#57 - Shooting the Bull: Frankenstack - When Your Tools Start Fighting

Every business owner has had the moment: wait, why are we paying for two phone systems? That's a Frankenstack ... the pile of overlapping tools you end up with when tech moves so fast nobody stops to turn the old one off. In this one we get into why it happens (every platform now wants to do every job ... your CRM does payments, your payment tool does texting), and why the real damage isn't the wasted spend. It's the handoffs. When two tools both own the lead, the customer gets double-messaged. When two tools both touch the money, you ask "what did we collect this week?" and get two different answers. We walk the three seams where this always breaks ... presales to marketing, marketing to fulfillment, and the money ... and the one discipline that separates the owners who scale from the ones who just accumulate mess faster.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Frankenstack on this episode of Over the Bull. I bet you you're a victim of Frankenstack and you may not even know it. So before we do that, please make sure if you've not listened to the previous podcast on artificial intelligence, go back and look at it. It's really sad what you're seeing in the uh the world today. I mean, the mythology of artificial intelligence is really just at a stupid point. I mean, no doubt, absolutely zero doubt, artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful things that has hit the world, possibly and likely ever. But the mythology that it's sentient, that it's going to become thinking, and that it wants to live, and that it's Skynet from Terminator and all this other stuff is ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous at this point. So if you go back and listen to the last podcast, you're going to see it. And just keep in mind, I don't care how much money somebody has, when they talk about something becoming sentient, and you listen to it and you say, This rich guy said that AI is going to become sentient, meaning aware at some point. Keep in mind we don't even know what sentiency is. We can't define consciousness. We'll never know if it's just doing a really good job of faking it or if it's actually conscious. We have no clue. And so at best, that's where we can hang it. So anyway, when you go back and listen to the podcast, because I kind of talked through a few documentaries, and one was pretty disappointing. The further I get away from it, the more I go. Really? This guy spent two years building a documentary? And I'm like, and this is the best he came up with? It's silliness. It's silliness. Um okay, so anyway, let's talk about Frankensteck. And here we go. So what is Frankenstack? Well, technology companies are spreading their wings and not necessarily in a good way. So what they're doing is you're seeing more and more of these uh tech companies uh offering more and more services and bleeding into other services. And so what happens is you get a tech stack, which tech stack is just a fancy way to say that it's the software and hardware that you're using to run your business from end to end, pre-sales all the way down to uh customer retention, reviews, and all that jazz. And and so the tech stacks are becoming convoluted, and it's getting harder to understand who's better at what. And what you're finding is that you're getting into this world where all the tech is overlapping and it's getting more and more complex. Now, from an everyday standpoint, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. You want to go to your bank, what do you do? You go to the bank app. You want to go order something to eat, guess what? You go through a whole other situation. You want to go buy something, you guessed it. You got in a whole other set of things you've got to learn and go through. The world is just getting really crazy with all the little special systems and logins and do it this way, not that way. And in the end, what we're finding is the best technology is not the one that's just the most powerful, but it's also the one that is the most usable. And when you start to buy technology and get drunk off technology, then what you're going to find is you have more tech stack, which doesn't just mean you increase the overhead subscriptions that you buy every month for your business, but you're also making it difficult for your employees and your customers to engage with your business. You can create more confusion than you solve when you do certain things. Technology companies, they don't care. They just want to sell it to you and offer you a solution. So what you have are you have Franken stacks where people are just buy, buy, buy, buy, overlap, overlap, let's adopt it. It seems to work, change, move, you know, all these other things. And then what you have are the uh the one size fid saw. And on that side, you usually have what appears to be the same thing all bundled in, but they usually lack certain key things that you need in order to be effective. So finding the the sweet spot, so to speak, within this is a challenge. Because who cares if it's this super robust piece of software that everybody uses that can do a bazillion things? If your company only needs to do two things, who really cares about things three through five million? And I get it, grow into it, I hear the arguments all the time. We really? Are you really going to grow into those other features? Or are you just paying a lot of money for the potential that maybe kind of possibly it would happen? The other thing is these things are springing up so quickly that it's hard to tell what's quality versus not and what's sales pitch and what's not. And uh I gotta admit, that part gets frustrating for me because everyone seems to be coming across as though they know everything about everything and their tool is going to solve all the problems of the world. And of course, last year with AI, uh, you know, with uh how that was going, you know, we had so many bad, bad mistakes going on. And the problem is it's moving so fast, it's hard to like even get people to pump the brakes on the mistakes before they like make big, big mistakes. Agencies using AI to create content, bad. Um letting someone else control the voice of