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Why Systems & SOPs Are the Secret to Business Growth
00:48:04
If your business feels like it’s running you—rather than the other way around—this episode is your roadmap out of chaos. Matt and Chris Reynolds break down why systems and SOPs (standard operating procedures) are the foundation of any...
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, coaches, are you still chasing clients? Every month we're flipping the script at the business of coaching workshop. We'll help you learn how to keep clients longer, set premium pricing, boost your dollars per hour, and let referrals, not marketing machines, make you more money. Register for free at Turnkey Coach Voc. That's Turnkey Coach Voc. We'll help you build a coaching business that lasts foreign.
- [00:35]
B
You're listening to the build your business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:45]
A
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening the build your business podcast. We are your hosts, Matt Reynolds and Chris Reynolds. Welcome to the show, sir.
- [01:08]
B
Thank you. Thank you.
- [01:09]
A
We are going to dive right in as we usually do today. We're going to talk about systems and standard operating procedures. The most exciting topic there is to talk about writing technical manuals for your business.
- [01:21]
B
I feel like the twist on this one is that it's exciting for people who are in the middle of chaos because it is the route out. Right. So, like, it's a, it's a great topic to go through, especially at this point in the year. I think most people have sort of started to kick off their, you know, 25, 2025 critical projects, and you're probably already starting to swim in a little bit of chaos. And so this is a, this is a great topic for us to hit and go over how we deal with it.
- [01:53]
A
Yeah. In fact, I just got back from Washington State, meeting with my, my executive team, or we lay out the 2025 Strategic Game Plan for the company and all of that sort of strategy deployment. And that really is what filters down into writing systems and SOPs for this year that maybe aren't written yet. And so let's just dive into what they are first. So those words are often used interchangeable. They're not exactly the same. But a system or a sop, which stands for a standard operating procedure. I was first exposed to this via the E Myth, and we've talked about the E. Myth, so we won't go into great detail about the E Myth, although I think it's a great reference book. And for those of you who haven't done this before, that's probably the best book to start with. And all it really is, is a playbook. A system or a SOP is just a. It's often as simple as a step by step checklist for how to Do a thing. Almost everybody's actually familiar with this because you use this on a daily basis, maybe just not in the business. So, for example, a recipe, a well written recipe is a sop.
- [02:56]
B
That's right.
- [02:57]
A
It's how to cook this thing, it's how to bake this pie. It's what ingredients do I need? What are the things I'm looking for? For metrics, when the pie crust turns lightly brown and maybe has an internal temperature of X, then those are the metrics. Right? And so it's that same thing we look at instruction manuals for. We are going to the Arnold this year to the Arnold Classic Arnold Expo convention. And we're big sponsors there. And so we bought a bunch of furniture, IKEA furniture. A system is just like opening up the box of ikea furniture with 10,000 pieces and following the instructions step by step until you have a piece of furniture that's put together. That is a system or a SOP that IKEA has written for people. And of course, there's lots of. They're not always super easy to follow. The key here is to make it as easy to follow as possible. And as this podcast comes out, this is super bowl weekend. Everyone has seen the coach on the sideline with the 9 by 13 piece of paper that's laminated. That's their game plan.
- [03:57]
B
That's exactly right.
- [03:58]
A
That is their playbook for what they're going to use over the course of the game. They're marking on it, they're writing on it, they go back at halftime, they make tweaks and changes, they probably print out a new sheet with those edits made and walk out into the second half and do the same thing. And so, and for us, where I really hone this, even with my kids, and I think I've talked about this before, is my kids, their entire lives have had a chore checklist. The things that they do to get paid, so things beyond what is expected of them like keeping the room clean and laundry done and whatnot. But the, you know, cleaning of the kitchen or, or the work around the house. We've got tons of trees in our yard, you know, picking up the sticks after the, after the storm. Things like that is on literally a stick, step by step in chronological order. Checklist. I do the same thing for our sister who works for me a lot. She shows up every day. There's a notepad on the iPhone that I can share with her that's got her checklist in chronological order of how I want it completed. That is the simplest version of a sop, or standard operating procedure that I think a lot of us use on some level every single day.
- [05:03]
B
Yeah. What you get, I think when you talk to people about this, and especially with entrepreneurs or founders who are maybe skeptical of systems, skeptical of this idea that you could build checklists, you can turn these things into systems that operate without you, is this idea that you bring some unique magic to the game every time that you're doing it. And it isn't so black and white as a checklist. The reality is there are a lot of things that are that way, but those things are things that are not yet ready for you to turn into a checklist in some circumstances. And in some circumstances, you're actually just wrong. And you could absolutely turn them into a checklist.
- [05:45]
A
And there's even a transition period, I think, where you often turn in the work that you have to do as a founder or an owner into a sop, that then you are the manager of that sop. You follow the sop, you tweak the sop, but eventually the day will come. Well, you'll. You will give that away as well. Right. And so what we want to do is start. As we start to write systems and standard operating procedures in our business, we want to start with the simplest task at hand, the thing that you can get the easy win on. You've talked about before. If you can sit down and write a SOP in five minutes, that's the one you should start with. It's actually not the most important one. It's the simplest. It's kind of that Dave Ramsey, like, whatever credit card you have the least balance on, even if it's got a high, you know, a lower interest rate, you still pay that one off first. Because we're looking for easy wins here to snowball, right?
