294: Chris Ronzio — The Business Playbook

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. You ever feel like there was more of you in the business? You can't get yourself out of the business. I think whether you're one person, five people or 500 people, still hear a lot of the same problems. That's the topic of today. Getting consistent business with you. Having a little more free time. Hey everybody. My name's Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm joined by somebody who's become a friend and who went through our accelerator program, who's just a rock star in the world of business scaling. That's a, a technical term. It's why we're not on the Disney Channel at this point. Chris Razio, welcome to the show.

What's up, Bill? I think I have to update my LinkedIn title after that endorsement.

Rockstar.

I love it.

They're definitely people who don't work with me because of those expletives. That's okay. We just, we label it. How many business things are labeled explicit except for me and, and that other guy, Gary something or other. We're talking about Chris's new book, the Business Playbook. Here it is. Yay, Business Playbook. We've got copies I, I like. So you sent me a couple copies of this. Really appreciate it. I have one, a foreign mate who could use this right now. I know a couple clients who are grappling with some of this stuff as well. So there's a lot of gold in here. We're going to talk about that in just a second. Reminder to everyone, we bring our shows to you every week. Two shows a week. We talk to gurus, authors, entrepreneurs about their journey, about their wisdom, about the stories and things that they've got to share. We also do a tip show for you every Tuesday. Share a little nugget of something that you could put into action that week. So anyway, all that more@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is our own website and of course we have the blog and the podcast there and all of the show notes and the links and special offers and all that from our guests on the show. So we've welcomed you. Welcome back again. We're going to get into it now and Chris has been on the show before. We've talked about your growth of the business over time and some of the different things you've done. Today. We're going to dive into this business playbook and what it offers. And I went through it earlier and I had some interesting thoughts and questions. I was surprised by some of the stuff in it. So we'll get into that. But before we do all that, let's talk a little bit about the business. So Chris Ronzio is CEO of Trainual Training plus Manual. You could think like a learning management system meets a wiki kind of resource or like whatever else, talk to us about that kind of journey for people who don't know, you haven't met, you don't know about the company.

Yeah, sure. So it started with my first business, which was a video production company. That was the company I was running right before we met. But what my business did was youth sporting events all around the US and so as I was growing it through high school, through college, I couldn't do the camera work anymore. I couldn't do the editing on every production. And I couldn't just be in the business every day. So I had to start training people, finding people, training them. And over years, I built these standard operating procedures and training and what was really the playbook for my company. So it was that, that was the seed that led me to wanting to create this for other people. And so I started consulting after that, working with people on their workflows, their tools, their standard operating procedures, their automation. And in doing that, I kept wanting to deliver. Here's how your business works, here's what your company does, here's how everything works. Because everybody wants that turnkey kind of business. And so that's where the idea for Trainual came from. It was how do we have one software, one place where all of the how to's about our business live and where we can train new people, where we keep existing people up to speed. And so like you said, it was the manual for your business, the instructions for your business, and then the experience of training your people. And that's what led to train goal.

That's really cool. So folks should know how many, like how, why, how big? Talk to us a little bit about the size, the scope of number of clients or something about your impact.

Yeah. So today we have almost 7,000 businesses using the software and logging in. Keep the finger on the button. So 7,000. All right.

Good job.

From 183 countries last time we checked.

Yes. Cowbell for the countries.

I love it. So, yeah, it struck a chord in the market because I think people were looking for something simple. It's bridging the gap between just Google Docs or writing down paper sort of stuff and then these big enterprise learning, management compliance sort of software. So it was just really simple. How's my business work? What's my business all about? And we started calling it a business playbook. That's where the book came from was after thousands and thousands of companies doing this. Now it's just packaged together the best practices.

Yeah. So I, I, I love that, like pulling all the stuff together. What I was surprised by, because I thought about. So we've done sales playbooks and you know, like in the style of Jack Daly with teams before and, and we've had people work with Jack and the coaches around Jack and, and then we've, we've had people develop SOPs and we've had some people use in all of that. But I really thought of tranual as primarily for the processes within the business. I didn't think of it of the business at a more meta level. Oh, meta, meta reference. Do I have to pay a royalty now for that?

Are they going to, Are we streaming on the metaverse?

We're streaming on the first now and then, but as I read this, I'm like, oh, you're actually just like even describing the whole business. Why do we get into this business and what do we do and that kind of thing, which I was cool.

