Eric Mulvin: 00:00
Welcome to the Unfinished Business Podcast. I am your host, Eric Mulvin, and this is a show where we sit down with CEOs, leaders, visionaries, and creatives who are out there changing the world through their business, through their organization, through their leadership, or through their creativity. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished. Even someone like Simon Sinek still has dreams and goals that they would like to see accomplished in their lifetime. And so we explore those stories here on Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin.

Eric Mulvin: 01:14
These are full-time remote staff who are part of your team, handling calls, answering emails, chat support, like I said, doing admin tasks. So you can improve support, scale faster, and keep costs under control. For example, one client cut out over $600,000 a year in payroll costs by switching key support roles like dispatching to Pac Biz Teams. So if you’re trying to lower costs or scale support, visit us at pac-biz.com to learn more, or you can give us a call Monday through Friday during business hours at 480-771-3009. Alright, so for today’s doing something a little different. And part of why I don’t have a guest today, well, because I’m running an active business. And sometimes, like in August, the business has taken me away from some of the stuff I really love to do, like sitting down with amazing business people and creative people and hearing their journey and sharing that with all of you guys through this podcast. But because of this conference that I just attended in August, well, right now the business is eating up a lot of my time and uh haven’t been so proactive with the guests. So if you’re listening and you’re a business leader, you got an amazing story and you’d like to share that with our listeners on the show, please reach out, reach out to us so that we could look at bringing you possibly on for a future episode. We actually have a ton of guests that we’d like to bring on. Just takes a lot of work to get people to commit to 90 minutes to sit down and do the podcast. So, because of that, a little behind, but I do have some knowledge and information I’d like to bring you guys today. And so if you’re listening, this isn’t a waste of an episode. Don’t think you feel like you need to skip it because I think I got some interesting stuff to share. And I’ll just share about what’s going on with Pac Biz here. And so it’s a struggle that maybe many of you guys might also relate to or might be going through yourself. And so maybe through this conversation here, some of you guys will be able to pick up on some things that maybe you could apply to what you’re working on yourself. But to give you a little background, Pac Biz is now an 11-year-old company, that’s which is crazy to me. I can’t believe we’ve been around that long, older than my kids have been around. But we’ve had some big goals over the years. And for many years, our one of the big goals, a big, crazy big goal that we’d like to really go after, is to get our company over a thousand employees. And we’ve been over the last five years, somewhere between 200, 250 employees. And with right now, we’re in the upward trajectory of growing, but a lot of that has happened because we brought in a lot of that’s happened because we started to really do more marketing and sales. And how do you get yourselves found online? And so we’ve had to go through that journey and struggle and figuring some things out along the way and and trying to solve that that big challenge. Dealing with managing your own marketing has been an interesting, interesting struggle because marketing is so broad. There’s so many companies that could build your websites, that could do your marketing, that can help you come up with strategies that can promise all these things. And we’ve worked with some great ones. And in fact, there’s a big big part of this too. You could have the most amazing ad agency in the world helping support you. But if you as a client have no idea where you’re going or what you’re trying to solve for, there is no marketing agency in the world that can help you. And I think that’s a little bit of what we’ve been dealing with here at our company at Pac Biz. Because for many years, a lot of people had no idea who we were. And in fact, today, still a lot of people don’t have any idea who we are. That’s why the podcast exists now to hopefully get a few more people in the world to know who Pac Biz is. But that’s not good enough. You know, when people are looking for outsourcing, when they’re looking for customer support, and these days, that’s not just happening on Google anymore. That’s not just happening on YouTube anymore. That’s happening in places like ChatGPT, in Claude, in Gemini, in Grok. And what do you do when people are going on there and they’re not finding you? Yeah, so you really have to start re-evaluating and rethinking like what are we doing to get our messaging out there to the world to make sure that people find us? Because otherwise, if you don’t get new business for your business, eventually you start to shrink. And then you start having to lose admin people. If you don’t have enough business, you can’t afford to have an HR manager, a recruitment person, someone that’s running training, someone that’s doing culture, someone’s, you know, goes on and on and on, and they become what goes from necessary to keep your business running to a nice to have because you got so small that you don’t have the budget to afford those people. So not a good position to be in. I’m not saying that’s the position PacBiz was, but if we couldn’t start turning things around, then with the growth, because AI is having an impact. We’re not losing jobs, but we definitely have a couple clients where, hey, I’ve got four people, I think we only need three now. We put some automation