Understanding Data analytics and AI solutions with Zulfiya Forsythe

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Zulfiya welcome to the show.

Sebastian Rusk 

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Zulfiya Forsythe

Hey, thanks for being here. I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes. I love telling people stories on this show. So for some context, as we get started here for our listeners, let's back up a little bit to the beginning of the story, wherever the beginning is for you. I know it's different for everyone, but in where you started and what really brought you to present day with what you're doing and what your business does to help serve people.

Sebastian Rusk 

Absolutely. So my name is Zulfiya Forsythe. I'm a CEO and founder of Omadli Group We are a data analytics and AI solutions company for, and we help businesses to get efficient and streamline their processes. So where it all started is I, by trade, I'm an accountant. So I went to accounting school back in Iowa. many years ago and I was working in corporate America just as a corporate accountant. What I've noticed is that we had same process month of a month that was taking such a long time from everyone, from my team members and just myself. I just started tinkering and thinking, okay, how can I just make it better? How can I automate this bank reconciliation process or just expense report that I was working on that time? And this is the first time I kind of got introduced to the syntax through Visual Basics, those old days, if anyone remembers, working in Excel. So just me kind of working through it and figuring out how to do macros. And I was like, oh, there is a better way. I mean, you can record and it can automate things. And this is how just the interest got sparked. And then I started hanging out with the IT department more and more and just kind of looking what they do. And at that time, this illustration by one of my managers was, they just took millions of rows of data and just with a click of a button, all of a sudden it was organized and the beautiful dashboard showed up. And I was just mesmerized. I was like, this is magic. Like, how is it possible? Why, why can we do this? Because in a corporate accounting, we always have to work on financial statements and reporting and it's never, But all my years of experience, it was never like, every software has their own out of box, but usually not utilized because everyone has their own kind of custom reporting that they look at, custom KPIs that they put together. So that's where I said, okay. Why can't we just build on backend? And now it comes out without the manipulations that we have to do month over month and sit there late evenings and nights. So this is how I got into IT. So I kind of begged my way into the IT department. I'm really lucky because to be honest, it was a challenging journey as an accountant trying to move into IT. It's interesting back then, I was even trying to find analytical jobs and recruiters like no, you're an accountant. You cannot be financial analyst, you're an accountant. So just kind of like was really grateful. I remember that day very clearly. It's just like I was so happy to get into IT and that's how my journey began. I was a system analyst, learn everything on that system, kind of produce reporting and debugging certain reports on a back end and just started working on sequel and and you know when you like something you don't really pay attention how much time it takes from your weekends and nights because you just kind of like it's curious it's curiosity it was curiosity driven and just kind of sitting there and like playing with sequel and kind of learning self-talk myself and after that I I got into more like data analytics jobs and COVID hit. I got laid off and I started looking into freelancing and taking one client at the time. And that time I remember also like my first client, I still remember that I still have it written down because it was a big deal for me. It's just like, you know, helping somebody, taking that expertise, putting the expertise hat on and like not having a team, like coming from a corporate America where you have a team, where you have people around, you can ask questions. You can bounce ideas off from, like, how do you solve this? But being on your own, it's like people come to you for expertise and they rely on you to kind of provide that and be self-sourced and dependent on solving these problems. So, you know, and then I got another data analytics job in healthcare. Actually, most of my experience is in healthcare and corporate world. And I just started, just kept that, kept that going as additional income for my family. In 2023, I just went full-time on my business and helping now clients with data analytics, now with the world and AI, helping them with AI as well, navigate that, basically automate their reporting. Just exactly what the passion drew me better, make the things better back in many, many years ago. Helping the clients to get up from Excel manual reports, integrating data across many different platforms, like Hotspot, for example, Salesforce, that well-known marketing space, and then joining that with their proprietary software or software that's prevalent in the industry, for example, and just making sure that all that data is married across, and then they get the full picture, as well as kind of like detailed picture on their reporting. So just something that would take every month or every week time just to constantly refresh the data, rerun those formulas, or doing even those macros that could break, could get your file corrupted, and now you're kind of spending that time again, just elevating that and building it once, giving them that kind of where they are at with their business on the go in real time is a game changer, because what you track is what improves. So giving the business that ability that there's no need of manual intervention anymore. You just build it once with the custom reporting that they want. And now they have all their numbers so they can kind of keep their business intact and also get alerted if any of their numbers go down. They can change their strategies around their marketing or even their product development right away instead of kind of looking at it post month or post week that things that already happened and it's It's basically too late to make changes.