Yeah. So everybody wants to jump into SOP is and processes, but if all you do is give someone the instructions on how to perform the steps, they don't have any of the context of your business. So they don't know the unwritten rules of the business. They don't know the culture of the business, they don't know the background of the business and that kind of stuff can influence how they do things. So if you can't write down how you do things and the story behind it all, then there's like a missing element and people just won't be able to grow with you. And so it's not just about process and sop. It's more holistically, what does your business do? If I was a person walking in off the street, how would you get me up to speed on everything your business is about? That's really what your playbook is.

Yeah. So that, I think is my first big aha in. In kind of reading this is that it's, It's. It's a lot of a bigger thing than just a couple of the core processes, which is where we tend to start to think first and foremost. Yeah. So people have context and that kind of thing. It becomes an overall thing. You talk in the book about onboarding and orientation and the role of the work and. And the book is. Is certainly it's an effective sales tool for Train. You'll. But. But it's not written as like, hey, here's what trainual does. It's more universal than that. Which I think is. Is great.

Yeah. So the idea with the book was not to just sell a ton of Trainual subscriptions. It was more like, if you're out there and just starting to build a business and not ready to invest in any software, what's the do it yourself way to do this? And so as we were writing this, we tried to think. Doesn't matter if you're using documents, if you've got some Google Sites or Dropbox folders or a system like ours, we want you to understand the framework of everything you should write down in your business and how it empowers your people and what it does to just take the burden off of you. It doesn't matter if you're using our tool. Our tool is designed around the philosophy, but it should help everyone, regardless of the software.

So maybe you can give some examples of some of these things too. But you've got four elements of a playbook. What are the four parts with this?

Yeah, so four parts. We made it simple. It's the four P's. So first is your profile. So every business has a profile in the same way that you would have a profile online, you know, in. In the Metaverse or whatever, or maybe a dating profile. There's some way that you represent yourself to the world. And so for a business, you can have two different companies that are competitors and generally do the same thing, but they have a very different story. They might have very different culture, very different values, very different mission, vision. And so all of that is the profile of your business. It's getting someone up to speed on what makes you unique, what makes you you. It's the products and services that you sell it's the customer that you target. It's almost like you're compounding, like the dating things.

Do you lie about your age and your weight?

Well, if you do, your people might, you know, hold you accountable to that and not. And not stick around long.

They might be disappointed.

Yeah, yeah. And. But hopefully you're representing yourself authentically and giving people a taste of it as you hire them and then reaffirming it through your orientation. So the profile is really the get to know you phase, your orientation in your business. So that's the first P. The second P is your people. So obviously the people in a business make a business really unique. And when you think about people, you've got org charts, accountability chart, contact info, people's bios and backgrounds, and then you've got their roles and responsibilities, what they actually do in your business. And learning who's who and what teams and departments people are in is a huge part of getting up to speed in the business. So there's a whole section on people in your playbook. The one after that is your policies. So these are kind of like the rules, the, you know, the legal things that you have to abide by, benefits that you offer, the cultural norms, the things inside the business that are okay, that aren't okay. Like, can you date a co worker? What's our social media policy? Can you use your phone while you're folding clothes in the retail store? Just these kind of rules that you want to set expectations on. And then the last P is processes, and that's the how tos. But that's the last one that you really get to when you're training.

Profile people.

Policies and process.

Oh, policies and processes. Okay, what's the difference? Policies, people as who's doing what and where they are and how you fit in the whole picture. And. And then the pro. The policies are what's okay and not okay, right?

Yeah.

Okay, good. And then finally the processes.

Yeah, and that's the last one, which, like you said at the beginning, people want to jump into that and just document SOP is. Yes. But if you don't communicate all that other stuff first, then just knowing how to do something doesn't mean you're going to do it in the right style, like the way the company wants you to do it.

Yeah. So I have a friend right now and he's struggling getting people to follow his SOPs. I don't know if they're well documented or not, but. But I do know that it's likely people are missing some context for Things because even with the SOPs that he's laid out, they're not following him according. And maybe if they understood the reasons why and who to talk to and what was. Okay, that, that some of this, some of this other P's might, the process might go better.

