Owen McGab Enaohwo — Train and Onboard Employees Faster

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. Hey everybody. We are talking today about getting your processes dialed, getting your process nailed, executing again and again, optimizing that that is key to scale. And we've got a great guest with a resource that many of our clients have loved over the years.

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My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We come to you every week with a topic, a conversation, an expert, a guru, an author, somebody, a CEO, somebody around the world of Scaling Up. What do you need to do to grow your company? You'll find 400 plus shows@scalingcoach.com that's our website, scalingcoach.com There it is on the video. If you're watching video, I see live viewers with us today, but you could be watching in YouTube or LinkedIn or elsewhere. And so there it is on the screen scalingcoach.com Anyway, that's where we've got all of those shows and more. And of course you can get it wherever you're listening, watching right now, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple, podcasts, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter even. So there you go. Hey, so I'm joined today by Om Owen McGab Andou. Owen is co founder and CEO of a company called Suite Process. Suite Process is a company that many of our clients have used and we've shared past sponsor the show but we like it enough that we thought we should actually talk about it even though it's something that we're like actively promoting. We've got a special offer for you at the end of the show that we'll tell you about for our listeners, viewers. So all in. Welcome to the show.

Hey Bill, thanks for getting me on the show. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you. Owen joins us from outside of Maryland. The company's based there. But you guys, your clients for suite process are all over the world, aren't they?

Yeah, primarily in the US but all over the world. Even the team itself, Our team is a distributed team all over the world. So we've been remote before remote became fashionable.

It's funny how that could be. My son is in the Boston area right now. He's working for a company, but the company's based in San Francisco, where we're from. And he just moved to Boston because his wife has a job or had a job out there. So we can and do work from anywhere and everywhere and sometimes that's really great. But of course it kind of makes the topic even more appropriate. Like if you're all working in different places, getting and synchronizing your processes so that you're doing the job consistently and is a great thing. So as we get into this, let's just talk a little bit about your background, you know, what led you to this company. Give us a little kind of, little insight, a little background on Owen.

Okay, great. So I used to, before I started suite process, this was in the fourth quarter of 2013, I used to run an agency where I would provide people here in the US where, you know, back office staff, you know, virtual assistant and people to do work for them. And this happened because, you know, that period we had these books like the Four Hour Work Week, the World is Flat that made it so that the small business owners understood that they also had the ability to leverage working with people outside the country at a much more affordable price. Because before then it was thought that, you know, it's only the bigger companies that could do this. You know, you hear of the, you know, the phone companies that will hire like, you know, hundreds of seats of people handling their customer support, handling their phone calls and all that. So before these books came out, that was the thinking. But then when these books came out, they made it clear to the, you know, small business owners that they too can leverage this. But then the problem that I was facing when I started, you know, bringing on this kind of clients on the small business side was that they had this assumption that, you know, they would just hire somebody and magically that person would just hit the ground running from day one, be able to do the work for them. This is somebody in a different country, in a different culture, different speaking a different language and a different time zone. We just be able to do the work for them just like that. So I had to spend time, you know, as part of the onboarding process to train my clients to say, hey, you know, There's a process where we would have to, you know, understand how the work is done. First of all, you know, you choose a specific task that you do on a recurring basis. They don't want you want to start with. And this back then we're using Skype, you know, it's not like now we have a stream yard or the zoom whatever it was Skype that we would use and they would come on with us and we'll do a recording of that training session and so on. Behind the scenes will take the recording on my team and take it and used to try and document a procedure and process on how the task is done. The problem we ran into back then was that the tools we're trying to use to do the documentation, they were either enterprise level tools that these were tools that were built for the much more technical people like the process consultant and all that, and so they were difficult to use, or it was something that we're hacking together a bunch of different tools together to try to achieve. That goes in back of my mind I was like, there has to be a better way. I have to probably, you know, figure out where to build this myself. And then fast forward, I went on a podcast mixergy, you know, similar to like how we on the podcast here. And I'm, you know, was teaching how to document procedures based on what I was doing with my clients. And my co founder Jervis, all the way from Australia listened to the podcast interview and reached out like, hey, you know, he liked what I was talking about, the frameworks I talked about during the, you know, the interview. And he just had some ideas that he want to, you know, share with me. And so lo and behold, turns out he, you know, he was wanting to build a software to make it easy for entrepreneurs and the employees, employees to collaborate together to document procedures. And I was like, dude, not only will I give you advice and I'll do this, are you interested in we building this together? Because this is an issue that I want to solve. You know, I intended to, you know, solve it, but I just didn't have a time to, to do it. And so, you know, we went ahead and I agreed and then went ahead and got started with the, you know, the process of building a company and building software. But one thing that we, I made sure that we had to do from the very beginning was like I said, the last thing I want to do was to have a software that ends up being as hard to use are the ones that I was having issues with. So let's spend Some time trying to interview potential customers to understand what are the root issues they are having with this whole thing of creating a single place where employees can go and find instructions on how to do their work so that we can take the learnings that we have from them and use that as the means to build our software so that our software addresses the root issues in a much more simpler way. But not only that, another reason why I did that was because my context was limited to what I was doing from the standpoint of being a, you know, a business process outsourcing provider. You know, so I wanted to see, okay, is this something across the board in different industries people are having issues with, so that, you know, I can expand my context by, you know, having these interviews. So we did those interviews, came back a month. We did more than like, 30 or so interviews with potential customers from different industries. Then we came back and used the findings and decided, okay, this is what we're going to build, and this is how we're going to solve the problem and keep things simple. And now moving forward, Sweet Process has more than 2,000 companies using our software as our customers. And, you know, typical company has anywhere from 10 employees all the way to, like, 100. And even more because we have banks using Suite process. We have churches using suite process. We have actual government agencies using suite process. I mean, law firms, I mean, it runs the gamut. Because at the end of the day, regardless of the type of institution, in order for you to have work done in a way that is predictable in the way that you want it to be done, especially things that human beings have to do, your employees, you need to have these documents in place. You need to have a solution like Sweet Process that solves that problem on your behalf. Yeah.

