AI is certainly one of the hottest topics in the digital world right now, and it is not surprising that every business wants a piece of this action. However, onboarding AI carelessly and without a concrete plan could lead to more losses than wins. Paul Swaney sits down with Zulfiya Forsythe, CEO and Founder of the Omadli Group, who helps businesses integrate AI into their existing systems in the most effective and responsible ways. Zulfiya emphasizes how to prioritize practicality over “sexiness” when adopting AI-powered tools to make the most out of these highly innovative automated tools. She also warns about AI bureaucrats, why aspiring entrepreneurs should not be afraid to start small, and what we can learn from the sweeping success of OpenAI.
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Onboarding AI Correctly With Zulfiya Forsythe
We’re sitting down with Zulfiya Forsythe, founder of the Omadli Group. Thanks for taking the trip down from Boston and sitting down with us.
We have Zulfiya Forsythe, who has a startup we’re really excited to talk about AI space. A little bit of background. You actually coldmailed me. Apparently just told me you used AI to coldmail me and get on. It is super nice to get you out. Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Zulfiya Forsythe Of The Omadli Group
The first thing I would like to do is hear about your background story. I know you’ve been to the US. I’d like to hear about that, then dive right into your career.
I came into the US in 2006 as a student to study accounting in Iowa, and the way I got in was back in the days we had those internet cafes, and from Uzbekistan. I would go to those cafes, and it would look more like a dungeon space in somebody’s basement, and a bunch of boys would be sitting in there playing Counter-Strike. I’m here basically trying to apply to universities all across the United States.
To be honest, I did not know what I was doing, I was just applying to anywhere that would take me. One day, I got a letter that I got accepted. It was amazing. I got accepted to Northwestern College of Iowa in a small town in Orange City. I remember the day that I was at the airport and I was crying my eyes out. My grandma was there. Do you know that movie Big Fat Greek Wedding?
Yeah.
That’s our family. Everyone comes out to say bye to you, and I’m crying my eyes out. I’m sitting in the plane, still crying. I remember the passenger next to me who goes, “What are you crying about?” “I’m going to miss my family. I’m going out to get an education in Iowa.” He’s like, “That’s what you need to be crying about. You’re going to Iowa. Do you even know where you’re going?”
You didn’t know where you were going, did you?
No, I had no idea. All I see is fields and a little house. My first question was from the coordinator who picked me up, I was like, “Do they have electricity? Do they have water?” They were like, “They have everything. What do you think is happening here? I come from the suburbs of a larger city of Tashkent, but I still live in Canada. If living on the outskirts, we still have those towns, like nothing like land and just a little house, sometimes in cities I grew up we don’t have electricity. Those towns will not have consistent water or electricity. In my head, that’s what I’m picturing.
That’s really funny. The US sometimes refers to that area of the country, particularly the New Yorkers, as flyover states because you wouldn’t go out there on a little crass. You’re in Iowa. You’re in school. How well did English?
I actually studied a lot of English back in school, back in Uzbekistan.
That’s good. You learned accounting. Walk me through your time as an accountant, and then what made you pivot your career?
My big dream was to work for the Big Four. I just thought, and that’s what I actually told to the interviewer when I was getting my visa then I’m going to work for Big Four, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and I had even magazine and I plastered it down like, “I’m going to work in these big offices and have a corner office.” That was making it for me.
Once I graduated, I graduated during the 2008 recession time and then I just never made the cut. I went for my CPA as well. I got that done, but I ended up in a corporate finance world. I definitely felt a little bit as a failure to getting the Big Four. I started looking around at my job, and I noticed that there were just a lot of monotonous repetitive tasks. Just corporate accounting, doing the same thing, monthly clothes, and just cleaning up the books, and even bank reconciliations. I just started automating it with Visual Basic. Just started sitting at night. At that time, we had no ChatGPT, none of the tools.
You have YouTubes, you have random forum chats where you put your dummy data, and then you hope somebody answers in the morning, and somebody usually does. I just started thinking with that, and then my CFO, I’m so grateful for the opportunity, saw that in me. I started talking to IT folks, and I basically saw the F5 button, the magical F5 button. You just press it, and all the data gets processed and spits it out in a second. I was like, “I want to be there.” I had the opportunity to move over to the IT department, and that’s how I ended up in data analysis.
