Trevor Botkin: 0:11

And welcome back to when Leaders Connect, where every week, we like to sit down with one of our members across Canada and talk to them about their business, their journey, what they're up to and what they're excited about this year and into coming years, and what they're excited about this year and into coming years. Hello, my name is Trevor Botkin. I'm the National Director of Corporate Connections Canada and it is my incredible pleasure to have on the show today Mr Francois Sauro. He's the founder and CEO of Improov, where he's turning the tide on workplace productivity. Francois has been at the forefront of merging technology with efficiency for nearly a decade, helping professionals not just work harder but work smarter. Today, he's here to spill some secrets on how you can harness the power of technology to supercharge your efficiency. Get ready for some game-changing insights that promise to make your work life not only easier but also more productive. Francois, it's fantastic to have you with us. Good morning and welcome to our Leaders Connect.

Francois Sauro: 1:02

All right, I'm really happy to be here with you, trevor. Thank you for an invitation. I'm super to All right, I'm really happy to be here with you, trevor. Thank you for the invitation.

Trevor Botkin: 1:06

I'm super to have you and I'm actually super happy to have you in English, because I thought this was going to be my first full episode in French and at the last minute we switched it up to English. So if there's French words in there, it's because one of us forgets our words in English.

Francois Sauro: 1:22

If someone forgets their words in English, should be me, you never know.

Trevor Botkin: 1:27

You never know. So it is. It is a Thursday morning, um, I'm only one coffee into the day, so but anyway, uh, great to have you here and it's great to obviously have you in our community and and you've been a real um, it's interesting how many people and I'm getting ahead of myself here, but it's interesting how many people have worked with you, I'd say, in the last year and a half since you started offering your courses to the members and to your community as well the lives, both professionally and personally, of a whole bunch of people. So, first off, I'm just going to start by saying thanks for everything you're doing, and then we'll get into what you're doing All right, thank you.

Francois Sauro: 2:13

Well, thank you for acknowledging it.

Trevor Botkin: 2:15

Thank you, yeah, it's fantastic. So let's start with your journey. I guess a decade ago, and we can go back a little bit further to when you started Improve, but maybe just take us up to the point where you realized that A this was missing and B you were good at it.

Francois Sauro: 2:34

Oh, that's an interesting question. Well, I have an unusual, you know, career where I started in the telecommunication. You know, when you're 20 years old you say I'm going to do a job, you know, trying to figure out where you're going to go in life. And I was. I'm an ex professional dancers and jazz and contemporary, so musical stuff like that and I knew I wanted to found a family young. So I know that lifestyle was not the way to go. So I knew that lifestyle was not the way to go. So I said, you know, that was the whole expansion of cellulars, mobile phones, you know, back then in the early 90s. So I jumped on that train just figuring out what I'm going to do in my life and I just realized I love technology, I love people and then I have a talent to help people, you know, understand the impact of technology for them.

Francois Sauro: 3:25

So I started at Rogers Wireless. I worked there for seven years at the head office in Montreal, was retail sales manager for, you know, four years, and part of that was training people and that's the part I enjoyed the most. And then decided to just do that in life. So, starting at what 30, 32, I started to do training for someone else. And then, finally, I said, why not? You know, found my own company where, you know, the lack was using technology, but with efficiency concept.

Francois Sauro: 4:07

Um, using technology but with efficiency concept. So, for example, outlook, it's not just about the buttons and the features, but it's also how to manage your calendar. So it's time management, it's task management, it's workflow, how you organize your inbox. People spend three, four, five hours a day, sometimes more, on a tool they've never been trained on, so, so the potential of recuperating efficiency is huge, and I just have a huge talent to make it fun, accessible and people enjoy the experience. So I started as a only one person. You know I wanted, um, you know, a one-man orchestra in, in, and then, you know, doubled my business revenue every year until you know, 2014. So, and then we just adjusted to the market and added a new chorus. One note after that. And then time management, and you know everything surrounding efficiency with technology, now with artificial intelligence that's a new branch that we've launched a year ago.

