Free Training on Building Systems and Processes to Scale Your Business with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot.

0:30by documenting and delegating the systems and processes in their company. You can check out more at chrisronzio.com. Fire Nation, Chris believes everyone needs background dancers. You've got to have a unique skill that will support your business. And when building a business, think about how you can have a solid support system and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Chris and our sponsors. DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer.

1:07Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores in DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Chris, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that a lot of people would disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? This is Chris Ronzio. I'm excited to be here. Something that everyone would disagree with. Let's see. I think everyone needs background dancers.

1:44That'll make sense as we get into my episode, but everyone needs background dancers. I love that you said that because you've been on the show a few times recently because we're doing a nice campaign together. And I was like, Chris, make sure you say something unique for this one. I don't want you just repeating yourself from last episodes. And guess what? You managed it splendidly well with a great open hook for the future. So Fire Nation, you know, this is a free training all about building systems and processes to scale, not my business, not Chris's business, but your business. And you created Chris, a simple playbook about your policies, your procedures, and you're going to share that with us today.

2:21So take it away. Let's get into it. So if you want a playbook for your business, then this is the episode for you. I know we've had a couple other episodes talking about training and different elements of the playbook, but what we're going to do right now is break down why you want to write one of these, whether you're ready to write one of these, how you can get started, how you can loop your team in. It'll be a lot of fun. So let's get started. All right. First part is, are you ready for this? We talked about in a past episode that an entrepreneur has to be at a certain stage before they're really ready to start delegating in their business.

2:57They have to have some consistency, some maturity to their business. On day one, you're really not ready to delegate because you don't know how to do anything. You're still experimenting. You're still figuring it out. We talked about, I think, on a past time that we chatted, my framework, do it, document it, delegate it. Because in a business, you do things first. You learn to do things and you keep doing them over and over until you refine it, until you get it right. And once you're doing something consistently, that's when you're ready to document it, to write it down and to delegate it, to share it with someone else.

3:29So my gut check for everyone coming into this episode is please make sure you are doing things consistently. You've done it the same way at least a few times because I don't want you to write everything down to create this playbook. And then a couple of weeks from now, a couple of months from now, you're like, all of that is irrelevant. I do it totally different now. You'll feel like you wasted your time. So please be in a place where at least doing things consistently. All right. So next step is you need to understand why you're going about doing this for your business. So in some businesses, you may deal with bad Yelp reviews.

4:04You may have turnover issues. You may be working 100 hours a week and it's just totally unsustainable. And so your why may be correcting some of those things, Maybe just formalizing how do we do it here so that we don't have to deal with those bad Yelp reviews so that every service we offer is the best service, is the best version of what we do here. Maybe it's something more positive. Maybe why you want a playbook is that you want to expand. You want to open more locations. You want to really grow your business around the world, and that's a great reason, too. Or maybe you're just about to hire a ton of people.

4:40Maybe it's a seasonal business and you've got this busy part of the year that you're coming up to and you're just trying to put the building blocks in place. But everyone should have a why for doing this because if you don't have a why, then you won't have motivation for you and for your team to get involved. Now, I'll tell you a story really quick about why you need to tell your team the why. So before Trenual, I used to do consulting and I would go into a business and interview all their people about who does what, the roles, responsibilities, and I would map it all out for the company. And of course, the purpose of this is to help that company grow, to standardize what they do.

5:16So one business I walked into is a moving company. I sat down across from this woman in their break room and she looked at me super skeptical. And I started asking her questions about her day, what she does. And she says, I'm not telling you anything. What? So I was kind of taken aback, like, well, what do you mean? You're not going to talk to me? And she pointed to my pocket. Out of my pocket, I had this little clear wire. And that wire is a part of my insulin pump. So I've got diabetes, and I've got this little insulin pump in my pocket. And she says, you're wired. You're just recording everything I say so you can let me go.

5:55And I was blown away. It had never happened to me before, but I'm thinking, wow, if this team didn't know why I was here, of course they're skeptical. They're like, am I going to be fired? And so when you've got your why, you've got to tell people about it. You've got to get your team involved because really what's in it for them. Does that make sense so far? Yeah, that was a great story. I love that. I mean, that wire sticking out, she's like, you're recording everything. I can totally picture that. Keep on rocking, brother. Yeah, like I'm CIA or something. So now that you've got like a why, you know, you want to do this.