Yeah. Yeah. So let me give you an example. Like in my, in my video business, my first business, we used to do a lot of figure skating video. And so we, all of us, figure skating performances around the country, up until the Olympics, we would do, and I would hire sometimes these broadcast camera operators that had never done one of these events before. And so when I had an sop that was how to set up the tripod and how to hit record on the camera, how to label the files and how to deliver them in between events. Like those are the instructions for how to do the video. But if they didn't get the context for where are we streaming this? It's going to the Jumbotron, it's going to the judges replay system, it's going to Grandma on a live stream. We're selling videos to the parents. If they didn't have all of that context about our products or services, our customers, our, our business model, then they would miss important things. And that actually happened. We would hire camera operators that were into the theatrics and then the judges would come over and complain and say, hey you, you missed the whole part of the performance that we have to technically grade for the score because they didn't have that context. And so there's a lot that people need to know before they can effectively do their job.

So, so important, why are we doing this? Right? Not carry this from here to there, but we're carrying this from there to there because it's going to be used in that way. And then you're like, oh, maybe I shouldn't spill so much as I carry it.

Yeah. Or sometimes, you know, like I remember consulting with a bunch of different companies and sometimes people would have such a narrow scope on what they did, what they were hired to do, they didn't understand where it came from before them, where it went to after them. And if, if all you're concerned with is that you're, you know, stapling this, these papers over and over again and putting them in that bin and then you don't know where it goes after the fact. How are you supposed to suggest innovations that make other people's lives easier? You know, and so there's, there's so much about just understanding the context of the business that That I think we leave out in our training.

Yeah, I just do this piece of it like I've got no context and that you could see that really getting in the way of teamwork as well. If we don't understand how and why something's used. Right. If you're. If I could see in that example you shared, if I'm shooting video and I'm thinking, okay, this is for the parents, then I'm going to really try to capture certain kinds of things. I'm going to capture the expressions on the kid's face and that kind of thing. If I'm trying to capture something of a jumbotron, I'm looking for the memorable things that stand out, the gaffes, the amazing moments. I'm looking for that kind of drama. I want to really document things and get the. A, maybe a little wider angle if I am serving it to the judges.

Right, right. Or, you know, there might be a team sport and if they didn't understand, if they were thinking of it like it's a broadcast performance, they might be zooming in thinking, oh, I'll get on this person's smile or I'll get on this thing over here and we're going to cut around. But if we're selling it to all of the parents of all of the athletes on the floor, then the parents are like, well, you, you missed my kid for the last 45 seconds.

You know, I've totally seen that as my kids are grown now. But as a parent, I can remember people around athletic events, drama, Christmas events, things like that, some video person capture, whatever. They'd capture their kid or somebody that that was of interest to them. They'd be like, where's my damn kid? I don't care if they were the third, you know, like, whatever.

Too many refunds. I've been burnt by that too many times.

Oh, getting it done. Right. Understanding the context, understanding. That's the first big thing that I saw from this is those other P's. I was going right in on the processes.

So people can, you know, you use this term playbook a lot in a business and you can make the sports analogy of thinking, okay, it's like, it's how we run our plays, it's how we do things around here. And so there's a lot of different ways you can start to document what you do in your business. And so as I was thinking across that spectrum of, you know, paper documents and three ring binders and Google Docs and, and, you know, word processing, systems, learning management, compliance, all this sort of stuff. I thought, okay, what are the elements that we want to try to achieve here? So the first is pretty simple. It needs to be accessible. You've got to be able to get it when you need it. And a lot of, you know, older businesses that had these legacy printed manuals just, they weren't with people when they needed to solve the problem. And if you don't have something on you, it's, you know, it's useless. And so it's got to be accessible. So, so check the box.

As long as fundamental thing, right? So I remember years ago, for a period of time I had something to do on like Sunday morning. And so like I ran a lot of things with my calendar that was in my phone or digital assistant before we had phones like we do today with the Gwiz, everything in them. And. But on Sunday morning I could be like in my PJs on the other side of the house with my coffee and not at all with any reminder of any kind. And I kept missing it. I'm like, oh, for a reminder to work, it's gotta be there when you need it. It's gotta be.

