PRODUCTIVITY | How to make your organization scalable by documenting what matters. w/Adrienne Bellehumeur.

0:00And now, Taking Care of Business, your hosts, Craig Moen and Shai Gilad. Welcome to Business Owners Radio, Episode 230. Our guest today is Adrienne Bellheimer, an expert in productivity, documentation, governments, risk, and compliance. She's the co-owner of Risk Oversight, a leading firm in internal controls, internal audit, compliance, and process documentation services. She is also the author of the book, The 24-Hour Rule, which discusses the importance of following documentation best practices and the significance of information management in the current world. Good morning, Adrienne. Welcome to Business Owners Radio.

0:46Great. Thanks for having me, Craig and Shai. Yeah, we're so excited to have you here today. We're really excited about your book, The 24-Hour Rule and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations. This is a book about dynamic documentation, which at first blush might not sound very sexy, but boy, is there a lot of pain around this. What led you to write the book? You know, I've had a fascination with documentation for a long time. Ever since I was in school, I remember looking around the room at people, who's taking notes and who's not. I mean, it's been a long term interest in this topic. When I entered the work world as a young chartered accountant, although CPAs are very well trained in documentation, you'd be surprised at how siloed and almost corporate-y feeling this training we had when I entered the work world.

1:40The same with, I've worked with banks and oil companies and so much. I always thought there was a gap in how we train the workforce in documentation. We do have training and documentation, but it's just always done very siloed by profession. Lawyers are trained one way, accountants trained another way, salespeople, business analyst project. I mean, like the list goes on and on and on. And now we get to our business owners and there's hardly any resources out there for them. Most resources are actually much more focused on the big corporate space. So I really saw this need for a usable, fun-to-read book on defining what the world of documentation is and how it can help your work no matter what you're working on.

2:29And to stop training our people in this knowledge workforce and these total silos as we've done in the past. Yeah, I could see we're coming from this background of compliance, where there's mandatory documentation, right? So I'm thinking about, I had started a charter airline years ago, and of course, working with the federal government all of the time, there's so much required documentation. And one thing that I think that your book does so well is you help give us some new language about how to think about this. And so there's sort of this corporate or a mandatory or compliance-based documentation.

3:06Maybe that falls under this category of something you describe as documentation with a capital D. And there's sort of the practice of how we document things that are relevant to what we're doing all of the time, which is sort of this documentation with a lowercase d. So first of all, Adrienne, I don't know if I got that exactly right, but that's how I'm kind of thinking about it. Could you share a concept about it? Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Shai. I mean, documentation has unfortunately been dominated by the conversation of compliance and legal and what you have to do. And this has actually hurt kind of its perception in businesses from corporate down to business owners, that it's just kind of this horrible thing that you have to do, like going to the dentist.

3:51So people don't actually enjoy it or engage in the process as much as they should. Although, ironically, if you were to engage yourself as a business owner or your staff, even if you're a big corporate in the process to just do what's best practice, do what's right, which is what I teach in the book, you would actually do better with compliance, legal contracts, everything, all that kind of big capital stuff as well. So I've tried to shift the focused on doing what's right, not just doing what you have to do for compliance sake. I own a compliance business risk oversight. So I certainly know what you're talking about.

4:28But even working with my own clients, I try not to make compliance just about compliance. It should be about actually documentation to make your business better. And that's where you get the most value out of it. But your perception of it is exactly part of the problem right now and why we don't have what I call dynamic documentation, which is documentation that actually moves you forward, moves you to a state of action, drives great things forward, because we're so obsessed with just this compliance piece. And unfortunately, a lot of companies don't actually document unless it is a mandatory requirement.

5:05And that's kind of missing the point of all the great benefits that comes out of reasonable documentation practices. Yeah. And as you also talk about, this is really about productivity. And maybe not everybody loves compliance, right? It's sort of necessary, but we all are chasing this productivity thing. How can I get more out of my resources? How can I be more productive, more effective? And documentation, the underlying need to have effective documentation is just crucial when you think about productivity. One of the first things that comes to mind, I'm thinking about the pain. All of us struggle with delegation, right?

5:45Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you know what that's about. Yep. So especially when we're making this journey from freelance to actually trying to grow a team. And of course, you're going to hire talented people and you're usually hiring for a specific reason. And you expect they can just sit down and start doing that thing. And then all of a sudden, and you realize there's this big disconnect and this difference in expectations. And if you don't find a way to get competent very quickly at describing exactly what they need to do, documenting processes, there's just no way to scale. It's such a common problem.

