How A Shortened Work Week Can Improve Employee Productivity

Brian, how are you, my friend?

Good. How are you, Matt?

Doing great, man.

Doing great.

I wanted to have you on for a while. You— how long has it been since you guys went to the 4-Day Workweek?

Almost a year now. Almost a year.

Almost a year. So about a year ago, you transitioned away from a full 5 days a week in the office to move to a 4-day-a-week rotation in the office. I'd love for you to explain to us what that looks like and why you did that.

Yep. So it probably really starts with a little bit of background of what our workweek and our workforce looked like before this. Because last February, 12 people co-located in the same office coming in every day, typical sort of 9 to 5-ish schedules. And then, you know, mid-March, after— it was, it was actually interesting because I was, I was having lunch with my business partner the day that they canceled the NCAA basketball tournament.. And we're watching this on the TVs in the restaurant. And we said, I think this means we need to send people home. And the interesting part about being sort of, you know, a software company, like every, almost everybody is a software person in our office, is that we're kind of built to work independently. We do a lot of collaboration, and that's a really important part of our culture. But we were already equipped, we were already on Slack, we're already using, you know, group tools to manage and to keep everybody accountable and to track tasks and projects. And all that. But we said, you know, we're set up to do it. Everybody's got a laptop, send them home, and let's just keep working. So that— we're really sort of fortunate to be in a position like that. And we went sort of 7 weeks just still keeping the same schedule in the midst of the early pandemic. And things were going okay, but what we started to notice is that people would say, you know, my mechanic is only open until 3, or I've got to get into the vet or the dentist or whatever the things that had to kind of keep going on. But without everybody co-located in the same office, it was really confusing. We'd have people sort of like bailing at random times thinking, oh wait, I needed so-and-so to help with this project and they're just plain gone. So what we did is we said, what are the, what are the things we could do to, um, to mitigate that, to kind of give them a predictable way to be like, well, business is going on, it's the middle of a work day, but I know that during this time I could schedule an appointment with the vet or the dentist or whatever it needed to be. On top of that, we were starting to see a lot of anxiety, especially because we have a younger workforce, a lot of them single, live alone, maybe, you know, got some pets and that kind of thing, but they're kind of isolated really highly, especially, you know, just a year ago. So we said, well, again, we can maybe fix that. Let's give them some time where they can just say, well, this is a day off, even if I have to stay home, I'm just gonna play video games all day, or I can go on a sort of a walk without having to worry, you know, during the day without having to worry about, you know, what I'm— when I'm going to come back to, because nobody's expecting that I'm going to be at work that day. Going through those ideas, we said, well, the way we support other businesses, we just simply can't say, well, everybody's off Friday, because we needed people around. And we also have sort of this cross— sort of a cross-team responsibility, cross-responsibility team, right? Where we've got some people are designers and some people are in QA and some people are just developers. And we knew we couldn't say, well, all right, well, all the developers are off Friday because that would be a disaster, or all the designers are off on Monday. So what we did is we created 3 cohorts of cross-discipline teams that would have their days off. So you're in A, B, or C, and, and then just gave each one a day off. So the first week, Group A was off on Monday, Group B was off on Wednesday, Group C was off on Friday.. And then so that nobody sort of had the advantage, or the company didn't have the disadvantage of people having 4 days out in a row, we rotated backwards. So the next week we just went back a day so that, you know, the worst thing that ever happens is that you go 8 days between your— 8 business days between your days off, which is not a big deal. Everybody loves it. And, you know, the first reaction was, oh, so you're furloughing people. And That wasn't the case at all. Like, everybody stayed at their same salary. Like, we made this sort of an added benefit. And the first sort of interesting thing that we saw is that we instantly, probably because of novelty, got a bump in productivity. So in those 4 days, everybody was working at a much more they were more productive, which kind of gave us the incentive to say, well, let's kind of keep this up. And for a very long time, 6, 7 months even, it was dubbed as an experiment. We said, you know, this could end any time. Just remember that this is kind of a privilege we're working through. It's not written in the policies. It's just, let's do this and see what happens.

That's interesting because that's one of the questions I had is, what sort of expectations did you set? Because you're saying I kept everybody at the same salary. I'm sure— well, I don't know, did you come around and say, well, normal work weeks, 40 hours. So now we're going to cram it into 4 10s, or were you setting the expectation that, you know, it's a normal workday on these 4 days?

