Can Your Business Run Without You in 2025? LIVE Systems Q&A with Layla

If you are just joining me, welcome. If you're on the replay, feel free to skip ahead. But we'll be starting for the live crowd. Let's pretend it's a crowd. We'll be starting live in about nine minutes or so. And if you're here, say hi in the chat. Let me know you're here because otherwise, well, then I'm just talking to myself in a room, which I guess is what actually is happening anyway. Right? We'll be starting in nine minutes. It Sam, if you're watching on the replay, skip ahead. This isn't really that fun, but if you're here live, follow Charlie's example and say hi. Let me know where you're listening from. Let me know that you're here. And if you haven't already, feel free to submit a question for today. We have a form that we emailed out this morning or the chat. You know, it's right there. Happy to answer any questions that are on your mind. It we'll be starting in a little over five minutes. But thank you to those of you on the email list who sent in your questions this morning. So that way I didn't have to just talk about the weather. That is not a fun thing to do. But if you're not on the email list and you're like, how do I ask a question? You can use the chat here or just get on the email list. So that way we can make sure your question is prioritized for the next ama, which is happening on a date I don't remember. We'll be starting in about five minutes. Sa Sam Foreign if you're just joining us, we'll be starting in three minutes. Ask your question if you're on the email list. You got an email this morning and you can put your question in. If you are joining us live, follow Paul's example and just put it in the chat. I can't find half the books that I thought I had on my bookshelf. Paul, so looking forward to answering yours from memory, which always serves me so well. We'll be starting in about two and a half minutes, folks. Sam it Sa Sam. Sa Sam as this music's coming in, some of you have been around the channel for a while. Be a bit of a throwback. But here we are back for another live Q and A. A whatever you want to call it. A thank you for joining me. This is a casual channel or doing great casual video here on the channel where I'm just answering listener questions, comments and things that have come in from the email list over the previous months. I'm hoping you can see and hear okay by this point because if you couldn't, you probably would have spoken up earlier. But give me a little peace of mind here and let me know in the comments that you are with me that you're able to see what we got going on here. We have a bunch of listener questions that have queued up that have come in from the email list this morning. If you're not on my email list, get on it if you are. You received an email about an hour ago. So if you want to get your question answered, that would be a great way to jump front in line. But I mean, I don't think I need any more intro. It's a Q and A. So. So let's get into it. First question of the day. Have you worked with construction companies before? If so, are there potential issues with rolling out a new system or process to the foreman and laborers? And another, wait, this is a two parter. Okay. I'm building on ERP system for our business, but struggling to create a workflow that fits my team. Any advice? This is my first time doing it from scratch. All right, let's go back to part one because I'm going to. My memory won't serve if we try to go two at a time. Yes. So just a little bit of backstory for those who don't know. I am married to a contractor. And so when I started this whole thing, before I even started this thing, I was helping him as the office manager in his construction company, carpentry. So a little bit different than general construction, but still kind of the same gist. From there I went into virtual assistant land and my niche was contractors. So custom home builders, roofers, plumbers, you name it. I was in kind of a slightly earlier in my journey phase at that point, but that was kind of where the roots came from. And then we've expanded over time into more industries. So that's kind of my backstory when it comes to issues. Rolling out systems to foreman and laborers. The biggest challenge we have is the, the actual physical environment when we're dealing with especially smaller contracting shops, which is where I was working. You know, you've got 50 people max. You don't always have the level of connectivity that you might need. So maybe the foreman has a tablet, maybe, maybe the sales guys have an iPad, but the general laborers don't. And by nature of their work, their hands are messy, their Internet connection is unstable, and they're not going to be able to get information to and from them as easily as a computer worker. So these days with ProcessDriven, we mainly work with folks who are connected on the Internet. So with construction companies, we're working with their office management team or their sales guys who are connected via an iPad just because it is a lot easier to influence those behaviors when it comes to rolling out new systems or processes to people who are in the field of any kind. I know we have another question about a cleaning company coming up soon. It is possible, but when it comes to system building for that demographic, what we're really, what we tend to be looking for are things like checklists, things like a, you know, a site board that you have in one room of the house where you have the full hit list for the day, hit list, punch list for the day. We've got labels for our toolboxes, we've got laminated cards for the cleaners to say here's the 15 things you need to do before you finish cleaning this house and so on. So are there, are there challenges? Yes. Is it possible? Yes. It's just a little bit different in format than what we typically do just because of the nature of the work. But part two is about rolling out an ERP so enterprise resource planning tool, kind of an all in one let's manage our business flow system can work really well. I mean with construction companies at the sizes that I have worked at, it's, it's not fiscally responsible to set up these kinds of systems because they require a lot of maintenance and oversight. So I can't say I can't share a lot of tips for that kind of setup. What we've mainly done is use off the box software where we're customizing it or customizable platforms where we're building inside it. So SmartSuite, for example, advice. What I can say would be keep it simple. Keep in mind that you've got two or three very different user groups. And oftentimes the best system is the one that, dare I say it, but is the one that is working best for the day laborers, for the people on the ground, for the tradesmen. Maybe it's because I'm married to a tradesman, but I feel like a lot of times I see systems consultants come into contracting companies and what they end up building is kind of like what I talk about on the YouTube channel. It's online based, computer oriented thinking. And when you're working in a world with a mouse, it's just the way you can do things and what is easy is a lot different. So I would just say work bottom up. That's my general philosophy, but especially with trades. Work with the guys on the field, work with the gals in the welding off welding office in the welding shop and actually like talk to them about what would work best for them. Because especially living, you know, know, vicariously through my husband. He's worked at quite a few places that try to DO systems or SOPs and a lot of the time my examples of what not to do come from what he has done or has seen in his job because it's done wrong far more often than it's done right. So I know I don't really have a great advice for you there. Paul says, I'm curious what you think of various books on the subjects of process, delegation, etc. EOS E myth. Okay. Yeah. So I, I really hoped I have more of my bookshelf. Paul. When I saw this come in I grabbed a few because these are things that I've mentioned on the channel before and I will just hold these up. I am so sorry my camera's blurry. And yes, I thrifted some of these books but this is probably the best technical book I still think on this subject. If you are someone who is an operations consultant, a process consultant, Service Design Doing is my absolute favorite. If you're trying to get into this professionally, that is the book to treat as gospel. These other books which kind of fall into the category of what you've described, I mean, I think I have a lot of respect for that. Let me say that first, like this book here, Scaling Up. Absolutely love it. Traction less so. But yeah, it's fine. There's a lot of good concepts in them. But in my opinion a lot of these books are not the best to look for when it comes to practical process building. I mean even the ones that claim or have become popular for that reason mainly the purpose these books serve in my view is to inspire people who have absolutely no concept of process or systems and basically give them a rah rah pep talk as to why it is really important to build them. And I think that is important. That's, you know, I couldn't do that. That's why I kind of gave up on trying to persuade people. My channel's for people who know it's important. But if you are actually looking to systemize your business. I don't think there is a lot of practical stuff in these books in my opinion by nature of, you know, having to be limited to a certain number of pages and also because of the year and timing that many of these were created and popularized, I find that eos and Scaling up, to me, they kind of all fall into that kind of leadership philosophy category. They'll tell you how to run a business really well, macro level. But in these books, and again, I don't have traction here. It's somewhere in my house. In these books, what you'll commonly see is that each section has kind of citations of where to dig deeper. And I think that is the best use of these kinds of books is you're reading through Scaling Up. You get to the cash section, you hear it mentioned Cash flow Story, and you're like, oh, cash flow story. I should go look into that more. What I love these books for is that they give you almost like a syllabus, a curriculum of here's all the things you should know to be good at what you're trying to do. And then it kind of gives you areas to double click into deeper. And my great criticism, it's not that radical. I think they would agree. I don't, I don't know. Someone asked them, let me know. But Scaling Up Traction, all those in that category, they all kind of stop when it gets to the practical application of process. I've been saying this for years, you've probably heard me say it here, that one of my goals for ProcessDriven is that eventually, in, you know, Rockefeller habits 4.0, few decades from now, maybe that ProcessDriven can be cited as an additional resource, an area to double click on when it comes to the process stuff. Because a lot of these books, their recommendations are create a chart of all the things your team does in a PDF or in a spreadsheet, and that's about where it stops. Or they'll say, like, what is it? Make your queen bee role and decide what's important to you and make sure everything else is not on your plate. And that's so true. But what you really need to realize that is more than a PDF worksheet, more than a file, you're going to like, collect dust in Google Drive. And I, I think, based on nothing other than my opinion, the reason these books don't get into that is because they don't have time. And by nature of being a book, they can't really talk about technology and software in the same way that we can. They might have their coaching certification programs. Let me actually read this through. Yeah, they have coaches and certification programs you can go through where oftentimes those coaches are given discretion of what kind of tools they would like to implement or work with. Sometimes they're forced into proprietary tool, but that's really not the best interest in my opinion, of most small businesses where we have tools we already use. What we need to do is connect these