Core skill set in finance accounting, finance role, over the IT side of it, data, and analytics. In 2021, you get a bug and you decide to start a company. Tell me the story.
With COVID, I got laid off, and I started looking into freelancing just until I find my next job. Now that I know my accounting, I was like, “How can I help?” Just started going to Upwork and started applying for a bunch of jobs. The first one was at the property management for a small company, just helping them with systems. Applying my technical accounting with systems, how can I set up all their properties, all their tenant work, just little by little, and then I got a job. I still kept that, and I started getting more clients, and I kept it going. In 2023, I went full-time.
Tell me about your company now. It’s three and a half years old. What’s the company look like? How many people are on your team? What are your service lines, your offerings, and your goals? What’s your value problem? Sell me.
Our team is about ten people. What I’m passionate about is that I think it all starts with going back to my accounting days. Just seeing the monotonous work and seeing long nights from my team members, even from myself, and just how can I problem solve with just different tech now? At that time, it was Visual Basic. Now we have data analytics and AI helping businesses, with when I hear, “We have no workflows, we have no processes, and things take such a long time.” I come in and I love that because I get to craft the new innovative ways of solving these problems with new tools, and then buying back the time immediately. That headache is gone. For example, even with small little innovations. That’s just my passion now.
Tell me about your first client.I will say I find a lot of people who have like a good idea or they see a market need, and they cannot get a client. They cannot get anybody to pay for it. Tell me about your first client.
My first client came to me, and I remember I actually have their check. My first check is still in my folder. I have a secret folder where I keep all my I’ll say notes, all my encouragement. Sticky notes that I gave myself when I changed from when I got yes from IC4 to move into IT, and the same thing, the check is there. I remember getting that first client. I was so unsure, like I got this proposal approved, and I was like in my head, “Can I help you? What if I fail you? You’re coming to me, you’re paying for these services.”
When you work in the corporate you have a team, you have managers. You have peers to give you advice on. Here you own your own, and people pay you money for it. I’m just like, “I really need these financials to be ready in three days. Can you help me?” I’m like, “My god.” I have to set everything up, basically set all the systems up. I just dived into it. I was able to do this, and I was like, “I’m not fired yet. He’s still happy, I can deliver.” I realized, I started talking to his team members they had behind, started educating them, and I just saw that, “This is working. This is great.” I started getting more traction when the other people started seeing, for example, that I do this and that started going up.
What would you say your key service offerings are?
My key service is that we help businesses. There’s a lot of business coming on because AI is just overwhelming for a lot of businesses. There’s a lot out there. Every day, there’s a new model, a new feature, and a lot of businesses don’t want to be left behind, and they want to use AI to cut them. They’ve got the overhead cost that they have, or to help them make more money, for example. They come to me, and the key offering that we have is how we can onboard AI for you effectively, responsibly. Are you even ready for AI? A lot of business comes through me, and then what I realize is that they don’t have systems, they don’t have processes.
What we do is we do the assessment of where they are at, assessment of their business, of their processes, and then we determine, “Is this reporting automation that you need?” Every business needs to know where they are at with the performance-wise, the financial performance, before they go and spend money on ads or before they go and hire people, or open a location. We make sure that 70%, when they come in, they want AI. Number one thing off the bat, off the cuff, is automation reporting on the financial reporting.
That’s what they want, or that’s the first thing you want to do.
That’s what we see that they need because once we start talking about, like, “I want AI to automate.” Even little tasks. “I want ChatBot, or I want to be able to put the right strategies for my marketing, or I want this communication or these follow-ups to be automated.” The core of it is now that I start talking, “I have all these reports, can AI just help me get insights on them?” We need to build a data infrastructure, we need to clean the data. Again, if you don’t have good data, AI is useless. It was just going to get garbage and garbage out, basically.
If you do not have good data, AI is useless. It will just get garbage and garbage out. Share on XPutting those systems together to make sure you have a consistent flow of reliable data sources for you to provide information on. The fast and rapid, and reliable information. Our core values are that we come in, we’re data scientists, we evaluate where they are from the systems, evaluate the data, and then we determine, “Based on your need, is it a business intelligence need, and then is it an AI need? AI needs come in the form of ChatBots.” Interesting stats that I just read, 27% of sales fail because salespeople at the time of the sale don’t have information ready to go for them, because this data is sitting everywhere.