6:27Now, everyone listening to this probably is doing something entrepreneurial, right? You've got a side hustle. You've got a small business. You've got something. So in your business, you have a ton of responsibility. You've got a lot that you or your teammates are responsible for. And so your first step to documenting anything is to collect everything. You've got to figure out what is the mess? What is everything that we do here so that we can start to pick and choose what to write down? And so I have a really simple exercise that if you're listening, do this for yourself, but also do it for every one of your team members.

7:01Get them involved. Have them listen into this simple instruction. So number one, you want to brainstorm all of the responsibilities that each person does by simple time period. So if I came into your business and I said, tell me what you do every single day, you probably have a routine. Maybe you turn the lights on in the factory. You check the cash register. You check the mail. You check your email. You pay some bills. There are responsibilities just baked into your day. I could ask you the same thing for your week or for your month, and you probably have payroll or reports that you file or meetings that you have.

7:33So start with simple time periods by day, by week, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and you'll already have a good start. The next way to brainstorm responsibilities, if your business uses email in any fashion, look at your email outbox. So all of your sent mail, and you might go back two, three, four weeks, but if you look through your sent mail, you cut past all the noise, all the stuff that's garbage, all the newsletters. It's actually the stuff you engage with. And so what you'll see in there is the emails you send to other people. You'll see the things that you reply to other people about.

8:12You'll see the things you forward to other people. and you'll understand like what are you interacting with in your business through email. Tons of responsibilities baked in there. The next thing you do is go to your calendar. So most of us keep some form of a calendar. And on that calendar, you'd see client calls, you'd see appointments, you'd see vendor meetings, all of the things that actually make it to your calendar, also responsibilities. So gather those. And then the last piece is the apps that you use. Maybe you've got a task list, a project management system. Just go through and look at all your completed tasks.

8:45So I promise you, if you do this and you have each of your team members do this, you will have hundreds or thousands of responsibilities for your business. And that's really the raw material. That's where you start. So I'm sure, JLD, you've got a ton of responsibility in your business, right? Quite a bit, I'd like to say. So anyone that does this, I promise you, I say it's the quickest way to outline your entire playbook in 24 hours. Just ask all of your people to do this. And maybe you're sticking them into a Google Sheet or something like that, but it is the raw material. So that's where you need to start before you write anything down.

9:23Now, I'm going to pause here because I have kind of a fun story to tell. Little background story here. We just shot a music video and recorded a song with Montel Jordan. I'm sure you've heard the song. This is how we do it. I didn't even have to ask you to sing it. I love it. So we started pinging Montel because we were like, that is what our business is all about. You know, this is how we do it. That's what your playbook is. He loved the idea. So we started working with him on a remix. So our remix is called This Is How You Do It. And it's about showing people how to, you know, do the things that you do that you love doing in your business.

10:00So I'm out in Brooklyn, New York with my brother. We're shooting a music video for Montel. We're watching and like the director chairs and he's he kind of waves us over and the crew, we start joking about like, we could be background dancers for this music video. And so somehow we end up as background dancers in the video for a take that we thought was just going to be for fun. And I look over to Montel and I'm like, Hey, Montel, what, what should I do? I've never done this before. What should I do? And he just turns and he says, whatever you do, don't try to do what I'm doing. The, the, the lesson here is like, we, we can't be Montel Jordan.

10:38No, no one can be Montel Jordan. And he's got a unique skill, right? That's why we brought him on. And in your business, you probably have some unique skill that there's no way you could delegate. But everyone can have background dancers that do other things, the things you don't want to do. And so that's what you're looking for in this list of responsibilities. It's like, put aside the things that only you're going to do because nobody could possibly replicate you. You're not going to clone yourself. But look at everything else that supports your business and be critical because you can't do everything the best.

11:10You've got a couple of things that you're probably the best at, but be very critical and everything else you could probably delegate to a background dancer, right? So that's why I said at the beginning, everyone needs background dancers. All right, we're coming up on the last part of this whole thing, which is how to actually document or write down the perfect standard operating procedure. But any questions so far or good so far? No, I love the stories being woven in here. You gave me a chance to sing today, which is thrilling. So let's keep it rocking. Okay. So you've got this massive list of responsibilities and trying to document every single one of those things would be a waste of time.

11:49It would take so much time because go back to the beginning. Like I said, you only document something if you've got a reason, if you've got a why, if you want to delegate that thing. And so from this list of responsibilities, you want to find all of the little things, cherry pick the things that you think your business could do better because you're lacking with consistency and you want to make a best practice or things that you think are really going to scale, like you're going to have a ton of people doing this thing. We better get it right. And you want to start to cherry pick all those things that someone else is going to do.