theories, kind of boil them down into practical realities and rules and rituals, and put those rituals inside the tools we already use. Not a proprietary startup or proprietary software they created just for their, their application, their methodology. And yeah, not something that is was decided back in 1995 and continued to be recommended today. I I think a great example of this is actually the Four Hour Workweek, which I only recently read. I know it's taboo to admit in online business, but I've been making a habit now of trying to read some of the classics that I've heard on so many podcasts that I was like, oh God, I don't want to. I don't want to read the book itself. I read it, I think over the summer, last summer, while staining my fence. And in there it used a lot of technical resources, it cited a lot of different software and I was like, okay, that's great, awesome. But it immediately dated the book. You know, you heard the recommendations of I forget what it was Trello and these different freelancer sites in the book as an attempt to be practical. And it made the book feel less relevant today. So I think that's why these og, you know, business books that have stood the test of time purposely don't do that. But our teams kind of need more. Would you write a book focused on the practical? I mean, my point of view is when I know what I want to say. Definitely. But right now, my book has been our course and I've written it six times. So Process Driven Foundations for those who don't know is where I basically put everything that I've discovered to be true. It's a living and breathing book. I'm even. I even call it the book Internally and Foundations is something I have rewritten, refilmed, republished, completely, redone just about every 12 to 18 months, sometimes less, sometimes more, since basically the business started. In some ways, I think the first edition was 2020. 2021, something like that. And Sarah, who's in the chat, we are working on version 6 right now. And my thought is what we're calling V6 is the book Internally. Because I'm trying to get all of the details right, like absolutely everything that you need to know for the practical guide. I'm going to create it. But whether I publish it in a book format. I don't know. I think the challenge I kind of the four sorry the four hour work week piece really comes up to me and I think if I were to ever do that I'd really want to come up with a way to use technology, to use links, to use whatever to basically create a book that changes over time. So until I can figure out what that would look like, it's not a top priority. But had a few people ask me that recently so maybe it's a sign I should consider next question and sorry if I miss anything on the chat. Mariah, I'll pull it up here if I'm missing anything but I own a cleaning company and only my VA and I work in the office. Okay. Another field team. I'm 51 and find the computer side challenging. Is Foundations applicable to me. So yeah, not not like yeah it's applicable to you but yeah, this is a good question. I think this is very common especially with small businesses who have been around a while. If you have if you're just not as tech fluent or you work in a space where you don't need to work on a computer all day, you're not going to have the sharpest skills on that makes perfect sense. Is Foundations applicable to you? What we teach in foundations is my philosophy. I shouldn't say my r the whole team, our philosophy and best practices around running a systemized and process Dr. Team but I will say the focus most of the examples, most of the templates, most of the practical applications use examples of folks who are connected with their team through an Internet connection. And I think that's something that we haven't done the best of job communicating because technically our principles, much like the principles in our favorite books, our principles are universal. They apply in the contracting company. That's where my background was. But even though they apply there, they don't like kick ass there. They're not 5x their value there. Where they really kick ass is for remote teams where you've got even more challenge to stay systemized. It's way harder than if you were in in person. So could it work for you? Yes, but I don't know if it would be the top choice. I would say if you are looking to organize the office component then yes, if you're looking to organize your folks on the ground it'll give you frameworks and concepts. But a lot of the practical stuff I'm teaching you will have to translate to the in person world because my bias and our default consumer of that course or books and concepts but a lot of the practical stuff I'm teaching you will have to translate to the in person world because my bias and our default consumer of that course or book as we call it is going to be someone who's connected through an Internet connection in some way so they don't get to see their people every day and their communication is different because of it. So hopefully that makes sense. I'm happy to talk through your specific situation by the way, if you email us. Our email is on our website ProcessDriven co head over there and if anyone here is like is this gonna apply to me for any of our things? Send us your life story. And I joke about that but it's happened before. Just send us what's going on, what's the struggle, what's working for you, what's not working for you. And my team, there's, there's four of us like or four core of us and we are all trained to just go through your situation and give you an honest take as to what will or will not help. A lot of the times it's no take consumer free content. But if we can help you. Happy to to do so. Shabby. Yes. Shobi Shoppy. How can I convince my team we need prostheses? Everybody tells me we already know what to do. Why do we need to write it down? Is there a video I can share to convince them? Yes. And I totally don't remember the name of it but Mariah's in the background and she's pretty quick so maybe she will think of it for me. But we did a live stream I want to say last fall this, this previous fall inspired by a member question who was struggling with a similar issue she had been setting up in her case, ClickUp. She had a lot of pieces in place. She was out of the office for a while. When she came back, nothing she had set up was really used. And we created this video on the channel for her kind of telling the story of why even though your team doesn't think they need it, why it actually could be really helpful. We'll, we'll hunt down that link somewhere here. But until we can I will give you a TLDR summary of what my, my point of view is. You already know what you need to know but you today is not you tomorrow. You could have Covid tomorrow and then all of a sudden brain fog prevents you from knowing what you think you know. You could also just forget which happens all the time. You also have a hard time communicating with other people because you know what you need to do, but does your neighbor as in your neighbor in the cubicle next to you? One of the challenges I see with this attitude, and where this usually stems from, is because you have highly competent people who are acting as individual contributors. They're each badass in their own way. That's like the word of the day for this live stream. Badass in their own way. They're so good at what they do, and they're good at what they do because they're relying on themselves. They tend to work in a culture where everyone is treated as individuals. You come together for a team meeting, but that's about it. There's not a lot of interdependence or interworking outside of meetings because everyone knows what they need to do. And so if we're looking at a task list and we're trying to collaborate, most of that is happening right here where we can see everything that's going on. And for that and so many more reasons that I list in that long form video, which I think is an hour long, I think what we need to reframe this as is this task list is not here to remind you of what you already know. It's to help you remember what you're going to forget. It's to free up your brain for creative purposes, and it's to allow us to work together. Because, yes, if you were a team of one, who cares? If you have a perfect memory and you never forget anything and you never get sick, you don't need to write down anything. But even if all of that is true in a team environment, we all need to see what one another are working on. We all need to be able to collaborate. And until we have neuralink, and I'm terrified for what that might be like, but until that happens, the only way that we can see what's in one another's head is to get it out of our heads. And that's how we're really sharing and building this leviathan of shared responsibility and shared collaboration. So that video, if I. I don't know if the link got in there, but the video was not my best. I'll be honest with you. Like, I remember being like, ah, I didn't do a great job that day, but I think the substance of it will resonate with you and should answer this question. Joby Shabby. Shelby. Shelby. Shabby. Whatever. We go by Roberto. Sorry for the question. Wait, no, no, no, no, no. Don't be sorry for the question. If I create an SOP doc for Example. Hold on, I need to take one more second. Everybody here, please tell Roberto, do not be sorry about your question. This is a Q A podcast or podcast video. This is an ama. No one should be sorry about asking anything that we have going on here. There are no dumb questions. There's nothing that's. Well, there's some things that are off limits. But please, I think especially in the comments lately, we've had a lot of negativity, and this is not about you, Roberto. Sorry, just side tangent. We've had a lot of negativity lately in the YouTube comments of belittling other people for not knowing things for just this weird, weird culture and time that we're living in. And I just want to make it very clear that this channel in this space is like a no dumb question zone. I am just so happy that anyone would even ask questions about this topic. One of the questions we have pulled up for later on, which we can hit on right now, before I go into this, Roberto, is all the trolls lately who are, like, bickering over my videos in the comments. We got a huge flood of them. So one of the things I want to say to them, which impacts what we're talking about with Roberto here, is, I don't care if you have a bad attitude about my videos or you think they're stupid or talk too much or talk too little or too fast, too slow, whatever. I'm just so happy that people care enough about business process to know what it is, enough to argue about it. Like, whoa, this is like being a math teacher and having kids argue about algebra after class. Like, these are champagne problems. So no dumb questions, no apologies ever needed. And with that, sorry, let's get into Roberto's question here, which here it is. Okay. If I create an SOP doc, for example, for my tasks, wouldn't that make me more replaceable? Because now anyone can do what I do. Oh, okay. This is so good. So let me rephrase this. For anyone who's trying to, like, wait, what does that mean? Picture yourself as a team member. You're on a team of five right now. You are the only one that knows how to, let's say, set up the website. And so if you were to be fired, no one would know how to do it. So it's great job security to keep that information in your head. This is a common, I think, common concern, especially if we're in less than ideal work environment. And I don't want to say it's not justified. I'm sure there are companies out there that would view this as some kind of factor in a hiring or firing decision. But how do I put this? We want to be replaceable. Sounds terrible to say we want to be replaceable because if the only reason you are staying at your company, your company is keeping you is because you know something that the rest of them don't, and you are being incentivized from all approaches to hoard information as a safeguard for job security, that's probably not the company you want to work in. That's not a place where you're going to grow. Because