#4 Telling Your Story Your Own Way

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast
Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing
Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #4 Wilton Rogers III
Telling Your Story Your Own Way

00:01 Dr. Doreen Downing Hi, I’m Dr. Doreen Downing, host of the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast series. And I once suffered from stage fright. And so, I know what it’s like to have missed out on opportunities, especially early on when I was building my business. I was too afraid to step into the spotlight. So, in this podcast series, I’ve invited people who have had that same experience. And most likely, like I did, found my way out. It’s like Michelangelo says, “The angel’s always in the marble.” And so, once we find our voices, and we’re then able to, what, give our gifts out to the world, we have a voice widely that not only promotes what we love in our hearts, and what we want to share, it also grows our businesses. So today, I’m very pleased to introduce and welcome a friend of mine, Wilton Rogers III, and to also say that what I’ve done this past month is to meet Wilton through a video series that we’ve done on LinkedIn– a challenge. So, every day, almost every day, he says, it’s 26, out of 30, something like that, or 24… every day, showing up to share his passion, share his life, personally, as well as professionally. So professionally, what I’ve learned so far about Wilton is that he is into automation– automating businesses, and he’s a leader in that. And what I’ve learned is something called RPA. Robotic Processing Automation. And it’s gonna be the wave of the future. I mean, the future is already here, apparently. And so, but… he’ll talk more about that I’m sure as we go on, but I want to first welcome you, Wilton, and say thank you for sharing your personal story about your fear of speaking and how you came through it. Let’s just first say, we’ll start with how it was for you when you struggled and what you understand about what kept you in that struggle? Or what was the cause of that?

02:22 Wilton Rogers III Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on here. It’s a pleasure to be on here with you. Yeah. When we first talking about fear, a lot of your videos caught me because a lot of things you were talking about resonated with me. And I really understood what you were saying. I’m like, I remember that, Oh, I remember that. Yes, I had to go through that. So a lot of what you were talking about is so real to me and it hit home. And it brought up some things in my past that I remember having to go through. And I think one of the reasons why I had fear growing up, first of all, you know, growing up in the 70s, just gave away my age, so—you know, growing up I was going to middle school, I mean Elementary School in the 70s. And I didn’t I didn’t know how to read. And I love to– I was like, I love to read, but I just couldn’t understand it. And throughout my whole middle school, and we lived in a rural area, so we didn’t have access to a lot of, you know, the city where you can just figure out what the problem is, go to specialists and things like that. Even back then you really didn’t have any, very many options like you do now. It wasn’t until later on that I found out that I have dyslexia. So, I was always fearful of talking, of reading, of everything. So, in other words, when I used to be able to tell each teacher when they– back then they used to call on you by rows, or, if they didn’t call on your rows, then they just point to a person and say, “hey, now you read.” I always try to read ahead of the person to make sure that I could understand what I could read. And every time it came to me, I failed. So, I finally got the courage to tell them I can’t read. So, I’m trying to read but I don’t understand how to read it. Can you please not call on me because I can’t. And so, what I found out is just ways to work around that. And that was more like, my sister was a great reader. So, she was my audio book back in the 70s and 80s. Right. So, she’s my audio book. But as I got older, being able to—and I did well in school. I did great in math, but anything that had to do with reading or anything like– I love history, but my sister would read to me, and I could visualize what was going on in my head. So, in history class, I was always raising my hand. But when it came down to tests, I would do horrible because I was just, I just didn’t understand it. But what I really found out was, as I got older, to really figure out how to overcome what I was doing. When it came to any type of reading, when it came to, it was like, “okay, you have to spend more time doing this in order to be able to be successful in this.” And what I found out when I started to talk, I started to– I love being an entrepreneur, I was entrepreneur since I was selling eggs at age seven years old. So, I loved being an entrepreneur, so I always had a business. Even in high school, I had a business. In college, I had a business. And as I got older, I just started, I started really building businesses, and then I started selling them. So, you know, it just became like, oh, I love this, right. But as I started seeing the opportunities come, people started asking me to speak more about how I did it. I was like a deer in headlights. And I just couldn’t do it. And I just remember one of my mentors that reached out to me, and I call him my mentor now, he was just one of my dad’s close friends, and he was a professor at the University. And he went in, you know, I was supposed to do a presentation for his class. And he taught– I just told him, “I can’t do it, because I don’t know what to say.” And so I told him my situation. And he goes, “you already know what to say. You don’t need to write things down like everybody else. You see everybody taking notes and doing everything. Memorize it.” I was like, “memorize it?” He goes, “it comes natural to you. You’re talking about it now. Memorize it.” And as I started trying to figure out how to memorize it, at first I did my bullet points. And as always in a presentation, I would lose my spot on bullet points. But then I figured, okay, I got to memorize these so I started memorizing it. And it just started hitting, it started hitting, and started hitting. And the more I did it, the more comfortable I got and that fear started to slip away. And it just—so, everything that I do now, it’s more– I have to do my research or I already know about it. And I’m very consistent about it. And it comes natural, because if you… if you throw a book at me right now and tell me to read it, I would have trouble reading it. But if you, if you allow me to read through it a couple of times, I could sit down here and put the book down and sit down and talk to you about the whole conversation. And what page that was, what page this was, because now I know how to memorize. So that’s how I overcame my fear.