Trevor Botkin: 5:13

So, learning to use ChatGPT, microsoft Copilot there's not a lot of offers for users, the beginners, to just be efficiency, to develop the efficiency they need to be functional yeah, I think that's fascinating and I just I want to go back because it was a profound statement you just made in terms of, uh, no one's getting trained on outlook. They spend hours a day. And then I was like, well, yeah, it's true, I've never, I've never been trained on outlook. I mean, I might have looked stuff up, I might have I don't think I've watched a video, but it's one of those things that, as and I was using I mean, I was using pine back in the day in the early 90s on the university chat board, and that was emailed before what we now know of as the wild wide web. I mean, it was basically a DOS interface, so but there's never been a moment where I sat down and said i'm'm going to learn to use this tool, and it's the same thing, I think, with word.

Trevor Botkin: 6:09

I think it's the same thing with with, um, uh, excel, powerpoint, exactly, and those, those tools you know and I've gotten training on Photoshop and I've gotten training on, you know, power tools that you know we use for video editing or or photo editing, or I mean, that's my background, but I've never sat down and learned the tools that I spend way more time in, which is you know? So, uh, that's that's interesting, cause I it just a moment where I'm like, yeah, it's true, I've never really done any training on on Outlook, so I just kind of mash the buttons until an email is formed and press send. Maybe, maybe, maybe not the most, and I think most of us strive for, or when we do CVs or when we look at these skill sets, we're looking for function. Right, are you functional at it? As opposed to are you the most efficient? You could be leaving you more time to do other tasks than just answer emails.

Francois Sauro: 7:10

Right, and you know honestly, you know Outlook is still one of the most you know sold course. In our curriculum we have 20 courses approximately. Outlook represent almost 20% of our sales today. Still, because it's basically it's your contact list, it's managing your emails, it's managing your calendar, it's managing your tasks and your follow-ups. It's a big portion of anybody's work, right? So as soon as you work with your intelligence and you work with a computer, it's part of it's at least an hour a day for most people so, and some people it's like it's literally open the whole day, the whole day. Yeah, so so and it's fun. I still enjoy teaching it. I still do a few course a week, and now with a team of 15 peoples. But you know, it's, it's, it's. I still give the course. I'm still exciting to see someone that's been using outlooklook for 20 years say, oh my God, man, I'm so frustrated by the fact that I've been using it wrong for 20 years or not knowing some features that will help me day to day Delivering the course.

Trevor Botkin: 8:21

I don't want to say in person, because I know it's online, but that there's still a real person delivering a course online, as opposed to recording everything and then selling recorded content.

Francois Sauro: 8:35

Yeah, it's totally and I get that. And you know, the reason why we still do live is because the video, and when people are trained on video, it's a format that is perfect for self-learners. So if someone in French we say autodidacte, it's someone that learns by himself really well and doesn't need someone to support him or her and follow through the progress. And you know what? It's 8% of adults that are self-learners 8%, 8% that are very productive in learning by themselves. And all of the. You know I've been in the business for over a decade yeah, and when I talk to customers that have, let's say, linkedin Learning as a membership for a certain number of people, the stats are less than 10% of people use it monthly, right, so that's why.

Francois Sauro: 9:29

So, when we talk to a customer, you say you want progress, then let's do that. That's where we do hybrid. That means that we do some live and then once people are motivated and they see the potential, then they find the time to go see some videos and practice potential. Then they find the time to go see some videos and practice. But the first meeting that we set up, let's say a thursday 10 o'clock yeah, I have, I have one course this afternoon 1 pm. So at 1 pm I I'm gonna have 16 people that they have an appointment and they reserved an hour and a half. They would never have you looked at a video right. So that's that's why we still offer that format and it's so successful I.

