We recently connected with Joshua Mentrup and have shared our conversation below.

Joshua, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

One of the first businesses I ever started was an event staffing business. Now, if you know anything about service-based businesses, it’s that they require a lot of calculations to go into their quotes. This is not like shopping online, where you see a nice shirt you like and click “buy”.

However, I didn’t want my customers to have to wait up to 24 hours to get them a quote, and I also couldn’t afford to hire someone to sit there and wait 24/7 for a new email to come in. So I had to come up with something that could

A) make sure I don’t have to sit in front of a computer 24/7 and
B) make sure that my customers don’t have to wait for a quote

The solution? A system that takes all the little parameters, such as distance to the event, number of staff members, hourly rates, minimum rates, guest count, … into account to calculate a quote automatically and send it to the customer. And the way I did this is with automations.

Now this business has grown to a steady $300k/yearly revenue machine where I answer emails for about 30 minutes a week and we’re constantly growing, automatically.

A couple of years after I created this for myself (mostly through learning by doing), I opted to get certified in certain automation tools, such as Zapier, Klaviyo, MailChimp, etc., just to name a few, and to learn Python in order to truly leverage my skills and to start being able to build automations for other people. I am constantly learning and improving current automations and building new, exciting opportunities.

I love building stuff and now I get to build stuff that makes other people’s lives easier. In the world of automation, only your imagination is the limit.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Through my journey of building this first for myself and now for others, I have discovered the perfect balance of what makes a great automation.

A great automation should:
– Streamline workflows to eliminate redundant tasks
– Reduce manual errors
– Allow my clients to allocate resources to increase their company’s efficiency

The way I usually approach new clients is to:

1) Consult: Every business is unique. Our clients share their story, their challenges, and let us tailor-make their automation solution.
2) Execution: My automation experts and I dive deep, designing solutions that are efficient, effective, and tailored to our clients. No automation is ever the same.
3) Deliver: Once our custom solution is ready, we set it in motion, continuously monitoring and tweaking to ensure optimal performance, allowing our clients to get the results they need.

The best part about this is that I offer the first 2 stages of this 100% free. Over the past few years, I have come to realize that no-one likes to shell out $10k for custom automations up front. So the way I set this up is that my team and I put 100% of the work upfront completely free of charge and our clients only start paying when we switch it “on”. And even then, they only pay for what they use, meaning we grow with our clients as needed.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Word of mouth! We are currently not advertising anywhere. We have a small 1-page website, but currently, no social media or other means of publishing content.

The fact that 100% of our clients are (currently) so happy with the results we produce that they reach out to family & friends to check if they need something automated is truly amazing. We primarily focus on business automations, but one of our bigger clients also recently wanted to automate some things in her private life, which makes me happy to hear because she trusts us so much to help her balance her life. She actually went on vacation for the first time in 14 years about 2 months ago and the postcard she sent me hangs in my office now.

I think “no compromises” and the show of trust from our end that we’re also in this for the long haul makes our clients like family to us.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Personally, I hate sales calls. I am not in this to try and sell someone something; I’m trying to make lives better and give people their time back.

That being said, I still get on initial 15 minute consultations because we also don’t just take on anyone. We always try to assess beforehand if we can actually be helpful because we also invest a lot of time, energy and resources into building relationships with our clients (again, they don’t pay anything upfront).

One consultation call I was on, a potential client (let’s call him Steve) heard about us through a friend of a friend (word of mouth, you know how it is) and wanted to jump on a call to see if we could help to improve his customer journey and satisfaction. The original 15 minute consultation call turned into a 3 hour strategy session because he had a lot of things that could skyrocket his business.

After we hung up, I had a pretty good feeling of knowing what he was looking for, so I had already prepped my team for the next steps.

Then… radio silence. I sent a couple of emails and texts to follow up, but I also don’t like to be pushy because some people need some time to wrap their heads around it.

Two months later, I get a phone call from Steve and apparently, he brought this up to his local chamber of commerce and all members were interested in getting this system set up for them. Instead of harboring this life-changing technology, Steve was extremely selfless and saw how this could improve the lives of many more than just him.

We ended up making a deal with the chamber for a combined plan, so that everyone can benefit from these features and the rest is history.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://insidermanagement.org/