We were looking at this company that produced samples for a chemicals company, they ship samples. Some salespeople are waiting two months to get a sample. The customer’s gone. You cannot get a sample product. The customer’s absolutely gone. I see a lot of executives these days wanting to use AI because it’s a buzzword. Like, “I need AI.” They turn it into a check-the-box. How do you convince them? “That’s like a journey. You need an automated report. You need automation. You don’t need AI. We need to automate this.” How do you work with them to get to that answer? You’re making more sense to me when people say, “Some people push the AI.” Talk me through the different paths that they go on, and how do you unpack that decision?
A 100%. I deal with this almost every day. People come to me, and I love my job because I get to educate them and get to show them. For example, as I mentioned, a company comes to me and they’re like, “I don’t want to be left behind in AI. We need AI in our business.” I was like, “Let’s talk about this. Let’s schedule a call. Let’s look at your system. Let’s see what you have.” I educate them, “You want your reporting to be cool? Like you’re pulling your manual Excel from multiple systems that you use, your systems don’t talk.”
That’s just reporting right now, automation is business intelligence, that’s not AI right there. You could actually save money on this because AI is costly. First of all, it’s tokens. Every time you prompt it, AI basically counts these words and charges money for you for that. For example, depending on what solution is, you don’t need a bazooka for a little fly. That’s where I come in and basically educate them on, “Depending on what we’re trying to solve, first of all, figure out what are we trying to solve? What have we got in terms of systems right now? What makes from cost and time analysis? What’s the best tool for that?”
Sometimes there is AI. Sometimes AI is great for knowledge base, for example, gathering information from multiple sources, from your slacks, from your Google Sheets, from your PDFs that like laying around somewhere on your internet, on your files, and gather all the proprietary information and now putting a knowledge-based ChatBot that now has that role. Also, cleaning the data that you’re feeding in to make sure that when somebody gets on a sales call, now instead of looking through this, “Let me look what did we sell this person.”
Twenty different files.
Exactly. Read them. AI could just quickly scan them, read them, and you just prompt it and it gives you the answer right there.
Prioritizing Practicality In Innovation
That’s my next point is that innovation here is exciting, but it also has to be practical. Everybody wants the next sexy thing. We’re a little bit more on the last point. What wins have you gotten for your clients that make them realize practicality is usually better than super sexy? Give me an example of a problem you solved. Give me a situation, what was complicated about it, and then how did you get to a resolution?
Number one, let’s say on the data analytics side, it’s every time now whenever I speak to a business owner and whenever they tell me, “I have these multiple systems and we have multiple people pulling these Excel reports and the data is not consistent. We’re missing money. We’re missing revenue.”
Missing the target, or we’re literally missing it? Both?
Both because nobody’s looking. It’s whatever. What you track improves. If you’re not looking at what sells best, because your data is in multiple different systems, by the time you pull this system, by the time you pull this, they’re all outdated. You’re not streamlining your reporting. You’re not looking at analytics. You’re not looking at which facility, for example, clinic does better than the other than when you onboard the overhead cost.
For example, you have clinicians that work there. All of a sudden, “This clinic does not need this many clinicians.” You’re losing money on over overhead or this clinic is providing these type of services that actually make you more money than the others but because you’re not consistently looking, you don’t have a tool or that gathers up information in real time and alerts you if certain KPIs are going down, you’re missing these critical key points.
Give a client example. I want to hear. Like you got into a client, you said it was missing. What was the unlock? What did you find, and why was it missing?
The unlock was once we gather everything and we put them in real time, now they see we had an interesting one. It was a happy client. We had a clinic that wanted to see which clients were dropping off suddenly.
Just quick for no reason, not revenue. I got you.
The volume of work that they’re getting from those clients is dropping quickly or consistently over time. Before, they would do Excel files that somebody had to put together, but then, really, every time there’s no real history of it. It’s just a snapshot. What we built for them is analytics, so now they can see, “What are our clients are doing over a period of six months, over a year, over this quarter? If someone is consistently dropping, let’s go talk to them about what’s happening.” Right there, catch it before that, before the customer turns.
What industry was this?
That was in veterinary.
Veterinary medicine. Customer being like a patient as a dog.
They were actually parking up with other radiology clinics as well. That’s what was happening basically, and then the volumes were going down.
