Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe (00:01.154)
Hello and welcome to Leaders and Their Stories. I'm Richard Lowe, your host. I'm the writing king and ghostwriting guru. And I'm here with Ben, the automator Christiansen, who has some very, very interesting things to say about automation. Ben, take it away.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (00:15.996)
Thanks, Richard. So first off, just a little bit about me. I'm what you would call an unconventional green-haired ADHD expert in automation with over 20 years of IT security, automation, and cybersecurity background. I've saved companies $15 million and over 500,000 hours of automation completed.

And, you know, what I'm very passionate about is actually automation of processes as well as making processes not suck. In fact, that's my tagline for my business is that your processes don't have to suck. And so I'd love to tell you a little bit more about some of the ways that I do that. Any...

What would you like me to do next, Richard?

Richard Lowe (01:15.79)
Well, let's talk about what a process is and why you would want to automate it. So let's start with an example of a process that somebody might want to automate.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (01:26.972)
So there's a lot of processes out there and without getting technical, it could be something as simple as replying to email. A lot of people need to reply to email and a lot of people hate composing emails. So, you know, when it comes to automation, if you understand how you would reply to an email,

Richard Lowe (01:38.702)
That's a good example.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (01:54.675)
and what you would say or any information you might need, that is a process that can be automated and it can just get a little bit more complex as you go along.

Richard Lowe (02:05.728)
And what would you do for somebody who wanted to do that?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (02:09.648)
You know, so automation of email usually is going to be best using something in the AI realm, like chat GBT in combination with what we call few shot prompting. So few shot prompting will take an example of an email that comes in and then show an example output. And you may repeat that four or five times, depending on what you would need to do.

to get your voice right, but, and it also, I guess, depends on complexity, but that would be what I would do is I would set that up in make.com, set it up so that it's ingesting your email, seeing if it can auto-reply, create the auto-reply and draft it and then allow you to review it.

Richard Lowe (02:59.83)
I see, so this would handle all emails or just a particular subset.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (03:03.961)
I mean, I, so, so I actually showed my community how to do this and I've had a couple people turn it on and they've, they've been pretty pleased with the amount of replies and how it's replying. And, you know, I don't think anybody's just turned it on full bore and said, okay, just reply to everybody. But, but you know, you, you can definitely say only apply or sorry, only reply to.

these type of emails or maybe you categorize it as only these customers or only this keyword. There's a lot of ways to filter that.

Richard Lowe (03:45.89)
Now, I take it that just that would result in some productivity savings for a business.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (03:51.387)
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we spend probably, you know, I would say upwards of hours per day replying to email. And for reference, mean, one one five minute daily task automated is 1 % of your job.

Richard Lowe (04:13.27)
Interesting, interesting. Well, a little more complicated example, I'm using Riverside to record this. And after the recording, there's a little bit of manual editing, which pretty much has to stay manual. Riverside has some automation features in it. But then there's some pieces that I want to post here, I want to post there. I want to take the script and put it into a webpage. It's a whole bunch of stuff that I want to do. And I'm definitely interested in hearing about automation for that. Even partial automation would be good.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (04:23.939)
Mm-hmm.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (04:40.078)
Yeah. So one of the challenges that I have going on right now is automated YouTube videos. So the way that that works is you take your video, you transcribe it, you get all of the words and everything in there. That creates then summaries, that creates chapters, that creates all kinds of different things. And it's really just a matter of what platform do you want?

to push it out to? Do you want it to auto publish? Do you want it to keep a human in the loop? There's all kinds of different ways to accomplish that.

Richard Lowe (05:21.966)
So I take it there's some upfront work to create the automation. And then once it's there and debugged, obviously you just let it loose and occasionally check it to make sure it's not messing up too much.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (05:33.4)
Absolutely. and I mean, so, so automation is, is a lifetime of ROI for a process, right? a lot of people look at it as, well, it's only going to save me time right now. No, it's going to save you time every single time it has to do that process. So if you post, you know, 20, 20 videos a month or something, you know,

And you no longer have to do that process, which could be an hour, could be a couple hours. I mean, it'll just keep paying for itself every month.