growth professionally, in my view, comes from the sharing of ideas and learning and teaching and being exposed to new concepts and new processes in the business. Especially if you're early in your career and you're trying to get exposure to a lot of concepts. So if you were in a team where you have to hoard information for job security, it's probably a shitty team in my opinion. But let's say that's not the case. Let's say it's not a shitty team, but it just feels, feels like this is the case but you'd like to change it, perhaps. A mindset I like to have is aiming for replaceability. Because at the end of the day, if you want to be sick or want to be sick, if you ever get sick, if you ever go on vacation, you need to be replaceable to not be considered shitty at your job. If you are the only one that knows how to work on the website and you go on a four week vacation, either you go and the whole team is mad at you because something terrible happens while you're gone because the website crashes, or you don't go because you're afraid about this thing that only you know how to do is going to break while you're gone, or you go and you're getting interrupted the entire vacation with questions about this important thing only you know, I don't believe as humans we should be irreplaceable components of our business. Now founders myself, like there's this kind of weird nuance, weird little dance we play there. But we can talk more about that later. When it comes to general team member, if you are irreplaceable, there's something functionally wrong with the team you are being. You are a cog, you are just a piece that needs to click a certain button that only you know. And that's not a business, that is a prison cell. So I think as we're thinking about our careers and we're trying to get Job security. I think job security comes from confidence and competence. And if we try to hold hostage, if our company tries to hold us hostage or we are held hostage by nature of having knowledge, that's a sign that we're probably not in the right spot. So, long story long, yes, it is true that documenting your knowledge could make you more replaceable, but also replaceable is kind of a good thing. When we think about the macro and what we're trying to do. If you are in a good company, I'm trying to think about, like my team here. I think we're pretty good. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to brag, but I think we've got a pretty solid setup here. And there are ways that documenting your knowledge actually can be and should be incentivized. When you document your knowledge, you get an assistant, you get to automate it, you get to xyz. This should be a selfishly aligned benefit for the organization. And if it's not, I would, I would point up the chain of whoever's in charge of your business and say, dude, you're not doing your job, gal, you're not doing your job, and so on. So just my opinion. I'm happy to dive into any of that, but now I'm probably just rambling a little bit too much and I just want to highlight this. Yes, don't be sorry. Never be sorry about this kind of stuff. Your. Your boss should be sorry in that application. Okay, next question from an email list. What is the correct relationship between a CRM, so a client relationship manager, and a task management system? Like ClickUp. Good question. I see. Who was it? Recently, I saw a question pop up, I want to say with a promotional products company inside the membership. Not exactly sure if that was a specific example, but they had a similar challenge where they're like, hey, we've got Printavo here where we're managing our orders, we've got QuickBooks here, we're managing our billing. How do these systems talk together? My point of view, which is what you're getting if you're watching the stream, is that your task management system, this thing here, whatever you use to manage tasks, or what I would call work management system, should be the Grand Central Station for your business, is the one source of truth that when you log in, you go to this one spot, it tells you everything that needs to happen in the day. Inside Grand Central Station, you have different trains you can get on, you've got different off ramps, different links, if you will. That take you to systems like this one, the CRM. I actually have a video that I think went out already about me trying to build out a CEO CRM, which is a mouthful. Basically, a CRM system to help me keep in touch with, like, my professional network. And what I show in that video is exactly the connection between these two. Basically, I use my CRM to track all of the data that I have, in this case touch points or the people themselves. And my task management system, which is my grand central station, my one source of truth, I go in here to know when to check this. Okay, so, so kind of like if you replace CRM with Photoshop or QuickBooks, same kind of thing. My task management system will say, every, every Monday, go in and check all invoices. Where do I go? I go to QuickBooks to check the invoices. My task management system might say, follow up with all leads. It'll then link to my CRM that'll show me which leads to follow up with. So treat CRMs, in my view as a database, a store of information, and treat your task management system as your one source of truth for what actions you need to take. Also, just want to shout out some of the really supportive messages in the chat, going to one another. Thank you for that. I love to see that. Need some more positivity in the world right now. All right, moving on. Any other questions? Today, Ophir asks, how do I make the relevant process map templates and other resources available to my team in context? Good question. And I'm glad this came up right after that. Task management system. The reason I like to call it a work management system instead is because work management is, I think, a better term to describe what we're doing. We're not just saying, go take out the trash, but inside our work management system, like ClickUp, Notion, Coda, SmartSuite, Smartsheet, Reich, so on and so forth, we can put this information. So my preferred approach, if your tool allows it, is to use relationships to backlink and link things together. Obsidian users, I'm speaking your love language here, right? We want to link together information. So when I go to take out the trash and I see that task, there's a little hyperlink or a relationship that I can click on that shows me where the trash can is, and another one that shows me how to take out the trash, and another one that shows me the process for taking out the trash. Okay, that might be a little bit of a funny example, but that's how I like to keep it in context. Use Your tasks as your prompts for action and when prompting action, give the context there by linking, not retyping, not recreating, but linking or using whatever your tool has. One of the questions that is not lined up for today, but I'm going to put it here because my team has asked this a lot and I want to give them an easy timestamp to reference. Why do we not recommend tools like Asana at ProcessDriven is because you can't do this very well. Asana has very simple features which is very appealing to some people, but having real linking connections between things without, without like clunkiness. It's very challenging in Asana. It's very challenging in Microsoft Planner to do. It's very challenging in other similarly simple tools. There's not a lot of bells and whistles I think your work management software must have and God forbid there's so many that they really shouldn't have. But relationships and the ability to have two way links between information. Something that I think became most popular by the tool notion that I view to be pretty much essential for any small team in 2025 and beyond. So hope that helps if you're oh, and another one we are project management or I think it's project management firm in construction and take clients from project brief to facility delivery. Should I start to map out the entire project? Should I start with some templates? Where should I start? Ooh, good question. I got a comment yesterday. I think I do see all your comments by the way. Even the mean ones. I see them all. I wake up in the morning and I'm like oh well you're an asshole sometimes. And then I post them on LinkedIn. But anyway, not you a fear. So when it comes to this, where do I start with building a business system? The comment that came up yesterday was asking this exact same thing. Which is why I'm glad you asked here so we can officially answer it. When it comes to building systems, the first place I like to focus is what's causing the biggest pain. So rather than doing a full process map, which is what traditional approaches would have you do, if there is an obvious pain point, I like to start there. So oftentimes if we're talking about project management through a big construction project, maybe it is. Maybe it's change orders. Change order management is the giant pain in the ass. In that case, let's take just that component and process map it. What is the flow from? Hey, we realize we need a change order. Sorry I always do it backwards. Realize we need a Change order to change order approved or denied or whatever, closed out. What is that process? And I would focus on just mapping that, which is something you should be able to do, and 10 to 20 minutes, then figure out what will fix that. A common example might be adding a form, automating it, defining a better way of approving things, a better check and balance. That is my preferred approach. Sometimes the solution to this mini focus is templates, sometimes it's not. But my focus would be a mini process map on just the painful part. If you were in the rare instance where you're like, gosh, it's all so good, what could possibly be the pain point? First of all, pat yourself on a back. On the back. That's very good. But in that case, then maybe, yes, zoom out to a full process map of what the whole process is. And if you're still not sure from that, where the big challenges are, that's when you could have stakeholders come in. And by that I just mean people involved. Get them in a room. And I bet if there's no power influence in the room, he will hear people bitch about what's wrong in that process again and again and again. And you'll walk away with, you know, 500 things on your to do list. So if you want to learn more about that, since you are a technical person in this space, this goes back to that book I recommended earlier. This is really great. I mean, service design is its own kind of sub genre of process mapping, but I find it to be very powerful and, and that would be one that you need to check out if you really want to dive deeper into that or if you have any challenges around the mapping side of things. Yeah. Okay, let's go on. How to systemize a. I can't read how to systemize a family manufacturing business with 120 employees but no documentation. Top management dads and uncles resist change and employees are rigid. Ooh. Okay, so I'm just going to make a joke about manufacturing families, but I know what you're talking about here. 120 employees. Is it safe to say that these are like in terms of the core office team, which is usually where I would focus on starting, is 120 that core office or is 120 including shift workers or people working the line or so on? Just if you can give that little nugget, that would be helpful. But I'm going to assume for now that everyone's in the core office. So top management dad and uncles resist change and employees are rigid at the end of the day you are not going to get anything done until you get buy in from top management. My approach to building processes I believe needs to start bottom up. We need to get the team members on board and then move up the chain from there because that's how change stays. But the fact of the matter is if you can't persuade management, I mean something is fundamentally wrong with management or similar. Because I've used this before, I'll rehash it here. The stakeholders I view when it comes to any process project are CEO, customer, employee and owners. And when we're trying to make change, we want to benefit in that