- [06:32]
B
Snowball concept, same thing. Start small and grow that thing bigger and bigger and bigger over time.
- [06:37]
A
We have read a lot of books on this, and we'll give some notes. Again, I talked about the E Myth by Michael Gerber. You can get it on Amazon. It's a bestselling book. And it's that introduction into systems and standard operating procedures. And again, coming back to what you just said, I think that the problem that most founders have, that certainly I had, and I think you have had in the past as well, is that most founders, you start this business, it's your baby, and you have, on some level, superhero mentality, and you're like, I can do all of it better than everyone else.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And that's true.
- [07:06]
B
Yep.
- [07:07]
A
It is for a time. But the reality is, is that if you continue to do that, you spend your entire life drowning in the business and not working on the business. So at some point, you have to be able to trust people enough to train them up to write the system, write the sop, give it away, train them in their first few weeks of using that sop, and then it becomes theirs. They have ownership of it. Their job is to tweak it. Their job is to make it better. And then some of those people, in the early years, you might be go from employee of one to an employee, you know, of five, let's say, or three to five employees that eventually grows to 20, which means each one of those people then are writing SOPs. They're passing down to the people that direct report up to them as well. And so this system works because this is really the only way you can scale your business long term. Yeah. Is through a series, a very systematic, logical progression of systems and standard operating procedures.
- [08:03]
B
Yeah. And actually, so I have not only heard it, but I have felt it myself. This idea that no one can do it better than me. And the quality of your startup, of your business, whatever, is really based on you. You set that quality bar for your company, you set it for your employees, you set it for everyone. It's actually the primary role of a CEO is to do this. And so in one of the hats that you're wearing as a founder is CEO. CEO. Then one of the main things that you are supposed to do is set the quality bar for your company.
- [08:37]
A
That's right.
- [08:38]
B
But there's an interesting piece here, which is that while you are the best, probably, certainly at the beginning, at all of these things, at the technician tasks. We've talked about the technician role before. There is actually a moment where you are not. And that moment when you are not isn't even when you are the least. When you are no longer the most capable of being that. Sometimes it's when you start missing meetings, it's when you start being the bottleneck. I would actually say that most founders dive into this idea of systems when the current systems are breaking and the current systems are. It's all in your head and you're doing all the work.
- [09:18]
A
Yep. And it turns into that feeling of chaos that you were talking about. Just chaos. I can't get my head above water. I'm drowning in this urgency. And that's a lot of what my book is about, of undoing urgency. And so that's certainly a place I Think my hope is that the listeners this week will hear this and we'll make these changes before they get to that point, before they get to utter chaos. Right. And so some other books that we've read that are great. Peter Drucker actually has a handful of books, but you mentioned Management is by Objective or mbo, the Practice of Management. Drucker also is famous for his effective executive book. Those tend to come sometimes a little further down the road. So if you're a little more of an established company, you're like a true CEO. Drucker is fantastic. Andy Grove, which we've talked about, has a book called High Output Management, probably the best management book ever written. He was a mentor for John Doerr, who then wrote a book called Measure what Matters, which is really what got you and I started on what has now turned into the game plan. And so I certainly don't want to put myself in the family tree of Andy Grove to Door to Matt Reynolds. But the reality is that those books shaped very much the way I run the business. And so all of these books are excellent. I think the best place to start is still the E Myth. And then also we've talked a lot about Dan Martell's Buy Back youk Time and the concept there. There's significant portions of that book that lends itself to writing systems and SOPs, so that you are purchasing back your time, you're giving these other things away that you don't have to do so that you can focus on the stuff that really matters. So a good synergistic book as well, with undoing urgency. And so all of those books are excellent. There are others out there, but those are some of our favorites.
- [11:02]
B
An aspect of this that is personal management of your tasks and organizing that as a founder, that's it's unclear where your stuff starts and ends and the business's stuff starts and ends. Right. So some of these books are better crafted towards the individual who is in the early phases of their founding process in an early company. And then some are, you know, Andy Grove with Intel, pretty big. Right?
- [11:30]
A
Right.
- [11:31]
B
Sort of scales up.
- [11:31]
A
Right.
- [11:32]
B
So, you know, no matter where you are in that journey, everybody struggles with the same. Same list of things. And I'll just give you a little bit of interesting info on this. I know sometimes this happens certainly with authors, but it happens with podcasts as well, where you can be listening to this and think, oh, Matt and I have got this figured out. We've got this like, we got this nailed. Absolutely. The answer to that is actually most of the time we're talking to ourselves.
- [12:00]
A
That's right.
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B
So just to give you an idea, I missed two meetings yesterday because I had quickly. In my. My situation is strange in that I have to. I do deep work a lot, but in my deep work, I'm inventing solutions for companies. That's what I'm doing.
- [12:20]
A
Right.
