 there's my Gareth. And Gareth, if you want to go ahead and start your video, there you go, Gareth. Thank you so much. Can everyone see Gareth's video? Okay. Perfect so much. Gareth, I'm going to hand it over to you and you can take it away. Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. That was just an amazing intro. And to echo what Chris was saying, you know, just the coming together of this community is long overdue. I'm really, really excited and honored to be here and even have just a small part to share with you today. I do have a philosophy that I will wrap up with about how Airtable can help us and how it improves all of our lives. But I do want to say that I think that there's so much that we can do as a community to just support one another and I'll tie into that more on the back end, like I said, but the way that we come together and lift each other up, I do have this philosophy that, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats. So I'm really excited to just be a part of this, as I said, and let me just kick on into it. I'll be talking today about building an Airtable consulting business. As Chris mentioned, my business is built on Airtable by Airtable for Airtable, something like that at least. But we do use Airtable to run our operations, but also we offer Airtable solutions to our clients. And while I certainly have a lot of things that we've built over the short two years that we've been around, I couldn't believe it was two years when I went back and looked at the timeline. It feels like it's been a lifetime. But in the short two years that we've been working on this, we've come a long way, but I want to also, and this goes back to my philosophy, I want to put out the option for you that you could also, if you find yourself with some extra spare time, be an Airtable consultant yourself. I think that there's a massive, massive need for this. The disconnect that I see that I'll go into more detail on is that people realize that Airtable is an incredibly powerful tool, but it's a very difficult thing for the average person to stay on top of that tool. And so if you wanted to dedicate some time or effort to helping other people with this, there is a massive need. And so I'll be talking from both the perspective of the fact that I am working on building my own business in Airtable, but also what could you do to perhaps lift this community up as well. So real quick, I owe you an obligatory intro. My name is Gareth Pronovost, and I'm the founder and owner at Gap Consulting. We offer really four different services or main focuses of our consulting group. The first one is actually what Chris mentioned earlier is our free YouTube content. So at least once a week, although if I'm being honest, in current weeks, we have to get a little more aggressive once a week is not enough with all the new updates Airtable's been putting out. But at least once a week, we're putting out a video on YouTube trying to educate people in what is possible. And this is really the cornerstone, I think, of what makes us a consulting group or what helps us to stand out as a consulting group, because Airtable is such a prolifically powerful tool. And it's so there's, as I mentioned, such a disconnect between where people are when they first pick up the tool and what it can do. And so really, we try to bridge that gap, and it also works out really nicely that GAP are my initials. And so we offer as Gap Consulting the bridge to where you are now in Airtable to where you can go with it. In terms of paid services, though, we have our hourly consultations. So anybody can go onto our website and sign up for an hourly consultation with one of our experts that consultation is automatically created. It's automatically billed at the time of signing up. All of this, you know, enhanced by the power of air table, having linked it to a couple of other tools like Calendly and Zapier, of course. So the hourly consultation takes place in Zoom at the schedule of time. The consultant gets reminders. The client gets reminders. They meet at the appropriate time, get the solution provided, and then a recording is automatically uploaded for them as well. So nice little solution there. That's one of the paid services we offer. I also built some online programs around, you know, just education and, you know, some more paid courses. And one of those are most advanced of those is our group coaching program that goes through all of the different steps that we take when we build our databases for our clients. So it really walks you through the steps and the thinking that is behind how to build a good database and automate it. And then we also, with that, have our group coaching so that once a week we have these coaching sessions that people can ask questions if they're stuck with an automation or they don't know how to build the structure in their database, they can ask those questions and they get answered on a live weekly webinar. So that's a neat program that we put together. But the core of what makes gap consulting, gap consulting, is our bespoke development team. And so this is where medium to large size clients say, hey, I understand that air table is a really powerful tool, but I am super busy doing this thing that I do. This air table is not my job, but I need the help of air table. And again, I say this not coming from a place of bragging or arrogance, but from a place of humility. I welcome you all to consider how you can help these clients as well, because there are so many people whose job is not to think like a data baser. But if you're here today, one thing I know about you is that you are excited about air table and that you know that it's possible to do really cool things with this software. And so if that is your passion, and if you get excited