The radiologist wasn’t sending as many patients?
Exactly.
Got it. Why were they not sending as many patients anymore? They’re not happy with the service? That’s for them to figure out.
That’s for them to figure out.
They can catch it before that?
Yes.
Three Years Down The Road I
Now I get it. If you look three years down the road, what does your team size look like? What do you expect to be doing?
I think three years down the road, we’re seeing that agent AI is going to stay and actually evolve and become more permeated in businesses and helping them to onboard AI safely, helping them to buy back their time. Either if we’re doing the knowledge base AI or even simple tasks. We have these forms. Every system, what it looks like, is it’s interesting. There’s a parallel. Every system that’s an ERP system out there, any type of enterprise system has gives the out of box data analytics.
What I see with the clients is that they don’t use those systems because they do the usual, generic same thing with AI. There are big models, generic AI models, but they’re not really fit to know this customer, their business, their operations, how they do things. This is where we come in, and we use basically the models that are best mom. We use all the models, benchmarking them for certain tasks, so they can be more efficient for the business owner.
They can help them to cut like 20%, 30%, or somewhere even 50% of the work that somebody is manually putting together. Now they can make more money with it because follow-ups are very easy one. How many businesses do I talk to every day that lead customers? They want more customers, but the customers are spread out everywhere in the emails, and they’re not interested in ACRM automatically. It takes a physical person just a little example right to come in and type that information in, and the follow-ups are not done. You have AI gathering all that information automatically.
Automatically emailing.
Pushing into CRM, gathering all your follow-ups into CRM, and then following up on your behalf as well. You don’t forget. Another thing is like the easiest part, interactions. How can they be easy? The ChatBots can be so easy to deploy, like on your Slack, on your teams. What I say is that you can tie in the opportunity and the future is to have a conversation with multiple systems that you have in one spot.
Instead of going into each one of them and clicking and seeing, “I want to see this customer profile and see when was the last time they paid us, and what was the activity, what type of things they purchased from us, or what type of service we gave. Even in the clinical world. I have to go on the patient record, and then I have to see the payments. All these different systems that I have to go to, for example. I have to go to marketing and see what customers we have from what funnels.” All the futures could be united and just quickly charted from one window.
These ten people are your team now?
Yes.
Technical Tools In Zulfiya’s Toolbox
Actually, let’s back up. How many different types of these technical tools do you have in your toolbox? Is it ten different tools? Is it 100 different tools? How many?
Depending on what the client needs. Our tech stack definitely has people who are strong in Python. That’s just the backbone of all the AI. Depending on what we’re trying to solve, we use different larger language models, benchmarking. There are so many models. You have Gemini from Google you have OpenAI, but all of them have different strengths. We need to know which one is good for whatever task, and also, there’s a cost efficiency on it too, because there are models that are lightweight and they’re less expensive. Also, there are models that could be, for example, if they’re HIPAA protected, they don’t want the data to be transmitted over the internet, they want to be locally.
You’ve got a lot of tools in your toolbox.
That’s right.
The Sweeping Success Of OpenAI
I saw the Nvidia CEO say the other week that what Elon had built in like eighteen days or something to get us farm up for Grok. Who’s winning this contest? Is it OpenAI or is it Elon?
OpenAI.
They’re going to win?
I’ll tell you something, the stats show this. OpenAI has somewhere 400 million users. I think a week, 52 million a day. I hope I’m not mistaken. Gemini from Google has about 9 million.
I don’t sleep on Elon.
Here’s the thing. You’re right. OpenAI, what they did is just such a strategic marketing move. OpenAI started in 2022. When they had the first model, what they did was they shipped it out. They shipped it out and were Gemini, Google, for example, their strategy was “We’re only doing this for enterprises. We’re only doing this for developers. We want to make sure this is vetted 100% before we put it out there because there a hallucinations, there are arrows, we don’t want people to make decisions based on something that has not been 100% vetted.” OpenAI did, “I’m going to ship it.”
They loved it, everybody loved it.
“I’m going to get people, common people, get their hands on that so they can get comfortable with the idea.” Now, when you ask the common person with AI, what do you think they’re going to say? ChatGPT. Now, AI is associated with ChatGPT. OpenAI still has the majority of our market share. I’m curious to see how that’s going to be.
It’s interesting because is OpenAI going to be Facebook or MySpace? That’s the question.
