Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [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. Or if you just want to know more about us, click the links below. Now, onto the episode Ops Experts Club. Taryn Turner, I want you to know, because I know you will find this highly valuable and exhilarating that I started Ted Lasso over again last night.
- [00:24]
B
Wow.
- [00:24]
A
Yeah, Season one started up over because they're going to be a new one coming out this summer. And I'm like, I want to be prepped, Taren. It's so important to be prepped. You don't want to just walk into something cold turkey. Like, I want to know exactly what happened to Ted the last few seasons before we walk into this new one. He's coaching girls.
- [00:39]
B
Yeah, I get. I do that with every new Jurassic park that comes out.
- [00:42]
A
And I was going to say, this is your Jurassic park medley. You know, my wife was not appreciative when I did this because I always do this with everything I do with the Mission Impossible series. You know, I'm saying, like, you have to watch seven of them to get to number 80. A little bit burned out by the time we're done with it, but I couldn't get enough of Tom Cruise. I thought it was amazing. Who doesn't love Ethan, you know?
- [01:01]
B
Ethan Hunt, Megan. That's who.
- [01:03]
A
That's right, dude. Our boy can run, though. You know what I'm saying? Like, he is not a young dude and he looks good running. Like, he's a good runner. Not everybody, you know, a lot of thespians, a lot of actors, they just didn't. They weren't very athletic in high school, they weren't very athletic in the sports. You know what I'm saying? So when they start running, Nicholas Cage, you're like, dude, don't run. Like, it's just better not to run like you. You look, get a stunt double to run for you. But, man, Ethan Hunt, Tom starts running, he. He starts running. He may be a little cuckoo cachoo, but, man, our boy can run.
- [01:30]
B
You should send him a personal note telling him that.
- [01:32]
A
You have to tell him all that or just stick to the running.
- [01:35]
B
You can tell him all that.
- [01:36]
A
I love it. Anyway, Ops Experts, great to see you guys today. Ops Experts Club, this is the place to come when you're like, where do I send my operations people? Where do I, as an operations person, get real intel from a company that's been under the hood of dozens of entrepreneurs in the online marketing space, online education space, and just knows what works and what doesn't work. This free information, we just drop it here and talk you through what we've seen work and what we've seen not work. So hope you enjoy tuning in. There's a lot of topics we cover here today. We're going to talk about, though, Taran, something that we do a lot of here at the collab team, and that is recruiting. You know, so at the collab team, you know, a lot of times we'll come in and they'll. The entrepreneurs will feel like, hey, everything's on fire. I just need some help. And so we'll say, hey, let us put you through our gap analyzer. It'll tell us where there are gaps and overlaps on your team, and then let us attack your gaps and we'll actually jump in there, start doing the work, create an SOP for the work we're doing, and then go out and recruit for you so that we can hire and backfill what we've been doing, help with the onboarding, and exit as kind of the expert on what's been going on so that you don't have to slow down as you scale up. That's kind of our whole jam. But a big part of recruiting, I think, needs to start with that part of soping, because I think otherwise you end up in a spot where you don't even really know what you're hiring for. You want to talk about that a little bit? I know you lead a lot of teams, you guide a lot of teams. You end up pulling our different team members in to help with different things on different teams. You want to talk about the importance of a standard operating procedure sop?
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, it really comes about in two ways. You hear a lot about people wanting to bus proof themselves. The old analogy of getting hit by a bus and you're no longer there, which is a terrible, terrible phrase.
- [03:17]
A
Right.
- [03:18]
B
You are needing to delegate things to somebody else or somebody who doesn't exist yet. And so both of those bring up the conversation of SOPs. How do we do it? How's it been done? Is it the best way to do it? Is it repeatable, followable? Can we pass it off to somebody else? So once you get that point, yeah, start creating an sop.
- [03:37]
A
Yep. And then I think from there, that'll hopefully tell you, hey, how long does this SOP usually take to do? You know, I mean, and then from there, how Much is going to go into this role and therefore are we hiring a full time position? Are we hiring a partner time position? Is this something better? You know, we've talked about it on previous shows that I should hire somebody fractionally, that I should hire somebody that's an expert at this, bring them in for a short amount of time, have them create the SOPs, let me watch how they're doing it, and then as I hire, I backfill into what they've been doing for me. Because obviously it's going to always be cheaper to hire your own employee than somebody fractionally, but you likely are not going to hire an expert straight out of the can, you know, so why don't you have somebody that knows what they're doing come in and do the role split out for you and then like, I know for us, like, let us help you find the person because we've been doing it this whole time, let us help you find somebody that's going to do this wrong turn. There's a lot of talk AI, obviously AI is all over everywhere. You know, everybody's worried about Terminator becoming something real. You know, I'm saying, and like Skynet just like taking over the world and all the different pieces. But tell me this, a lot of people have been using AI to do SOPs. Are you a believer? Are you not a believer? What are the pros and cons from your perspective?
