AMA: Responding to Your Questions & YouTube Comments

Hello and welcome to an Ask Me Anything. We'll be starting on the hour. If you're watching on the replay, go ahead and skip ahead a few minutes. We'll have a timestamp below for when the actual party begins, but if you're joining me live, thanks for being here. I will be starting in about six minutes or so. If you have questions you want to have me answer live, this is a great time to put them in the chat. I've received a bunch via email. Thank you guys for sending those in and of course our YouTube comments. But if you want to make sure your question is answered, go ahead and put them in the live chat. Otherwise we're just going to be chilling out for a bit as we get ready and make sure everything is working properly. Little Debbie Cake. I really hope I didn't scare you by speaking just now, but thank you for being the first in the chat as well as PWR user. Good to have you here. Thanks all for joining me so far today. I think this will be a fun little hangout. We'll be starting in about five and change minutes. If you are just tuning in, you're not missing anything. We are just waiting to get started, so go ahead and let us know where you're listening from in the chat. Say hello. Hopefully I'm not also terrifying you in your office of choice, but go ahead and use that chat. Let me know that you're able to see him here. Okay, I'll be starting on the hour and if you have any questions that you'd like to make sure I answer in this live stream. If you're here live, you guys get priority. So go ahead and you know, write your question right? I mean I guess your comment that'd be a little weird for an ama, but whatever you'd like to do, write that in the chat now so I can make sure we get your stuff answered first. For those of you who are here live and great to see, Belgium is here with us. Wyoming. Where's everyone else joining from? Let me know. Streaming here from Utah, USA and excited to get started in about three minutes. We'll be starting in about a minute, so I guess there's nothing you need to do if you're already here, share this with a friend. Let's let me know what your questions are in the chat, but we'll be starting in a little bit less than a minute. SA Whoa. Hello there. Good to have you joining me for our live Q A today as I totally pretend to not realize that I am broadcasting from my Tiny little closet. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to be answering live questions from anyone here in the chat, as well as some of the most asked comments that we've gotten on the YouTube channel so far. This is not going to be some kind of scripted, SEO optimized presentation of sorts. I just want to make sure that I am responding to the comments and, you know, stumping questions that have come up again and again as just a, a service to those of you who have been in the YouTube audience, because I really appreciate each and every one of you. So I know we've got some questions that have come in before the stream started and I don't want to spend too much time on preamble, but I saw a question from the live chat that I think I'd like to tackle first. So little Debbie cake, let's get your question up here on the screen. So do you find yourself revisiting and redoing process at any particular part of your year business cycle, or does it happen naturally as you use them? Okay, I think this depends on the process. There are certain parts of our business, certain pipelines that are very regularly updated most of the time. The way this looks for my team, which again, I'm not prescriptive here, you do whatever works for you. But an example I'm thinking of is our YouTube or our email pipeline. Those are content production areas for us. They are constantly being used. They're like a manufacturing line. And I would say every month at least, we have some kind of update to that process. But the way we prompt ourselves to remember to change a process is because something happened. Usually a mistake has happened or an idea has come in, or we learn something new by watching a YouTube video and we're like, ooh, ooh, ooh. We should really do that. We should incorporate AI into our email formatting task. We should change the order of our YouTube scripting process so that the thumbnail comes first. Different, just insights along the way. When we have those moments, we're pretty quickly and immediately getting them actioned into our pipelines for those core areas of the business. Now, other kinds of processes. So maybe employee onboarding, those are much less frequent. And that's just because we don't have as much regular use of them. We don't onboard people that often as a small team. So I would say for me, it is when I use them regularly, when we're prompted for something to be improved. I don't have like an annual process of like, let's review all of our processes. Because generally speaking, when you're just kind of following a forced rhythm of like, all right, every year I will review every process in my business. I find that I don't even believe in the value of doing it because I'm just following a calendar rather than an actual business need. So I, generally speaking, follow the business need. Instead of I realize something is wrong or we have a new person being onboarded, let's review our onboarding process. There's a handful of ones where we do use that calendar setting for things that might change because of policies or, you know, governing rules. But for the most part, it's based on naturally as you use them. But every team will be a little different there. Debbie. All right, next up, we have power user. Not sure if this is in your wheelhouse. I don't know either. Let's see. But I'm having issues with developing templates for research. I find that normally research requires ongoing task creation, and I use notion currently. So I think it depends on. Oh, my question is how you handle research and research generated tasks. Power user. When you're thinking about this, are you talking about, like, you are an academic and you're creating some kind of research report or a study or a thesis, and so right now you're collecting information for research, or are you saying there's actions you need to do and you don't know what they are until you conduct the research, and then that's making you think, oh, I need to do this and that and the other. When we're talking about templates, which side of that arena are we on? Are we on the knowledge accumulation side or the turning knowledge into action side of things? I think that'll help me narrow which way I point you to go next. But give me a quick response in the chat. Power of being here live. Second option. So you're trying to get your research that you're figuring out as you go into tasks. Yeah, in those cases, most often when you're templating them, when you're templating an unknowable thing. So let's. I want to give a tactical example here that everyone can relate to. Let's say we are researching. What can everyone relate to here? Let's say creating a new product. Maybe you're not a business owner, power user, but most people here can relate to creating something. They want to write a book. They don't know what the book's going to be. They don't even know if it's going to be a book or a comic. Book or an encyclopedia, they've got no idea. They just want to research a topic and create it into something that they're not quite sure what it is. In those situations, I define that as a project, meaning we kind of know what we want to end up to, but we don't really know how to get there. And so in those cases, all we can really template is the container. It's kind of like if you have an artist and you're trying to template their process, you can template, slash, structure, how they stretch their canvas, how they prime the canvas, but there's not a lot of templating you can do for the actual art itself. When it comes to this writing of a book, the same thing applies. You might know that you need to outline, you might know that you need to draft, you might know that you need to publish. But how you actually write it is going to change every time you write a different book, every time you discover new research, the chapters and so on are going to shift around. So when I approach templates for these kinds of projects, I think of bookends, I think of the canvas, the frame, the container for the creativity, everything on either side of the unknowable creativity template. So if you're in ClickUp, for example, it might be a list and you create all the tasks for the things before and after the unknown portion. Then for the unknown portion, the stuff that you're still discovering along the way, treat that a little bit more like an agile project, meaning every week have a task that says, you know, create tasks for what I've learned based on last week's research. So basically every week you're building out your task list or your project plan for the next week. So you're, you're. Rather than trying to have it all planned out in advance like you would for a waterfall project, where you know all the variables because you're discovering things as you go. You want to give yourself a repeating cadence to plan in smaller bites. So maybe for you, it's two days out. Once you do some research, you know, okay, this is what my next two days need to be. So then you have a two day repeating cycle of planning my next two days of work. Maybe for you, it's every month. You do a month of research and you're like, okay, I know what I got to do now. I don't know what happens after that, but I know these next two months, whatever cadence works for you is probably what I would do. And that's how we approach any unknowable projects here. At ProcessDriven as well. We have the beginning and we always follow the same process of kickoffs and, and planning and this, that and the other. We have the wrap up. It's always the same, but the middle portion, that's different every time. We kind of plan it a little bit more iteratively. Does that answer your question or is that a little too abstract? Let me know in the chat while we wait for your reply. Power User, I want to pull in one of the questions we had come in, I think via email, Mariah, about AI and SOPs. And we'll just keep firing away by the way. Keep firing, keep the questions coming. I want to answer as many as we can today. Just want to make sure that we get these responded to. Okay, so this is from a YouTube comment. I don't have a good way to show the screenshot of the comment, so just bear with us here. But this question is, can I use AI to write my SOPs for me? So SOPs meaning standard operating procedures or recipes for how to do things in your business. Can I use AI to write? The answer is absolutely, yeah, of course you can can use AI to write anything. But just like using AI to write, you know, your significant other a love letter, it might not be as good as what you could do with your own two hands. I actually have a video coming out on the channel. Mariah, I know you're behind the scenes here. If you remember the date of it, we can put it in the chat. But we have a video coming out in a week or two and that video is about how to write sops quickly. And in that video I kind of give you a side by side of writing a writing SOP with artificial intelligence and writing an SOP just with your own hands. And newsflash, it's actually faster in every test I've done, which I've done two or three times now, to write SOPs with your own two hands, if you are writing them properly and with a good template. Surprise, surprise, you can use AI to write sops, but I only recommend it for folks who are really allergic to typing. So maybe they type less than 100 words per minute. Maybe they just, you know, maybe they physically can't type in those cases. Go for it to use AI in those. In those instances you'd want to record a video of you doing whatever it is. Take the transcript, which you can usually get from Google Meet from Zoom, from any video recording thing out there, put that into chat GPT and say, hey, format this transcript as an SOP Following XYZ template, it'll spit out an SOP for you and you can tweak it. Problem is that usually takes longer by about double of what it takes to write out those SOPs. So yes, you can certainly use AI. I'd probably not recommend it and thank you so much, Mariah. So September 26th we have that video coming out. You'll check it out on the channel and if you are listening to this and you're like ooh, sops written by hand can be faster. How I've never experienced that. We do have a workshop at the end of this month, I think the 25th, fifth, one day before that video where I'm actually going to be doing a live training going through how to write SOPs. And we also have super cool SOP exchange part of this where if you write an SOP you can get up to 200 written SOPs in return. It sounds crazy. It's actually really cool you can find info there. Okay, a sneak up question from power user. I want to make sure I hit on this. So I use the para method for organizing notes. Do you use something similar to store your research results? This is an interesting lane I don't have. When it comes to like Process Driven's arena, we usually stay shy of the note taking space, knowledge storage and all that stuff. The para method is actually a book that we read here at Process Driven in our internal book club. I'm familiar with it. I've also used a Zettel Aston. I'm going to butcher the name of it which is very similar for business stuff. I don't for things where I would need to do research. Like if I go back to when I would write like an honors thesis in college. Yes. So if you were in the academic arena, I absolutely think having a more structured note taking system, a tagged second brain system of some kind is absolutely the way to go. Usually you. Whether you use para or some kind of variation thereof, that's usually the nice way to build around it because what you're basically doing is tracking information and tagging it in a way that you can access it later rather than having to categorize everything when you don't know yet how to categorize. This gets more into how do you track notes and information. And there are a lot of great channels on note taking on YouTube. So Tiago Forte is the person who created, I believe created para and build a second brain. Tom @ the Paperless Movement also has a lot of great content on note taking. So those would be the Two people I point to. If you're looking to dig deeper into that. I have opinions, but more from the user side, not so much the recommendation professional side. All right. Little Debbie takes says, I Love to use AI to query our SOPs. Oh, using ClickUp and Brain. Very cool. My boss is allergic to writing