Make AI your new assistant

In this video, I'm going to show you how I got Claude Desktop to actually call restaurants for me in order to book reservations. You'll learn how to connect Claude to any of the apps that you use on a day to day basis. This means that you could actually speak with the Claude interface and ask it to do things like make a phone call, book meetings, send emails, etc. 

All right, let's dive right into a demo and I'm going to explain exactly how you can do this yourself. I'm going to simply ask Claude to call restaurants for me and book reservations. It's going to be using Synthflow, which is an AI calling platform, to interact with a restaurant to book this reservation based on my Google Calendar availability, which it has access to. And after it confirms, it will then add this as an event to my Google Calendar and even send an email with the reservation details, all by messaging with Claude right here directly. 

All right, so here are the instructions that I'm giving it. I'm basically saying book a reservation at this phone number, which I provided a phone number, which this is actually mine because I want to show you what this phone call is actually going to sound like. Instead of calling like a real restaurant, however, any phone number right here will be applied. So if I said call a certain number, it will actually call it. 

Next up, I basically added some information that I needed to hand over to the AI assistant for this booking. So I want this to be for. Let's actually make this for four people anytime between 6pm and 9pm on April 11. Basically, it's going to pull to see if that's available in my Google Calendar. And then once that is actually confirmed with the restaurant and the call has been completed, it's going to add this to my Google Calendar as an event, along with sending me an email confirmation at my email address. So all I need to do, I'm going to click Send and now it's going to begin actually performing these actions and making this phone call. 

So what it's doing now is it's asking to have access to these tools that I created via this MCP that I'm going to show you exactly how to do in this video. So right now it's pulling information from my Google Calendar to see if these time slots are available. 

Next up, what it's doing is it's actually triggering this phone call and I should be receiving a phone call any second from the phone number that I actually told it to call. And this is going to be an AI assistant that I configured. And I'm going to show you how you could do that in this video. Is that possible? Yeah, sure. When would you like to book this reservation and at what time so I could confirm? Great. I'm looking to book a reservation for Friday, April 11th at 7pm it's for a party of four. Can you check if that's available? Yeah, actually looks like we have that available. Would you like me to confirm that with you? Yes, please. That would be perfect. Can you confirm the reservation for four people on Friday, April 11th at 7pm? Thank you. Yep, you're all set. We'll see you then. Awesome. Thank you so much. Looking forward to it. Have a great day and goodbye. Yeah, have a good day. See you. 

All right, there we go. So it actually triggered that phone call. That was an AI phone call. And what it's going to do now is it's going to basically add this as an event to my Google Calendar and now it's actually going to send me an email with this information. And here we go. You could see I'm writing to confirm you about your dinner reservation. Here are the details. It shows the restaurant, it shows the time, the amount of people, and it shows that this has actually been added in my calendar. Let me check my Google Calendar now. And here we go. You could see right here, dinner reservation at ariana for people, 7 to 9pm so there we have it. Claude actually triggered all of this for me on my behalf. I'm going to show you how to do that in this video. 

All right, so first things first, I'm going to be using Synth Flow in order to initiate our AI phone call. So what you just saw in the previous clip of me actually using this is an AI phone caller that I actually created using Synth Flow. So if you want to use Synth Flow, there's a link to sign up in the description. However, I'm just going to log into my account and when I log in here, you're going to see this user interface where we could actually configure and create our own AI assistant that can make phone calls for us. 

So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go ahead and build this from scratch. We could choose whether we want this to be an inbound caller, an outbound caller, or a widget. However, for the sake of this, since I'm going to be using this to actually make calls for me and make reservations on my behalf, that obviously needs to be an outbound phone caller. So let's just click on the outbound and Obviously the first thing we need to do is configure this. We're going to give our assistant a name. So I'm just going to call this Brock's Calling Assistant. I'm just going to basically configure this. Use the recommended model, which is a GPT4OH mod model. We could actually add a knowledge base to this. 

So if you've seen my previous videos on synthflow, we could give as much information about our business or a background on ourself or whatever use case we're gonna be using. For now we're gonna skip this part. We don't need to configure this knowledge base. Next up, big part here. We wanna configure the voice so we can choose what voice we would like to use. For example, let me just listen to a couple of these. Hey there, go ahead and edit this. I actually created a couple clones of myself which we could use if we wanted to. Let's take a listen. Hey there. For the sake of this, I'm not gonna use that. I'm gonna use one of the ones that are inside of here. 

