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Abel Horvath talks with Jason Barnard about systems that scale.
Systems That Scale! Abel Horvath, CEO of Fulfillment Hub USA, reveals game-changing automation strategies that transform logistics businesses. Drawing from his experience scaling operations across 8 U.S. warehouses and international locations, Abel shares his proven systems for automating e-commerce fulfillment, AI-powered customer service, and operational efficiency. Learn why starting with repetitive tasks is essential, how to navigate the transition from manual to automated processes, and discover the technology stack behind fully automated customer interactions.
In this value-packed episode, you’ll discover:
– How to identify which operations to automate first in your business
– Why AI agents now handle customer calls better than human representatives
– The 6-month process for successfully transitioning from manual to automated systems
– How to build databases that power intelligent automation decisions
– The “future-proofing” mindset that keeps systems adaptable as technology evolves
This conversation delivers actionable insights for founders looking to scale operations through strategic automation implementation.
#SystemsThatScale #AutomationStrategy #EcommerceFulfillment #AIAutomation #BusinessSystems #ScalableOperations #LogisticsTech #OperationalEfficiency #BusinessAutomation #FounderStories #FastlaneFounders #FulfillmentHub #AbelHorvath #BusinessScaling #TechStack #AIImplementation #ProcessOptimization #EntrepreneurTips
What you’ll learn from Abel Horvath
This episode was recorded live on video July 29th 2025
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Abel Horvath
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Transcript from Abel Horvath with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Systems That Scale
[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: It is easier to train a machine than it is to train a person. You agree with that, and it’s also scalable.
[00:00:10] Abel Horvath: Yeah, completely. We have trained AI on multiple levels. Our sales department got reduced because we have AI agents for receiving calls, for doing live chats and on the receiving call side, it’s amazing how natural it sounds.
[00:00:28] Abel Horvath: AI developed in the last two years from a robotic voice who is just barely understanding what you want to like a very natural sounding, almost human-like conversation. So it does really and it’s incredible to think where are we going to be two years from now?
[00:00:48] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. And you are talking about the kind of automated voices for responding. My immediate reaction is I hate those standards where you that you call in and it says, if you want this, click one. If you want that, click two which is the old style. And it we may lack the imagination to imagine what it can actually look like.
[00:01:07] Jason Barnard: What does it look like?
[00:01:10] Abel Horvath: Literally as soon as you dial our number, the agent picks it up and it’s like, Hey, how may I help you? And you just tell them, I’m looking to talk to your sales representative. Then it will ask you, oh, wonderful. Then, what are you exactly looking for? What kind of services are you looking for?
[00:01:27] Abel Horvath: And it gives you the answers. You tell them, I’m selling shoes online. Danny tells you, okay, you can do that in these facilities. Like it has access to our massive database, our contracts, our agreements, our pricing list. It has a lot more information than a human agent, and it’s providing information that humans can’t even comprehend all that information.
[00:01:49] Abel Horvath: So it’s very useful. It’s better than a human.
[00:01:52] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week. Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.
[00:02:09] Narrator: How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and become their legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:02:22] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard. And I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go.
[00:02:29] Jason Barnard: Welcome to the show, Abel Horvath.
[00:02:35] Abel Horvath: Hey there. It’s lovely to meet you and thanks for having me on the show.
[00:02:40] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. You’re in Turkey with a very dark sky behind you in a beach if I see correctly.
[00:02:45] Abel Horvath: Correct. Yes, it’s it’s about 9:00 PM right now, so it got a little dark but the weather is still fantastic, so can’t complain.
[00:02:53] Jason Barnard: So this is what happens when you automate systems that scale. You get to sit on the beach in Turkey in the middle of the week and your company’s still making money with the automated systems you’ve got in place.
[00:03:05] Abel Horvath: Correct. Yes. So these are some of the benefits once you get to that point. Yeah.
[00:03:12] Jason Barnard: So we’ll be talking about that dream, delightful. Before we get into all of that. Here, it’s your traditional Google Search Results, the old blue links that we all recognize from years and years. I’ve been doing this 27 years now. The blue links, the foundation of everything we knew about Google search.
[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: And in the last couple of weeks it’s totally changed. And now you have AI mode and that same research. Instead of having the boring blue links with a couple of photos, we have your entire career if now in front of us, and it has used eight cascading queries. So it’s taken your name and then related queries, built that up with I think it was 70 different passages of different pages to create this single response.
[00:03:55] Jason Barnard: That is really powerful. And this is the future of where search or research rather is going not just with Google, with ChatGPT. How do you feel about that, Abel?
[00:04:06] Abel Horvath: It’s exciting. It makes life a lot easier when you don’t have to go through those 70 pages and you get a quick summary. I hope what Google found is all positive. But yeah, it’s fascinating how the world is changing and it just we can make decisions a lot quicker.
