Inside guHRoo: Setting Goals and Achieving The Company Vision

I remember when we first started Guru, I was at a local coffee event and I was talking to one of our early clients. I've mentioned that experience with him in a prior episode about how we landed them as a new client. But he asked me, Matt, how are things going? He knew we were pretty early stage in our journey. He knew that we were less than a year old. I think we're about 6 months at the time. And he said, you know, what's going on? How's the entrepreneurship experience treating you? How are things? And I said, man, it's just so dang hard. I said, there's just, there's no right answers. There's no playbook. There's no right way to do anything. And he said something so profound and so simple at that moment that I'll never forget it. He said, Matt, there are a million right answers. Just pick one and run after it. And then if it, things change, adjust, start over if you have to, but just make a decision and move forward. And that was a very freeing conversation. It just, it was such a light bulb moment for me in that, yeah, it doesn't have to be the exact perfect answer. It's just a matter of making the decision, committing to it, and plowing forward. Today's episode's going to be a little bit different. I'm going to give you a little bit of a behind the scenes peek of how we do things at Guru now after 8 years, uh, versus maybe how we did them back then. Some of the systems, operating systems we use to think about goal setting, to think about we progress towards our long-term vision, how we think about long-term vision, and some of the tools, and, and really just share some of our vision with you. I think this one's going to be unique in that it's going to be— if you're listening to this right now and you're a Payroll Bureau owner, it's going to really resonate with you on some of the things we're talking about. But if you're just a small business owner or leader, I think this one's going to be really valuable to you as well. And even internal teammates here at Guru, I think you're going to get a lot out of this because we're going to talk specifically about the vision of the company, where we're going, and how we're going to get there. So thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to taking you on this journey with me, and please share your feedback because again, I don't think we have all the right answers or any of the right answers necessarily here. I always joke, you know, maybe one day when we're a quote unquote real company, we'll figure it out. So that day's still on the horizon and I hope it never gets here. I want to be a perpetual startup. So thank you for joining us and I hope you enjoy the episode. All right, so we use a, uh, system you've heard me talk about on the show before, and that is called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's based on a book called Traction by Gino— I think it's Gino Wickham. Um, that's one of many internal tools we use to kind of manage our vision for the future, how we're going to get there, how we get into our cadence each quarter, each year on how we're going to grow the company. And so each quarter we go through with the team our 10-year vision, our 3-year vision, our 1-year vision, and then we boil that down into 90-day rocks. And that's something that is really outlined very well in the book. And just as a side note, you can follow a very similar process when you're looking at hiring and onboarding a new hire. So if you cast a vision for what is What does just an absolute rockstar look like 1 year from today? If they accomplish these 3 to 5 things, I would know that they achieved the goals we had set out for that role and then some. That helps you to back down into, okay, cool. If I know they need to do those 3 to 5 things at 1 year, then what do they need to learn and be able to do by 6 months? What do they need to learn and be able to do by 90 days? And what do they need to learn and be able to do by 30 days? Obviously we can't work in 10-year, 3-year, 1-year terms when we talk about employees because we're probably not going to get that type of life cycle. A little bit of an aside, but that's been something that's really revolutionized how we think about bringing talent into the team, how we structure their training programs, how we invest our time and energy in getting people up to speed. And it's always the North Star whenever we sit down for our monthly plan and reviews and our quarterly assessments, as we know These are the 3 things we're driving towards over the next year, and then we continue to repeat that process year over year. So, all right, back to the company planning and vision. So I've just pulled up over here on the screen, I'm looking at our most recent ROX meeting and kind of how we structured that. And so, you know, the ROX meeting, again, something we do every quarter. We do it with the whole team. We're doing, uh, we're a little bit behind on doing our Q2 ROX meeting here. It's on the books for next week, I think. But So the most recent one I looked at here was we were reviewing year-end. So first and foremost, we kind of went through, you know, 2020 year in review. How did we do against our reviews? What were some of those successes? What were some of our results from Q4? And then we talked about our theme from last year, which last year for us, our theme was welcome. And they, we had a pineapple down here in the Southeast. The pineapple is recognized as a traditional expression of welcome. And it's something that is pretty synonymous with hospitality in the Southeast, particularly in South Carolina. And so we had the pineapple theme. We didn't really do a very good job. That was one of the big takeaways of like integrating that into our day-to-day world. We did do a good job achieving our goals, however, which is much more important. And one of the things we did for last year was said, hey, if we achieve not necessarily all of our goals, but if we achieve 80% of our rocks for the year, And there's a lot that goes on as we're about to boil into here and just— or dive into here in just a moment. Then we'll take a team trip to Charleston, which is a couple of hours up the road, but is one of the top