Trevor Botkin: 10:09

I guess it's also. It's like a gym membership, right. There's a point where you, where you get the, the trainer gets you up to a certain point where you have some success and you don't want to go backwards. But if you don't have a trainer, that first couple of weeks where you work out like mad and you still weigh too much and everything hurts and it's not enjoyable, you quit, you stop doing it, you don't go to the gym. So I guess it's getting somebody to the point where they've seen success and they've seen an increase in productivity and the accountability, yeah, why?

Francois Sauro: 10:40

where you say, oh, I have someone, he's waiting for me at the gym and I paid for him, so you go. Same thing when we have a training. So the Outlook program is three weeks in a row same time. So let's say it's every Thursday 10 o'clock we go and we go on Zoom or Teams, and then we go an hour and a half and then they have work to do for a full week. They practice and then we see them the next week and so on and so forth. But they have to show up and then they know the company paid for it and then they know we can follow through if they looked at the video. So that accountability is huge. It's really a big portion of if people do it or not.

Trevor Botkin: 11:20

What's been the biggest surprise for you over the last decade of doing this?

Francois Sauro: 11:41

Wow, that's a great question. What's the biggest surprise? 20 people go downtown in a hotel to learn something, especially if it's something technical or productive, like how to use Outlook or Teams or OneDrive, sharepoint or Google Gmail. It doesn't make sense to travel the trainer to pay all of these fees. But the surprise was in 2014, we almost went bankrupt because we sold a big project to a company and then no one was really ready to go on that format. They had no mic, no webcam. So we were visionary Pre-COVID, right, and then pre-COVID, yeah.

Francois Sauro: 12:33

So as soon as COVID arrived for us, it was a blessing in disguise. Well, not in the first six months, because we had to. You know, 90% of our business was wiped out when COVID arrived for us. When COVID arrived for us, and then within a month, we've just transformed in a Zoom and then just readjusted everything and now we have something that's very stable and the thought process of the training online is very refined and we're really primed right now and it's working super well. But it took a few years to just find the right balance between live the videos, the platform and then having that, you know, set up properly. But now today, if someone says to me hey, I want training in my office. Live with my with, with my colleagues will say it's, it's not worth it. It's even the experience is less effective than a live training sure, yeah, completely understand that.

Trevor Botkin: 13:35

And then I'm curious so how many employees do you have? Now it's 15, 15, 15, yeah, and and I'm assuming every one of them is like a productivity ninja, like there's no, no time.

Francois Sauro: 13:48

That's not true, it's, it's for real, it's, it's. The reality is, uh, I think we're better than most companies. That's for sure. Because when we, you know, when someone comes in the uh, the company, we have to train them. Sure, even if they say I know outlook as soon as we go into our process, if they know how to learn and you know use any tools there, we still have to make them go to our level. So it's definitely better than most, but, but not necessarily. And then you have also to take into account that my talent is not being super organized. Naturally, my talent is I'm a great communicator, you know. I have people skills, I have listening skills, I have all these skills. But you know, being organized in my task oriented nature, it's, I'm probably three out of ten. I'm not that great so. So I need I. I I'm surrounded by people that are way better than me. However, my time management skills is really tough, like prioritizing, delegating. These things I do really well.

Trevor Botkin: 14:55

But I think that also comes from being an artist.

Francois Sauro: 14:57

Hold on one second. So I had an issue with my. Are you there? Yeah, okay, sorry, it's okay, I'll have to cut that. Yeah, okay, sorry, it's okay, I'll have to cut that part, sorry.

Trevor Botkin: 15:13

Oh, we're going to leave it in so everyone can see this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Francois Sauro: 15:18

I'm so good with technology I just unplugged my headphones right in the middle of it. Yeah, that's silly.

Trevor Botkin: 15:25

Okay, good, let's continue. Those who can do, those who can't teach, no, no, I. Okay, good, those let's continue. Those who can do, those who can't teach um, no, no, I, I was. I was talking about a little bit, it was going back to a little bit.

Trevor Botkin: 15:35

You know your, your journey and in terms of having begun as an artist, and I think you know when, a, when, a, when an artist becomes a business owner, they bring that passion, the, the, the gift of communication, which is truly what an artist, a real artist, is about.