your company and without knowing what your company is, bad. Um you want to be able to incorporate human human consciousness and sentiency with a tool called artificial intelligence that can help you out and then use only the technology you need in order to make your business operate smoothly. It's pretty easy when you boil it down. The problem is we get caught up in the shiny. And if you're the type of owner that gets caught up in the latest and greatest, you are going to be chasing things that are just going to drive everyone crazy. You can't chase it, add it, put things onto it, move from this to that, back to this. This didn't work, let's put this back in. Oh no, here's something great. Let's move back over here. I got a spammy email from somebody I don't know who says they've got my solution to web development. Let's go to that person. Now let me make things awkward with the current developer that I'm working with. Those are horrible things that go on. And tech stack is just one more layer of that. Now, how I know this happens is I see it. I see it. And the idea is a good leader, you know, basically you want to make a system that is easy and usable, predictable. Everyone can get on the same page with it, and it does what you need it to do, and it does it with uh accuracy and consistency. Somehow we've gotten away from that. Somehow we've gotten away where we think we've got to buy this latest and greatest tech stack. All right, so with all that being said, here's another challenge. This little thing called artificial intelligence. Because when I look at what we've done now, like I'm talking about the last, seriously, last 60 to 90 days, it's dramatically different than what I was doing in January. I mean, the amount of tools and the amount of technology and the amount of stuff that I'm learning right now is more than ever. I'm drinking from the fire hose every day. I mean, I just got through building um a communication channel with Claude where I use visual elements. And then I was pitching back and forth and fine-tuning this visual language by asking Claude to interpret what I'm trying to give it visually, where I could do certain things quickly, visually, that would convey it accurately and I get back accurate results. That wasn't happening that long ago, guys. And so the other part is making sure that you can stay current with technology and use it where it makes sense, but not where it doesn't make sense. So is this not the perfect storm? I mean, when you have technology salespeople trying to push you on certain things and claiming certain things, and some of them may be good, some of them may be not, some of them may be too complicated, some of them may be not. Everybody's giving their opinion, and your your buddy down the street who's in the same business as you says he uses that, and so you default to that sometimes. So, how do you do this? Well, this is a challenge, this is something I do a lot with businesses, and I I never intended to do this. It's just the natural fallout of basically the the weirdness that's going on in the world of technology today. So, you know, uh one of my I have a couple quotes that I really like, and I try to work them in whenever I can. Uh one was the uh Jeff Goldblum uh quote from Jurassic Park where he said, you know, uh you ask yourself if you could do it, but you never thought, you know, stopped ask yourself if you should do it. And then the other one, which has nothing to do with today's podcast, is the quote from Braveheart: Every man dies, but not every man truly lives. That's awesome stuff. Okay, so anyway, getting back to what we're doing. So how how do we how do we fix this? How do we respond to what's going on and how am I responding to business owners who are trying to navigate through the seas of technology to make sure that their business is easy and operational? First thing is, is let's take another movie reference. Uh, if you've ever seen the movie Armageddon with uh Bruce Willis, there was a part in that movie where they built a moon rover based upon his pad to technology, and they couldn't get the thing to work. So he's in there and he's seemed like tugged down inside this big device, and he's throwing everything out. And at one point he throws, sticks his head out and says, What is this thing? An ice cream scoop? And he throws it out because it was irrelevant. It was junk, it had nothing to do with the mission, and part of what he was doing was just throwing the junk out that had nothing to do with anything. Now, see, right now your business likely has an overlap of technology, and that technology you're paying for every month, and you're not using it. Or worse, you're using this you're using two different pieces of technology to perform the same task. That's really, really bad. Um I'll show you a quick example with that. Let's talk about phone systems for a minute. Phone systems become this enigma for businesses because, you know, they look at buying uh, you know, desk sets and they look at what they call IVR trees, and they look at just ringing to a cell phone, um, how to route phone calls to different places, uh, all these things that the whole time they're they're wondering about KPIs and tracking results, and they're not even doing it because their phone system's so convoluted. Now, what I know that I know from my end is if you're not tracking phone calls granularly, you're wasting money in marketing. And so from our perspective, what we do is we look at a couple different pieces of technology, but we draw hard lines between the technology that we choose. So, first of all, within the world of phone technology, we could pull out a few pieces. The first piece is call tracking. Now, there are two good tools that are out on the market right now, call metrics and call rail. What they do is they have where you can incorporate single trackable phone numbers. So I want phone number 1234 on my yard sign, and I want number 5678 on my truck. And then I need a pool of numbers that are known as DNI numbers, and I want those DNI numbers to dynamically switch based upon how someone finds my website so I can determine where those calls originate from. Now, that's the tracking piece to the phone system. Now, there are