Let'S talk about a few of these client companies and what they do. Maybe you can share some of the stories or examples. I think there's a few different parts that are particularly interesting. The first, to me, I think, is the key, critical thing. So maybe you could talk about this, about identifying and documenting the process. Tell us about something that either went well or didn't go well.

Yeah, I guess the question you're trying to maybe help the listener understand how. How to go about identifying what to document. Right. So let me give them a framework, if that's what you're asking for. So the first thing is, you know, before you even start doing anything, you got to understand like, okay, what exactly do you work on? Every recurring tasks that you do. Because if it's not recurring, we don't even have to document it. It's just like a project one time and it's done. So we focus on the recurrent tasks and the best way to do is kind of look at, you know, all the things that you and your employees have been doing maybe the last maybe month or whatever. Just to give you an idea of, you know, all the things that has come into this bucket of, okay, we're going to consider these things. And now the next thing is you're going to ask yourself, are these tasks that we need to keep doing or can we eliminate some of these things? Because I know there's this whole thing of tribal knowledge, how we've always done things, but we don't want to move into this whole documenting thing and document everything. We want to only document what we need to document. And if we don't need to document it, let's eliminate it altogether. Now we are left with the tasks that are recurring and we need to document. Now the questions to ask yourself is, okay, which of these tasks are the income generating tasks like the sales, the marketing, the sexy tasks people, you know, entrepreneurs talk about versus the production tasks, the things that you do behind the scenes to actually deliver the stuff you need to deliver to your customers, Right? So some people might be, you know, thinking, oh, let's go ahead and document the tasks that are, you know, the sales, the marketing stuff. Because obviously if they do that, then they can bring in more employees to take over the tasks and then maybe more customers. But my thing is that if you do that, you're going to end up having more customers coming in, into a situation where you have a lot of bottlenecks on the production side. So more people to be pissed off, more people to be angry with your. With you not being able to deliver. So I said focus on the production side of things first. This is where we want to start first. So let's look at those tasks that are recurring and they are production based, right? And then the next question to ask yourself is, which one is the biggest bottleneck? The one where anytime, you know, you need to do that task, you know, everybody's running around trying to figure out how it's done. Or it's the task that takes the most of your time and you just don't like doing because the information is not right there where it needs to be. Right? These are just ways to identify where is the one you need to start with first. And so you've identified the one you want to start with first. On the production side of things, how do you then go ahead and document the task? It's at the time you're about to work on the task. Because remember, these are recurring tasks. Maybe you do it every month or every week, whatever. So at the time you want to work on the task, this is when you start documenting it. So first thing you need to do is you can use reprocess or you can use, you know, any tool that you, that you want to use. But you know, let's say you're using three process, for instance. And then you will go ahead and document the title of the task, and the title will be how to do whatever. So that anybody in your company sees the title of the document, they know exactly what they can do. And then in real time, as you are going through each step of the task, all you need to do is just go in and document the title of each step. If you're working on a ten step task, by the time you're done working on this very task itself, you would have what we call a fancy what a minimum viable procedure, which is fancy ways of seeing an outline that will just have the title of the procedure and the title of the 10 steps. But here's a caveat. No details filled in just yet. We have this skeleton outline. How do we go from here to something with more details filled in? What we do is we give this document, we've created, this outline to our manager or to our employees on the ground saying, next time you're doing this task again, your job is just to make sure that you fill in some more details. And those details could be some screenshots or it could be some additional text, additional blurbs that will go into each of those steps. And so when they do that, you are supposed to now be on guard to look at the documents, the things they added into it, to see that it is what you need it to be, and then approve that. And then anytime they keep working on that task, the job is even yourself included. If you're working on that task, your job is to look at that upgraded version of the document and try and add more stuff in there. And that's how you build it. It's very important that when you doing this very whole thing that you install in the minds of your employees, that this is going to be a continuous improvement project where we're giving you the permission to, we all