294 - Best of 2025! How to Build a Business That Can Run Without You with John Seiffer

24:44I got a kick out of it when EOS came on board and there's a retraction and you have to have a visionary and a - Oh my gosh. Whatever they call it. And I'm like, oh, you mean a CEO and a COO?

24:59those terms have been around forever if you like calling them something different go for it first of all the amount of people who talk about oh i'm a visionary i can't i need an integrator i'm a visionary i'm like dude everybody exists on a spectrum and every visionary i've ever met has played integrator at some point so like but it but it gives people it gives people that language to like start identifying that's fine and that's that's wonderful call them whatever you like. The thing is, for most, particularly SMB companies, the outputs, the functions that come out of a CEO or a visionary are not necessary 40 hours a week.

25:38Say more about that. What do you mean? Well, the things that are typically done at that visionary or CEO level are strategy. They can be raising money, mergers and acquisitions, planning, organizational structure. In a$5 or$10 million plumbing company, those things don't change very often. So you have this person who's usually the owner, their title is CEO, but they're also the salesperson, or they also fix the widget machine when it breaks, or they're the one going out and buying new trucks and negotiating the deal, that kind of thing. That's not what the CEO of General Motors does because a company of that size needs that function on an ongoing basis.

26:26I think it's funny. I was just talking to, you know, Chris Munn, and I was talking to Chris Munn two weeks ago, and we were talking about how do we position this framework that we're thinking of. And basically what I said was, oh, you know, let's position it this way. Whatever. It doesn't matter what the thing was. Chris was like saying something about the way that businesses are operated, you know, every 10 years that someone's got a new strategy. And my comment was like, I don't believe that's true. There are no new strategies. There's only new positioning. Yes. I agree with you. EOS, for example, that is this, you know, scaling growth and strategy.

27:08All that is, is like, who's your ICP? What's your mission and vision? Like, these are all things that we've already done. Peter Drucker was talking about, what does your business do? What customer do you serve? Like, those are all the same things. They're just repackaged in a nice acronym or now it's EOS, right? And it's, it's all about helping. And I'm not trying to minimize it, but it helps the entrepreneur have these, Oh, cool. That's a framework that I can refer back to, to operate in my business, but it's all the same stuff. It's just repackaged in a different way. Exactly. Because there's only so many ways to make a customer happy.

27:42Yeah. Yeah. 100%. So now that we have that framework, how do you go about, if you're an entrepreneur and you're like underwater, you're overwhelmed, how do you go about finding the first thing to systematize? Like, what are the red flags you should be looking for? They're like, Like, warning, warning, get this thing off of your plate. Well, you want to look at what are the outputs that are required to sell and what are the outputs that are required to fulfill and to serve a customer and who's doing those. At a granular level, every output has a frequency associated with it, how often it needs to be done.

28:21So your monthly reports, financial reports happen monthly. Your taxes happen annually. some of your stuff has to happen daily. And so you look at all the outputs that you personally are responsible for and the frequency with which that you're demanded. And then you say, wait a minute, I want to get rid of these daily ones. So how can I train somebody else to do these particular ones based on the frequency that could do it as well as I can do it or better? Do you go through step-by-step and like, hey, entrepreneur, sit down for an hour and just list out everything you're doing? Yeah. That's one technique.

29:03Usually when I work with a client, they're already complaining about something. So they already have it there. Okay. They already have it in their mind. Something is bothering them and we can start there. As I said in the book, I talk about different ways of documenting the SOPs, how these outputs are produced. So you want to start with the ones that are critical, meaning that you need to get off your plate. Probably not the ones that you're really expert at because it's longer and harder to train somebody to be as good as you. Well, like you said, it's the Eisenhower matrix of urgent, but not important to you.

29:39Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So you want to delegate those, but that requires, first of all, that you understand what those outputs should look like. What does a successful job mean? Secondly, that you have the team in place that can do them. That's often where a lot of the changes need to happen. They're used to depending on you to do them. And you go, wait a minute, no, no, you got to do that. Well, I can't do that. Have you ever hired a VA? I have not because back in the day when I had an actual company with people, there was no such thing as virtual anything. I've hired a few VAs. Only one of them is stuck.

