Paul Malott with Automations24

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. So today’s guest is Paul Malott, founder and CEO of Automations24, where he helps growing businesses eliminate friction and scale smarter through no code automation. With more than 15 years of experience in procurement system strategy and digital transformation, Paul has built automation solutions for everyone, from lean startups to fortune 500, focusing on fast, flexible, high ROI workflows without costly IT overhauls. He’s also a doctoral candidate in AI and business strategy, author of a forthcoming book on automation. We Should talk about that today and host of the Control Alt delete, Repeat podcast, Paul brings a people first approach to automation, showing how the right systems free leaders to scale with clarity and confidence. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Malott: Well, thank you very much for having me, Trisha, I appreciate that. Uh, we’ll also have you introduce me when I walk through the door in the house to my children. They’ll show me some respect. Maybe, uh, a little more than than they do now. You know what I mean?

Trisha Stetzel: I pride myself on giving very nice intros to my guests, Paul.

Trisha Stetzel: Because we don’t often do that for ourselves, so I’m glad you liked it. Hey, hey, let’s dive into who in the world is Paul? You already talked about your kiddos, so you may have to give us a little bit of insight into maybe you’ll tell us a dad joke or something later. I don’t know, but who is Paul? And then let’s talk a little bit about Automations24 before we take a deeper dive.

Paul Malott: Sure, sure. So again, thank you for the opportunity. I’m a fan of the show and very glad to be here. Um, my name is Paul Malott. Uh, m a l o t and not mallet or anything like that, but, um, I digress. I am essentially a 15 year procurement professional who roughly two years ago took the deep dive into entrepreneurship. And that means a lot of different things. Um, it means adjustment to from corporate life to entrepreneurial, uh, hustle. And it means, you know, reskilling. It means essentially revaluing and looking at yourself all over again. And, um, that’s been a fantastic experience while I’m here talking today is because exactly that what’s happened is I’ve transformed as a person from being a corporate, uh, juice sipper, so to speak. Right? To really valuing the type of what I can bring to businesses. Right. The type of value in my unique value proposition that exists for businesses. And that’s really what turned into automations 24. I had this realization in my corporate experience that there were things that I were doing that were confined by the guardrails of the organization itself. And, um, unfortunately, we weren’t a fit, right? It was kind of a mutual decision, so to speak. And from that, automations 24 started right. I reskilled myself became, uh, so an expert will say in automations and use some of the skills that I had learned in the corporate environment to start transforming businesses. And it was really serendipitous the moment. Right. The timing was everything. Because these tools, these artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, perplexity, Claude, they became accessible and widely available and cost effective. So, you know, my feather in my cap, so to speak, in my professional career was through building systems, through changing processes, and these tools becoming accessible like they are today, uh, enable businesses of all sizes to make leaps and bounds in their internal processes, external processes. And that’s what I’m doing now, is essentially removing the digital rock from people’s digital shoes and helping them be more efficient.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that digital rocks from their digital shoes. Okay, so I may use that later. Paul, please. All right, I want to I want to start with something super simple. There are people listening to this show today that are still reluctant to dive into AI. I’m just I’m just throwing it out there. What would you say to those folks who haven’t, who feel like they haven’t even put their toes in the water when it comes to AI?

Paul Malott: Sure. It’s a it’s a really good question. I question. I think it’s a perspective, uh, the idea that hustle equates to money is changing, right? We see these companies that are 510 smaller than that people and making, uh, huge, huge value, presenting huge value to, to clients. Right? Whether it’s through software or changing the way that physical services are delivered. And we have to kind of embrace that change of of mind frame. It’s not necessarily hustle equates to more money or more success. Now it’s about developing something that is agile and flexible and can be, uh, basically you can update it and change it, right? As the external market demands. And AI is really good for that. Right? We have to think now about if you remove the hustle from the equation and you just think about doing things smarter. And we think about manual processes, how much manual effort we put into our business. And I’ll speak to the CEOs out there, to the to the business owners, the the presidents of their own company. We’re not working to bury ourselves from the work, right. We’re working so that we can benefit from it in one way or another.

Paul Malott: Maybe we love it. Maybe you’re freaks like me. You really like to work really, really hard and deep dive things. But there’s a bigger reason for it, all right? And when you think about all the hustle you’re putting into it, the manual work, you need to think about it like a tax on your business. Right? It’s an inefficiency. It doesn’t necessarily show up as a line item, but it’s going to erode your margins. It’s going to present the risk in the future. And you have to think of a way, just standard business is to think of a way to compete. Right. And AI is a tool to compete. Automations are a tool to compete. So with the accessibility of it, don’t be afraid to dip your toes in it. Spend the $10 right where it used to cost two. Two years ago. Ten years ago. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. Right now, it’s effective. And if you have a little interest, you can adapt to it or adapt the tool to you and your business process and start doing things slightly different, but more effective and more efficient.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. And $10 will get you a long way with tools that.