6:20I actually, I'm going through this in my own business as well. So I can feel the pain. I mean, I can tell you all the theoretical things you can do to improve your ability to leverage and absolutely documentation is part of it. I mean, we talk a lot about automation, chat GPU. I mean, that's almost a sexier topic to talk about in terms of leverage. But documentation, and I'm not just saying big formal processes, it's just even sharing files, making things easy for other people to read. You can't just keep your storage system, can't just be all locked in your head, is a huge part of leveraging your own business.

6:59I'm in the same boat as well. I've had to build templates, systems that are easily accessible, that I don't always have to be directing people to find things. CRMs that people can actually help me with, that I'm not the only one who knows how to do it. The list of my own little tasks, but they have a heavy documentation component. What I call it like the findability or re-performance standard. I do talk about some very basic standards in the book. And all of these, the operative word is standalone. You need to build documents and document systems that can stand without you, basically, that people can find things, they can understand things without explanation.

7:45And that's actually a high bar to reach. Very difficult for business owners who are, we're usually stretched very thin on our time, but still that's kind of the standard you need to really get that leverage to get to the next level. And as a business owner myself, I can tell you it's difficult to find the time to build systems, documents, practices that really stand alone. It is something that you do have to invest time away from your business that actually makes money to achieve those results. Adrian, for decades, we've been developing amazing tools for documentation and organizing. And there's just so many of them and so many possibilities of how we do it and so forth.

8:30And we kind of have our own personal way of doing things and it evolves and some of them are disasters and some of them work and we keep trying things. From a small business owner and growing business, obviously, it's really important to establish these methodologies or standards for documentation for the business early on rather than repair some real broken things. given the volume and multiple medias we got coming at us, what are some thoughts today about where are we and what are some red cautions times and things we should be thinking about before this disaster really gets out of hand? That's such a good point, Craig.

9:13I mean, there are so many tools now on the market that it becomes overwhelming and you don't want to be in a situation where you're just constantly chasing the next shiny object. So you will notice in my book, I'm quite technology agnostic. I actually use a lot of stuff. The problem we're seeing right now is it's actually very basic. Like when you strip down the basics of what you need in information management, and this is not just what big companies do, but the very basic of information management, you need very approved repositories. You need consistent location to store what matters. And companies, big and small, mess that up.

9:57And now with so many tools on the market, that very basic information management principle of store things consistently in a designated areas is getting more skewed and more difficult to hit because we have more places where things are going. Text, teams actually brought in more information getting locked in chats. This is actually a common problem with businesses of all sizes. We have SharePoint is, you know, they grow out of control. But actually companies from small ones I work with to multinationals are actually still faced with the same problem of not defining clarity around where to put things.

10:39And I'm giving you an extremely basic answer to this. There's so many good tools right now on the market for just basic document sharing. I mean, I use a lot of them. Dropbox for business is good. Google Drive can be used for certain things. SharePoint is great. I use a lot of Microsoft products. Really, the tool doesn't matter. There's lots of good ones. The bigger challenge is to be consistent and no tool will do this for you. Information shifts over time and you need to be on top of it. Again, very difficult for business owners. I'm one myself. I manage my client's documentation really well, but you need to find that time a little bit every few months or so to stay on top of your personal practice because information shifts and even what you defined as where to put things will shift a little bit over time.

11:31I've never really seen a company or a person just maintain beautiful documentation without actually putting the effort into it. It just doesn't happen. There will always be a need for clear definition of where to put things. This doesn't have to be complicated. And then ongoing management, even a little bit reasonable efforts throughout the year as well. On the surface, it sounds like a major challenge, putting some structure for the business. individually. We wrestle with our own stuff, but for a business to function and share amongst team members and have instant information available, logically, visual maybe, what are some of the symptoms that we're out of control and where can we start?

12:19Your book has a lot of pieces and parts to it that really make sense. And I know you have a framework. What are some the symptoms of the disasters that are out there and kind of what are your thoughts for where do they apply their efforts first? Sure. Well, I will talk a little bit about a framework I use called the five stages of documentation. And it's almost follows like the capability maturity model where in the olden days, we used to talk about processes kind of going from kind of ad hoc to initiated to repeated. Like we had this kind of old school view that processes just got better with time.

12:56My five stages are that kind of stage one and stage two are just starting off with don't have a lot of documents. You're just getting going. Stage one or stage two is very common. I'm sure many of your listeners are actually in stage two right now, which means they have spotty documents, but not really a consistent process, especially as we're about to scale. And there hasn't been a burning platform yet to get documents in place. Stage three is, I would say, okay, but going through the motions. Actually very common in the corporate world where you satisfy compliance requirements, but you're not really getting that productivity benefit, which I talk about extensively throughout the book to make things more productive and actually drive you forward.

