Boost Creativity by Optimizing Your Business Processes with Joshua Monge

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I am your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Joshua Monje. So Joshua is the founder and CEO of Think Adapt Build. He's a seasoned business leader with over 20 years of experience across industries including food and beverage, finance, manufacturing, marketing, and economic development. And he works today as a fractional COO. And he specializes in helping businesses with revenue between $500,000 to $5 million really streamline their operations, optimize their processes so they can scale efficiently. So Joshua, welcome to the show.

Oh, hey Mark, thank you so much. I appreciate that, man. These intros, I love it.

Well, so, uh, we've been having some fun, uh, sort of catching up a little bit before the show, but for our audience, why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of your path and how you got to where you are today at Think Adapt Build and You know, really what you do there.

Okay, so let's start off. So yeah, right now I work, like you said, as a fractional Chief Operations Officer, and I got into that because a friend of mine got me into it. And now I'll go a little bit back to kind of a mile marker in my career. It was February of 2020. I was the Director of Economic Development, and I left the chamber And it was in a small city. And so I had this opportunity to walk into a COO position, $10 million in revenue, was being brought in by the money guys because the CEO, the business grew really fast and the CEO was making a lot of money. And so he's out skydiving and doing, wind up like breaking his back or something. And so there was nobody running the company for a couple of weeks. And so the money guys were like, we need a, we need a number 2. So February 2020, I'm supposed to walk into this position. But the money guy says, hey, listen, there's this COVID thing going on. So we're gonna kind of wait till see how this blows over and then we'll get you in here. And so 2 years, that's how long, you know, COVID was shut down in Oregon pretty much. So I was like, man, what am I gonna do? And so I had to bring something in the business. I had to bring some revenue in because my family likes to eat and have a place to sleep.

Yeah.

So I saw everybody going online and I ran a terrible agency many years ago. And so watching what's happening with economic development stuff and everything else, I was like, okay, I think I can do a single product. So I did SEO audits and I helped basically people audit their sites and get ready for SEO. Simple. So I got that to 6 figures in 18 months. And so And it was because I just kept my operations really simple. I kept my product simple. I knew exactly who I needed to get a hold of. And a buddy of mine who was a fractional CFO for a regional CPA firm was like, Joshua, between what you did at the chamber, the fact that you were gonna be a COO of this company and what you've done with your own business, you know, you should get back to helping people. And so I thought, oh, I wonder how I could do that. And so he gave me the instructions on how he kind of set up his CFO, fractional CFO practice. And so I basically kind of copied some of those things and put that to market, put that to test, and that took off really well. And so I was a little ahead of the big wave of fractionals, but, you know, not super early adopter. So, but—

Sure.

Anyway, so I've been doing that for a couple of years and I love helping service-based businesses, like you said, from half a million to $5 million in revenue and Yeah, that, you know, businesses can fail from success. And I think that's where we get some of these smaller businesses where they can't quite get forward is because it's not because they're terrible at what they've done, it's because they're succeeding and there's more complexity. And so I just wanna help with that. I wanna help people succeed.

I really love that phrase, fail from success. And that's one of the things that we see so often in working with companies is they've been successful, which has sort of gotten them to a certain spot. But, you know, one of the things that we actually see is if they aren't paying attention to, you know, some things like, you know, more customers can actually bankrupt them because of cash flow issues or cash forecast issues or, you know, things like that. What are some of the, you know, sort of failing from success examples that you've seen, you know, companies have or, you know, potentially what are some watchouts for our audiences listening on You know, to make sure that they don't get in that situation where they're failing from success.

Yeah, that makes— well, think of it, it's a little bit like the frog that's in the pot of water that's slowly moving up a few degrees. It's hard to recognize that. So, but I think at some point you do kind of look around and go, man, I think things are getting kind of hot here. So I think some of the signs that that's happening, one is if You're waking up in the morning and you don't really, you're not excited for going into work.

Yeah.