07:20 Dr. Doreen Downing Oh, what a story! I’ve never heard anything so unique and creative. And first of all, what I remember, what you just said about being young, and then speaking up. So that says something about you, that you had the courage to speak up to the teacher and point to what you felt was one of your deficiencies. And I also think that, you know, what you’re doing now about automation, and processing– when you started out, I mean, it’s such a link! You started out with a processing problem, right? You had a problem processing, and now your business is all about processing!

08:02 Wilton Rogers III And I think it all plays hand in hand because I figured out a strategy on how to do that. And then when I understood RPA, I figured out a strategy on how I can help businesses out. So it became like, “okay, now I understand this.” So, and I knew that the small and medium-sized businesses never had that; it was only in the enterprise world. And I was like, “no, I’m gonna make it happen in small and medium-sized businesses.” And for years, people told me “you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t do it.” And now we cracked the code on doing it. And now a lot of these vendors are going, “Hey, man, we want you to do a presentation for us to understand how you did it.” You know, so you’re right, it was just figuring out the process back then. And today still using the same and just in a different way.

08:43 Dr. Doreen Downing And the way that you described your sister as being the audio book. And that you can process information or, what do they call it, that you could see it visually, orally, and kinesthetically, but visually was not so good for you. But you got to the visualization through listening. So to me, it feels like as a businessman, you’re perfectly positioned to be where people really can’t do what you do when they need to do automation for their business. In fact, it feels like you’ve figured out how to automate reading.

09:24 Wilton Rogers III You know, in fact my book– I literally read about two books a month on my audio, you know, I have a, what’s it called, the Audible. Audible. So, I release at least two– a minimum of two books a month. Because I can consume it and it’s really, really– it’s helped me. It’s really helped me.

09:45 Dr. Doreen Downing Yeah, so information is out there. And at first it was, I’m not gonna say “impossible,” but at first it felt like very challenging for you to actually be able to take in information and then have it come out through your voice. And what you did along the way feels like it was a problem that you faced. You stood up and said, “Hey, teacher, I can’t do this.” And then you got creative with your sister. It was just natural that you found a solution. And I think that what you’re telling me today, and what I hope the listeners will see– anybody who is struggling– that there are many different ways to come up with a solution to a problem around the fear of speaking. And yours, yours is certainly one of the more creative ones.