venues or avenues you can take from there where you could simply route those calls to a series of cell phones and put in a workflow where certain things happen when someone calls and the phones are not picked up. Or you can have that uh that phone tracking portion of it go to another solution. And so the idea is to create the boundaries, understand it, and then properly be able to communicate where one starts and where one stops, and then make sure that you're not um spilling the two different pieces of technology to do the same task. Now that's important to understand that, but for a much bigger reason than just the Frankenstack problem, because call metrics or call rel or whichever one program you want to use, it also reports that information back to places like Google Ads. So that's really important because Google can learn from those actions and then send you more of those actions, i.e., more phone calls for less money if it's reported back and forth accurately, which means that the technology has to be able to talk to other pieces of technology. There are challenges in each one of those situations to make sure it's accurate, so that your KPIs are good, to optimize machine learning, to optimize your ad budget, to make sure that the calls route appropriately, so they don't get caught in some stupid loop when someone's trying to call you and it just gives a busy tone or keeps looping someone back in circles. Yes, I've seen these things. And I've seen these things happen for clients for a month, and they go, why is my phone not ringing? Well, it's because you called phone company A that you're using, and you're using phone situation B, you told phone situation B one thing, which is creating this loop of death on your phone calls, and you had no idea what was going on, you just figured it was slow. So, what does that do for the reputation of your business? So this is kind of what I have uh been trying to do as part of what we do with our clients is kind of help them understand their tech stacks and just kind of give an experienced perspective outside that works with a lot of companies and do these, does these things in order to bring sanity back to it. So what you need to do in order to navigate the seas and avoid the the Frankenstack, first of all, if you own the business, you're gonna have to get away from being drunk on technology. And do not ever chase anything, do not ever implement anything if it starts off with, we found this secret out, or you're not gonna believe this hack we have. Or we discovered if you shoot a video this way that it's going to mean this. These are sales techniques, they're exaggerations, they're not accurate, and they're gonna waste your time. Okay. So what I do typically is I break down the customer, the the journey from beginning to end, and I try to understand that. So you have to involve your team with me to get that. So take this, build it however you want to in your own world. So, first thing I do is I want to understand what the pre-sales in marketing looks like for a business. Um what's the expectation? What do they want to happen? What's the ideal way that that should engage with the people on your team or yourself if you're a one-man show? What do you what do you want to happen there ideally? And usually those answers are pretty easy, you know. I want to know where my phone calls are coming from. I want to optimize it where I get more phone calls for less money. I need the phone calls to come to this person or this group of people, and then we need to do this, and then I also want to set up a series of automations that go out to people that we miss, maybe a text message that goes out. Uh if we miss a call to a booking calendar, uh different things like that. Um we need to know how many calls we miss. We need to know how many calls we pick up. And uh these are the important things that actually bring money to the table, and these are the things that are more vanity metrics. Because once you understand that, then actually things clear up quite a bit. And not just from a tech standpoint, but also from just an understanding standpoint, because your agencies will shred you if you don't know what your conversions are. They will give you reports on things that don't mean anything, or they will stack what they call conversions with clicking on a page. I mean, you name it, you're going to run into it. So, first thing in pre-sales and marketing, you kind of want to understand what that journey looks like. And then you want to know, well, how what does marketing look like when it goes to the actual fulfillment? You know, who owns the customer once they become a customer? So the handoff from the we won them to we deliver, um, this is where things can get silently dropped. You know, the job's sold, but the fulfillment side never gets the uh clear record because two systems uh are like two ships passing in the night. So, you know, marketing tools may be good for acquiring customers, but the fulfillment tools are usually more specialized and do certain things. So I'll give you for instance. We work with a particular client, and this client, she has uh a lot of land and she's got uh several cabins that she rents out. Now, within the cabin world, there are certain things that happen. From a marketing perspective, you're trying to sell the features, you're trying to sell the all the good things a while people would want to be there, and then keep them involved as they're going through that decision-making process as they're looking at you versus other people, and then just finding people in general who are looking to travel to the location, and the list goes on. But at some point, when that person books, now their experience changes. You've just handed the ball off. Okay, so what's involved with that? Well, it could be materials that the customer needs, what they need to do in an emergency situation. It could be how to get into the cabin. It could be what happens if they can't get into the cabin, it's scheduling the person to go through and clean the cabin. Once that person leaves, it's triggering in another event to where they can say that they cleaned it. Maybe you got somebody else who goes back in to make sure that it was cleaned the way it