12:23And for each one of those things, you want to document it. You want to write down a standard operating procedure, an SOP. So there is a recipe, a formula for the perfect SOP. And I'll give it to you here. So first, every process has a simple name, you got to be able to find it and understand what it is. And so, you know, maybe background dancing would be a process is probably a really bad example. But it could be posting the show notes to this, there is a process and it's really simple posting show notes. Next, every process should have an owner. So who is responsible for this being done right?

13:00Who is quality control? Who is the person to go to for questions? Every process has an owner. The next piece, every process probably has some tools required to get it done. It could be tools in a physical sense. It could be software tools. It could be passwords, logins. But what do I need in order to get this thing done? Next, how often is this done? What's the frequency? Is this something you do every day at 8 a.m.? Is this something that's a once a month task? So how often is the process done? After that, how long should this take? Is this a 30-minute process? Is this a three-hour or a three-week process?

13:40Provide some guidelines. That way someone knows if they've done it right. After that, what's the measurement? Is there a KPI associated with this that we want to measure to make sure it's done right? So maybe customer success or responding to tickets, the measurement is a happiness rating. There's some measurement. Next after that is the context, the why that you would do this thing. Why does it matter for the business? And then finally, the steps. One, two, three, four, five. Here is how you do it. So make sure as you're documenting any responsibility, any process, you answer each of those questions.

14:14And that is how you hand off a perfect process for someone else to start to do in your business. Fire Nation, listen, you might be thinking to yourself, what a pain in the butt Chris is talking about right now. And guess what? It is work. But as you mentioned earlier, number one, you can do the first part of what we talked about in 24 hours. Literally, you can get this stuff done in one day. The other stuff you can get done over a reasonable amount of time. And the beautiful thing is, once you do this right the first time, you are creating a machine that will run. Stop waking up every single morning and trying to create an engine to then put in your car, to then turn your car on, and then to drive to work.

14:53Don't you just want to just go to your garage, turn your car on, know your engines are already put together and running and you can just drive? Of course. And that's what you're building here with this playbook. And we have a lot more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Marketers have never been spread so thin. Trust me, I feel it too. Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating leads, nurturing your prospects, and more. You barely have a second to breathe, let alone do your best marketing. But I've got some great news. There's a better way to do things, and it's with the help of HubSpot and Breeze, its new built-in AI.

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16:00Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. So Chris, we're back And we talked a lot before the break about how to create this playbook with policies and procedures because, you know, so many people fail with the orientation, the onboarding, the training portion of their entire business. So where do you want to go next? What do you want to talk about for Fire Nation today to make sure that we can get all of these amazing, lovely listeners on board? So you said it before the break, but this takes work. I mean, you've got to invest in this and it is a catch 22 because if you want to free up time.

16:38You have to invest the time in doing this. You know, anyone that I talk to that doesn't absolutely love their job, love what they're doing every day, I ask them, well, what don't you love? What parts of your job do you not want to do anymore? And there is your starting point for what you need to document and delegate to someone else. So it's really an amazing opportunity we all have. It's not a burden to do this stuff. It's an opportunity to kind of craft and mold what we actually want to do in our businesses. So as we go forward here into the next piece, the most common thing you will ever train your employees on is what is your company all about?

17:14It's your orientation. Because you could have all these granular responsibilities that apply to maybe one person or 10 people in your business. But the thing that applies across the board to everyone is who are we? What are we all about? Where has this company been? Where are we going? And so I I want to focus here for a couple minutes on just creating an amazing orientation experience. Sound good? Boom. All right. So the first thing you want to do as you're welcoming someone into your business, sounds simple, welcome them into your business. Like take a second to record a little video of yourself saying, I'm so excited that you're joining us.

17:51Like if you're watching this video, it means you went through our hiring process or interview process. It means that we liked you better than everyone else that applied for this job and that we're bringing you into the family. I'm so excited you're here. Can't wait to meet you on your first day. Something so simple as that, a 30-second video that's high energy that you can send consistently to every new person that starts, it means that their welcome into your business is the best it could possibly be. Whereas maybe someone starts and you're sick on the first day, or you're traveling, and you have to just welcome them with a quick phone call, or you don't meet them until their second week.