Trevor Botkin: 15:54

Communication, whether it's dance, music, uh, stage acting, it's still, at the end of the day, communicating a message, and in a very specific format, and so I think that makes for incredible, um, I think it brings something to business. A lot of business leaders are lacking, maybe, some of those soft skills or intuition, uh, empathy, emotion, um, but also, you know I've worked with a lot of dancers haven't been an actor myself that you know there's, there's an energy, there's a, there's a poetry, and, and they see that in movement and, and a company's always in movement, it's always in flux, but necessarily, that's something that I struggle with too is my own organization, and I was going to ask you. Is it normal to have 600 unanswered emails in my inbox? Normal, yeah, I know what's normal really. So I opened my phone next to someone and they're like, oh my gosh, does it drive you nuts all the notifications. I'm like what notifications? She's like there's a red flag on every one of your apps.

Francois Sauro: 16:53

I'm like okay, yeah, yeah. Well, that part is not. I have the same. Some people say oh, there's so many notifications on your phone. Some are totally irrelevant 600 unread emails. It's an indication that your process to do the triage of your emails is probably lacking. It's not the fact that you haven't dealt with those emails, or you probably just left them unread because just by the title you don't take care of it, for example. I hope so, because I hope out of these 600, there's 150 important ones. You have a big problem, but it's probably not the case, right? So it's just the way you, the workflow, that you decide how you triage your email so that it actually you touch it only once and then it goes out your inbox. And this is one of the teaching of our course, that's definitely to bring your inbox to just an emergency room triage room where the person comes in and then they say, oh, is it urgent? One to five, and then they don't leave the person hanging there.

Trevor Botkin: 18:10

They know already, okay, the level of urgency and then they move it to the appropriate place it's it's 500 offers um to uh for recruitment, and then it's it's 100, probably more important ones. But yeah, yeah, that's yeah, anyway, that's amazing. I'm guessing for you, and now I know you do training in both english and french. Obviously, yeah, the business started in french, but you've branched out and are able to help english companies just as much as french companies, which is fantastic. But is it the business owners that you speak with first? Is it, uh, hr departments who maybe are looking for adding training to companies? Since companies of a certain size have to do training in Canada, it's a prerequisite that a certain amount of the budget goes to improving and training people.

Trevor Botkin: 19:00

Is it managers struggling with employees maybe not being as productive? I know Canada has a productivity issue as a whole. We talked about that before the recording that some numbers just came out that Canada ranks 18 in economic productivity based on GDP, which is interesting from a statistical standpoint. But I don't totally understand that. I know a lot of business owners are struggling with getting employees to be as productive as they could. There's lot of distractions there is. There is a post that you commented on, I think, three weeks ago, about.

Francois Sauro: 19:35

You know this idea of this myth of multitasking yeah, it's a huge, huge issues today, because if you, if you, glorify multitasking, then you have all the reasons to multitask today and you can open up three applications and work at the same time, but like that doesn't work. If you do anything valuable and needs deep work, yeah, right, so so it's definitely a big portion. Now, when you say who needs to? Um, what was interested in our service, I would say all of the above because it's literally, you know, sometimes the owner usually have a smaller company. It's HR sometimes, but most of the time, hr are more in a mode of fulfilling what the organization needs in one task.

Francois Sauro: 20:22

Yeah, and that's the issue, because you don't wake up in the morning say, hey, I need to be trained on Outlook or on Microsoft 365. It's not necessarily top of mind until you see what you're missing, and this has always been a big, I would say. The adversity for us to be known is that people don't necessarily look at our service by default, but as soon as they see it exists and they see the impact, then the sales process and the interest is very high, very fast, right. So, but it can be any one of these, either the professional, the managers, the owners or the HR. It can be any of those we talk with.