order. So we want to find out what will make the customer's life better, prioritize that. If we max that out, what will make the employee's life better, max that out and then what will max out the the owner's life or stakeholder's life going in that order. The reason I suggest CEO is because no matter what we do, the owners are benefiting. And so by forcing teams to prioritize in customer first order, we make sure we're not overly prioritizing the needs of the C Suite. If C suite is looking at a systemization project and like, like we don't need, like this isn't doing anything, I think there might be a fundamental lack of understanding there as to, I don't say as to like their job in that process, but they just don't understand what they could stand to gain from it. Because every single systems project ultimately like dark truth, it benefits the owners. Because when you sell the business, this impacts your multiplier. Something I wish I was able to do and want something on my vision board long term is to be able to quantify the impact of systems on the sale of a business or the appraisal of a business. Not something I'm able to do right now, but for folks in that camp, I mean these might not be the best examples here, but honestly some of these inspirational books like we talked about earlier would be a good point of reference. I would really focus on management, getting them convinced with the abstract theoretical visionary benefits of systems, which are the appraisal value going up, looking like a less high risk for investors or banks reducing individual people reliance. Kind of the flip side of what we were talking about with Roberto. For your uncles in this case or your dad in this case. Sorry, I forgot which one it was. Exactly. We can get the question back up here, but we want to make it clear to them what is the risk of not doing this? You know, you Rely on Bob who's in charge of all marketing to keep everything running. What if Bob gets Covid like what are we going to do dad? Or what are we going to do Uncle? Like let me know that's kind of the situations you want to start playing out. And these books for all you know the stuff I give them for not having a lot of details that is what they do. They do a great job painting the picture of why this is important in long term. Mariah, can we get the question back up here though? Because I'm trying to remember the details of it and it's gone. But yeah, so trying to remember what else is in there. But that would be kind of where I'd start. Convince the boss and then go from there because the employees being rigid there are. It's, it's so once leadership is on board it's so much easier to persuade the team. Then you start just doing the build by build bottom up approach of figuring out what the micro problems are faced by the employees and solving them using systems based solutions. Thank you. Woohoo. Mariah is going like this in the background because she's so happy she found it. Just so you all know, I'm outing her top down dad and okay, so it is dad and uncle is good and employees are rigid. Employee rigidity is also something that can be beneficial to have some conversations. Now Aditya, if you are someone who is related to management and the employees are all not related, you may not be the best person to lead this project. I just want to own that you're the probably the best person to persuade management. But when it comes to the overall team, I would suggest bringing in a third party or somebody else who's kind of in the middle rung of the business to start having these conversations. But a lot of the time rigidity comes from founded or unfounded fear. So Roberto's question. Sorry I keep picking on you today Roberta, but that is such a valid concern for a lot of team members that might be a cause of rigidity. And is it true if it's a true concern because that's actually how your, your management thinks of it. Fix that and then the rigidity will go away. But rigidity is just a symptom. And Mary adds for the question on family business there are always, there's always a challenge because of the need to feel part of the family version versus a fear of change. Just from my experience, yes. So for those who don't know, I grew up in a family business that continues to run today and I see this dichotomy, generational layers into this also factors in. But if we are dealing with just interpersonal, intergenerational relationships inside a family, that has an absolute bias in here. But families, much like businesses, have a power dynamic in them and families do change. How do we get change to happen? Usually because someone's stubborn with the most sway, starts proposing an idea again and again and again until they get a little bit more force and more people are in favor and it starts expanding and expanding. And so I think that even though there is the family dynamic, you can approach this from a person perspective, almost like a psychology perspective. Get pal, like get the heads, the heads of state, get the management on board and then start from the bottom and work up from there. But really focusing on that senior leadership is where you need to get the buy in first. I wouldn't worry too much about the employee rigidity at this phase. That's that that won't be a problem if we can get these other areas sorted. I'm champing Asana for my org. Oh. So, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Asana as kind of the first tool someone uses, but if someone has the choice and they're willing to go a little bit beyond the basics, I always like to get people to skip past it. Most people I know, when they're getting into task management, they start with something like Asana, a glorified to do list. And then they grow up from there. They start going further. And Asana works great for so many organizations. It's shocked me how many large, large companies end up using Asana for their, for their business. We just added a. We just add a link field as a standard cross link. And are automation heavy as a business? That might be the clunkiness. Yes, that is the clunkiness I'm referring to. So when I'm talking about linking and yeah, when I'm talking about linking and relationships, the functionality I really aim for is actually what you see inside of SmartSuite. And I know it's a newcomer on the block, not a people. Not a lot of people are familiar with this tool. But what SmartSuite does that I think every tool in this space needs to copy, but maybe don't copy, but learn from is. SmartSuite's approach to linking is more like Obsidian. So you connect something and it's connected in both directions and then you can use math and reporting and summaries based on that connection. So for example, if I had lunch and I had 14 different recipes for lunch, I could connect these together and then report on how many different lunch options do I have? How many different lunch options do I have that I've eaten in the last 30 days? How many lunch options do I have that start with an L? You know, this kind of connection two way relationships with the ability to report and quantify based on them is incredibly powerful. And need I remind you that none of this requires automations. I often come off as a Luddite because I'm not very pro automation in project management, but the reason I am in that way is because automations tend to require maintenance. They break, they require work and understanding to fix them when things change. And and if at all possible I love to see a system where people can just use a formula, use a field that's there and not need to go messing around with automations just to do basic things, which is what I consider this to be. So no shit on Asana. It's led us for a long time, but I think it needs to get an upgrade. Okay, let me think on this. So one of the if you're a little heady, this is the book that kind of changed my world. This is an old version, but you can find it in I'm sure a much prettier format. The goal would be a great example. It gives you an intro into process and it uses a manufacturing example with a narrative format. This is the one that I would have you read. Probably not your management team because of just the resistance that you're saying. When it comes to management team, I would really look at the personalities of them and pick out one of the top business process books that matches their personality type. Common ones are things like the Checklist Manifesto, ones that are so, so simple that even if someone who's like resistant can at least get through a chapter and understand the gist of it, that's where I would go. For your leadership team, your uncle and your dad just kind of feed a podcast interview or a little audiobook there to them in terms of the failed system implementations. And yeah, ERP is probably not an option. Understandable. I would look at what you were trying to do. I think the question earlier on about the PM firm is a great example for you. Oftentimes when I see people fail to implement systems right here, it's not because you're bad, it's not because you're doing the wrong thing necessarily, it's because you're focused on the wrong area that is the most common piece. So a lot of the times I see people try to implement systems on things that either they don't yet do or aren't very impactful. And I mean that makes a system fail because you don't have the buy in to follow the new way. What the best systems projects do is you get kind of this guinea pig on an area of the business that everyone agrees absolutely is terrible. Gosh, if only anyone could fix it. We try anything that that is your best friend. And so that's what I would say is find a small painful thorn that you can take out very gently with a system and implement that. That might also help you with the persuasion when it comes to dad and uncle. As someone who's also been in that arena before, convincing family business owners to maybe change their ways a little bit, taking a micro win and saying, hey, I can do this again is a lot easier than saying, hey, let's try this giant overhaul. Eventually you want to get to that, but it might not be where you start. So an example of a small system might be time off requests. Gosh, it's such a pain in the butt. We have a spreadsheet. People put forms on this desk and then they get lost. What if we just automate that? What if we make that a form, a QR code that people can scan and put in on their phone, whatever it might be. Small thorns are what you want to remove to get started on that. But terms of book, I actually think you'd like this one at least I think it's great. I don't know, not a very popular one, but. All right, what else do we got? How can you incentivize documentation as part of your culture? I can give you some examples. In your meetings, if you have a highlights and win section, you as the boss man, boss gal, boss person, talk about people who fill in their documentation. We are working with a client right now who uses a who's just rolling out documentation throughout their team. They're creating a bunch of SOPs. And we established a routine for each team member to update their SOPs every 90 days. More on that philosophy is actually in the video featuring my team members, which we'll link somewhere. It's up on the channel. But what we also did is we created a routine for their manager to go in every 91 days, let's say one day after. So still 90 days and check who has done that. And if people have updated their SOPs and if anyone's created more than one, we want at least one shout out highlight celebration being added by that manager into the next team meeting. So in that way we have this routine task basically saying, dude, celebrate people. And that is one way to incentivize documentation. Another way is to punish. I mean, you got this carrot and the stick, right? So stick approach is your documentation hasn't been updated in 45 days. We report on this as a key metric. And so every month you have a individual metric where people say, what is the average or max number of days since your last documentation update? So let's say I, Layla, I'm in charge of 45 SOPs that are in my zone of work. I know as a organization, we value keeping those updated. My metric every month