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B
So it's never been. Never been done before. Like, I've not done it. No one else has done it either. And I'm inventing some new solution. And that solution is, you know, deeply technical and all those things. I had not yet taken the time to hand off more of the tasks that I needed to hand off to build the playbook, to make the introduction to the people and do all the things that need to be done. And so at every phase of growth, you will run into this problem again, you will see it again. There will not be a point in time where you go, oh, I tackled that. That's solved. No, it isn't. It's solved for this phase right now. And I've done this many, many, many times. And at varying degrees of scale, you run into the problem again, and luckily it's like an old friend. You look at it and you're like, oh, thank God. Like, this is. This is where the solution is. Like, I just need to. I need to hand a few things off, make some introductions. I need to write some playbooks, and I need to. And I need to go through this, this process. So just understand, give yourself a lot of grace on this, because everybody runs into the same set of problems over and over and over again. And at scale, it will continue to happen.
- [13:26]
A
Sure.
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B
And you just got to remember, oh, you know, I'm starting to feel the stress. The urgency is getting super high. I'm starting to miss meetings like, oh, crap, I need to go in and do some work here to. To hand some things off. So just a note that, like, yeah, everybody deals with this.
- [13:42]
A
We will often talk about the carryover between, like, training, as with me as a strength training coach in my background, you've done lots of training, I've coached you, We've trained together. Training in the beginning is extremely simple. It's linear progression. It's adding £5 to the bar. It's incredibly simple. Over time, it has to become more complex. The key is to not let it become more complex than it has to be. Still the simplest it can be for the period of time that you're in. As the business grows, as you might imagine, I can't even Fathom the complexity at say, Amazon, where they're running these two massive companies, if not even more in the retail side and the AWS side or Google Alphabet. You know, think about all the things that Elon Musk is doing. I have no idea how he does those things. But for us, as our businesses have grown in the beginning there it really is relatively simple. You're doing everything. You start to identify the things that are easy systems to write that can be hired out for relatively low wage and you give those away. And that's a great place to learn with very low risk on how to write these systems, to hand them off to somebody, to a college kid, to a high school kid, to somebody who has the, you know, entry level wage job. This gets much more difficult as you're writing systems and standard operating procedures for executives, which again, as a CEO, you're often they're direct reporting to you and then they're writing lots of systems and standard operating procedures to their management team and, and so on and so forth. So when I started this process at Strong Gym first, and then what is now Barbell logic, I just made a list of all the things in my business that I was doing all the tasks. And we've even talked about this in kind of setting up, identifying this list of important, urgent sort of dichotomy of things. And so I had my list because there weren't any other employees in the beginning. And then as those things started to fill up and I just couldn't stay ahead, I started to Write systems and SOPs that were the simplest things I could write in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, I sat down and did the work. I hired somebody to do the thing. I trained them up on the thing, which shouldn't take very long because that's a simple task. And then you give them the system or the sop, right. And so the key then is to start writing those simplest systems first. And often even the ones that you are still doing, you then get to test that it's really just the scientific method. Is it working? Are things in the right order as you get it? Pretty tight and it's not going to be 100%, then you'll start to give that thing away. And so the key here is that you have to start. So you mentioned about giving yourself grace, and I absolutely agree because even today at Barbelogic, as we continue to grow, just coming back from Washington and meeting with my executive team, we recognize that for 2025 there are 3, 4, 5, 10 systems that are new endeavors for the company in 2025 that we don't have systems and stops written for yet. We have all these other, I mean we have thousands of those, but we have five or 10 that need to be written now. And so now the goal of the executive team is to come back and figure out who needs to write that system or sop. Is it somebody on the executive team? Is it somebody on the management team? And start to pass those things down. And so one of the things we do then at Barbell Logic, as the business becomes a little bigger and becomes a little more complex, is then not only do I look at my task list, I start to look at the life of the client. Every single touch point, every single milestone of the client, from the time the client first hears about you on a podcast or sees a YouTube video or whatever that thing is, when they first have engagement or awareness that you exist, to the time they become a lead to how you nurture them as leads to how you convert them. And all of the things that go in that, that's not just a one step process. There's all sorts of, there's some people that are just like, great money, wired, done right, and then there's others that want to do nine phone calls to be converted. And then you convert them and then you start to go in the process of the post conversion client life cycle. Like how long does it take for them to get buy in, to fully activate, to really accept the thing that you are, that you're providing them the service or the product that you're selling them. And from there then it's like, okay, then what are all the things that could potentially go wrong? What are all the possible roadblocks or challenges that they're going to have? And so we've mapped out our client lifecycle and for us that includes Both in the B2C sector and the barbalogic online coaching sector where we're dealing directly with our coaches, deal directly with clients, the heavy leaning on the marketing team, advertising sales team, customer service coaches, all the way down to the client. But then as you get to the B2B sector, it gets even more complicated because now you're selling not just to an individual client, you're selling to a business who is then leveraging your service or product to their clients. And you have to start to think about that entire client lifecycle. And so where this has really come to fruition, even for me personally this year, is that 2024 was a very busy year. Obviously writing the book, the book has done very well. This podcast continues to blow up. We got 475,000 downloads last week, which is insane. So thank you so much for listening and please continue to share and give us reviews. It's been fantastic to have this podcast, but we are at a spot now where the growth in the company, we believe, is primarily going to be leveraged, or we're going to move the needle the most in being able to grow the B2B commercial sector. So, turnkey coach, which is our B2B product, and I'm a great sales guy. And some CEOs are sales CEOs, and some CEOs are tech CEOs or engineering CEOs. I'm a sales CEO, which means for the next six months, these things that have taken me out of the sales cycle. It's time for Matt, the CEO, to get back into the sales cycle. Not because I want to be the head sales guy for the rest of the life of the company, I don't. It's time for me to revisit the systems and SOPs, train up the team, create those things, learn from the ones who are already doing excellent versions of sales, both in the B2C and B2B sector, and write those systems and sops, and devote my time there. And that's where not to skip ahead too much, but this is where it comes down to the game plan, where you start to identify what are the most important goals that you need to achieve in the business each year, which then also requires you to pull weeds on the things that you're doing that you shouldn't be doing.
