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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club. If you're at all interested in anything we talk about here in this episode, go ahead and check out the description down below and click any of the links there.
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B
Or if you just want to know
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A
more about us, click the links below. Now, on to the episode Ops Experts Club.
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B
Taryn Turner. That's what I'm talking about. This is the place, Taran. I think, like, honestly, sometimes I think to myself, people could be watching Netflix, they could be tuned into like, Amazon prime, some cool stuff's out there. Or they could tune in to the coolest, most riveting show on in podcast history, probably and tune into Flow.
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C
Yeah, I think it was said recently on Planet Earth, dude, on Earth, we're number one.
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B
I knew it, dude. I had it kind of in my gut. I'm like, probably this is on Earth, but that feels a little bit like, presumptuous to say, like, I'm going to break my patting myself on the back.
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C
But yeah, I think David Attenborough's is starting up a documentary on us as we speak.
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B
I was wondering, I was getting some reach out from his people and I'm like, what could he possibly want to know from me? But now that that actually makes sense.
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C
Yep.
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B
Hey, Ops Expert, great having you tune in again this week for another riveting episode of Ops Experts Club. But honestly, I know that our stuff isn't always the sexiest, but let me tell you this. If you're an operator running an online education business or some sort of online platform where you are selling products or you're selling coaching or you're doing anything where the Internet is your main vehicle, you know that things can whip out of control quick. You know that things can get super squirrely and you can start experiencing a lot of growth. And if you don't have good systems in place, everything feels overwhelming. And then you start getting really distracted from what you're there to do, which is make money, and you begin doing a bunch of things that shouldn't be requiring your time. And you can't just say, well, I'll just have AI do that. I'll just create an AI agent to go do that. I think there's a lot of people out there right now. There's whipping that out there. But I'm telling you this right now is AI is great for certain things. There are certain things that absolutely you can automate and, and I can do to help you with, but there's a lot of things that you need to put in processes into place before AI is going to be able to help you with the lift. And that's what we're here to help you do. So, Taryn Turner, we are here to talk about today. You know, we do a lot with bookkeeping, a lot with helping people do payroll pay vendors stay on top of, especially contracts. And this is something that you do for a lot of people. You're not necessarily part of the accounting team. We have five ladies that kind of run the whole accounting bookkeeping side of collab team. But where they intersect with you is as the operator, you know, you're over certain accounts and you really are the gatekeeper on what should we be paying people. And I think there are a lot of people out there that once they sign a contract, they never check and balance it. And then so all kinds of vendors, all kinds of people can take advantage of them because they're too overwhelmed to check and balance. What should we be paying people, truly? So I thought we could talk about today. I know it may not sound like the sexiest, most exciting topic, but I do think it's one that's really vital if you're trying to really tighten up your belt. And that is should we be paying people what they're invoicing us. Turn. What's your thought on that? Just out of the camp.
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C
Yeah, that is a tricky one. And that's how a lot of companies get taken advantage of 100.
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B
Like, I remember early on, early days, and I'm not going to name the client because I don't want to embarrass him, but like, we had a bunch of coaches working underneath his banner and they were just turning in invoices to be paid. And we're like, is there any kind of check and balance that they haven't already invoiced us for those calls? And there was like, none. No, no check and balance. Like, this person could literally be charging us for the same coaching call three or four different times. And we didn't have any, any really check and balance in place when we stepped in. And we're like, no, that's got to stop, obviously. And so we shored up that gap, got a fix for them. Then we rolled into another client right behind him who had a very similar program. And we're like, hey, is there any check and balance to make sure these coaches aren't double billing us, triple billing us? Nope. Just trust, just pure trust that people are not going to double and triple bill us. And I think that it happens more often than people like to admit.
- [03:48]
C
Yeah, it does. And this is definitely where operations kind of swings into what some people might consider finance. And so that's why we're talking about it now is finance usually gets involved when they're actually being paid out. So how do we import them into the system to be paid out? Do we have all their information? Are we paying the correct person? But operations, they're going to be the ones in charge of, are we paying them the correct amount? Is this approved? Do we have contracts for them? Are they invoiced based on their contract? Do we need to have a conversation with them before we submit this and finance can pay it out? So all that needs to happen before this even goes to payout.