Or, you know, or maybe you couldn't even sleep the night. I don't know if you're, if you're just what you were like the original when you started this business, you had some passion, some drive, some energy, and then here you are and it's on the other end of that. That's, that's a very strong sign that you need to change. You probably need to change things. That or die of a heart attack. I don't know.

It's up to you.

But Just kidding. But definitely wanna change. I think the other part is, you know, with the increased complexity as a business grows, you start adding people. Those people have different relationships and dynamics. You add new products, different service vendors, whatever. It gets complex. So then if you don't have somebody that's managing that complexity, then it's most likely falling on you as the owner. And so you're basically probably working somewhere between 60 to 80 hours a week. And so that's another sign that you probably want to change things up. And then the other piece that I would say is when you're growing, if you keep replacing people and people don't stay and there's, you're just constantly turning people over, you know, I, your listeners probably aren't gonna enjoy this, but, you know, if you have a problem in your business, it's usually a reflection of leadership. And so There's a statement out there that's, that's the stinky fish rots from the head. So we probably need some leadership upgrading because how you ran your business when it was just you or you and 2 people is a lot different than when it's you and 5, 10, 20 people. So you just have to be, you have to shift gears and you have to basically be prepared to kind of run a different type of race at that stage.

Yeah, that's so interesting to hear you say that too, because we see very similar things and we actually, you know, talk a lot about how, you know, B2B growth systems set you free. Like that's sort of our slogan and, you know, it's free from that sort of stress and worry about like, you know, are the revenues gonna come in? Am I gonna hit forecasts? Because you've got a system, you've got some leading indicators and you have some confidence of that. Free from that sort of strife that comes from teams fighting with each other because it's like, well, you didn't do your job or you failed at it versus if you've got a system, you can say, well, the system failed us. How do we collaborate together?

That's smart.

To improve the system. So just, you know, having to do it all yourself because you can't outsource it to anybody is one of the big, you know, failings that people have when they don't have systems too.

You know, it's interesting that you say that because basically too, you're also freedom from being the bottleneck, right? So if you have a system in place and you're delegating responsibility and authority, and then you're actually leveraging your team to do all of that work. And so ideally you can be, I think one business broker called it an absentee owner. Like that's if you're actually a business owner.

Yeah.

And then I've talked to someone else that was, basically saying, you know, if you can't walk away from your business or take a vacation, essentially you have a nice— you have a job. And—

Right.

Yeah, they don't have a very nice job. Calculate all the hours you actually work and stress and don't eat and don't everything else times what you actually get in your distributions. You know, I did this for one client. She was almost at $1 million in revenue and she came out to $7 an hour is what she was making. So yeah, there's, if you do the math and you're making $7 an hour and you're like in your million-dollar business, yeah, you probably need to, probably need some help.

You might need some systems. Well, and that concept of the idea of building a job versus building a business.

Yeah.

And the value that comes from, you know, having the documentation that really makes it a business instead of just a job that all lives between your ears. And I know that you've done a lot of work, you know, working with your clients to sort of create some of that documentation. What is that? How do you do that? How does someone go from, you know, that they had all the ideas in their head and they grew it, and then they brought somebody in to help them, and then they brought somebody else in to help them, and they've kind of been, you know, just going so fast that they haven't had time to sort of create some of this operationalization. to support the growth. How do you take them from there to a place where they're not going crazy and they've got some process documentation? What does that process look like?