SOPs, so he walks through them and then I take them up. That's a great case. I mean, that's exactly where AI is helpful when you have an intermediary going through. A lot of the times when I see folks struggling with SOPs they're trying to use, they're trying to create them in a way that does not work with their brain. Like they hate typing and yet they're forcing themselves to type. And so one of the common workarounds I tell people is to use interviews. So you have a conversation with somebody and they're asking you questions while you're demonstrating the thing. AI can be a nice replacement for those kinds of less efficient methods for writing SOPs. And so I think that's a great suggestion to make sure that you are using ClickUp's AI integration or just Chat GPT to make that more simple. I actually thought before about the merits of maybe creating like some kind of free AI SOP writing bot that we could just share with people on Chat GPT, but I don't know if people would find that helpful. More on that, if anyone's curious about what Little Debbie Cake was referring to is in the video on how to write. How to write SOPs for your personality type I think is what it's called. It has the disc profiles and it goes through four different strategies for writing SOPs for any brain wiring. Sorry, I missed the next comment. Proxy me, I think. Love your content. Thank you. I am a software engineer that loves process and projects. Yeah, I would like to produce content in my mother language Portuguese. About the subject. Any advice? Yeah, I was just on a podcast yesterday on a recording for the Niche pursuits. Niche Niche. I should have asked them which way they pronounce it. But the Niche Pursuits podcasts talking about this and I would say if you're getting started producing content around this, I would, you know, the basic stuff, get good audio, your camera, doesn't really matter, use your webcam, it's fine. But produce content that solves questions that your customers are asking you or your potential customers. So that's how I started. I mean I, I've been telling a lot about this story, but only this year have I really considered myself a creator. Like oh, you know, 50,000 views. Like we might be there now we're at what, 60 some? I don't know. But for the first hundred videos, every video was literally a customer asking me or potential customer asking me, hey Layla, how do I do xyz? And I would go to go home, go to my webcam and I would record a loom video for, you know, two to ten minutes answering their question. I would remove their personal information. So if Susie asked me, I wouldn't say hi Susie, you know, in the video, I would just answer the question. So if you want to have tasks in ClickUp, here's how you do it. If you want to write an sop, here's how you do it. Whatever I would have sent to them one on one, I would say it to the camera. Then I upload it to YouTube often with no editing. And that's how I started my channel. Especially if you are a service provider. I think that is the like I'm biased, but that is the way that I would do it if I had the chance to do it again, no editing. Live also works and the goal just being letting people know what it's like to work with you and ideally targeting topics that you know your clients really care about. Everything else about this whole creator thing is like icing on the cake. It's like the 10%, but the 90% is just actually producing helpful things that help somebody. And if you create them for your customer, for a human you actually know in real life, then you know you're at least helping one person. And that is a lot better than the majority of content out there. If you want to see more on this proximity, I have an interview I did a while back on a podcast called behind the Upload, I believe is the name. It's on our website. Mariah. We can probably grab the link to that, that press page thing or whatever the link is to the interview. But I actually go through my whole beginning journey on YouTube. You are welcome to steal from that. It's a very simple story, but I think it might help you get started as well. What else? Pierre says hi. Love the channel. Oh, thank you. We are re looking. We are relooking our organogram. I do not know what organogram is to adapt and prep for growth. Currently 33 team members. Any top tips you can share? I think you'll have to tell me what an organogram is. Unfortunately I just do not know. Just do a quick Google organigram. Unless it's organization and just autocorrected organizational chart oh, okay. So organigram organizational chart. I learned something new today as well. So when it comes to an organizational chart at the 33 team member mark, I have a pretty opinionated stance on it. Generally thinking, generally speaking, I don't find it to be terribly helpful for planning for teams of that size. When you're at 50, really 100, those organizational charts are fantastic. But at these kind of messy middle sizes, they can often cause more harm than good. My suggestion is to start from a more process focused lens. Big surprise given the lens of the channel. But I like to map out what are the functions of your business, map them all out. And that is your organizational chart. I call it a process org chart. This, and then from that chart where you've mapped out everything your business needs to do, I simply circle or color code things for each role. The reason this is more helpful than an organizational chart for small teams is because you can actually visually see. All right, here are the functions of my business. Here are the collections of responsibilities. Are the people responsible for these functions spread out or closely together? So if you have one person in your business who's in charge of all of your fulfillment functions, those are all over here in your chart or over here if we're gonna mirror the view. That's really great for giving that person a holistic understanding of the front half of the business. But if you're looking to have that person have full understanding of the customer journey, you might find it more helpful to shape their role to be spread out throughout the business so that they have some functions in sales, but they also have some visibility into the fulfillment side of it. Designing roles based on the process org chart allows you to kind of see, you know, your customer navigates through your organizational chart left to right. And when you look at your processes, rather than just looking at your people, you can actually make sure the people's roles you're building give them visibility into as much areas of the business as you can. Generally when I'm building small teams which are usually smaller than 33, I'll give this out. I'm really looking to make sure that as many people as possible have process responsibilities that go this way, meaning they have sales and some marketing and it's peak into CX or they have CX and a bit of operations and a bit of hiring. If I go deep on a role where they only see customer service or they only see operations, is usually where I have to spend a lot more time on management, a lot more time on communication. Because by design of their role they don't have visibility into the broader business goals. The second thing I would share is to consider working with someone who is more on the business people side of things. When you're thinking about different organizational structures on the HR side, once you actually do get to that, there is a whole strategy in place and there's different philosophies around. Do you want to have, you know, deep hierarchies? You want to have things by vertical, things by product, the different ways to collect and store your business? It's a whole school of thought. What is it called? Organizational theory I think is the name of the major in college consulting. Somebody who's a specialist in that area may be well worth the time to make sure that you're getting it right for your business culture and your niche. My stance is more from the process perspective of what helps operationally, but reporting lines and HR and culture building are its own separate list of demands and you probably don't want to ignore those either. So finding the balance between the two is what I'd recommend. Hey B. Good to see you. Absolutely, absolutely. Happy to help. Power user asks what app or platform do you use to illustrate that process or chart? If not a whiteboard? Just wondering. I imagine it's shareable or collab capable. Yes, absolutely. This sometimes makes people uncomfortable who are used to offline apps. You know you're used to QuickBooks Desktop, you're used to Corel, you know you're used to old school platforms. But pretty much everything I recommend teams use in the modern age is cloud based because it gives you version control, gives you shared collaborations. Granted I am a sucker for a whiteboard, but this is just my external brain. This is like pre sharing because I am. This is how I process things. But yeah, for the process Org charts my suggestion would be to use whatever whiteboarding tool you already use that is cloud based and accessible to everybody. Right now I use Whimsical the most. It's the one you see in most of my videos. I am trying to get Whimsical to sponsor us though and they are not interested yet from what I can gather. So if anyone knows anyone at Whimsical, help me out. But I've been using them for quite a few years. It's just a really nice platform. Shout out to Ashley who introduced me to them originally. Miro is also great for this LucidChart ClickUp. Whiteboards is okay if you can stand the bugginess, but any tool that gives you the ability to collaborate in real time and track version history will do this job quite well. Very simple even, I should say canva. Canva's whiteboard is also very popular now. It's something I might be checking out because I love canva. All right, ProcessDriven is loyal to ClickUp and SmartSuite. More on that in a second. Do you think it's possible to create a shared task management system in Notion alone? We're trying to centralize our SOP library and Meeting Note library in the same place and would like to operator task management there as well. Yes. Shawna, let me know what your team size is if you don't mind, but let's go back to the part one of this question. Mariah, if you don't mind. So this is actually something I'm so glad you asked Shauna, because this is something that is changing at ProcessDriven. It already has and if you've been on our email list, you've probably seen about 2 months ago I sent out an email or an email slash video that only went out to our email subscribers and it said basically, hey, because you're on our newsletter, I want to tell you something important. And it was a video explaining why we are actually not producing any content about software specific platforms moving into the future. We've been slowly phasing this out with like a 1 to 4:1 to 5 ratio over the last or more than 12 months of phasing out software specific content. And the reason is because of exactly what you asked. Like I love this question. I know how you can combine your note taking and your task in the same place. I know how you can run your business off of notion. But because of the types of content we produce on YouTube, there is this assumption that ah, we can't help you with that. And my obsession is the process and the systems and the way people work. I don't care if you are more of a sticky note person, more of a whiteboard person, more of a trello person, more of an asana person. I just care that you're getting processes that work for you. So just to say that's a big shift that if you aren't on our email list you're going to notice in our content because over the last, I want to say two months, three months, all we're going is into process. So we are really moving into that agnostic sphere. Anyway, your actual question is five full time and 11 contractors. Awesome. Is it possible to use it in Notion alone? Yes, it completely is. The stuff that we teach inside ClickUp and SmartSuite is applicable inside Of Notion. We are actually at the end of this year. You're the first know publicly here guys, but we'll be introducing a, you know, any software is available version of our programming. The thing you need to watch out for, Shauna, and this is where the software does have some implications is Notion's flexibility does become a bit of a problem at probably not where you're at, but where you're going to be once you hit like 20 people. Notion can become quite challenging because it is meant as it originally was started as kind of this student note taking, very personalized experience. When you add 20 people in there who are each personalizing, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, it can be challenging to enforce a pipeline, a series of steps with no edits, no changes, no deviations. Notion has challenges in that area. It's not the only one and it's not insurmountable. But it is a challenge. You can absolutely do it. The way you can overcome the flexibility of the software is adding rigidity in your policies and in your monitoring system. So unlike maybe a smartsuite user, a notion user will want to have some routines to double check that. Hey, are all of our stuff actually going through the process that we wanted it to? Hey, were any new templates created or any new databases created? Were any new pages created for no reason? Those kinds of double checks aren't things that SmartSuite users would ever have to worry about because the platform itself is so much more rigid. It has a lot more protections for teams and keeping things locked down. But a Notion user, you can accomplish the same things. It'll just require a little bit more management from humans to make up for the flexibility of the software. Is the flexibility still a delight in most cases? It certainly can be. But there's always that two double edge when it comes to flexibility. So across the spectrum of software, the more flexible, the more management you typically need to do at scale. And I will, I'm giving it to you straight here. We have no, no contracts, no sponsorships, no associations, except, you know, positive relationships. But like nothing with any software company and we don't plan on changing that in the future. So I'm giving you my straight opinion and that's probably why we will never have sponsorships with companies that don't appreciate that. So B, as someone starting out in operations, any advice or tips for career advancement in this field? Oh, that is very sweet, B. Thank you. Any tips or advice? I have a hard time with this because not many people know this. If you guys have been watching the channel, you've probably picked this up. But I'm not a, you know, professional