Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams

Decision making is a crucial part of our lives, affecting us regardless of whether we are pursuing our passions, thinking about business, or focusing on our personal lives. Many people believe that the outcome of our lives is the sum of all the decisions we make, which can be a bit overwhelming. How can we improve our decision-making skills to shape the lives we desire? In this episode, I have Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Computer. Our talk revolves around decision-making in business. Greg emphasizes the importance of evaluating technology vendors and building strong relationships with customers. We also discuss the potential of AI to transform business operations and leverage it to attain work-life balance. Tune in to learn how these insights can enhance your business strategy! --- Listen to the podcast here: Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you’re pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you’re even thinking about a business or a career at all, and that is decision making. There’s a lot of people out there saying that your life’s outcome is kind of a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say, in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really, truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world in our lives, I would like to introduce you my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer, --- Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Stephen. It’s great to be here. Yeah. Thank you so much. And so, first of all, let’s get a little bit of your background. So, you’re a VP of Strategy, Western Computer, the name doesn’t necessarily clearly stay what it is, so what is it that you do as VP of Strategy? Yeah, so we’re an old company and I like to say that we don’t sell computers and we’re not really Western that much anymore but that’s our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That’s what we do. We’re primarily a Microsoft partner so we implement the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products. For our customers, we support them long term. Last few years, it’s been their journey in digital transformation. And just so everyone knows what we’re talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to? So ERP is the backbone software of the business, accounting, inventory control, sometimes ecommerce. It’s really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing. Yeah. And CRM is, there’s two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce, that do that for the most part and it’s for your front office. It’s your sales team, it’s your customer service team, it’s your field technicians, if you’re in a service business, the applications that they use, And in your role as VP of Strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses? A little bit of both. I’m obviously very focused on our strategy but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology. Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you’re on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general piece of advice for anyone that’s making a decision around their business, whether it be, obviously, you talked a lot about the IT, the tech decisions, but people who are starting something up, whether it be a business, or even a side project, are making decisions pretty much every day about selecting this tool or that tool? I do help out there quite a bit. One of the things I see with founders of startups is that they often don’t think holistically about what applications they may need in two or three years from now. They’re just plugging holes with what I call point solutions. And before you know it, they’re paying ten different subscriptions. They have Google Docs, they have Slack, they have Zoom, then they may have a HubSpot CRM system, and the list just keeps going, right? Yeah. And none of them really talk to each other that well, if at all, and we’re a little biased because we’re a Microsoft partner, which is kind of the all-in-one solution, but we do see sometimes serial entrepreneurs come to us and they say, “Hey, I’ve been down this path before of being two or three years in business and trying to scale with disparate systems. Instead of going down that road, I’m gonna pay a little more upfront and get on an integrated platform and scale with that.” So, you talked about paying a little bit more upfront. Is there any element of fear or concern, especially around, say, first-time entrepreneurs or first-time business owners, where people don’t pay more upfront because they’re just like still in that mode of, “Well, is this going to work? Am I ready to pay for this full suite of products given that I haven’t gotten too many sales yet?” Yeah, I think that’s probably the fear, and a lot of times they just don’t know. They just don’t know what small- and medium-sized businesses are using. They come from a consumer mindset of what consumers use in their technology every day and they try to apply that to the small business. Oh, interesting. Because they’re still thinking themselves as this is me and my initiative, not that this is a business. Exactly. And there’s some validity to that because, over time, we see consumer behavior and applications come into business-to-business applications.Share on X So, ten years ago, ecommerce sites for between businesses did not have reviews on them. Now, people are asking for that. Even if it’s a business-to-business site where they’re selling to other businesses, they want to see reviews and Q&A and a lot of that stuff that you see on consumer websites. So, all that stuff trickles down into businesses. We were doing Skype calls long before we were doing Teams and Zoom calls. Yeah. And then have you found a balance between, say, being too reactive and being too in the moment, “We need this,” versus being too long term and possibly falling into analysis paralysis, that state where people just keep thinking and thinking and thinking and don’t do anything? You can definitely get into what I call feature poker, where you are looking at different applications and comparing them purely on the features and what I usually suggest is look at the viability of the vendor and the strength of the platform and weight that in your decision, maybe not as equal to features but as an important weight. Because a feature here and there isn’t everything, and you may not even use all the features. So, there are companies that make amazing accounting systems with all kinds of features but they’re not hosted properly, they don’t have scalability, they don’t have georedundant backups, they don’t have all that stuff that’s really important to a business, but you would never think to ask that, you just assume everybody has that, unless you know. And so you bring up no georedundant backups because that’s something that I think most people who don’t have that much experience with data, especially big data, probably wouldn’t be thinking about something like that but I think in any business, there’s going to be something technical that you’re maybe not thinking about, I don’t think the average person even knows georedundant data, why they want it, how they want it, et cetera. So what’s a way of kind of trying to think through as many of those bases as possible, knowing you’re not going to think of every single thing but think of as many of those as possible without obviously falling into this analysis paralysis where you’re spending too much time trying to think of everything? Right. So I think you just have to ask the questions about the platform and how it’s hosted and what the technology backing is and also how it’s supported. I give you a quick example. In our business, we have a lot of European vendors, they have great software applications, especially out of Scandinavia, and they want access to the US market and they come to us to kind of get that access. Some of them are very organized and are like, “Hey, I’m going to set up an office over there, I’m gonna have people, in two years, I expect to have five people, we’re gonna be able to provide tech support, we’re gonna have boots on the ground to help people in your time zones.” Other ones say, “Hey, we have great software and you can buy it from us but we’re not setting up an office over there and we don’t see a need to.” And our customers won’t always pick up on that. They’re falling in love with the functionality, but we ask those questions because we know if you’re trying to get support from someone in Scandinavia in August, it’s really hard because they’re on vacation and that’s a cultural difference that we just take for granted, we don’t even think about it. And then how often are you able to ask those right questions and say, potentially, not to say that there’s a right and wrong, but lead a customer to a better decision, say, like, “Had you not asked this, we probably went this way and it would have caused a lot more hardship.” ...