Oh my gosh, I love the setup because essentially the imagery that I always kind of cast is the bus is on fire and the wheels are coming off. And so that's where I show up where someone's like, hey, by the way, you should talk to Joshua because, you know, anyway, so One, put out the fires. Like, you know, there's some key business aspects of the business that definitely need attention. And, you know, if you could spend 5 minutes just kind of sitting off to the side and actually thinking about what you need to get done, put the fires out. That's step one. And then step 2 is to actually look at what your processes are and then start documenting those. And I'm a big fan of continuous improvement. And so The idea is that even your first pass at writing something down of what that looks like, that's more documentation than you had, you know, a while ago when it was all in your head. And so I think documenting those processes kind of on a meta level. So every business has to do some sort of client awareness, right? I mean, you have to get your product in the marketplace. There's always some sort of intake that you have to do. So what's that process look like? you have to accept money, right? And everybody has to pay something. You have to do some sort of fulfillment and then there's some sort of reporting out on that and then a continual marketing effort. So if you break it down into those pieces and kind of document those, those are core business functions that pretty much any business, whether it's a law firm or a lawn care person or even a hospital, you know, they still have that kind of pipeline of what that customer journey looks like or customer experiences. So I would say definitely start there and then write it down. Like, it doesn't count if you don't write it down. I've met so many people that are like, oh yeah, we got processes. Great, show me.

Yeah.

They're like, oh well, I know this, and then Bob over there knows something, right? Aaron over there. And it's like, if you write it down and actually get it into a binder, then the nice thing now is, and I think you were alluding to this earlier, this is kind of like the arbiter of any of those miscommunication situations, because then you go back and say, well, what did we all agree to? Or what did we all write down? And then you kind of go back to that binder, and then you're like, oh, okay, that's where we, that's where we made the mistake. Maybe somebody forgot or wasn't trained, or— but then that becomes the, the focal point. And so, I, I mean, I love operations. I think, you know, if this was something everybody mastered, then I definitely would be okay not being able to do that. I would just figure out something else to go do. But For now, it's operations that definitely seems to be an area that people need to focus on a little more. So.

That's so interesting. Well, and you talked about sort of creating focus and that's one of the things that we see, you know, we work primarily with folks in sort of revenue systems, but that, you know, includes things like marketing and things like sales and even things like customer success where you're trying to grow an existing account. And so often companies just don't even know where to start. And so even just by starting to document some of your performance metrics of, well, what number of leads are we getting on a month? And what number of clients are churning or are growing? Or how long does it take something to go through the sales process? Just getting that baseline metric, then you can go find some benchmarks. And, you know, we've built some benchmarks that we use for folks, but then you can start to say, Oh, well, you know, these metrics, my benchmarks are really, I'm really bad against the benchmarks. I'll focus there first. And that's sort of like that, that sucking chest wound that you gotta get healed up. And then, but just having that ability to focus one place instead of having to, you know, try to, you know, eat the whole elephant in one bite can be a big change for people.

Yeah. And I think, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm a little, for being an operations person, maybe I'm still a little hippie dippy kind of warm and fuzzy. But I really feel like business owners, you know, if they had to, if they could take some time and reflect on what's happening, I think they can usually identify where those choke points are or where some of those frustration points are. And so, you know, I wanna say I'm dogmatic when it comes to like processes and Like what you need to build out, but how and when, that's kind of up to you because that's what got you to the place that you are, right? So if you're—

Yeah.

Yeah. So if you're a business owner, it's, you had some intuition, you had some skill, you had some luck, you had some opportunities, you know, that you still need that to navigate the rest of this road. It's not like you shut your brain off and then—

Right. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Because even with the marketing stuff, right? Like you still need to, you'll give them options of what they can do, but they have to make a decision like, oh, I think the market's gonna do this or, Man, I really enjoyed this piece. Like, this is the direction I want to go.

So, but yeah, we, we actually see that, you know, having a system creates an opportunity for more creativity. Like, it, it doesn't shut because then you've got a baseline of what works.

Yeah.

I mean, you've got some baseline, you know, performance metrics of, well, when we do it like this, we get this outcome. Now we can all collaborate on, well, what can make it better? And then you can measure the thing. But if you don't have it written down, You don't know if you're actually trying something new or if you're just, you know, sort of going with the whim. Like systems instead make it so that your best self always shows up.