Yeah. I remember being told, you know, the best camera is the one that you have on you. You know, like that's. I had all these expensive cameras and ended up taking most of the pictures on my cell phone because it was the one in my pockets. So as long as you've got something on you, that's the important piece. So the next essential quality I guess is it's gotta be searchable. So a lot of the systems people use to document these days, sometimes they're using these course systems, class systems that are built for teaching. And then those systems, you can't even go back and search for something you did in the past. It's like you were there to get a certification. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, being, I remember being in college and thinking it was crazy that I couldn't like look at my textbook during the tests. You know, I'm going to be able to look things up later in the real world, why can't I look at it during the test? You know, so you got to be able to look things up later is the next one after that. It's got to be collaborative. So, you know, a playbook is not something that's a top down thing. It's not like there's somebody that knows everything about your business and they're pushing it out to everyone. Everybody in the business can come up with new best practices. And so everybody should be a contributor. Everyone should be a writer.

This is a really genius thing. I think you think about, like, how many companies, large or small, create something. This is the way we do it. And in that moment, to the best of their ability, they documented the best way to do it. However, over time, then somebody gives you that same thing, and they're like, but in reality, this is what we do. Oh, yeah, because that doesn't work. And then it becomes this sort of dated reference that's imperfect and doesn't evolve.

Right. Or they say, you know, oh, that's why do we do it that way? It's because that's how we've always done it, you know? And so you want to throw that away, like, there. Everybody should be empowered to come up with a new best practice for however you do what you do. And that's what makes it collaborative. The next piece is there's. There's an instructive element to it. So I talk a lot in the book about learning to do something versus doing it. And when you're learning something, the first time, you actually have to be shown in detail how to do something. And teaching something is different than just somebody clicking the boxes and checklists and doing it over and over again. And so there has to be a teaching component to your playbook. And I think that that's something that paper or documents don't really teach. They don't take someone through a guided experience. They're not interactive enough. And I think it's important to have to use video and different multimedia stuff to explain something. So it's got to be instructive. It's got to be fluid and open to be changed. You know, that goes back to best practices that they can change anytime. So it's got to be fluid. Two more. It's got to be structured. So just like there's a structure to your business, there should be a structure to your playbook. You have departments, you have teams, you have roles. There's an organization to how things happen. It's not just this abyss of knowledge. And then the last one is it's got to be trackable. You got to close the loop and know that people are up to speed. And that's something that, you know, when people train with documents or they train by email, you don't know if people have actually seen the thing on the other end. And so track it in some way, whether it's a spreadsheet or a software tool, track that they've been through the training.

You know, it's interesting. You put all those things together. You talk about a tool and a reference and then a whole process for learning and reinforcing something over time. But if you think about it, you take some basic business thing or almost any pursuit, and you say, and you describe what happens with it, and people go, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Oh, that works totally. And then they go and attempt to do it, and they know exactly what's supposed to happen, and then a thousand other little things happen instead, and it doesn't at all come together like this simple thing that's supposed to happen. It's not beautiful, it's not perfect. People cancel, right? To drive this home in kind of a funny way. A couple of years ago, I saw a video of a friend of mine from IO in Hawaii doing this new sport called wing foil surfing, right? So this is foil surfing, hydrofoil surfing. It's a surfboard with a hydrofoil underneath it. It rises up out of the water when you get going fast enough. And all you have to do is just hold this wing up. So he got on the thing, he held the wing up at a certain angle. The wind caught it, it pulled him along. The thing rose up out of the water. It looked amazing and beautiful. Right? When I did it, the first thing that happened is the wing flipped and flopped every which way. Wasn't. I couldn't get. Get on it. I couldn't stand on the board. I couldn't get it going fast enough to like, there was a million things that didn't come together and make it look anything at all. Like, now, today, I can't.

But.

But I really, like, worked at it and I. I spent time at it. And because I have a busy life, it wasn't like every day. So it took a long time to get that. And then I watched a jillion other videos with, oh, well, you got to hold it a little bit more this way than that way. And you got to put this arm out straight, or if that's the arm, and then want to switch your stance and like, there are all of these other kind, okay. You got to stay centered on the board, right? Like, think about that in your business, you put somebody new into it, right? And they're like, wait, how do I do any of this stuff?