So what I'm gonna do, I'm go prompt and I need to change the greeting message here. Otherwise we're not going to be able to hear Like I want to be able to hear an actual full sentence before choosing which voice I want to use. So let's just say. So basically our AI caller is going to greet the person by saying, hi, I'm calling to see if there are any reservations available. Are you the right person to speak with? So what I'm going to do, I need to make sure to save our prompt and then I'm going to come back to our configure here and just go to the voices. Let's take a listen to these. I am calling to see if there are any reservations available. Are you the right person to speak with? So first of all, that's actually a great voice. Except I could actually go through and listen to a couple more. Let's listen to the clone voice again. Again. So this is me. I am calling to see if there are any reservations available. Are you the right person to speak with? That just sounds so weird to me, the fact that it's my voice clone. So I'm going to go ahead and move forward with Jessica. This is great. 

We could configure this however we want. Patience level. We could make it low, medium or high. That's basically how long it takes for the AI caller to actually respond. We're going to make that low so it sounds as human as possible. I'm not going to touch any of this. 

We're next going to move down to the prompt. So we already configured our greeting message. We can make this whatever we want for whatever use case we are going to be using. However, we need to come to the prompt and edit this this. So I need to change all of this because this is a like predetermined prompt from a templated AI calling assistant that has no context of what we're going to be doing. So for what I'm going to be building, we could use a pretty simple prompt. So right here it basically says you are an AI assistant calling restaurants on behalf of Brock to book reservations. Your task is to request a reservation for the party size, date and time specified by Brock. Confirm the reservation is successfully booked before ending the call and then if the requested time is unavailable, please or politely ask the closest available time and confirm with rock if needed. Be polite, clear and efficient. Your goal is to ensure the restaurant reservation is confirmed. We need to add this last sentence here, so this should be good to go again. You could get as specific with this as you want. I'm going to click on save prompt. 

Next up we need to actually go ahead and give our assistant a phone number. So I'm going to come to deployment. I'm going to click on change here to add a phone number and I'm basically going to select a phone number here. If you don't have one, you could actually go ahead and come over here and buy a phone number. It's super cheap, like maybe a dollar a month or something. So now that that's configured, I can now go ahead and test this out. I should be receive a phone call on my phone via this AI caller. So I'm going to click on test assistant. I'm going to input a phone number and then let's click on call and I should be receiving something shortly. I'm calling to see if there are any reservations available. Are you the right person to speak with? Yeah. When are you looking to make a reservation? Great. I'm looking to book a reservation for brock on Friday, April 11th at 7pm it's for a party of four. Is that time available? Yeah, that sounds great. I'll make sure to book you in. You are confirmed and we will see you then. Awesome. Thank you so much. Looking forward to it. Have a great day. 

All right, there we go. So we actually got the phone call. This is all working properly and again we could set this up however we want we could get very custom with this for whatever specific use case we want for our phone caller. 

However, now we're going to go to Zapier mcp. So what Zapier MCP is, it essentially allows you to connect this with Claude. So think of Zapier. It's an automation platform. You could build out any automation that you want. It's connected with 8,000 different apps. This essentially allows us to make it so we can trigger a phone call directly inside of Claude, so it has access to the different tools inside of this MCP server. I'm going to show you exactly how to configure this. 

First of all, what we're going to do, we're going to come to edit MCP actions, and there's a couple of different actions that we need to add in order to recreate the demo that I did in the beginning of this video. We initially need to enable Synflow in order to create the phone call. We need to enable Synthflow to get the phone call, which you can see right here, we need to enable Gmail in order to send an email with this information to ourself to confirm this as well as we need a couple of Google Calendar events, such as Find Event or I mean, we need to do Google Calendar find multiple events in order to see if we have calendar availability. And then we also need to create detailed events here. 

So it's as simple as coming down here, clicking Add a new Action. I'm going to type in Synth Flow or whatever app we're looking to add, and I'm going to click Create Call. Basically, I'm going to have to just go and connect my account. It's really easy to do. You just basically come here, you're prompted, you just connect this, connect your API key that you find in Synth Flow, find your API key, you'd come to deployment. And then right here, just copy that, and then you're going to paste that over into that window we just saw. Once we enable this, we just click Enable. 