started from version 0 and the permission is given to everybody that we are going to improve this document as we go, as we keep working on it. Why is it important that at the Time they're working on the task that these documents should be in front of them is that because when they're working on the task, this is when they get insights or questions about things that were not covered in the initial document. This is when they can pass that information back to you. Not necessarily when you're brainstorming to document it, but a lot of the insight is getting when you're actually doing the work. Now we've talked about what to do to identify the first one and how to document the first document. Then we move to the next step, you know, task on the production side that you do the same dance for before, you know, you started documenting a bunch of these different documents. And then at a certain point you move on to the income generating task, the sales, the marketing stuff, and do the same thing. Right. And, you know, documented the task and going through that same process like I mentioned. And eventually you would have, you know, a lot of documents on, you know, the production side, a lot of documents on the, you know, income generating side as well. Right. The next question might be, okay, how do I get my employees to be bought into this thing? So there are ways that you can do it. So first of all, what I would suggest is maybe you might want to incentivize your employees because guess what, they already are, you know, have a lot of work that they have to do on a day to day basis. And now you are saying, I want you to, you know, document, help me document procedures as you do your work. Well, if you can incentivize it by paying them to do it, then that to an extent solves that problem. Another way to make sure that this becomes a culture of theirs is that maybe at any time when a employee has a question about a specific task, and if you're using a software like Suite process, the manager could say, hey, I know you're asking me how to do this, but have you checked Suite Process? Have you checked the tool we use to do this stuff? Right. And so over time, what that happens is in the minds of the employees that anytime they have a question, they know their manager or their boss is going to say, have you checked sweet process? Right. So to avoid that question being asked to them, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to go check, you know, the suite process to see if that document is in there. And then what happens is over time, this becomes a habit where anytime they need answers to something, they go check suite process without even coming to talk to the manager. And what happens to now is now that's starting a habit. But not only that, when they go start looking at these documents, they see documents that their fellow employees have created or they have actually helped to improve. Because like a software like suite process, we're tracking all the changes and who says what and who made the improvements to this document. So now subconsciously in their mind, they're like, well, in this company, not only are we empowered to help improve the documentation of how we do our work, but I'm seeing my colleagues are doing this. Why wouldn't I want to join? Right? So you are basically creating that mindset in them that, hey, you need to go first of all checks. We were street process and see what the. How things are documented for your work. But not only that, you're seeing your employees, your, your, your colleagues doing it, and you're seeing how the managers are approving the changes that they're making. So those are the ways to try to, you know, get your employees into it. But let's say for some reason, one, one more thing too, is that I've seen situations where people document like a, a template of how they document procedures, basically a procedure on how to document procedures so that even though people are trying to do this on their own, they can have a template in front of them that says, okay, when you're documenting a procedure, this is how I need you to create the title. This is how I need you to create the steps. This is how I need you to add information in there. If you're creating a video, this is how long I need this video to be. It shouldn't be more than a minute, because we don't want to create a movie for this step. We want to create a very compact and concrete information. If you're going to use a video. So basically you can have a procedure that outlines how people should create procedures so that when they're actually doing that, they have something like a guide that they can follow to essentially deliver what you're looking for, which is them documenting procedures. Another thing you can also add into the mix is that, let's say, for instance, you don't have enough time or your employees don't have enough time. There are people called process consultants that they can come into a company, obviously for a fee, it's not cheap. They can come into a company and then look through all the different things you're doing, help you brainstorm through how you do work, help you eliminate things that you need to eliminate. And then once they're done gathering all the requirements, they can help you actually document these procedures and processes, and then you can have this as a starting point that you and your employees can take from them and improve from there at that point. So this is kind of the framework that you can go ahead to actually get documents in place.

