The Importance of Embracing Technology

Niel Malan - Business Coach

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Full Transcript

[The following is the full transcript of this Vlog: “The Importance of Embracing Technology “

NIEL MALAN: Hi everybody, Niel Malan. Welcome to this week’s video blog. I’m excited to be with you today. I’m going to talk to you about a really really important subject which is the importance of embracing technology. Now last week I spoke to you about what you should delegate as an entrepreneur and what you should kind of keep on top of yourself and one of the five areas that I suggested that you personally take care of is innovation. And this is so important you know. We live in a world that’s so fast changing. We live in a world that’s constantly evolving and I find that the vast majority of small business owners are further behind than what they realise.

They’re further behind to what they realise and that’s because of one key thing. They fear technology. You see what happened is when the internet just got started everybody kind of got excited by it but were confused but it was this thing you know kind of a side-line thing. Nobody took it seriously, went through the dot-com era, we all heard it was a load of rubbish, then Google came out. We all started using Google. Smartphone technology came out and technology became, without us realising it, an integral part to our day. Now many of us are still succeeding you know, running our businesses the way we’ve always run them and we’ve been listening to trend forecasters and SoothSayers for years saying the end is here you know unless you get with the program you know and unless you embrace technology and year after year we see well the sky still hasn’t fallen on my head so we’re still believing you know and I hear what these people are saying about technology but here quite frankly our businesses are doing fine and I probably should do my website.

I should probably get a social media presence but you know it’s not really that important. Now I’m going to be a Soothsayer. I’m going to be that guy right right now that’s going to tell you the end is near. Unless you embrace technology you know the end is not near. At least not yet, okay? Give me six months. That’s it okay? Unless you’re online. But I want to give you five very very practical reasons why you should embrace technology. So first of all the question is why do more entrepreneurs not embrace technology? And there’s two reasons you know. The first is overwhelm. I find people are scared you know. What on earth should I do? Should I get a CRM system? Put in time and money into that? Should I develop a Facebook page or should I, you know, focus on building a website or is Linkedin the big new thing you know? Everybody talks about LinkedIn or Snapchat you know. What’s frisking Snap or Google, you know. The point is there’s so many choices and it causes overwhelm and what happens when people overwhelm? They do nothing. It causes the in-action. And it’s a reality. We live in a world right now that it’s overwhelming. Where do I start you know? You see Facebook live. You know and you see live streaming. Now you’re starting to see augmented reality. You’re starting to see people wearing goggles. For heaven’s sake! Why are people wearing these goggles you know, like can’t we just go back to the old days where we you know, didn’t have all that stuff? We often reminisce about these things but that’s only because we’re overwhelmed. It’s because of fear right? And the second reason is because the lack of knowledge. A lack of knowhow you know. It’s the weirdest thing. I mean I teach Facebook marketing. You probably know this by now. It’s impossible to escape my ads online. I apologise for that but hey and if you’ve ever watched one of my introductory videos you’ll see that one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about Facebook advertising is, it’s a stepping stone to get into technology.

Now I get seventy-seven year old people okay, they go through my program. Initially they are trembling with fear because they believe they’re technology numbnuts okay, and they kind of take one tiny little baby step at a time and they kind of do it… you must see these people three months into it. They become like machines. Damn next moment they’ve got their phones out and they’ve got this little app working and you know they’ve got like a little live video going on it on their page and it’s unreal the world that opens up to people because they mastered one piece of technology you know. And that’s what I find. I find that the barrier, the hurdle is a psychological one you know. Its overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start so we end up doing nothing but when you become a master of one piece of technology that adds value to your life and to your business boom. You’re not scared to tackle the next one. You’re scared to tackle the next one and all of a sudden you can profit and you can benefit from the wonderful world of technology. So I want to encourage you to make a commitment. 2017 to do it. To just do it. To get online, to understand technology and I want to give you five very very practical reasons why you must get online. Why you must benefit from technology and these are very practical reasons okay. It’s not some ethereal rubbish out there. This is right here right now. Number one: consumers interact online you know. If you look at every single stat that you can find people nowadays don’t want to call into a call centre. They want to post their question on Facebook and they expect an answer on Facebook. They want to send you a Tweet right, a Twitter Tweet thing and they expect an answer. They want to have an app where they can send a photograph of the thing that broke and they want someone to respond on the app. Its consumer behaviours changed you know. People are busy. They no longer have time. They don’t have time to go through voicemail gel trying to get through to a call centre and consumers interact online. Now let me ask you a question: If your prospective customers find a competitor that’s digitised, they do a search for your category of business. They go online. They see. Boom Facebook page. They’ve got a LinkedIn page. They see Twitter posts. They see the person is listed on Google places. They can see that there’s a YouTube feed with all sorts of really cool videos teaching people how to do something. They come across an app in the App Store. There’s an iTunes podcast.