Richard Lowe (06:14.21)
Yeah. Now what I'm doing is I'm scripting it in English and then I'm sending that to a VA to do Filipino VA. She's 10 bucks an hour. So, you know, I don't need much time from her to do this. And that's, that's my automation, but I'm sure that it would be better to be fully automated. And that's probably going to happen down the road when I get tired of paying for that.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (06:20.056)
Yeah

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (06:26.745)
For sure.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (06:35.705)
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, just a single chatbot that's trained on your style, on your voice. Like, for example, I have a process I'm working on called the VoicePrint system. And what it does is it analyzes 600 to 700 individual characteristics and data points about you, thereby allowing me to drop it into almost any chat, GBT prompt or any AI.

and have it mimic me. So.

Richard Lowe (07:07.288)
Nice. Nice. So we're to have a clone of you.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (07:10.937)
Eventually, Yup. Yeah. I probably do something through Hey, Jen, when I'm done with it. So yeah.

Richard Lowe (07:13.442)
Digital clone, digital clone.

Richard Lowe (07:21.112)
Now, when I think automation, I normally think about factories being automated and big robots and things. I'm sure you've ventured into that realm at least a little bit.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (07:26.477)
Right.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (07:30.061)
Yeah, yeah, a little bit. And that's one of the common misconceptions, right? Is that, for automation, it's got to be factory driven. And that's not entirely true, right? Any kind of process that you have, the five characteristics of a good automation candidate are that you have a clear trigger, right? Something has to happen to be able to kick off your automation.

Next, you need consistent inputs. You need to know what is coming in or how it's coming in, the types, things like that. And then it needs to be repeatable. If it's not repeatable, it's not automatable, right? Because if you, if you rely on AI to do that, you're going to, you're going to really be upset with the results, right? Then you have your outputs and you know, just making decisions. That's really about it.

Richard Lowe (08:22.19)
Of course. Of course.

Richard Lowe (08:27.694)
Now, the way I like to think of AI is as a digital assistant. And it sounds like automation is a layer on a layer on top of that, where you're not really replacing a person, you're enhancing a person. you're so that you've got a person working and then you, that person has digital assistants that do different things. And one of some of them will automate things. Some of them might, for example, fill in an Excel spreadsheet the way they want, you know, some of them might do some writing, like you said, for emails.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (08:32.728)
Mm-hmm.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (08:40.62)
Absolutely, yeah.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (08:45.825)
Correct.

Richard Lowe (08:56.718)
Some of them may do other things, answer the phone. Although I tend to hate chatbots. I get caught in chatbot hell every once in a while. Yeah. And I want to destroy the phone, but it's my phone. So I'm not going to, not going to do that. yeah. So if you think of it, you know, you people who are leaders out there, if you think of them as digital assistants,

rather than as, okay, I can get rid of 15 people. Obviously you probably can reduce staff a bit, but you can make those other people even more productive, which means they're going to be happier. They're going to get more done and your company is going to make more money. What do you think of all of that?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (09:43.051)
Yeah, I 100 % agree, right? I like to approach AI not as a replacement or a job killer or anything like that, even though that's the way that my career has been, replacing jobs doesn't mean that those people were out of work. What we did instead is we leveled them up, right? So if you take a SOC analyst one who is doing just triage and basic

basic tasks all day and you make that done automatically, great. Now they can actually do things that matter. They can do other processes that matter. So for leaders out there, I would approach it as investing in your people to make them more productive, which will lower your operational costs and then also allow you to get better results quicker. you have an effective and

and well thought out strategy for how to use AI and what you're going to use it for and how you're going to use it. You're able to see not only increased ROI productivity, your morale will improve. You'd be surprised how quickly morale will improve when you remove a crappy process.

Richard Lowe (11:03.662)
Yes, yes, and of course, this could be part of any company's digital transformation effort. And in that case, there may also be a cultural transformation. There may be other kinds of transformation that have to take place because you have to change the culture to accept this because if the culture doesn't accept AI, it's not going to work. And it's a very important part of digital transformation.

Richard Lowe (11:28.558)
So I hear you've told me you're writing a book. I actually reviewed it and it's coming out pretty soon on Amazon. What have you got to say about that?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (11:38.24)
Yeah, man. you know, the book was an incredible journey, right? I'm an engineer by trade and creating an 80 page manuscript of dense engineer does not translate well to business. So, taking that with some enhancements from AI because I'm a neurodivergent, I don't like the sound of my own voice.

And that's, that's something I'm slowly getting over, but, I was able to, I was able to embellish as well as, you know, make sure that I'm not losing any of the core message. Everything was a hundred percent fact checked. mean, I, I double checked my ROI section probably about 80 times just to make sure that it was consistent. but the book is designed as a non-technical guide to streamlining your business. So.