So I have so many things. So first of all, the first thing I start thinking about is like those Pinterest fails, you know when you're like baking something and it's like a smushed down imploded cookie or cake or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

I've Had a ton of those, and they're, they're funny to share, but, you know, there's, there's two elements here. One is that sometimes there's an art to what you're doing. You know, you can have all the instructions. Right, but you just need the reps of the experience to get good at it. And so in our businesses, I think that there's an element of experience and art that you can be taught the instructions, but you're not going to advance to the most senior level of doing something until you have a ton of experience. Like, I remember working with a hair salon, and, you know, you can all get the same hair certification, but then there can be dramatic differences of what people charge because they're the master stylist, that they've been there for 15 years versus they're fresh out of school. And so, yeah, love your hair, by the way. So there's, there's, there's.

I'm just glad to still have some at my age.

Yeah, mine's, mine's getting gray. So. So there's a level of art that comes with experience, and you can't train art necessarily. There's, there's the best training could not make you have an epic surfing experience. The first time you hit, hit the waves.

Just you wait to the right moment, you paddle, and then you stand on the board. It all works out. And then you turn in, and when it gets too close, then you turn back, and if you ride up the lip, then you can just kind of turn and go down. That's really cool. So, so.

But then take that experience again and say, let's say you read all the instructions. And this is something in, in a business, you read all the instructions and you didn't get the outcome you wanted. But now the person that's trying to show you and look over your shoulder says, oh, I forgot. I missed a step. I forgot to tell you something. So actually, running through training, delegating something is a really good way to refine your documentation because the people on the other end of the training will raise their hand and say, well, what about this? What about this? And that's how your content gets better. So, you know, it's not perfect the first time around. But, but I want to distinguish there, there is that difference between incomplete instructions and then where there's just a level of experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but, but what you said there is really great, because if you've been doing something a while, there's lots of things you do that are. You're like, unconscious to. You don't even notice until you try to teach them. Until you try to explain to somebody else. They'll be like, wait a minute, Wait, why. Why'd you put your hands there? And. And then you're like, oh, okay, so there's a piece. I didn't. I. I don't even know that I do that.

Yeah. So. So great hack here for anyone listening. Sometimes you're not the best person to document the training for the thing that you do because you skip a lot of those steps in your head and you take it for granted.

More cowbell for that one.

So sometimes you can just have an intern or an EA or somebody ask you, say, say, train me how to do this thing. And then they can be in a learner, you know, beginner's mind. They can be asking those questions to actually write down better documentation than you could create yourself.

Yeah, it's really great. I know in the background, like watching us and being ready on the titles and comments and things like that is Wanda. And she is, like, cringing and like, squirming because she's been going through this as the newest member on our team. Like, nobody told me how to do that. Nobody told me that matters.

Well, that is a great person. So if you're just getting started in this and trying to assemble your playbook, that newest person that's coming into your business is the most valuable person because they're the one that has to learn everything. And so they can kind of journal as they go the things that they're learning. And that's like your minimum viable training. You know, if they can get themselves up to speed and figure out, just like they're the pioneer trying to learn about your business without any training, then they can make it that much easier on the next person.

Yeah, it can. Or. And as you expand, you know, and get additional people onto the team and. And most of our folks are scaling up and trying to figure out how to scale, how to get more of themselves. Okay, so what haven't we covered? We got these four parts, which was my biggest mind blowing, and then the seven elements of this.

Yeah. So maybe, maybe the things to document first is a good place to touch on. Because some people, they look at this and it just. It feels like a mountain that's impossible to climb. And so there are some quick wins that you can get to first. So first start with the profile. That's why it's the first p. Just tell the story about your business. You can even do it as a one off Recording, Just start a webcam record a few minutes. It may be clunky, it may not be perfect, but at least you've encapsulated. Here's the story, here's the history of our business. Try to get some form of mission, vision, values. The reason you want to do that stuff first is because you need everyone to be aligned on all of that. So that really is the place to start. But then the next thing is you start to get your people in there and you start to organize roles and responsibilities. Now most people already have some form of job descriptions or LinkedIn titles and business cards. And you sort of know, here's the area of the business that you were hired to work on. And so what I recommend in the book is that everybody starts to create a catalog, a list of all their different responsibilities in the business. And then before you create any training, what you want to do is look across all of those responsibilities, dozens or hundreds or thousands of responsibilities, and you want to figure out what are the things that we as a business do most frequently. Like if you're Chipotle and you make a thousand burritos a day, you know, that's a thing that you should probably document how to do. Right. Because doing it a thousand times and doing it the wrong way is going to cause a big problem, a lot of bad reviews. So think about what you do the most in the business. The next one is what is the responsibility shared by the greatest number of people. So maybe you have like a retail store and every single person needs to know how to check people out at the cash register. That's a shared responsibility that could be inconsistent across everyone if you don't document it. And then the third thing to look for is what is the next thing we need to delegate or train someone on. So it could be something that's got to come off your plate. It could be the thing that you're hiring someone that starts on Monday, whatever they're going to do. But there is some urgency to, I need this thing to shift from me to this person or this person to this person. Let's document that for handoff. So those are the three areas to really key in on.