- [04:43]
B
Yes, I love it. I even created a custom GPT for a couple clients that was an SOP builder function and worked out pretty great. You know, input all the information about the company, the tools they use, any resources, and then you could ask it to help you build an sop. It would generate the correct questions to ask you so that it wouldn't make things up.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah, it would.
- [05:04]
B
It would call out if these were placeholders instead of just adding something in. So it would create something that can actually be followed and concise. Outside of that, I've also just used it. Just quickly create, create me a quick SOP for this. It's great. But yeah, anytime you're doing any of that work, you always gotta be proofreading it. They do hallucinate. It is common. They do tend to give you too much all the time in a sense that people aren't gonna want to read it all and say, wow, this is a novel. I'm not putting together an aircraft, I'm just trying to send a marketing email. I don't think it needs to be five pages long. Right. So yeah, always proofread it. Trim it down, make it concise, make sure it makes sense, ask for feedback from other people if they're following it on if it can be improved. There's steps missing. Yeah. So don't. Don't ever use it as a finished product. Use it as a starting point.
- [05:57]
A
Yeah, I know. I've seen you correct people, too, on making sure that it's not just like, too much, that it's going to choke people out, but also like, similar format. Right. Like, if you're creating SOPs for your company, you probably don't want a bunch of formats out there where it's like, everything looks a little bit different. They don't all have the same inclusions, like. And so probably guiding the AI as well. Right. As far as the platform that you're using to build it on the format you want it built in, get some sort of similar similarity in the cadence of order of events that you want on there. Because there is something that we really believe in pretty firmly. In fact, if you're interested in our SOP template, we'd love to give it to you for free. SOP opsexpertsacademy.com you can download it for you there and we'll show you how we build them. But I think probably having a similar cadence for the sake of somebody that, like, way we talk about it, is that it would be so simple, stupid, that a monkey could pick it up and do it. But would you agree something that's like a similar cadence, a similar look, a similar feel, so that all sops turn out the same, not just letting any. Any AI platform you're on just build whatever they would deem as a. As a viable sop.
- [07:02]
B
Yeah, I think that's a great suggestion. I wouldn't scrap something just because it's in a different format, but if you can set up some protocols and standards to be followed early, do that. That'll only make it easier.
- [07:12]
A
Yeah. So, yes, AI is a good thing. Be careful of hallucinations. Be careful of it becoming so long and lengthy that nobody's going to follow it. I know that. I heard you talk about the other day about how. What was the analogy you gave? You can create a. You gave a great analogy of creating an sop. Do you remember what it was of slicing bread, slicing cheese, doing something. You had some awesome.
- [07:33]
B
I think I was cutting onions.
- [07:34]
A
Yeah, cutting onions. What was the analogy? Cause I thought it was a good one.
- [07:38]
B
I forget exactly. I think it was just, you know, there's. There's going to be some sort of. It's like you're reading a recipe book. You know, they're not going to tell you exactly how. They're going to say, pick up the knife, hold the onion like this. Slice it right here, Slice it right here, slice it right here, slice it right here. Like that. Over and over again. They're going to tell you, grab an onion and chop it this way like it's a dice, is a sliver. And that's kind of the same way with an sop. There's going to be a little bit of an assumption of knowledge to your sop, which is fine. We're not trying to write a how to cut an onion article. We're writing something where the person. There's an expectation of knowledge that they're reading this cookbook. They know how to cut an onion just by grabbing it and using a knife.
- [08:18]
A
So bullet points. Not. Not paragraphs. Right. Like, as far as move them through. What. What is it that we're trying to do? You don't want somebody to get lost in your sop. And it doesn't need to be so detailed that you're taking them by the hand and leading them through every intimation of every platform. It's like, no, no, no. This is where I need to go. This is what you need to do. You're assuming at some level that they know how to move through general computer knowledge or whatever the knowledge is that you're trying to pass on.