around that, I would encourage you to think about how you might be able to help other people. We've had some amazing clients that I never in a million years dreamed I would have the opportunity to work with. Disney, Viacom, ServiceNow, not to mention just the small to medium businesses that need our help. There's a massive need in the marketplace. So let me talk a little bit about why I think air table consulting is a big deal. Obviously, we're all air table nerds. Howie, the CEO of air table in their recent press announcement, he announced that over 200,000 companies are now using air table. The software is rapidly evolving. As we saw this week alone, new features came out, right? Air table sync being a massive one that we've been asking for for a long time. Super excited about that. Not to mention the fact that automations inside of air table are just so cool. And I can't even begin to tell you how much I'm geeking out over that right now. So there's just so much potential in the software. It really is in some ways, there's so many ways to solve problems with air table. I would almost say that there are as many ways to solve problems as there are people in the world. Everybody has their own approach, their own way of coming at it. And I think that that makes it just a really fun and powerful thing. It's a fun community to be in. And the cornerstone of why I think that air table consulting is valuable is because almost every business that I've ever come into contact with wants to scale. And I define scaling as follows. Two things have to be true. I want to get more of something for less of something else. I want to get more revenue at less costs. I want to get more clients at less efforts, or I want to help more people with putting in fewer time, fewer hours. So more with less is really the core of scalability and what tool allows us to scale better than air table. I mean, really, I can't think of one. Without having the need for code, you can build scalable solutions for practically any business inside of the software. And I have a picture here of a board game that I remember from my childhood. If you were a child in the 90s, like I was, maybe you are familiar with a fellow. And it's this game that you put these pieces on the board and you try to dominate the volume of the board with your particular piece color. Anyway, the slogan of this game is a minute to learn a lifetime to master. And this is what I think about whenever I see air table. When I think of air table and I talk to new people, new clients about air table, they always look at it and they're like, it's so intuitive. It's so cool. I get it. I can do so much stuff. And I'm like, you haven't even started to crack into it yet. And that's not a slam, right? It's just that there's a big, big, what do we call learning curve to get up to where you can really unlock the true power of it. And so it's really a fun, fun industry to be in. Now, I want to take a little bit of humble pie and let you know that if you wanted to build an air table consulting business, your life doesn't have to look perfect right now. 2020, if we're being real, oh, guys, it's been a tough one for a lot of people, right? My life previous to building gap consulting was not what I would have pictured when I was in school. I had landed a dream job in December 2016. I was working for the startup company. And I mean it in every sense of the word when you think of startup and you watch movies about startups. Yes, we had a calculator. Yes, we had a foosball table. Yes, we had a basketball hoop. I thought I had it made. I was working this great job in Denver, we just received $100 million in startup funding and I was like, this is awesome. And so eight months later or so, I got engaged to my long term girlfriend, we bought a house together and we were super excited that things were moving forward and our life was on the the plan that we'd always envisioned for ourselves. And then out of nowhere, a few months later, I got called into my boss's office, having thought that I was doing great work, got laid off, completely unexpectedly. And that put me into a bit of a, what do I do next mode? I tried not to spiral down, thankfully, I have been through enough ups and downs in my life where there wasn't too much of a rock bottom. So I got up and said, well, I need to get money on the table before I figure out my next move. And so I was looking at working in contract jobs, and I was just taking small finance jobs that I could find hourly engagements, things like that. And during this time, I thought, YouTube is a powerful tool. I need to leverage this tool. I want to help educate people about the different things that they can do to improve their businesses and lives. I didn't even have air table on my radar when I first started experimenting with YouTube. Somehow or another, I convinced my wife that she shouldn't leave me even though I was unemployed. And so we went ahead with our planned wedding in July of 2018. But right before we got on that plane to go, I posted my first air table video. I'll talk a little bit about how I came up with that aha moment in a moment, moment in a moment. I'll talk a little bit about how I got there in a moment. But I want you to know that it was an experiment. It was a I don't necessarily know what's going to happen. And I think that that's a very important approach to take as a consultant and as a business owner, being afraid, being unafraid to get out and try something is a really important skill that I wish I could stress enough. So I put together this video called getting started with air table. If you look it up on YouTube, you'll find it. I hate it. I can't watch it now today because it fills me with dread when I go back and look at how stiff I was. And I think about how much I