Trevor Botkin: 21:08

All of them Do you have a just randomly asking this do you have a, a questionnaire or a, a way for a manager or owner of a company to kind of self-evaluate their productivity in their company, where they could go through and go yes, everyone answers their email within a day. Or you know just a way to kind of self-assess if their company's as productive as it? Because, again, it's contextual right, so you may look at your company and go, wow, we're super productive. And then you know, somebody from the outside could come in and sit with the employees and ask 10 employees say are we, are we effective, are we productive? You know, do things move fast? Do you have all the tools you need?

Francois Sauro: 22:04

Are you that? And they're like no, heck, no. And so sometimes there's a disconnect idea. I never thought of going that upper level in the perception also of the people. But we do have assessment on their efficiency with a tool. For example, if they go on Excel, most people they over-evaluate their level of knowledge every time we show them and they say, oh, I don't need level one. And then we test them and they score 15% on level one and they want to go straight to level two and it's going to be catastrophic. So I would say 80% of people they over-evaluate their knowledge as soon as they start to know and learn. So yeah, we do that, assessment the gates when they do the training, because you know some activities in Excel will take four hours for a person and then the second one will do it in 25 minutes, yeah, literally. So you save every time.

Trevor Botkin: 23:06

Right and as a business owner, you can do the math pretty fast in your head. So if you're paying someone top dollar and it's taking them four hours to build an Excel that someone trained can do in 30 minutes, the minimal gain of time when people go to our Microsoft program.

Francois Sauro: 23:25

it's an hour of productivity per employee per day, recurrent, wow. So if you do the math, usually the return on investment is two months and less and it's recurring after, like it's. People don't lose what they've learned and they can always continue improving, but then also when they they start to to taste the productivity increase. You know there's some people they go straight, like straight, from really being bad with computers to being very proficient within a year.

Trevor Botkin: 23:56

But I would. I would assume also you would also see an increase in retention rates too, because people are getting invested in, they're getting training. They feel that you are giving them skills and tools to help them be better employees, and it's not just you know, I mean, those are transferable skills. It's not something you can only do at company A. Everyone should understand how to use the Microsoft. I hate Microsoft, but it is it's Word, it's Excel, it's Outlook. That's what we use in business.

Francois Sauro: 24:27

Yes, I think that when people feel that employees invest in them, that's always a big plus. I've never done a more thorough assessment on what's the impact on turnover after a year. That's not something we do, so I cannot state any numbers of that sort.

Trevor Botkin: 24:47

Let's just assume it's a positive impact on turnover.

Francois Sauro: 24:51

Yeah, there's no negative impact, that's for sure. And what's also very important is that if you save an hour a day or two per day per employees, that means that if you save an hour a day or two per day for per employees, that means that if you have 200 employees, you know you probably need 20, you know, with the lack of availability and employee and the shortage of people, that's, that's a great way to get ahead.

Trevor Botkin: 25:14

Yeah, yeah, get more done, more clients without having to hire more staff. That's it. Um, we're almost out of time, but before we finish, because we'll just go a little bit longer on this one than normal, because it's I mean, it's francois, everyone, everyone's gonna get that they're gonna be like, yeah, more francois. Um, what has ai, what? What's been the big change over the last two years with chat, gpt for you?

Francois Sauro: 25:40

Okay, well, chat GPT, well, it's there for a few years, right, but the reality is, you know, the implementation and the use of chat GPT is very. It's less than a year.

Trevor Botkin: 25:52

Yeah, three and four since last fall, really Wow.

Francois Sauro: 25:55

Yeah, so we started to do training in June last year, right? So it's less than a year and people starting to use 3.5 and then 4 was launched, I think in the Q4, q3, q4 last year, and you know that platform people are just, it's the same thing as Outlook. They just use it like that pretty fast without any prior knowledge. Use it like that pretty fast without any prior knowledge. Again, there's 10 of people will go on youtube tiktok and learn by themselves and find the ways to be efficient with it. That's 10. That's for those who really use it. So I've been to many, many companies that people are not using it right now and it's it's boggles my mind to see how much they lose opportunities and time and productivity.