10:43 Wilton Rogers III You know, and it was but it was almost when I was in high school it was almost forced on me. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because I was sort of, I’m a, more of an introvert. I really don’t like to be around a lot of people. I’m like, really to myself, you couldn’t tell that if you’re, if I’m talking to you. But for the most part I’m, my wife will tell you is like when she first met me, I was on the stage performing on fitness in front of hundreds of people. And then she, she thought I was a certain guy. Then when she met me, she’s like, “you don’t like to go anywhere.” I said “No, I’m gonna stay at home.” So I like to be that way, but grow– in high school, I was the only black kid in my school. So, I don’t want to be the dumb black kid. I don’t want people to really come out there and say, “oh, man, you can read, you’re dumb, you’re this, you’re that.” So for me being bullied at a young age, I talked to the teachers like, “don’t put me in that position.” You know, because I want to be– and they, for the most part, they understood that. And I didn’t want my parents to be involved with it. I wasn’t that person. I was like, you know what I think, my grandfather told me, “when you speak from your heart, people will listen.” I remember him telling me that when I was very young, You know, so, tell people, speak from your heart and don’t allow other people to speak for you when you know you can speak for yourself. So that age, I was like, my grandfather was my idol. And I followed him everywhere. I mean, no matter where, I was like his little shadow, you know. And so, I remember that. And every time I knew that I was in a position, or I was going to be in a pickle where someone might look at me differently, might judge me, I reached out to those, my teachers from the beginning. I was like, “Listen, I’m gonna take this class, but I’m going to tell you, I can’t read. I try to read all the time. I try to do it. For some reason I can’t.” Some people. Some teachers even told me, “Hey, go get some help over at the university. We’ll get you this, we’ll do that.” It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, that um– sophomore in college. But I was going to be a sophomore my freshman year. I started to flunk out in very simple classes. And my teacher– my coach is like, “dude you can’t play with us if you flunk out.” I told him the situation, and he took me to a test, found out I have dyslexia, and then they reversed and helped me start reading and understand how to read. So now I mean, reading is okay for me. I mean, I still get the letters mixed up a little bit. But I could, for the most part, if I’m seeing that, that letter, that word over and over, it’s already, it’s already in my head, but it’s something that I haven’t– I’m not used to saying, I haven’t said. Then it’s like, whoa, okay, let me let me try to piece it all together. So, it was a struggle at first, it really was, that fear was, but it was more fearful of people making fun of me. When I got older, as I got older, so I reached out to those that can protect me from people making fun of me.

13:29 Dr. Doreen Downing Well, what you just did there, you gave a fabulous word of warning and wisdom, actually, to people who find themselves in such a predicament, that there are resources around them– people who could actually protect or somehow arrange it so that you aren’t shamed and put in front of people and being judged pretty severely. So, asking for protection. That’s, that’s wonderful. The other thing I heard you say, which is already speaks to me is the heart. And I know from your bio, and from your last month’s videos, there’s, there’s a way that the voice comes through a heart. When, when there’s sincerity, and when there’s a genuine human being who’s not trying to impress, who’s not trying to sell, who’s not trying to, you know, be more than he is, and I feel like you’re that kind of person to me, and I’ve been very anxious, not anxious but excited, let’s say, about watching your videos because I know I always come away, I always, Wilton, come away uplifted. You are an uplifting person. So, I’d like to just move into a little bit more around how you can uplift, because you do just naturally, but more technically, RPA– Robotic Processing Automation. And so, I know you did a video training on it earlier today. But you can say just a little bit more about it. Because I think you’re bringing heart and soul to businesses who need to be able to automate it so that they can then be more creative. Like you are creative.

