestly, I generally get about 90 minutes of work done in just 60 minutes or less. It really, really works and if you’re a practice manager or you know own a practice, I actually encourage you to make a subscription to brain FM as a gift to your team. Whether they work remotely or not. It can really change the way that they deliver and feel about their work. Ah well.

That’s all we’ve got for this week was a little bit of a long one but please be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix, automatically sent to you Each week, and if you’d like a speaker at your next event to brief your audience on how they too can become bionic advisors, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn, forward slash Peter, nd that’s PITAMD. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.