All right, so before we move forward, we're going to need to do one thing. We need to map our Model id. So this will essentially trigger the specific assistant that we just created. So what I will do, I'll come back here, click on Assistant id and I would click on Set a specific value for this field and add my Model id. It'll essentially trigger this specific AI calling assistant so that way it doesn't get confused. However, all of this is good to go. We can now click on Enable Action. 

And so now when we Connect this MCP server to Claude, it will have the ability to actually make that phone call. So we need to do that for all of our actions here. Sending an email, finding multiple events from Google Calendar, anything you want. You could actually connect to 30,000 different automations directly inside of Zapier and connect Claude to it. 

All right, so the next thing we need to do is I'm going to look up Zapier mcp, I'm going to click on get started here and we need to actually copy this Endpoint URL. So if you're right here, we're going to come to mcp. On the left hand side, we're going to copy this URL. So this is almost like an API key. We just need to copy this into Claude and it will then have access to all the actions that we enabled inside of our MCP server. 

Next up, I'm going to need to use the Claude desktop app. So if you don't have that already, make sure to download it. I'm going to come over to the settings. So I don't know if you can actually see this on my screen, but if you come to the top on Mac, you're going to click on the Claude app and then go to Settings and then you're going to come down to developer. Looks like I already have a preexisting one here. Let me just delete this and show you how to set this up. So I'm going to click on Edit config. I'm going to open up this little file here. Also. Do not worry if you don't know how to code. Don't pay attention to this. You just literally need to like copy and paste what I just copied. Right, sorry. Actually we're not going to copy this. I forgot. We need to actually come to Claude here and we need to copy a different code snippet. So I'm going to copy this code right here again. Don't let this scare you. I'm just going to come back over to Claude, I'm going to click on Edit config. I'm going to open this, basically going to paste this exactly in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just exit this and save this and I need to actually exit Claude and then I'm going to reload it. And then once I reload Claude desktop, we should now have access to these tools. Tools. 

All right, so once we open up our Claude desktop app, after shutting it down, we should now see a little camera here along with a number. So Right now we have 26 MCP tools enabled, which are from the Zapier MCP that we just actually connected. So if I come here, you can see all of these different tools that I have access to that we give access to in our MCP server, including the Send Email tool, Find Event tool in the Google Calendar, Create Detailed Event as well as there is is the synthflow Create call right there as well. 

So now we can actually come here and tell it to send an email or initiate a call. So let's first of all test off the email functionality. Let's just say send a joke to this email address and essentially it's going to ask us to enable this tool. And here we go. I'm not sure if you can see that. I just received an email on my phone from Claude directly. 

All right, let's try to trigger a phone call just like we did at the beginning of this video. Book a reservation based on the availability I have my calendar and then send an email with this updated information once this is actually confirmed. 

Looks like it's now triggering the synth flow Create call action here. So I should be receiving a phone call any second. Calling to see if there are any reservations available. Are you the right person to speak with? Yeah. When would you like to book your reservation for and for how many people? Great. I'm looking to book a reservation for brock. It's for four people on Friday, April 11th at 7pm Is that time available? Yeah, that sounds great. Awesome. So just to confirm, I've got a reservation for four people on Friday, April 11th at 7pm Is there anything else you need from me? Nope, that's everything. We will see you then. Perfect. Thanks for your help. Have a great day and goodbye. See ya. Okay, there we go. 

So now what this is going to do is going to create this act. It's going to create this event in my Google Calendar and it's going to send an email with all this information to my email. 

So we created an entire AI assistant inside of Claude that could actually perform actions for us, like even sending phone calls and making phone calls for us. That's absolutely insane. The fact that we're able to do this, this is a power of the Zapier MCP in action. So it makes it easy for anybody. 

Even if you don't know how to code, how to build these MCP servers with literally thousands of actions across all your different apps for your agents to perform just like Claude. All right, guys, there you have it. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like and subscribe to the channel. I cover all things for non techies. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. I'll see you guys in the next video.

Hello, I'm Mike. Well, I can do so much for us right now. It can answer our questions, it can go off and do deep research, but can it make outbound phone calls and find the best price on something?

I'm looking to get a quote for a taxi. Probably about 80 quid. Oh, wow, that seems a bit high. And maybe even negotiate a cheeky little discount. I've actually gotten much better rates before. What's the absolute best you can do?

In this video, we're going to find out if AI is up to the task of making multiple phone calls on my behalf so I can spend more time chilling out and doing what I love. While AI researches the boring things, let's dive in and use a tool called Synthflow. I can create agents that can make phone calls on my behalf.