How did that conversation go? So really what we did is we said, we got to have— there's got to be a little give and take. So let's add a half hour to our normal 8-hour workdays. And so we're at, what is that, 34.5 hours of work per week. One of the early adjustments that we made was that we would also sort of keep a little bit more strict on the flexible starting and ending times because it was more important because of the, the days off and because we were all working remote now where we'd all been co-located to, to be able to say, yeah, they're going to be in at this time. So it was a little bit less of, yeah, you could show up at 10 and kind of work later that day. So that— and some of that flexibility has actually started to come back now a year in Um, but throughout that time, you know, as the novelty started to wear off and you started to see like, okay, well, we're not really getting as productive as we were— that's still not bad, but it was still not as much as it was when the novelty was still in there. Um, we started with a little bit that says, look, we still want to do this, right? As a team talking about this, we still want to— we still want to do this. Like, you like that day off, the rotating day off. I mean, it's an extra 50 days of vacation, basically a week predictable vacation a year. So we had some discussions about what we could do, and one of the biggest sort of remedies to the fading productivity was that we said, well, let's just make it a privilege. So if you're falling behind, everybody, the whole team is going to expect that you're going to use your day to catch up. Well, you know, how many times has that happened? This happened a couple times where people have said, I need to work on my day off to make, to make up for some lost time because something happened or whatever. But for the most part, everybody takes their days off because they know like that, that's something to work towards. And it's been a really, really, really positive sort of more sustainable, I think, than just the novelty of, hey, I only have to work 4 days and my buddies are all at other companies are all working 5, whatever. So 5, 6, 7, maybe.

I don't know. So that's a mindset shift, right, of I've got to move to earn that 5th day or in that day off instead of it's a given.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. So you guys are in professional services, you're a custom software development shop. That's right. More into what you guys do in a little while, but I just want to set that table because I know a lot of people listening, myself included, we're very customer-focused, we're very client-focused, we spend a lot of time— we're a professional services organization and a software development shop. And so You know, when I first hear, okay, 4-day weeks rotating and people getting time away, and well, who's gonna talk to the clients, right? And so who's gonna have those conversations and what's gonna happen? We can't have any gaps in our service. How do you guys navigate things like that and how did you set it up for success?

I think there are a few things. One of the things is that we do talk to, especially our more, um, our more high-touch clients, we talk a lot about what, what that means for us as a team. You know, so we do a lot of— a lot of our client communications happen en masse. So we'll get requests come in and they'll know they need to copy a few different people because they don't really know the schedule and they think, oh, you know what, so-and-so may be off today, let me make sure that, you know, someone else is included. And we're small enough still that our leadership team gets copied on a lot of the client stuff anyway. And we are, you know, we're always on, we're business owners. I mean, leadership team is pretty much always on. So we, we catch a lot of that. At the same time, we've had to make adjustments as we've had, you know, new people come in. And then in turnover, that we've had to shift people around. Well, you know, this team doesn't make any sense anymore. Is it okay if we shift you to a different cohort? Because now we've, you it just works better that way. People working on projects and say, hey, you know, I really kind of need you to switch, even if it's just for the next 4 weeks while we're building this product out, because you're on a— you've now become, you know, the 2 people working on a project and both of you on the same code. So, so there's, there's a little squishiness with that. And the team, again, there's such a benefit to saying, well, I've got this predictable day off. Sure, I'll switch. That's not a big deal. Um, in most cases.

What about— do you guys still have a PTO policy as well, or no?

Yeah, and early on it is pretty simple, again, because we're small. So it basically— we, we dropped it by— what was it? I think we— for the first, for the first 6 months, we basically said, just give us a little bit more advance warning on your PTO. And by the way, since we're giving you an extra 50 days, can we take a couple days off the PTO so you're not requesting? Yeah. Right. So we figured a 20% reduction in a normal work week meant a 20% reduction in that PTO, which nobody had a problem with. Nobody was taking vacation. There wasn't anywhere to go. Their vacations were these mini things every week where they could say, I'll go to the, you know, to the state park and hike or those kind of things. And now we're back. We've restored that now, so we're back to just do PTO like normal. Again, use your judgment. You're, you're adults, you know, make it work. And we haven't had problems.

So it's late April 2021. Are you guys back in the office?

We are. We— you can come back in the office. One of the interesting things that happened through our moving to remote is that it kind of gave permission, and I think good permission, to the team to say, well, maybe I don't need to be centrally located anymore. So we had, um, 2 people move out of state. Um, we had a couple hires from out of state. So now, um, there's no requirement to be, um, in the office. And, uh, people— I mean, as As the sort of overall climate of pandemic and everything sort of shifts, we're seeing a little bit more people kind of trickle in. But it's one of those things where if it's going to help you do your job to be in the office, great. Not going to require it right now, but it'd be great to see you. So that's kind of where we are. We don't have a requirement. In fact, my business partner is one of the people who moved out to another state. So it's working well. And again, being in sort of that software space, we're kind of built for the remote thing, built to kind of be independent. You know, all the things that everybody else has adapted to, having, you know, Zoom and being really, really, really entrenched in Slack and sort of having a little bit more of the, maybe the nerd's advanced usage of Slack over, over what you might see, you know, some a random, uh, you know, nonprofit or something who's, who's like, oh, I hear Slack's great, let's try to use that. Um, we take that a little bit more seriously, but, um, that's, that's been helpful.