in place, it’s running efficiently, it’s handling some of the easy stuff. So now your team can handle the more advanced things. Now they could have spend more time on the phone with the customers that need the extra support. And so, okay, well, that keeps happening across a lot of staff, and you get to you start to see that okay, we’ve got to be able to grow. So we’re doing a lot of things to address that. We’ve been building software. So we got there’s our mascot, Tala, that uses AI to analyze the calls, plugs into your dispatch software, uh, does it all automatically, and then gives you reporting how the agents are doing. Are they following your processes on the phone for the dispatchers, for the people answering calls? Do they need some coaching and correction? So that’s part of the answer we have to the AI uh challenge, but still, AI is really threatening the call center industry. So, my solution, we just grow. There’s so many businesses out there. Let’s just work with the ones that need our kind of support. And so that’s the thing we started solving for. And then we’ve gotten more narrowed and focused with you, you know, you hear the different businesses we go after in the sponsor message. And for us, we’ve made the decision to really focus on NEMT businesses, non-emergency medical transportation, which is why you’ll see folks from time to time as guests on the show in that space, because that’s where we are putting all of our focus on. And and well, because of that, now we’re starting to see some results. We went to NEMTAC, the conference here these last uh couple weeks ago, and from that conference, I got to talk to 50 business leaders, people who own their fleets, people who are managers or directors, leading a big part of operations at other companies, people who are running platforms built software to help support this company, NEMT companies. Every angle you can imagine, from financing the vehicles to retrofitting the vehicles and converting them to a vehicle that could put a you could put a wheelchair in that has a lift, you could strap the wheelchair into the back, or a stretcher, or the oxygen that’s needed for patients that need oxygen, you name it. That’s that every facet of that industry was represented at this last conference. And I was able to talk to tons of businesses, and I don’t think I’ve been in a position like that before. I have, we’ve done these conferences, but I’ve never spoken to this many people at one time that are all dealing with very similar problems, and it’s really interesting. So I’ll share this about the NEMT space. It’s a fairly new industry. If you unlike the taxi industry, where we got a lot of background in, where you have we have clients that have been around for over 75 years, the NEMT space is not that old. It was a lot of people called it paratransit back a few years back, and there’s still some of that terminology around. But because of our aging population in the United States and a lot of other westernized countries are facing this, a significant amount of the population is now they can’t drive themselves to the doctors, they can’t they can’t have they can’t drive themselves to the grocery store. The basic needs are not being met because of a lack of transportation, a lack of accessible transportation. You could have people call up an Uber, a Waymo, a taxi, but if they’re in a wheelchair, if they have special requirements, like they need to be having the driver go into the facility to get them, bring them into the vehicle, and then go into the other place that they’re going. That’s not an Uber driver is not going to do that. Good luck even trying to get the taxi driver to help load your groceries in your home. And I mean, that’s something that some really great drivers do, but it’s it’s really unheard of. And so that’s the space that we’re now going all in on, and it’s a space we’ve been in for many years, but visibility. I did not do a good job with visibility, and so we’re changing that. And I could tell you now, after working on this all year, and like, okay, how do we get our website up and ranking again on Google? How do we get Chat GPT showing us, telling people, like, hey, when you’re looking for problems that Pac Biz can solve, make sure you mention Pac Biz. I talked to a business today, they found us because of Chat GPT, and and it’s been really fascinating having these conversations with businesses. Like, how did you find us? Because that feeds back into your marketing. So there’s the tip for you guys talk to your customers, talk to your potential customers, and work that data back into your marketing plan because that is they’re giving you real insight into this is how I found you. That is what I asked today. Oh, you found us on Chat GPT. Well, what did you search to get to that result? And it was interesting to see the journey they took. And you can’t pay for that kind of insight, right? You could sit there and have Chat GPT, ask Chat GPT all day, how can I help myself rank higher and better? And give me a bunch of frequently asked questions that we could put on our website to show up. But ultimately, it’s having conversations with your customers and taking that, taking notes and putting that into your marketing. So that’s what we’ve been doing all year and putting that into our presentations, our conversations, the emails, and now like overnight the floodgates have opened. And so good problem to have. I I wish we had an episode for you guys today, but things are kind of busy right now, so that’s okay. And I I could share this with you guys. But let’s I want to zoom out a bit. I know I’ve been talking about NEMT, and if you’ve made it this far into the episode, thanks for continuing to listen because I I do have stuff that can help any of you guys that are listening. But one thing that there’s a couple observations I found from these 50 plus conversations