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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and you all already know that I am very keen and excited to see your business succeed, and that's why I'm so excited that today's guest feels the exact same way that I do.
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This is someone who is so committed to helping businesses scale and flourish and succeed not by improving, making minor improvements to what it is that you're already doing, but by completely re-imagining your growth platform.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Eli Glanz.
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Eli is the founder and process engineer behind Workflow Architects, where he pioneers the fusion of deep tech automation with business strategy.
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That's what I'm saying.
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He's not looking to make minor improvements.
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He's looking to overhaul the way that your business is fueled for growth.
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With a relentless focus on solving hard problems at scale, eli architects operational systems that allow companies to move from scattered inefficiencies to streamlined, tech-powered growth.
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His work challenges the status quo, ensuring that businesses not only run more effectively today, but are structurally designed to thrive in the long run.
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By applying first principles thinking to workflow automation, eli is redefining how organizations approach scale, efficiency and operational intelligence.
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And before we kick things off.
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I want to share with you probably my favorite messaging of what I've seen a company stand for.
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Here's what workflow architects the way that they articulate what they do.
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At Workflow Architects, we don't just optimize workflows, we reimagine the fundamental architecture of how businesses operate.
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So I think that is the most perfect segue into today's episode.
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I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Eli Glantz.
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All right, eli, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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It's a pleasure meeting you.
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Heck, yes.
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Well, eli, I will say I very much admire the work that you for having me.
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It's a pleasure meeting you.
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Heck, yes.
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Well, eli, I will say I very much admire the work that you do.
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I'm excited for listeners to learn from you, while I also get the chance to learn from you.
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So let's start the party with you taking us beyond the bio.
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Who's Eli?
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How did you start doing all these cool things?
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sure?
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Um, who is Eli?
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I mean, that's a big question, so I guess we'll get to that later on.
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How did I get going with this?
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I started a lot of the things that I started with in terms of automation and process improvement started with doing a lot of it in Excel and Google Sheets, and my background is not the traditional background in terms of education and so on.
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I sort of joined the workforce and essentially learned everything on the go.
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I grew up Hasidic, so I don't have the traditional education in in terms of all that and it's a conversation in itself.
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But my first I started working in.
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I was working in construction and when I joined the workforce I just looked around everywhere and I was like why is this done this way?
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Why is this done that way?
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And I just constantly see the inefficiencies or efficiencies that could be gained.
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And I started like building out many applications and so on, optimizing the process, and then when I went working for the next company, I essentially spent half where.
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So over there I was doing estimation and construction, and essentially half the time I was doing the work, the other half I was automating my work.
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So whenever I came across something during my workday I was like wait, why am I going to spend 30 minutes doing this?
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There has to be a better way.
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I would spend a couple of hours automating, so next time I won't have to do it.
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And initially, for the first few years, everything I built was on Google Sheets, essentially.
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I would love to show you some of it, of how it was built, because it's kind of freaky in terms of you have a 20-page proposal, generated and rendered entirely in Google Sheets, with images and everything and calculating very complex things while simplifying the workflow by a lot.
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Initially I built it for myself, but over time I built up the team and they all started using it and over time I went on from there to the rest of the business, where automated finance, sales and project management, the end-to-end process for the entire company.
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Yeah, so that's essentially how I started, and I went on to build workflow architects to help businesses across the board in various industries with the same blessings.
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So yeah, I love that overview, eli, especially because when you talk about those automations, what a lot of people will hear inside of that story is it took you a few hours to build those automations, but of course you did that for future gains, for future wins the fact that once you automate it, you're saving yourself a lot of time in the future and I feel like a lot of people want to skip that step of automating things because it is a lot of work.
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And so where I really want to start with you today is, it seems to me like you view automation as assessing.
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You said it a few times in that overview of you love asking why, why is it that we're doing this?
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Why is it that it works this way?
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Why is it that it doesn't work?
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You ask that question why, and that guides so much of what you do.
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When you start working with businesses, it seems like you don't just automate their processes.
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It seems like you start with that.
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Why Talk to me about understanding the strategic side of it before you ever sit down for those automations?