Well, you hit on something really important there. We've been talking about with a lot of our clients, a lot of our friends that are business owners, and that is the ability to recruit from a national stage. Now, if you are willing to continue the work-from-home model, then you can find people that are not in your market. I know for us, as an example, we always struggle to recruit payroll and tax people. Well, we're in a small market. And so once we kind of cycle through the market of people that are looking or available, or we can recruit, then we have to look outside the market. And so we have to find ways to set them up for success to work remotely. And, and that comes down to the right people though, too. I think this is something where I had a good debate on a podcast a while back with James Hornick. I suggest folks check it out, but we talked about the future of work from home. And I tend to believe that this is going to correct some over the next few years in that there will certainly be a shift towards a much more flexible work environment of work from home and, you know, the combination of the two, in-office and work from home. But I also think that we'll go back to our old ways a good bit, 3 to 5 years down the road. But so for those of us that are willing to maximize talent that are willing and able, which is a really important part, right, people that are able to work from home and be be effective and be efficient and, you know, avoid distractions and understand. And usually that takes some maturity, that takes some practice, that takes a lot of different things. And there are other people that just need to be in the office for a variety of reasons. They crave the social component of it. They also are just much more productive there. They need the structure, but it's about you as an employer recruiting the people that are good at either or. You don't necessarily— if you're going to go 100% back in the office as soon as you can, And then you're recruiting somebody who has the expectation of flexibility, and you're setting both of you up for failure, right? And so I think, but there is somebody right around the corner who's 100% willing to come into the office every day. So find that person. There's, there's not this zero-sum game with talent. And, and I think that's important for folks to know, but you touched on something that I think is important. And also probably incidentally sideswiped a bunch of our audience with the, you know, the folks who are now grabbing a bunch of online tools to work remotely that maybe weren't using them before. Right. And so, and all of us had to pick up some new tools. Tools to be able to manage the situation, and hopefully they'll continue to improve over time. But what are some of the tools that you guys use to make remote work work?

Right. What's interesting, because— and I've had a lot of conversations recently with our clients because, you know, it kind of comes back to, okay, we're a software shop, but in the end, it's really sort of like we're this tech-forward go-to-market company that's going to kind of get into your business and figure out what the best ways are to, to really succeed in business and to to make you productive and make your employees, you know, be more human and less computing, right? Because that's really the whole goal. And a lot of those conversations have been around, well, you know what, we threw Zoom at this, we threw Slack at this, we put all these tools in place and we thought it was going to be great. And it's just like a— there's just a mess. Like we made a mess of everything. And the funny thing is that even when you get an off-the-shelf tool, like I'm gonna advocate for don't reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you need custom. That's what keeps us in business.

And we'll get to, so one of the things that I know we wanna talk about is internal automation and some of that low-code or coded things that will strap some of those things together or replace those things. But let's talk off the shelf right now.

Of course. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But, but the, the whole point of that off-the-shelf, um, you know, being valuable is don't reinvent the wheel, is that even the off-the-shelf is going to require some configuration. And so what happens is, even though we're not, you know, a vendor of off-the-shelf software, we wind up doing a lot of, well, have you looked at your Slack notifications and tried to you know, turn the dials a little bit. Maybe you don't need to be, you know, notified of every channel in your entire workspace. I got a lot of, you know, COO types who were thinking, yeah, I just stopped signing on to Slack because I was getting notifications. Like, you know, you can change that. Those guys, you know, so there's a, there's a lot of that that goes on. So the off-the-shelf stuff that, that we have really, really, really latched on to, um, There's a lot of sort of the really specific dev stuff, which I can kind of skip over, but Slack has been huge. Zoom is really big. We're a G Suite, or now it's Google Workplace company, so we've got a lot of those integrations built in. So when you get invited to a meeting, you can kind of see that come through on Slack. When someone comments on something on a Google Doc, that comes through on Slack. Those are, those are really It's really important to sort of take this, um, you know, there's the, the Einstein sort of quote of, you know, as, as few as you can get away with but as many as you need. Like, that's the very, very paraphrasing. But I don't want to use a ton of tools, but if whatever tools I actually need, let me make sure they're working together. That's the really biggest, the biggest part of that, um, making sure that, you know, Google wants you— when you create a new calendar invite, they want you to use Google Meetings.

Do that.

Well, we're a Zoom organization, even though we're a Google Workspace team. So there's an add-on where you can just switch that to, to, you know, include a Zoom invite. Um, that's been big. monday.com is what we use for all of our task and project management stuff. Um, that's another one that can be immensely overwhelming. Um, and some of that is because it has so much flexibility that you really, really, really do have to put a lot of structure around the configuration. To make sure, um, that it is bending to your will instead of you just getting in there and creating a mess. And that's half configuration and sort of the nerdy side of it, of making sure that you go through all those systems of, oh, I can automate this a little bit or whatever. But then also the human side of that is enormous. By the way, we don't just create projects willy-nilly in Monday. And, and just making sure that your team is, is educated You know, we're, we're an EOS company, so we really, really strongly believe in sort of the 20/80 process rule. Like, let's just give a really short summary of what that process looks like on how you, you know, instantiate, provision a new project to be tracked in our project management system, and just give a really short outline that in 5 minutes somebody can look at and go, okay, I got the gist of this, I'm smart enough to to do the right thing in this scenario. And those are the big, those are the big daily ones. Slack, Monday, a lot of Zoom. We have a lot of Zoom fatigue, but you know, that's just part of life right now, and we'll get over it. But it's really instrumental to say, you know, we'll be slacking back and forth and get to the point of, you know what, we've wasted 5 minutes trying to get to the root of the actual question here, let's Zoom for 5 minutes and another 5 minutes instead of having to go back and forth for an hour and sort of really, you know, get into that. But again, it's really that— it's really the integration of those products that, that are the, the force multiplier there.