- [08:41]
B
Yeah.
- [08:42]
A
So, I mean, something a little sideline that people don't know. Taryn, do you. Do you grow your own onions on your farm? Like, that's just a little side question.
- [08:48]
B
I have. Yes. I actually just used our last onion from last harvest, last year's harvest, and
- [08:55]
A
I knew something like that was going on. So not. So cutting onions is something you're very aware of and what other people don't know on this show is not only do you grow your own onions, but you are a master chef. Taryn makes some pretty amazing stuff. Homemade pizzas. That's my favorite one that he's been promised me for a long time, but he's never served me. And multiple other things. Is that a correct story?
- [09:12]
B
This is correct. I learned from the best. Lauren.
- [09:14]
A
Jeez, man. Lauren, who doesn't love that lady. She's an amazing. And yeah, I mean, that's just going one step further. And you remodel your own kitchens. So not only do you grow your own onions and you cook in the kitchen, but you remodel your own kitchens.
- [09:25]
B
That is true. These are all True facts.
- [09:27]
A
What could Taryn Turner not do? Okay, so SOPs don't make them so robust that they choke people out. Yes, AI is a good thing as long as you don't let it hallucinate. Spot check, make sure that you proof it, make sure you've got it down. Determine about how much time this is going to take and then ask yourself how much of these roles. Right. We're really big into delegate elevate here on ops experts where hey, if this doesn't require your brilliance anymore, let's task it down. But the only way you can task it down is if it's soped out. So a lot of times the way we will determine if there needs to be a recruiting project that happens is who's overloaded and what kind of stuff are they overloaded with. And could we do a delegate elevate exercise with them? Strip off enough work from them that would actually justify another lower level part time, maybe full time role that we could actually create more bandwidth than somebody that's a higher paid employee on the field.
- [10:15]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing too to call out. We were just discussing kind of like a some assumed knowledge. So it's always good in your SOPs I always like listing out a part of like prerequisites. What kind of knowledge, what kind of access is this a critical thinking SOP is this close your eyes and it can be followed easily by anybody. Sop that's really going to tell you too what kind of role it's going to take to do it. Yeah.
- [10:39]
A
And I'd say too because we live in a time where there's a lot of people that are being used by companies that are overseas. Right. So asking yourself, is there anything that I need to be like English is a second language. Is that going to make this SOP tough? Like is there something in here that's going to make this more difficult? A lot of times what I found with VAs is they're virtual assistants. They're great at doing exactly what you ask them to do. But if you're going to ask them to be a free thinker on how this could go, if there's going to be decision tree stuff that's happening in the middle of it, a lot of times they don't do that kind of work all that well. Unless you really train them on how you want them to do, it's not their fault. Like English, their second language, they speak two languages. How many languages do you speak? You know what I mean? But in that realize that there could be some complications in this. There could be some things that this is more involved than you realize. So don't just assume I can just hire somebody overseas to do everything in my company that needs to be done. There's probably is levels of expertise and excellence that you need to consider and quality control check. Right. Like if you're getting something done cheap, then it probably creates some budget and margin for some quality control, you know, so make sure you don't leave that out because I think anything handed down should be quality controlled by whoever's handing it down for the sake of making sure like this is still happening the right way.
- [11:49]
B
Oh yeah, a hundred percent.
- [11:50]
A
Karen, what are your thoughts on generational efficiencies when it comes to SOPs? Like, maybe we've always done this this way, but there's a lot of new technology out there now. There's a lot of new things out there right now and there could be some efficiencies that if we always just do it the same way without quality controlling from an efficiency perspective. Do you have a thought on that?
- [12:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. These days I definitely see SOPs as a temporary document. Things change so quickly with the applications you're using, with the direction your company's going, with what they're selling, with how they're doing it, everything. There's so many different areas where things are going to change that there's some fluidity there to the process too, of how we're doing it today might not be how we're doing it next year, but it'll be a good starting point. And if things change next year, we have an SOP half done that we can just update.
- [12:42]
A
And I think too, I mean, it's. It seems like for me, the way that we're involved with customers doing a ton of operations right now and everybody's trying to be more efficient and everybody's trying to plug AI in wherever they can. I think it always. SOP is a great place for AI to start, right. If you're thinking about like sizing something down, if you're thinking about making something more efficient, spelling it out for the AI agent that you're going to try and hand it to is only going to help, right. And it's only going to help get them the right direction, then you're able to fill in less of the blanks or let AI make less of the assumptions.