13:45Stage four is my ideal, which means you're just getting, it doesn't mean your documents are perfect, but it means they're being legitimately used and are serving your business. People are using your content system to create proposals. People are using your CRM to follow up. People are just using it to actually drive their business forward. And stage five is overkill, which is where you have way too many documents. So I'm going to kind kind of go through stage three, which is just going through the motions is a very common challenge because of the way we've traditionally taught documentation as something like going to the dentist that you just have to do.

14:25And you just do it because your lawyers say so, or you do it because your auditors say so. I would say that's one of the biggest kind of challenges I see. And then stage five of overkilling, less of a challenge with business owners, admittedly, because business owners are naturally pragmatic, predictable people that aren't going to go into the overkill zone. But stage five is actually very common in big corporate where you have, you actually throw too many resources. Your systems are overly complicated. You are documenting too much. You're keeping way too much. Stage five is, and I shouldn't say I haven't seen this at all with small businesses I have actually as well.

15:06It also speaks to our misunderstanding understanding about what good documentation is. Documentation should kind of hit that sweet spot that it's always driving you to a state of action. But if you've gone too far and your system is so complicated that it's actually hurting your ability to drive action or your documents are so long, no one uses them, you've hit that stage five. So stage three, going through the motions and stage five overkill are actually two of the biggest challenges I see. And I mean, I've lots of tools for overcoming those two very common pitfalls. It sounds like a great solution and getting started is half the pain.

15:48It sounds like there's an element of corporate standards or business standards or best practices initially so that everybody's following the same patterns. Everybody's utilizing the systems the same way, that there is a standard for what a good document even looks like that are generated internally. Of course, we have volumes coming from other sources, but is there some high-level guidelines regarding the structure of documents and the structure of how they exist in the system? The structure of individual documents, I'm not that prescriptive in my own teaching that I would say a document has to look exactly the same all the time.

16:32I do believe in more conceptual standards. I call them the super standards of documentation. Unlike some documentation professionals who come with very, you know, these are the templates you need to follow. I believe in being more conceptual because documentation is so broad and it needs to apply to a wide range of the workforce. My super standards that I talk about are clarity, which again goes back to this concept of re-performance, that someone could actually understand what you wrote without having to ask someone else for help. So, re-performance is that someone could do a job based on the instructions you've written without having to ask for help.

17:21A findability is someone could find the documents or locate things in your repository without asking for help. Engagement is a trickier one, but this is huge. Are people actually asking questions about what you've written? Does it spark any thought, emotion? This is actually an important standard. I can do work for clients. I can pump out reports, produce nice, beautiful processes, diagrams. But if I haven't seen a reaction, like they actually changed what they're doing, they rethought their processes, then there's actually something wrong with your documents. I think documents should drive some form of engagement, even reaction, even positive or negative.

18:08And then use is another standard. Very easy to measure actually with a lot of tools on the market, but are documents actually being used? I have actually been, in my many years of consulting, I have been given assignments to go do documents that the people don't actually use, but now that's usually in the big corporate space where people haven't thoroughly vetted what they needed. Much less of a, I shouldn't say it's not a problem with business owners. I have seen many small businesses as they're in that state of leverage, growing, they bring in new people. No one knows about the old documents there.

18:43They're not really used. You should measure how much documents are used. And that's a good indication of whether to get rid of them or that whether they need to be removed or whether you gave the right project in the first place. So Adrian, let's talk about the title itself, the 24 hour rule. Where does that come from? So the 24 hour rule is near and dear to me. It comes from substantial anecdotal evidence in my own work life. So the premise of the 24-hour rule is that you need to rewrite, reprocess, or rethink information within 24 hours of hearing it. Or in simpler terms, just do something with that information.

19:28So it really hit me in my many years in the corporate space. I have actually been a business owner for a long time. I started as a business, but very humbly, by the way, when I was 25, I'm much older than that now, but I work with big companies. So I have been to so many meetings where there's so much disgust. We have expensive consultants in the room. We have leaders. We have expensive lawyers in the room. There's all these ideas. People are really jazzed about what was talked about. People leave the meeting and crickets. Nothing ever happens with that information, intellect, ideas. They literally vanish.

20:13And then what happens? You typically have that meeting yet again. This cycle, I just saw so much in the work world. And I actually couldn't believe how much money my clients were wasting on these meetings that did not really generate any activity. And then worst of all, even worse than that, they would repeat the same meeting and still not write anything down. So the 24-hour rule started largely because of meetings. It's a practice that you should rethink, do something with that information within a 24-hour period that I noticed in my own work that when I was able to take some notes, follow up, reflect on it, maybe pull that information into a document.