- [04:28]
B
I'm going to be totally honest on the show. Not like I'm not totally always honest on the show. I am mostly totally honest always. But my question for you is this. So I'm in the different chats, I watch people ask you a lot of questions and you carry a lot of accounts. You know, we're, we're helping a lot of online entrepreneurs to tighten up their operations. We're a one stop op shop. So I think that we are really helping a lot of people do a lot of different things. But I'll watch people ask you questions, I'll watch our finance team say hey Taryn, when we're supposed to be paying X for X, how is this supposed to be working for this to this? And I'll watch you really rally very quickly on answers. What's your secret sauce? Like how, what is it? Just your, you've got such a big brain. Like you're just a smart dude and you carry all that stuff in your brain or is there a way that you keep that organized? I know that you work with a lot of different automations. I know you're, I mean currently at the CO lab team, we're really trying to lean heavy into where can we plug in AI? Where are things that we can use automations or use, you know, things that are outside of just the capacity of our own brain. Can you maybe give us some secret sauce on how do you keep it all straight? Like how do you keep contracts straight? How do you know where to find everything? How do you know what to tell people in a pretty quick turn time? Because they can't slow down payroll, right? They can't slow, slow, slow down payouts. They A lot of times finance doesn't trip until they're in the middle of processing. So maybe can you talk about that a little bit?
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C
Yeah, I'd say the first step that helps. Is I, in some roles, the one executing contracts. So if I'm the one executing contracts, I already have the knowledge base when it comes to payout. And I'm also the one giving first line approval. And so I know them from contract execution to now payout. I've got that knowledge. Outside of that though, that's not always the case. And there could be other people involved in contracts. I like to make sure they have a system in place for contract repository system. Where are these contracts living? Are they searchable? Are they searchable not only by the business name, but by the point of contact's name? Because if I'm running through something, I'm trying to pull up a contract, I might type in the business name in my search bar, it might type in the person's name what's going to come up. And so that's going to give me the contract quickly. If I just want to review the entire contract. I'll also, depending on what kind of tools they use as a company, create some sort of a task manager view breakdown of the different recurring vendors we're paying with links to their contracts, with quick cheat sheet notes of their payment terms as well. So I don't even have to review the whole contract anymore. Sometimes in there too, I'll even start listing if they're the type of vendor that are getting paid for something specific, like an event that happened two months ago, I'll start entering in all the events they've already invoiced for. So as they're sending new invoices and I'm approving them, I can see okay, they haven't submitted an invoice for this event yet.
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B
Some good stuff. Taran, I know you're. You're doing a lot with AI. Do you feel like there's a world where it would make sense to drop all of our contracts into some sort of repository that AI is reading from that then we could actually ask the brain of Claude to say, hey, with this contract here, what's the payment terms of what? Like that you could actually ask it instead of having to go research it. Would that be a good use?
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C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's essentially what I'm doing. Just in some situations, maybe I can be a little quicker depending on. Depending on your AI, what you filled it with and what it has to search if it's got. The issue with PDF files is sometimes it has to read them as images, right? And it can't extract it as text and quickly synthesize it to be able to pull Something out quickly. But especially with signed DocuSign agreements, I found those are extra protected and cannot be extracted as text. But yes, you can definitely create a repository and just have something you're chatting with, similar to what I'm doing. I'm creating basically putting them in a, in a Google Drive folder and searching for it and pulling it up and scrolling to the right section and reading it.
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B
So would you say the process goes like. So, like as we're speaking this, if you're a visionary or you're a solopreneur, or you're. You're maybe working with a small team, the chances are, let's just be honest, you're probably not the most organized, right? That's probably not your skillset. You probably have hired somebody to help you be organized. Or if not, that's probably the first person we'd always recommend that you would hire. Start with an ea, somebody that's organized in a way that you're not, and have them start helping you with that. I mean, that's something we do for people all the time. Either help them find an EA or step in is some sort of fractional operation solution. Right? So you're saying, Taren, first things first. We get into a contract, we sign it. Let's say on something like DocuSign, don't just allow your contract signing vehicle to be where all your contracts live. Right? So once that contract is completed, you want somebody to download that and now add it into a new repository that you're actually going to put all contracts in so that all your stuff is in one place. Is that where you would start?