that I had with all these businesses. And so the big picture thing that I saw, lots of business owners doing way too much. Like I went out to an event at Top Golf, for example, with some of the other vendors that one of the other one of the vendors put on, so it had other companies that are our target market there, potential clients. And one of the people I met that day was sitting across from me and he was answering calls saying, Eric, this is what I’m talking about. We need someone to answer the calls for us. I’m answering the phone. And these aren’t small companies, they’re big companies, but they got new contracts, their team isn’t ready to handle the volume, or maybe after hour calls or calls on a Saturday. And so what do you do? The business owner is gonna do what you need to do to get the work done because there’s bigger opportunities there for that business. But that’s one example where even if you have a big fleet, 40-50 vehicles, you still might find yourself in that situation. But lots of smaller people that have five cars, 10 cars, and they’re wearing all the hats. They’re one guy today is literally doing the driving and answering the phones and doing bids for RFPs and like you name it, he is doing everything in the business. And it’s been like that for a couple of years. So, how do you get to where you want to be if you’re the one doing all the work? Eventually, you need to be able to delegate things off to a team so that you could take on the tasks that are needed to grow your company. So that that is a a problem no matter what business you’re in, no matter what industry you’re in. It’s a natural process of what happens when you grow your company. You gotta be able to delegate and move and elevate what delegate and elevate, you know. Something else I was telling people today is like, look, if you’re the one driving the vehicle, if you’re the one answering the phones, you’re at the 5,000 foot level. If you think of an airplane, you know, and this is another thing that was taught to me by business coaches at 5,000 feet, if you’re in an airplane, you could just see a small, maybe a neighborhood that’s right below you, not very high up, versus when you’re at 30,000 feet, way high up, cruising altitude, and you’ll say you’re flying over Phoenix to go to LA, Phoenix doesn’t look that big. It’s still pretty massive. It might take 15, 20 minutes to fly across versus maybe 10 minutes, but you’re able to see more. You’re able to see the landscape, you’re able to see what’s ahead, that there’s cloud systems ahead that you need to navigate past, that there’s mountain ranges up ahead that might cause turbulence. You won’t be able to see that if you’re at the low level. And the same thing happens to your business. And that’s what we’re seeing with these business owners that they recognize that, but they don’t know how to get out of that trap that they’re in. And so maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re doing too much, you have bigger dreams for your business, and you’re like, man, if I can’t get this stuff off of my plate, I’ll never be able to get it to that level. So that’s a critical thing, whether you’re a startup, NEMT company, or a startup tech company, a startup restaurant, coffee shop, anything, you’re gonna have the same problem. Another thing, AI kept coming up a lot, and so AI isn’t really the business conversation that people think that it is. People are talking about AI replacing jobs, but after talking with a lot of people, because they’re putting AI in place there, they’re also not. I didn’t really meet a single person that was like, Yeah, I’m gonna put AI in to replace all the people on the phone. They’re like, I need some people to help manage this and oversee it. So you need people, but that’s the thing. It’s it all comes down to people as the core differentiator. Everyone, and this is something that came up recently in a podcast episode last week. When everybody has access to the same AI tools, what sets you apart? Right? And it still comes down to people. If you have better people, if you train them better, if you have better management of them, if you are able to provide better customer experiences, you have better systems, and people are able to actually follow through, that’s gonna make a huge difference. And all of those, yeah, AI could help with some of that, but at the end of the day, you need to be great at dealing with people, managing people. So if you’re like, man, I love what I do, I just hate people. You’re gonna have a tough time leading and running a business. You got to be able to appreciate and work with those people around you and help get them to where they need to be so that they can get your business to where you want it to be. So it was interesting having the AI conversation, and lots of people obviously were curious how we stand or where where are we at? What impact is happening with us in AI? So I was able to share that with a few folks too. That, you know, there’s lots of opportunity, and I really believe we’re gonna be able to grow this thing well beyond where we’re at today. A third observation we had is growth is exposing problems that were already there in the company, right? Like you don’t have these problems when your business is not growing. But if your business is growing, now things like your driver onboarding process that you’re able to fill all the gaps all of a sudden, now you’re being exposed. Like, oh my gosh, we skipped those couple steps, which if you’re missing a background check or a drug test, some of those could make you lose contracts andor lose your insurance. There’s a number of different ways that impacts your business. And so, as we also talk about at Pac Biz, growth is a great thing, you know, and it helps bring those issues to light so that you could tackle them and solve them. But if you’re such a small company that you