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So, essentially, something that you'll see when sitting with me in order to resolve your pains, is that the first conversation we'll have I'll essentially spend the whole time asking questions will have.
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I'll essentially spend the whole time asking questions, not scripted, because I mean, I can't tell you what questions I would ask right now, but I would essentially, I mean, hear what your business is about.
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You give me a little bit of a thread on what's happening and then I'll just be going on asking questions.
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And you said asking why, um, and that should, what's the?
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What's the saying?
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Uh question, a good question is half the answer, um, and I think it's actually more than half the answer, um, I would usually walk away from that conversation, um, with a lot of the answers, but then it would take some time to process it and sort of then sort of a picture forms like a puzzle.
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It's very visual and all the pieces would sort of fit together and see where we can eliminate things and why.
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Like, it's about the interconnectedness of things all around.
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I know I'm speaking very, I'm being very abstract, but yeah, we spoke about the Tao right before we started and it all starts with nothingness, like looking at it from a blank slate.
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Okay, you tell me everything that's going on, but the bottom line, the question, is what do you really want?
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Why did you set out to do this business?
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To set up this business?
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What are you offering?
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Why did you set out to do it?
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And very often you start a business, even myself.
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In theory, doing this is great, but actually executing and bring to the table what we offer is very difficult, because we don't just offer to solve your problems, we offer to solve it and then build it.
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We don't get paid if we don't deliver, like it's all about the results.
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Um, so it's great thinking.
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So you have to go back to why did you start this and what?
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What's the foundation on a very basic level?
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If you could be super abstract about it?
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Or what's the foundation On a very basic level?
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If you could be super abstract about it?
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Or this is what I want to accomplish, what would that be?
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And then we would eliminate everything else, all the not waste, all the things that just came into play, because in order to execute this, you have to do all of these things, but we have to look at okay, what if we eliminate all of those?
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What is the least path to resistance to your goal, to what you want to accomplish with your business eli, it's funny.
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You say that you're probably the first person to ever make sense of of a bad habit that I have, but you're making me feel like maybe it's a good habit, and everyone who works on my team knows that sometimes we'll be working on something.
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Let's say, it's a new guide that we're putting together for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs.
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And I'll just reach this point, eli, where I go, I don't know why, but I hate it Like can we just start from scratch?
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And I want to throw everything out the window, because what we fall into the trap of doing as business owners this is not unique to me.
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I think it's just part of being human and definitely part of being a business owner is that we look at what we have and we consistently try to make it better, and I love how much you brought it back to.
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No, it starts with nothingness, and things become so much easier for me when we literally delete the entire document.
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We don't even strip out the parts of it that we like.
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We literally just say hold on, let's reimagine it.
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And that's what I really appreciate about the way that you work at Workflow Architects is that a lot of people come in, and when we talk about process improvement.
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It is that it is improvement.
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Eli, it seems to me like you're not in the business of process improvement.
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How would you articulate the reimagining work that you do, that nothingness that you enjoy?
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starting with, Well, I don't post much on linkedin, even though I should.
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But I have one linkedin post because I had like a moment a few weeks ago and I wrote something on that.
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I mean I'll just so.
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I wrote the evolution of great work.
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Many get discouraged when their work is seemingly evolved from for the purpose of starting from scratch.
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What they don't understand is that they laid the foundation for something greater.
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The work of today is to be formed and executed to completion so that, after the dust settles, there would be a deep understanding as to what's next.
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And, contrary to how many build, it's not so that something could be built atop of what already exists.
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It's so that something could be built on top of the foundational understanding this project brought, not its material existence.
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It's to pursue the foundation, rock bottom, the truth, as close as we can get to it.
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And this work is a constant.
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Now let me rewrite this.
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I love that, eli.
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I'll tell you where my head goes when I hear you read that is simplicity seems to me to be the hardest thing that we can all yearn for, and what we can achieve I think about.
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I think it was an Abraham Lincoln quote where he said if you want me to give a five hour speech, I'm ready to go right now.
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If you want me to give a five minute speech, I'm going to need five hours to prepare.