- [20:10]
B
Yeah.
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A
So the first thing I do in understanding, okay, here's how my role is going to change a little bit in 2025 is I have to look at the things that I'm doing that no one else is doing or no one else can do because the system or SOP hasn't been written. Write it and give it away.
- [20:26]
B
That's exactly right. A couple of things spin out of that. I feel like one of them is you. You know, you rightfully said, I got to go take the seat back in sales for a bit so that I can sort of go through what that process looks like, use my judgment to figure out how we want to build the processes going forward and what kinds of decisions we need to make and what kind of systems we need before I can hand them off. I actually think that's the thing that makes this difficult, and I think it's where a lot of people get stuck.
- [20:59]
A
Yep.
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B
The idea is you've got as A founder. And at least initially. Initially there's one person on the planet whose judgment you trust.
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A
Right.
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B
And it's yours.
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A
That's right.
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B
Right. And so over time that changes. Over time you will come to trust in other people's judgment and those will be the sort of your long term employees, long term executives that you'll, that you'll put in place. But the first thing that you're gonna have to do to give yourself enough time to even do that is you got to start by pulling the weeds.
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A
That's right.
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B
There are weeds that can be pulled in this case that are literally where the whole, the whole SOP is an email that needs to go to somebody and you're basically done. Like I did that one yesterday where it was like, why am I interviewing all these people? Like I can handle.
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A
Especially if you trust the person. If you trust the person that you're emailing, you actually then trust them to write this up.
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B
You tell them to. Yeah.
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A
You say like, this is going to be your job now write this up, send it to me. I'll put my stamp of approval on it. But I trust you. I know it's going to be great.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you pass it off.
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B
That's right. And then you've got these things where you are inventing the future. You know, you are using your judgment to figure out what a, what a sales go forward motion looks like. You are figuring out, you know, how to do various things. And on those things you are right to keep them initially. That is the list of things you need to be working on. Right. But it is, it ends up being what are all the other things that are not those things.
- [22:27]
A
Right.
- [22:28]
B
That you need to hand off and make sure that you have clear definitions around. For us, I think a big, you know, our business essentially creates these for people. What we do with a lot of engineering companies or the engineering portion of an organization is we'll go in and actually watch what they're doing and the way they're building software and shipping it and all the various things that are happening. We can figure out very quickly where they are losing time and where, you know, why maybe it's not as effective as it needs to be. And then we actually take those standard operating procedures. We write them down, make sure that everybody, everybody agrees on them or at least understands them. We don't always get agreement early on. We have to sometimes just get, you know, sorry, but this is what we need to do.
- [23:10]
A
Yep.
- [23:10]
B
We automate those. Right. So they're completely automated. The thing that's interesting is being that company, you kind of have the problem where the cobbler's children have no shoes. That whole thing like, sure, we're doing this for other people. Hard for us to remember to do it for ourselves.
- [23:29]
A
Absolutely.
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B
And you may find that you do something very similar if, you know, especially if you're in a service business, a lot of what you do, helping other organizations, helping people, whatever, you know, you can find that you're, you know, you're needing to turn that attention towards yourself a little bit to say, like, how do we build some of these processes and procedures? But at the end of the day, the thing that you need to make sure that you keep clear in your mind is there are tasks that are judgment oriented tasks and they are going to be the prime tasks that you are going to need to work on. Your goal is to get them into a formalized system and hand them off, right?
- [24:04]
A
That's right.
- [24:05]
B
But you may have to do it for a while. That's okay.
- [24:06]
A
That's right. That process is pulling the weeds on the things you don't have to be doing right now so that you can focus on the things that you should be doing right now. As you're focusing on the things that you should be doing right now, you're then writing the system for that thing so that eventually you don't have to do that thing either.
- [24:21]
B
That's right.