Well, it's interesting that you say that because one of my clients, interior designer, she was like hitting her head up against the $1 million mark and couldn't quite get there. And I was talking to her and I was like, you know, she wanted to hire another designer, which like that there's some complexities because essentially they're hiring their competition and they have to like train the person, but then they don't want them to do it. You know, it's a complex thing to do. So then I was looking at her processes and I was like, man, she does a lot of administrative work, the interior designer herself. And so we started doing process maps. We got through about 6 of them and I created a lane for an executive assistant and she's like, I don't have money and I don't have time for this and there's not enough work for an administrative assistant. I was like, just watch. And so we built in the lane and we took, you know, like updating client into Basecamp and sending like the basic emails and intake forms, all that little administrative work started moving into the lane. She kept pulling things out because she's like, no, I'm the only one that can do it. I was like, you're not the only one that can enter client information.

Right.

It's a project management system. And so then we were doing it and then she started realizing, so she started throwing things in there. time we were done, we took those lanes and all of those little tasks and we wrote up a job description. There you go. So then we hired, so then she hired an EA a week later and once we were done, it was a week later and like within the first week she got 20 hours of her life back because all of that small little stuff was done. So then as a creative person, you know, she definitely just took that time she got back and reinvested it. And so she last When we parted ways, she was in the process of expanding into a showroom and moving into a warehouse facility because she had that creativity, like, to do that now because she wasn't bogged down by all, like, the day-to-day grindy stuff of the job.

Yeah. Well, and it's so funny too, like, hearing you describe how you help, like, you know, you don't have to think about sort of operationalizing and creating processes, this giant activity that's gonna, you know, just sort of overwhelm your life. And, you know, some people think about, oh, I have to document, you know, every single aspect. You don't. And in fact, one of the things that we do oftentimes is we'll bring in sort of a documentarian that just sort of watches what you do. And so you just kind of continue doing what you normally do, and we just sort of capture it down, get some bullet points, have you read through it one time, be like, yeah, that's pretty much it. Like, there's your first, you know, draft of a process.

Right.

It can be really Not nearly as painful as people expect.

Well, because people hear it like, oh, I need SOP. Like, the warning sign for me is when someone says, oh, we need to get SOPs. I was like, oh my gosh, that's like saying, you know, we need, oh gosh, like peas in our carrots for our stew. And like, what kind of stew are you making? You know, let's get back to like some of the meta stuff because You know, do you, do you need an SOP on like how to enter in the customer information into the, to the QuickBooks or like whatever accounting system you're using? Yeah, maybe, but some data entry you can kind of, you know, do okay with. But if you can't even figure out where the data is coming from, or like making sure that you're asking all the right questions up front right away from the client, you know, that those are the bigger things that need to be addressed.

And so to your point, Don't worry about whether you require a middle initial or not. First, worry about, are you getting their name? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think too, also looking at some of your processes, I, again, we had another client. She showed me an email chain and it was about 3 hours of work over a $25 receipt that the team couldn't figure out where it went. And so, and she's like, do I have to put up with this BS? And I was like, well, one, you let it happen. And 2, Like, what's the lowest level person in this chain? What's their authorization level to actually make decisions?

Right.

What do you mean? I was like, like, if this person spent $25, $100, $500, like, where would you be upset? She goes, oh, she goes, I don't care if anything under $100, like, I don't want to worry about it. I was like, great. Now let's make a rule here then that employees, anything under $100, just take care of it. Still let us know and report it. But because we don't want a series of $100 decisions being made.

But Yeah.

So then basically, you know, again, that was one of the things that she knew was a problem, but she just couldn't figure out how to address. Great. Let's just talk through it, you know, come up with a system for it and then figure out how to solve that problem.

That's awesome. So I heard you talking before about, you know, like moving things into lanes and, you know, when you and I were chatting before the recording, you know, talking about sort of a process visualization. And so, you know, for our audience, something like 40% of the population is primarily visual. And so if you're just talking through things or you're having them just read SOPs, that 40% or more of your staff is, is lost, or at least not doing their best work. Talk to us a little bit about, uh, the importance of visualizing some processes and how you do that with your clients.