should be cleaned. And so now you've got the operations part that's separate from the marketing part. And if that's more specialized to a certain industry, then that makes sense. But it doesn't make sense that you go with the fulfillment guide that offers marketing services too, because they probably just bolted that on the front end because it sounds like it does the whole job. Now, I've yet to see a fulfillment company that does a good job on marketing. Matter of fact, I've seen some insane stuff. I've seen a fulfillment company that uh has uh phone numbers and they say that they work with Google Ads, but they don't report back to Google Ads the results, and so the machine learning never grows. That's a new company, guys. That's a new company they had, and they did not have any idea that it needed to do that. So I've yet to see that. So I typically look at two buckets there: the pre-sales, the marketing leg on the beginning, and then the fulfillment. Now, the fulfillment and the pre sales and pre marketing, you'll see, like in that example, there are certain things that really need to happen to manage properties effectively. There's a lot of little pieces there that are specialized and nuanced. Now, you could get stupid. With the fulfillment software to where it becomes so cumbersome you can't do anything with it. And that's the problem. They keep bolting on. They bolt on the marketing because now they can say, we're marketing plus fulfillment. It sounds good, it sounds easy, but if the marketing's ineffective, then who the heck cares? And so the idea is you want to make sure that the pre-sales and the marketing tools do everything that it needs to do and that it can effectively market and manage your budget well, and that the fulfillment tools can accurately do what you need it to do from a fulfillment standpoint, and that the ball, just like from a quarterback to a halfback in football, the ball gets handed off and then they can take it and then they can move down the field. Now, too much stuff in between there, too much headache. I mean, if the people who are cleaning the cabins can't understand how to use the software without clicking through 20 different things, uh, and then they don't mid-they don't know the steps and they'd forget to check a checkbox that tells them that they're done. Well, guess what? Now you're calling back in to find out what happens, now you're retraining people and trying to figure it out. It's got to be easy and it's got to fit within the construct of your business, which means a lot of times park your ego, I mean, for lack of a better word, and go with whatever's needed in order to do the job, not what the biggest, latest, and greatest and the Fortune 500 companies do. You want a clean, seamless operation that is predictable, which is another factor. A lot of the software that I'm seeing coming out today, old and new, the old stuff is bolting on new stuff, which is making it buggy, and the new stuff is buggy because it's new. And so finding software that's stable and reliable is a challenge because we typically look at things like, well, the history of the fulfillment product, we look at the reviews of it, we look at what other people do with it. We talk to people who actually use the software and then we make recommendations based on it, and then we kind of look at what the company's trying to do to determine if it's too much, too little, all those things. And that kind of helps out with the whole thing. Okay, and then of course we have the payment scene. Um so what we do is we're talking about payments. Um what did we collect this week? Now, if you're collecting money from multiple places and you don't have a system in place, then it's going to be hard for you to reconcile that because as numbers pass from one system to another system, you may see that some things are put in dynamically in one place and so your numbers won't match. And so building a clean system that makes sure you do have this ultimate source that is reliable when it comes to the money leg of it is just as important. And and believe it or not, um you've heard some I've heard some horror stories. Like if you're taking multiple um uh systems that handle payments, it can get kind of nasty kind of quick. And so basically you just want to have a clean system that handles those three things. And then obviously the last leg is review, customer attention, which kind of loops back around the pre-sales and marketing. And so that's a whole other leg of it. Now, within the marketing leg, there are different tools that are also there. For example, there are some companies that will say they can run Google Ads, or more she you run it yourself from their portal, and they do Google business optimization. You see, they bolted on certain things, but they bolted it on in a very rudimentary fashion to where it kind of looks like it works and the reports are pretty looking, but it's not robust enough. And you kind of need a a marketing expert and a design expert to be able to do that. So what you find is you find out that some of these tools are, you know, um they they oversimplify, overcomplicate things. And uh unfortunately, you've got to have, you know, but unfortunately, you do need to have someone who kind of knows what they're doing uh in order to kind of help you navigate that. And then reviews responding to reviews and all that as well. So the idea is, now I can tell you within the marketing world, so debating how to even break this part down. But typically when it comes to Google Ads, uh, let's focus on that for a second. Google Ads is incredibly complicated. Um you can set it up in a way that's going to be effective and you constantly learn from it, or you can set it up in a way that's very rudimentary and it's going to look like it's doing things that it may or may not be doing, and it doesn't learn the way it should learn. Um a lot of these systems that are Google Business Optimization, uh Repation Management, plus Google Ads, plus meta-ads, these are very, very topical tools that typically do not work well. They they may handle some situations where the competition is extremely low, uh, the factors are just perfect. Where, you know, basically it's kind of like a raised