Your Business Has 99 Problems, But A Playbook Ain't One with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down how your business has 99 problems, but a playbook ain't one. To drop these value bombs, I brought Chris Ronzio in the EO Fire Studios. Chris is the founder and CEO of Trainual, a platform for entrepreneurs to get their business out of their brains by documenting and delegating the systems and processes in their company.

0:34You can learn more about Chris at chrisronzio.com. In today's Value Bonds, Fire Nation, don't delegate tasks, delegate responsibilities. And if you learn the skill of documenting, delegating, and empowering other people, the sky is the limit in how to do that and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Chris and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:09AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated and most reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. 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.

1:55What'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. That'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, Well, not my business, not Chris's business, but your business.

2:34And you created, Chris, a simple playbook about your policies, your procedures, and you're going to share that with us today. So 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?

3:09We 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. They 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.

3:41And 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. So 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.

4:14All 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. You 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, may be 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.

4:52You 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. Maybe 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.

5:31And of course, the purpose of this is to help that company grow, to standardize what they do. So 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. So I was kind of taken aback, like, Oh, what do you mean? You're not, 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 the part of my insulin pump. So I've got diabetes and I've got this little insulin pump in my pocket.

6:08And she says, you're wired, recording everything, everything I say so you can let me go. And I was blown away. It had never happened to me before, but I'm thinking, wow, if, 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, 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.

6:41Keep 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. Now, 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.

7:13And 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. Get 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.

7:45I 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. So 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.

8:25And 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. You'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.

8:59Maybe you've got a task list, a project management system. Just go through and look at all your completed tasks. So 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.

9:38But it is the raw material. So that's where you need to start before you write anything down. Now, 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.

10:14And it's about showing people how to, you know, do the things that you do that you love doing in your business. So 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?

10:46And he just turns and he says, whatever you do, don't try to do what I'm doing. So the lesson here is like we can't be Montel Jordan. No, no one can be Montel Jordan. 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.

11:22You'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. You'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.

11:55You 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. It 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.

12:38We better get it right. And you want to start to cherry pick all those things that someone else is going to do. And 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. That's probably a really bad example, but it could be posting the show notes to this. There is a process and it's really simple.

13:12Posting show notes. Next, every process should have an owner. So who is responsible for this being done right? Who 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?

13:51After that, how long should this take? Is this a 30-minute process? Is this a three-hour or a three-week process? Provide 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.

14:29So make sure as you're documenting any responsibility, any process, you answer each of those questions. And 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, like 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.

15:13Don't you just want to just go to your garage, turn your car on know your engines 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. We all know that starting a business is hard, but there are tools out there that help make it easier. HubSpot is one of those tools. And just one way HubSpot makes starting a business easier with their all new entrepreneurship kits. This all-inclusive kit gives you step-by-step guidance and frameworks to help you crush every stage of starting a business.

15:47I'm talking project management, professional email, and skill development templates, in addition to an entire solopreneur guide and freelance pricing worksheets. So next time you have a question about which step to take next, HubSpot's kit will have your back. Ready to get up and running fast? HubSpot is on a mission to help you do just that. And the best part is HubSpot's entrepreneurship kit is free. Starting a business doesn't have to be so hard. Go to clickhubspot.com slash ENT to download the guide right now. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business this year? Are you looking to learn the proven success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories?

16:28See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less than hiring a minimum wage employee. Yes, it's month to month and costs less than hiring a minimum wage employee. Schedule your free personal 13-point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, You will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories, and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring football great and entrepreneur Tim Tebow today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire.

17:18Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Tim Tebow and Clay Clark at the next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. So Chris, we're back and we talked a lot before the break about how to create this playbook with policies and procedures because 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.

17:55I mean, you've got to invest in this. And it is a catch 22, because if you want to free up time, you 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 a 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.

18:26So 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? It'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 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.

19:05Like take a second to record a little video of yourself saying, I'm so excited that you're joining us. Like 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.

19:39Whereas 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. So again, this It 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?

20:09What 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 have enough to stress out about as they're starting a new job. So 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 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.

20:51We 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. And 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.

21:28So 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. So we got one coming your way, Chris. All the promo product company listeners that are out there like, yes, absolutely. So the 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 such a good starting point for their journey with you.

22:07After 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, who 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.

22:44And 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. You'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.

23:19Writing it all down is the manual part of trainual. When we came up with the name, it was just slamming training and manual together. So 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?

24:00Yes. 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. But 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 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.