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And so I love that quote because we can all rush through things and we can all put anything out on our websites.
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I'll call business owners out.
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You know what, eli?
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Let's pick on business owners websites for a second, anyone.
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When they go to their Squarespace dashboard, they can just fill in a template and just say, yeah, here's my about page, here's our contact us page, here's our services page.
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That's what we do and it's easy to fill in those templates.
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But what I think is harder, and that's why I so admire words mean a lot to me and I really admire the way you talk about your business, the way that your website is laid out.
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Actually, it's fun picking on websites with you here, because I think your website is brilliant.
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I think that it's so clear.
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It's got wit, it's got humor, it relates to the person who's scrolling through it, even the section you totally got me, eli where it says we don't care whether you pronounce it as data or data, we care about results, and it just shows a little bit of your personality behind all of that.
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Talk to us about that approach of I guess, yeah simplicity, because a lot of people, when they think about automations I know I'm a sucker for whiteboards I will map out an entire process workflow and say, okay, someone's going to submit a form on this part of our website.
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It's going to feed into our crm here, which is going to kick off an email.
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Here we complicate things.
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Talk to me about that simplification angle so, personally, personally, the way I go about it is sort of forming an abstract idea, like a very ideal situation.
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This is what's happening right now.
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This is what I want.
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What if?
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What if you just do A and then you get B, that's it, nothing in between.
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And, of course, and getting from A to B usually involves a lot of steps, and that's where we sort of get tangled up, having a back and forth in terms of the gaps, in terms of, okay, we can't necessarily make this happen because of this limitation and that, and we need, we need to, there's, we have to add steps in between.
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You can always, there's always a way to get to where you want to get to.
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It's only a, it's only a question of the path, um, so I don't know how to explain this I'll tell you this as someone who's listening to you and engaging with you while we're talking, that right there is a profound insight into the way that your mind thinks.
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There's always a path between a and b.
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It sounds to me like you don't worry about that path when you're dreaming up what it is that you want, because you know that you can trust and fill that in later.
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Pretty much exactly, yeah.
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Yeah, I mean sometimes we have a, we have a good team so we can throw.
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We can throw the ideas against that, against them.
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I mean sometimes I'm a bit too idealistic so we have to validate things beforehand and sometimes we go into projects like in a way, overly ambitious, but so far, thankfully, we haven't had a project we didn't execute.
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There is always a path.
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Sometimes it's sort of I mean, you've got to rip your hair out to sort of achieve that initial objective because it was overly ambitious.
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And making the technology work, um, or the process, the people making that work, is not easy, but there's always a way.
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Um, people get too stuck on the path, that the way that they envisioned, rather than that's not what matters.
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What matters is going around it, or I mean whatever the best path to get there.
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Essentially, yeah, eli, let me put you on the spot here and ask you this, then because one path or one destination that a lot of people look for in business is that term that we throw around so much scale.
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Everybody wants to scale, eli, and I know that it's a big part of your business language.
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As you talk about enabling people to scale, setting them up, you've already talked to us a few times in this conversation about having that foundation.
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Well, the foundation is ultimately what's gonna determine if we can or can't scale.
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I actually think, think quite frequently.
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My word of the year last year was building, and so anytime I was in a city, I looked at buildings and I was like man, that hundred story building must have the most unbelievable foundation, because ultimately, that whole thing is built on top of that foundation, whereas a foundation that's not very deep and maybe we can get a one story, two story, three story building on there, and so I love the fact that you tie in foundation so much.
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With that in mind, what does scale mean to you?
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Everybody throws that term around, but I want to get inside Eli's mind when it comes to scale, how you view it and how you build that foundation to achieve it.
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Sure.
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So on a very tangible level, I'll bring an example of a project we worked on for one of our clients.
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They do legal real estate inspections across New York.
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They came to us that they're spending a fair bit of time on the field to basically, you know, inspectors going down performing the inspections and then they would have to spend up to 20 minutes per report in the office in order to process it.