wish I could change the way I presented it. But I put it out there. I took a risk and I would encourage you to do the same if you're at all interested in doing something similar. So I put I put it out there. We were in Jamaica. And wouldn't you know it? I start getting emails of people who are interested in talking. I spent $50 pushing that video and putting it in front of people that I thought needed to see it small business owners, literally $50. I spent $5 a day for 10 days. When I got back from Jamaica, I was able to close $10,000 worth of consulting sales on that $50 investment. Best ROI that I've ever seen in my life. And I would strongly recommend you to do the same. Now again, it sounds like I had this plan ironed out, but I promise you I didn't. It was an experiment. I tried it out. I wish I continued to get that ROI on my videos. I don't. But it did tell me it proved to me that there was a strong need. So from that gap consulting was born. But I want to talk to you about my aha moment. This is my good friend, best man in my wedding, Srinivas Rao. He owns, if he looks familiar, it's because he owns a podcast called the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. He's done a lot of stuff and he's been in a lot of media pieces over the years. He's owned this company for 10 years. And we've just been good friends. No ego. We came up together. And I'm sure you have people like like that in your network as well. Anyway, I mentioned to him one day I said, Hey man, you really might want to consider checking out this new tool called air table. I don't know anything about it. I read an article or two. It's pretty cool. And I thought that was it. Never thought we'd talk about it again. Two months go by. This is before the YouTube video ever got posted. Two months go by. And Srinivas told me, Hey, thank you so much for introducing that tool to me. It's completely revolutionized the way I run my business. It's completely helped me to organize everything. And now I know where everything is at a moment's notice. And I was like, Dude, that's cool because I like air table a lot too. I've been tinkering around with it. Can I see your database? And he was like, Of course. So we took a look and Srinivas, if you ever watched this, know that this comes from a place of love. But that database that he showed me was poop. It was really and and you know, it was really a two dimensional approach at a three dimensional tool. I like to think of air table as because it's really a relational database, it offers a 3d insight into your data. But it's a difficult thing to wrap your mind around if you're not used to using databases. It's a difficult thing to wrap your mind around in terms of how do I transition from Excel mindset from spreadsheet mindset into database mindset? And he hadn't made that transition. So I helped him put some things together, made some recommendations. I said, Listen, your guests, they don't need to be in the same table as your episodes because your guests might be coming back to film multiple episodes. So why not break those out as separate data sets and connect them? And your sponsors for your podcast, that should be a different data set as well. And we can link that. So I showed him how to set up this structure and then automate some processes. Don't get me started on how much time he got, you know, was saved for him in the long run by automating emails and reminders and all these things. And before you know it, he had a fully functioning app to run his business, this full database with including automation. And that was the aha moment for me that there's this disconnect between where people understand or where people come at the software air table and where it can take them. So if you're at all interested in putting together your own consulting firm, I would caution you to consider three basic fundamentals to the business that you want to build. Inevitably, you're going to have to answer these questions for yourself. I can tell you how I answered them for myself, but my answer will always be different than than yours. First, you need to come at this and decide how are you going to gain the confidence and experience you need in order to talk to a client? It's not an easy thing. The first time you get on a zoom call or pick up the phone and start talking to somebody about how you can help them if you haven't helped anyone before. The second thing you'll need to answer for yourself is how are you going to attract clients? And I'm going to talk about a couple of ways you can do that. And then the third thing is how are you going to serve your clients? There are so many ways that you can help people achieve more with air table. The software itself is virtually limitless and there are so many different slices of sub communities and the way that people want to use the tool. There's so many ways that you can serve clients. So first and foremost gaining confidence. How can you do this? I'd recommend offer something for free upfront. Maybe that's a free consultation. Maybe you're putting together YouTube videos, maybe both. But give a lot of value so that people know and they build a relationship with you before you ever take money from them. That's going to go a long way in helping you get that confidence. Now the second thing is and I promise you I actually did this. I have a mantra that I used to recite to myself before I would start working with my clients and it was if I can help them with one thing, if I can just help them understand one thing inside of the software, I will have done my job. This will not have been a waste for them. And I'm not talking about big thousand dollar engagements. I'm talking about I'm going to spend time with this person and work with them. And I made it my goal just to fix one thing. Help them