21:02I was just exponentially more productive than the times where I missed it. And I will preface that early in my career, I made many mistakes of not following the 24 hour. It was actually never really taught even CPA articling, which is very good documentation training. We never really taught that you will forget information and you will lose that momentum on it. So I developed this rule largely to save my own career. I needed a mechanism so that I was taking more action on information, but I actually have done a lot of research over the years and the 24-hour rule has meant more and more to me over time.

21:45The 24-hour rule is actually based on science. We are very good at processing information in a 24-hour span. And you can look at things like the forgetting curve and all the science behind the human memory. The human memory bank and the short-term memory bank only has seven slots, which is phenomenal. Seven slots is nothing. When you think of all the tasks you have at work to do right now, throw in your home life, God forbid you might have something in your personal life, other activities. We really do not have a lot of space to manage all the things that we need from our short-term memory. So that is one reason why we go to meetings.

22:28We're very engaged. We think we've solved the answers. We have all these great ideas. And then we lose that information from Tuesday's strategy session. We'll literally get dumped in about 24 to 48 hours. So I had a fascination with driving better productivity off using information. I saw this as like a superpower and so misunderstood in the work world, companies of all sizes that, you know, go to meetings and don't really do anything with that information. Over time, the 24-hour rule has meant more and more to me. I call it the golden rule of documentation because it's kind of that inflection point where you lose a lot of information.

23:11And certainly business owners are really stacked. Their calendars are jammed. But it's so important if you meet with a prospective new client or customer, are you documenting that in your CRM? Are you making a few notes? Are you writing back to that person? You don't have to necessarily write back in 24 hours, but you should have at least a minute. Let's start really small here to reflect on that meeting and to put it somewhere. So important for business owners who are generally wearing so many hats and have such a stacked schedule. It started actually with my observations in the corporate world of so much waste.

23:53But certainly for business owners, they want to be as productive as possible. But sometimes we have to even reduce our amount of meeting time so that we can actually take action in the window of time where we are the most productive. I'm sure Craig and Shai, you guys have, well, maybe you guys are perfect, but you probably have something on your to-do list right now that has just sat there for the last two or three weeks. And you're just like, for the love of God, I cannot get to these things. And then you probably had something that came in in the last 24 or 48 hours and you attacked it with record speed.

24:29That's actually part of our human processing. We're really good in those 24-hour spurts. The part of the 24-hour rule is learning, with being reasonable, but learning how to maximize our ability to act on information in that time. And it actually has dramatic impact on documentation. And it's a very new way of thinking of documentation. And actually following this rule will make your compliance documentation better, your sales and marketing better, your accounting. I mean, all this stuff gets really lost in this very short window we have to process information at its best. And I mean, there's lots I can talk to you about, about this big implications on your workflow.

25:14If you cannot even manage things at 24-hour spurts, there are obviously other compensating parts to work into your personal workflow. But it's a good way to observe where things might be falling off the rails. I'll give you an example. In my own business, I have a bit of administrative help, but I do not have enough. I'm finding I'm not getting to even take action on administrative tasks that come in. I really need more help there. I'm seeing that as a symptom of the 24-hour rule as kind of, it's like an indicator of what can be going off. If you're too busy, you're short-staffed, it's kind of a mechanism that'll help you to process information and your workflow better.

25:53Well, Adrienne, you've certainly given us a lot to think about today. I want to thank you so much for being here. Thank you. It was great speaking to both of you. Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our listeners? Well, if listeners are interested in the book, and hopefully it will help many business owners out there, it's called The 24-Hour Rule and Other Secrets for Smarter Organization. It's available through pretty much any retailer, certainly Amazon, Penguin Random House, Barnes and Noble, wherever you will find that book anywhere. My website is bellhumorco.com for more information and to sign up for my monthly newsletter.

26:32And I certainly also love connecting with people on LinkedIn as well, and happy to answer any questions on documentation specifically for business owners who are, I believe, are some of the hardest working people and the most practical clients I have. So I look forward to connecting with others in the future as well. Our guest today has been Adrienne Bellhumer, author of The 24-Hour Rulebook. You can find more about Adrienne as well as find links to her book and newsletter all on our website at businessownersradio.com. Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show.

27:14As always, you can read more about each episode along with links and offers in the show notes on our website, businessownersradio.com. We want to hear your feedback. Please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes. Tell your fellow business owners about the show. And of course, you would love the stars and comments on iTunes. Till next time, keep taking care of business.

27:43Thank you.