15:23 Wilton Rogers III Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you. Yeah, I think well, first of all, I think more of the, you know, coming, being authentic, it came from a lot of dark times in my life. And you know, and I know, I can see a hustler, really, when I, when he passes in front of me. So, and I don’t like that feeling. And I don’t want people to feel that around me. It’s like, you know, I’m not, you know, I want to be someone that can inspire, or encourage and educate and what I can do. In order for me to do that, I have to really know my craft. And I have to really study my craft, that way if there’s questions, I can answer, or I know how to get those answers for them immediately if I can’t answer. And with RPA, I feel that way. Because it was in 2017, I was, just had sold my business and I was working for the hotel, and I just sort of like, I know what I want to do, and I just can’t stay retired. I can’t stay, you know, I gotta do something. And the RPA opportunity came, and I heard about it, and I was like, well, this is pretty good. I like, I like what RPA is, I still was like hesitant about what it was. But they said it’s working. Long story short, the company said, “We want you to work for us.” They moved my family and me out to Houston. And we started from scratch and they said, “We want you to be the VP of sales. And marketing wants you to build this up, boom, go.” Okay, so I start learning it. And I start talking to businesses. And I start noticing this is all for enterprise and for the enterprise level. And I was like, I don’t feel, you know, that’s what I want to stay in. Because as I started talking to them, a lot of them didn’t have– they weren’t authentic. They weren’t real. It was– I felt like it was just so corporate, right. And there was no feeling behind it. It was all about the data and the numbers and, you know, in black and white, it was this or nothing, right? And so, to me, it was like I don’t– I’m not that type of person, I want to build relationships, I want to make sure that people walk away like, “Wow, thank you, this changed my life, this changed it.” And I wanted that feeling. Because I know for me, it’s like I’m doing my job. And so that’s why I said, I got to have RPA in small and medium-sized businesses. So basically, RPA is automating processes that already exist. And we don’t change it up. You don’t buy a new system, you don’t do anything. We just figure out what you’re doing manually and we automate it. And people are so amazed on what they have been doing for years, until we turned around automated it. You know, we had a company that was, we did– we’re doing their fourth process now. But they’ve been doing the same ones over and over and over with them, the client, and their staff for the last 15 years. We went over there in two months and automated everything. And we’re saving them over $6,000 a month, their ROI is like almost 250%. And those employees are so happy because now they’re doing something else and don’t have to worry about that. But that was the feeling that I wanted to have for all of our clients. But as small and medium-sized businesses, they had no idea what it was. They’re like, they don’t understand. And from that point, I was like, Okay, I can’t sell them, because they’re gonna think I’m another automation software, like anything else that’s out there, which we’re not. So, I had to educate them. And through education it’s more like, okay, find areas of their business that you can, they can identify. And I’ve been doing that for two years, literally, like constantly for two years two years just like boom, boom, boom going at it. And we started seeing a bigger trend starting to pick it up. But once we have some solid clients, and we build a process that we can automate real quick, because the turnaround time for automation is usually a couple of months. And I was like, that’s way too long for a small business. Small businesses can’t afford that. They have to do it immediately. You know, because they’re wearing 15 hats, you know. They start taking off each one of those hats, we start automating them, but using none of their time. Like I don’t want to interrupt them. How can I do that? So I just, I put this up, I said, “I don’t want them to spend– I want to be able to automate in 30 days. And I want to be able to do– for them to use it less at least one hour a week of their time, no more than four hours.” I was, you know, I was asking people questions and I was doing everything else and they’re like “this can’t be done.” Well, if you try hard enough it can be done.
Long story short, I was able to, to, to create a blueprint to do that. And I built a team that helped me do that. And of course, we had we run into some– a lot of hiccups along the way, but now it’s totally solid. And that’s why today we had our first webinar, our first real webinar, that shows it. And, I mean, we had, we had some great responses. I mean, it was, it was, it was pretty amazing. But the feeling that you, that I’m getting now to help in these type of businesses, it was it was worth the struggle, because I was like, I knew what happened, because I was that business. You know, I was that business owner that needed this. And if someone would have showed me that, I would have been like, “Whoa, this is a game changer for me, it’s gonna help me and my business. Now I can focus my attention on my staff and focus our attention on this, and not on that, you know, we can just take care of that.” And now they’re starting to understand it more, and now they’re calling us, “hey, we want to we have another process we want to talk about.” Said “alright let’s sit down and talk about it.” That’s what I wanted. Because now people are like, seeing, okay, now I see the benefit of it. And for us, it was never about the money. Because, you know, for us like, okay, we want to make it affordable. I mean, they’re using– the typical clients are getting a return on their investment within three months. And the rest is just, you know, pure, pure profit, I guess you could say. So, we made it very, very affordable for businesses to make, to do it for them and see that return immediately. And, and just to see that, as soon as seeing the momentum it’s getting has been something I’ve been visualizing for years. For years. So, so yeah, that’s a little bit about RPA and where it’s going, and we’re the first ones to break into the, into the market and the SMB market like we have. And now we’re getting a lot of national recognition. We’re the, we’re the premier development company for the fastest growing RPA vendor in the world now where they’re reaching out to us to develop all the processes for their clients. So, it’s been a blessing, it really has.

22:11 Dr. Doreen Downing Oh, just a natural growth. I have a couple other things I want to talk to you about. But before I do that, I want to make sure that you give the website or where do people go to reach you and find out more?

22:26 Wilton Rogers III It’s very simple. The website is called SCALETHROUGHAUTOMATION.COM

22:31 Dr. Doreen Downing SCALETHROUGHAUTOMATION.COM
Well, that’s, that’s the whole point… scale through automation, isn’t it? So, and just to see you smiling, and so pleased and happy it… So my comment was about you being able to go into a business. And it, to me, feels a little similar to what it’s like to go into an area that you can’t, you can’t figure out what to do, which was the dyslexia and the reading. And yet, you’ve had enough experience that “there’s a way through this, there’s a way through. There’s another way, I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to find it,” and that that kind of knowing and that strength that I guess it’s kind of like “if there’s a will there’s a way.” Hey, that’s you!

23:23 Wilton Rogers III That’s it, a will!

23:25 Dr. Doreen Downing “There’s a will, there’s a way.” That could be your model.

23:27 Wilton Rogers III I used to always use that, “if there’s a Wil…ton, there’s a way.”