[00:04:27] Jason Barnard: And you say, I hope what it found was positive. At Kalicube®, what we do is stop you having to hope. You know that it’s going to show the positive stuff because we engineer everything so it does and it gets it all right. I think that’s something that people don’t really pay attention to is your digital footprint is what Google is using and ChatGPT is using to represent you when somebody asks them about you and leaving it to luck could be fine. I personally would argue for my Personal Brand, I don’t like leaving it to luck.
[00:04:58] Jason Barnard: But the topic today isn’t that, it’s systems at scale. You have a fulfillment hub with 47 ecommerce platforms, the whole thing is automated and your team is very small. Am I correct?
[00:05:13] Abel Horvath: Correct. So we do have a warehouse team as well, which is we operate multiple warehouses across the US and Europe but ultimately the software itself and the usage of it is quite simple and straightforward.
[00:05:27] Abel Horvath: So compared to how many companies we work with, our administrative team is quite small.
[00:05:34] Jason Barnard: And the idea of automation, you came into this and thought immediately, I’m going to do something really complicated that generally speaking, has a lot of human interaction and I’m going to automate the whole lot to beat the competition.
[00:05:47] Jason Barnard: Was that more or less it?
[00:05:49] Abel Horvath: Correct. Yes. So the whole retail industry, it’s quite old like logistics. Logistics been around for ages. So what we came in with is focusing on ecommerce and then look at the tech aspect of it and see how we can create the product that’s just runs with much of human interaction.
[00:06:11] Abel Horvath: And I think we have succeeded with that. So it’s been working right.
[00:06:16] Jason Barnard: I was talking to you earlier on, I have Allyssa, who’s the head of production, who is now saying I want to automate absolutely everything in production that I possibly can because it’s easier to train a machine than it is to train a person. You agree with that, and it’s also scalable.
[00:06:33] Abel Horvath: Completely. We have trained AI on multiple levels. Our sales department got reduced because we have AI agents for receiving calls, for doing live chats and on the receiving call side, it’s amazing how natural it sounds. AI developed in the last two years from a robotic voice who is just barely understanding what you want to like a very natural sounding, almost human-like, conversation. So it does really and it’s incredible to think where are we going to be two years from now?
[00:07:10] Jason Barnard: Yeah, a hundred percent. And you are talking about the kind of automated voices for responding. My immediate reaction is I hate those standards where you call in and it says, if you want this, click one. If you want that, click two which is the old style. And we may lack the imagination to imagine what it can actually look like. What does it look like?
[00:07:33] Abel Horvath: Literally as soon as you dial our number, the agent picks it up and it’s like, Hey, how may I help you?
[00:07:40] Abel Horvath: And you just tell them, I’m looking to talk to a sales representative. Then it will ask you, oh, wonderful. Then, what are you exactly looking for? What kind of services are you looking for? And it gives you the answers. You tell them, I’m selling shoes online. Then it tells you, okay, you can do that in these facilities.
[00:07:58] Abel Horvath: Like it has access to our a massive database, our contracts, our agreements, our pricing list. It has a lot more information than a human agent. And it’s providing information that humans can’t even comprehend all that information. So it’s very useful. It’s better than a human.
[00:08:16] Jason Barnard: Alright. And what’s the tech stack or the system that you have behind that?
[00:08:21] Abel Horvath: So we are using a third party software to assist us with. We also have our own software development company. So we had to customize this quite a bit because usually the tech is out there for restaurants or very basic things. What we needed is something a lot more, so we had to create a massive database where we’ve had to feed all this information into and then this AI has access to that.
[00:08:43] Abel Horvath: So whenever it puts together what the customer wants, it gets access to the database and then pulls the information and response right away instead of waiting two days to receive an email back with an answer.
[00:08:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And the huge job then was creating that database and cleaning the data to make sure it doesn’t say anything incorrect.
[00:09:01] Abel Horvath: Yes. So that’s the tricky part. Like on one hand, training a human, it’s easier because there’s a certain basic human understanding, like common knowledge or common common sense as they say. AI doesn’t necessarily always have it, so you do have to tell certain basic things for it not to go off and talk about something completely different.
[00:09:26] Jason Barnard: Right. Hundred percent. So you’ve got the calls coming in. Do you also have prospecting going on automatically?
[00:09:33] Abel Horvath: So we do that’s something that we are looking into right now. We are using, we have a system that uses emails. So email outreach. So we are using LinkedIn to get contact details that are matching with whatever we are looking for.
[00:09:49] Abel Horvath: So we are managing currently about I would say 16 to 30 to calls with customers every single day, which is about double, almost triple what we used to do a year ago without AI help assistance.
[00:10:05] Jason Barnard: But you were already automating before AI?
[00:10:08] Abel Horvath: We were, but it was not. It was very different. It was kind of like you said, push number one to reach this one, push number two to reach that one, that person.
