Optimize and Automate Your Company’s Processes - Nicholas Sonnenberg

When you first joined Genius Network, an automated process started and you got into the flow of things. The right things were sent to you and hopefully you felt connected and ready to be an active member. What if you had a process for virtually eliminating, for virtually not eliminating? What if you had a process for virtually everything you do in your business that was documented and automated? That would mean if your key person left, one of your new team members could step right in and make your process work. That's what you need to grow your business. Processes and systems that are automated hiring is a great place to start and thinking about process documentation and automation. And Nick Sonnenberg is an expert in this area. And I know this because I am partners with these guys. In just two years, Nick processed thousands of applicants and have hired hundreds of people. They now have 161 team members that leverage a company which he co founded with Ari Mizel. Nick is going to share with you how the process works by showing you an actual hiring process and the steps that are automated. This is the exact same process he used to bootstrap his business from zero to over a million dollars in the first year. Nick's title is Optimize and automate your company's process. Please help me welcome Nick Sonnenberg. Thank you.

All right, so we talk a lot in these meetings About Unique ability Scaling 10xing Working on your business, not in your business. But how do you actually do that? You need good processes and we all come from different backgrounds, different industries and businesses, but one thing we all have in common is we all have processes, whether you realize it or not. Most likely somewhere between 100 and 1000 processes. Who here hires? That's a process. Firing is a process. Payroll is a process. If you have books to ship, that's a process. There's literally hundreds and hundreds of processes that it takes to run your personal or your business life. If you start, well documenting your processes, you're going to find three major benefits immediately. So the first is risk. Now, risk can be interpreted different ways depending on your business. So risk could be an error. Like if you fuck up payroll, that could be an error. That could be a risk. So if that were a well documented defined process, you reduce the risk of messing up payroll. Another risk could be losing a key team member, who here, if they lost one of their key team members, would really be in a bad situation right now. So that's a huge risk that you guys are having. You have bottlenecks in your company and you want to be able to remove those bottlenecks. As much as possible. I just read a good book called the Checklist Manifesto. And in that book it's written by a surgeon and risk in surgery is death. So the main point of this book was by creating checklists for surgery, you can greatly reduce the amount of death or errors in surgery. And it was something staggering like 20 something percent or even higher just by having a stupid checklist. The second benefit that you'll see by having process is you allow for breakthrough and innovation in your company. So Howard Getz in yesterday's talk was talking about quant traders. I used to be a quant trader and as a quant trader, the bank used to force me to take a two week vacation every year. And the purpose of this vacation is to make sure I'm not hiding trades. But what always happened was when you have someone else looking at your book, even if I'm a thousand times smarter than this person at math, having fresh eyes on a process, when I came back from that vacation, I always had some improvement to what I was doing. Because it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're looking at the same thing every single day, you're not going to see something that someone even less good as you will see. So it's going to spark innovation. In our company, we're implementing a rule where we're rotating everyone every month onto different roles. People that were doing payroll are hiring, people that are hiring are now firing. There's monthly rotations and this has been super critical for us to improve all of our processes in the company. And the third is you save a lot of time and money if you have a well documented process. Hiring people and getting people up to speed is way faster. And also you can then automate various things and have a robot do it. So we literally have hundreds of processes at leverage. But I thought that today I would share with you how we hire because for us as a business, we're a virtual assistant business. We have a lot of applicants. That's the core of our business is delivering high quality freelancers to people. So hiring the right people is critical to our business. And I figured that everyone here has to hire. So I'd show you guys how we do it. Now this is probably iteration number like 200 of this process. And it's probably going to be changed by the next time I give this presentation. But I'll show you guys where we're at right now for how we hire. So this is really the hiring process. If you go to workforleverage.com this is how people apply. So when you do that, you go to a WUFOO form. And in this form we ask some basic questions. Name, email, we show a little video so people get a sense of our culture. And then we do a few things that are a bit different. So resume is normal, we ask some questions. But the main thing that we do a bit differently is we found that it's a waste of time to schedule phone calls and interviews with people. So we have people do a two minute pitch and put it up on YouTube. So asynchronously we can basically interview them. So they fill this out, they select what kind of role they're applying for, whether it's a generalist, designer or developer. And when that happens, automatically a checklist is created in this tool. Process Street. I'll go through. You'll see the value of processtreet as we go through. I get no kickback from processtreet. I'm just sharing this with you guys because I find this tool really cool. There's a bunch of other tools that do similar processtreet Process St. There's others, there's pipefy. It really doesn't matter which one you use. The message here is you have to whatever you choose, it's important to, well, document and define your processes. So you fill out an application. It just so happens we got an application in today from Joe. So I thought that we would walk through and decide together if we want to hire Joe or not. So Joe's applied to work for Leverage. He filled out the Wufoo form. I got all the information here. And the very first step that whoever's in charge of hiring has to do is they have to watch the YouTube video. So let's see what Joe's YouTube video is.