That’s very interesting. Another thing with X. You get Grok once you are on an X, for example, for free. Honestly, I try all of these tools sometimes for just research purposes. I have the same prompt going on Gemini, for example, OpenAI, and also Grok. Here’s the thing. People make purchasing decisions based on emotion. Sometimes when they feel comfortable with something, it doesn’t matter what technical abilities, whistles and bells and whistles you got. “I know this, too. I’m comfortable with this, I’m buying this.”
People make purchasing decisions based on emotion. They will buy something they feel comfortable with regardless of its technical abilities. Share on XThree Years Down The Road II
I know people bought $50 million ERP systems because they like the sales rep or they used it before. I go back to my question. You’re ten people now. What does that look like in 3 to 5 years?
I definitely want to expand. I want to grow, but as I help businesses to do AI, I also help myself in our business to use AI as because I’m a business as well. I’m trying to figure out like, “Even little things.” As soon as I get a recorded call, I have a sauna ticket created based on that call, for example, as a to-do list. Just little things like that. How can I automate my admin work? Also, in our team, how do we use what models that we use to help us code things better?
Speed is a thing nowadays. We have AI tools to help us get to MVP, to test our new things that we’re trying to build for ourselves and, essentially, for our customers, fast. I always have our R&D in place, looking forward. I also have a separate R&D research that’s looking forward and saying, “What can we build? What works and what doesn’t? What can we scrap quickly?” I met Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas at Harvard two weeks ago. I got to asking questions. It was incredible, and a handshake from him.
What was the big question?
My big question was, “What strategic bets are you making in the next 1 to 3 years?” His question was 1 to 3 is too long, a quarter.
That’s crazy. 1 to 3 years is too long.
Things are changing so fast in two years. Nobody would think that things that happening quarter are calling to a two-year span.
That’s crazy.
I listen to indicate myself. I listened to Andrew Ng, from founder of Coursera. He also talks about speed. Talks about how MVPs before would take months to deploy. Now with AI, you can just quickly come to the MVP stage. Something that took months will take, for example, a weekend. Just quickly test out to see if it’s a viable product or not.
The Danger Of AI Bureaucrats
What’s the biggest misconception people have about AI? Before you answer me on Twitter, for a hundred years, people have been saying that robots are going to take jobs away. Technology’s never caused a net job loss. Big move, we started, we were 60% agrarian in the 1800s, and then we were at 5 or 10, I don’t know. Where we are, not much. It took 75 years or whatever it took. When I think of automation, that’s what my lens. What’s the biggest misconception about AI?
As I listen to the tech innovators like those from Nvidia. They are all an OpenAI. They’re also investing, and think also in Grok as well, investing in robotics. Everything that moves, the idea is that everything that moves could also be done in as a robot basically. Here’s the thing. YN Harari is one of my favorite writers. He wrote 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Sapiens as well. He said very interesting, “Hollywood portrayed robots as something that would be taking our jobs, something so negative, something that’s taking like Terminator.” It’s not what we should be worried about. We should be worried about AI bureaucrats. What does that mean?
That’s disgusting.
What AI bureaucrats, what he means by that is that in every business there’s going to be an AI model, a machine learning model, that’s going to make decisions, “Do I get a job? Do I get a loan? Do I get denial on my health insurance?”
I’ve never thought about this. That is scary.
That’s that is what’s going to be something that we need to think about. Not the robots out there, but really some of the machines making decisions on our livelihood.
I think you just ruined my weekend. That is way scarier than the robots coming alive and killing us.
Machines are very consistent. One of the things about AI is it’s consistent in terms of, “You give it a task. You have to evaluate, if you say for insurance denials, these are the criteria of people that you need to deny health insurance on board covered for.” Humans come in, humans have the ability to judge, and have emotional intelligence. Where we can overwrite sometimes, so it’s an exception. That machine doesn’t.
Humans have the ability to judge and possess emotional intelligence. Machines cannot. Share on XYour judgment. It’s factors that you cannot, that are not 1s and 0s. Do you remember the movie I, Robot?
I’ve never watched that movie.