- [13:11]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [13:12]
A
Love it. I love it. So once I've got my SOPs done and I've determined that this is a role right, I think that probably A lot of times when you think about hiring, when you're thinking about recruiting, it's good to look at the org chart. Where's this person gonna fit? Who's this gonna. Who are they gonna fit under? Are there multiple roles that maybe we could strip off of higher level employees that we could. Then it might even shift your org chart up above, right? Cause you're able to elevate other people up into other seats and then create some space down below. So I think thinking about your org chart, thinking about the roles and responsibilities, you know, Eos is really big on three to five key duties that any one role is to take on and to be careful of. Not much more than three to five key duties because otherwise you start getting choking points. So I think really ask yourself as you think about delegate and elevating and soping things out and going out to hire, hey, how is this going to affect my org chart? Who would this person roll up under? How much room does it give this person? Does it make sense to maybe shift my org chart around a little bit and move people to other places? You know, could I know. We, we recently I put all the leadership team through working genius, you know, something that we've been working through on asking. I know we've done this for a long time. Do you enjoy doing this though? Is this the kind of work that you were wired to do or is there other work that you might enjoy better, enjoying more? So I think that putting them through some sort of test of if you're sure that your people are the right people for the bus, is everybody in the right seat? You know, or could there be a shifting of seats as you grow? Because probably the way you started isn't going to be the way you end up. And there are some people that as they ascend, they may ascend into different branches of the tree. It maybe that wasn't where they started, but they're your people, they're your flavor, they understand your culture, they want to progress forward with you. Why don't we ask ourselves, what do people enjoy most? Like where do they want to be, what do they want to do and use it as an opportunity for not just everything's on fire, everybody's overwhelmed, let's just go out and hire. Which a lot of times is the worst time to do it and the worst thing to do at that point. Because somebody's gonna have to train them, somebody's gonna have to do something to give them something to do. So let's try and just put a little bit More brain space into who should be doing what. Where do they fit on my org chart? What kind of space does that create? Okay, now let's go out and hire for this because we have these sops from the people that have delegated things down, soped them out and now if somebody starts, I have something playbooks to hand to them, things that they can read to read through, things that they can go back and meet with that person on that handed them down some kind of check and balance of training. All those things kind of are pre populated and pre programmed when you just put a little forethought into it. And if you don't have the time for forethought, I think find somebody that can help with it. You know, whether that's us, we'd love to help or find somebody that you know and love and trust that knows what they're doing, that can come in and help you do that. Because I think that a lot of times it's really hard to see the force for the trees when you're growing, when you're scaling, you know, and a lot of people have to slow down as they scale up because they don't have the right infrastructure in place. So great things to think through before you hire. Taran, Anything else you feel like we've left out when it comes to SOPs, when it comes to recruiting, delegate, elevate any of the things we talk about here on the show.
- [16:06]
B
I like it when you talk about org chart. I always like to view what does your future org chart look like too? Because now you're also planning for the future. It's like dreaming in your own non work world. You're dreaming business wise. And as you're filling in that org chart you can see future roles that may open up too as you continue to expand. Yeah, you might have future spots in there for like a customer support manager. You don't need one yet, but you know now when you're going to hire a customer support person, you could be looking at somebody who could rise into that future role because you see it in that future version of your company. And so that also helps you not just hire for now, but hire for the future.
- [16:46]
A
Yeah, I like that. So you know EOS is really big on vtos. Vision Traction Organizer. Right. Your one year, three year, ten year picture. Right. And I think that that's an excellent idea of hey, this is where we're at today. But I could see us getting into this in the future and when we get there and have to scale up this amount realize scaling up more dollars also means you need to infrastructure up to be able to bear those extra dollars, you know? And so what are the rules that need to come along with that and including that in your Vision Traction Organizer? I think that that's super smart. Good idea, Taran. Great inclusion, man. You're a smart dude.
- [17:16]
B
Thanks.
- [17:16]
A
Awesome. Well, Taran, always appreciate time. Ops Experts always appreciate time with you. If you haven't watched Ted Lasso lately, I would always recommend go check it out, man. Just to feel good. Makes you feel good about life, makes you feel good about people. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And we'll see you back here next week on Ops Experts.
- [17:35]
B
Thank you.