Before I do that though, I need to upgrade my plan because I'm on a free plan and you can't make outbound calls without upgrading. You'll see here there's a very reasonable starter plan at $29 a month. But I'm actually gonna start my free 14 day trial on the pro plan.

Okay, that was super easy. Now I'm a Pro member of SynthFlow. Okay. Okay. Before we get started, we need to add a new phone number to our Synthflow account. This is really easy. We just click in and buy a number. Note that at present, United States, Australia and Canada only are supported.

Now I can start from scratch building my AI agent. And for this example, it's going to be an outbound agent that I can automate later with tools like Zapier or their API. Okay, now here we've got Mike's AI agent and it is indeed an outbound agent that can make phone calls for me while I sleep or do other things.

Inside Configure. We can give it a different name if we like. We can choose the voice engine. I think two is good. We can choose the AI model. GPT4O sounds fantastic. Choose a time zone, add knowledge to it. There really are limitless opportunities, but we're going to keep this super simple.

The prompt is the most interesting thing. Let's go ahead and edit this prompt and tell it what we want it to do. Hello, I'd like to book a taxi from London Heathrow Airport to Buckingham Palace. Can you help with that please?

So the greeting message will be the first thing our AI agent says when the phone call is answered. Now for this prompt, I've actually used AI to help me come up with objectives. 1. Follow the script exactly. And get the best possible taxi fare. 2. Never actually book. Just get quotes and negotiate. 3. Say you'll need to check details and call back.

I love this. Be friendly but firm in negotiating. Never actually book. Always say you need to check. Push for the lowest possible price. Casual, natural language. Sound like a regular person and not a business robot. I absolutely love this. I wonder if it'll work.

This is pretty good. I just need to assign a phone number to my agent now. Now, with that done, we'll do a test run to Mike and I'll put in my mobile number here and then we'll go ahead and click Call Me.

Okay, I'm getting a phone call. Hi there. I'm looking to get a quote for a taxi from Heathrow to Buckingham palace for June 2, 2025. Probably about 80 quid. Oh, wow, that seems a bit high. I've actually gotten much better rates before. What's the absolute best you can do?

Whoa. Well, you know, I can give you a cheap kind of old model for maybe 75 quid. Do you offer any discounts if I book a return journey as well? Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. If you book a return journey, we can do it for 100 quid. All in.

Let me be direct. If I were to book right now, what's the very lowest price you could offer? I've gotten quotes from other companies too. Okay, how about 90 quid? Thanks for that info. Let me check a couple details with my travel companion and I'll call you back to book if we decide to go with your service. Could I get your name? Yeah, my name is Mike. Perfect. Thanks for your help, Mike. I'll be in touch soon.

Wow. Wow, that was surreal. Now let's go and try it out in real life with real taxi companies in London. What is really cool is I have a full recording of this phone call. Now I can go ahead and click into transcript. And the best thing is we can see all of the conversation that occurred with my AI agent, including that fantastic bargain of just 90 quid return to London Heathrow.

And the good news is Zapier integrates with Synflow AI and they have two popular templates here. One is to make phone calls from new Google sheet rows and another one is to log completed phone calls from Synthflow to a Google Sheet. That essentially means every number that I put into a Google sheet will be called and then the results of that call will eventually be logged to a brand new sheet.

This is so cool. Let's go and try it. Okay, I've got a sheet called AI London Taxi Outbound. And we'll put name and number, and then we'll just bold up those two rows like so.

On the AI London Taxi results, we've got name, number, price, and then notes that will all be passed on from the transcript. And we'll do that inside Zapier to automate this entirely.

So let's go ahead and create a zap and we'll start with a trigger and we'll look for Google sheets right here. Now for the trigger event, we'll go for new spreadsheet row. For the spreadsheet we'll choose AI London Taxi Outbound. And of course it's going to be sheet one in that sheet.

Now we'll go over to that spreadsheet and we'll add my name and we'll add a number. Okay, it pulled in my name and number. Now let's continue. And for the action, we'll go ahead and choose something from Synth Flow. There it is.

As our action event, we'll choose Create Call. Very simple. We copy our model ID from Synth Flow. Copy id, paste that into the first field. Then phone number comes from our Google sheet and the name too.

And now for good measure, we'll test the step and see if I get a phone call. Here is my phone call. Okay, this all works. And we can see the status of the API call was. Okay, let's publish. Now that means every name and number I add to this spreadsheet will get a phone call from my AI agent.