Well, that was broad over you. A couple of things I noticed. So both from experience as a CEO and also with our clients, I notice again and again that needing to bring in that outside person really makes a massive difference. It seems. So few companies are actually able to take the time to document all their processes quickly enough themselves. I see many that are like, okay, it's time, like, we've got a new area or we're growing business and we have to create these procedures and then manage them over time. But that we're actually doing the work, we're doing the selling, we're doing the operations, production. And so time and again, I think bringing in somebody else to do that is a pretty critical thing to do to actually make sure that it happens within the declared quarter that we want to get something done. And then it seems like it also adds the additional benefit of having some outside eyes look at your process who work in this world, who could sometimes question, why do you do that that way? I see companies all the time and they do things like this, and I think you're making this harder than you need to, or you're missing this piece of technology or something like that.

I don't know.

Do you actually help people to find those? How does somebody go about finding that kind of outside resource?

So if you were to go the route of actually hiring a process consultant, my suggestion will be to find somebody who's actually a process consultant consultant within your industry, specifically because the reason is that they might have some learnings that they can bring to the table based on the fact, like, let's say, for instance, you're running a restaurant. Let's say that's the business you run. And you bring in a process consultant who focuses on, you know, helping restaurants, you know, scale their operations and document procedures and all that. That person can bring the learnings that they have had from a bunch of different restaurants to the table so that when they're coming to work for you, they're bringing, you know, best practices across the board from different industries. Right. As opposed to just hiring any general process consultant. Obviously, the more niche focused they are, the. Yes, the more expensive they will be, but at least, you know, you're getting that additional benefit. But let's say you don't want to go the route of hiring a process consultant, there are ways in which you can actually hire people within the company who are specific to helping you streamline the operations. At a certain stage. You might even end up hiring like an operations manager where that's their role is to kind of come in and, you know, be that process consultant in some sort of way, but inside of the company to help you, you know, you know, streamline the operations, talk to your different employees, help them take things out of their head and help them document it and you know, have this in place for them to see and then help to, with their input, improve it from there sometimes to, depending on the stage or how large the company is, they might go from the point where they don't even have operations manager, but they have actually have somebody who's like number two to the CEO who is the chief operating officer. Right. But usually this is when the company is much larger with, you know, a lot more employees. So starting out, I would say an operations manager type person might be, you know, a route to go to bringing that person who their job is dedicated to figuring out who, what are all the operations we have, how can we streamline things, what things we need to eliminate? The CEO has a vision of what he needs to do. Okay, now how is that vision going to be implemented? This is what the operations related person does.

Yeah. So do you have, with suite process, do you have any sort of designated or identified recognized process consultants that you regularly use to recommend?

Okay, so that's a. I understand the question now. So basically we do provide the software and depending on who comes to us, and we usually have a consultation to see what the real problem is. And sometimes you find during the consultation that we have with them that the issue is not only just the software. The issue is also the process consulting side of things. So we do also offer that as well, where we can actually help, you know, come into the company and do the process consulting. I do have to say that that is actually expensive because it's not software ways. This is somebody, a process consultant actually working for you on that. So we do provide that as well.

Yeah, I think it makes a massive difference to jump start it. And you may have people internally and you may take a crack at it, but if you find that you're not making progress on this and you've designated like process work as part of your quarterly plan and one of your priorities, then you really might want to think about getting some extra help doing it because it's, it just really sucks if it gets stalled out. Can you Share any examples of companies that maybe tell us about some companies that have actually really turned things around with implementing this.

So a lot of the, what's it called, Case studies, you can find them on our blog as also even on our website, you can find videos. But I remember a situation where there was this agency that, you know, they do, they work for, it's a government agency and they do like some work that is like, I think has. Has to do with like child protection service and stuff like that. So the idea is that, you know, they had a lot of things that they had to do in a way, especially when they're dealing with children and all that stuff. You know, they basically. What it's what it is.