30:18And the reason only one of them stuck was because she's from Britain. And so she's Western. And before anyone calls me racist, just hear me out. When I would work with the Pakistani or the Filipino VAs, I had two problems. I was overcoming cultural differences and I was having to figure out the SOPs. I hadn't mapped them. So it was like, you can be very direct in certain cultures, but I was being too nice. I wasn't being directive enough. And they didn't know how to get it out of me in order to get the right information because they were very deferential. It just didn't work the two times. But then I hired my current executive assistant, and she's from the same Western culture.

31:00And so we were able to have a better communication. And I realized it's not that those VAs didn't do a good job. I sucked at communicating to them what I wanted from them. And they didn't know how to pull it out of me, whereas my current executive assistant, she understood how to get it out. What you're talking about here is like, if you are trying to document and hire at the same time, those are two different things. And it can be very difficult because not only do you need to document it, but you've got to have the team to fulfill it. Yeah. They're very different skill sets. And some people should not be documenting what they do.

31:36We get other people who are good at that. But one of the things that holds people back, I doubt it doesn't sound like this happened to you, is that to describe the outputs at the level of detail that's required, people think, oh, that would be, I'd be a micromanager and I don't want to be that guy. And the truth is, if it's important enough to be done that way, yes, you have to say it. Let's take this example where you're delegating a one-off, not a full-time job, but a one-off task. But could you handle the, you know, the Johnson situation. And somebody says, sure. You, in the back of your mind, know exactly what you mean by handling the Johnson situation.

32:21And you know when you want it done, but you never said that. And so then two or three days go by, you haven't heard anything. And you feel like, geez, I need this by Friday. And I didn't, I don't see anything forthcoming, and they didn't know you needed it by Friday. Or they dropped everything to do it because you said it and it didn't need to be done tomorrow and all this other s*** went down the tubes. Or they drop everything, they get it done for you by Friday and it's a mess. And you're like, this isn't what I wanted. And they've spent 20 hours during the week working on this proposal for you that they thought they wanted, that you wanted, and you were like, I don't care that you worked that hard on it.

33:06this sucks. So you've got now an employee who's getting negative feedback, feeling like they did a bunch of work and you still don't have what you need. Of course it happens. I think it happens to everybody who manages people. You just realize like, I've got to flip that around. Suppose you had hired a contractor to do that job. You would specify in the contract, the scope of work, what a successful job looks like. You should have that level of agreement with your employees. The difference, as I mentioned a while ago, is that many of the outputs that you want from your employees have nothing to do with their job description.

33:43So great. Put those on the list. Do you have like a, I think you do, this is where it's coming from, a minimum viable SOP template? Like is there, hey, you at least need to have these things on your SOP template in order for it to be successful. Yeah, the two parts to that. One is the ideal SOP should be usable for training a new person to do the job. Hand them the video, hand them the document, whatever it is, and say, you should be able to learn this and do the job. Maybe not as quickly as the person who was doing it, but as good. Or at least you should know when it's not as good and we can hone your skill set.

34:29So that's the ultimate design of an SOP. There's actually three kinds of SOPs. One is what I call the recipe, just like grandma in the kitchen. Well, grandma, how much salt do you put in? Well, it's enough. How long do you stir it? Till it looks good. No. You know, and it turns out when you make French baguettes, which are just salt, water, flour and yeast, I guess is all it is. But if the temperature and the humidity is not exactly right, you have to adjust the oven temperature and the timing and all that good stuff that grandmas know intuitively. But if you're going to scale up a factory making baguettes, which some people have, and I've seen a documentary about it, they actually look at what's the humidity today and what's the temperature.