garden bed I made. I put so much uh organic uh soil and stuff in it that there's no way nothing's not going to grow in it. Now that's not with most businesses, but the point is they're not trying to really help you grow your business. They're trying to give you a tool to give you the perception that you can run your own business cheaper. So I can't think of one example where that's actually done well, come to think of it. So the idea is if you're if you're going to run ads, you really need a Google ads specialist, not an SEO guy that runs Google Ads on the side, but really understands Google Ads. Certifications are a good way to understand that. Awards are a good way to understand SEO. I've won awards on search engine optimization. Those typically are not easy to get from the owner of a company if you didn't produce web development. Stay away from the theme people, stay away from the cheap shared hosting people, stay away from the agencies that sell the cheap hosting and tell you that it's not cheap hosting. That's the other thing that's really important. And then make sure that you're building these stacks in a way that makes sense. Um an agency perspective, I'll tell you, man, it gets hard. This is where I'm trying to really figure out how to break this stuff down a little bit. I don't want to get off the train. But what we do is we have a wide assortment of disciplines that are hard to find with an agency. Where we run ads on a very complex level, we run SEO on a complex level, we run Google Business Optimization on a complex level, but within our agency, we silo each piece of those technology in a way that's meaningful. So just like you have pre-sales and marketing and business and the marketing and fulfillment, uh, what we do is we silo that technology within our business, but we don't jump into technology we don't understand from a conceptual standpoint, but then also from an execution standpoint. And the thing is that there are some tools that have always presented themselves as being able to bleed over, bolt on other features. They're so bad. They're just they're just horrible tools. And so in building it out, um in working with the clients that I work with, I always see where they try to take it in-house with their IT people. And I'm not gonna say always, that's not true. There's some really good IT guys out there. Um, but I see where they try to take all this stuff in, and then it never gets fully understood because IT doesn't get marketing, they they they're looking at it from nuts and bolts, type A. But then the the marketing needs a certain amount of things, but then to convey what has to happen in order for marketing to work uh is is something out of their wheelhouse. And so what I'm trying to say is that uh when you're working with someone and especially trying to navigate the seas today, having a clear understanding, yeah, this is this is how I want to say this. Having a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve through marketing, what your short and long-term goals are, and then being able to spell out exactly how you need your business to operate, and then being able to silo the technology to where it's the goods place. It's not too complicated, it's the baby bear, not too complicated, not too light, it's in the middle. And then being able to implement that and then test it and then fine-tune it without chasing the shiny, that is where the magic is. Now, the layer on top of that magic is looking at tech and then being able to understand tech in a way where if it does make sense to move to something that you do it, but you do it in a very methodical fashion. You just don't bolt something on just because somebody says it's good. We usually find an enter and an exit strategy with any of that stuff. And in all honesty, I have never seen someone who specializes in an industry when it comes to marketing, and they make all these promises about the cost per leads. And typically it's not true. I've never seen one. I mean, I I I honestly cannot think of one company that specializes in it. Um and so bringing someone on board that understands that, but then understands what you're trying to achieve, and they can kind of help you navigate that without having a dog in the fight, I think that's where the magic is. Um, what I would do if I was action planning that or being asked by a business owner how I would handle it, I would spell everything out as plainly and cleanly as possible. And then I would set those guidelines and then I would test it to make sure that it happens, make sure the handoffs happen from marketing to fulfillment, make sure that the reviews go out in an effective way, make sure that you're getting reviews. Don't send reviews out when you send out an invoice. That's a horrible idea. Um just things like that. And so once you get the system in place, then uh stay true to the system, don't overcomplicate the system, keep it easy, stay away from Frankenstein it, and then quit paying for overlapping services and never, ever, ever use two services that do the same thing and have that in your production environment. Otherwise, you're just asking for muddled, muddied, horrible data. Okay, guys, that was a little bit a lot to throw at you this week, but I hope that helps you out. Maybe the rambling in Food for Thought will help you as you're planning your tech stack, what you're doing. Um, if you've got it, um take the Armageddon route. What is this? An ice cream scoop and chuck it because you're not using it. Um and let me throw this out. I've not said it in a while. Don't read the emails that are spammy, someone saying that they can fix your website, someone saying they can fix your Google ads, someone who says this chunk. Forget those people. Mark them as spam, go on about your day. If you take 10 minutes with one of those a day, you do six of those. 10 times six is sixty. You just lost an hour of your time. Spam emails belong where they belong. Your spam box and block. That's my advice of the day. All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Hope this helps you out. Until next time, this is Kenneth Over the Bull.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integrist Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.