- [24:22]
A
You know, maybe a Dan Martell might disagree with me. For us, I love my work, you love your work. It's not so I can unload everything off of my list forever so I can just retire and have a cash cow and just be the owner of the business and get paid. I like solving problems in the business just like you like solving problems in both your business and, and other businesses. And so it's not that. It's that there's always the next important thing that the founder or CEO needs to do. And so that's why things like the game plan, a seasonal game plan or a yearly game plan constantly focuses you on the goals that really matter. That's why you can't have 20 goals. Yeah, that's why. So for again, for example, out of our work in Washington, one of the things that we noted that we thought would make the biggest difference for the companies, we have three, three primary priorities or goals for this year in the company. And you know, because you help work on, on turnkey coach, your dev team does, it is very easy to convert coaches to turnkey coach. It's very hard to get them fully bought in or what we call activated. So as we define activation, to get 90% plus other clients onto the software or to have at least five or 10 clients on the roster, whatever that is. So that activation piece, it's that buy in piece. It's what happens right after conversion. It's very clean, very clear onboarding. It's how do we move somebody from conversion to full activation? Well, I'm actually not owning that. Andrew owns that. He's our coo. He helps organize the entire product team. He works with you at certain and your dev team and our dev team. But for him, in the same way that I have to go back and do some sales and understand the sales process again because of how the world has changed the last several years, as a tech person, I think a lot of times you just have to go back and talk to the customers.
- [26:14]
B
Yeah.
- [26:14]
A
And so for him there's going to be a lot of talking to customers to understand where are their pain points that are keeping them, that we're able to get them converted, but not to step in and fully bought in to the system. So that activation piece is his SOP is his responsibility to write and then to pass down after that. And this is not in chronological order for us. Number two is acquisition. And for acquisition, my CMO owns that. That acquisition piece is everything from top of the funnel to conversion. I'm going to own the conversion piece. So in this situation where even though I'm the CEO and the founder, I'm actually direct reporting up to the CMO in the acquisition piece. Yeah, he's in charge of helping make sure we have systems for every plate. Again, top of funnel, lead lead nurturing, conversion, all of that. And I'll write the systems for from lead nurture to conversion and then to have a smooth handoff to the activation team from conversion, you know, and then that activation team is product, customer service, working together a lot, lots of talking to the clients and then from there it becomes more of a, of an expansion or retention, how then do we increase the lifetime value of the customer from that perspective or from that point on? And Nikki Sims, my cxo, she'll own that and she'll own that sop. And so full circle, when I started Barbel Logic, I've told this story where I just sat at my desk for like 16 hours a day and wrote systems. Yeah, Everything I could possibly think of, right? Like how does somebody put their credit card on file? What happens if their credit card bounces? What's the email they get for the welcome to Barbell logic. How do we get them connected to a coach? How do we get them to do their first test workout? Does the coach know all the technology to break down the technique? All of those sorts of things were very important and very clear to me that that was what needed to be done because I had been coaching. We also have an advantage that you've talked about in the past that I think sometimes we forget as a moat for barbell logic and turnkey coach is that we've built turnkey coach for strength coaches and we are strength coaches.
- [28:15]
B
Yeah.
- [28:16]
A
And so what we've done is we've built this software and this system to serve barbell logic online coaching first really having. No. We hadn't even looked forward into the future of being a B2B company yet. And now we're building something that we enjoy and that we like because. And most of our coaches are not just coaches on the platform, but they're clients on the platform. So we see it from the client side, we see it from the coach side. And then we can go to other businesses, other coaching companies who maybe aren't quite like us, but we're already really close on solving those problems. I remember you talking about when you were running an insurance software company. You've never run an insurance company and so you're trying to solve problems for an insurance company having never run an insurance company, which is what 99% of all tech companies do. We've got the opportunity to be able to build a thing. And then we now look at Barbalogic online coaching as really the alpha tester of the features that we produce, of the things that we launch. We often test those ahead of time. Let's see what the feedback is before we push them out to the rest of the B2B world.
- [29:17]
B
It's the best opportunity you can have. Like wherever you can do this as a business, you should always do it. The idea in software is called. Usually it's called eating your own dog food, which I don't really know why they call it that exactly. But the idea is the stuff you make is maybe not totally fully baked yet and you want to be the first consumer of that so that you know what the experience is like.
- [29:42]
A
That's right.
- [29:43]
B
Whenever you can be the customer and also the company that is delivering the goods or services to that customer, you're in the best possible feedback loop you can be in.
- [29:53]
A
And not a fake version. Not like.
- [29:54]
B
No.
- [29:54]
A
Like the real tend to be an insurance company or I'm going to pretend to be a Strength coach. We actually are strength coaches.
- [30:00]
B
And so I actually said when I was basically building an insurance software company further along in that process, it would have been valuable to have acquired a small insurance company that wasn't competitive with our customers so that we could run it and use the software simultaneously. That that feedback loop was one I always wanted. And the closest proxy that you can get to this. And I actually think this is also really good input for those of you that can't do this. I think a good proxy for this is just how freaking close you need to be to your customers.
- [30:32]
A
That's right.
- [30:32]
B
Just do things like, it'll blow their minds. If you ever go to a customer and say, let's say you get feedback on something and the customer says, this part's not working so well. It's actually pretty painful for us. And we're dealing with it on a day in and day out basis. A thing you can do to solve that problem and say, okay, give it to us, we're going to do this manually as you, we're going to step in as you, we're going to handle it because we won't deal with it for very long before we automate it or solve this problem for good.