If you like what you see so far, do throw a Like and subscribe as I do these videos weekly.

Okay, before I go nuts and start adding names and numbers, let's create the other zap so we can record and analyze what was said in each call using AI.

First we'll give a name to this app, which is London Taxi Research. Now we'll go ahead and create a new zap. And this time our trigger is going to come in from Synth Flow. So I'll type in synth and there it is, synthflow AI. And the trigger event is simply when a phone call is completed, again making sure to paste in the correct model id.

And we'll test now. You'll see here. This is really cool. I've got a few phone calls that I've made to test this bot out. And indeed it records everything, including the start time and a full transcript of the call. Meaning we can take this into our zap and actually make something that's useful in our results sheet.

Okay, next up, I'm going to throw in some AI. Let's get in ChatGPT. We'll go ahead and create a conversation, look at this conversation and output the final agreed price only as your response to two decimal places. And then underneath I've inserted the call transcript and we can see this is finished.

And if we look at the data that's outputted, the reply is exactly 90 pounds to two decimal places. Pretty cool stuff.

Right now we're going to go ahead add another step. This will also be AI: create a very simple one sentence note based on this transcript with anything important the user should know. And again we'll paste the transcript in below. That's done. Continue. And we'll test that step too.

The user is considering booking a taxi from Heathrow to Buckingham Palace June 2, 2025. Quotes ranging from £75 for an old model to £90 for better options. May receive discount for a return journey.

Pretty helpful stuff. So not only do we get the final quote, but we also get more context over what was negotiated.

Finally, we'll add our last step. And this is of course going to be a Google sheet, so we can get all of that into our results sheet and we'll go ahead and create a spreadsheet row. Now we can map those columns in. And with that all done, we'll click continue.

And now it's time to test this automation in the real world by filling in a name and number of a real London taxi company that's gone into my spreadsheet.

And there we go. We've got a task running already, so I'll just drink coffee and wait for my quote. And if we check in on the status here, we'll see my call is presently in progress. Now I'll drink more coffee while I wait for this row to populate with all the notes I need for my first London Heathrow taxi quote.

This is incredible. My first quote has come back 85 pounds but can do an economy rate of 75 pounds if booked 24 hours ahead. I'm feeling really confident. So let's get my AI agent to make five, five simultaneous calls and get the best quote.

I'll just go down to row four and then I'll paste in five different companies that I found on Google Maps. Now my agent is making the calls for me while I drink more coffee.

Now we'll watch for the results of my five calls populating here. There's the first, second, third, fourth and fifth quote. This is crazy.

Now I'm going to take this spreadsheet and sort it. We'll sort it by price. And we'll put the top, right here at the top. And then the cheapest quote here, 78 pounds economy car only, all luxury vehicles booked is available right down here as my last quote.

So I can just simply pick up that number, call it back myself and get that great deal that my AI agent negotiated.

This is pretty cool. All the boring stuff, including phone calls to numerous companies to get services at the best price, can now be outsourced to AI.

I wonder how you're going to use this automation. All the details of everything I did will be linked up down below, so be sure to use the links below. Discuss it in my community by joining up for free and letting me know how you do this.

And before we go, let's have a quick listen to one of the calls my AI agent made. Hello, I'd like to book a taxi from London Heathrow Airport to Buckingham Palace. Can you help with that, please?

Hi. Yeah, sure thing. When is this for? On June 2, 2025. It's for two passengers with one suitcase. Could you give me a quote for that, please?

How many passengers again and how many suitcases? It's for two passengers and just one suitcase. Take your time. Just let me know when you're ready with the quote.

So we have a saloon car at 79 pounds. Or if you prefer something more luxurious, we have an executive saloon at 96 pounds.

Is there any chance you could offer a bit of a discount on the saloon car? I'm just trying to get the best deal possible.

Unfortunately, our prices are fixed and this is the best I can give you. I understand. Thanks for letting me know. I'll need to check a few details and get back to you. I appreciate your help.

All right, take care. Goodbye.

Pretty cool, right? YouTube is showing a video on your screen right now. You should watch next. Thanks.

In this video, I'm going to explain how I run a global remote team of 10 people from down here in Auckland, New Zealand, and the tools we use so that I don't have to run weekly team meetings. 

Hello, my name is Paul Miners, and welcome back to another one of our training videos. Now, at Minaco, we have experts and members of our team separated all over the world. We have experts in Canada, the United States, the Middle East, Australia, and of course, New Zealand. 