We touched on something I think that's really important, and we're working backwards in this right now, and that's that setup. Component and the integrations and the extensions and all of the different things. We use Zoho for a lot of different things, but we use Google for a lot of different things. And the list just keeps going and going and going. We browbeat people before they start here of like, yes, you need to be tech savvy. And I don't even know how to explain this other than you need to give me a list of every application you've worked inside of and how much time you spend during your day so I can really understand if you're going to be able to survive in this 500-tab world that we live in, unfortunately. You know, we once had somebody come into our office. Obviously, we provide payroll and HR services and they're looking around, they're going, this is not what I expected. And I was like, what do you mean? And they're like, where are all the file folders? I was like, file folders for what? What would we need file folders for? There's no need for paper. And I mean, we print very little just generally. But so we're actually going back, getting consultants come through, look at our setup of our Zoho CRM. Getting it to integrate with the projects, getting it to integrate with everything else, and kind of working into some of the things that we're gonna talk about in a little while, and that's some of the internal automations. But I'll also give people just the, you know, I just spent some time doing this the last couple days. Whatever tool you're using, if you have something else internally that you'd like it to speak with, do the quick Google search of Zoho CRM XYZ integration, and you'll be shocked that there's probably either an integration that already exists or they're connected with Zapier or Zapier. Or however you pronounce it, and you can strap the two together. So there's a lot more out there for us as small business owners than ever before. It's a really cool time. You mentioned EOS. I gotta give the disclaimer, right? Everybody we bring on uses EOS. So if you're not familiar with EOS, it's Entrepreneurial Operating System. I don't get any money from them, unfortunately. I feel like I should. I feel like I should at this point. EOS and IPPA, if you're listening right now, you both owe me some money because it seems to come up every single episode. Um, but it's based on the book Traction. It's a business operating system, highly recommended for those of you out there, small business owners that are not familiar with it. Check out the book by Gino Wickman, check out the process. Like I said, most of the successful small to mid-sized companies I know that are growing are using EOS. And so there's something to be said for it, or a competitive system of which there are also some. So let's go over to the— well, let me just kind of put a nail in the coffin here on the 4-day work week. I mean, So you guys have started to make some changes on it. You started to say, well, you know, hey, we want you to earn that day off. We want you to, you know, really understand how valuable this is. And it's not about just, hey, we just work 4 days because that's our cool culture. It's like, we're trying to earn something here so that you understand that it is a benefit, a huge benefit. I think everybody listening that is not a business owner is going, what the heck can I do to convince my boss to get on this schedule? So hopefully everybody from our team hung up. If you're from ERG and you're listening to this, or Grow or Guru, you know, drop me a chat and let me know if you made it this far. But what else would you change if you were starting out from scratch today?

You know, I knew you were going to ask me that. And really, it's— I think a lot of the lessons learned, we would just implement them earlier. I don't think we have a lot of loss on that, but when you look at the, um, when you look at, okay, well, you know, did we, did we need to, um, to make it clear early on that it was this sort of privilege that we were earning? You know, when we, when we added it in, it was kind of like this: how can we fix these two problems? This is one solution to fix both of them. Um, that was— but if we looked at it a little bit less like a Band-Aid, though, you know, experimentation is is a huge part of the game. One of the other things that I didn't mention that may be important, especially since, you know, talking about HR stuff, is, um, we do put a waiting period on new hires to take it because we want them to have to get all of the— we want them working with everybody as much as possible. So a lot of surface area for them to learn all the new processes and everything. Um, what's funny is I should, I should have noted, I don't remember whether it's 30— I think it's 30 days. For new hires, maybe 60. That's the other side of the house for me. So they, before they are actually, you know, enabled that privilege, and that's never been a problem either. So, oh sure, yeah, it's good for me to get, you know, that exposure. And then they kind of look forward to that day when they're sort of ready to pick their cohort, be picked into their cohort, be sorted into their cohort.

So nice. I love it. So I think one of the things that, that stands out to me that you guys did really well, you talk about positioning that, hey, this is an experiment. We might have to double back on this, right? We're going to try it. We're going to see how it works. And then as it evolved, you said you continued to set better expectations. Hey, you're going to earn this. And that's what it always comes back to is communication and expectations. Whenever I see people in an office that are, oh, Susie works a flexible schedule and she's leaving every day at 3. And everybody else in the office is getting upset when they watch her walk out the door. Well, that's because that communication was communicated— or excuse me, that expectation was communicated to Susie, but not shared with the rest of the team, right? So now there's envy or there's jealousy or there's whatever of, oh, I'm picking up the slack for Susie. Well, they don't know that was her employment agreement because she has to pick up her kids every day at 3, and then she logs back in at 10 o'clock every night because the leader never communicated that to the rest of the team. So expectations are the one thing that trickle over all this stuff whenever you're getting into a flexible work environment, whenever you getting into additional benefits that relate with how you come and go from the office. Because whether you like it or not, people are going to get up in other people's business of why— oh geez, Brian's never in the office, you know, and it's like, well, you know, Brian actually negotiated work remote because he can't come to the office. So it's important to set those expectations on the front end. It sounds like you guys are doing a great job continuing to iterate on that. Um, I want to talk about internal automation, so things we can do to make our businesses run smoother. And there's nobody better to talk to about that than you. Before we do that, it might make more sense to have some context on what is Fivable, what does Fivable do, tell us about the business, so then we'll understand why you're the expert to talk to about internal automation.