Yeah, I think The reason why process visualization works so well is, you know, okay, yes, 40% of people will, will, you know, that makes sense. The other piece to it, though, is then it's also about spatial relationships. So when you actually see that there's a sequence of events, right? And then it's going— the nice thing with these maps is you can also see the different lanes. And so when it goes from sales to customer service, All of a sudden you could see like why it's important to capture the client information correct, because you pass it over to customer service. Now they gotta deal with it. And you're able to see those relationships and those connections. And then the other piece to this, I mean, when we make these for people, is then we'll take all of the steps and put them in kind of a big long document, you know, and then you can put time elements to it. So you know exactly how long each thing takes.

Yeah.

You could put dollar values to it, you could put quality standards, you know, I mean, there's just so much you could do with these visual maps. And the nice thing is that everybody can see it all in one place. And so I think even the people that comprehend in other ways, when they see that there's actually a map to what those flow, I think that adds a lot of value to them.

Yeah. So you shared with us at the beginning that you're working with businesses between sort of $500,000 to, I kind of $5 million and sort of doing these operational solutions. Give us the pitch. Like, so if there's someone that's listening and they're recognizing a little bit of, man, maybe I am the bottleneck too often, maybe I am working too many of the hours myself. But so they're thinking about maybe improving their operations. Why should they do it with you?

Well, I think the other piece of this is I'm very economically minded. And so operations could be seen as something like, oh, I'm trying to cut overhead. That's why I'm gonna hire an operations person. But, you know, we can actually identify revenue opportunities. We can identify, you know, costs, but also at like ratios. And so I think, I don't know, for myself, like I'm always trying to tie it back to, you know, providing more value than I'm capturing, i.e., you know, hey, you're paying me this flat rate and it's costing you X, but I'm providing Y. Yeah. And so that's— I'm very mindful of it. In fact, even those process maps, they're one of the reasons why I do it. And some people are like, well, you know, can't you use other tools or systems?

Sure.

But the way I do it, it's very clean. And then you can actually go get that copyrighted and now it becomes IP. That IP, now you can put that in your operations binder. And so when you go for evaluation or if you wanna get finance or anything, you can actually show how your processes work. And so that visualization actually increases the value of your business, you know, and in one case for a doctor's office, we had a 2x valuation because of what we were able to document and prove.

So, definitely strong return on that investment.

So yeah, so for me, I'm like, I'm economically minded, so I'm making sure I'm providing way more value. So I think that's kind of my pitch. I'm pretty easygoing, you know, I think I respect business owners. And I think the only qualification I have is that, you know, you need to be in a place to learn and be flexible. If you can do that, then great. I think we can work together, and I'm not here to tell you, well, you know, your business is terrible or good, or what it— hey, it is what it is. You want to get out of this maze? Here are some options, and I, I've always tried to present things as options and choice. And, and then the areas where I am a little stickler, some of the documentation, but Because I want to make sure that's documented in a way that other people can approach and use it. So I don't know, I'm— you're the marketing guy, man. I mean, better pitch for that. I don't know.

Well, we'll refine that later. Well, this is obviously an area we're both really passionate about and operationalizing and growing through that. So we could probably talk about it all day, but I gotta be mindful of your time. But Joshua, it's been a great time chatting with you. Before we go, why don't you tell us something that's on the horizon for you that you're excited about in your business?

Ooh, that's an interesting one. Yeah, you know, I'm actually slowly expanding my team. And so I've been talking to business brokers pretty routinely about creating operations binders and trying to get people prepared for potential exit at any time, whether it's because of divorce or health or you get an offer from somebody outside and you don't even know how to value your business. So I'm creating a more formal process for that and then I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid here with that and creating processes to train up the team members so that they could do it. And then we can also bring the price down because then we can get other people to help do that. So it's something I'm working on and I'm excited. I think probably Q2 of '25, we might try to expand that out.

Very exciting. Well, Joshua, thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate your time and all your insights on sort of How to get your life back through operationalizing your business. So thanks again for joining us.

Thank you, Mark, so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. This was super fun.

Yeah, talk to you more soon.

Alrighty. Bye.

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