[00:10:18] Abel Horvath: So it was not to the level that we are at right now.
[00:10:23] Jason Barnard: So it’s been what, 2 and a half, three years now that the AI has really come into play, how far behind is everybody else or how far ahead are you?
[00:10:34] Abel Horvath: I would say we are, our company’s a little complex. We have the logistics side of things, the fulfillment, and then we have a software development company, which really helps us stay ahead of the curve.
[00:10:47] Abel Horvath: So we work on third party software development, so where we get a lot of information, we have to stay up to date in order to stay relevant. So all that knowledge that we get, we feed into our logistics company, which I would say probably two years ahead of most of our competitors. But also there are still the guys out there that use Excel sheets to do their work, which is something people use 20 years ago.
[00:11:13] Abel Horvath: So that’s still existing. So there’s a big variety of clients out there or businesses.
[00:11:22] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. It says here, you’ve written the book, the Fundamentals of an ecommerce business. I like that title because I wrote a book called The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business. So anybody who starts with the fundamentals of anything is my new friend.
[00:11:36] Jason Barnard: Can you share the methodology that you have in that?
[00:11:40] Abel Horvath: Yeah. So the mere core audience for the book is people who want to get into ecommerce, like kind of the small passive income. It explains it how you can set up from a Shopify side, then move from a Shopify side, do marketing, Google marketing, advertising, just basics to get you off the ground and all the way to the basics of scaling. Because once you have just having a great idea, it doesn’t really help you actually. Implement it and turn it into a business. There’s a lot more to it. And a lot of people don’t have that knowledge. So that’s the book to help them off the ground and then get them inside the fulfillment center that kind of does the legwork for them so they just can remain creative and come up with new ideas and grow their business.
[00:12:31] Jason Barnard: Alright. So the secret to ecommerce is to have somebody else do the fulfillment and the shipping.
[00:12:36] Abel Horvath: A lot of people underestimate it. That’s a lot of because in concept it’s very easy. Order comes in, ship it out. But when you have a thousand different SKUs, so a thousand different potential products, like a sock can be different size, it’s different colors.
[00:12:51] Abel Horvath: You have to find the right phone, you have to track the inventory, you have to ship it at the right time. There’s so many components to it. So definitely having a good fulfillment center is extremely helpful.
[00:13:01] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Now I’m looking at Kalicube®, my company. I’ve got a market department, a sales department, a production department, and a dev team.
[00:13:11] Jason Barnard: What process do I or should I go through to figure out which operations I can systematize and automate?
[00:13:19] Abel Horvath: Any repetitive task. I will start with that. So that’s how we looked at it. So things that we do the same way for all of our customers. Like for example, the sales process was always the same, usually the same questions or similar questions and it went through the same process.
[00:13:34] Abel Horvath: So we set up a system that took us about, took us quite a bit, like about six to nine months where we can fully automate that process then we moved on to the onboarding. So one is a repetitive task, the other one is just literally starting from where the customer joins our company all the way through the lifecycle.
[00:13:54] Abel Horvath: So from the start to the finish, and then make sure that the each component that’s following fits to the one previously.
[00:14:03] Jason Barnard: And for the onboarding. It’s not just one series of events. So you have different personas with different onboarding processes.
[00:14:11] Abel Horvath: Correct. Yeah. So we have an onboarding specialist that’s stay on top of the company. But then they have a meeting with the billing department, the accounting department, and the warehouse department, the packaging department. So there’s a lot of components to set everything perfectly. But we try to automate it as well. So you receive information upfront to speed up the process to make for everyone a little bit easier to join our services on our company.
[00:14:41] Jason Barnard: And what are examples of things that you’ve automated? Outgoing emails, replies to emails?
[00:14:47] Abel Horvath: All of that. So outgoing emails, replies to emails, as I mentioned, the phone. The other one is, it gets a little bit more complex, but on the shipping side, we have a software that looks at whatever is the cheapest shipping method to ship your products depending on where your customers are, how heavy the packages are, depending on different rates. Then we also looked at we took it a step further. Where let’s say UPS or FedEx tells you, Hey, we’ve going to deliver it in five days, but we have the data supporting that they actually on that route, even though they say five days, they deliver it historically speaking within three days. So we start using different services based on our own data to optimize the shipping costs for other customers.
[00:15:29] Abel Horvath: So that’s really gets down not just on the process size but monetary benefits of automation.
[00:15:37] Jason Barnard: Okay. And from the marketing side, have you automated things?
[00:15:42] Abel Horvath: From the marketing side, we do use a few services to send out emails. It’s mainly the cold emails that we have automated. Other than them, it’s relatively minimal, I must say cause we get a lot of customers coming in.
[00:16:01] Jason Barnard: It’s because you don’t need the customers rather than that you don’t want to automate the marketing.