vacation destinations in the world. We're very blessed and fortunate to have an office in one of the places that most people are vacationing to every day. So, all right. So we went ahead, we reviewed last year, we talked about the welcome theme. We then started to move into what are we focused on here in 2023? And we're doing a lot of hiring in 2023. I think we've added 6 people over the last 60 days. And so we are really focused on making sure that we are building out, we are adding a ton of talent density. And so the theme for 2023 is Dream Team '23. And so we got into the story of, you know, we're getting to be, I'm a little ashamed to admit, we're getting to be that age where there are a lot of people on the team who don't even know who Larry Bird and Magic Johnson are. Well, we, I had a picture up on one of the slides that had Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, and about half the team didn't know who Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were. And, and, you know, had to kind of squint and figure out who Michael Jordan was because he looks so much different back then. They probably all just know him as the crying Jordan meme at this point. But there are a few of us around that are relics of an era past and know who the Dream Team was. But so we took a few minutes to explain about that dream team and about, you know, what made them so special. And, you know, really for me, the things that made them so special is going beyond just, hey, this assemblance of talent that had never been seen before, but the way they lifted one another up and the way they challenged one another. And there's some great stories about how they, uh, you know, the scrimmages that they had are the stuff of legend and just how hard they pushed one another and how competitive they were. And so we want to not only emphasize the you know, hey, we're bringing in a bunch of talent to the team, but also emphasize the fact of like, hey, we need to push each other to get better. And this is the type of team that if you join, you should be expected that you're going to be pushed and you're going to be challenged by the folks around you. We took a few minutes then to go through, hey, what does your dream team look like? We've done this exercise internally in the past where we talk about what is the perfect teammate, how do you become the perfect teammate, what are those characteristics. So we kind of revisited some of that and talked through You know, what does a dream team look like? And then how do you become the perfect teammate for those people around you? One of our core values is teamwork makes the dream work. And so this is something that's always top of mind for us when we look at how we serve one another, which is so critical that we serve one another before we worry about serving clients, and then we serve our community. So that was a little bit of how we got into that. And then we, we walked through some, some client testimonials that we'd received, some of our feedback and reviews from clients. Obviously nothing but the good stuff there. We wanted to take some time to emphasize some of the really great things that our client success team is doing out there and our sales team and everybody really as a unit just helping to execute and bring success to our clients and their goals. All right, so next up, so we've gone through and really, you know, again, we're going through the structure of what a ROCKS meeting looks like. And we do these 4 times a year, this one particularly reviewing last year, getting into some of this year's focus as well. Next up, we saw some opportunities to improve. I'm going to go through these because I, you know, if you're listening to this and you have ways that you can help me to improve here, I'm wide open to hearing about it or your best practices. If you're hearing this and you say, ooh, we've got similar opportunities as well, hey, Matt, I'm going to ping you and see what you guys are doing to improve on this. Happy to share, happy to talk shop. We're making a ton of progress on each of these. But so opportunities for us is always clarity of focus, making sure that we're staying dialed in on what the overall vision and goals are. Better internal training. So our program, our accountability, how we track that. We want to continuously improve how we're serving our team. We want to minimize some of our systems and improve the utilization on our current systems. We have been, you know, paperless since day one to a detriment in the respect that we have, I think, 40-some-odd apps you, you get logins to when you start here. And so it becomes a little bit challenging for people to get up to speed on the technology in those first 90 days. And so we want to make sure our focus is on, you know, not necessarily adding more apps to the, to the kitty here, but using the ones that we have because, as you know, I'll use our CRM as an example. Zoho CRM is a big opportunity for us. There's tons of automation in there that can be utilized, and we're just not leveraging that platform to its fullest extent. So, which was the next bullet, which was more automation. We want to continue to improve our process documentation. And then as leaders, we want more active coaching out there for the teammates. And so, you know, really recognizing in the moment when there's an opportunity for coaching. We also want to better leverage our own HRIS internally for our own tools. So, you know, kind of eat our own dog food, if you will. We've become a client of our own products and services. So that's always very good to make sure that you understand how those things are working and use them to your own benefit. And then you can tell better stories to clients out in the field of, hey, here's how I document our performance reviews inside of the HRIS. It's really beneficial to me as a business owner. We want to improve some of our marketing. We want to improve how we support our resellers. So we do have a reseller white label side of our business. You know, it's been something where it's been a little muddy on how that support model works over the years, just because, you know, we have our direct-to-market, which is very crystal clear. Reseller was kind of an