35:22And we're going to adjust how long we beat the flour and what all that stuff is. Because they get that. It's not intuitive anymore. It's now a process. And so a recipe SOP is an algorithm. Do this, do this, do this. And you should probably document it with video. Anything that has to be done on the computer, have somebody do a screen share, talk through what they do. I open this tab, I'm clicking over here, blah, blah, blah. It's also good for mechanics, for tools and machinery. Here's the screw that you turn. And those are documented step by step by step. And many of the, I don't want to say inconsequential because the outputs are important, but the repetitive stuff is documented that way.

36:08The next kind of SOP is what I call a dance. And it's usually when there's people involved. So customer service, sales, you can't really tell somebody, here's how you make a sale. Step one is you say, hi, George, how'd you do? When'd you go to school? Oh, I went to high school there too. Ha, ha, ha. You know, that's awful. But what you can say is, look, these are the outputs that you want from this conversation so that you know when it's complete and you can move on to the next stage. So I want to know what's your budget. I want to know how do you describe the pain that you're feeling. I want to know who's making the decision with you.

36:51Those are outputs that you can document. Now, how you get there, you got to dance and you got to be good and that kind of thing. But that's documenting that SOP. So tell me the three again. So there's the recipe SOP, the dance SOP, and then - The dance SOP. And the third one is a creator or a creation. So if you're hiring a graphic artist, you don't know what the output should look like. Otherwise you'd do it yourself or you'd have AI do it. This goes back to that conversation about AI. You could tell AI what to do, but what you do have for a creation is the constraints. Sometimes the constraints are, this has to work within the laws of physics.

37:30Otherwise, it's not going to happen. Sometimes it's the legal constraints. Sometimes it's like with a graphic artist, you can say, these are our company colors. This is the mood that we're trying to promote. These are the fonts that we use. And the files need to be in this format when you're done. And within that, go to town. So let me give you an example of two different kinds of SOPs in perhaps the same business. So you hire somebody to do your taxes. If your taxes are at all complex, the crafting of the strategy is a creation SOP. They'll look at all your different businesses and all these different things and say, okay, why don't we take this approach?

38:14Here's two contradictory parts of the tax code. I think if we go here, we'll split them right down the middle and we'll save you money. That's a creation. Within the constraints are the laws of tax, whatever. Then they hand that usually over to somebody else in their firm and say, fill out the forms this way. That's the recipe. And then they say part of that is send it over to somebody else who's going to double check that you didn't transpose numbers and whatever. And the dance SOP would be probably from the accounting firm's perspective of this is how you extract the knowledge out of these people's heads.

38:52Yes. Yeah. Right. In order to get what you need. Yeah. I think something that I really loved doing is early in my career, I got overwhelmed because I knew I had to create something to document, but I didn't know how to like write SOPs and I didn't know how much was too much or how little was too little. And so for me, because it was so overwhelming, I just didn't do it. And that was a problem. But the biggest unlock for me recently, and I'm curious to get your opinion on this, has been AI. I have this little pendant that I wear around all the time that records all of my conversations. And I can just talk.

39:26I have an intern who started with me two weeks ago. And we spent three hours talking about what does the internship look like? What are the deliverables? What is he doing the first week, the second week, the third week, all of that of stuff. And then I just took the recording, uploaded it to chat GPT and said, please make me an SOP for X, Y, and Z, or please make me an onboarding template for him, or please make me his internship calendar. And it just does it. You still have to iterate to it, but it takes like the 80 % of the work out of it. And that has been a huge unlock for me. Just, just recording the conversations, taking the transcripts and then uploading it and having the AI to do kind of the rest of the work.

40:07Have you started seeing entrepreneurs do the same thing? AI is getting better. And what it's doing in my phraseology is it's extracting the definition of the outputs from your conversation. I have, somebody once fed my book to, this was maybe a year ago, so it's not the current version of AI. They fed the book into it and gave me an AI summary of it. And it was awful. It said things I didn't say. There was a whole lot of hallucination in there. If you have gone back, you said you had to go back and tweak it, which was great because you knew where it was on and where it was off. Here's my opinion of AI, just really briefly.