- [09:16]
C
Yes. Yep. So DocuSign, step one, not everybody's going to have access to it, but if you want to go ahead and get those into your personal platform of document storage, because there might be a time when you stop using DocuSign, when you switch to PandaDoc, things like that happen all the time. Or you just want to be able to send one person access to one contract that they have a question about, you can just shoot it, share it directly with them.
- [09:41]
B
Would you say? Awesome, thank you for that. So second, you mentioned having some sort of cheat sheet. Do you create cheat sheets on all of them or only super complex ones? Or would you recommend they have some sort of working doc that kind of is like an index of all the contracts they have that at least call out in a really quick manner, like what were the terms and what did we agree on and how should payments be made?
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C
I mean, in a more organized sense, if I'm in a position where I do have more time to spend on it, I would do everybody. But if I'm working for a company where I know some of these people are going to be onesies or twosies, then I'm not going to put them in my cheat sheet document. I'm just going to keep them. I know where to find them real quick. If I know we're only going to be paying them out for the next one or two months, maybe a few invoices, I'm not going to worry about it.
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B
I love it. So then when you say thank you for that by the way. Genius. Okay, so number three, so we've, we've, we've taken, we've pulled down and deposited in the repository the contract from our signing software. We've made a cheat sheet if necessary. Number three, you mentioned there are two parts that I'd love for you to speak to. First you talked about oftentimes I'm the approver of the second, like once it's put into a bill payment software, you're actually one of the approvers in there. I'd love you to speak on that. And then number two, you mentioned using some sort of task management software to show us if there are multiple bills that are to be paid to like an event situation, like maybe the setup of that. Will you walk through those two things for me?
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C
Yeah. So we definitely want to have at minimum one kind of, I don't know if it's considered external or outside. Just one person, non finance team reviewing invoices can speak into them or know who can speak into them and ask questions about it. So usually that is the main operator for the company. If we are building out for an even bigger company, we'll have first level approvals, go directly to department heads who are in charge of that contractor and then it goes to the main operator and then it's ready to pay out. So yeah, I'm the approver, the person doing the payouts, they just need to know these have been approved for payout and they're good to go and they trust that I've asked all the questions and you know, it's a, it's, it's a lot of trust in me making sure that things are being looked at carefully and considered. And then the other thing I do is if they are people, you know, very date specific invoices and not necessarily project specific, where I know like oh okay, yeah, we are billing for this project we've never built before, easy. But if they're doing an event and we do events every weekend, maybe two or three a weekend. And like you really need to start keeping track of which events they've invoiced for. Especially if they don't invoice directly right away. Maybe they invoice 30 days later. Then I am filling out in this situation. I'm just putting out subtasks of all the events, the date they billed for it or the date I approved it basically. And then as new ones come in, I'm referencing that, just making sure it's not already on the list.
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B
So what I heard you say that I think is really important is most visionaries, they don't want to see money go out, but they also don't want to be the one that's having to read all the fine print. So it's great for them to have somebody that they know and trust. Right. You establish a lot of trust. People aren't just like saying, hey Taryn, know all these contracts and approve what's getting paid unless they've seen that they can trust you in that. So obviously find somebody that you can trust that's going to understand the way your contracts are written so that when it comes to payment, that person can answer questions for not only finance team, but I've also seen visionaries come back to that person to be like, hey, what were the terms on that agreement? Hey Taryn, where are we at with this? Hey Taryn, didn't we already, didn't they already pay us once on that? And then like so you kind of have to be the 1 choking spot of like all agreements should come back through that person. And most the time that's not the best ROI on the visionary.
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C
Right?