might be, if I look at that list and go, you know, high to low, what is the oldest one? How many days has it been since that update? I could report on that number or different versions thereof. What else do I mean? I think framing things in this, in the sense of process, in conversation is another one. I talk about a lot on the channel and then for good reason. Example came up just recently of a task that came up and what was it? Sorry, I got distracted for a second there a test that came up and I had sent it over to somebody and I was not clear what I was asking for. I just said, hey, could you delete this email? And just this morning, Darren was like, leila, what do you mean by this? Like, can you give me some cars? Cars is a form of documentation for us. It's documenting what we actually mean. And I was lazy and I hadn't done it. And I went back to it and I was like, oh, sure, let me explain that out. Let me actually find follow our process. Thank you for the prompt. Gave it back to him and he was like, oh, my God, thank God. I thought you were asking me to delete this entire email that just went out to hundreds of people. And in reality, I was just asking him to delete a user. I miscommunicated. I under communicated. And rather than saying, layla, answer my four questions. Darren, my team member, told me, hey, Layla, follow our process. And so in that way, conversations are incentivizing us to follow our process as well. When things aren't going well, we redirect and we ask for help by using the process as a reference. So Darren asked me, hey, can you give me cars on this? Or can you give me context on this? I might ask Sarah, in a conversation, hey, did you follow step three of the sop? Because it doesn't look quite right, you know, whatever it could be, we're using it conversationally, which makes it an incentive because as humans, we are, we want to fit into the social structure, we want to understand the social norms. And so if we socialize about our process, so sorry, Darren. If we socialize about our process, we are making it more relevant and important in the minds of our team. Can you briefly describe cars or define cars? Yes. And we've got a video either out or about to come out breaking this down in more detail. Context, attempts, request and stakes. This is the four part framework actually created with. When I hired my husband, I want to say five years ago, I hired him originally to help with emails and he's like, oh my God, Layla, I'm a carpenter, I know I'm helping you out here while we're moving to a new state, but like how do I write emails that are good enough to answer these customer support requests? And I told him, I was like, all right, well let me just look at my emails and figure out how I do it, make a framework for it. And all those years ago, it's now stuck around. And, and cars stands for those four components. So context is what is happening. Attempts is what have I tried already? Request is what am I asking you to do specifically? And stakes is what happens if you don't help me. Why does this matter? In other words, in some cases at Process Driven we actually add an additional S, which is spice. Because we've found that sometimes people get into this like robot mode of here are the components and sometimes it's nice to add a little space, add a little fun, add a little sass into that. Juan asks, I would like to know the major problems you face with process interactions. For instance, facilities and manufacturing and or other processes. Tell me what you mean by process interactions and then we can answer this one because I think I need a little help. Phone a friend, Juan, help me out, give me some examples of process interactions and we can dig back into this one. How do you build systems for a company that creates sops for other businesses? Okay, you're not gonna like my answer. You sure you want me to answer it? I am not a proponent of creating sops for other businesses. I, I don't think it works very well for a lot of reasons. So please like skip this part of the video if you don't want to hear that, that feedback. But I actually, when I've seen a lot of folks who hire out or job out SOP creation and what they end up doing is a top down project where they end up inflicting a process on other people, at best their SOPs reflect how people Actually do it, but create it for them. At worst, they inflict how they think people do it and inflict it on them. And in both cases what you end up are SOPs that feel like applications as opposed to what they should feel like, which is tools by the people for the people. I am a strong believer and again, I'm sorry for saying this, but see, like now I'm sorry. We're all sorry. Today I'm a strong believer in SOPs being tools for the employee. And so if I am creating an SOP for how to answer support tickets, because I am in charge of the team that answers support tickets, I should be creating that SOP in collaboration and edited by created with the people who are also working on this. And so in terms of creating process for that. Is that the original question? Can I get that back up here? How do you build systems for build systems the same way you build them for anyone else, same kind of process. But in terms of the actual how do I get SOPs from other people? To me, my preferred way would be to not and to instead create SOPs with the employees. Have them do it. Because that co authorship, it's like, what's it called, the Wine and sip nights. Right, where like people get slightly drunk and then create terrible art and then treat it as if it's their pride and joy. Yeah, that effect is what we want. It doesn't matter if my picture of Norman I painted is complete, because I painted it, I feel like it's at least worth taking home. Same thing with the SOPs. The quality might be higher if we had professional technical writers write them, but we don't actually want them to be perfect. We don't want Mona Lisas that people look at and admire from a distance Behind a glass, 20ft away in a crowd. We want working tools, we want working instructions, we want people to edit them when they're wrong. Right. And all of that is aided by having people have buy in by actually helping create them in the first place. The only time I'm really proponent for technical writers is when. No offense to technical writers, but my preferred use of that kind of skill set is for external documents where you're making how to documents for the public. Then yes, a little bit of finesse would certainly help. But for SOPs, I just like to keep them. I like to keep them internal, a little messy and buy in for you because it just solves so many challenges later on with adoption. It. If you have any specific questions about systems, let me know though. Sorry to. Sorry to Be such a buzzkill there, Charlie. Do you have any experience with Six Sigma approach to things? No, not really. I. My, my school is the school of hard knocks and common sense. That's my main degree that gives me credibility in this arena and I understand there's definitely some similarities. I've learned enough of about Six Sigma to appreciate the differences. I do like in general a lot of components of their philosophy, but I'm not trained in it. It's not something I've studied in part because I think we're serving very different avatars in some way. But no, not a lot of experience where I can give you a play by play breakdown. But common sense, bro, it's. It's universal for a reason, right? Even though in my pointed out common sense is not common, I'm using it euphemistically here. So fun. Starting with the Creating employee training video last weekend. Woohoo. Congratulations, responder. I have a small landscape company and the features you showed with SmartSuite seems like the best. Do you agree? I'm. I think SmartSuite's a great tool. I think it is solid. I think whether it's the best tool for you depends on what you've got going on. But generally speaking, if I hear a business that's doing the same thing again and again and they have one process that apply to many different things and you're looking to basically make a digital assembly line. I mean that, that's my go to choice right now for anything with that level of structure, which generally speaking, not knowing a lot about what you're doing sounds like it could be a fit. If you're doing fully bespoke landscapes where you're working with a luxury estate and everything's different every time, then you could probably open up to more options that would be equally valid. But I don't think you're going to go wrong with SmartSuite. How good is ClickUp IA? I do not know what IA is. If it's AI not impressed, I wouldn't pay for it. This is funny. When people ask like are you sponsored by ClickUp? I'm like have you seen my videos? Any other questions? I sign up for Foundations and I'm interested. Oh yay. Congratulations. Or congratulations to us. I can't wait to work with you. Foundations is like our book, so I'm so glad you're signing up. Signing up to read. Read the book to implement it. We've got the boot camp coming up on March 6th and 7th if anyone's curious where I'm going to be implementing it with folks live step by step. So I'm psyched for that. It's going to be so fun. I'm really interested to know if you're going to cover the following topics in ClickUp, CRM, ticketing system, inventory and SOPS. So in foundations version 6, which is what you'll be getting if you just signed up and you're joining us for the boot camp, I'll be guiding you live through through all of the setup stuff. Our main focus will be first on task management, nailing that. Then we'll move on to data management. Data management is applicable to CRMs and tickets and inventories. So we'll be giving kind of like the how it would work. I'm not going to be giving away like here's the exact template you need for a CRM. Here's the exact template you need for a ticketing system. We're not going to go into specific specific flow build outs. We'll be doing a general build out, general knowledge documentation build out and then show you what expansion could look like. But because we are limited to two intense days, we're not going to go into specific bonus applications. I anticipate that we'll have like some Q and A time where I can go into some deep dive individual answers and if you join like afterwards we're doing the support period after where me and my coach Sarah who's here with us today, we go into any other kind of scenarios you want and we have templates for CRM ticketing system and inventory management actually all inside that support level if you want to push further. But in 48 hours I'm kind of worried I'm going to melt people's brains just with the any, you know, specific applications like that will probably hold off SOPs though. Yes, we are hitting those hard as well as all other forms of knowledge documentation. So any other we've got such a good group today, let's just keep going. Got a link? Someone does. Hey Mariah, you're impersonating me. Yeah, there's the link. Boot camp. By the way guys, if anyone's listening, this is a live Q A. We do these a few times a year. But I am, I host live trainings far more often than that. And actually on to recap March 6th and 7th all day east coast time, I'm going to be hosting a two day training to implement our book, our Foundations approach with anyone who wants to join us live. It is paid but if you want to do that like this is the link we only plan to host this once in 2025 and like, I'm pretty sure this is the only time we're going to do it ever because presenting for 12 hours back like it's going to be a long day for me. So I don't think this is going to be something we're ever going to repeat. But if you like this live instruction and you can keep up with my pace of speed speaking without slowing it down, this is kind of like a oh gosh, this way. This is like a once a year, if not once ever opportunity. If you want to get in on that. Aaron, I'm trying to implement ClickUp for my law firm. Have you had success with that? Yep. Work with quite a few law firms. Any particular pitfalls or pain points to avoid pitfalls or pain points me a challenge mode today. The big challenge is a lot like what we talked about