40:50I think that people treat AI as if it's a sentient being and just all-knowing. I think AI is an employee. And in the same way that you need to educate the AI and quality, you know, do QA of their work and all the other stuff, excuse me, of an employee, you've got to do that for AI as well. And so when I get an output, many times I'm working on it even after the output. So there's this like 10, 80, 10 rule that I follow. I kind of do the first 10%, tell it what I'm looking for. It does 80 % of the work. And then I finish up the last 10 % of it. So it's like, It's never just the finished product, but it also does what I say.

41:28It spits out the first bad idea. Sometimes I just need something to look at to say like, oh, no, that's not what I want. And then it at least gets the juices flowing somewhere else. So I agree with you, though. It's not a silver bullet. It's a tool in the tool belt. The other thing that I've had to do is there's a function. I use Zoom for a lot of my coaching calls. And Zoom has this thing that'll summarize your calls. And it'll say, so-and-so talked about XYZ. I don't care that we talked about it. I want to know what we said about it. So there's a level. I'm sure if I cared enough, I could go in and tell it to do that at a different level.

42:07I could show you some cool stuff. I was working with somebody who was looking to buy a business and we had had like seven hours of Zooms recorded. And I took the transcripts and I created a buyer profile for him. It was like, it was like, you know, I don't know, 20 pages, skill set, experience, likes, dislikes, geography, capital, all of that stuff. And now he has it and he's able to feed deals into it and just say like, Hey, does this fit me? Does it like, what questions should I ask? It's almost like it's just getting it the ball rolling. But anyways, I view it more as a tool to like capture these things and do the first, again, the 10, 80, 10 rule.

42:45You do the first 10%, You tell it what you're looking for. You give it the transcript. It then kind of spits out a first draft. And then you got to do the last 10 % of it. But it's cut down the amount of time. And I just don't get as overwhelmed about documenting things anymore, which has been a huge unlock for me. Yeah. And you're more of a solo practitioner than a lot of people. But somebody who's got a company of 25 people, they could have a lot of the people that do that work, just document their own stuff by doing a video and talking through, here's why I'm clicking here, here's why I'm clicking there.

43:18And then if they want the AI to polish it up and make it into steps and all that stuff, that's a good thing too. Here's a question for you. Many people who have businesses have people that work for them that have really important knowledge. So how do you get that tribal knowledge out of their head without making them feel uncomfortable or that like, oh, they're asking me to do this so they can replace my job. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. The flip side of that is if I can't replace your job, I can't promote you. That's a great answer. Because whatever you're doing now, the company needs it. Otherwise we wouldn't be paying you.

43:55If you want to move up to a different position, these are the outputs you're going to have to be good at in this new position. But we're going to have to backfill what you're doing now. I love that framing. I love that framing. Hey, do you want to move up? I do. Okay. Let's document what you're doing so that we can eventually offload it from you. And so you can do higher levels of work. And not everybody does want to move up actually. Sure. Sure. But that's a different issue. Let's land this plane for the entrepreneurs that are overwhelmed, or we've talked about the eight bucks of buckets of a business, sort of an MVP SOP, if you will, what's the best way for them to just get started in thinking through systematizing their business?

44:40Block out what I call CEO time. At least an hour, two hours a week where you're in a different location, where nobody is bothering you, and where you're working on stuff that is not urgent. And get a CEO notebook and start writing your thoughts about how to do all this. do it through the framework of what are the outputs that I need to produce personally and the ones that I hate and the ones that I, you know, what's the frequency of these? And then you can start to prioritize, oh, this is one I'm never going to give away. I love doing this. This is one I want to give away tomorrow. So now how do I do that?

45:22Which, what are the things somebody needs to know in order to do it the way I do it? So I think that that's a really, really good recommendation. But I think that 90 % of entrepreneurs will hear that and think, that's a great idea. I should do that sometime. Yeah. You got to do it tomorrow. They never schedule it out. What I have found to be really powerful and I am teeing you up here, but what I have, what I have found to be very powerful is like some type of an accountability system. I could be a peer group. It could be a partner. It could be whatever, but just the kickstart of like, can someone just help me walk through this?