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B
The visionary shouldn't be the one that's trying to remember how all the contracts were written. Like create a system, push it through the system and find one person you can hold up accountable to understand what that is. So that visionary, you can come back and ask questions. They're the one source of truth. Bookkeep bookkeeping. Come back and ask that one person. They're the one source of truth. But also, I thought you, you also mentioned something that was really great, which was having some sort of software where there is a two part approval process where somebody has to approve it before the actual person paying somebody can pay somebody. Like it's good to have a check and balance of like it has to come through this choking point before it's actually going to go to this choking point. You had mentioned that. Right, That's. And then finally the last thing would Be is it's great when you have something that's a multi part paying system if that can be managed by some sort of task management so you can have conversations within that task manager is what you were saying. Right. Like a Monday.com or an asana or some sort of project management software. So there's bookkeeping is filing all the things that they have that's got reoccurring payments or payments that are multi part. You can actually have a conversation within the software itself. Within the task management software they can ask you a question about one particular payment. You can answer it back. And it's not just lost in email land or lost in the middle of Slack attack, but it's actually something very drilled down on this specific client at this specific specific payment. I've got a question about is that what you'd advocate for?
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C
Yeah, I think that's a wonderful way to do it.
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B
It's awesome. Taryn, good ideas, good thoughts. When it comes to. We do a very similar thing though too when it comes to HR docs too. Right. Because I've seen people come back and ask you questions even about that. Hey Taryn, when we hired this person like did we signature signed like it it's a very similar function as what you do for paying vendors and even like you were talking about events payments. Right. Is having the tory for did we get our people to go through the onboarding the correct ways? Do we have all the right on them? Did they sign all the right contracts? Do we have NDA sign? That's a big one. Right? Like are we super clear that our stuff is safe? Are we super clear that they can't hijack our clients? Are we super clear that everybody has gone through the gauntlet before we start giving them a ton of access because it's really hard to reel that back in. I know there was a situation that we were in a couple months ago with a client who one of their top level leaders hadn't signed the right agreements but man, they had freaking all the keys to the kingdom and then they, they started getting real weird when we asked them to start signing things and it was like man this is the wrong time to be having this conversation. Now that they have all the keys to the kingdom and if they just choose to bounce right now, we have no legal repercussion for them taking off with all the kingdom because we didn't hold them to anything or we didn't have to sign something.
- [15:56]
C
Absolutely. And in some ways in my processes that I work in, I'm Treating employees and contractors the same just because we work in companies where you're dealing with so many of either of them. It's not like we only deal with employees or only contractors. It's the only difference is payroll in the type of contracts or agreements they're signing. Other than that, we tend to treat them. I tend to treat them the same way, just slightly different checklists that they have to go through.
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B
Awesome.
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C
I love it.
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B
Well, Tarantino, do you have any other wisdom that you could drop on the people today just to know that they. That you feel like they should be thinking about if they aren't thinking about some of these things now, like, what's maybe the beginning steps, the right direction where they could start thinking about it the right way?
- [16:37]
C
I would say ask the right questions and don't be scared of the holes you already have that you're going to find. You know, learning new things is great, and it just opens you up to a new process to introduce. I'm sorry if it's been burned before in the past, but, you know, take this opportunity to try something new. Yeah, don't be scared to ask. I still end up sometimes having to ask the visionary and the entrepreneur about invoices that I have no idea about because they're out left and right doing things that nobody else knows about. And then the invoice hits and I have to ask them personally about it. And it's always better to ask than to just assume and let it go through.
- [17:13]
B
You know what they say about assuming, Taran? Assume is not a good idea. So, Taren. So anybody that's listening, if you ever need help with any of these kind of things, just know we're always here to help with this kind of stuff. You can always hit us up on any of our socials if you have questions around. Hey, Teran, you were talking about this or you were talking about that or do you have a good reference on this? Know that we love talking to people on our socials. So Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, we're on all those things. LinkedIn, you. You can hit us up any of those places. If you're interested in us just coming alongside you and doing an audit on your stuff. Like, hey, where are my people at? How are my systems set up? You know, you can check us out. Finance.thecolabteam.com is a great place to start where it just kind of fills you in on some of the things that we do for people when it comes to audits, when it comes to helping people with tightening up their books, tightening up their systems. But, Taran Turner, thank you for being awesome at what you do. I think you're an amazing ops expert. Ops experts, thanks for tuning in for another week worth of riveting shows by the infamous Taran Turner. And I hope you guys have a great week. And we'll see you next week here on Ops Experts Club.
- [18:11]
C
See ya.