with the C CRM question, which is, you know, where is the line in the sand between task management and our CRM? Same thing with law firms. A lot of the time I'll see folks coming in, they're already using Clio or something else to manage the matters themselves if that's the case. The most challenging thing I've seen with law firms is just knowing where is the line in the sand between what goes in that system versus what goes in our general work management system. We want our information only in one place and linked if ever possible. And so that would be the thing to watch out for. Just make sure everything you're doing, everything you're communicating about. There's one obvious spot that you go to. You don't want to have your paralegals saying, oh well, we need to update the client's email address. I'm going to update it here. But actually they should have updated here like that kind of double talk or double typing is the most costly and problematic thing I've seen, especially with law firms, home services firms, accountants, anyone who has a core system that manages their, you know, subject matter expertise and then they're adding ClickUp or similar to it. It's that line that's really challenging. My boss is superphobic about complexity, especially extra work that's going to be needed to maintain any documentation or databases. Yeah, I mean that's fair. That's, that's, that's a fair place to be. It keeps you from being a perfectionist. Are there any tips to convince him that he's overly worried? And how can I actually minimize the amount of work that will be required for upkeep oh yeah, it shouldn't be a big thing. I think a lot of people approach systems and if you read. This is terrible to say, but if you read some of these more dated books, the old school way of thinking, or the corporate approach to systems, which unfortunately is what floods the Internet. If you search anything around SOPs and you don't put process driven after it, you will get very complicated and convoluted approaches that do work fantastically but will absolutely suck the life out of your small business. For small businesses, I would point to our channel as a great resource for how to do it in a lightweight way. Everything that we approach or we, we prescribe is defined or designed. I can speak designed to be simple, quick, iterative. And so each time you're creating an SOP, my average is 12 minutes. Each time I'm updating an SOP, my average is 5 minutes. And guess what? You don't create any of that shit unless it actually saves you far more than 17 minutes. I think if we just use that as the guiding principle, which is what we do in our approach, you can really avoid that. Just go into it saying, hey, we're not creating an SOP for everything because some book from 1984 said we should do so. 1984, great year choice. We're not going to do that. Instead we're going to create documentation when it actually helps us and we're going to update it because we need it, because it helps us. And so you know that here. And I'll even give this example which I give Inside the Foundations Course v5, the fifth edition. For any of you have seen that I view time, I view time as being kind of going into two categories. You can invest your time or, or you can expense your time. And a lot of the time when we're in our business, what we're spending is time on expenses. And we are spending our time to fulfill the client order, to answer the email. And those are all one time expenses that once we spend the time, it's gone. Systems work. If you're looking to, to convince him, conceptually, systems time is about building an investment. Now, just like finance, if anyone here is into that kind of stuff, you want to invest as much as you reasonably can because it's gonna compound in the future. Now, should you invest in an account that makes 0% interest? Probably not. But if you can invest in something that's gonna save you 10, 20, 30 hours next month, absolutely freaking lutely you should. It's common sense. Do the math. And so that would Be the mindset approach I would give to this boss is say, hey, I agree with you. I don't wanna expense my time on things that don't matter. And I also don't wanna invest it in things that have no return. But if something does, can we Both agree spending 30 minutes now to guarantee save 40 hours next month is a good call? Yeah. Great, let's do it. A good example of this, if you want to see it in action, is actually the video about how I saved time as a CEO. I forget the title keeps changing from split Tests, but that's where I basically Mariah, who's in the background right now. I went to her and I was like, dude, I am exhausted. We have way too much going on. There's way too many tasks. Can you please invest a little bit of TLC into our systems and process to fix this? And one of the moments that you'll capture during that kind of vlog journey over a month is Mariah went in and worked on a system that essentially allowed us to remove, I want to say about two hours from our email pipeline, which meant every email we wrote went from taking four hours to two hours. And again, I don't remember the exact numbers. Watch it to find out. But that is such a great example of simple math. If Mariah had gone to me, if, you know, if she started this and she's like, Layla, look, I got this idea. If we do this, this and this, it'll take me about 30 minutes to implement. We'll go from four hours per email to two hours per email, which will save you 16 hours a month. Can we do it? There's no way in my right mind I would say no. And so that's kind of the math we want to go into is think of it as investments. Quantify the output and try not to, try not to follow the old way of doing things unless you're trying to franchise. But don't, don't try to systemize everything just for the sake of it. There are bigger fish to fry and eventually you'll get to the point where everything is systemized. Then it's just micro adjustments. But at first, just focus on the big ones. Addie, is your process. Sorry, I can't read. Is your business more geared towards existing businesses or brand new businesses that realize they need process but don't have them? My business, process driven. We work with existing businesses. And I'm so glad you asked this, because this is a common point of confusion. Our sweet spot where we have been able to make the Biggest impact is a team who's a few years old, maybe they're 5, 10 years old and they've been operating for a while, they've got a kick ass product, they've got a great team, they love what they do. But they also kind of hate their job and such some ways because the way the business is running is making everyone want to rip their hair out. They probably have tried to systemize before and it didn't work. They probably use a work management tool, maybe ClickUp or Notion. They use a tool already but they're not quite using it fully. And what they really want to do is figure out a way to fix how they approach tasks and projects. But as they do that, they'd like to create a better way of working so that they can, you know, enjoy work again. And that, that crunch of feeling like, God, we've got so many clients coming in, we've got a really established business, we've got a team that wants to do this and yet it all feels so freaking hard. Ah, there's no HR consultant that can help you. It's not a culture issue. You don't need to switch software for the 40th time. Maybe you've already tried. That doesn't work. Those people are who we can really help help in a big way. Inside foundations now, new businesses we had have a few startups go through this program, some have gotten a lot out of it, but generally speaking we try to avoid that crowd. Because when you are brand new business, your focus should be on process development, figuring out what works. And then when you figure out what works, come to us and we'll help you lock that in. Process work is about locking in, making success repeatable. And if you don't know what's successful and when you're in experimentation mode, there's really no point in doing that yet. Right. You don't want to make rigidity in an experiment, you want to test hypothesis. So if you are earlier stage, I would say watch the YouTube channel. We will have. Okay, I shouldn't say we will. I hope to have a course for some beginner folks, just a low ticket thing, something really affordable to help you get a crash course coming later this year. Fingers crossed. Right now we do have something that's completely free called task page plunger. That's like an intro to delegation for these early stage businesses. But otherwise our bread and butter are these guys existing businesses. Sorry, there we are existing businesses who are tired of it being hard. You know, 10 years in business, 20 years in business, 30 multi generational businesses. Whether you're ready to step down and let your kids take over, whether you're just looking to scale up, whether you're looking to get investment for the first time. There's a lot of triggering moments that can lead to someone realizing, oh, I really need to f fix this. But whether you're in boom times or you've got some free time, there's hardly a bad time for an existing business who's struggling with this to finally get the help. Because we've had folks been able to completely automate two, I think it was two jobs worth of project management. They had two project managers. That's all they were doing. And once they set up these systems, they didn't need those people to just be, you know, button clickers reminding people of due dates. Instead those people were moved into other areas that actually added value. You those kinds of examples of dramatically changing how your resources are allocated is what happens when you finally build some supports for the business. I would like to know. Oh, this. Okay, follow up on this one. You know, main process support, process, managerial process due to differences among levels. I wouldn't know if it was clear. Okay, I would like to know the major problems you face with process interactions. Got it. And then we've got the different layers playing in here. We have kind of a philosophy and an approach to how we handle the connections between the macro, process and systems and the micro. We've historically taught it through a workshop called whatchamacault called the Blueprint. We've had that around for quite a few years. And the actual exercise is called the process org chart in version 6 6, which is what I'm going to be sharing in the live boot camp on March 6th and 7th. Look, version 6 on the 6th. How perfect we planned it. We actually are releasing a updated version to that exercise but we have a framework and kind of a. An exercise. I don't know what to call it. It's a way for you to get those layers out of your head to help you see the interaction and make sure that things are compatible. But I will also say, Juan, are special to hear small businesses, established businesses, sure, but small businesses. And so we on the high end, teams of maybe we've. We've seen up to about a hundred but our sweet spot is really like 20 to 30 people or anywhere between three and 30. We'll often say in those team sizes it's rare to see huge challenges and huge stratas be formed between all the layers of process. So not too crazy much here. Clara I recently became the chair of a small church that is making an effort to create grow. Awesome. Congratulations. I immediately saw that a big part of stagnation and leadership burnout was. Yes, thank you for sharing this. We talked earlier about ways to motivate leadership. That is a great one. Burnout. Have you ever worked with churches or non profits that don't have traditional products and employees? Any advice? Yes, I do not know the percentage off the top of my head. Sarah might, I know she's here, but yeah, we have a healthy. Off the top of my head, I would guess 5 to 10% might be a little bit more than that. Nonprofits, churches, universities, non traditional organizations that go through foundations. As much as I said, you know, our approach is really approached is really focused on people connected through the Internet. It doesn't have a strong opinion around business