Sure, sure. So, um, we're about a 10-and-a-half-year-old custom software shop, and we say, oh yeah, we're a custom software shop, um, but really, like I mentioned before, we're kind of a tech-forward go-to-market consultancy. So a lot of that is realized with a startup that might come to us and say, you know, I have this idea for a product. Maybe it's a software product, maybe it's just a product that will rely on software either through e-commerce or fulfillment, or they have an interesting sort of payment method for their service where you've got to hit a lot of people, Or maybe that, you know, we deal with a lot of nonprofits, maybe they're doing fundraising out at the edges and they're having tons of events and they need to use, you know, mobile, you know, either SMS or mobile apps in order to, you know, garner donations or to get people to join in their initiatives, those kinds of things. They come to us and they say, we don't know what to do, we understand you do, how do we start? So almost everything we do is web-oriented, and if not, it's sort of network-oriented. We do some Internet of Things, with, you know, getting devices to collect data from, you know, disparate places and collect that in one spot and then do some analytics on it and get business intelligence. So the idea is that you could come with us, come to us with an invention, and even if we don't have all of the skills in-house to do it, we know where to go to get you. Oh, well, I need somebody who can do molded plastics. Well, we can find you. So we need somebody who can build firmware or, kind of this device that looks like a phone, like all of that stuff. We can kind of get you the right connections and give you the direction so that the technology is going to integrate with the things you're using off the shelf just to run your business, you know, document management and all that kind of stuff, communications, Groupware, um, email, and stuff that might be sort of highly customized, like, you know, customer dashboards or data analytics or just a lot business logic to handle events that are coming from, from the field. And so that's, that's sort of, you know, what Fivable does. We're mostly, mostly developers, but actually we're really sort of— there's more developers than anything else, but it's developers on one half and then product on the other half. We got people who are doing design, they're doing business analysis and quality assurance as well.

So I can come to you with a problem I want solved and say, hey, can you help me automate this thing or build a dashboard or build some middleware or whatever it is. Or I come to you with a product and say, hey, I've got an existing development team, but we need to build this onto it. Or I've got this product that I need built from the ground up. I've got this amazing idea, but I'm a non-technical founder, or I'm a technical founder, but I know I don't have the bandwidth to be able to write all this code, and I need you guys to act as my fractional team or fractional CTO and all that stuff. That's right. Awesome. That's awesome. So that sets the table perfectly because there's nobody I'd rather hear from as far as what they've done internally to automate things, right? So we have all of us right now in 2021. If you're listening to this and your team is not overwhelmed, I congratulate you. I, I'm, I'm happy for you. We tend to be pretty full all the time with inbound work, outbound work, proactive work, a lot going on. And we're always focused on, hey, What are the things that we can automate? What are the things that we can get rid of doing, trying to stop doing things we shouldn't be doing? But, but automation is always at the forefront of our minds. So I'm curious to hear what are some of the things that you— first, some of the like low-hanging fruit that you're like, hey, look, even if you're non-technical, you can grab— you can figure out how to automate this with a little bit of help. And where would you get that help? And, and let's go further technical and say, all right, what are some of the things that, yeah, you should hire a developer to automate this because it is going to save you X amount of hours, time, money, etc.?