operations consultant. I'm not, you know, coming here, recovering from McKinsey burnout or anything like that. I got into this space from the bottom up. I worked for as a virtual assistant. I helped start my husband's company and that got me into operations through working as a contractor office manager. And then I kind of just kept working up through the ranks of what actually works. So I have been through the school of hard knocks for operations, not the corporate and MBA route. That was very intentional. That was kind of my plan to get here. So for folks that aren't going that route, here's what I would say. The best thing I can say for career advancement is to get a good job. That's what the only thing, the only regret I have about my journey with ProcessDriven is not when I left corporate, not getting a job in operations as quickly as I could at a growing company with lots of opportunity that had a small team like I, if I could do it again, I would get a job at a team of 10 people in a startup environment where they needed a project manager probably at the beginning and work my way up to be EA or you know, COO if it's a really small company, but probably just like ea. That would have probably been my, my peak and get the boots on the ground experience because the MBAs don't matter. The Lean Six Sigma certifications, they don't matter. I remember when I worked on my first project that followed iOS certification principles and I worked with a team of consultants where I was not licensed in that practice, but I was learning along with them to support them. And I was like, this is so silly. This is so easy. Can you imagine? I couldn't imagine if I'd spent multiple years in school getting this certification just to know how to write paperwork in a certain way. And I know that's really belittling in a lot of ways these traditional frameworks because they do add a lot of value. But if I really wanted to make it and build skills faster, I would put myself into the, the trenches of the busiest high growth small team I could find that could trust me enough to get me in at the ground level and get up to a management position within like three to five years, get to that management position and then probably hop to another company and anyone is going to like, I've told this to my team member. I had somebody previously who wanted to like move up and like, ah, I don't have anything, you know, and Oftentimes the best way to grow your skills as an operator is to to company hop to work at one to get to a point, go somewhere else, particularly a bigger company for your next one, 30 to 50 people where you can get a little bit more focus and then hop back to a small company. Because small companies don't have as much infrastructure for training. They don't have as much resources for training. So having that big company experience or even SMB company experience will help you grow a lot faster. Faster. And most employers like, if you're. I shouldn't say that. I would be, I'd be delighted if someone told me like, hey, I need to quit because I need to go over here and learn this skill set I can't learn anywhere else. I'll be back in a few years like that. That is I think a great way to grow your career. And now I'm rambling. So let me know if that helps or if that's way too much detail. Dory asks, hey, I was just starting a company and I'm getting them set up on a workflow with ClickUp. We're very small. Is it best to start super simple? Any things you say we should avoid? Yes. So start super simple. The most important thing. And this is where again, like our focus on tutorials actually hurt our audience because we got lost in the details. No, I shouldn't say that. It's not like we got lost in the details. We just spoke too much about software and it biased people. But the software does not matter, especially at the beginning. What you're looking to build in the beginning are habits, habits and behaviors and culture of following a process, of writing down what you do, of keeping receipts, notes of what happened, doing what you say you're gonna do. Like if you say yeah, I'll get that to you by Friday, doing it by Friday and having a record of that promise inside your tool, those habits and behaviors, that is the thing that you really need to get down at the beginning stages. Most people I see, they kind of skip this and they go right to the shiniest software. They get right to the templates and accidentally by creating the content. I was, I was contributing to this because I was telling people, oh, look at how cool dependencies are, look at how cool automations are. And yeah, I'd rather serve a businesses like yours than help a software company get more users. So here we are. But my suggestion would you for you would be to keep super simple. Avoid introducing more hierarchy. Focus on habits, cultures and rituals that will scale with you so those habits, like I mentioned in this stream, if you have funds, which you might not at this point, when you can join foundations, because our program foundations will help you set all of that up in minutes rather than months. And as soon as you get the basics down, focus on capturing your methodology. So the basic habits of like, what do we do? When do we do it? Who does it? Get that down. Which requires almost no technology and the simplest list you can imagine. Once that's working, move on to how do we do it? So that's the documentation, the process, the SOP stuff. Once that's down, then we can start getting NINJA with our software. That journey is what we cover in foundations. But a lot of folks, if you're in the startup stage, you might not have any resources right now, that's okay. But if at any point you're like, I'm going to fast track through this. That's what we help people do. And we've got templates and all that stuff that makes it a lot faster. Ask me how I know. Danielle or Sorry. Danielle. Oh my God. Hey, Danielle. Sorry. I promise I can read. I'm using the SOPs from your YouTube videos in ClickUp and they work great for me. I understand them, but my team struggles when creating or updating them. They understand when I explain, but since they don't speak English, they often don't do it right or don't keep them updated. I'm the only one who speaks English and I'm not sure how to help them realize how important SOPs are. Are. Yeah. What language do they speak? Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, whatever that language is. I would suggest that you write SOPs in that language, and more specifically, they write SOPs in that language. This is where AI will become actually quite helpful to us. I. I could see it in the very near future. I mean, I have no reason to believe this, just a hunch. I would suspect in two to three years, maybe five years, every software that we're all using, these work management software will have the option to not only translate interfaces into multiple languages, you know, for example, Notion smartsuite, it'll do a great job translating your interface into different languages. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see content being able to be translated to the contents of your description, the contents of your comments, to have all of that per user. That will change this suggestion because that would be the better way to go about it. But until that happens, we need to remember SOPs are tools for our team. It's tools for the people who do the work. If the people do the work, do not speak English, don't write them in English, write them in their language and ideally have them be the ones writing them. Now, if you have a team that has multiple languages, you've got, you know, Mandarin, you've got Japanese, you've got. What else? What's another language? Spanish. You've got all three of those languages happening at the same time. Then this could be an instance where actually having multiple translations is worth it. Take the time. Like I think, what was it Debbie was talking about, AI before? Use AI for this, Write the sop or have them write the SOP in their language, then have AI translate it to the next language, take it to somebody on the team who speaks that second language and have them make sure it all makes sense because it's not going to be perfectly accurate. Then do the same thing for the third language. But these SOPs are tools for the people doing the work. So everything about them, where they are, how they're accessed, the language they're in, the colors they use, everything should be optimized for the person. The best way to do that, Daniel, that'll also save you time, is just stop writing SOPs for them. Easier said than done, but. But that will make sure they experience how important they are and you'll get better luck with buy in as well. And Mike, thank you for exactly. Having them translate and write also gives you a chance to check their understanding. That's the same thing with having them write them to begin with. The more involved these people are, you're seeing how their internal process is on the outside. You're taking what's in their mind and building a shared understanding. If it's just your understanding being written down, you're learning nothing from that. You're not. What is more helpful to you is to have their internal understanding written down and amalgamated. So you've got it coming from all these sources. Everyone's internal understanding is reflected in one document. And your job is just to look at all the chess pieces where they're laying and say, hm, all right. So Susie thinks this works a lot differently than John does. Time we kind of rally these together and come to a consensus. That is all. And I'm actually a little nerdy, but I'm working on writing like Process Driven the book just for internal use at this point. And one of the main headlines I kind of have in there is how process building in a small company especially is this Leviathan. It's all about getting what's an individual by default. Our Habits by default are so individual. Getting them to be a shared custom, shared habit, a shared belief is all this process building is about. And that comes from with having shared authorship. Yeah. So hopefully that's helped. Mike asks, love all this. What are your thoughts on taming the Wild west via process? When following process is only policy or police. Sorry. Via policy rather than access control. Hoping also lets you credibly push back on unfair criticisms about your process. That experience removes the idea that our company is special. That won't work here. Okay, let's start back at the first part. Taming the Wild west and going access control. It is challenging if you are in inflicting process upon another person. I want you to just imagine that we're doing one of these morning routine videos. Let's pretend I'm like a YouTuber saying, here's my 4am morning routine as a CEO because we need more of those on the Internet. Then I were to tell you that I wake up at 4am, I do a polar plunge. I go on a run for 10 miles. I eat this weird avocado toast, XYZ. XYZ. And I give, I outline all that stuff. And then I say, all right, by the way, because you watch this video because you're here, you have to do this too, starting tomorrow. Do it, you have to. Or you lose your job. That is not going to be received in the best way. And so even if that. The ultimate outcome that we want to get to is that everyone is doing polar plunges. The best way to get people to actually do the thing rather than feel shitty that they don't already, or to feel forced or to feel like disciplined is to build with consensus and practice some change management principles. And change management is a big topic. I am not an expert, but I think I am a practitioner with it. Change management is about identifying, here's where we are, here's where we want to be. The first step is we need to get consensus on where we are. Can we all agree this is what's happening? Yeah. All right. What's not so good about what's happening right now? Yeah, you don't, you don't like that you're stressed before vacation. You don't like that you can't hire an assistant because we don't know what the hell they do. We need that consensus. And then the second piece is consensus on where we want to go. This is where your point about, you know, oh, this wouldn't work in my business. What we want to focus on is not the method of getting There. If I were to say, hey, we need to start recording all of our sales calls, it might get pushed back. But if we talk about outcomes and say, hey, I want someone else to be able to cover for you when you're sick. If a client books an appointment and you're not here, we might be able to agree on that consensus. That is where I would start with any kind of wild west taming is. Where are we? Can we all agree on this? Good, bad and ugly? Where do we want to go? Why does it matter? Let's believe in it. Let's really feel like, ah, okay, this is an outcome we all believe in. Then all of a sudden bridging that gap is where the change actually happens. And if we're not doing this carefully, that bridge between this, you know, these two cliffs could be like a rickety rope. If we're just like, hey, we're just gonna switch on Tuesday, that's kind of like the YouTube 6am morning routine example. Or it could be a freaking highway. And the way you make it to be a highway from point A to point Z is through co authorship, through ownership along the way. If you have everybody on the team laying a brick in that path, it's going to be a lot easier to get them to cross the bridge because as they're building the bridge, they're crossing it at the same time. So for example, policy about tracking tasks. We can all agree that we want to be able to go on vacation without stress. We can all agree we want to be able to delegate. Well, hey guys, how are we going to delegate if we don't know what we do? Does anyone know? Do you want to just write down what you did every week at the end on Friday? That would be one path. We want to do that. That sounds kind of shitty. Do we want to. You can go through the different examples and one of your proposed solutions might be the thing that doesn't work in your industry. And maybe the decision is maybe we just try it, maybe you can come up with something better, but odds are your group can. If you're coming in as the expert saying, hey, here's a good way to bridge this divide. I've seen it work here often, that that will be good enough. And I'll also say, just as a final piece on this, on the second part about this won't work in my industry. One thing I like to remind people is that companies are groups of people and process documentation, policy implementation is about what I said before. It's taking habits that are individual clarity, Pulling them out of your head to