model, industry or for profit or non for profit status. We've seen a lot of folks on both sides in terms of advice. It's the same principles. It's the same principles. You will have the challenges. If you are in person, you will have the same challenges. What we talked about with the contractors earlier, especially if you're balancing with volunteers, you may also struggle with the churn there. The one thing I would just say for non profits or churches is because you tend to have leadership or your board or your advisors, they tend to change over time because they tend to be volunteer positions for you. Documentation and having a set system that people can access when they're in that position and lose access to when they're not has a lot of value because you have implied turnover by the duration of board seats or about the number of. For the number of years that the person is in a given position. There is not a lot of special exceptions that come to mind for me when it comes to churches that wouldn't also be faced by any other organization in that size group. So I would say once again, start with a thing that actually hurts, keep it simple. And for you, since I'm guessing this might be a smaller organization, you may consider implementing that work management system as one of your first steps. Giving you at least that architecture to then fill in with those systems as you go. But setting up the architecture with like a volunteers access group or a, you know, board access group can be really nice as a starting point. Task plunger. Yes. Yeah, it's very simple. So I will say if you're like a seasoned manager, you're gonna be like, yeah, obviously. But Task Plunger was created as the name implies. If you feel like you have tasks just flooding and overflowing and clogging your pipes of productivity. You need to plunge them, right? So we created a little mini course called Task Plunger. It's free, we can put the link in the chat. It's on our website too at ProcessDriven co. And it's, it's basically a five day email course. So you get an email each day. I think it's five days at least. And each day gives you a different thing to do to get closer and closer to delegating for the first time how to think about it, how to approach it, which has to do. It's simple. But for folks who are like, oh my God, how do I ever get help? Fantastic starting point and stuff, I wish I would have known earlier. And it's free. So like, come on, what else? What else you got to do? Andre, have you implemented with financial planning firms? See these questions about industry? I mean probably any industry you're asking. Probably yes. I mean we've had well over 2, 000 clients at this point in our core program, not to mention the ones in our other programs. Yes. We worked with financial planning firms before though. So have you implemented it? Yes. ClickUp or SmartSuite more suitable? Depends on the. The structure you have. My general rule of thumb, which I kind of talked about earlier with the landscaping company, is do you have a set process that all of your clients go through? For most planning firms, I would say yes. In that case I would find SmartSuite more suitable if you have a lot of variation. If you work with four Ultra VIP financial clients, then ClickUp might be a little bit more suitable. The big difference between the two of them, I could go through the full list, but the huge difference between them is around the rigidity of the hierarchies. And so I usually use rigidity of your service as the main deciding point. If you answer that question, you're like, eh, it could go either way. Then I would watch my video on the channel about ClickUp versus smartsuite. It. It's a little old, but don't, don't hold it against me. I'm not refilming it because there's nothing that's changed. Yes, the interfaces look a bit different but. But the functionalities and the comparison I give in that video have remained unchanged. And that would be where I go and look. I'm finally reading the rest of the message. Small group of client families maintained over three years with regular repeating meetings. Probably SmartSuite then. But watch that video if you want to Play by play of some of the other variables to consider. But give it a try. Like you can use our link. Hey, use our link. Try it out. And if you're like, oh yeah, this is pretty nice, it's probably the right choice for you. The only time I would kind of overrule the logical choice is if you have an emotional reaction. Sometimes people, they'll try one of these tools and like, ugh, ugh, you know, oh God, so many clicks. Can't stand it. And then that can also sway you. But sounds like you might be on the smartsuite train just based on that. If those are your final two. Oh, man, we're going long today. Why not? This is fun. What are your thoughts on how to best do an intervention? Oh, man. Actually, tabs, my thoughts are Task plunger. It doesn't handle the mindset as much, but it's the tactics, right? The tactics of getting started for delegation, mindset wise, I think Bonnie Christine is an online creator. I've recently watched one of her talks from Craft and Commerce a few years ago. She has a good little like pep talk about why you should stop doing everything. You can find it online. So Bonnie Christine, Craft and Commerce. I want to say it was 2023, but I actually don't remember. Shout out to Craft and Commerce, by the way, best conference in the orbit for creators. But anyway, her talk is kind of a motivational pep around this kind of stuff that might be. If you're looking for the mindset side, that kind of concept would be what I'd hint on practically though Task Plunger would be a great framework and you can, you know, check it out. It's free. Yeah, right. I know it's gonna be two six hours days and you know what? I think it's gonna go by like that. I am so excited for it. Can I recommend any resources to educate myself in this space so I can help those in my community? I'm always asked for help. Well, it depends on what you're looking for resources for. If there's a specific thing, let me know. Like if there's a topic you're like, I'm looking for resources for blep. Let me know. We can narrow it down. I give some book recommendations at the beginning. That would be a good start if you're looking to look into this stuff. If you're talking about recommending process driven stuff, our YouTube channel is what I always ask. If you guys haven't noticed, we are sitting like, like strangely close to a hundred thousand subscribers. I'm Watching it tick up and I'm like, oh, this is happening. And so if you can share the channel with a friend, that would be a huge help, a huge support. We also have a ton of free resources. So ProcessDriven Co Hub Hub has all of our YouTube videos, all of our free resources. Our newsletter, like all of our stuff for free is on that one page. So if anyone is like bargain hunting or just getting into this world and you want to give them a sampler platter, that page is a nice place to send them. And it helps us as well because like views on this video make a huge, huge help. And yeah, hoping to get that silver play button this year. Woohoo. Which for those who don't know is when you hit a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, they send you a little plaque. So this is crazy. I, I honestly thought, and I've said this to my YouTube, the person who does our, our thumbnails, our YouTube guru, shout out Josh. I was talking to him the other week and I was like, dude, we're gonna hit 100k soon. Like I don't really know. I don't know what we're doing anymore. Like I thought we already, I thought we'd cap out at like 40,000. Who knew there was more than 40,000 people who gave a about process, let alone could tolerate me talking about them? And he's like, well Layla, you gotta start thinking bigger and still working on that. But it's kind of surreal to me, still in my head, we're still at like $5,000 or 5,000. 5,000 subscribers. I remember those days and I actually looked at the chart. I'm going to share it on LinkedIn soon. I took a screenshot, but if you look at our growth chart actually here, you can see this. Here. No, there. Okay, hopefully you can hear me. If you look at our screenshot, this is what our growth looked like. And then this, and then it's just like this and it's just kind of hard to see here it's up here. It's a bit absurd. So I think we got more subscribers in the last month than we did in the first like two years, which is crazy. So a little surreal. What do you think about Notion? I think Notion's a good tool. A little too flexible for my like on work management, I think it's too loosey goosey. It makes it very hard to use as a team. They're trying to make that different, so maybe they will. But they're popular for a reason. Point of view on automation and AI? I do not know what AI, or sorry, ia. Is it like information architecture? Is that what we're talking about here? Are we talking about AI? I'll answer as if it's both. Automation generally, I'm a Luddite and I think it's valuable, but used in moderation for small teams, unless you have a team that is all technically proficient. Because automations tend to become a bottleneck that only one or two people know how to use and that slows us all down. Information architecture, if that's what we're talking about, super important. It's one of the things that implicitly we teach inside of our program. When it comes to structuring your data and tasks, it is so important to do it properly and part of why most implementations fail AI. Ah, there we are. When it comes to AI, I think it's super helpful, but I don't think it's at the point right now where it can be run autonomously. I think it's a lot like automations where it becomes a bottleneck in and of itself, where you have to focus it on very specific use cases to make it very simple or train a few people in using it. So it's kind of like all advanced tools in the business. Yes, you could have a custom developed WordPress plugin that you own and you create for your membership, but if you do that, you're the only one that can maintain it. So do you want to sign up for that? Maybe you should just go with conversation. Joby. The same kind of math applies in my view to automations and AI. That said, for the boot camp, I know I'm talking about this because I'm so excited. That's where my whole day is being spent after this. For the boot camp on the 6th and 7th, we are giving away some AI bots. So I'm hoping to set up some pickaxe ones. And we will be giving away to the participants bots to help work through certain specific process challenges. Do I think AI is perfect? No, but can it help you refine an SOP draft, create job descriptions and what's the other one we have? We've got SOPs job descriptions and one other one I can't remember, but we've got at least three bots that participants will be able to use throughout the day to speed up their process. And I'm psyched. I think it'll be a huge help, especially to those of us who might be perfectionists and struggle with that. How can I systemize a business if clients own my Schedule, change your business. That's terrible. No, that's not true. I was on a panel the other day and we were talking about building systems. And one thing I pointed out is that a lot of the times the best way to build systems is to actually change your business model. And that is true. If you are doing fully bespoke projects, you will never be a systemized as someone who's selling a productized offer. And unless there's a really good argument, you probably should productize as well if systemization is what you're optimizing for. For otherwise, though, for the rest of that question is, how can I shoot? What else was it? Can we bring it back? Please help me. Gosh, my. Sorry, Kristen. I'm so distracted by your wonderful question that I want to answer that I lost track of what I was actually saying. Mariah's loss. None of us can remember. Okay, what the hell was I talking about? I swear it was something, okay? She'll find it eventually. She's dying of. She's dying of embarrassment in the background. She'll find it. Let's move on. And I'll remember that thought eventually. Kristen, will ION stay