Yeah, I think it all starts with really having an assessment of those. First of all, your core function, right? Like, what are the behaviors that are going to be critical to the success of your business at every level, right? And then looking at those critical behaviors, thinking, well, what parts of those things are dull or prone to human error? Like when, like the, there are 3 Ds. Like we look at robotics, we're not a robotics company, but let's look at robotics. When we first started going into manufacturing and putting those giant sort of dangerous arms on the manufacturing floors and everything, what did they say? Like, if it's dull, if it's dirty, if it's dangerous, then let's get a robotic arm to do that instead of the people who are sitting on the line. Right? And so in computing, Dangerous and dirty are probably not the, you know, gonna happen, but dulled certainly does. And prone to human error is the other big thing that you find in computing. One of the things we see all the time is companies will come to us and I'll say, well, what's your process for this? And they'll say, well, you know, Debbie's got an Excel spreadsheet and every morning she updates that from another Excel spreadsheet that's sent to her from the floor. And she does copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. It takes her about 20 minutes to do that. And then she uploads that to the leadership team, and the leadership team does a couple of pivot tables, and then they take the results of that and they put it in an email. And then we come out with, with the report that we need at, you know, 4:30 PM every day. And I'm thinking, Wow, that in any time I hear copy and paste, anytime I hear, well, we pass around this Excel spreadsheet, and there's nothing wrong with Excel spreadsheets, a lot of power you can get in that, that's just sort of unparalleled, right? Especially when you need somebody to think through things. We use a lot of spreadsheets, we really do. However, a lot of those spreadsheets are either fed through programmatic data, or they're actually just you know, the result, right? So they're coming out of a system that says, all right, well, let's take a look and see what the annual statement looks like. Let's see what, um, with the results of this project, like, how do we go over-under on hours and their estimations and those sorts of things. Um, and so what you have to look at is, you know, do this assessment, figure out what those tasks are, and then see what is the tool set we're using. In a lot of cases, your tool set may be excellent. Like, you may have exactly the right set of tools, but like I was talking about before, it's just not configured properly. Um, maybe it's, you know, we're over— you know, we're a Google shop, we're using Google Sheets for this thing. Um, and, and everybody's kind of, um, sitting in there. A really good example internally is that we track all of our, um, project allocation and billable time through a Google Sheet, um, because it was a new initiative. We've been doing it now, um, the, the way we're doing it, we've been doing it about 2 months maybe. I said the path of least resistance is to create a Google Sheet that everybody has access to. Um, we've locked down some of the data that, that is the extrapolated data where you automate and move things around. There's a lot of fancy formulas that go into that. Um, but now we're in the process of, of using, um, an Amazon, an Amazon Web Services product called Honeycode that actually is going to create this in— and it's meant for— it's a no-code, low-code, internal teams application development. So you wouldn't build a product for your clients with Honeycode, at least not right now. That's not what it's meant for. But you can build a form that then does a— like, it's Google Forms, if you, if you're familiar with that, the way that works. It dumps the data into a spreadsheet. Or things like Airtable, it's like that on steroids, because then you have the power of all of the Amazon Web Services stuff that can connect in and do some extra extra, you know, data manipulation, all that. And it's really, really, really easy to create these automations and platforms just, just like that for internal tooling. Really good, um, really good tool. So that's, that's one of these things where we're using the Google Sheet and we said, well, you know, I need to, you know, take my own advice here. What is that next step? And we needed to figure out what the, what the shortcomings of, of the Google Sheet were before we moved to that step.

So what are you actually doing with it? What problem is Honeycode solving?

Yeah. So one of the, one of the things is that if, you know, in 2 months we've got like 800 lines in a single spreadsheet of data that needs to be ongoing, which is great at 800 lines, but that means that a year from now we're gonna have 5,000 lines in this spreadsheet with some major lookup formulas happening in each thing. And it's going to take so long for any of our employees to load that sheet that it's— in addition to that, there's no way to sort of, at least not an easy way, to do the logic that says, hey, you know what, you've gone over on your hours for this, and we need to remediate somehow. You can, you can give warning, you can say, oh, I put this— now this is a red column because we ran out of allocated hours. But there's no way to sort of create these alerts and all these— or not an easy way to create those alerts. As soon as we start going into a system that's meant for, um, understanding events instead of just presenting data, then you really have the ability to say, okay, they submitted their hours with this form, it went here, now I can start building an automated process to— oh, it's going to send a notification to the leadership team that says, hey, this project's over budget. And, and those sorts of things. And then the performance is just a different— it's a different world of performance when you're looking at a tool like that.

And I want to go back to something you talked about at the beginning. It's that sort of assessment process. And, and for us internally, you know, we don't have a lot of, uh, local developers here in our office. So whenever we're doing one of these, we're pulling up the whiteboard, we're saying, all right, from the time this process starts until it's done, who does what, what has to happen, what's not happening that should happen, what, you know, what are the systems that are, are making each of these steps occur? Where does that data go from system to system? It's almost shocking every time we do it, right? It's like there's almost always at least one system that shouldn't even be involved, or multiple things occurring that humans should not be doing at all. And that it's simple reminder, even sometimes just these simple reminders that need to be triggered inside of one system that are going back to your, uh, initial thought from a while ago, that a setup, right, like turning a notification on or off or turning on Zoho has this great thing called blueprints where once this happens, then it triggers X. And most systems today have similar things like that, either inside the system itself or through an integration. But I think as you start to plow through each of the things you do, I like the way you phrase that, things that are dull, right? So is it going to be hard to recruit talent to do this over time? And, you know, if they're entry level, are we going to You know that you're not going to keep them for 10 years. So do you want to keep rehiring every 2 years for people to do this dull stuff? But it's core to the business though, which is critical. Um, so, so Honeycode, something like that, it might be a little intimidating to some of the folks that are just getting going with it. But I think when you start to look at that process map, then you, you identify where the problems, where the gaps are in your current process and go, okay, we need to solve this. Now I need to start to talk to somebody about a solution instead of going, hey, somebody come in and look at all my problems for me and figure it out. Because sometimes that can be challenging without the internal expertise. Right, right. All right. So, so kind of low-code stuff. And there are a ton of low-code things out there, y'all. I keep going back to Zoho just because it's— we use their CRM, their customer service tool, we use their accounting piece. I, for the Zoho One suite, we get like 40 apps, but we do have to strap a lot of them together and we do have to code a little bit of that together. It's not all as seamless as they would make it appear, like most softwares are not, but it is very powerful when we do that. And they also have same thing. They have Zoho Creator. It's a low-code thing that I can drag and drop features and I can solve problems if I have the time and patience. Now, last episode I had Paul from Poster Elite on and he was like, look, man, you got to have an external person do it. He's like, if you try to look at this stuff yourself and you try to solve your own problems, you're just not looking at it through the right lens. And I thought that was really interesting. And we've had similar experience recently. I know this just counteracts everything I just said, but like, we just brought in a consultant to look at that Zoho stuff and like, oh wow, you are much better at this than we are. This is what you do full time and you see this much cleaner and everything we think is completely unique to us. Is not and is the same as all the rest of your clients with the similar problems that they have. So, so low-code, tons of great options. You feel free to kind of build on that. But what about as we start to move into sort of more complex workflows and problem solve?