Okay. And when people go about documenting this, how what's the right process to getting started with and going through this. So you said just open a camera and start talking about the business itself. That seems very video centric for that, but maybe that's appropriate.

Yeah. So it's, it's whatever the person that's doing this is most comfortable with it could be text. But some people get, you know, dawn, it's daunting. They have to write like articles, blog posts, and they're not really. Right.

Yes.

So for some people it's easier to jump on a video like this. For some people, audio is fine and it could literally just be like fire up a little audio recorder. And it doesn't even matter what you're wearing. You're just talking and it's something that people can listen to for two minutes.

You can be in your house slippers like everybody is the last two years.

Yeah, it can be slides.

Use the last two years.

Those are yours, I see. I love these. These like all bird slip on.

Oh yeah, the allbird slip on.

Those are feel like slippers. They're so nice.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

Yeah. So, so I forget what we were saying now. It's slipper mindset.

Slipper mindset. We're just talking about being comfortable. Right. If you're not comfortable being on camera, then don't do that. If you'd rather write, do that. I think that's what you're saying is.

Yeah.

If you like wherever you're comfortable. Yeah.

Use slides. You know, there's a lot of formats, you know, and in anyone that's used trainual, there's like 700 places you can embed stuff into Trainual from. It's really not about how you document, it's about that you document and then you centralize it all in one place. Yeah.

Get a document. So after I think about how what works for me to get it out, then I go to think about what does my audience need? And it could be that your audience really needs video, but you're not so comfortable with video. So maybe you start with creating some slides or writing some text out and then you have somebody else make the video. But. But you've got to go one to the other. Right.

And there's, there's also different formats that are more appropriate for certain things. So for instance, if you're telling the story of your business, a video is really nice because it's personal and you can share that story and be enthusiastic and you know, it's nice to hear from the founder, the CEO or the leader, whoever it is. If you're talking about your policies, you may not want to just rattle off ad lib your harassment policies in a.

Video, you know, like do it in my style with F bombs and sound effects.

Yeah, yeah. You may, you may want to like make that one text, you know, and run it by your attorney. So. So like there's different, different formats lend themselves to different types of content.

Yeah. So what about inside versus outside? I know a lot of the companies we work with, they, they're like, okay, we really need to do this. And then it bogs down because they're trying to do it themselves inside. And then other people outsource the whole thing, but they don't feel like then it's really representative and it doesn't necessarily get adopted. It feels like a foreign object. Talk about that.

Yeah. So when I think internal versus external training. External training is for things that there are institutions set up to train that content and you can't possibly replicate that inside your business unless you are a business that's all about training and conferences and some special area of content. You're not going to be better at it than some other institution that. That's all they do. And so like an example of this, for instance, is a surgeon. You know, a surgeon has training that they get in school about how to do surgery and learning about the body. They don't get hired at a hospital and expect the hospital to train them from day one on how to do surgery. No, but the hospital does have to train them on what their policies and processes are. You know, how do they set up for surgery, who else is in the room, how do they record notes in the emr? You know, like there are processes and policies that are internal because they're different for your business and you're the one that has to train them. And then there's the content that you should be learning outside of your business. So I tell people, like, try not to replicate a university or some, some program in, in house. You can't build the best school in the world in house, but you can explain how your business adapts those things.

Yeah, it's really, really useful. The mix of the two, I think is really useful. So having a ready reference, a policy manual, understanding being trained on something, having lessons in it, then having active things where you're actually following a policy or procedure checklist, things like that, all of those things coming together make for more consistent operations.

Yeah, so. So another example, like at Trainual, we have almost 100 people now, and so we have a lot of people managers. And we talked about this internally. You know, is it our responsibility to put together guides on people management? No, there's programs out there that are great for teaching you about communication skills and how to manage people and how to do one on ones. But, but it is our responsibility to explain how to be a manager at Trainual what are the unique things that we do here? What is the cadence of meetings that we do here? How do we handle engagement surveys? You know, there are things that are unique about managing people in our business and that's what we have to teach our people.