- [30:59]
A
That's right.
- [31:00]
B
With this thing that we're doing. And so you can step into their shoes and it looks like incredible customer service to them. They're going to be blown away because nobody does this, by the way. Like nobody does this.
- [31:10]
A
Sure.
- [31:10]
B
And if you will do it, you set yourself apart as being, you know, a top 01% company. But the advantage is really that you are standing in the shoes of your customer so that you can understand what needs to be done. And taking this back to this idea of SOPs and the way that we build our systems, this is another example of a place where we're talking about the critical nature of judgment. Whenever you have, if it's you, if it's an exec, whoever it is that is actually doing this, it takes tons of judgment and a lot of buy in and ownership mentality to be able to do this. Well, you can just imagine trying to hand off to a low level employee the idea of, you know, I want you to stand in the shoes of the customer now and let's solve this problem for good for them. What they're going to see is you just gave me an extra task that I have to do and it doesn't sound like my job, it sounds like their job and that won't work at all. That's not obviously not why you're doing it, you're not doing it so that you have a thing to do, you're doing it so that you solve something for the customer. And that is just completely different mindset. So as you build these out, just there's a very, very important sort of Occam's razor here about like how you decide what things are being handed off and what things you need to either keep or give to an executive as a, as a primary SOP that they're going to be working on. And that is really built around how much judgment does it take and is the person properly incentivized to make sure that this goes, you know, the way it needs to go.
- [32:42]
A
You always have the vocal minority. Right. So sometimes we have clients, B2B clients who are very small, who just have a few clients on the roster and like, boy, if you could give me this feature, I think I would be all in.
- [32:56]
B
Yeah.
- [32:56]
A
But that's the only time you've ever heard that. And one of the things that Andrew and the team have done, the operations team has done really, really well, is they're always listening. And as that pops up a few more times, you start to realize like, okay, if I solve this problem, I'm not just solving it for this customer, I'm solving it for many or maybe even all the customers in the future.
- [33:17]
B
Yeah.
- [33:17]
A
And so then your order of operations and we do the same is let's just figure out the manual way to fix this first. Which makes it slower in the beginning, but you know that it works when it works, and then you can fully automate the cost of full blown software development, Automation launching and then having the thing still not work, that's actually a far greater waste of time. And so you have to be patient in the beginning to say, we're going to test this, we're going to manually do this, we're going to make sure this works, we're going to get the feedback and when we know that it works now, we take all of our efforts and we go, now how do we take this off of the manual plate and put it on the automated plate? That's, I think, really key.
- [33:59]
B
What a good. That's a super good point too. And I actually don't think that this is perfectly obvious to most people because I have to say it on an almost daily basis, not just to my own staff, but also to the companies that we work with, that you never, ever, ever automate something before you get the manual process. Right.
- [34:18]
A
Right.
- [34:19]
B
So like, this is like, to me, this is this is just like business 101 like. But it's really, really important to get this deep in your brain that there are a lot of things that you can automate and a lot of processes that you can build. And none of those things should happen until you are absolutely confident that you've got the right procedure or process in place to begin with. Right. That you're doing the right things. Don't automate the wrong things. That's a terrible thing to do. You got to tear down the automation and rebuild and all these things. That's why it's so important that you always, always, always do the work manually to start. Make sure you validated that it's good, make sure that the customer experience is good, make sure that the whole process is the way you want it to be before you get it locked down and start automating it. Because even the automated processes, once you build them, still have to be maintained, of course. And they'll have to change a little over time. Right. Things change on the ground, you know, new technology emerges and all that. So these things will have to be revisited over time. But never, ever, ever automate a thing until you have it manually working exactly the way you want.
- [35:23]
A
Yeah. So the last piece on that is just to understand what you said there at the end is very important, is that all SOPs are living SOPs.
- [35:32]
B
Yes.
- [35:33]
A
These are not documents that go into a three ring binder. Not that anybody uses those anymore, but and then just sits. It's that as technology changes and the customer changes and the needs of the customer change, the SOP will change a little bit. And it shouldn't typically change 90% or 80%. It changes 2% at a time, 5% at a time. It's a little bit of steering the ship. And if you already have a great system or SOP in place, making a 5% change is much easier than making a 90% change to that SOP. So you just have to recognize that these things are always living that sops that I wrote 10 years ago for onboarding a client. Our onboarding system looks totally different now, but it didn't go from what it was to what it is overnight. It took 10 years of little iterations to continue to get it better and better over time. Well then that doesn't feel like such a huge spend of resources, whether that's time, effort or money. And so that's how we approach this. These things are always living. As new owners own those SOPs, they bring their skill set and then that's another Piece of this is that as the business grows, while, yes, you may be the best at all of these things, on day one or in the first year, you are then hiring people and giving SOPs away to the right people who have the potential to be much better at them than you are at some point, you do recognize, and I think most people go through this as you get into your middle ages, that you, in fact, are not superhuman and you're not great at everything. And so you do the thing that you're great at and you give away the things that you're not great at to people who are great at those things. And just like you said, there's somebody out there that loves that thing that you may hate, but someone else loves it. And that's the person to own that. Stop. And on day one, and Martel talks about this, if you can hire somebody, you know, at best they're going to be 80% of what you are. Sometimes they're going to be 25% of what you are at this. But if they have the potential to be 80% or above, that's the place to push out. And what you'll often find, what I've found is that especially at the executive level, all of the executives are far better at their job than I would ever have the potential to be. Even if I spent the next 10 years of my life doing just their job.