Zulfiya Forsythe

So you went from accounting to IT?

Yeah.

You must really love numbers. Yes, I do. Because both of them sound extremely painful.

Yes, I do. I do. I do. So back in school, I kind of looked at what I was good at. I was good at math and drawing. So that was kind of two subject matters that I really enjoyed. I could do math. It's like, you know, you have the rules and formulas you follow. the logic, and then the creative part was just drawing. I love drawing.

Do you still draw today?

Yes, I doodle a lot. So it helps me. It's funny. I take notes all the time, although there are so many electronic, but I do like physical paper and take notes while I'm in meetings. And sometimes even if I doodle, it kind of helps me to instill that process and kind of help me remember. It's just, that's how just my brain works sometimes.

Yeah. I find that fascinating when people are able to, you know, draw an entire like set of notes with like a drawing, like care, like colors and like characters. And I've tried to do it. I did an okay job of it. I mapped out one of my, I'm a speaker and I mapped out one of my talks by drawing things. And I literally took out colored pencils and, Crayons and adult coloring is grossly underrated. A lot of people don't understand how, how incredibly fun adult coloring is. I just wish they made better coloring books. They seem to be very thin, like the, like you have to color. They're very thin, I guess. We were burning back to when we were kids. We had a lot of space to go in and coloring. It's very, it's a good stress relief to say the least. So what kind of companies do you work with?

We work with veterinary clinics as one of them. So we help with veterinary clinics. It's kind of interesting and mirrors my healthcare experience that I work in all the corporate America work in behavioral health and renal care as well. So with the veterinary clinics, we work with helping basically marrying the data across many enterprises that they use. Like for example, Cornstone, this is one of the patient record keeping, enterprise that they use, as well as the CopsBot or Cogus Online. A lot of business owners use Cogus Online. So just kind of mirroring it across and have the system talk to each other. So for example, if you're looking at the patient records, if you want to see, all right, well, what's my payments are like in terms of accounts receivable? Who are they from? If you don't have those systems talking, you kind of have to manually get the data from all of these Systems and then have the Excel cleaned it up and kind of do the VLOOKUPs and just spend a bunch of time basically on it. And then by the time you're done, it's already outdated because you get new records populated in the system, so you have to kind of refresh or redo your work. Basically, merit crossing in the art case, for example, if you want to see, okay, well, what's my outstanding error, who's causing it, and then you can kind of drill down to the client to see the patient's history, their, for example, their records, their behaviors, the kind of whole picture now, because you have it tied to your patient record system. So, kind of helps a lot with seeing ups and down or if you have like multiple clinics, and you want to see which ones performing better than the other. I mean, then you can compile the data and kind of see which ones are giving you the most revenue on what type of treatment. and, uh, what type of times, uh, that are more, for example, busy as if you're trying to like staff your clinic on those busiest times. And then, uh, that's like, especially if you're trying to scale as well, like seeing where your overhead is and where is your revenue is. So it kind of helps you to, again, um, to tune those strategies that are essential to a business.

What's the hardest part about your business?

The hardest part? Um, The most, I guess, the challenging part is showing the clients that, okay, this is not as expensive as you think. For example, when they think of onboarding these tools, right, it's showing the value that at the beginning, Once they are on our service, meaning once we build those tools for them, they're like, oh my god, this is amazing. Now they're like, can we do this report? Can we do that report? So it turns into this like, oh my gosh, what else can we do? What else we can automate? But this first step is a bit of a hesitance there, just because there's not enough, I think, education around it and this is where they're just a little bit hesitant on onboarding it but once they see the value of it they don't have any of their staff now pulling it together or figuring it out or sitting there late nights and evenings or weekends sometimes if they need like to see their volumes like every day and nobody is like touching it anymore it's just kind of smoothly goes through it, I think just taking that first step on getting the value out of these reporting tools. And it's not like a soft, and here's another thing, it's not like a software they need to install. So we're living in the world of, you know, 24 seven, kind of like availability of reporting tools being on the web on a cloud base. So there's nothing heavy that you need to install on your computer. It's just all kind of taken care of on a live version. So Just taking that first step.