[00:16:04] Abel Horvath: Yeah. Correct. So we were already getting a lot of customers in, so our focus was really just to get them in the company and make sure they’re happy that was our priority one.
[00:16:14] Abel Horvath: And then marketing took a back seat due to the volume of new customers we already had anyway.
[00:16:21] Jason Barnard: So if we go back to an automation, let’s go back to production, or onboarding, sorry, onboarding. How do you manage the transition from the time it’s manual to the time that it’s then automated?
[00:16:33] Jason Barnard: Because there’s a period when it’s neither one nor the other.
[00:16:36] Abel Horvath: Yeah, that’s a very tough period because during that time, employees don’t know when they actually should be involved and when they shouldn’t be. And a lot goes wrong where customers are not getting a response to their emails because the employees think, okay, the AI or the automation, or they took over. It was a tough period for us. It took us about three months to go from one process to the other. And we had a lot of unhappy customers during that time where just the lack of communication happened because it was unclear which process is actually functioning for which customers.
[00:17:16] Jason Barnard: Okay. That’s immediately a kind of problem I can see. And what do you need to do? Do you need to say, okay, we’re going to prepare for six months, we’re going to have three months of general problems with people not getting the right email, or getting too many emails, or being forgotten and then it’s going to settle down?
[00:17:33] Jason Barnard: Or is it in retrospect, was there a way you could have dealt with it better?
[00:17:37] Abel Horvath: In retrospect, we should have taken it a little bit slower, make it more clear which companies are we moving onto automation, make tags or certain way we should have flagged the customers that are going through the automated process.
[00:17:54] Abel Horvath: Also, wait until that process is over before moving more customers onto it because at the beginning, obviously there’s a lot of bugs. So we had too many customers on this new process where we were fixing the bugs, obviously it created a bit of attention, so if I would do it again, I would just put a single customer on there.
[00:18:14] Abel Horvath: Let’s see how it runs. It’s going to take the whole process would take probably twice as long but it would be just a very experience for everyone.
[00:18:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So that temptation to leap in and think, “Let’s just do it all at once,” is very strong.
[00:18:29] Abel Horvath: Yeah. Because our team was like, we are good to go.
[00:18:32] Abel Horvath: We have tested it a million times. Everything is perfect. And I’m like, okay, let’s give it a try. Let’s move on to this new system and then boom, all these, problems come up that they didn’t even think about could happen.
[00:18:47] Jason Barnard: So you’ve got this system set up, it’s now working absolutely fine. There are very few issues, very few bugs. How do you ensure that it’s future proof?
[00:18:59] Abel Horvath: That’s the thing you constantly have to keep looking at it. So even though you have an AI or automation, since the technology advances so fast and things change, like you mentioned earlier, Google analytics or Google itself is also updating its algorithm.
[00:19:17] Abel Horvath: Same thing here. There’s new tools coming out. If you want to stay relevant, you constantly have to innovate and then use those new tools. For example, recently Google announced the Veo 3, I think the video tool. The things we can do with it are amazing for social media. And our social media team is using it right away.
[00:19:36] Abel Horvath: But if we would just stick around with that one, we would miss out. Veo 4, 5, 6 are going to come out soon. So we constantly have to use new tools in order to be the best in the market.
[00:19:49] Jason Barnard: But isn’t there a danger that you’re going to jump on every bandwagon that comes along and some of them are simply not going to go anywhere?
[00:19:56] Abel Horvath: There is. There certainly is, and we had that in the past. We tried certain things that just did not work out. I would say, we don’t really jump on it. We put someone to work on it, see if it’s feasible, and if we see true benefits, then we pivot over. But we try a whole bunch of different things constantly.
[00:20:16] Abel Horvath: Every month, the guys are coming to me with new ideas, new tools. And we do try them and then we decide whether, if it’s worth paying for it or worth further exploration or we just stay with what we got.
[00:20:29] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it’s a decision with you each time? Or is it a group decision?
[00:20:35] Abel Horvath: So as a group, they come to me and ultimately it’s up to me whether I think it’s makes sense to further explore it. I like to be involved ’cause I personally really enjoy these conversations about new tools and what else is out there. Every now and then they come up with like there are certain tools I didn’t even know it exists.
[00:20:56] Abel Horvath: So it’s quite interesting to see that and talk about it.
[00:21:01] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. That’s absolutely delightful. So we now, you now have automation and it’s not future proof, but it’s certainly adaptable and basically it’s never a set it and forget it. You are always going to be updating your automation.
[00:21:14] Jason Barnard: So at Kalicube®, we’re going to be building our automation and we’re going to stay on the game like you do. Thank you so much, Abel.
[00:21:20] Abel Horvath: Yeah. No, you’re very welcome.
[00:21:22] Jason Barnard: You get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Abel.
[00:21:30] Abel Horvath: Thank you.
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