- [37:43]
B
Yeah.
- [37:44]
A
I would not be better at their job than they are at their job. Because they're different personalities, they come from different backgrounds, they have different skill sets. This is what matters. And this is why it's so important to pick the right person to hand that SOP off to.
- [37:55]
B
That's right. I mean, eventually we'll have a conversation around how you build executive teams, but this is the way, right? Like, at the end of the day, a good executive team, first of all, they don't all look like each other, talk like each other, do the same thing. Right. That you're looking for people that fill the gaps of the things that you as a founder, as how you're going to start you as a founder are bad at.
- [38:15]
A
Right.
- [38:16]
B
You want to find people that sort of fill in those gaps. But I think it is definitely also true that you are going to find that there are areas of the company that are really critical that you are just either not good at or cannot make yourself stay interested in. I actually have a few of those myself. Right. Like, I'm pretty fascinated by most things. There are some things I am not fascinated by.
- [38:36]
A
Right.
- [38:36]
B
And I just need somebody else to do that work. And there are people who absolutely love it. So hand it to them. The last piece of this is also, and this is a callback to a thing you said earlier. And I think it's really also very important. I have seen companies as they've grown and I'm talking about grown to the level of being ready to publicly IPO.
- [38:55]
A
Right.
- [38:55]
B
All right.
- [38:56]
A
So big company FIG.
- [38:57]
B
Right. I have seen the CEOs of those companies still have to go take a position within the company, take off CEO hat for a second. Right. I mean you always keep your CEO hat on, you know, technically, but they take it off and go step into like a key sale or some of the key roles that need to be done. Because at the technician level and it may not be sales. Right. If you're in the tech company, sure. In the technician roles, that human is still probably a top.0001% in that one technical space. And every so often they need to go step into that role for a second to help the company get something across the finish line.
- [39:41]
A
Sure.
- [39:41]
B
It should not drive you crazy if that has to happen, of course. And it is not a failure if that happens. That is simply my way of saying, yes, you're going to hand things off. Yes, you're going to create standard operating procedures. There are still going to be times where you need to recognize, and it's okay to recognize that you have the magic in some capacity within the organization that you may need to step into and hold that role for a couple weeks, couple months until you are able to train the team up to be at that 80% line of what. Of what you are. For me, it's always about I'm looking for that 80% line.
- [40:19]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [40:20]
B
I don't expect a hundred like. And I think if you do, you're going to fail at this. I think 80% is the number the human you're going to put in charge of a thing needs to have the capacity to get to 80% of what you can do it. It may never get higher than that and that's okay. Or at least your perception of it may not get above that.
- [40:41]
A
But often they do grow into. Sometimes they do and are and are better at it. So let's talk about specific, specific really quick on how you actually create SOPs, because I think technology has changed us quite a bit. Again. When I was writing SOPs in the early days, I was writing SOPs like on a Google Doc. As a matter of fact, Google Docs were probably relatively new. I Might've been writing them on Microsoft Word. And you use video a lot now. Use loom and whatnot. So when it comes time for you, as you think about again, the time investment that it takes to write a sop, what you found is that by recording a video and just walking through you doing the system or the sop, that's, that's how you start to create that. What's that process look like for you?
- [41:22]
B
Yeah. So just remember the type of work matters here. So if you're out on a manufacturing floor, this is not gonna work. You're gonna need somebody to either walk around with you with a camera or whatever. But for me, everything that I do is on a computer. Everything that I do is on screens. And the things that we solve are eventually are, are those things. Right. So what I've learned is that it's okay for me to take even a pretty critical event, something that's like this thing needs to get done in the next 30 minutes, or this customer is going to be pretty, pretty upset about it. Even in that kind of intensity, which is where we live day in and day out, I will still fire up a loom video and record my screen and talk through it as I go. It doesn't slow me down more than 1 or 2%.
- [42:07]
A
Sure.
- [42:07]
B
Because I'm doing this anyway in my head. I'm thinking all the steps. And as long as the words come out of my mouth while I'm showing it on the screen, just like if I was on a zoom call or if I had a person behind me or something and they were looking at it. Right. And I walk them through, step by step, what's going on. And I do that because that is so easy for me to hand off. I gotta do the thing anyway. Cause nobody else knows how to do it yet.
- [42:29]
A
Sure.