Yeah.

But, you know, information was all over the place and a lot of employees that had all the, this information, these government employees were leaving, they do for retirement, all that. And so they knew that the, the knowledge was going to be gone when these guys leave. So there was this urgency where they needed to have these whole things documented and have it streamlined. So, you know, they came to suite process and we work with them to make sure that everything, especially from all these, the employees that we're leaving, you know, all documented and now there's still our customer, things are moving smoothly and they keep adding more and more employees using it. But that was just an example. Another examp is I remember a law firm. It's actually a video testimony on our website for this law firm. And one of the issues they were having was they were trying to scale the company. But onboarding was an issue, right, because you hired, you know, you hired, it was a whole issue to hire somebody. But then when they come in, if the person can hit the ground running, you're just basically wasting money paying them and you're not getting the results you want out of them. So they needed to make sure that this onboarding that they had was not a nightmare, but actually become smooth so that the person comes in, hit the ground running and can start doing the work. So they came over to us and that was the solution they needed was, you know, how to fix the onboarding. So they came in, created procedures and processes on specifically how to onboard, you know, the paralegal, how to onboard the lawyers based on the different departments they had or different roles they had. They had all those things in there. So when they hire somebody, they press a button, a task is generated based on the underlying procedure or underlying process for that very role. And that employee is basically going through all the different steps, learning how to do Their work by using suite process. Another example I can think of, and a lot of this I'm trying to remember the ones that are specifically like case studies that people can actually look up. I know there is a school board that in this case, the school board has a bunch of different school boards that they are managing. And they wanted to make sure that because a lot of school boards that deal with parents and all that stuff, there's a lot of information they wanted pass on to the public. So this is not necessarily obviously them wanting to have procedures and processes in place for internal employees. But there's a lot of things that these, you know, the public needs to find out from them. So they use three process to create knowledge bases for each of the different school boards where if you need as a parents, you want to go find how to do one specific thing regarding that person, your child's school that they manage, you can find that all there at the end of the day still instructions that you need to pass to people regardless of whether they are employees or whether they're public facing. Like in this example I shared. All that can be done.

Yeah, I think case studies and examples like this are really helpful in creating a picture of it because it's one thing to give instructions and no good steps, but when we actually see it, it becomes really clear. I think about child protective services and the criticality of that. I think about a law firm working on behalf of its clients and needing to get people knowing what they're doing right clearly and quickly and being done on a consistent basis. How do you make sure that the software is used consistently over time and how do you distinguish between say checklist or project management software and suite process?

So let me answer the two questions. So the first one is how do we make sure the software is used? It comes down to keeping things simple. And in our case, the way we price is that we price such that, you know, It's a specific fee 99amonth for up to 20 employees. And then once you have more than 20 employees, they say per user fee. That is only comes into place if the users are active. Unlike the competition, the competitors where, you know, if you have 100 employees that you add into the software this month.

You will pay for a whole regardless.

Of if people use the software or not. So the reason why we align our pricing with the active thing is that the reality is if the software, if it's hard to use, people won't use it. Right. And so. Well, that's the thing, people won't use it and so by keeping our, the way we make money from each customer based on the actual usage of the software, for the most part, that forces us to make sure that everything we do, we try to figure out from the, from the lens of how easy is this to use. And so we, you know, with regards to how we determine who is active, if someone has not used the software, for us to determine someone is active, they must have used the software at least four times on separate occasions in a month. And if that person has used that software at least four times in separate days in a month, then we say, okay, this person is getting some value from it.

That's pretty high standard.

Putting the pricing in that way forces us to always look at how we can keep things simple. Because otherwise people would not use the software.

Right.

And then, you know, it's not going to be used and we wouldn't be able to land and expand. Then the other question, what was the other question about?

How do you compare? Like, when does a software like yours come into play versus project management or checklist software?