make them shared habits and shared beliefs. That is basically what religion is like. If you don't extract it out there, that's basically what religion is. It's taking, like, your morals and beliefs and putting them out of your head, putting them in a book and getting a whole bunch of people to agree to them. Now, I think we can all safely say religion has done pretty good over the last few thousand years. It's. It's held its own and processes the same way. And just because the way religion works in, you know, South Asia might be different than how it looks in America doesn't mean it doesn't work the same way. Religions are able to be international across all cultures, across all institutions in the same way processes and the way we extract personal habits and turn them into shared habits and cultural values. It doesn't care whether you're an H VAC contractor or a dog trainer. Like, you're still people building shared habits. The biggest and hardest part of that is the people relating to other people. And as long as you're working in a team with other people, the same principles are going to apply. In fact, pulling things from other industries is going to probably make you more disruptive than just copying what all of your competitors do. But I know I'm preaching to the fire on that one. All right, I went down a whole rabbit hole there. I hope I didn't lose all of you. Let me know. Shauna. My boss has difficulty holding himself accountable when creating good habits, and that trickles down to another team member. How do I get my boss to be consistent and get other team members participating as well? I've watched your video on how to convince your boss you need a task management system. But how do I get them committed? So I think the. It's very similar to the conversation about change management, except when it's a boss, it's a little bit different. I don't do a lot on the channel about persuading external stakeholders because there's enough work to do on people who are persuaded and still just need to roll it out. But I think what you're hitting on here looks like I went away, but you're hitting on here is kind of the next frontier for our content. So let me see if I can put up. We'll just open up webcam here. Hey, welcome to my blurry picture. I don't know what happened there. We'll just keep it rolling. Welcome to my webcam. We're back in the old days. But how do I get Them committed. Shauna. What it comes down to is figuring out what they value and framing your content or framing your transition in that sense. So let's talk about a business owner. Usually they care about consistency, reliability, profitability, long term sustainability of the business, whatever it is. So how do we frame frame what we need to do in that lens to be motivating? Usually that will say something like, hey Bob, no, let's we'll be progressive. Hey Barb, you know, you aren't really practicing what you want the rest of us to around tracking what you do when you don't track that. I can't get things off your plate because I can't recognize where are you spending your time, what is pulling you away from the important work you have to do. And if I can't do that, I can never get you an assistant. I can never get things off of your plate. And we're kind of just trying to convince that person of the belief that point B the bridge we're trying to make is worth getting to. That's usually what it comes down to, especially with somebody who is in a leadership position where they are stretched really thin just by the structure and requirements of their role. For something to force them to change their habits. They need really good reason. For team members, often, you know, we have to, this is our job, this is our culture. That's enough of a reason. Because team members are often more used to being told what to do, for lack of a better word, and more patient with it. Business owners tend to be mad kids. We tend to not listen very well. So you have to work in whatever motivating factor works for that person. It could be an emotional, you know, argument of like, here's why this helps us all feel more peaceful and you more peaceful. It could be time, it could be money, it could be finance. But you need to really persuade them and it needs to be a deep found belief. It's kind of like getting people to go to the gym. It's really hard, if not impossible to get somebody to go to the gym because you tell them to. It's really easy to get people to go to the gym if they believe in it and they're committed to it, which is something you can't do for them or if they pay a personal trainer to force them to go to the gym. So Shauna, sometimes that's where process driven comes in. I mentioned before, we're trying to get into a little bit more, a little bit more agnostic. We're going to be launching something a little Bit more VIP at the end of the year. If anyone's interested, just shoot me an email. But we're going to be holding people's hands and holding them accountable as they go through applying prosthetic foundations. And one of the reasons why I want to kind of introduce this higher touch version is for situations like your boss here where they need the personal trainer who's not just going to give them the plan, like, hey, go do it, but the person who's going to check in with them every single week until it's done. And oftentimes by putting a little bit of money up front too. Like you would pay for a personal trainer. You'd pay process driven. You're going to pay more attention because you are paying some money for that accountability. So I don't know if that helps, but I hope it's close. What's your favorite brain food or snack while working? Dandy Blend. Everyone knew I was gonna say this on the team. So it's like a. A coffee alternative tea I'm obsessed with and that's what I. I drink during the day. So I've been pretty much off caffeine for a while. And yeah, that's about it because I pretty much work straight through. I don't eat too much until like two and then it's like full meal or fruit of any kind. Any books you recommend? Fiction? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Do I have it? I don't. I just stack in my. My luggage still from last weekend. I just finished reading the Shithead by Tim Grohl. I actually just put it in the newsletter. I think the next newsletter that's coming out, I put a mention of it for my email list. But it's a friend of mine, Tim, who wrote this fiction book about. I don't think he would describe it this way, but I describe it as the intersection between business ownership and like trauma and like almost a mental breakdown. And it's a fictional tale going inside the head of a person who's going through this. Anyone who's a business owner who just wants to feel very seen should read it. It's just also a really good ride. It's kind of like a mystery. It's. It's really good. So it's called the Shithead and I think it comes out in seven days. I. I know I got an advanced copy, but it's really, really good. Not just because he's my friend. It's actually just a good book. Innocent Dingo says, what shows are you watching these days? How's Norman. Norman's great. Norman's my dog, if anyone doesn't know, he's still doing well. Shows we watching Avatar the Last Airbender? Yep. Show from the 2000s, starting back in the beginning. I'm in season two of Avatar. Yes. I promise I am an adult, but enjoying my Y7 shows these days. Definitely. Yeah. Check out Shithead. It's great. Oh, thank you for the book suggestions. I love it. I love it. All right, I think we have a few more questions we can pull from the email that came in as well. But Daniel, let's tackle this. Now that we have the software management, I'm scared to make more bureaucracy. Instead to make things right away. Now that we have the software management, I'm scared to make things more bureaucratic. Instead to make things right away. I would say if you have your work management software, focus on just building the habits. I hear where you're coming from on the bureaucracy side of things. Build the good habits of like, we're going to write our tasks down. If. I know you said you were struggling with getting SOP buy in. If you don't have the what, who and the when down what who and when you're doing things, your tasks, your recurrences, then I would start there. Bureaucracy is going to be more on the discipline side of things and having layers of approval. Probably want to avoid that. But SOPs would be the natural next thing. Working on that. How would be the fourth step. So, Daniel, if you're feeling, if your gut is telling you, oof, this is gonna be too much to go into SOP land, don't do it. You have. This is your team, you know them best. Every single team is different. Take a step back. Live in what, how and who. Sorry, what, who and when I messed it up. So what, who and when? Get those three pieces down working perfectly for. Get it working perfectly for two months. When it's been working perfectly for two months, come back to how. But until then, give yourself a break. That's okay. Trust your gut. How do we hire you to consult for our team? What are your pricing options? So up until this live stream, the answer was really that there wasn't much. I'm not. At the time, I wasn't taking on any private clients. We are just working with people inside foundations. At the end of this year, that is. This is weird. Like, I wasn't planning on announcing this today. This is not official. Team's gonna be mad at me for saying this, but I. I don't have a filter at the end of this year. The hope is to add this in. The plan is to add this in. I'm hoping that we can start pulling in some VIP clients for some customized bespoke projects where we would start in January. So I'll be booking people through probably November, December just to vet people, get them prepped, get them ready and then be starting Some probably some 13 week projects. I like to give us a quarter because we can make a huge amount of progress quarterly sprints with folks in January. So yeah, and we also got this question emailed in. So if you are interested in this, you. I'm not supposed to announce this yet, but you can email us at hellorocessdriven co let me know your situation and we can talk more about whether this could be a good fit for you. Also if you're just like I don't need consulting but I want to figure out what you guys are talking about. Our foundations program is great. Our SOP workshop at the end of the month is fantastic. But if you're looking for more one on one VIP help, I am actually opening that up. So. Okay, noted. Noted. Shauna awesome. Next question. Can we build a task management in tandem as we are building our SAP library, should we have our square Stimpy library well underway? My suggestion is if your team. No, this isn't a suggestion, this is a rule. I'm gonna say it. What? Who and when? First. First and two months. At least that working perfectly before you move on. If you are teaching a team a new software two months, give them two months. If you are teaching people new habits months. All of those things need to become muscle memory before we start adding in SOP library stuff. Stuff it's fine for you like if you want to start building it, go for it. But I wouldn't roll it out to a team without that stagger. That's why when I'm working with like when we're going back into VIP projects, I'm looking at 13 weeks because it's a perfect timing to roll something big out and then have enough time at the end to roll a second layer. But I always recommend get the task management habits down first. Your structure it'll take. If you use our templates it'll take you five minutes. We've got some proven templates you can use, but it's the habits and the people getting used to them that really need to shift. I do not have any thoughts on Sweet Dash. Have not checked it out. I wish I had some but feel free to give me another question. Maybe I'll know the answer to that one. Isaac asked ClickUp question I've set up a very comprehensive signal flow for my creative agency. One of the things I have is a content calendar. How do I have every task shift relative to the start date? I can tell you how we do it. So when it comes to this, ClickUp Automations are a little funny. ClickUp has a remapping feature, as do many of the softwares that y' all use and love, where you can remap dates, push them back, push them forward. The way clickups work is a little funky in that you can push dates back and forward when they are created manually or you can push them back and forward by editing them in certain views, particularly Gantt view manually. But if you're automating your creation of tasks, in this case a content calendar Automations and remapping dates in ClickUp do not play together. They don't. It always requires manual work. So two options people do is either automatically create tasks with all of your steps involved and the very first task is move the date, move your parent task, it moves everything under it. The second option, which is actually what we do, is have a quarterly routine or monthly routine to just manually create each of the tasks. That gives you a double check and make sure that no date, no tasks are sitting in there with fake dates at any point in time. But those are your two options for shifting things around the start date by using remapping. Daniel what who and when? Do you have a video explaining these? Yes, the ultimate guide to systemize your business. It's the featured video on my channel if you go to it. Also if you join my email list it's like one of the first emails I will send you is kind of about our philosophy on that. Isaac oh I do not. I wish I did. If I did we might be in a very different situation here. But unfortunately click up to date does not. Yes, we'll. We'll leave that at that. No I don't. Matt White Hatter without threatening their job, how do I hold my subordinates accountable? By looking to carrots and to looking to things that actually matter to those people. So this is a YouTube comment I think on the confessions of a bad manager video. So I appreciate you asking it. Accountability is really just about pointing out what happened and holding people to promises. And it's I think I saw it in a Layla Hermosi video actually where she talked about how leaders real main job is accountability. So here's what accountability might look like. I'm Going to call with my. My person. Hello, thanks for joining me for the one on one. So last Thursday you said you were going to get all of the emails finished. How are they? Where are they at right now? That's it. So all I am doing for holding accountable is remembering or having a task for what they promised. If they created the task in your tool, they're making that promise public right