don’t have the bandwidth to be able to tackle all of those issues with growth, that’s why you got to be able to delegate, whether it’s with a company like ours. But that doesn’t mean that your problem is outsourcing. Maybe your problem is with payroll, maybe it’s with finance, maybe it’s with HR, maybe it’s with training. And so can does your team have the capacity to solve that problem? Do you need to maybe bring in some outside experts to help bring in a solution, maybe a software, a framework, some training, some teaching? But again, it’s because of growth, it’s exposing things. And so that was a refreshing thing as I talked to a lot of people out there that were really growing their companies like massively. People who are growing at a rate of 100%, 200% every single year, you know, and in the NEMT space, transportation space, it’s easy to measure. I had five vehicles this year, now I’ve got 10. Next year I want to get to 20. Really easy to see the growth there. But that again exposes where there’s breakdowns in your process, where there’s breakdowns in your operations. And so that was where that was a lot of conversations we were having. Is someone got a new contract, someone all of a sudden has a lot of drivers, and now they’re like, I wasn’t thinking about outsourcing, but now I am. So you might be facing those in your business, being able to recognize that and figure out, hey, how do I solve this problem? But again, it’s a it’s a good problem to have if it’s growth the one causing it, but it will expose those gaps. So don’t think that you’re gonna be able to grow and everything is smooth sailing. And then sometimes this is another thing that came up that was kind of interesting. Sometimes you got to leave your business a little bit to understand the business. And for some folks, it was going to this conference and meeting a bunch of people and understanding, whoa, there’s a lot of people that have the same problem I have, and there’s a lot of businesses that are providing solutions to solve those problems. So I was really also refreshing to talk to people and they’re like, oh my gosh, I did not know that a company like you existed and you are exactly what we’re looking for. And you’d think it’s common sense. Like, hey, look up what we do and you’d be able to find us. But it’s not so straightforward. And you don’t know what they’re putting into Chat GPT to find businesses like you, don’t know what they’re putting into Google, and they might not be searching the exact keywords that you think they’re searching for. And so it takes showing up where your customers are going. For me, it was a conference. For you, it might be some festival, might be some other industry conference somewhere happening in the country where all of your customers. Together. But that is but having that break. If you’re there every single day nonstop, picking up the phones, running around like crazy, trying to just keep up with what’s happening, you’re never going to be able to pause and take a look at the big picture. Like I said, the 30,000 feet level, and be like, oh, this is something that we need to be able to fix or need to be able to solve. One moment, man, I got to send a text. So whether it’s going to a conference where that’s the thing that’s getting you out of the company and being able to look at things, kind of zoom out a little bit and see what’s going on. But it could be a vacation, it could be you know a weekend getaway. We’re able to just process some of that because it’s really not possible to do when you’re in it every single day, and all you could think about is what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. As my business coach always says, you know, working in the weeds, and you know, if you’re down in the weeds in your business, you can’t be thinking about bringing on new contracts or scaling the fleet or growing the company. I’m using NEMT stuff, but whatever industry you’re in, you know, what is it going to take to grow that business? And that is very difficult to put your mind around that while also dealing with all the things that come with growth and marketing and sales and operations, and you know, the list goes on and on, which I’m probably preaching to the choir here for those of you guys who are listening. So that kind of highlights some of the main takeaways I got over the last couple of days talking with all these business leaders. It’s there’s a lot of people dealing with the same thing, super stressed, and it’s very exciting to see all of these people that are very new in to being a business owner. A lot of them they were nurses before that saw a need because their patients weren’t getting picked up properly, or they were sitting around for hours after their appointment because they’re poorly managed transportation. And so they jumped in feet first, dove right in, and started a company. And now they’re at 10 cars, 20 cars. They’re like, Yeah, I I’m just figuring it out as I go, and I don’t know what to expect, but I know we’ve been able to get this far and I could see where we could take things. It is amazing. Like it’s like another podcast episode over and over and over again, times 50. So if you’re one of the people I met out there, what’s up? I know I’m working my way through the meetings that we’re doing, but my hats off to you guys because there’s a lot of people listening that are going through the same thing, the same journey, and not everyone’s able to see the success that some of you guys have been able to see in your businesses and and get to the level that you guys are able to get to. And I can’t wait to hear, as I’ve been starting to meet some of these people last year at another conference, now meeting a lot of the same people again and seeing where their business is going. And maybe before they didn’t need us and now they do, or maybe before they had this one set of challenges