Yeah, it's really useful splitting between those things. So there are lots of resources, there are things around certain kinds of policies. There are standard kinds of things in communication. There's a world of stuff that we use regularly that's part of the whole scaling up world@growthinstitute.com and our clients have access to that huge library. So things like how to create a sales playbook. Right. We have a video on there. There are things on negotiation in there. There's a range. There's things on who hiring methods in there and top grading. And so there's a. Those are kind of universal business things. They're not unique to you and your business. But then there's how does your business handle? Right. How did they make, how should they make the videos or set up for the day that that can go on? One of our past clients, how do I set up a job? How do I approach a job? How do I leave a job? You know, what do I, what's my contact like when I'm there?

Right. What, what's the dress code for how we show up? How do we stay in touch with contact clients after the fact? We send them a card, you know, what, what is the CRM that we use and how do we manage those relationships after the fact? How do we bill those customers? There's all these how tos that center around the work that your business does and that could be very unique from how other businesses operate. So it's not your job to teach the skill, it's your job to teach the policies and the process.

As long as you are central to the day to day operations of your business, it can't really scale and its scale is limited. You can't do a whole lot on your own. Right. You can do some cool things, but you're going to have a much bigger impact when you get a lot of people doing similar kinds of things for an awful lot more folks. And I think that's the fundamental thing here. How do you get yourself out of your business? How do you document, delegate the things that you do so the company gets past you, you and the limits of you, Right?

Yeah, yeah. A lot of people, you know, are focused on scaling their income and when you want to scale your income, you're tempted to take on more Work and load up your schedule and maximize the client work that you do and raise your prices and all of those things can scale your income, but you're not scaling your business. And so if you're focused on scaling a business that produces income in order to scale your income, and it's kind of a roundabout way to do it, and in the short term, it may seem a lot more expensive to build that infrastructure, spend that time, make that investment. But if you go the first route of just trying to scale your income, there's a cap on your time and there's a cap on how big your business will get. But if you can scale your business, that's unlimited. And so really focusing on how to grow an infrastructure around you that just, you can remove yourself from entirely, that's, that's the secret, I think.

Yeah, it's really great. We've been talking about how to scale your business using the Business Playbook, Chris Franzio's new book, that's all the things that he's learned, both that led to the creation of Trainual as well as the way Trainual itself operates as a business and the service it provides. So this is how Trainual gets it done for themself and why investors have put tens of millions of dollars in their company, why they're over 100 people with over 7,000 companies now. And whether you use Tranul or not, a ton of that wisdom is captured here in this really easy to use business playbook. So, Chris, I'm so glad you came on the show and talked a little bit about this. I'm glad you wrote the book. I'm glad you sent me a couple copies because I've got a couple friends who are going to get it this week and give them something else to give thanks for.

Thanks for coming.

It's great to see you again and to, to continue to watch from a distance how your company is just killing it and, and doing such a good job.

Well, thank you, Bill. Always great to be here and chat with you. And, you know, I'll just keep getting one step further out of my business so I can just surf with you all day.

Come on out. We've got all manner of foils now. We can foil and surf, we can foil with the wind, we can foil behind a boat, we can foil without a boat.

That sounds fun.

A little obsessed with all of it. Hey, so the company is Trainual, the book is the Business Playbook. Thanks again to Chris Ronzio, thanks to Wanda for producing our show. In the background, getting our guests ready scheduled, the show at the door and all of that. And to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling up framework that we use that we live and die by over here@scalingcoach.com the website, the resources all@scalingcoach.com if you want to send us an email info scalingcoach.com is our email address and our website of course. So you find all the I mean we're approaching our 400th show now when you count the Getting Real episodes, the regular shows, the tips, all that kind of thing. So at it for a little while now. So there's lots of stuff there that you could find on everything to do with your people, your strategy, your execution, the cash and the leadership required to get it all up and going big. Thanks to the folks at Podfly Productions who get our show out the door. Alby Burge, ein Kadina, Tim McGowan who edit the show, write up the show notes, proofread everything and distribute us every week. Thanks again everyone for listening. Keep Scaling up. Bye bye. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by alignment, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.