Doug Wagner [00:00:01]:
7:46 now in the Morning Show. Doug Wagner with you on a Friday the 13th, February 13th, that is. We have 24 degrees in Cedar Rapids, some light fog. Iowa City checking in with fog and 21 degrees. Haze in Dubuque and 27, 21 and sunshine in Waterloo, and it’s partly cloudy, 30 degrees in Davenport. On the Morning Show, joining me on the Corridor Energy Cooperative Newsmaker Line is Morning Show friend Joshua McNary from McNary Marketing and Design. Um, once again, it’s— he sends out these newsletters and they just catch my eye. It says, why technology feels harder right when your business is working.
Doug Wagner [00:00:42]:
We joined Joshua McNary at the intersection of technology and marketing here on The Morning Show. Good morning, Joshua. How are you today?
Joshua McNary [00:00:51]:
I am great. Thanks for having me back on.
Doug Wagner [00:00:53]:
Glad to have you on. I know my listeners take a lot from this, whether they’re business owners or they work within businesses, or maybe it’s just a mom or dad or a grandma or grandpa who’s puttering around here in the morning. They learn something from you because you’ve always got a very unique perspective on this. Talk to me about where this headline came from, why technology feels harder right when your business is working.
Joshua McNary [00:01:18]:
Thanks, Doug. Yes, well, As we grow our businesses, as we continue to use technology in our work and our lives, we find success. We find revenue growing, teams expanding, customers being added to our repertoire. But ultimately what happens as we’re doing that, we’re using technology to help us jump those lily pads, we’ll say, across the pond. And as we do so, we find that we the connective tissue between these technologies start to break down. The technology was scrappy and forgiving as we started the process, but as we move along and start to mature as a business or an organization, the technology starts to break down because now that technology that was great to get to where we are now is starting to not really be able to support the weight of our success.
Doug Wagner [00:02:09]:
Is that because it’s not scalable, or is it because it’s specifically designed to be become extinct?
Joshua McNary [00:02:18]:
Well, I think it really comes back to not so much the technology, because each individual technology could support that or not, that particular question you have. So it’s really more about the people and the processes that we are employing and then supporting with the technology. So it’s maybe less of a technical issue as much as it is as people and an organizational issue of how are we documenting our processes and then being able to apply that in the technology. How are we working with our team to ensure that they all understand how to use the technology tools that we put in place or help us identify where the weaknesses are in the process and the people systems to get the technology to do what we want. Technology is just a tool. It is not— it doesn’t have any values of itself. We as individuals, especially in this day of artificial intelligence, still are at the center of everything, and we need to make sure we employ that so that as we try to go to that next level in our business, jump to the next lily pad, we’re able to actually do that.
Doug Wagner [00:03:22]:
Lily pads everywhere. I like that. It takes me back to video game days. I mean, for me, that’s, that’s a nice one. I like the way in the email that you sent out that you’re drawing people into this conversation that you would like to have. You say what often helps at this stage isn’t more tools or more effort, it’s clearer thinking. And I think a lot of people can just get in their own way. I mean, instead of, um, instead of raking the yard, they’ll throw down rakes so they can step on them and hit themselves in the forehead.
Joshua McNary [00:03:52]:
Yes. Well, I mean, technology has a way of enticing us, right? I mean, the marketing around this stuff, literally now with artificial intelligence particularly, you see a lot of little magic icons and pretty much any application you do in your personal life or in your business life. And they’re telling us, “Hey, this is going to be magic. This is going to allow us to get to the next level.” But the reality is that that is just a tool. It still is just— you need to know your reason why you’re trying to do something within your business, within the next step. And this is where we get lost, and that’s what this article was about, is we get lost in our success around technology, and then we kind of find ourselves floating a bit and not really being able to figure out that next piece. And it really is focus and energy around the who and the why and then the what.
Doug Wagner [00:04:43]:
How interesting is this? It’s The Morning Show, Doug Wagner with Joshua McNary from McNary Marketing and Design, taking a look at the way you interact not only externally but even internally. And I think that it’s so funny because depending on where you are, like in my industry right here technology, they make a leap. But the funny thing is that they, like, they leap forward and they say, we’ll get to training you later, we have people who will handle this in another place right now. And then the problem is, then soon they’ll let that person go and it falls on you. You’ve got no training to get it done. Smaller businesses, it, it works a lot more differently. You have to become the jack of all trades, master of none.
Joshua McNary [00:05:26]:
Well, that is true. I mean, it does depend on the size of the business, and that common scenario you just said that you have someone who is in charge of that technology and for whatever reason they leave the firm or they get busy with something else or something, and then the loss of ownership of a technology can lead to big problems. So say you have somebody in charge of your e-commerce element and then they fall off for whatever reason, and then the people that are in charge of the accounting department which is going to need to connect to the e-commerce thing don’t know what to do. Make the move forward that you need for your report or whatever you’re looking for. So that is a very common scenario. And then when we have an individual or a smaller business trying to keep all the balls in the air here, it’s very easy to fall into this trap that we’re talking about here. And then I’ll add that we were talking about being strategic here with our technology. And I’m all for strategy.
Joshua McNary [00:06:20]:
You’ll see that in anything I write. But there’s also the element that there is a speed component to technology, and that adds to the mix here in that because technology is moving so quickly in the age of AI and whatnot, we end up in a situation where we not only have to be smart about what we’re doing like we’re talking about here, but then also take action at the same time and in good pace so that we can be successful.
Doug Wagner [00:06:44]:
Joshua McNary, he is the guy that we go to at the section of technology and marketing, McNary.me, M-C-N-A-R-Y dot M-E. Thanks for joining me on The Morning Show, Joshua.