John Pierre argues that manufacturers need onboarding workshops before technical training because confidence, not competence, drives adoption. He defines success as a system that shows what's broken and lets clients fix it themselves, and pushes for launching at 80% rather than waiting for perfect.
Today at Empire Blueprint, we've just onboarded another 4 clients, and it's a 40-minute onboarding session, and people say, everyone kind of complains when they sign up. They're like, do I have to waste 40 minutes of my time? Like, yes, you have to spend it wisely. 40 minutes with the JP. And I keep trying to think like, why is it so important and what does it solve? Everything I've ever done has been to make life simpler, make life easier, the world easier to navigate, and things not as complex. And I'm trying to take the difficulty or the uncertainty out of any situation. When you sign a new client, just because they've signed the paper and they've paid money, doesn't mean that they understand fully what they're going to get. You think they do, they say they do, but I will assure you, 10 times out of 10, there's always a question mark, an elephant in the room, a little bit of doubt. These onboarding workshops have been, they've proven to be so valuable. They allow me to be me, they allow me to share our company values, they allow me to set expectations from what we're going to give the client, also what we need from them to be able to do that. It sets boundaries, it sets expectation, it gives guidelines. We're even starting to define what success looks like. And it's interesting because for a company who builds workflow solutions right now, we build systems for manufacturers. Everyone says, I want a system that's going to work. Then I ask them if they think they know what our definition of success is, and they say, isn't it the same? And I say, not really. So I'm going to define it to you. Because maybe you need to hear this. At Empire Blueprint, our definition of success is a system that will show you what is broken, it will highlight to you what is broken, and we would have given you the confidence and the competency to go and fix it in our absence. Why do I say this, and why am I so passionate about this, and I find myself saying it day in and day out? It's like, hey, it's confidence first and then competency. Most people, if they will it hard enough, can do, I think, almost anything. And that's arguable, and I talk about it in other videos where I'm like, yeah, you've got to really have it in you. But if you're just having to learn a new system, which is difficult but easy if you put your mind to it, the thing that holds you back is fear. And confidence is what propels you forward. So we teach confidence first, and then we teach the skill set on the system to make sure people feel safe. They feel like whatever they do, like, they're going to be okay. Once they've got that, there's nothing they can do that's wrong. Because inside them, they're just like, yeah, I can do this. Like, even if it's wrong, so what? I'll go and fix it. Secondly, the idea of a system that is final is like a complete fallacy. The only thing final in life is not even life itself. It's actually death, which is bizarre if you think about it. And so I make this joke to all the clients. I'm like, not even life is final, or even the only thing is like at the end of life it's final. So how do you think your system is going to be done? You want this 100% perfect system that just happens. The truth is it can't, because every day that you're alive, every time that you make a change, you have an idea, you go and change your system, you go and change your behavior, you change a set of workflows, whatever it is that you change is going to have an impact, it's going to have an effect. 80% should be the measure for good enough, especially when you're doing things in systems. That idea of pursuit of perfection and 100 to 110% is absolute, like, it's ludicrous. It's some bullshit fantasy. It's some fallacy that we've all been told. It does not exist. It cannot. Because by the time you get there, the whole thing would have shifted anyway. Go live even when you're not ready. Do the hard thing when you don't feel like you can. Show up, rock up, bring confidence to whatever it is that you do, because that's going to be the one skill that you can take anywhere. And when it comes to building a system, if you don't know what to do, just freaking start. Start with a smile if you can, and just Say to yourself you're going to get through to the end and don't stop. And I will assure you, all of our students who go through our training programs come out the other end not only better in context, but better in terms of character. And the whole reason is we build confidence before we build competency. So it keeps dawning on me just how important that is. And it humbly reminded me today is like why I spent so time engineering that workshop. To anybody who's trying to run a business and says, my clients are messy, Oh, we're not meeting expectations, they're expecting too much, I'm not sure why we're under-delivering, and all these problems that come. I want to ask you, have you actually taken the time, have you paused and taken the time to think about those questions? And are you giving them time to address it? If the answer is no, go and figure out what an onboarding workshop looks like. It's changed my life for the better, and it's definitely changed the way that we do business.
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