And my leadership style is I prefer to be hands off. I don't want to micromanage. I don't want to have to check in with every single member of my team every single week to make sure they're getting their work done. I prefer to give people autonomy and authority to make decisions and manage their own work. If my team are coming to me all the time with questions on how to do things or what to do next, to me, this is a sign that I, as a business owner, am not giving them the systems or the mindset that allows them to actually solve their own problems or make their own decisions. 

And of course, especially in the last few years, remote work has become more and more common. A lot of clients come to us looking for help with tools like Asana and pipedrive, because these tools allow them to stay connected with their team, see what people are working on, and communicate asynchronously across time zones. 

So in this video, I'm going to explain some of the tools that we use to stay connected, which actually helps us to avoid having to have regular weekly team meetings. 

In fact, when we do meet as a team, as an entire company, which maybe only happens a couple of times a year, it's actually a real novelty. Now, this probably won't come as a surprise if you've watched my videos before, but the first and main tool that we use to stay connected and to communicate as a team is Asana. This is where we manage most of the work that the team is working on. I can click on a member of my team, I can see their tasks, I can see what they're doing and when they are due. And this is one of the main reasons I don't have to check up on everyone every single week. 

It's also the tool that we use to communicate as a team. We don't use email, we don't even use Slack. And the nice thing about keeping conversations in Asana is it puts everything in one place. Any one of us can look at a task, you can see who's doing it when it's due. There are notes and attachments on the task and you've got the conversation or the comments right there in front of you. So you're not switching between multiple tools. 

And because Asana really is our primary hub where we're working, we've connected Asana with a lot of the other tools and systems that we use. And we do this using Zapier. For example, when a client of ours books a call with us using Calendly, Zapier grabs the details of that appointment and it creates a task in Asana for the correct person. It puts the notes in the task of what that client wants to talk about on the call. And this allows us to estimate our workload and track each of the appointments that we have. 

When we finish that meeting with the client, we get an AI generated summary from Zoom and again, Zappy is our superhero here. We take the summary from the meeting and we then add that as the comments in Asana and we even identify the next steps, which makes following up with the client a lot easier. 

And editor, let's link up here the video we made last week about the time saving zaps that we've built. If you want to see some of the ways that we use Zapier to save a lot of time when we're working with the clients and definitely go and check out that video that we put out just last week. 

And we don't just use Asana for communicating on tasks. I will often share reviews that we've received from our clients. I love sharing those with the team via the messages feature. And it's great actually seeing my team now posting questions to one another when they need help with something. They're not sure how to do something in Asana or pipedrive, they'll post a message and people will respond with videos and screenshots and they all help one another through this tool. 

Another app that really helps me see the availability of my team is Fantastical. Now, Fantastical you can download for PC or Mac. And editor, let's link up here. The getting started with Fantastical video that I made last year. Highly recommend this app. What I love about Fantastical is firstly I can see my calendar and this has got my work Google Calendar synced to it, but also my personal icloud. I've got everything I need in front of me, but I love these calendar sets. So I can switch up here to Warwick on my team, I can go to Lindsay. Each of them is sharing their calendar and I can see when are they available and what are they working on. This is really nice, these calendar sets because I don't have to toggle different calendars on and off. Like if I actually went to all calendars, you can see the absolute mess which is on the screen. So these calendar sets just easily and quickly allow me to see when are people booked and what are they doing. 

So on the left hand side here I can see my local time, it's 12:44pm New Zealand time. And on this right hand side I can change the time zone I want to look at so I can switch to US Eastern Time. And I can see right now it's 6:44pm Eastern Time. So I can really quickly just work out what is the time locally for members of my team or even clients that we're working with. I don't need a separate app. I I can see all of that right here in Fantastical. 

Now another major tool in our stack is pipedrive. Pipedrive is the CRM I've been using for years and now use it to keep an eye on my team. Last year I started handing over control and getting my team to do sales. And so in here I can see all the deals that we are working on. And as you'd expect, we've again integrated pipedrive with the other tools that we use. 

So we get new inquiries through our website, new prospects book an introductory call through for with us through calendly and again we use Zapier to route these into pipedrive. Now Zapier is smart enough, we have those client calls going into Asana as I mentioned earlier, but new inquiries or introductory calls, they go into Pipedrive and Zapier is our middleman that puts the inquiry into Pipedrive. It creates a contact and a deal. 