45:55Is this like something you'll do on a one-off call? Do you have anything that you offer? I mean, that's one of the things that a coach is great for. Because as business owners in an SMB world, we typically don't have a board of directors. So we don't have anybody holding us accountable to, oh, you know those goals you set two months ago? What's happening with that? It's the best thing about entrepreneurship, and it's the worst thing about entrepreneurship. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Exactly. And so the thing about being a coach is I only hold you accountable to yourself. I don't have any other influences.

46:31I'm not like, oh, well, I need to make a certain amount of money off of you because I'm invested in you or none of that. It's just like, what do you say you want to do? And if you want to scale a company back and whatever, that's fine too. But I'm holding you accountable to your best self is a way to say it. And that's what the coaching is. The other thing I want to mention is a new program that I just started. I don't know if it'll be new by the time this gets released, but Chase Murdoch and I are doing a thing called the Operator Accelerator. And it's a combination of education, content, and training, and coaching for entrepreneurs to learn all the different aspects of their company, all those different buckets.

47:13What do you need to know about sales and marketing? What do you need to know about finance? What do you need to know about people and all that? And then how do you, not just in a theoretical sense or an academic sense, but how do you adapt that to work in your company? And so that's the operator accelerator.com. People can look at that. First of all, John's not paying me anything. There's no affiliate relationship here. I'm just a huge believer in coaching. I didn't used to be, but I've become more and more of a believer in coaching because to me, it's similar to like, I want to lose weight. And okay, well, you could do a HIIT type of a workout or you could lift weights or you could do the Atkins diet or keto or you could do the caveman or whatever, right?

47:57There's a million things. But at the end of the day, there's like just two things, move your body more and kind of eat better. Those are the two things. Everything else is sort of an accountability mechanism to help you stay on the straight and narrow. And so whether or not you reach out to somebody like John, who I think is, you're amazing, you have fantastic experience, or somebody else, just the accountability piece of it is incredibly important. Obviously, you got to make sure they know what they're talking about. I do a combination of coaching and consulting. And my working definition is a consultant brings in expertise from the outside.

48:30So they would say, the kind of body that you have, the age you're at, this is the kind of, this might be the plan for you. That's knowledge that you didn't have. Then the coaching is helping you maximize the expertise that you do have. Let's talk about when you're energized. Let's talk about when you get lazy and start to eat too much. Let's talk about what works in your daily life with your kids and your schedule and all that. That's the coaching piece. And because of my experience in running so many companies and working with other people who have, I can do a little bit of both, I hope. I think it's incredibly valuable.

49:05And if, again, John's not paying me for any of this. I have his book. I don't know that I've unpacked it and put it on my shelf yet, but Output Thinking, there it is. Output Thinking. It's phenomenal. If you're just like overwhelmed, start reading that book. It'll start giving you some ideas to get your stuff tightened up. But John, this is fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I would love to have your listeners contact me, email me, john at ceobootcamp.com. Go to my website, ceobootcamp. You can learn about the book. there's a link for a free coaching session, which I promise is not just a sales pitch and the operator accelerator is there as well.

49:42So all the stuff I do. John gave me a free coaching session like over a year ago. It's not just a pitch. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Nick. All right. Hopefully you liked that episode. And if you've made it this far, you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone. So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. will you please help me grow the show i want to reach more people there's a couple things that you can do like and subscribe is the simplest thing obviously you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out but if you go the next step will you leave me a review five star on spotify or apple what that does is it tells the algorithm that oh hey this is a high value podcast because more people are leaving reviews for it and it then pushes it out to more people.

50:27So that's why when people are like, well, you log and subscribe and put the five-star rating, it's not just to make themselves feel better. It's actually to get more exposure for the show. So if you do that for me, I would greatly appreciate it. And I'll see you next time.