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There's a lot of I mean legal requirements and data points and so on that have to be included in each report and essentially, again, taking this A to B approach is like okay, you perform an inspection, you want to send it to the client, and scaling that from 20 minutes per report, which means that a person can do, let's say, 10, 15, 20 a day to doing a lot more than that, we essentially brought it down to less than a minute per report in our initial system that we built by essentially processing the data automatically, compiling it and generating it.
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That's taking a process of a very core part of the business, which their business is essentially, to generate these reports.
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That's the value that they bring to their clients.
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To generate these reports.
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That's the value that they bring to their clients and first of all, we did a 20 to 1 improvement in terms of how many you can generate per day, but they got known in the industry as having 24-hour turnaround.
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So that's essentially a tangible example of taking a business, a core aspect of the business this is the service that you offer and essentially scaling it.
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Now they can do an infinite number of these with the same amount of staff putting them together.
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But going a step further, what we did two years after we built the initial system, we essentially set up a system which allowed, instead of the data being pushed to the office the traditional way, we essentially let them fill in the people in the field.
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To fill in information is very difficult and very often doesn't work out or it comes with a lot of pain because you want things to be done simple.
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I like to say that my favorite screen, my favorite UX, is when there is only one button.
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There is only one button Like don't over, like.
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If you can get away with just one button in order and handle everything in the background, the system should do it.
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Then that would be perfect.
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So that's the goal.
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So we essentially sort of have a two-screen, a single screen with another page to select, just like a checklist, and then uploading, uploading the file and the system processes everything in the background and we essentially eliminated back offers in entirety.
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And then we have a portal where their clients log in, get all the reports and that's scale, essentially.
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Yeah, eli, you're preaching to the choir here.
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As a Tesla driver, I, anytime I get into a car now I'm like no, no buttons.
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Why do we have all of these buttons?
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Just give me one iPad that we all know how to use.
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And and honestly, I think that it's that level of simplicity.
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And it's funny because, you know, when I get into my brother's car, my mom's car, their cars have so many buttons.
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German cars love buttons and what kills me about that is it actually makes things harder to find because there are so many different things.
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So simplicity actually comes in that removal.
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It sounds like that's such a core part, coming all the way back to the ultimate removal of starting with nothingness.
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It seems like that's so ingrained in you.
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I do wanna talk about the tech side of it because you're right, you and I both love the abstract, but we also love the technology.
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We love the building blocks that help to enable all of these things.
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Obviously, everybody wants to talk about AI.
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This year it's such a hot topic.
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We hear it from listeners, we talk about it a lot in these podcast episodes.
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What's your take on AI?
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Because I love the fact that AI makes my life easy, some of these processes that you've talked about of compiling data, making sense of it, outputting reports.
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It's really cool that AI can actually do things.
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Now, what's your take on where we are with AI and how we, as business owners, should implement it?
00:22:06.170 --> 00:22:21.048
Okay, so that's a very loaded question, but I guess, to start answering the question, it comes down to the debate whether AI is a product or a feature.
00:22:21.048 --> 00:22:45.288
Two to three years and a lot of them have struggled, especially as open AI sort of improved their model and essentially eliminated them, because they made AI the product rather than a feature.
00:22:45.288 --> 00:22:56.900
It could be like a very defining feature, if not the primary feature, but we've deployed AI across different applications for our customers.
00:22:56.900 --> 00:23:03.805
But the example I gave you beforehand is not AI.
00:23:03.805 --> 00:23:13.548
It's just rethinking the fundamental workflow and finding the simplest path to achieving that, the simplest and most predictable path and just really good UX.
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The simplest path to achieving that, the simplest and most predictable path and just really good UX.
00:23:17.386 --> 00:23:25.670
Because our systems, like the typical adoption time is nearly nothing.
00:23:25.670 --> 00:23:28.388
It's effortless for people to get to know them.
00:23:28.388 --> 00:23:37.972
We put ourselves in the shoes of the user and we make sure that it's just done, simple, as we like to call it.
00:23:37.972 --> 00:23:50.515
At the same time, we've deployed AI as a core feature, which just saves a ton of time for some of our projects.