You have to watch it because the whole point of the movie, and I don’t want to give it away, was that the judgment of a human is better than the judgment of a robot, to unpack that Will Smith had. You should watch it because it’s salient for this. Bureaucrats in government they reward control, and I guess predictability and repeatability. That’s like if you get the character of some of the Asian cultures of you didn’t miss the thing on this form. You got to go way back in the line. Come back in two days. Does AI go that way, or does AI help you get the form done? It would cost them more money.
It depends on the data that AI was built upon. Here’s the thing, another interesting thing that I actually listened to conversation at Harvard was how data is masculine, so data is not feminine. That’s interesting. Who’s putting together the data? There are less women who are scientists who are involved in putting together these data models. The decisions could be biased.
That’s super interesting.
Those are the models that we’re deploying right now. That’s why you have OpenAI and Anthropic Claude. We have this Google that constantly reiterates their models and invest billions of dollars to make sure that these models are not biased. What they need to do for that they need to scour the internet. Gather everything that’s out there and basically train their models on that.
In the news, the guy Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Does that change if an AI is doing it versus a person making that decision? Does a backlash different? This impacts a lot of ethical questions.
A 100%. Who is responsible?
Who is responsible for that? He didn’t have his personal claim situation. Now he just knew about it. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s really interesting. At some point, AI will at least make the first-level decision.
That’s why there’s so much scrutiny around in health care when AI is deployed. There are a lot of regulations right now. I actually attended an entire seminar on ethical AI at Harvard last summer for an entire week. What we talked about. Ethical AI in education, in healthcare, and in the government as well. Who is overseeing that? How are we examining that these data models are passing that check, that quality check before they help us to make decisions? Who’s responsible for that?
Setting Guardrails Around AI
What’s more important? I guess what’s worse is it’s worse to not give AI enough guardrails, or is it worse to give it too much?
That’s such a good question. Here’s what I would say. That’s why it’s so important for companies that onboard it. They need to onboard it, especially if they’re making decisions, and look at their proprietary information along with AI. Right now, AI models are very general. They need a context to make their decisions better and more educated as well. That’s why we need people that are onboarding them, evaluating and testing it profusely, and there could be even some small models and also adjacent with their proprietary information. How do they do business? What expertise do they have to get better clarity on the responses to get a better outcome as well?
Can you build empathy into AI? Do you know what I mean?
Yes, I completely understand. Even if you open ChatGPT. Even right now, everybody has ChatGPT. It’s a free version, even the plus version is $20 a month. If you have interacted, do you notice how it’s nice to you at the time? I don’t know, did you pay attention?
It feels phony, but yes, I do notice it.
It’s actually trying to make you, even if one makes mistakes, even if one gives you false information, it still sounds pretty friendly. Is that as well?
Of course, yeah.
It’s the AI there to make you. The OpenAI tool is to make you feel good, actually. That’s why the responses come in very friendly, and even when it make mistakes, you miss that. “It sounds so educated, sounds so good.” That’s why we need you in the loop. It’s so critical that we say and sometimes think, “AI will come over and we’ll take our jobs.” We cannot rely on AI. Every time when I work with businesses, when businesses want to, I want to onboard AI so I don’t need to hire a person.
You do need a person. You do need somebody who knows the business, who’s been there for a long time, to use that AI now to accelerate, guided in, or oversee it. It’s a virtual employee that needs to be monitored. Otherwise, it’s just a child of a credit card. You need oversight. You need the control. You need monitoring to get the full value out of it and actually get the full potential. AI with an employee together that’s been in your business for a long time is a superpower.
Starting Small And Embracing Consistency
Let’s pivot over as we get to the top. What advice would you give someone who wanted to start their own thing?
When I started, actually, I didn’t start full head, I started out of necessity. I got laid off, and I was looking for just money to make extra money.
It happens.
During COVID, I’ve always had two jobs before I even started my own business. I always had my full-time job, and I always had a side hustle to give me more. I say before we go ahead, and it’s like, “We need to figure out what are you trying to do?” Also, maybe test it out while you have a full-time job. Maybe try that thing that you always wanted to and see how it’s going to look, what’s the market for it, because consistency is key.
As an entrepreneur, you get beat down sometimes, there are high days, low days, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, and you have people depending on you. Your clients that looking for your expertise to help guide them, and you also have people who work for you as well to guide them and pay salaries for them as well. There’s a lot to manage. Knowing why and starting small, but starting is key, and staying consistent with it.