and now they have a whole new set of challenges because they’ve been able to grow their business. Like I said, growth exposes these things in your company that you got to be able to take on. That’s a little bit of what we’ve been going through here. I shared a lot, personal experience of what we’ve been dealing with at Pac Biz. And for those of you who are in the middle of this saying, man, my website’s not bringing me leads. No one’s finding my business on Chat GPT, you know, no one’s finding my content on Instagram or YouTube. Make a plan, make a strategy. You know, we’ve been saying the same thing for years as well, and we finally started doing something about it, and everything is starting to come together. And they all, these algorithms, all this stuff kind of they all work together for better or for worse. And so it’s not just going to a conference and that’s it. For us, it’s building a web strategy, putting a team on that so that we’re coming out with more content, that we’re coming out with videos, that we’re taking a look at the conversations we’re having with clients and seeing, okay, now that we’ve had all these meetings with people, what can we do differently? And we are shifting. We actually have come up in the last two weeks with some ideas for some entirely new services that I would have never thought of if we didn’t attend this conference and didn’t have these meetings with these folks. So some of this does take getting out of your bubble, getting out of the little space that you’re in that you operate in every day, and going into the outside world to see what are other people doing, whether that’s in your industry or just in general, general business. And hopefully some of you guys are picking up on some of that today from the show, from this episode. So I hope you learned something today. I know this is probably, I think this is only the second or third time this year that I’ve missed an interview with people, and uh, we got some more lined up. I actually have some lined up. We’re just working on editing them, and they’re really good episodes. So we want to make sure that they’re they’re ready to go. So stay tuned for that. We have a lot more amazing guests lined up for you guys throughout the rent the rest of the year. I made a goal for myself in January that I’d interview 40 people this year, and we are definitely on track to hit that number and go a little beyond that. And so I’m really excited. And first, thank you guys for all of you who’ve been listening. I was looking at some of the stats from the podcast just yesterday with my producer Ann, and it’s really amazing to see wow, we’ve got a ton more followers on social media. We have the the what we’re looking at all these metrics, right? So if you’re trying to figure out how to do this yourself, looking at the metrics each month, more people are listening to the the episodes longer. We’re getting more new visitors coming in. I don’t know. This is all kinds of metrics all around that are showing positive signs that I know as I’m recording this that there’s people out there that are gonna listen to this and it’s gonna make an impact because you’re continuing to listen to more episodes. So, thank you guys for subscribing. Thanks for watching. It means a lot that we’re able to put out stories and messages that hopefully inspire, that make a difference, make an impact. And and we’re gonna continue to bring those messages and new episodes out to you every single Tuesday. So, and if this is the first episode you listen to, not the normal episode, don’t think you’re gonna hear from me giving out business advice or sharing stuff like this all the time. But go check out another episode. We’ve got amazing guests, amazing business leaders and creative people who have been sharing their journey and their story, how they’ve been able to build their business, and people who have built up hundred million dollar companies, hundred million dollar nonprofits who have been able to build massive organizations with over a million users, lots of people who have touched a lot of lives. And so I think no matter what, there’s an episode for you that you could check out. And if you came here and you are in the NEMT space, stay tuned. I’ve got some really great guests in this space also lined up. That’s for everyone. We got people sharing their amazing family business journey of taking over operations from their parents that started the business, and how they’ve been able to be a leader in the entire country and be an example for what other business leaders can look to in this space. And so, yeah, some of them are NEMT focused, but doesn’t matter what who you are, every episode, there are takeaways if you’re a business owner, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re looking to get started, I know you’re gonna find that inspiration here on the show. And and we’d love to hear from you, by the way. So I don’t normally get the chance to talk to you guys like this. So if you’re watching and you have some comments, some feedback, some questions, please let us know. I’m I am really here to continue to bring stories to you guys and amazing guests that can inspire and hopefully change the trajectory of where you’re taking your business. So if there’s any suggestions you have, please reach out. You can shoot us a DM @BizWithEric or shoot me an email. My email is eric@pac-biz.com. I also give my phone number out to everybody as well. And so more than welcome to well, our company phone number. So you’re more than welcome to give a call, schedule some time on me, and we could chat about the podcast. But thank you guys for watching, super appreciate it. And make sure you subscribe at biz with eric on social media and follow Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, thank you guys for watching, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. See ya.