I go over the last 20 years of tips and tricks that I've used and implemented elsewhere. give you my golden rules of automation, talking again about the good automation candidates, and then just breaking it down step by step. I probably can't say that it's like a dummy's book, but it's kind of written like a dummy's book.

Right. It's, set up in a way that is repeatable, scannable, and, and it's ADHD friendly because otherwise people, people put it down and they, you know, they, they may want to skip ahead. Great. There is actually even TLDR sections too long. Didn't read. So.

Richard Lowe (13:27.214)
Right, right, understood. What's the title of the book?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (13:31.785)
The title of the book is called Demystifying Automation, a Non-Technical Guide to Streamlining Your Business. It is available on Amazon right now with Kindle Unlimited, and I'll be releasing a paperback as well as a hardback later this year.

Richard Lowe (13:36.009)
It's available.

Richard Lowe (13:39.873)
and is available on Amazon.

Richard Lowe (13:51.471)
Awesome, awesome. Now, why would a leader like you're a leader, why would you a leader want to create a book? What's the value?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (14:01.344)
So, the way I would approach that is that the value here is being able to educate and get your message out to other people, as well as share from your experience. Leaders grow based on what they learn and what they experience. And good leaders or great leaders grow from learning from

great leaders.

Richard Lowe (14:33.462)
Right. Right. That's an excellent reason to write a book to pass along your knowledge to others in a way that they can understand. And it sounds like you've broken it down into relatable chunks so that it's not so dense and difficult to read.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (14:40.467)
Absolutely.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (14:48.04)
Also just wanted to say, you know, I loved the fact that when I met with you and you were able to give me some clarity, that saved me hours, if not days of research. you know, just from your experience, what have you written? Like 80 books now?

Richard Lowe (15:10.004)
I'm well over a hundred and about to reach a hundred and twenty.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (15:12.981)
120, okay, so I grossly underestimated. But I mean, it's just amazing, man. Like it's been an incredible like four month journey for me and I now have the tools to be able to crank out entire series based on understanding some tricks of the trade and just one session with you.

Richard Lowe (15:36.936)
And you know how hard writing a book is. I mean, you could write it yourself, obviously, or you can hire a ghostwriter to do it for you. There's advantages to each one. Writing it yourself obviously is going to be less expensive, but it's going to probably take longer and be more frustrating. Hiring a ghostwriter is going to cost money, but they do all the work. Your thoughts on that?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (15:41.149)
Uh-huh.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (15:59.505)
Yeah, 100%. So, you know, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably hire at least an editor, if not a publisher, to do things. I spent probably a couple weeks trying to format my book just so that it would look good on every screen and then didn't understand re-reflowable text until a couple weeks in and

Richard Lowe (16:22.894)
Thanks

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (16:26.108)
and then used Kindle Create only to have it actually get completely corrupted and then have to go back and redo all my edits. Luckily with the near photographic memory I have, I was able to recreate those, but it was like six hours of work.

Richard Lowe (16:46.286)
Now if any of our listeners run into that kind of problem, that is some service that I offer I can help with, is helping you publish your book and go through all the steps. It's something other than ghost writing. It's my self-publishing package. Just a little thing that I offer so you could have come to me and I would have taken care of all the publishing steps, editing and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (17:04.967)
Next book. Next book.

Richard Lowe (17:08.718)
So even if you do write it yourself, I can help you get it published where you want it. Well, all right, this has been a great interview. Thank you for your time. So this is, I've been talking to Ben, the Automator Christensen. How can we find you?

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (17:16.507)
Absolutely.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (17:22.558)
Yeah, I'm on automatewithben.com. There you can either collaborate with me on learning things. I offer a community where we do both AI and automation. And then I'm available on pretty much any social as Ben the Automator Christensen.

Richard Lowe (17:44.674)
Very good. And I am Richard Lowe, the writing king and ghostwriting guru. You can find me at thewritingking.com or ghostwriting.guru. And I will be happy to ghostwrite your book. I also offer coaching services where you write the book, but I help you. And I offer the self-publishing service that I just told you about. So it's been fun. Thank you, Ben, for your time. And I hope this was viable to all our listeners. Thank you very much.

Ben "The Automator" Christensen (18:10.675)
Thanks for having me.