Right. What I think is that if when you're, when you're looking at your toolset, whatever that happens to be, every industry has, you know, a niche CRM. Every industry has like, this is how we do that core functionality in our business, and our staff can operate it. They know how to do it. But again, what are the dull things that they're doing? And you brought up the points about the, you know, dull and sort of keeping talent, but double-clicking on that is, I don't want to do something over and over and over again if it's just this. And I think, you know, could a computer do this? There's this made-up stat that I have since we started this. I made this up years ago, and I said 86% of people do things the hard way because they don't know the easy way exists. And all the time we have clients, and these are clients that maybe that we've just done a little bit of sort of gluing some systems together, all the way to clients where we've built their entire mature dashboard payment processing protocol levels of device, you know, keeping track of devices all over the world. And I— and they say, you know, what really bugs me is that I have to go into the payment processing dashboard and I have to click refund myself, and that I can't just let the customer do that. And I'll say, well, you know, it would be easy to add this little portal to the system where we did this, this, this, this, this. Wait, you can do that? Is— I hear it all the time. And it's not that it's easy to do all of those things, but it's almost always possible to do those things. And you're not even getting into, you know, there are sort of a few classes of, you know, development-oriented, like software-oriented tasks as we classify them internally, right? You have the things that you know, will really fall into that low-code, no-code system. When someone fills out a capture form on my website, can I get a notification in Slack on my customer service channel so everybody can see this is something that needs to be taken care of? That falls into that. Sure, of course, millions of low-code systems will do that. Millions of lead capture forms would just do it naturally, right? That's, that's, that falls in that first category. Then you have the second category of Well, you know, this is a little bit more complicated, but I need to do some business logic in my own— maybe it's a customized system, or maybe it's just a really highly flexible system like Salesforce or Monday or something like that, right? Where there are the series of actions, like you talk about blueprints in, in Zoho, but they need to be connected to a system that maybe there's not an integration already written, but it has an API. Sort of a problem that, that developers can solve. And that, that there are a lot of those things like, can we create an inventory management system? Can we do payment processing at a general level that sort of fit into that developers can do this? And then you have this next class that we would call engineering lift, which is, you know, we haven't done that before. We don't know exactly how we would accomplish that task. But I know we have people smart enough to sort of put all the pieces together and develop the algorithms and the systems that could connect and make those things happen. And those are really, really rare where you get to that classification of— I mean, even if you have a brand new idea, you have a brand new sort of like spin on the way that your industry operates, those engineering feats they're, they're rare. And they're always accomplishable. They're just usually accomplishable for a little bit more money because it takes a lot more minds thrown at the problem. So we always classify those things. Most of the work that a custom software shop does is right in the middle there.

Yeah, and you're making me think about here, there's like this crawl, walk, run thing here where a lot of people listening, I feel like, aren't even really crawling. When you think about the number of clients that we bring on that haven't even automated employee onboarding and haven't automated, you know, the basic things around performance management, even just as simple as getting notifications and automating the forms and making sure that, you know, people don't have to have calendar reminders and email things. Like, those are big things to me. Anytime you have a calendar reminder, a PDF, a series of emails, spreadsheets, like, those are things I look at and go, okay, well, there's got to be a better way to do this. And usually there is. Like you said, inside the systems you already have that you haven't even looked at. That's right. And then maybe, you know, so that's my crawl. My walk is, all right, cool. Now I'm going to strap some of these things together with either some low-code or, you know, getting somebody in here just to, hey, can you make a little, a little bridge between these for me? And then the third is, okay, now I've gotten that far, but I've got a really big business problem that this is something we're doing nonstop and investing the money in the software once again versus hiring over and over and over again to do this. You know, we see it everywhere. You use the robotic example from the floor, and I think that was a great example of those 3 Ds. So tremendous stuff. And obviously Fivable can help if, uh, if anybody needs, you know, gotta get you that shameless plug in there. And, uh, but, but work on the basics first. I think that's always my thing. And that's always what we're looking at. I mean, we, we talk about master the basics, like that is our internal mantra is, you know, we always getting out in front of our skis, trying to do the next progressive big thing. When in reality we have so much low-hanging fruit we haven't even touched yet.