with a lookup field. Help them with a roll up field. Build a better formula for them. If you can do that one thing, they will not feel like their time is wasted and you'll gain confidence incrementally as you do that more and more. And then the third thing is don't wait until you're ready. And when I was in business school, we called this paralysis by analysis. Don't wait until you're ready. If I waited until I was ready on everything, I would not have kids. I would not be married. I would certainly not own gap consulting. You have to be afraid. You have to be willing to get out there and be willing to try something that might not work. That's going to take me a little bit into how you're attracting clients. This idea of a customer avatar, know who you want to serve. This needs to be strategically aligned with the other parts of your business. If you want to serve enterprise level clients, they are out there and they need your help. If you want to serve the small business client, they are out there and they need your help. What age is that person? What demographic are they? You know, all the different ways that you can break that down will determine all the other parts of your business. And these things all need to work in tandem. Are you going to be approaching people at a regional or a worldwide level? Are you going to use paid ads, referrals, you know, other non-paid ad ways? There are a ton of different things that you can do in order to get out there and make yourself known. The Airtable Forum, for example, is a fantastic way to get started. People are constantly putting up things that they're struggling with. And that's a great way to gain both experience and attract clients. And then the third pillar of building a consulting practice around Airtable is to really pick a service. How are you going to serve your clients? I mentioned we put together at this point several different offers for several different market segments. But when you start out, you'll probably start out with just one. Are you looking at solving hourly problems, working by the hour or do you want to go on a project basis? Is this just you or do you want to build a company, an agency? And then pick your pricing. Make sure that you've done the math and the homework on the back end so that you're not losing money because trust me, it's easy to do so. When I first started, in fact, I lost money on a lot of projects because it seems to me that that's what the value was. But realistically, when things when push came to shove, we needed to raise prices. A couple of things that I would then say, don't be afraid to do these things. Don't be afraid to say no. If there's not the right fit. If you attract the wrong client, don't be afraid to say so. I'm sure you've heard of the 80 20 rule that 20% of the work that we do winds up providing 80% of the value in our lives. Saying no is a big part of making sure that you're doing things that will continue to add value. The other thing is, as I mentioned before, don't be afraid to experiment. I didn't know if YouTube was going to be successful. And I can promise you, I lost a lot of money trying out Facebook ads. They didn't work for me, but they might for you. Google ads didn't work for me, but they might for you. I haven't gone to a town hall or a city council meeting, but that might work for you. Don't be afraid to get out there and try some things and don't be afraid to break the mold. And along with that, when we experiment, mistakes are going to be made. So long as you learn from those things, you're moving in the right direction. So I mentioned that I do want to come back to my overall philosophy. And I mean this not just for consultants, not just for air table pros. I really think that this needs to be an overall philosophy for us as an air table community. And if you don't think of yourself as a leader in the air table community, I would recommend that maybe you reevaluate that because being here today means that you are one of the top users of air table who is most active, most engaged and most excited about moving forward with the potential of this software. So as leaders in this air table community, whether you feel like an air table pro or not, I think we should all work to encourage learning at all different levels of air table. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, when we put down other people and take an air of superiority, because our way we think is the best way, we're not encouraging the whole community in general to come up together. And I try as hard as I can to bring humility to all of my interactions. In fact, just the other day, I made a recommendation on a Facebook group about how a certain automation could be solved and somebody else mentioned that I should use Integra Mat and didn't I know that Integra Mat had this feature and honestly I didn't know. And the only way that we're going to learn those things is if we bring humility to the table every time we have these interactions, and we're willing to say, there's no way that one person could know everything. Let's learn together. And again, I mentioned this at the beginning, but this idea that the rising tide lifts all boats, air table is doubling its size, its value year over year over year. And us in the community, we have the opportunity as leaders in this community to also make sure that new people feel welcomed as they come in. Beginners feel welcomed as they try to wrap their mind around the amazing things that are available with this software. So with that being said, I hope that that's the philosophy that we can take as an overall group today. That certainly my philosophy and our philosophy at Gap Consulting, I'm going to kick it back over to Chris. Thank you so much for listening and welcome to the First Air Table Conference.