Speaker4: We have access.

Trisha Stetzel: To now for sure.

Speaker4: It really will.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, you’ve you have experienced, Paul, from startups all the way to fortune 500 companies. What’s the biggest mistake you see businesses make when they first try to automate?

Paul Malott: Well, it’s the boil the ocean problem, right? You can’t eat the elephant whole. You can’t try to boil the ocean. The ocean. Um, and I think, uh, especially in the past year, we’ve seen a lot of organizations jump on the AI and automation hype train. And that’s great right? They’re recognizing the value that it can bring, but they’re also, in a sense blinding themselves to the complexities of business. Right. In any business, implementing something is a challenge. It’s a cultural challenge. It’s more than, here’s your tool, go use it. And unfortunately, the biggest issue is that businesses look at the tool like it’s a tool. And they expect use just because the tool is available. There’s a lot more to it. And to defeat that. My suggestion is always go for the low hanging fruit. Go, go for small wins. And those small wins, they build momentum over time rather than, you know, hitting a wall like some of these other organizations will when they’re throwing everything in the kitchen sink at the the the problem. Right.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I need this tool and I need that tool and I need the other tool. And then I try to implement all of those tools at once. And it makes things super challenging.

Speaker4: Right. Yeah.

Paul Malott: And you know, and it does. And some people believe that they need AI in their business, but they really need automations. And it’s it’s really interesting to me that they get mixed up in definition because an automation is really just taking the way I define it. It’s taking a piece of information from one application and transferring it to another, or transforming the information as it goes between the other application. Right. And it’s it’s a set of ones and zeros and codes that people way smarter than me are able to come up with some really cool solutions with without really embedding AI into that workflow or that process. Then when you start embedding AI into automations, that’s when you’re not just generating using AI to generate stuff or using automation to transfer data. That’s when you’re transforming it and you’re really building upon. You’re putting your own essence into that message that you’re trying to get across or that that process. Right. And so to delineate between both and then say, well, what is it I really need? That’s also a really good first step. Maybe you just want to take something from ten Excel files and make them go to one. That’s an automation problem.

Paul Malott: But maybe you need ten sentiment analysis on those ten Excel files. That’s an AI problem right? So so determining what problems you may have or is maybe a good first step. And that usually equates to where am I spending time? I hate spending time on like uh, for me, back to the Excel thing. Ten Excel files open at once makes my mind explode. You know I can’t. And then you one piece of data is off in my mind explodes again. That’s a perfect situation for me to use AI, right? It’s it’s a good enough tool now where you can confidently, especially with data and transforming data and interpreting information, you can confidently use it with the right prompts and the right guidance. I tell people back to my children, talk to it like you’re talking to my three year old, and you will learn how to speak with it, how to prompt it better, and you will get better results as you learn the process, right? But you gotta you gotta start. So the first thing is always start. Don’t start in something huge. Start with something small that that you’re going to be able to manage.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah I so I love that you talk about or even in your bio um, no code automation. So I thank you for giving us a great definition or a difference between AI and automation. So what exactly is no code automation?

Paul Malott: Oh, it’s the serendipitous, the serendipity I discussed earlier about my career and tech kind of coming together, right? I always looked at things as a corporate procurement director from the very high level. Eagle. Eagle. Eye view of the process and what we need to do. And no code tools allowed me to apply that logic to technology without code. Like literally no code means no code. So there are platforms out there like Make.com and Zapier, Pipedrive and probably others, right. That you as as a like me, not classically trained in, in coding or development. You can go in there and with logic start putting together a process. Right. You can the we’ll go back to Excel. You can take your Excel sheet and find through this system that sell sell a two and grab the data from that literally like you know if your you’re visual, it’s beautiful. You can grab the information and pull it to the next step. And what the platform is doing is handling the coding behind it such that you now have a workflow. Previously, you’d have to hire a developer to build a custom solution for you, and now you can do it yourself. Or you can hire companies like automations 24 to do it at a bigger scale and help with the implementation and support. Um, the the implementation, the effectiveness of it. Right. Making sure it’s effective.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Paul, who are your best clients? Who are the people that come to you and say, this is what I need. Help me.