there. You don't have to do extra work. But my human interaction is checking in on the progress of, of that promise. Every task is a promise, either your future selves, your teammates, or your clients. Some stakeholder is being promised something by creating a task. If it's not a promise, it shouldn't be a task. Yet that's a separate topic. And so holding people accountable just looks like telling them or calling them on their promises. You said you were going to cold call 20 people every day this week. Did you do it? I'm not checking to see, you know, I'm not checking their math. I'm asking them to declare what did or did not happen. Only if I have real reasons to mistrust would I ever verify that personally. But accountability just means pointing out someone's own promises back to them. You said you were going to go to the gym every time, every week, day this week, did you go to the gym? I'm not judging. I'm just asking for the status of affairs and then my job is all right, you didn't. Okay, what do you need in order to make that happen next week? Or maybe if it's more severe, maybe they just completely ignored the task they said they were going to do. They just didn't do it even though they promised. In those cases, you might start taking it into the discipline arena. And that's where it's like, hey, this is a company where your promises matter and XYZ will happen if you don't meet your promises. So this is warning number one. And that's where we're not getting into threatening jobs. We are making clear the expectations of performance and letting someone know when they fall beneath them. And these can be difficult conversations, but they're the most, they're helpful. They're intended to be helpful. So to tell somebody, hey, I expect you to meet your promises. You didn't and you didn't tell me that this divide can't exist for another week if it happens. Like, you know what I mean, three times you're out kind of thing. But you're just setting the expectation to making it clear how someone can meet it. That's not a mean thing. That's not threatening jobs. That's letting people know what they can do to be excellent in your eyes. So that could be something like, hey, when you promise something, I expect you to do it and not doing it's not okay. This is warning number one. But if you make a promise and you meet it or you made it, get it done early or you X, Y, Z, whatever things I want to see happen, that's awesome. That's excellent. That's what I want to see. And that's what's going to get you a, you know, a five out of five in your performance review. We're focused on the gap we want them to cross, not so much what happened or the emotions around what happened or threatening jobs. So yeah, Join the email list. You'll get a bunch of content this way and watch the video Ultimate Guide to Systemize your Business. It is on my channel. You can find it up at the top. Hey Leila, what has been your experience with Notion man? It's a Notion theme day today. I have a video called the best Task Manager Task Management tool for your personality type. Check that out. It does have a section on Notion and and it tells you a little bit like who I would recommend Notion for. One caveat I will put on that, which we did talk about earlier in the stream, is just Notion because it's so flexible, it works a lot better for smaller teams. I know Notion is trying to develop their team market, but it's just, it's really flexible and so that's great when you're small and you're you're making things up as you go. But as you become more systemized it can actually become a bit of a pain in the ass because you have to personally be the discipline forcing things to stay the same. Otherwise the editability can actually cause people to kind of go rogue without meaning to style asks. I often find different ways of doing the same thing to do list in calendar view vs. Trello vs. A to do app. Any rule of thumb when switching to a new platform when the existing one is good enough, yeah, don't. If the existing one is good enough, don't switch. Don't let the marketers convince you otherwise. Just just use the platform you're going to use. How you use it is way more important. It's probably 80% of the value versus the features which will have about 20% of little icing on top. So if it's working, don't change. Otherwise if you are going to change cold turkey Cold turkey. You know all the stuff I talked about about like gradual change management. Not for software, that's for the philosophy and the changes when it comes to software. When you're going to use it, you're using it. You're not using the old thing, you're using the new thing. Starting this day day, no exceptions, except perhaps for admins who need to have view access into the old records but it needs to be ripped the band aid. Otherwise you're defeating the purpose and undermining both tools. Yeah. Good tip, Lara. Thank you. Yeah, based on personality types. Absolutely. And perfect. Yeah, exactly. You need to have with Notion and even ClickUp, like that's towards the middle of the flexibility but anything on that flexible side, Coda, Notion, Airtable to an extent. You need to have almost like a disciplined person. Your project manager is going to be a lot more involved in enforcement than you would in a more rigid tool that does that enforcement for you. David, I've. I've decided on this one. Electric banjo for sure. I just. That just seems like what I play. Okay, so we talked about this one already. Probably not coming anytime soon. We continue to do for our clients. We have rapid reviews inside foundations and other things. I'm always happy to answer questions about ClickUp or SmartSuite or Notion or airtable or Asana or Coda or Todoist Trello. You name them, I've used all of them. But we're not going to be producing a lot more YouTube channel about YouTube content about them just because I don't want to continue to mislead people to think software is the answer. I'm sure we'll be mentioning software here or there as examples such as the video we did recently about how to digitize your forms. But it's not going to be our shining truth because I think there's so much work that needs to be done on the process lens that is more important. And there's tons of people now creating like software tutorials and copying stuff and I'm just going to let them like they can just create their how to tutorials. But I'd rather solve the bigger pain for our customers, which is like how do I actually use this thing regardless of the tool? How do I get people to do things by the due date? How do I get, you know, systemize what we do? That's the more interesting puzzle for me in this season. How do you get to help teams that require to use proprietary software due to strict regulations? For example, I can't use click over SmartSuite in my insurance brokerage or you know, you're using CLIO for your legal firm. Yeah, for small teams. If you are using a, like a job management platform, something specific to your industry. Maybe you're a roofing contractor who has to run all of your insurance claims through. I forget the name of the system, but that insurance system, that happens in the U.S. maybe you're a legal team that has CLIO for all of your matters and you need that for HIPAA compliant, maybe not HIPAA compliance, but you need that for privacy and security reasons. Maybe you're using Dubsado as your service provider because that's where you keep your, your source of truth, whatever it is. If you have software that you cannot change because of maybe your multinational company and they enforce it, or your industry requires it, or it's a legal thing, you still probably want a work management software. But the work management software you want to use is going to be for filling in the gaps. So filling in the gaps between where your existing tool can't cover. So if you're using job progress for your contracting business, it's great for tracking your ordering, tracking the jobs, tracking your invoices. But what you're not great at doing is tracking SOPs, your policies and your background office functions. So that's usually where you're going to insert a task management tool or a no code work management software like Notion, Asana, Trello, whatever, to fill the gaps. Those proprietary tools almost never actually serve the goal that of running your whole business. They usually suck at it. They're good at a few things, but having that work management tool to fill the gaps is really great. Common cases to fill the gaps would be for back office functions, hiring management, anything that is not really well done, like task management. Anything that's not well done in your proprietary tool. And sorry by the way, for looking to the wrong camera. When my camera died, I realized I've been looking at the wrong one. So thank you so much, Mariah for signaling me in the background. And if you guys are watching and you're like, what the heck is she doing? Well, we're rolling with it today, let's put it that way. When is it time to adopt an erm for your company? When you. It's. It's difficult to say right now, honestly. I know there's tons of ads on the like the entrepreneurs podcast network and on the radio. There's a lot of ads. I hear about ERMs and ERPs. I think they're. It's a struggling market from my point of View for small businesses. It's almost always better for businesses of less than 100 people, definitely for people of less than 50 to use no code tools instead. Lower upkeep, easier to create. And you've got tools like SmartSuite on the market now that are really coming at that erm lane where they are really rigid and structured and you have the customization that if you're willing to compromise on certain details like how exactly it looks and how customized the flow and interface is, you're just going to get a lot more for a lot less money, a lot less time and a lot less energy than if you went the erm lane. Again, it comes back to like, almost like notion where you need to have that systems administrator to make sure people don't go rogue. When you get into ERMs, you also need a systems administrator because like notion is too flexible. ERMs are usually too rigid and too hard to edit that you need to have a specialist just whose full time job is setting up and customizing and fixing errors in your flows. So that's why I usually tell people in SMBs to go to the middle. If you're a team of 3 to 100, go to the middle. You can hang out there for a really long time. Saves you a lot more money and keeps you from having to spend extra on just people who are pressing buttons for you. How do we politely manage a leader's expectation or say that it's time to take it slow when they tend to move from one software tool to the other? Send them my way. Well, maybe you can point out the costs. I mean this is kind of the opposite of convincing them to do something. Convincing people not to do something is to point out the cost of switching. I mean you're talking three months of pampered productivity to switch software when it comes to your core software, three months probably. And the history you can lose along the way, the headaches, the confusion, the time it takes people's time. Like you are losing hours every week of people learning that new software, especially if you're not getting a professional trainer and to teach people that new software quickly. So the best thing you can do is point out the cost. And if they're like, no, no, that cost is worth it if you can get them to get a second opinion from someone who is not in the pocket of a software company to tell them to just validate, like, is it really worth it? Get a third party if you can. She look at this tech stack, look at the reasons the person wants to switch and really Evaluate like, is that reason worth three months of losing 20% of your productivity? Is it worth. Takes a pretty steep advantage of a new software to be worth that cost. That's part of why people love the project management space from the SaaS side because it's so sticky. But it's something you really want to move carefully on because a lot of times people move because they think the software is holding them back from xyz, from being organized, from getting things done, from missing deadlines, but they just hate the interface when really it's habits and culture and process that is the problem. What else? Cool. Do you have a recommended app for an email manager? Missive for teams, for individuals? I. I don't spend a lot of time in that lane. I've used some of them, but not to the point where I would say, ah, this is the perfect one for personal use, I think. Francesca over at Key Productive has a lot of great content on email management tool reviews. Jeff sue also has a lot of content on email management. I would check out either of their channels. They do a lot more in that lane than I do. Yeah, I don't want to give you like an unqualified opinion. I was also wondering how to convince people to use a platform without looking weird. I signed work with Outlook once the analyst ignored it, preferred the old way of going back to someone's desk. Oh, of course they will. Of course they will. Um, it kind of comes down to ripping the band aid change management and building that bridge. You need to force flow to be forward. So if you are all in on like, hey, we're going to use Outlook tasks or Outlook work signed work there, then you need to go all in on it. Rip the band aid. It's very hard to rip the band aid when you can't just deactivate someone's account to go visit someone's desk. Right. So you need to get a bit more creative when you're in person. You really need to hold boundaries. So if someone comes over to you and asks you a question, you need to be willing to say, did you check the SOP first? Did you. Did you create a task in Outlook first? No. Okay, make the task and Outlook and then come back to me and then I'll look at it. You see how like we're forcing the redirect. It's a lot harder for this kind of stuff when you're in person because in person habits are a lot harder to break and can feel more incomplete comfortable for people than saying the same thing offline. A video I would recommend for you style is how to fix a disorganized business. It's a little cringy, but it's me acting out the experience of being in an in person work environment where these kinds of habits are undermining process and trying to reposition. So next up is Daniel. I want to thank you for your work. Oh, awesome. I. I appreciate that. I mean, if you, hey, if you enjoy this video, if anyone else does, please, please, like, comment and share. Those kinds of things make a huge difference in helping get the word out. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. Like, let's talk on there. The best thing, the big priority I have and why we're doing live streams like this is because I really just want to get the word out about what we're doing. Help people who are in that messy state of like, oh my God, what do I even do? I don't even know what to search on YouTube. I want them to get into our orbit so that they can start speaking this language as well. What do I think about automation? Super helpful. Definitely get things down with the what, how, who first, then do the why, or sorry, then do the the how. And once you've got all that cooking, you can come back and revisit the who. So maybe the who, rather than being a person, is AI or an automation, but I like to do that after the how is locked in because otherwise you can really be automating the wrong thing. Ah. Hey, Danielle, Good to see here. Thanks for joining my little party. Oops, sorry. Now I'm clicking things I shouldn't be. Sorry. My hands are off. All right. Shauna says I'm the VP of operations for a small company. How do I convince my boss we need a process consultant when he's paying me to run our operations? Oh, no. You guys are making me think I should publish the book. I'm, like, working on behind the scenes. But process and operations, in my view, are different things. Like, they are different disciplines. Operations is a lot more generalist. It often requires a lot more skills around people. In most companies, operations touches on finance, people, legal, and just the overall project management. All four of those things are in one space. Process is both above and below operations in the sense that it works inside the processes of project management, but it also guides the overall business strategy. It is very hard to be. It's not hard to be both, but it's rare to be both. They're two separate skill sets. They require two separate sets of experience. And you can absolutely. Shauna you probably know you might be a master of both of these disciplines, but to get the reps in, in each of these disciplines, it would take many years. And, you know, why would you pay for someone? It's kind of like, let's imagine you were marketing ahead of marketing, right? And you need to run paid ads. Would it be easy to persuade your boss to say, hey, I run all of our marketing, I, project manager, all of it. I manage all of the people, but I don't know shit about paid ads. Can I hire this paid ads consultant to give us a strategy in almost all cases that that boss would say, oh, yeah, because I see it two for one return on that. The problem with process consulting is it's also a very big return. We're dealing with intangibles. In many cases, what you're getting from a process consultant is costs that don't happen, dollars that aren't spent. It's. It's a ghost almost. So unlike an ad, where you can see the, you know, the return on ad cost, you see that return with numbers, with operations and the process side of it specifically, we're seeing negative return. It's invisible. It's stuff that's not happening. So something we're working on at Process Driven that might help is we actually are starting to kind of create our own original data set. So if any of you have taken the snapshot, we can put the chat in the. Or the link in the chat. But we have a snapshot audit we're doing for the public, and we're also doing it for our clients to a greater extent. And it's allowing us to start to quantify what operations realities are. And then if you fix your operations, what could the benefits be in financial terms? Right now, when you take the snapshot, it'll give you kind of a score based on just best practices, like how far you are from them. Level two, the next place we want to go and where we're going to be going with VIP clients is quantifying that. So, for example, one of the metrics you'll see when you go through that snapshot, it'll ask you how many mistakes have happened over the last 12 months or six months or whatever number you can report on. Imagine getting that number down to zero. That is what could happen. And maybe not zero, maybe like two. That kind of reduction in mistakes and the amount of time and stress associated with them is what can happen when you start building out processes. But it's hard to say, oh, that's worth $2 million until you actually start going into an individual company and looking at what their mistakes have been and how much those have cost them in terms of time and money. So how do we persuade people, get operational stuff, get their mindset right about. Is this just like marketing? It's just a negative, like an invisible return in some ways in the sense that it's things that aren't happening rather than things that are. And to help them understand the value of that, we need to measure what is happening. So that Snapshot is a great tool and we're, we're working on making this a lot better in the future because I feel you, we definitely have a lot of folks that are struggling with that balance. And thank you, Danielle. Talking about stopping today. That is our SOP workshop. We have at the end of the year. Definitely. If anyone wants to get their sops done, join us. We're going to unlock a library of 200 this year. So raising the stakes. You join, you'll get 200 written SOPs as long as you participate in the workshop. So pretty cool. I don't use a traditional content matrix. If I did, I would gladly share it, but also might not be that helpful because I am an operations person who markets, not a marketer who knows operations. So hence like the camera dying and these like I, I'm learning marketing. But I would say if you're really looking to get a solid content matrix, you're probably better off going to some of the marketers on YouTube. I can, I'd be happy to share what I use in a video, but it's not my specialty. Good. Awesome. Glad to hear this. We need a theme. Hey, I'll take suggestions. Oh my gosh. All right. What do you think of using ClickUp as a database for my products? I connect with sheets. I am. I generally prefer, prefer not putting data in two places. So if you have a database in sheets, keep it in sheets probably and link to it. If there's a reason it needs to be in ClickUp because you need to use roll ups and relationships, you need to use it in forms, whatever it might be, then it can certainly work. I think ClickUp, it has a lower threshold than other tools in terms of how big you can go with data sets before it becomes really unmanageable, like 150 or so. If you have more than 150 records in that database, I would say probably go somewhere else. You can use it in ClickUp, but it's just going to be a clunkier experience because as of right now, ClickUp requires everything to be a task, which is a little bit funky. And again, so sorry, guys, we're looking at the wrong camera for like 10 minutes of the stream. We definitely like labels, loyals, whatever we're gonna call this. You all are. You all are real ones for sticking with me through this funky stuff. So do we have any other questions? I know we've had a bunch that came in via email and comments and I know we're running long, but, like, I just want to hang out with everybody. I want to make sure everyone's questions get answered. So, Daniel, we got yours down. Let's see. I'm gonna get through the rest of these here. Oh, okay. Emmett asks, what are your. What is your experience in the space and what are practitioners backgrounds? Job titles vary. Should I just get hired and apply Six Sigma, whatever org I joined? So this kind of touches on the other one. Yeah, process stuff. People tend to muddle it with operations. They're very different skill sets. Tell you what, I'm a lot better at process than I am at operations. Ask our project Manager. Job titles will vary. That's why I think job titles are the stupidest thing. And I wish, I wish as a society we could just get past job titles and just actually list. Here's what this job does instead of these, like frou frou job descriptions that tell you nothing. But what you really need, Emmett, is to find a job where the job contents are. This doesn't matter what it's called. It might be called ea, Executive Assistant. It might be called Operations Manager. It might be called Project Management. Look at me. Looking at the wrong camera Again, it might be called something else. But what matters are the job duties. You're looking for a position where you have the authority and the culture. Culture for making structural changes to how work happens. This is probably going to be best indicated by the team when you're interviewing with them, asking them questions. I remember a pretty significant job interview I went to was with the team and it was with three people. The owner and like the CEO, founder, and then two people who were doing the job that I was interviewing to do. A product management job. And I went to this, this interview and the questions I kept asking were, you know, how do you handle disagreement? How do you decide what to do? How do you decide the best way to do things? Basically probing into this question of process and innovation. And I noticed that every time I went to ask a question, they would both look at the founder and then the founder would answer even when the founder left the room. Every time I asked a question, there would be this deference in the way they answered of like, oh, well, we usually, we, we never really disagree. We just end up usually as shoot. People just really have a clear vision into what we have going on and that, you know, helps with things. And ultimately, like, I decided that. Oops. I decided that that is not a path I wanted to go down and pulled out of the interview. And I think that's where you really need to be careful about where you want to work in the culture more than the job title or the responsibilities. So what else we got? I grew my business based on my personal brand. If I start delegating areas, is this going to ruin everything I built up? I don't know. I'm going to ask you guys here, many of you on the stream, like, you're experiencing me running the stream. You've probably talked to my team in the inbox. You replied to an email. You might have met Mariah, who's our project manager and marketing coordinator. Like, has it ruined your experience to talk to other people? I think not. I mean, to me, delegating areas is about getting things done better than what you can do so that you can do other things better than what you could do otherwise. So I'm able to make better YouTube videos because Mariah helps me with answering emails in the inbox. I'm able to. Or tracking ideas for content. I'm able to, you know, focus more on the. The book of processor and foundations because I'm able to. Because I'm able to not have to track every content idea we come in. Mariah just puts them on the project list. Just giving examples of Mariah because she's here. But no, I, I think we just need to be careful about what we're doing and be honest about it. I see a lot of people having their team members get access to their email and pretend to be them. I have a really hard time with that. I very like, I have like one or two instances where like, that's acceptable for this, that or the other. But, like, very clear of who is writing. And like, one rule we have internally that helps with this is trying to avoid we language wherever possible. So people aren't speaking on behalf of the company, they're speaking on behalf of themselves as an individual. So when, you know, whatever it is, we want to make it in first person. We're speaking as individuals, but we are all associated and choosing to work together. So anything else? Why is there no overdue automation event in ClickUp? Yeah, I, I got nothing for You. I know it's been on their candy board for a while, but I don't have any say over what they choose to do, unfortunately. Shauna, do you have a coupon code for the Stop in a Day workshop? We have the link to the workshop which we can get and put in the chat. If you are a member of Indie Ops Network, our back end membership, you do have free access to that so you don't need it, but otherwise we'll put link in the chat. I think we have a few more questions here. How do you recommend we approach hiring? What platform should we find leads? Should I be involved or or hire a good person for HR that will help me? You should watch the video of Confessions of a Bad Manager. I think it's what it's called, something like that. Or 11 rules for managing a Small Team that outlines my entire philosophy of what I've learned so far. I am not an EHAR expert. I am not. Please don't take my this is a good standard for everything. Don't take my advice on anything. You should not trust me for anything. But if you do, maybe not about hiring. I have my own personal perspective. If you watch that video, you'll get what I've done works well for me. I also have a referral in that video for the HR person that I've chosen to use and I explain why I use that person in the video. So if you do go that way, say hi to Vanessa for me. She's amazing, but I think it depends on your team size and your personal skill skill set. Are there any other I'm trying to make sure we got all of the questions that wanted to come in. What is the membership? Indie Ops Network is our kind of experience membership. Most people who go through foundations and finish it or anything. But if you do, maybe not about hiring. I have my own personal perspective. If you watch that video, you'll get what I've done works well for me. I also have a referral in that video for the HR person I've chosen to use and I explain why I use that person in the video. So if you do go that way, say hi to Vanessa for me. She's amazing, but I think it depends on your team size and your personal skill set. Are there any other Trying to make sure we got all of the questions that wanted to come in. What is the membership? IndieOps Network is our kind of experience membership. Most people who go through foundations and finish it are then kind of moving into that back end. That's for people who have all of their systems and processes together but are looking for continuous improvement. And it's, it's a virtual co working space is what it is. So people who are running established teams, they've got their systems and processes in place. They're at like that pretty experienced level where they're, they're pretty much my peers at this point. We have a virtual co working space where those people can come together, swap notes. We have meetups, we do webinars each month where we talk through different processes. It's like, like the Advanced Guild for operators. That is our Indie Ops network. It is on our website. You can find it on the Work With Us area. Do you have any tips for people with adhd? I'm a solopreneur and I'm new