Great, great. So a project management software is more like, you know, you have a single project that you're working on and most likely once that project is done, you won't do that project again and that's it. So you have to maybe kind of mind map all the things you want to do. Like let's say it's a consulting thing where you have different consulting clients and each one has different needs, each one has a different thing you have to do for them. So you kind of, in the very beginning, figure out all the things you need to do, mind map it down, and then put it in the project management tool and that's it. The next client comes, it's probably a whole different thing. For us, we are more of business process management where for the most part, a lot of the work you do tends to be the same. Right. And so because they tend to be the same and it's the same series of steps or whatever, you are able to use a software like ours to basically document each and everything of how you do the work. Right. So if the task that you have to do tends to be the same and is recurring, that's where a software like ours comes into play and you can use it. Like in our software, you couldn't really assign a task to anybody, except that task has an underlying procedure like checklist that it's going to be based off or a process that it will be based on. Yeah.

So in your software, the user is just reviewing the Instructions for how to do it or actually checking off that it's being done.

So it's twofold. So they have the part that is them collaborating together to document, brainstorming, create a document. So there's that whole working together with your employees and your managers or whatever to build a document, and then that documents continuously be improved over time. And then there's the other part. Where is the task management? Where now that you've documented how the work is done, you want to give work to people for them to actually do the work. So you can actually do that with our software. And what happens is, because any task in the software needs to be based on an underlying procedure. For instance, you cannot assign a task to anybody without it having an underlying procedure.

Yeah, see, this is a really critical thing. So this is not just the document and review. You're actually doing some task management in here and you're able to assign things. And that's really different than. And more can. Or that's, I think, what I was asking about, like the blend with checklist and project management. If I've got a recurring process and I'm managing the fulfillment of that recurring process in suite process, then I'm actually not just looking at a manual or operating handbook, but I'm actually managing the process in suiteprocess.

Yeah. And let me make it clear using an example. Let's say you run an E Commerce business and you have a procedure on how to refund the order, right? So you have a, you know, step one, this is what you do. 2, 3, 4, these are all the things you do in order to refund the order to somebody. And now let's say an order, guess, a customer, Jane or whatever requests by email that they want to refund the order. They're returning it. Now you can assign a task to your, your customer support agent in suite process, and that task will be based on that underlying procedure for them to refund the order to that client. And so when they're going through that whole process of trying to refund the order, the instructions are right there in front of them. Step one, do this, they actually do that and they check it off. Step two, do that, they do the actual thing. And by the time they are done, because the instructions are right there, they will follow all the different steps. And what ends up happening in the end is the order is refunded exactly the way you want it to be refunded to the customer. And they followed all the steps. And on top of that, by marrying the documentation with the task Management side of things. What happens is, like I said earlier, a lot of the insight for improvement comes when work is being done. So when they're doing the work, if they come across a step that was not accounted for or you didn't outline in your document, they can pass that feedback to you, say, hey, step number four in this very scenario doesn't match. Because for this very scenario of what we're doing doesn't matter. Now, the manager of the document sees that feedback from the employee who's doing a task. He can then take that feedback and improve the underlying procedure based on the feedback, press the button, and now that task is updated with the new steps that they have to follow in this new scenario. That's how by marrying the task management with the document side of things, there's a flow back and forth of information that begins to keep, allowing the documents to be continuously improved.

Yeah, I get it. It's really actively being used. I think that's a useful thing. It is useful to have operating handbooks and manuals and standard procedures, SOPs, whatever you're going to call them in your company, and to teach those in a consistent way and to keep those as things. And I think there's really a couple of ways to ensure that they're actually being used. And one of them is a simple thing like a laminated checklist that a lot of companies use. We can also design our physical spaces to do that, like by having places or cutouts or markings for where materials and tools are kept and that kind of thing. Refill lines, those kinds of things ensure that process is done in the physical world and over time. But there's also the use of a software tool like this where we're actually task managing a repeated set of specific steps that we're using again and again in a business to ensure that it's done in a consistent way.

So I will argue that if you put things outside of a system like ours, you're now having a situation where you're basically introducing a situation where things won't get updated. That's facts. So when you have it like that, when there's an issue or something that is not clear how, where they put past that information back into. So that's why for us, what we also have is a situation where you know, you can create like a QR code, right, from a procedure you've documented in suite process. And let's say in this scenario now there's a specific machine that this employee has to use. You can put that QR code on the machine and the employee just has to take their digital, their phone, their camera and scan that QR code and voila, something on sweet process will pop up and say, hey, this is the procedure on how to use that very machine. So now you're taking the thing from, you know, goes right there.

Yeah, yeah.