Paul Malott: There’s a lot of different, uh, businesses that find value in this, right? So it’s a hard question to answer. And I wish I had a better answer because every smart business owner knows exactly what their ICP is. But but the capability of Automations and artificial intelligence is functionally agnostic, right? And when you think of process and just data exchange, then then you can apply the same kind of logic across functions and so on. So it’s really hard to answer that question, but I find that founders who need to develop their business, they need a digital infrastructure. They really benefit from no code, low code because they can piecemeal. It sounds wrong to say piecemeal. They can strategically build modules that are custom to their needs, that are specific to their businesses requirements, not spending $5,000 doing it. And they can build these systems and have them talk through that type of platform. And now you’ve basically built an enterprise resource system with under $100 by piecemealing with automation. Right? So there are blueprints out there. A blueprint would be something you could go on and download the automation before you even have to drag and drop, right? There are blueprints out there for small businesses that can help them start up that are free. They’re very simple automations, like categorizing emails or taking that email and reading the document in the email.

Paul Malott: And those things are very helpful when you’re doing it yourself, when you’re, uh, technical founder and you’re very focused on the product you’re making, you don’t have time for that stuff, you know? So so to be able to do it quickly where it used to take hours, it’s a huge time saver. On the other side, the businesses that are ingrained in how they do things, the business, the small 50 to 200 people, businesses, e-commerce, they’re they’re stuck in their ways. And they are realizing now that doors are opening where inefficiencies can be closed off. They can be just by doing things and, uh, differently. And it’s unfortunate that the way that some companies are realizing is through oh crap moments. Right. But there are other companies out there that are like, I think we could use this tool in this unique way. And you start to see the value come in, uh, almost instantaneously for these companies because they have the business, they have the tried and true customers that come back and that hits their bottom line immediately. So I love serving those companies as well, because you can come in and very quickly provide them return on investment.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Well and listen, your ICP has a challenge. It’s not a particular industry or particular size. Right. They actually have something in common. Uh, so I think you exactly who you serve without, uh, worrying about who that you know, what industry they come from or what size they are because they’re challenged with the same thing, which is they need to be more productive in their businesses. Um, okay. I know people are already ready to connect with you because you have so much knowledge around automation and AI and so many of us don’t. So we need somebody like Paul to talk to and come in and help us with our businesses, tell people how they can connect with you or the best way to find you.

Paul Malott: The phenomenal compliment. Thank you very much. People can find me at WWE 24.com or on LinkedIn. Paul Malott m a l o t t.

Speaker4: Okay.

Trisha Stetzel: Thank you very much, Paul. So I want to talk about the human side of systems because not everybody’s ready for automation or they don’t even want to talk about AI. So how does a leadership mindset or even the culture of a business. Play a role in creating this automation ready organization or environment.

Paul Malott: But, uh, great question. And we kind of alluded to that earlier in that you can’t just grab a tool and hand it to somebody and say, you know, here you go. It’d be the equivalent of me, uh, you know, having a chainsaw or something, and I wouldn’t know what I was doing with it, you know, it’d be dangerous, right? Excuse me. So in these cases, these companies need to realize that their fear is a common fear. Just like you had mentioned the. Com the commonalities of issues across the businesses. It’s a common fear across businesses. And I think the best thing that companies can do culturally is build the idea that artificial intelligence is not replacing people. It’s an augmenting. It’s augmenting their capability more or less. Right. And that means AI isn’t here to take jobs. It means that the company is trying to do the same thing they’ve always tried to do compete, right? But they’re competing in a way that they’re giving us the opportunity to augment our value. Right? So it means augment means amplify. It means if I’m really good engineer, I have a tool now that can amplify what is really good but also really bad, right. So it’s a balancing act that I believe company leadership must do when they’re implementing this.

Paul Malott: Take their time. Right. Recognize the value that comes through taking the time and allowing people to achieve comfort in using the tools before you demand the return from the tool itself. Right? You know, it’s a harmonizing action here. So with augmenting and amplifying comes this idea that the Dunning-Kruger effect, that if you just give people this tool and we use the tool and we don’t really understand the layers that are developing under it. We could potentially develop this idea that we’re super Uber competent in whatever it is we’re doing, but in reality be incompetent in it, right? And that’s a that is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action in AI. And some of the things I’ve studied is found to exacerbate that issue a little bit, because you can get on using it and get answers and you get. And it hallucinates. Right. And then studies have found that humans are reading the answers from AI and repeating the answers, even if it’s a hallucinated wrong answer. So the element of human in the loop, the element of giving your people time to learn the tool, learn how to communicate with it, and demand from it the ROI with that time. That’s really the important thing for businesses.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, and I love that you talk about it’s not a replacement. There are so many conversations and posts and things out there, right, that we’re reading that says, oh, automation, AI are going to take over the world and everyone’s going to lose their lose their jobs. I mean, the sky is falling, right? Uh, and I think in reality, we know that’s not true, but it’s nice to hear you, an expert in this space, really talk about how humans need to be, uh, writing alongside or using the tools. Right? Because that’s where the information comes from. It comes from smart humans.

Speaker4: Not not. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Go ahead. Please.