18:28So again, this sounds simple, but just record a welcome that you send to every new person after they accept your job offer. It's the easiest place to start. After your welcome, you want to get some prep done for their first day. So send them some instructions, whether they're starting remotely or coming into an office, what is their first day going to be like? What should they wear? What should they bring? What does their calendar look like? Do they need some tech set up in advance? All of that stuff. Answer those questions so that when they get there on their first day, they're not they have enough to stress out about as they're starting a new job.

19:00So be thoughtful and really invite them into the business. When we have new people start, the next thing we do as soon as they walk in, bombard them with swag. So I'm sure you've got a ton of Fire Nation swag as well. Oh, yeah. It's it's the simplest investment in making people want to post on social media about your company and making them walking billboards when they're at the grocery store, you know, sweatshirts and hats and water bottles and chargers and all these fun things, backpacks. We give them a ton of stuff. And maybe it's a few hundred dollar investment. But when you think about the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of salary dollars you're going to spend on a person, like those couple hundred dollars is so insignificant.

19:44And yet some people will look at that and be like, well, I'm not going to buy a$10 water bottle. That's expensive. So I would encourage you to invest in some cool swag for your business because it is one of the things that our people really love. And if you have some Fire Nation swag, I would really love to receive that as well. I can tell you, we actually go all out on our swag too, because I'm like, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right. So people actually wear our swag because it's super comfortable to like gyms and to different places because, Hey, if you're going to invest in the swag, you might as well have swag that people are actually going to wear.

20:18So we got one coming your way, Chris. All the promo product company listeners that are out there like, Like, yes, yes, absolutely. So so next thing we do, I call a welcome interview. So when someone sits down on their first day or they're on Zoom, we talk about why did you pick us and why did we pick you? And it really reaffirms everything they experienced during the hiring process. That is so it's such a good starting point for for their their journey with you. After that, we go into training. So, of course, we use our own system. But the simplest training for your business is a background on the company, like your story, your history, your mission, your vision, your values.

20:57Who is your team? What do you guys do as a business? What are your products and services? And then what should this new person expect 30 days out, 60 days out, 90 days out? Just set that groundwork. And if you write that down and record it once, you use it over and over and over again. After that, some simple social time. Get to know the person. Do scheduled check-ins with the manager, with the boss, with you to really get to know them. And then celebrate when their training is over. And at the end of everyone's orientation, we have things that automatically go out on Slack. And everybody celebrates like, you did it.

21:32You're through. You're up to speed. Congrats on accomplishing the first thing you did. And that is how you make someone successful. If you do that in their first few days, imagine what the rest of the journey with your company looks like. Fire Nation, we talked about the orientation. We talked about the onboarding. Let's finish strong with that training portion. All of this is training. You know, this is documenting your responsibilities, documenting your orientation. Writing it all down is the manual part of trainual. You know, when we came up with the name, it was just slamming training and manual together.

22:06So you write your manual and then you train it. You give people that experience. And so just being intentional about all of this, that's training. You're investing in training by writing it down and thinking about how you deliver it. So you have something that's coming up that I want to just label right off the bat as a can't miss. Playbook 2021. This is actually an event and it's for entrepreneurs. So Fire Nation, take notes. Can you finish strong today by talking to us about Playbook 2021? Yes. All right. So this is a two day event that we're hosting. It's September 29th and 30th of 2021. If you're listening to this in the future, I promise there will be pre-recorded events and we do this every year.

22:51But if you're listening right now, September 29th and 30th, it is a two day thing. The first day is just like Apple's developer conference. We're running, rolling out a ton of updates, training sessions, how to build training in your business. And so if you're out there listening, maybe you use our product, maybe you're looking at it and you just want to get to work and start to make this happen in your company, that first day is all about how to do it. And we'll hold your hand the whole way. Day two is for the general public. This is for anyone at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey that just wants to learn about systems, processes, and the playbooks that have made other businesses successful.

23:29So we've got a live Q &A with Gary Vee, a live Q &A with Shaquille O 'Neal, which if you don't know, he has like 400 businesses. He should be on the show. He's incredible. We've got speakers from Loom, from Bombas. I'm wearing their socks right now, from Coco Kind, from Healthy Kombucha. And we also have a special musical guest that if you were listening earlier, you could probably think who it might be. It's going to be an incredible event. So if you're around September 29th, 30th, go to playbook2021.com. We'd love to see you there. Totally free. playbook2021.com. We're talking Shaq. We're talking Gary V.