the same? I'd be a better position to join when I finish the education season. Yeah. So here's the plan, actually, Creston, and you're the. This is the first time we're going to be announcing it in a video format. It's going out to the ions as we get into it. So. Ions, our membership, we're actually going to be expanding it a little bit. So we're going to be incorporating in some more support options. I'm sorry, Mariah's still laughing in the background. I can't. I can't believe we lost that question. That's so funny. Our membership will stay the same. We're going to expand it a little bit to have some more support options baked into it. So that way, if people go through foundations and then join ion, they still have the option for additional hand holding. In other words, historically, the ion, when we launched the membership, it was intended to be, you know, when you finish foundations and you're done with it, go here. And one of the things we've found that is that sometimes people will join before foundations and sometimes people will join when they're in foundations and there's questions about the curriculum that the peer only format of ION kind of limits them. And so moving forward, it'll probably be announced in the next month or so. ION is going to get an additional feature of a support forum, basically. Where ions have access to our coaching team which right now is Sarah myself. It's pretty small where you can get additional help on subject matter questions like the ones that you see here. We're not planning on too much crazy additional stuff at this point. Yeah, be cautious of the automations man. We've all been there. Hey. Oh my gosh. Thank goodness. I totally remember what you're talking about now Question is back. I wish I had some, you know, air gun sounds I could put on very low key live. If clients pretty much own your schedule you can still systemize but systemize the stuff that is not related to when the meetings happen. That's it. So time blocking might not be your favorite thing but how you do everything other than the time of day can be systemized in the same way that everyone else can. If there's specific question of like oh how do I do this? Let me know Crescent. It will not be denied. Although we do not yet have an ASANA forum inside of Ion but if you like bribe Darren with some chocolate or something we could probably hook you up. We've got a lot of ex ASANA users though so like sorry. Yuri asks what is the role of the team leader when we talk about systemization? Lack of systemization is their fault. Team lead no, by, by default. No by default. Lack of systemization is the fault of the founding team or the C suite, the leadership team. Ultimately they are the ones with the natural incentive to systemize by like just laws of human behavior. Owners should be in a position where they're like oh my gosh, I can raise the value of this asset I'm building by systemizing. Of course I'm going to do that. That and if they don't follow through on that good intention it's really their fault. Once systemization is pushed forward though, let's say leadership is like, like Aditya from earlier uncle and dad get on board. They're like hell yeah, we need systems and they start rolling it out. At that point there may be a transition where leadership starts to give out mandates okrs objectives to leadership teams and we say hey sales team, sales team, division lead here you are in charge of making sure your team is systemized and when that accountability is set, when that expectation is set, that responsibility is set and accepted by the team leader then yes, responsibility starts to shift downward in the organization but naturally, naturally the responsibility is at the top and that's why when we're actually building systems, unlike every other book you read out there, my philosophy, our philosophy here is to Build them from the bottom up. So we're counterweighting the natural incentives. This is a comment we've been getting a lot lately. Love you guys who feel the need to chime in. The reason I'm not using a lot of technical terms in my content is one, because that's not how I speak naturally. And I'm, I'm just myself like. So I'm not going to be speaking about OKRs and OFBs and ERPs and TPS reports naturally because that's just not how I would talk to you if we were in a room getting coffee. And two, because I create this content not for process consultants. So I know quite a few of you here are in this industry. Love you. Like, great to have you here. Glad to have you as part of this community. There needs to be more process consultants. When I started, I had no one to learn from. I couldn't find any resource worth itself consult. So I'm glad to see more people in this space. But this channel is not for process consultants. We have a lot of them here because there are no other resources. But what this channel is for is for the small business. It's for the small business with 25 employees who runs a promotional product company and a laser engraving shop in Wisconsin who's struggling with adding the the daughter into the business, who's going to take it over and can't keep track of what orders are happening and how tasks are actually work. And they're frustrated, frustrated. And they don't need to have a BPMN course in order to move forward the business. They need to figure out how the hell do I get Johnny to actually do his task on time. That's who I'm working with. That's who I'm talking to. And as you're watching these videos, if you're like, man, this is, this is just so basic. You're using cutesy talk instead of the proper terminology. It's like, yeah, yeah, I am. And if you want to get the technical terms, go take an MBA and you can spend 100 grand to learn what was true 25 years ago. But for the rest of us, we're working in a small business and need practical tips for how to get started today. That's what I'm trying to get in here. And yeah, cutesy talk, humor, like all these dumb jokes, it's my personality. And it's also just a way to make sure you don't fall asleep on this boring topic, which I don't think is boring for the record, but either Way haters aside or whatever, I'm just glad people care enough about this to argue about it. But my goodness, calm down. Go hug a tree. I love. I love the passion, but like, misdirected. Go, like, do something useful with that energy, man. Anything else? Tabs says I'd love to join and learn from foundations, but I'm running my company myself. No team. What do you recommend if you plan to stay with no team? Hold off. Tabs, I talked about a little earlier, but we're hoping to release something a little bit more beginner. Not to say beginner, but like small team, pre team, early stage. We're going to create a course for that demographic. I think later this year it might be 20, 26, but I think it'll be later. You can hold off. If you anticipate having a team or if you have contractors and that is the kind of construction you're looking to build, then foundations can be helpful. This is the only live bootcamp we're hosting, so if that is like, gosh, I need to do it live, like, that's the only way I will ever finish this, then it could be a reason to jump now. But otherwise I would hold off. Our focus is on communicating in a team environment. And so a lot of the stuff we teach you would just skip over at this point, which might be less than effective use of your time. Okay, I got some comments saying don't change the content. Good. Well, I appreciate that it seems to be working. So I don't know, just the. The more real it gets, the more real it gets, it seems. So. All right. Is that everything? I know we've been going on for like an hour and a half now, Mariah. I see. I'm reading her lips. She said, let me see. Yes. I have refined my lip reading skills here. I think that's all the big ones. I'll do these two while she waits. These are two questions I actually put in here. I planted them. Yes. What I'm working on right now, just for those of you who are curious, is on the boot camp. So we've got some swag and surprise orders coming in and different things for this live rendition. And if you or anyone you know has been looking to systemize their business, but they cannot be trusted to just DIY it, even if I give them the step by step instructions. There was a once and potentially ever opportunity on March 6th and 7th, one month from today, where I will guide them through it step by step from their computer screen. So check that out. And then the other Thing is, put this on right here. Something I'm trying to solve right now. I want to put this out on this live stream because I think if I talk about it more, it will magically solve itself. There are two challenges I am personally trying to solve right now in my business that you'll probably see covered on the channel in the future. And I like to share these. So, you know, like, I'm not some guru. I'm not. I'm figuring it out. But problem number one is we are doing, we do a monthly process improvement podcast inside our ION membership. So that was the one that we were talking about earlier here. And right now, one of the problems we're having is organizing guests. And so one of the things I would love your help on is if you have any creators, you YouTubers, podcasters, that you're like, oh my God, I would love to see a collab between Barney and ProcessDriven. I'm looking for referrals of who you think would be a really good guest for us to collaborate with. This also ties into my video where I talked about trying to just, just build more relationships in the creator community. I don't know who, like, I got a few people reaching out to you, but like, I would love some recommendations from you guys. If there are other channels, adjacent channels, it does not have to be in the process niche. In fact, I'd prefer it not be. But marketers, AI people, automations people, financial people, folks that, you know, that do really good work that we should collaborate with. I'm trying to get some referrals in there. So if you have any favorites, I would love your referrals in the comments, in the chat here if you're live or in the comments if you're on the replay. The second challenge I am trying to solve is basically trying to figure out how to get live in person YouTube content. So I have some people I'm reaching out to to try to get some help, but I want to put it out into this universe so you guys can help me as well. I really want to start filming some YouTube videos on site or close to with clients, or if not clients, at least people who are doing cool things. So an inspiration for this, which many of you might be familiar with, is Cody Sanchez. She has. She invests in businesses and then she goes on site and does these little mini video tours while promoting them shamelessly. I don't want to replicate to that extent, but I really love the concept of being able to be in person, working with a team or seeing a team in real life and showing how process is impacting people, real humans in the moment. And I'm trying to find the right opportunity, the right vehicle for getting some on site fit filming so I can share the stories with you guys as a YouTube kind of TV show, Allah the Prophet, if anyone watched that old TV show, love that. But I can't figure it out yet. So if you know anyone, let me know, Send me, send me some help, put it out there in the universe. I'm sure it'll eventually boomerang back, but that's all we got going on for now. I think that's the last question we have in here. See one recommendation for some. Oh two recommendations for some people to collaborate with. Like love that. Thank you. Keep them coming. I know Darren's here. He's the one helping me book these. So we'll see what we can find out. And please keep them coming. If you have any referrals for who you think we should collaborate with, I would love to hear it. Thanks so much for though for joining me for this very long live Q and A. I have this apple that I've been wanting to eat this entire, this entire live stream and I think now one hour and 45 minutes later, it is time. So thanks so much for joining. I'll see you next Thursday for another YouTube video. And I until we talk next, enjoy the process. Bye Bye.