Paul Malott: Well, it’s interesting, I always like to think about Henry Ford in this example and the automobile. And there was a I’m going to misquote this and I apologize for this, but he was asked a question like, what do the if I gave the people what they wanted, I would have gave they would have wanted faster horses. Right? So the idea that, um, we’re at this kind of moment right now where, uh, we’re we’re getting a tool maybe that we don’t realize we need immediately to. That can be something, uh, that we have to cope with because it is a different way of doing things, and it’s being forced on us, uh, I think to the benefit of all of us, faster than we’ve ever seen before. Right? I the way smarter people than me out there talk about how we’re seeing 30 plus years of technological change in three, right? From from these changes in AI. That compression really makes it hard for us to adapt. So business owners, again, have to be understanding of the culture impact that that has on their business. Right.

Speaker4: Mhm.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely. And and technology is moving so fast. Thank you for bringing that up. Because you knew I was going to ask you this question. Not really. Uh what are you excited about coming through the end of 2025 into 2026 and beyond?

Paul Malott: Uh, the accessibility of these tools, the fact that they are more accessible than ever, the fact that that means that so many creative people are going to be start using, are starting to use these tools in ever more creative ways. I believe the and I need to caution about this too. They’re all making our lives frictionless, right? These tools are designed to make our lives frictionless. And I believe innovation. And, you know, it comes from friction in a way. Right. Solutions come from problem solving. So, you know, I’m excited, but I’m also astute in watching it happen. Because as we start to alleviate frictions in business, you know, we can’t be complacent, right? So I’m really excited about the tools and solutions that creativity is bringing out there. I’m really excited about the possibility that, you know, I envision the future being, uh, personal tech stacks where we all are capable of designing our unique persona, for lack of a better term. That is digital and and we’re able to we all have the capability to manage it accordingly. Right? And it goes to the idea that we’re personal branding ourselves. This is another way for us to recognize value, right? Um, but we have to be cautious of it too, because it’s going to present unique issues, but unique issues present unique solutions. We just can’t be complacent.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s moving so fast at this point. Right. We’ve got to at least embrace a portion of it and start small. That’s what I heard you say. Start with something. Right. Um, okay. Can we talk about the book? Can we talk about your book? Okay. Tell me about it.

Paul Malott: Sure. Unleashing the AI Cash Flow Machine is a book written for small business owners, and it essentially details, uh, ten of my favorite open source tools, and open source is essentially where the developers are kind enough to provide free or very cheap usage of these high tech tools. Um, and what I do is I describe, you know, these tools individually what their business case uses are. And it’s really meant to bridge the gap between the super techy stuff that, you know, I barely understand and, uh, the and the people who want to just run their business but don’t know where to start with AI. This is designed to give you a high level idea of what tool is out there, for what purpose, and teach you when the time is right to start dipping your toes in the water.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay, awesome. So can we find the book yet, or are we still waiting for it to come out?

Paul Malott: You can you can find it on Amazon right now.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. Ai cash flow machine.

Paul Malott: Unleashing the AI cash flow machine.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely unleashing the AI cash flow machine I love it. It’s fantastic. Okay, what about your podcast? Control, alt? Delete, repeat.

Paul Malott: That podcast is, uh, where I talk with tons of people in my situation, right. And business owners and we it’s meant to be a quick ten, 15 minute, uh, trial and tribulation, so to speak. Right. And the idea behind it and the reason for the name is exactly that many times in business and in life, your control alt deleting something, right. And automation is, uh, repeating something. What what process are you repeating. So we take that principle. What processes did businesses or small business owners run into that they were like control alt delete please. And then what ones were they? What did they find that was super successful for them and why? And how did they use that and adapt. So that’s where when you hop on and you’re listening, you get to hear really cool examples of business owners and from all different types of industries, and how they’re using AI and automation to overcome that. Control alt delete moment.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s fantastic. So you guys go out to Paul’s website or and or Amazon to find his book, and his website is automations 24 so o t o m a t I o n s the number two. The number four. Comm automations 24 comm. Paul, what a great conversation today. I’m so glad that you came and spent this time with me today.

Paul Malott: Thank you very much, Trisha. The pleasure is mine.

Trisha Stetzel: So if you could leave the listeners with one thing today, what would it be?

Paul Malott: Start small. Don’t. Don’t be afraid to get wet. But. But start small and, uh, talk to when you’re using a large language model, talk to it like it’s Paul’s three year old daughter.

Speaker5: I love that Paul’s three year old daughter.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. And and if you want.

Paul Malott: Brains in there. So. So you’ll get good answers. Trust me.

Speaker5: I love it.

Trisha Stetzel: It’s fantastic. Paul, thank you again for your time today. This has been amazing.

Paul Malott: Thank you Trisha I appreciate you.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation I had with Paul, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran or a Houston Leader writer. Ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.