Francois Sauro: 26:45

Microsoft just had a, a survey and a study done for those who use copilot inside their, their, their, their platform and it's 30 percent of gain of efficiency. It's 30 percent. So it's like three hours just by using these tools. And that's just starting because you know, um, it's going to evolve and it's going to get even bigger and better. So I think people need to understand the impact if they don't go there. Um, it's the same impact of in construction, when we start to have these bulldozers. You have one person who's going to operate the bulldozer and you had before 20 people with the shovels I mean 19 are going to learn to use the machinery. It's the same equivalency. It's 20 to 1 in some cases.

Trevor Botkin: 27:40

Yeah, well, in Quebec, in all fairness, those 19 people stand around and move the orange cone while the one person moves.

Francois Sauro: 27:48

Is that only in Quebec? It's everywhere. I don't know.

Trevor Botkin: 27:51

I'm just teasing, that's awesome. So okay, last question, and then I'll let you get back with your day. What's the one thing business owners should be asking themselves right now? If they're listening to this today and they're like, hmm, maybe I can improve productivity in my company, what's the one thing that they could do today that might give them kind of the impetus to reach out to improve?

Francois Sauro: 28:19

Well, one thing we have a training for leaders, uh, on time management and inefficiency, and the first step in in that training is having your objective very clear. Okay, you cannot do time management if your objectives are aren't clear and and that's the biggest issue I see, that will affect any software. You know any employees that works on a day. You know a day-to-day basis is. You know they will tell me oh, there's so many unplanned events, it's so many urgencies were you know and not feeling, yeah, exactly so.

Francois Sauro: 28:53

And then I always tell them it's okay, what's the plan? What like did you draw your day? What's your ideal day, how it should look like. And then, if you have that in mind, then you know what's really on plan, because in the word on plan there's the word plan. So if you don't have a plan, it's not really on plan, it's just improvisation. And that's what people experience very often is they are good at their work, they are very knowledgeable, they, they are good at their work, they are very knowledgeable, but they improvise. So the the quickest win they can do is getting very clear on what they they want and when they're, and clear on what their employee wants. And then if, if, if, they see where are the o's and where where what's missing, then definitely they can call us and we can help with that part, or we can help with the nitty-gritty of any tools that they are using right now that they want to have people more proficient or, you know, effective with it.

Trevor Botkin: 29:48

So start with themselves, figure out how to get more efficient, and then it's easier for them to see where, maybe in their own company, their employees are struggling and don't even know it.

Francois Sauro: 29:57

Yeah, and then they are at that point. They will become, you know, a someone to follow right as a leader. It's difficult to, it's very difficult to say to someone to do that and then you're not doing it and then you have my inbox, right.

Trevor Botkin: 30:11

No, I get that. Yeah, I'll invite you to the course, I think. I think it's time. It's time. Yeah, francois, thank you so much.

Francois Sauro: 30:19

That was very, a very, a very nice conversation. It's you're at it. It's the first time I have this interaction with you as a host of a podcast. I feel that you were listening very well to my answers and having that flow adds up to you had a conversation where we didn't have margaritas in our hand.

Trevor Botkin: 30:38

I think that's what it really comes down to. So, uh, look, I really appreciate you. Uh, if people are interested, they can obviously go to it's wwwimproveca, if I'm not mistaken, dot pro, dot, pro so I am p-r-o-o-v dot p-r-o.

Francois Sauro: 30:58

That's it exactly. And then if, if it's, you know any, you there? That's part of the Corporate Connection chapter. Outside. You know Quebec, and I'd really love to connect with you guys. And I'll talk with you, Trevor, because I really want to make you know some virtual visits, and even Toronto is part of a place where I want to go in person eventually. So let's connect.

Trevor Botkin: 31:22

It's an easy trip. I'm going there next week, all right, beautiful. Thank you, francois, and to everyone listening. I hope that you got as much value out of this podcast as I did talking to Francois and to everyone else. Hope to see you on the next podcast. And this is where leaders connect.