to ClickUp and a bit overwhelmed at first. I would say I have a hard time with this question because we have a ton of clients who have ADHD or some like similar variation and I am not somebody who is trained in working with people with different neurotypes. However, our coach certainly is. Sarah is more than qualified in this regard and I've actually asked her like, how should I respond to this? Like this is not, I don't have the accreditations, even though you do. What I would say is based on working with people in that niche. Starting simple works well regardless of your brain wiring, the way you approach due dates and prioritization is going to probably look a little bit different depending on how you are performing Wired. But the advice we were giving earlier on of starting very simple, getting the what, who and when down and then focusing on the how, that is the, the same suggestion I would make for people with ADHD versus people who have some other kind of variation. What I would just say is be very cognizant of what works for you in other arenas of life. A lot of times I see people with ADHD who are actually really, really good at system building because they've found ways to build systems in other areas of their life that just kill it for them. Whatever that method is, whether it's, you know, things on your calendar or having a pomodoro system, whatever you found works for you. Build your system around that rather than the other way around. And with ClickUp specifically, avoid overbuilding one list. That's it. That's it. Do that for months and months. If you're at all worried about being burnt out with ClickUp, I would say instead of just the two month rule that I said for everybody else here, I would go up to four Months. And then I would shake it up a little bit. So, next one. What strategies can we implement to ensure that all employees adhere to and respect processes? Oh, okay. So we talked about this one a little bit. This is about positive reinforcement, making clear what the change is, why it's worth it for them. And yeah, see what we talked about. Previously on Change Management. I think we actually hit this one thanks to some of the live questions as well. I'm gonna hit the. Yeah, that one. So this came into the inbox before, and I promised I would answer it here, so I want to make sure we get to it. I'm a one person in many roles in a very small business that is financially bleeding. I feel constantly anxious. Am I right to believe I can't fix this without being involved as an insider? Now, this was a much longer message that actually boiled down to this. So for you, I didn't want to put your personal name here, but for you watching this, I really feel your pain. I read through your message multiple times, and I'm so sorry you're feeling this way. I'm sorry that you feel like your boss is kind of leaving you high and dry. As someone who is also a boss, although I struggle with that title sometimes, most bosses, they're also hurting, especially if the business is financially bleeding. If it may not be intentional, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt you. But, like, that might be a helpful mindset to just realize, like, they're also hurting right now and they're also scared and they're also anxious, and so they're having a hard time protecting you from that, even though that is in many ways their job. I know I haven't been perfect about that either. So your question, how can I fix this when I'm one person doing everything? How can I do it? The best thing you can do is to do less. I think you mentioned in your email you're doing accounting and bookkeeping and social media management. This, that, and the other. If at all possible, convince your boss of the value of focusing your time. Prove it right. Prove that turning off social media is not gonna have any impact on the business. Prove that, you know, whatever it might be, whatever you can reduce is the best, best thing you can possibly do, both for your sanity and stress levels and ultimately the business's financial stability. Because what you need to be able to say is, hey, I want to cut out this 50% of my job, but I want to focus that 50% on this thing that I think will help us overall big picture. And if you don't know what that big thing is. Start with that. Hey, boss, what could I be doing? Like, If I had 10 more hours a week, 20 more hours a week, what could I be doing that could be really help move us forward? You know, if they don't know, that's okay. Figure it out on your own. But then that becomes your pitch as a boss. I mean, that's what I'm doing all the time. I'm trying to think, okay, how can I focus this person's time? If someone could bring that to me, that is gold. That is exactly what we need in a moment where you're financially bleeding, because unfortunately, hiring a social media manager in your case, that's not. That's not viable in a financially bleeding business. Oftentimes we need to go the opposite. We need to narrow. I have a video coming out, I don't know when, maybe it's already out, where it talks about reducing capacity or. Right. Sizing capacity. And it follows the story of actually behind the scenes at ProcessDriven. Recently, I found myself overwhelmed with too many tasks. And it was. I know it's a different situation, but it's very similar. And I had the awareness to say, you know what? I'm going to record this. Click. And recorded my kind of journey through. Oh, my God, I'm so overwhelmed. I've got no time for anything to fix the business because that has happened to me, even as a business owner, multiple times throughout the set. Like, we're going on seven years here, this. This journey. And I think even though we're in different positions, I think you might find that that video is helpful for some tactical strategies on how to actually dig out of the hole and reallocate energy, because that's ultimately what you need to pitch. Hey, I'm gonna focus. I'll reduce your stress level because it gives you direction, it'll reduce your workload, and it'll allow you to focus on things that actually drive results. Because I bet your boss is also frustrated too. Maybe not at you, but just in general. Anything else? How can I reduce complexity in business? Same thing. Do less. That's the best response I got for you. What training or certifications do you recommend from others starting out in this field? It is. It would be hypocritical for me to recommend any because I don't have any. I think the best. I mean, besides my training. Right. Process foundations is great, but no, I don't think any training or certification is going to properly prepare you for what it really means to do this work, I think the best training you can have is become a project manager and move up to a head of like get more involved in management, get into the strategic side of management, learn a bit, a little bit about process from that project management level. And if you, you'll have a choice as you grow as a project manager to go into operations, meaning build HR and financial skills in that full stack or go this way and get into process, I would kind of choose wisely at that divide, but I would start with project management and get that down. Training and certifications, the school of hard knocks is what I would highly recommend. Yeah, yeah, I certainly do. How do you go about explaining it to them? I have this YouTube channel. No, no. It's incredibly difficult. I think this is my, my personal biggest challenge with process driven in general is I have a tendency to go into the weeds. But people don't even know the name of what this stuff is called. Organizational process stuff. Like kudos to you. Most people don't even know that. They just think, oh, sops. I guess the only term they might be familiar with and even then, not always. And so yes, it's incredibly difficult. Something that we have as a challenge and something I'm having to learn as I try to learn to become a marketer is how to focus more on the end pain and less on this actual subject matter. So you'll see some new videos coming out on the channel of, you know, what are some examples? Like how do I save time when I have no time? Like how do I find more time? Basically the answer is using process. But we're trying to focus more on marketing to the pain point, which is obvious if you're a marketer as one who is not. This was something I had to learn and get others to teach me. So that's what I'm trying to do to get that awareness. The second thing is all of you, like if you each shared this with one person, that would be amazing. Like you, one business nerd in your life say, hey, watch this channel. It has a lot of stuff about how to do what you do better. That is the biggest thing right now. We are all organic, all word of mouth like these videos. It's all organic content marketing. Hoping people find this. So that's been our first challenge and how do we explain it to them? Like where their friend. Like they're not an idiot. I have a problem with a lot of the process channels out there right now. There aren't too many, but the ones that are there have a vibe that's not, it's not what I would want to watch. And so when creating these videos I am trying to explain my specific breed of nerdiness to people who are hyper intelligent in their own field, but just don't get this stuff. And I think that perspective is important to our content. It's also helpful because I am a young business owner, I'm a first time founder, I'm an idiot in most regards. So it's very easy for me to when making YouTube videos to treat you, the viewer, the same way I would treat a client. Meaning my clients are all super impressive. The clients I work with are amazing. They're huge. Like they're running big businesses, they're running big teams, they're super smart and I am, I look up to them. But I am really good at this one specific area and I hold my own in that small little lane and I speak very like with authority for this lane that I know very well. But everything else, like I want to treat you as someone who's extremely knowledgeable in your lane and I think that is very different than what the dynamic is on most of YouTube around this where a lot of the content is. I've, you know, I've done this, that and the other and I'm so great. That's why you should listen to my advice on ABC because I'm awesome. Look at how amazing I am. Look up to me. I try to kind of flip that script and so that's my approach. I wouldn't burn any bridges there. I more power to them. It's just not my cup of tea. No, probably not. How do I choose a task management software? Watch my task management software for your personality type video or hang out on my email list because I don't know when but we're hoping to release kind of a task management software picker just to help you kind of shortlist which tool might be the best choice for you in the future. That's a great choice. Or also like check out YouTube. There's a lot of comparison videos out there that'll help you choose. But really I would focus on what works well for you offline. Oh, last one. Okay. I wanted to say EOS is a registered trademark. Eos, blah blah blah. Because they keep. Anytime we mention eos they send us some kind of like scary letter saying you can't mention us. I promise guys, we're not trying to take your table, Mark. We're just talking about your thing. Okay. Anyway, EOS or Traction, this way of operating your business is compatible to process Driven. So like I talked about before, where there's these people that know so much and I just have my little lane here, a little corner where I really know a lot about process documentation. Same thing with eos or with scaling up or with. Or with. Or with or with. When it comes to process Driven's approach, our approach is about how to document knowledge, make it a shared institution, put it in a place people can access and make task management tie into it perfectly. So tasks and how you do things, that's our main lane. The software use is usually how that's embodied, but we're focused on the tactical, the practical, the process level. Many of these frameworks like us and scaling up, they do, they do broader business strategy, they focus more on planning, they focus on the big picture and systemizing at that level. And that's fantastic. We touch on that a little bit. But really the way they combine together is these books, us tracking these frameworks, they stop once they hit process, they stop once they hit practical. Clockwork, E myth, you name it. They give you these broad mindsets and they're like, all right, go systemize. And they just, because of scope, they don't have time to get into, okay, how do you actually structure an sop? How do you use it in day to day life? How is it linked together? How do you teach people the way to interact with the process? How do you build that culture? That kind of nitty gritty stuff is beneath these books, frankly. And we pick up where they left off, we plug in. Like when you go through their framework and you're loving it, you're living your best traction life, love it. You're going to find that your standard work list doesn't give you enough details as to how to actually accomplish that standard work. There's going to be some pieces that are just kind of left for you to figure out when you reach that point. That's where we plug right in. We build out more detail and pick up where they left off. Not at all competing with their broader philosophies. Whether you use EOS or not, or scaling up or not, or whatever it is, we plug into it by giving you more guidance and structure on some proven ways to tactically make process and systems work in your team itself. So, yeah, I hope that makes sense. I can give more context on this and I think I should probably at this point I'll go through these questions, but this last call, I know we went half an hour long, but I just wanted to talk to everybody today. All right, so Daniel says We are virtually run nonprofit organization. We've grown organically to 11 people. Congratulations. That is huge. How do I introduce a tool like ClickUp and get adherence? I think I would have to have established SOPs. So no pushback. Well, you can join our foundations program. I know I'm putting that out there. That's. We will guide you through the steps and give you templates for that. That is one option. Next cohort is in November. If you want a diy. More power to you. I would probably not go with established SOPs in the sense of having instructions for how to do work unless you already have them in place. Now, if you're just moving them from one place to another, by all means go for it. If not though, I would hold off. I would set up ClickUp with a basic task structure, very simple. We give you one