00:23:52.902 --> 00:24:15.095
We have a client in the construction industry who essentially what they do is interiors purchasing, so they I mean, let's say, you'll go to your favorite um steakhouse and you and let's say, and you look at all the detail, like every tiny detail, the furniture, furniture, the lighting, the plants, everything.
00:24:15.095 --> 00:24:33.732
And it takes a lot of effort from an architectural perspective and then a logistics perspective and a building perspective to make sure that everything comes out beautifully according to spec, and what they do is essentially handling it for you.
00:24:33.732 --> 00:24:39.146
So all the interiors, you look around you, they will make sure to purchase all of it.
00:24:39.146 --> 00:24:54.625
But on their end this is a very time-consuming process Getting all of that data and putting it into the system, quoting it, estimating the costs and then purchasing it.
00:24:54.625 --> 00:24:57.412
The logistics there's just so many moving pieces.
00:24:57.412 --> 00:25:02.992
A single estimate would result in 10 to 15 purchase orders across different vendors.
00:25:05.480 --> 00:25:10.732
So what we did over there were two very defining things.
00:25:10.732 --> 00:25:45.797
One we utilized artificial intelligence to ingest these quote requests and for every line item the system would automatically categorize, subcategorize, detect the manufacturer, vendor margins down to every line item for them, and all they have to do then is just enter the cost and the system will spit out the proposal in their ERP, which we integrated with, and their financial software.
00:25:45.797 --> 00:25:49.722
But that's not.
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The coolest part is that once we ingested every line item for that project within the system, beyond the quoting process, everything was essentially eliminated, because now we have the date, now we know every line item, which vendor it is.
00:26:11.106 --> 00:26:14.775
So now you don't have to spend a ton of time creating your purchase orders in the system.
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The system already has the data.
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So now you don't have to spend a ton of time creating your purchase orders in the system.
00:26:16.252 --> 00:26:17.205
The system already has the data.
00:26:17.205 --> 00:26:33.172
So now, with a single click, you have 15 purchase orders generated without a single error, as long as the intake was done right, and since then they haven't had any errors we're talking about.
00:26:33.172 --> 00:26:35.597
It costs a lot of money, mistakes like that.
00:26:35.597 --> 00:26:53.731
It wasn't just AI, it was defining the process end-to-end, from the beginning until it's delivered to the customer and presented to them in their portal, to make sure the entire pipeline misses no detail, and it essentially eliminates all the work.
00:26:53.731 --> 00:26:57.410
Everything is a cascading effect from the first step.
00:26:58.732 --> 00:27:04.090
Yeah, eli, the way you even talk about these examples in real life case studies of clients that you work with.
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It's so evident to me why your company is called Workflow Architects, because it really is an accurate description of what it is that you're doing.
00:27:13.165 --> 00:27:26.151
And, kudos, I'm super grateful that you worked in the construction industry, because I would imagine that that has shaped some of the way that you see the world, because, obviously, working with clients, working with businesses in that space, it is a methodical.
00:27:26.151 --> 00:27:31.690
They have to follow a blueprint, they have to understand the steps required and I love the fact that you love re-imagining that.
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One thing that I want to call out for listeners that you shared with us is you really emphasized for us that AI is not a band-aid.
00:27:38.791 --> 00:27:46.553
You can't just apply AI and in that one example that you gave to us about generating those reports, you said, no, ai is not part of that.
00:27:46.553 --> 00:27:54.738
We re-imagined the workflow and I so appreciate the way that you share that, eli, but of course, also with the examples of the powers of AI.
00:27:54.738 --> 00:27:58.633
But it starts with understanding the underlying business.
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So lots of food for thought in all of our businesses.
00:28:01.769 --> 00:28:08.071
Eli, the only time I'm going to put you on the spot with a completely left field question that you can take in any direction you want.
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It's the question that I ask at the end of every single episode, and that is what's your best piece of advice Knowing that we're being listened to by both entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at all different stages of their own growth journeys, and you're also one of us.
00:28:21.288 --> 00:28:25.949
You're not just a subject matter expert, you are a fellow entrepreneur who's growing your own business.
