#208 with Steph Smith - Why You Need a Chief Automation Officer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
If you are skilled with either SEO, email list building, DTC customer acquisition, this is a business in a box that you can start. I would love to see somebody start this. If you're gonna do this, email me, shaan at shaanpuri.com. I will invest in you, advise you, whatever.
What's up, everybody? Sean here and no Sam. We have a pinch hitter, but it's gonna be like when Tom Brady took over for Drew Bledsoe. I don't know if everyone gets the sports reference. Basically, when the sub comes in and outperforms the starter, that's what I'm expecting here. So we have Steph Smith here.
You work for The Hustle. You also are just one of the more interesting people out there on Twitter in our space of business stuff. So Steph is here. You were telling me you're nervous. Are you done being nervous yet?

**Steph Smith** (2:02)
I'm a little nervous. I feel like it's just the pod has grown so much since I was on a year ago, but hopefully I'll live up to the hype.

**Shaan Puri** (2:10)
Well, it doesn't matter how many people listen. It's the same experience either way. That's the good news for you because it's just us talking. So you did a bunch of research, and I had a bunch of topic ideas because that's kind of your job for the hustle and trends and whatnot.
And I just see bullet points. I want to just call them out, the ones I think are interesting. I don't know all the details. So what we'll do is I'll look at your notes here. I'm just going to call out a name.
You introduce it, tell me why it's interesting, what it is, and then we'll react to it and we'll just brainstorm off that. So let's start with this one, the FSA store. What is this?

**Steph Smith** (2:49)
Okay, so the FSA store, if you're like me and you're not originally from the States, you're like, what the hell is an FSA? And it's a flexible spending account. So it's basically a health account. There's also HSAs where you allocate some amount of money and you allocate that pre-tax, I believe. And so you're basically saving tax and allocating this money only to certain products, only certain products related to your health.
These products range from actually seeing a doctor to getting a COVID shot or not a shot, sorry, I should say, a test or band-aids. There's a whole range of products that you can use it on. But the interesting part about an FSA that's different from an HSA is that it expires.
It's basically the only expiring money that I can think of. Even gift cards, you're actually legally not allowed to expire gift cards anymore.

**Shaan Puri** (3:32)
Use it or lose it with FSA.

**Steph Smith** (3:34)
Exactly. And so there's something called the FSA Store. It's fsastore.com.
And if you go to that, one, it gets millions of page views a month, which you might say it's just millions, that's not so many, but they're so high intent because basically what happens is at this cutoff period, you get millions of people going and saying, I have hundreds of dollars. You can get up to $2,700 in your FSA per year. So you have a decent amount of money that you're like, this is expiring. I have to spend it. And I've done this before. I don't know if you have. I ended up buying like 10 bottles of sunscreen or something ridiculous.