in foundations. You can make one on your own, whatever works. And get your team to use it regularly for two months and kill your old system immediately. After it's working smoothly for two months, there's not constant questions. Then introduce SOPs. So this is again like the what? Who? When all that happens first, then two months later, how. And that's where the SOPs come in. If you are already more advanced where you're using SOPs every day already, then you can. If you want to jump the gun, you can just have it all in there for sure. Launch it fast, kill the old system immediately and again, let it sit for two months before you expand upon. But yeah, so I. I think you'll be in a good spot. What else do we got? Style asks. I have tried creating an SOP for brainstorming R D and innovation. When I take the emotions out of it, it is ineffective and dry. How do you include emotions in an sop? In the step names and in the outputs. So for example, I have a video coming out end of the month where I'll show like how to create an SOP for customer process for processing customer feedback. I promise I can speak and one of the outputs is as a result of this process, our customers were heard. We feel confident that we've. When I take the emotions out of it, it is ineffective and dry. How do you include emotions in an sop? In the step names and in the outputs. So for example, I have a video coming out end of the month where I'll show like how to create an SOP for customer process for processing customer feedback. I promise I can speak and one of the outputs is as a result of this process, our customers were heard. We feel Confident that we've heard their, their qualm and we've taken action appropriately or something like that. That is an emotion based statement, that's a sentiment, that is an output of the process. The other place you can put emotion into a process is in the step name. Each step in an SOP is a mini result. So you could have step two of, you know, the feedback one saying you read, you've heard their, their qualm and we've taken action appropriately or something like that. That is an emotion based statement, that's a sentiment, that is an output of the process. The other place you can put emotion into a process is in the step name. Each step in an SOP is a mini result so you can have step two of you know, the feedback one saying you read, you've read the feedback and you understand both what was said and what wasn't said and hear it deeply. So here we're adding some emotion and some impact statements into the result we expect for that step. That's probably where I'd include it. When it comes to the actual tactical, kind of like asking how to make MapQuest emotional. Kind of hard to do. I don't know how to make your plum pudding recipe emotional. Not the easiest. Usually it's going to be the result stage where you can really add that emotion in. And I would really question like why do you need the emotions? Usually it's because you need a certain output. Just write that down, that'll capture it. Darren asks, how did you start? Well, I started just a little bit ago by looking at the wrong camera. No kidding. Started in this. In 2018, I was working a job in fintech. It was the job I always had wanted. After being a first generation college student, I was like, I want to get out of small town America. I want to go international. I got the dream job. Setting up for the dream, like move overseas. It was everything I thought I wanted. And I realized when I checked in with myself, kind of hated it, which was a shock. Quit with little plan and a nest egg and I was looking for other jobs. I couldn't qualify for any of them because corporate America cares about pieces of paper and I don't. I care. You know, I, I, I wanted a job that would push me and every job that I thought would push me required certain pieces of paper or certain years of experience that knowing what I know now, I would have just, I should have just applied anyway because I know, I know now many people would do that. But I did the classic female thing of oh, I Don't meet every single qualification. So I'm not going to apply. Let me go try to become qualified. So I considered going back for an MBA or a PhD or learning some other way. And I decided to learn some other way rather than doing an mba. I started a business thinking I would run it for two years. I specifically started as like a virtual assistant, just doing odds and ends. And my thought was I'll do it for two years, learn the ins and outs of business. By then I'll have, you know, the five years experience to get the mid level job I wanted, apply for that and get out of this along the way. I never stopped learning. And I had one conversation early on with somebody in the town I was in at the time and they were like, Layla, you graduated from this school, like you're doing this thing. You, you should not be a virtual assistant. I remember that very early on, like you should not be working for $12 an hour, you know, or whatever it was. It was really low at the time. You, like you, you are capable of so much more than this. And I remember that call conversation very distinctly over Thai food. And shortly after I shifted into all right, I'm going to push myself a little bit. Do something that's not just hands to keyboard but actually uses my brain a little bit. Got into some consulting and tech setup work, setting up systems and so on. And then it kind of organically Grew. Started a YouTube channel as a free video storage tool. I did not plan on starting a YouTube channel at first. It was just clients asked me questions so I recorded answers and sent it to them via YouTube link. Which is funny in hindsight. And that started booking out my consulting. I raised the rates in consulting, sold out all of those. Continued to grow on YouTube. Sold out all of my rest of my consulting. Raised the prices to the point where I was like this is absurd and people kept paying it and I was like okay. So at that point moved into a group model, a membership and 2021 I want to say and have been running that ever since through our group program foundations. As boring as it sounds, I've been pretty much running the same exact service just it switched from one on one to group since 2020, 19, 2020. And yeah, I've just been doing the same thing for five years. But my shock and horror and excitement, it has not gotten boring and I have not learned enough to feel like I've graduated from my mba. So I just doing it. And a piece of advice I got early on is to pick, pick something you want to be known for. Greg, thank you for that feedback. And the other piece is to pick a problem that is so interesting that you could spend 10 years solving it and not be bored. And around year three, I really realized that this topic of how do you systemize a small team? Is the question I could spend 10 years working on. And that shifted my mindset around year three when I realized, all right, this is more than a DIY mba and, yeah, the rest is history. Now I now I've learned how to market this thing. That's how I got into what I do. And now slowly, like now, I'm learning how to market this business as well. Do I have a video? I have a video on budgeting in ClickUp. I don't think ClickUp is the best for large data sets. I will say that. But for most of the things you're talking about, I'd probably be looking at a routine task list. So, yes, we do have some videos on routines inside of ClickUp and a day inside my ClickUp video. We'll show you some of that. Jeffrey asked any tips on how to make SOPs followed by teams out in the field? Jeffrey, I love this question. I was talking with my husband, I want to say, sitting over there, I want to say it was yesterday, we were talking about, like, man, I wonder if I should start working with contractors again. I was telling him, I was like, ma', am, I would be down to work with contractors. Sorry, I'm, like, looking at you while you're here. I'd love to work with contractors again. Because one thing I left out of my story I just talked about is my first clients. My very first client was my husband. I launched or helped him launch his contracting business. And then when I got into the VA world, I worked mainly with contractors. And we were talking yesterday about, man, should I focus more and do some more with contractors again, Because I love the trades. I love tradesmen married to a tradesman. And I just feel like I love the no vibe of that niche. And one challenge is the field work. It's. There are very different requirements for them. So when it comes down the field, here's my current conventions. If I dive deep into the world of contractors again, I'll probably have to come up with a more sophisticated answer. But right now, I think sops for the field are really a job of a foreman. And unfortunately, it's very challenging to actually have SOPs be something that, you know, your. Your crew members are referencing. It's just impractical. Like, I mean, I don't know about you like, but when I like working on our house and we're like putting mortar in, I not going to take my phone out of my pocket and check, oh, what's, you know, take the iPad to check what I need to do next. It's just impractical physically. Also, most or many job sites don't have Internet access reliably. And so how do you navigate that? My solution is to take your foreman and have them have sanity checklists. That's what I call them. Another word is to just say like QA checks. We're at the end of each task, whether the task is to tell the crew what to do or the task is to walk through with the building inspector, to practice for the building inspector or to do a final check on the tile. Whatever the task is, when your foreman is doing that check, they are the ones doing pulling up the sop and their focus is less about the steps to manage it because unfortunately it's very hard for them to be able to really check that in the field. It's going to be more on the outputs. Are these 20 things done? Yes. No. Almost like glorified punch lists. If you're familiar with that punch list at each phase, whether it's a task or something else, that is kind of the best thing I've seen work well for trades. And when it comes to the actual sop, like the how that training is usually happening before they're out in the field. I've worked with a roofing contractor where we built out a whole training app for their team to actually train them. Like, oh, here's how we do roofs, here's, here's the pitches, here's the terms you need to know. And they did that as a boot camp camp like once a year they would get everyone together and do like boot camp on, you know, the, the matter how we do things. They would train people for one week, fly them all in and then they're back in the field. But on a day to day, getting your phone out of your pocket when you're, you know, slinging mud, like, it's just very difficult to do physically. So I would say the foreman and then combine that with real time synchronous training events of some kind or a training course on the subject matter because it just, it's very hard to do while you're in the field. All right, last, last questions, last questions. I'm gonna stop after this and you all can come up with the name of what we're going to call we need an Audience name by the end of this stream. Otherwise we're just gonna go with the PDAs, and that's a little weird. King Kun says hi from India. Will it be practical for me to join your courses? Certainly could be, depending on what you're looking for. We have. The main course we have is Foundations. T talked about it a lot in the stream. It's how to systemize your business from A to Z. Implement it inside your work management tool. Right now it only supports ClickUp and SmartSuite, but we're looking at some VIP stuff at the end of the year in more software. So if it aligns with your goals, for sure. If you don't have the budget to invest in systemizing your business, then it's probably too early, and that's okay. A good way to tell is to take our snapshot assessment, King, and you can take that assessment. It'll tell you whether it's too early or too late. And then it's up to you to figure out if financially it's worth it. But yeah, and if it's not, watch the YouTube channel. That's fine too. Marina says if someone wants. Oop, my bad. If someone wants to start learning more about systems and processes, where should we start? I mean, just for fun. Just for fun, check out my video on books to learn business systems. It's an old video on the channel, but it's. It's still good. And check that out on the channel. Just search on my channel for the word books and you'll find it there. Practically, if you have a team right now, if you're working on something, join foundations. I've been making a few references throughout this. Not my book. I don't have a book yet. But internally, we do have a philosophy. We have best practices. We have beliefs and frameworks around process and system building. We teach all that inside our living and working book, which is Process Driven Foundations. It opens in November. It opens a few times a year. And yeah, so that would be the place to learn. Like my belief system and how we suggest doing it today, but on a more theoretical view. Watch that video on business system books. Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like we've got all the questions answered. Everyone who emailed in, we got you down. Yay. Awesome. And we've been going for almost two hours. So how we doing? Anyone still with me? No. All right, well, I guess the. The PDAs are wrapping up. We will have to come up with a better name for this. Let me know in the chat before we wrap up. If you enjoyed this kind of live Q and A. I know this is the first time I've just gone live and chatted with you all in a while. And if this was helpful to you, I want to know, like, share this with people. Like this video. Leave comments on the video, not just this live chat. Like go down to the video and say something in there. It doesn't matter what. It can just say, norman is so cute. Who is my dog. It doesn't matter what you say. But that'll just give us some read as to whether or not this is something we should do again. And if you're impatient and you're like, yeah, I want you to do this again, heads up that I do these kinds of live streams twice a month for our foundations clients. So right now I think it'll be ending at the end of the year. So if you want to get into it, get in there now. But yeah, I already do these quite a bit. We just don't do too much on YouTube, so. And yes, come up with the fan base name. Let me know in the chat. Leave comments below. And thank you all for Jo joining the slides. I'm going to wrap it up here, so thanks everyone. Bye.