Tell me about the worst startup day. I’ve had some doozies. It’s been almost three years for me now. What is that? Tell me about the day that you were just like, “Why am I doing this with my life?”
I think it’s one of the biggest things is that when you feel so many new things coming on, and then also when you have clients that you want to help. For example, some clients that turn and they leave, but they leave not because of your fault. For example, we have clients have been with us for a long time, still with me, legacy clients. My biggest thing is my obsession over my clients. Sometimes we’re their outsourced team and we help them to the point that they ramp up their production, they onboard everybody in-house, and we have to part ways until the next project comes on. Those are the ways because you get really close to your client. You get very attached to your client. Those are the days and times that are hard to take on, but it’s just part of the business. It’s a part of the way to write.
Zulfiya’s Book Recommendation
The last question I ask everybody, what’s the book you’ve read that has had the most impact on your life, and you can only pick one?
That was a hard thing because I like to read books a lot.
I know, everybody that I talk to and everybody that listens likes books, but I always make people pare it down.
Phil Knight, Shoe Dog.
I haven’t read that yet. I have to put it on my list. What did you like about it?
The entire ride of him starting a business from scratch, and him losing the contract with one of his biggest manufacturing. One of the things that he’s saying there is, “It’s relatively easy to win your competition, but batting yourself every day is never an end in commitment.” Something along that way.
It is relatively easy to win your business competition. But battling yourself every day is a never-ending commitment. Share on XGet In Touch With Zulfiya
People that do stuff like that are always our own worst critic. Every single day. I’ve had many moments where I’ve gone to sleep going, “Why did I do that? If I could do that over again.” Zulfiya, it’s been super nice sitting down with you. Where can everybody get in touch with you?
You can find me at Zulfiya Forsythe on LinkedIn as well as Instagram. If you can just say AI checklist if you’re ready to onboard AI for your business, I will send you a checklist to help you to see where you are at, and I know you’re coming from this show.
Thank you so much for making the trip down from Boston.
Thank you.
I’m going to tell one more question. I just coiled it. You said you have a 3 1/2 year old and a 5-month-old before we started. Did you start your business like 3 1/2 years ago?
Yes.
Let’s take two minutes to unpack that. What was that like?
I always had two jobs, as I said.
You have 3 or 4 jobs.
No, I have 3 or 4 jobs. I had my daughter. She’s five months old. I think this one was actually very hard. March of last year, I guess I should have told this story. When you asked me what was the hardest thing for me, March of last year, 2024, my husband got laid off, and I just find out that I’m pregnant with our child. I’m the single breadwinner of the house. That was hard. I have always been a hands-on person with my clients.
I did not know anything about marketing and sales like that. I’m like, “How am I going to get more clients?” I have everyone depending on me, my family, and my team. It was a very scary time for me. I worked through it. I got coaching actually. I did Martel’s one, my coaches signed up it was one of the great decisions that I made. I also found more people in the elite team to help me out, and I worked through my pregnancy. I also gave birth. I started working right off the hospital as well. I didn’t take zero maternity leave.
Good times.
Since January of this year, my husband actually joined the company, so he works with me now. Effort, I would say. I like Mark Cuban, and I have literally print out what he said, The only thing you can control is effort.” That is what I stand by every day.
Super nice to meet you. You have a lot to be proud of. Everybody says hello on LinkedIn. You said AI checklist, right?
Yes.
I’ll send your copy. Anyway, super nice to talk to you. Thank you for making the trip down to Boston.
Thank you so much.
Important Links
- Omadli Group
- Zulfiya Forsythe on Instagram
- Zulfiya Forsythe on LinkedIn
- Shoe Dog
- Aravind Srinivas on LinkedIn
- Coursera
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
About Zulfiya Forsythe
It all started with a simple question: “There has to be a better way, right?”
I began my career in accounting, spending countless hours buried in spreadsheets. The inefficiencies were frustrating, and I knew there had to be a smarter way. That curiosity led me to discover automation and data analytics, starting with Visual Basic and SQL. The first time I watched millions of data rows transform in seconds, I was hooked.
That passion pushed me to transition into the world of data, where I deep dived into data analytics and automation. Fast forward to today, I am CEO and Founder of Omadli Group, where we help businesses streamline operations, uncover valuable insights, and use AI to buy back their time. My mission is simple: turn complexity into simplicity and empower businesses to focus on what truly matters.