Hello, Nick and Ari. My name is Joe Polish and I'm.

Applying for the role of virtual assistant at Leverage. And I just wanted to let you guys know I've been a huge fan of the podcast and the book and I know I can bring a ton of value to the team. A little bit about me, I'm super duper tech savvy. I'm the opposite of whatever add. You know, people refer to that as I'm super detail oriented. I can type about 10 words a minute. I'm definitely the smartest person in the room. Granted, I like small rooms. I very much love details and I am super focused and my hobbies include juggling and riding unicycles and hiking. And I would really be honored if you you guys would let me have this role.

All right, so what do you guys think? Should we move him through? Oh, yeah, he's perfect. All right, great. So we check off that. We like the YouTube. Then we look at his answer to a question. We ask a question about UFPs, he answers, who goes to post office anymore? Anyways? That looks great. A few more questions. His resume we take a look at. We then send him an email congratulating him on moving to the next step. And then the next phase of the interview process is to test him and give him live tasks internally that we want to test him on. So we click this and now it kicks him off into stage two of the hiring process. So this little risky doing a live demo, but I think that it's not going to mess up. All right, so if you guys recall, he moved from the initial interview part. Now he's in sandbox testing. So it's this cascading. He's moved from step one to step two. Now in step two, there's a different set of requirements that we're looking for, and it doesn't need to be the same person that did step one that's doing step two. So now in this, there's a bunch of requirements. We have to add him to various things. We have to put him on a phone call. I'm not going to bore you with these things. But then after that, let's say he does a really good job on his testing. Now we're ready to bring him on board. So that entails doing a background check for him and having him sign contractor agreement. Are you going to show us Joe's background checks that. All right, so in the background check, it's really simple. We submit a background check. Here's some steps that it takes to submit the background check. So I'd have to log into on fido. This is not automated yet. This is one step where we still have to automate this. But then after this, we are ready to send him a contractor agreement. And all I need to do is check that off. And he gets an email from HelloSign automatically to sign a contractor agreement. And it pre populates it with the date, his name. All Joe has to do is fill out his address. It even populates the rate that we put in. So we, you know, we figured he was worth 22 bucks an hour. And then all he has to do is click sign, continue, agree, and then we automatically are notified that he's just signed the contractor agreement. And you can see here.

That now.

He'S automatically moved from the background check. I didn't click the right button, but he's automatically in the add to production list now because of signing that hello sign. So this process used to take about 30 minutes, and now as you can see, it takes around five minutes and it's still improving. So that's the. I mean, there's much more to show, but in a short period of time. That's really what I wanted to show you guys. So, again, this tool you can use, this tool you can even document in Evernote. It doesn't matter. The purpose here is it's so critical for you to be able to scale your company by having well documented and defined processes. The automation part is kind of like the sprinkle on the cupcake. It's really the benefit is that you can have someone else sit there and follow a well defined, documented process and not have risk for your company. So my takeaway for you is on Monday, when you go to work, think about your processes and follow just three simple steps. Literally, just identify your processes, try to document them. You can even do it on a piece of paper and then hand that paper over to someone else and have them test it to see if they can actually execute what you've given them. And that is a quick way to test if you have a well defined process.