This is your competitor and they come across your website and they look at it the way it is right now in all probability. Now you may have a fantastic website so take this with a pinch of salt but if they look at what most websites look like and they don’t find any of that stuff? What conclusion do they come to regarding you and your business? These people are behind the times. And nobody wants to deal with the business that seem to be behind the times. You want to interact the way people interact now. So that’s reason number one. Reason number two is because of business efficiency. Listen if you have a competitor that can achieve the same job you do with seven people and you require ten people, the three people got replaced by technology in this business. Are you going to be able to compete? Of course not. And the opposite is also true. If you can deal with a team of fifteen people, what it would take another team of thirty people to do, who’s going to win the race? It’s pretty obvious. So you want to make sure that you bring incredible efficiency to your business and let machines do the work and you let software do the work instead of humans do the work. You want to use humans for the highest leverage activities in your business but anything to do with routine mundane things that could be automated, why not let a human still do that you know. It’s just completely inefficient. So business efficiency, absolutely important to not only survive but to thrive. Number three: Rapid scalability. Now I’m going to talk to you next week about why you can explode your business growth in 2017 and beyond and I’m going to give you a little bit of a taster. We find that people create wealth very rapidly nowadays. People used to take years and years, decades to create wealth. Nowadays it happens incredibly quickly and I’m going to explain on that next week but the reason for now is because of the thing called scalability. The moment you develop a formula and you’re digitised you can grow your business from here to there in a very short space of time and I love the topic of scalability. We’re going to talk a lot more on this about scalability on this vlog series. The next one: Is there is new disruptive technology? Now let me give you a couple of examples of how the world is going to change and this is why I’m putting on my scary Soothsayer cap alright. So what is new technology that is here that is upon us? Well driverless cars. We all saw Google coming out and saying they’re going to create a thing called the driverless car right and we were like are you kidding? Really a car without a driver? Okay I thought that would never pass. Guess what? We’re going to start seeing driverless vehicles okay. We’re going to start seeing driverless Uber cabs as early as 2018 okay. That’s going to displace a whole bunch of people that are currently drivers right. We are seeing new technology. Amazon just came out with a concept store in Washington called Amazon Go and Amazon Go is a store without any staff in it and how it works, there’s an app on your phone. You open it up. The sensors detect that you’ve got an account in good standing with Amazon. It lets you into the turnstiles. It detects when you take something off the shelf and leave with it. It builds your account. In effect if you took it off the shelf and put it back in and it can detect basically all of your moves. You’ve got a pre-approved account with Amazon. Imagine walking into a grocery store and being able to pick something off the shelf and leave. Imagine that grocery store doesn’t have the staff overheads that you possibly have if you’re a grocery store owner. Imagine the high-end profitable consumers that like new technology the innovators and the earlier doctors going to that new funky store and no longer going to your store. What are the implications of that in your business alright? Give you another example argumentative and virtuality. These goggles that we see that you think of cheesy and it’s for kids, well let me tell you how it’s going to change shopping experiences. You know nowadays people go online. They watch videos and videos are huge. They’re very important but it’s still only one experience right? Put on a virtual reality set of goggles and basically you take your phone and you put on you know into a little harness and basically this technology’s evolving very rapidly.

What do you do? You get a complete 3D interactive experience with the product. You can look at it from this angle. You can look at it from that angle. You can pick it up right. You can do pretty much everything except for taste and smell it. Yeah but they’ll probably fix that problem as well soon enough. It’s going to completely change the shopping experience you know and people are going to start buying from people that has the product catalogues and their services available for viewing digitally right. People one of things I talk a lot about is the importance of video alright, so new stats. In the last two years the amount of content that people consume on the internet has changed from one in five page views of being on Facebook to one in four page view of page views being on Facebook. It’s gone from video being about thirty to forty percent of all content they consumed. This year eighty percent of all engaged content. Engaged content is content the people consume. They watch it, they like it, they share it, they interact with it and they click on it. That is engaged content. Eighty percent of that’s video. If your competitors are better than creating video than you are, they’re going to whip your butt. Same is true if you’re the number one person in your field that provides How To videos, it provides educational videos, it provides lots and lots of video you’re going to beat them. So you want to make sure that you embrace new technology because it helps you to stay current you know. It helps you to stay abreast of disruptive technology and instead of you getting disrupted you become the disrupter in your industry and finally new technology is displacing jobs. You know that fourteen to sixteen percent of people are employed in retail. What if all retail jobs go away because of what I’ve just described with the Amazon Go technology. Do you know how many people are employed in the fast foods services sector? What if most of those jobs get displaced? Do you know how many people are drivers and involved in transportation and what if all those jobs go away? You know they believe that matriculants who are currently going into college, thirty percent of the jobs that they will end up doing don’t even exist today. A really good friend of mine Graham Cottingham who’s a future analyst and he’s a Soothsayer and if Graham is watching this you’re right, he told us yesterday you know his daughter’s going to college next year and thirty percent of the jobs that she can apply for once doing her grad or a post-grad don’t even exist today. I watched the a video clip by the world economic forum that was said by the year 2025 in certain sectors sixty percent of the job descriptions that people have right now won’t exist. So we want to get ahead and I know it sounds scary. I know I’m you know probably adding to overwhelming your stress. I want you to adopt a good attitude about this. I want you to embrace it. I want you to embrace it realise you don’t have to crack everything in one go you have to start you can no longer define yourself as a person that’s slow in technology. You can no longer define yourself as a person that is a tech dinosaur. There’s no noddy badges for that so where do I start? Well listen, you’re asking the wrong person because I’m biased. Start with Facebook advertising. Why? You can print money alright, you can expand your business if you get that. All other marketing platforms make sense. You will lose the fear of technology. But that’s not the only thing you know start keeping an eye on what’s new and if something new comes out buy it test it out and get with the program. Do not let technology scare you don’t let technology negatively impact your business. Profit from it. Benefit from it. Scale your business. Go to the next level. In the next video I’m going to share with you why and how you can explode your business growth in 2017 and beyond and why this can be and should be your year. I really enjoyed this time with you and I love making these videos please comment below let us know if you enjoy them remember to share it with your friends, do something and until I see you next week please remember work hard, live fully, love openly and try something new today. I’ll see you next time.