Yeah, absolutely. So how do you guys get new business or is it referral based? Do you guys do any marketing? Like how do you market IT or software services?

Absolutely. So our reporting services and AI solutions, what we do is most of it, I'm pretty young as a company and I'm learning a lot in terms of marketing space. So it's a referral. We work with, for example, I manage service providers like IT support companies, maintenance companies, and they sometimes also give us clients because they already have these clients that are coming to them through the door and they're already supporting them with all of their enterprise on the cloud. So they're like, we partner up together with them where we become kind of their partner in delivering those services for these clients. And this is one way. Another way is referrals. And also we are on social media platforms and we're trying to get into the ad space right now as well. And then like fine tuning our message there.

Absolutely.

And also events and podcasts like that.

Yeah. Podcasts. I'm a big fan of podcasts. Absolutely. For sure. So what are you, what are you guys excited about for 2025 as we get started here?

Absolutely. For 2025, what I'm excited about is AI. As much as 2024, we've been having AI discussions now, it's the third year, I think I'm excited about that we have built a couple of AI bot solutions, chatbots, but they are not more What I'm seeing right now in the industry, for example, if we take veterinary industry, we build natural kind of the chatbot that imitates that natural language that we're all getting used to for chat GPT, where you just ask a question and you get their kind of conversation back, the feedback back. So that's what we're building for veterinary space, where now their customers can go and ask a question about the services, hours, and rescheduling, and, for example, old patient records that could be tied down to their patient records system. And kind of get it coming out from the form field, because right now what I'm seeing, most of the chatbots there, they're more like a form. They're just like, provide your email, we'll get back to you. but we're creating a tool that's more like a conversation piece, more engaging and providing that kind of like a quick response. So, because we all got used to Amazon days. I mean, nobody's going back. Everybody's like used to getting response now. And people sometimes are so busy that they just want to like close that ticket out of their, for example, to-do list. Like I need to make an appointment. I want to make it right now. I don't want to wait till I get back two, three days because I might forget about it. I just right now I have time, I want to set an appointment, move on with my day and put in my calendar, done. So that's where we are at. So with 2025, we basically onboarding AI solutions for our clients. We're providing that as well as like, hey, we have kind of here's a package. The bot, for example, a veteran clinic, but also let's take a look at the processes that are taking a long time on your end, like some business processes, maybe some documentation that you're doing on HR onboarding processes, for example. And let's figure out the kind of workflow that we can set up for you so you can scale your business so you can educate also your team on on the AI solutions as well. That's exciting piece because as we know right now, I am an AI every single day, putting my head down and learning a lot of things. And the more I learn, the more I realize, oh, wow, there's just so many things that are happening. And it's, there's just no turning back. The writing is on the wall. So what I'm trying to do is be resourceful as much as possible for our clients, for future clients, for my friends and family members, just, hey, how can I help you? Like give you like some tips on so you can start using it and seeing the value of it.

Absolutely, yeah. AI is definitely not going anywhere. Looks like it's here to stay, whether we like it or not. Well, it's been so great to better understand a little bit more about you and your business. I appreciate you taking some time out to hang out with me for just a few minutes. Wishing you the best here in 2025. Any final thoughts for our listeners about the world of AI and IT?

Absolutely. So I would love to, if you guys have questions on, I have actually chat GPT, some free AI system guide. So DM me, you can find me as Zofia Forsyte or amaldigroup.com or LinkedIn as well, just add Zofia Forsyte. So would love to help.

Absolutely. I'll include those things in the show notes as well too. Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Alrighty. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.