- [42:30]
B
So I gotta do the thing. Might as well record the video. Once I've recorded the video, I now have most of what I need to hand it off. And so what I'll do is I'll take the video and I hand that to the most ideal person to own that standard operating procedure. And I tell them this is a process that is mostly baked. It's not perfectly baked. So if you have any questions asked me, there's like this little period of time where I want to make sure that we get this really well refined. But I go ahead and hand it off. And then I tell them I want you to make the generic sop, which I don't want, you know, a written form of my video that's not going to be helpful there. They just watch the video. What I want instead is just very generic lines for this today. You can get loom, for example, which is a tool I typically use. We'll give you the transcript. You can take the transcript, drop it in AI and say, I want a generic set of steps for this thing. Thing is done right or 90% done right.
- [43:20]
A
So you're watching the video, you get it transcribed, you plug it into AI, you say, give me a clear step by step SOP for this. And then you just pour over it. And you basically copy edit that, if that's right, so that it doesn't miss any steps. Make sure that it's. Everything's clear.
- [43:36]
B
Yep.
- [43:37]
A
It works incredibly well. So, yeah, it's a great way to do. To do a stop, for sure.
- [43:41]
B
Well. And then I think the final step of this is make sure they understand that they now own it and that they can and should change it.
- [43:49]
A
That's right.
- [43:49]
B
But now here is really the kicker, because people suck at this, and I just want to make sure everybody hears it. You can make changes only if you write those changes down and they make it into the formal documentation.
- [44:02]
A
That's right.
- [44:03]
B
What happens to unravel a company.
- [44:06]
A
Right.
- [44:06]
B
Is that people will take these standard operating procedures and things get busy. You know, there's just, you know, I had a critical customer ticket I had to deal with. Okay. And it changes over time with no documentation and no clarity.
- [44:20]
A
Now they're the only person that can do it.
- [44:21]
B
Now you got a problem, and then.
- [44:23]
A
That person dies in a car accident or leaves the company or whatever, and it's just like, oh, God, nobody knows how to do this anymore. Exactly.
- [44:30]
B
I don't want to say this like it's a. You know, like, I don't see this super frequently. But you can also just be held hostage by people that are like you. I have found people. It's a rare person. And if you ever find them, you have to fire them immediately. You have to immediately fire them. I have found people that will hoard information merely for the purpose of making sure they're the only one that knows how to do the thing. And when that happens, you a company, that's cancer in a company. You can't have that.
- [44:54]
A
Yeah, it's that linchpin model that. The book is fine. But if you've ever read that book, it's. There's a little bit of that. Like, if you're wired just to be evil enough that you make yourself the linchpin, and then you can. And then you hold that hostage over the company. That's, that's gross.
- [45:08]
B
Yeah, that's real bad.
- [45:09]
A
Part of the core values of who we are.
- [45:11]
B
And so last step in there is just you gotta follow, you gotta follow up. So yeah, this is where your one on ones will happen with the people that you hand these things to. You should be having those anyway. One on ones are very valuable. We'll have a conversation about that at some point. But I think those one on one meetings, one of the primary purposes of them is just to also go over any SOP changes that they have in place or that they have questions about. Make sure that your judgment is still being applied until it has made its way to lower level employees. Sort of take off.
- [45:38]
A
Yeah, this is where, this is where I still love. As simple as the technology is of like a Google Doc. Because I can hand off a SOP to somebody and say I really want you to follow this SOP 100% the first few times you do it. Now if in the beginning you already see clearly that there are steps that need to be added or taken away, just make it a comment on the SOP and then we do the one on one. Review that with me. I'll give you a thumbs up. Or sometimes I don't even have to do it during the one on one. The very next day I can look at their SOP and they can put in the comment, here's why this step should be added. And I just go approve. And now it's in the document. And then. But the key there again from a culture standpoint, is that not only do you have to trust them enough to give it away, they have to know that you trust them enough for them to have ownership of it. Yes, I don't want employees to feel like they have ownership of a thing. I want them to actually have ownership of a thing. Because when they actually have ownership of a thing, they take more pride in the thing. That's again another story for another day. This is why I try to be generous with equity with stock options. I don't want employees who feel like they're owners of the company. I want employees who are owners of the company. I want employees who are owners of the SOPs because that raises their level of pride and expectation for themselves. To go like, this is a thing. I own. My, my boss, my, the investors, the board, the every. They've entrusted me with this thing. I own it. Therefore I'm going to. If you've hired the right people, I'm going to swing for the fences and knock it out of the park. I want to prove to everybody that I can crush this, because most employees, especially great ones who are internally motivated, want more responsibility, not less.
- [47:19]
B
Yeah.
- [47:20]
A
They just want it clearly defined. And what a SOP does is it clearly defines the responsibility and the expectation of the SOP owner and the team that comes under that. And so that's really, really important.
- [47:31]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. By the way, we're going to have to wrap this one up because we have a final stop coming up here. We're not going to hit quite the last point. That's okay, because it probably has a whole podcast coming.
- [47:42]
A
Yeah, we'll lead into how these things lead into the game plan, the goals, actions, metrics, and execution. And really the execution is the sop. That'll be the teaser for next episode or next couple episodes coming up. So that's another episode of the Build you'd business podcast with Matt and Chris Reynolds. Again, things are going great. Rankings are awesome. Would love for you to share this with a friend or family member. Five star review or honest review anywhere you listen to your podcast. Tell somebody about it, share it on social media and we'll see you guys next Friday. Sam.