And what I now do on a weekly basis is I'll come into Pipedrive and I will review each person's deals to see how they're progressing. I'll review the notes and the emails that they're sending out. So I can come in here and I can click on these favorited filters along the top, I can click on Andrew or Liam or Lindsay and I'll open these deals one by one and I'll read some of the notes and see what they're doing and I'll give tips or advice on what to do next. And we'll link up here another video that I made a little while ago on how I manage a sales team using pipedrive. 

Another thing we do with Zapier is when we win a deal over in Pipedrive so a client has paid for their project or signed up to one of our programs, we win the deal. Pipedrive has now done its job and we use Zapier to then create a task over in Asana, which is where we manage our active client engagements. And we use Zapier to create the task and copy over some of those notes from pipedrive. So we've got important details in front of us ready for when we have our first meeting with them. 

One more thing I just thought of actually that we do in pipedrive is when my team have questions or they need feedback on a proposal, they will mention me in the comments or in the notes with their questions. I can then take a look and I can respond. This is one of the only times we actually communicate outside of Asana. The reason we do it in pipedrive is because we want to keep everything on that deal. So we can always look back and see what we've talked about related to that particular opportunity. 

Something else I have talked about in quite a few recent videos is how we store SOPs, or standard operating Procedures. I've talked about this a lot because it really has changed how I think about my business and now my job as the business owner, because I'm giving up or handing over rather a lot more control. The SOPs allow me to document how we need to do certain types of things. So I have an SOP for my administrative assistant who, who's managing my email. I have an SOP for the consultants who are also doing sales. We have separate documents for consulting and sales, and these are Google Docs. 

We are a Google Workspace company and we have these Google Docs, written documents that really do outline, step by step with screenshots and videos, how to do certain types of things, whether that's working with a client, booking calls, following up, how to sell the scripts that we use. And this helps me achieve a couple of things. 

Firstly, as the business owner, I can now focus more on the process, refining our process. And then when I want to change how we do things, I can update the sop and I'll actually put a comment inside the Google Doc saying, look, this is the new process, please review it. And I can now focus on keeping that up to date. And it means changing our process is really quick and easy. 

It also makes onboarding a new salesperson or consultant really quick and easy. Number one, I have them read the sop, it's written down and it's up to date with how we do things and how I want them to work. And then I get them to actually shadow one of my team members. So I'll have them sit in on a call so they can see how we sell, how we pitch. And I'll have them sit in on a client meeting so they can see how we structure the meetings and the type of things that we cover. 

And the final app I want to talk about is cleanshot. Now, cleanshot is a screen recording app for the Mac. If you're on a PC, check out Loom or there's no shortage of screen recording apps. But what I do with it is I can launch it from my menu bar and I can record a section of my screen. This is great. If I want to show how to do something in pipedrive or Asana. I'll also make videos which I will add to our SOPs. Or if I want to give features feedback on a proposal. I can even record a full screen video like this if I want to record a message to send to members of my team. I actually did this at the end of last year. I wanted to send everyone a message before the holidays to just say thank you for their hard work. So I sent everyone a personalized message using cleanshot, shared it through Asana. And it's just a nice way because we are a remote team, we don't see each other in person, you know, talking through the camera. 

I really like, as you can tell, I think a tool like Cleanshot or any recording app is great, especially for remote teams. Because if you were just communicating all the time through written text, you miss a lot of that nuance and emotion. Whereas if you can send somebody a video, I mean, number one, it's great for explaining things, but also for things like team updates and messages, you can communicate so much more appreciation and it kind of fills a bit of a gap that you create as a remote team by sharing a video. It feels a little bit more like, here we are in person. So I love cleanshot. I've been using it for a while and it's a really. It's something I use dozens of times a day and editor. Let's link up here. One more video. Our getting started with Clean Shot Video, if you do want to learn more about how to use this app. 

So that is a little look at some of the tools we use at MinorCo to manage a remote team. There's a lot there. This wasn't all set up in a day. So if you're looking at that, like, wow, that's quite a lot of stuff. Yeah. This is the result of years of tweaking how we do things, experimenting with different systems and tools, building automations using Zapier. So these kind of things certainly do take a bit of time, but that's what building a business is about. 

So much of growing your business is not just about growing the revenue and the products and services that you offer, but actually putting the tools and systems and processes in place that help you to manage a more efficient team, especially if you are remote. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment down below. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next video.