And so what happens now too is if they run across anything that is not talked about, they can pass that information right into the system. Because you know, if you don't have this thing in one place online and digital you have, you run into a situation where things get old and still fast. And the more things get old and still, the more nobody wants to be willing to make any improvement because it's going to be a whole big project to try to fix stuff. So that's why we want to have everything all in one place, digital, where you can access. And even if you need to connect things by having QR codes stuck on your machines or whatever, you can do it. And information is back and forth inside of a digital system.

Yeah, that's really cool. I'm thinking more about kind of the modern checklist and how we think of it like in the use of an airplane or whatever. Well, I'm not going to necessarily use a QR code, although today many planes, iPad and other systems and panel systems will have checklists built into them. But very often you'll have something like a laminated card in the case of something. So we have a quick reference in a critical time. Another of our clients would never use a QR code in their trucks. But the trucks, when they get started up and leave the yard and leave a job site, had something to use. And while it probably is a good idea that they would a better idea that they would scan something and use a mobile device in many of those cases, some of them are so short and specific that they want to put that in. Like did you scan the area around the truck to make sure you loaded your tools before you returned or something like that where they're not going to use a digital tool. Refuse that in, in some respects because of that.

But in that scenario that you are depending on them, like let's see, let's say that the truck driving person, you're depending on them to use a physical piece of paper, whatever. Now how do you track that they actually did it if it's not even digital?

I mean, right? Yeah.

The QR code thing is not even that difficult because as long as you have a camera, you can take a picture. Just put your camera. Most phones now just Put your camera on the QR code, it pops something on your camera right there. You click it, it opens up. And now the employee who's in this case who is driving the truck can just follow the checklist. Oh, step one, I did this. Click it, it's doing it in the truck. Step two, I did that, you know, and everything is tracked and is saved inside the system that for this very instance of today when this truck driver was supposed to do something, he followed it, he saved it and he tracked it. Now you've gotten rid of the paper, you've gotten rid of all the other stuff.

Well, let's recap some things before we run out of time with the show and then I'll share that we talked about having a special for people on your software in particular. But like identifying and documenting your repeated processes is critical to scaling. It's critical to adding team, to doing things in a consistent way, to continuously improving the processes. So there's work to be done there. You may need to get help to do that. There are people, process consultants that can do it. Getting it loaded into some kind of a digital real time software application like suite process or something else can make a big difference in having it be the latest, greatest thing and then actually connecting the standard operating procedure with the real time usage of it. The task management is a useful thing. So whether you're going old school with some kind of laminated paper or you're going real time digital with QR codes or things like that, the key is getting that regular use of it and keeping the whole system current over time so that it's actually impacting things. And there's not a process in the books versus a process in reality. Right. There's sometimes a process in practice and then there's the one that's documented that we're supposed to do. But nobody does that. And I think that's the case or.

Even worse, the one stuck in someone's head and nobody knows if the person is not around.

Oh my God. I worked with a major, major, multi billion dollar company as coach and they were telling me about, we were doing some of the process work and they're like, yeah, well we had this thing, it's multi, multimillion dollar product and this guy died who knew how to do it and he got sick and he passed away. It was tragedy. But the key thing is that now we can't fix this thing. And now there's a multimillion dollar piece of technology that we're still trying to figure out what to do. The recipe lived with him and we don't know how to do it right. Major, critical, substantial piece of technology was a fascinating story. I'm like wow, I bet you never want that to happen again. So this is a really great conversation. So the offer, like all softwares, there's a trial period and that kind of thing. But Owen set up for our listeners this that they'll give you basically 28 days, about a month instead of a couple of weeks to actually go and play with this. So if you want to go play with it, try do one of your processes, start to work it through. Sweetprocess.com Scalingup is where you'll get that special offer to double your trial time and get something there. It's there on the screen. We'll put it in the show notes like that. So suiteprocess.com scalingup is where you get that double trial time for our listeners and viewers. I think it's really great. I'm sorry, I'm so glad and grateful for you for coming on the show. I want to tell give some special shout outs and thanks. Thanks to Wanda Mitchell getting our show produced in the background and to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish who created the whole Rockefeller habits and scaling up framework that brought us the world of scaling up to the folks at Podfly Productions who get our show out every week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can contact us. Info scalingcoach.com info scalingcoach.com, suggest a show, find a coach, any of that kind of thing that we can love to do that for you. ScalingCoach.com is the website info is a decent email for us. Thanks again everyone for listening for watching. Keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next time. 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 Align. 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.