And we have people a lot that'll come to us and say, we've got big problems. You don't even know how big our problems are with digital, with our digital strategy for building our product out, for getting people to understand what we're doing, just for the day-to-day of what our whole operations team is doing. And we'll ask a few questions and then say, well, you said you have big problems. You have a few little problems. What really— like, what's actually annoying you here? And, you know, we use the 5 Whys and just go deeper and deeper and deeper into what is actually at the root of the problem. We were talking to somebody the other day that was like, I just get too many Slack notifications. And if there's an actionable event in there, I just don't know what to do with it. Well, in like 3 minutes, you can find us Zapier on Zapier or Zapier, you know, I'll go either.

I think it's supposed to be Zapier, but it would make sense if it was Zapier. If I've heard people calling it Zapier and I'm like, why? They're called Zaps. Why would it be?

Anyways. Yeah. So I think it's because people have the long A in API and that's the— I think that's the whole reason.

But the Zapier, so GIF or GIF, Brian?

It's GIF. I know the guy who— but it stands for graphics, not graphics. That's my— so anyway, the It took 3 minutes to find this Zap, which was pre-published. It wasn't— it didn't require configuration other than connecting it to Slack. Connect to Slack, where if you click the little save icon on a message, it sends you an email with that in there. And I am an inbox doer, like that's where my actions happen. You want shameless plug, um, David Allen, Getting Things Done is like the core of the way that I get my own personal work done. In my inbox. My one true inbox is my email inbox. So, you know, I tell my kids all the time, if you, um, if you want Dad to do something, a really easy way to get that is to put it into my inbox. So they send me emails all the time. It's like, hey, can you, uh, you know, buy some gas for the car?

So that—

you're not there yet, Matt. Soon, soon, soon, soon. Quicker than you'd like. So, um, it just— but that's a really, really, really potentially life-changing thing where you don't have to worry about something missing and that sort of anxiety of, oh no, what was I supposed to do, to just have that in seconds?

Well, I'll give you a fun one. So we use Trello and we use G Suite, and I used Zapier to create a bridge where whenever I starred an email, it would create a card on a certain Trello board whenever I did it. And then, you know, 6 months later I realized, well, Gmail and Trello have a direct integration. I don't know why I have a Zapier. And so I added an extension. And that's the other thing too, right? It's like taking the time to do just a little bit of digging. I mean, we just did it yesterday. We're looking at integrating a direct mail service into Zoho CRM. So if we want to send somebody a thank you card, it's a click of a button instead of somebody on our team going and filling out thank you cards. It costs $2 to have the thank you card sent instead of somebody doing it. Yes. But is it much simpler and easier? 100%.

Is it—

it does it matter? Do I have to train the next person to do it? No, because it's a button that's right there in front of them. So this has been great stuff. Any parting thoughts you want to leave the folks listening with?

No. I mean, I would say, you know, if you start, you know, classify sort of like what's going to be that 20/80, like what are the, what are the small things I can do that are accomplished huge amounts of work, always start with the, the dull, the annoying. What is it that, you know, as in leadership, like if you're a leader, what is it that you're doing in a given day that you think, I hate this, or it is silly for me to be doing this, I don't belong in this tool, I don't belong in this task. Start with those and you probably— there's probably a low-code, no-code way to do it. And if not, reach out to somebody who either— there are consultants that they're not— they're software people, they're not developers. Like, they're just implementing that. Consultants to do that. Um, just find somebody to bounce ideas off of. Email me, I'll— you can all day long, I'll bounce ideas off of you.

Yeah, same here. And, and I'm, and I'm just thinking about this, like, one of the greatest joys I have is talking to the other people in the payroll and HR industry all the time. And it's so, it's so awesome because there's always something they're automating or doing differently than I'm doing, and we can do that sharing. And it's not even, you know, you I mean, you get to Brian once you figure out what the real problem is, but don't just talk to other people that have the same problem. That's right. And, and don't do what I have done so many times, and that is start with a tool and then look for a problem to solve. Start with the problem and then look for the tools, right? That, that is something I've done over and over again. Oh, monday.com looks great. I know we already use Trello and Projects and this and that, but what does Monday do differently?

And that's actually a really great example because we migrated from Trello to Monday, but only when Trello— we got to the end of Trello and said, it's just not doing it for us anymore. We've got to change to something else. What's out there? And that's it. And but we see a lot of, a lot of organizations we go to work with that have a glut of tools that are either a mess because they've got too many of them, or they're just too many of them and they don't have wide adoption because this team uses this, this team uses this. They don't talk to each other. If you just spend a little bit more time in that due diligence to say, do we really need this? And what are the ways that it works with what we're already using? Or maybe something we're already using just needs a little bit of work to get it to that extra point. So I think the parting thought for me is like, really just stop doing silly things and start doing smart things.

Stop doing silly things, start doing smart things. I'm going to take that to heart. I might start As soon as next week.

Start today, Matt. Start today.

Well, thank you so much for joining me, Brian. Thank you.