23:31 Dr. Doreen Downing Yeah, there’s a Wilton. Okay, you got it. I, I just, I just discovered that myself. So yes, I think that’s the whole point I was making about you having the ability to be able to look at things in a very different way than most of us. Our brains don’t work the way yours does. So, I think you’re gonna add even more value to companies. You say small and medium businesses, is that what SMB means?

24:05 Wilton Rogers III Yeah, yeah, that’s my passion, was the company’s passion. That’s our motto. We have enterprise clients, obviously. But I’d probably say about 95% of our clients or 90% of our clients are probably SMB right now.

24:19 Dr. Doreen Downing So, what’s the difference between small and medium? How do you define small and how do you define medium?

24:25 Wilton Rogers III There’s like a big range, you know, I like to it qualify for, as far as employees, you know, any anybody like with 50 employees or less to us is considered a small business. Anybody with 50 employees up, to like 250 or 500 is small businesses, but anybody making like, you know, 150 million or more is considered more of an enterprise level, because there’s so much red tape you have to go through in order to get things done. So that’s how we classify it. So are our strengths you know, and our love is the small businesses, anyone with 50 employees or less, because those are ones we can touch them directly and communicate with them directly without having to go through a lot of red tape just to get the conversation going and get everybody on board.

25:14 Dr. Doreen Downing Yeah, you used another good word, the people that you’d “love’ to work with. And I think that’s the key here is, that you’re bringing, of all things, love, to business, to small businesses, and I can feel your enthusiasm and your excitement. Well, isn’t it great that people find their voice, and this is, the whole world benefits. And I guess this is what my podcast is about is showing people that you may feel like the world is judging you and you have to hold yourself back and you can’t figure out that you’ve got something valuable to say. But there is and that’s, again, the Michelangelo quote, “…inside is the angel.” And all we have to do is know that he or she/they is inside. And so thank you anything else you would like to direct us to? Or, I know you do a podcast?

26:13 Wilton Rogers III We do. We do a podcast. It’s a live podcast now. We decided, because we’re doing a recorded podcast, but we were like three months behind on production. And I was like we don’t– by the time we get somebody out there, the information is old. So we just started going live. And now we’re doing a live podcast, recording that, and putting that into production. So they can go back if anyone wants to look at it later on. They can. So we’re doing that. We started already. We’re doing it every Tuesday and Thursday at 3pm Eastern Standard Time, 12 Pacific time. Pacific. Yeah. And so, 12 Pacific, three, three Eastern US, Tuesdays and Thursdays. And we’re live on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, if you just go to Scale Through Automation, just Google us there you probably find us and will be, will be plastered there. All right. Yeah. So that’s

27:00 Dr. Doreen Downing And who are you interviewing for your podcast, your business empowerment podcast?

27:05 Wilton Rogers III We interview everyone. I mean, we had Lisa, Lisa Nichols. The one that was– she was the author of the book The Secret. Yeah, we had her on last week. We had an NFL, retired NFL player pay for Martin Schottenheimer on a couple of weeks ago. So yeah, but we’re also having just people that specialize in certain areas of their business that can give value to our listeners. So, it’s nothing, it’s not an automation podcast at all. It’s not, it’s not technology. It’s just really getting– finding out okay, that person can make a difference to our audience, just get them on and see what we can do. Yeah, yeah. So we were touching that we’re pretty much hitting the different industries and from big to small businesses to mom and pop businesses, you name it, we’re hitting it.

27:59 Dr. Doreen Downing Right, what I got about the podcast, then, is it’s part of your play and part of your fun, but also part of just reaching out to the wider world to say hello world, here we are. And that, to me feels like what you do is also connect people to more of what’s possible. So…

28:19 Wilton Rogers III That’s it. We love to connect, we love to be able to share what we can do and share the network that we have with others because it could benefit people. So that’s all that’s, that’s what we love doing. I mean, we’re, we’re all in the networking world. And it’s, when you really use it to not only not necessarily benefit you but to benefit others the benefit comes back to you tenfold.

28:44 Dr. Doreen Downing Yes, that’s a great last line. When you benefit others and there you will benefit. It’s just a circle isn’t it? A circle of love.

28:55 Wilton Rogers III That’s it. You’re looking for nothing in return, but it’ll come back to you tenfold for sure.

29:02 Dr. Doreen Downing Oh, thank you. Thank you, Wilton.

29:06 Wilton Rogers III Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.

29:07 Dr. Doreen Downing Bye bye.