add-on later down the road, and it's been a little bit of a confusion on how we categorize some of those tickets and different things that come in. We want to make sure that we're constantly holding each other accountable and we're reviewing our rocks a little bit more frequently. So those are some opportunities we saw as far as how we can improve. So next up we go into, we had a couple other things in between. We talked about our core values for a little while and then, then we moved into our vision casting. So I'm going to talk about our 10-year, our 3-year, our 1-year, and our 90-day rocks. I'm going to also boil it back to some of our themes. Boil it back. I don't know why the heck I keep using boil it in this conversation, but help me expand my vocabulary. If you're listening in, maybe you can come up with something better for me there. I don't know. Boiling has nothing to do with what I was just talking about. So anywho. All right. So we talk about our 10-year vision. Now, one of the tricky things about using the EOS process is this 10-year, 3-year, 1-year is just like this constantly moving target. And so in 2021, we're like, look, the 10-year vision has to have a date on it or else we're just, 10 years just keeps being 10 years and it just keeps being in the future. So this is for January 1st, 2031. 2031. That sounds like too far in the future to me that I don't think that there's the thirties. Come on, man. That's not really ever going to happen. But anyway, so 10-year vision, we have 3 big goals up here. It's how much are we going to give to charity? What is our annual recurring revenue going to be and how many clients are we going to be serving? And so we have those metrics as things we can track and we can look to and know, are we pacing out towards where we want to be? But then there are the things that are also really important to us as being a human resources outsourcing market leader, being a best place to work multiple times, regional dominance, the number of employees we have, the number of partners we have, what does our office look like? How do we locate, how do we serve our clients? What is our platform look like? You know, to us, we view our platform the way we're building it out. We're going to be the Amazon of the HR space in the respect that not only can vendors come in and plug into one side of our platform and sell their wares to our clients and through our resellers, but also our resellers can plug in, grab what they need to sell to their clients. Our direct-to-market folks can grab, you know, if I'm Joe's Plumbing, if I'm a small business owner, I can plug in and grab what I need to purchase from the platform. So we talk a lot about our platform. We make sure that people are crystal clear on the vision for where we're going with that. It's going to not only serve the small businesses out there, but it's going to also serve the small regional payroll providers, CPAs, 401 providers, healthcare brokers, and also serve those partners who want to distribute their products throughout the platform as well. 3-year plan. This is in '24, so we're actually coming up on the 3-year plan here. Talk about how many new teammates we want to add. Well, we've again got these sort of 3 big bullets that are primary. We've got ARR goal, annual recurring revenue. We've got client retention goals, and we have a partner revenue goal. How much is coming in from that partner reseller side of our business? So we talk about also how many new teammates we want to add, how our model's going to work, getting that target of best place to work now that we've reached the appropriate headcount to be eligible. Talk about our distributed team, what that model looks like. We want to make sure the team is clear that we're going to continue to be a hybrid workplace. We're going to continue to improve talent density by meeting people where they are, and then also going to make the Inc. 5000 list as well. Then when we take that down a notch, we look at our 1-year and we say, all right, how many people in 2023 are we going to add? What's our focus on product set? What's our focus for revenue? Talk more about the automation focus, client retention. And our product development goals. So we have a big amount of development going on on our platform in 2023. And so we talked for a good while about what that means to both us and our clients. And really that's the kind of format that we follow for that meeting. And what that allows us to do is, and I wrap it up with, you know, talking about focus. What are the most important things you do every day How would you know you're doing them well and what benchmarks apply? And just leaving people with some food for thought there so that they can be better equipped to make sure when I leave the day, did I actually do productive work? Did I actually serve my team? Did I actually serve in a way that's going to help build me up as an individual? And, you know, how do I know that? Is that measurable? All right. So that's walking out of that first meeting. And then, you know, as we started to, come back to. I'm going to talk a little bit about our goals for the year, uh, because at that point we had kind of set the table, brainstorm some of the rocks in there. You know, a big part of that meeting— actually, I did skip the slide, didn't, uh, um, I skipped the slide in here, but we start to brainstorm what are some of the, you know, if I look at that 1-year plan and I say, hey, we want to achieve this amount of revenue, this amount of retention, you know, we want to have this built out with the platform, Then we brainstorm with the team and we've changed the structure a little bit now in the last quarter since our team's continued to grow. But when we were smaller, 10 employees and less, we would brainstorm this as a team just because everybody needed to have a voice in what all the rocks were, not necessarily just the company rocks, but all the individual rocks. All right, so now we shift the focus to the 2023 yearly rocks. And as clever as I am, I came up with this amazing amazing acronym, and you're just gonna love it as much as I did. So DREAM— we talked about Dream Team 23— come up with DREAM. D-R-E-A-M. D is for development, R is for recruiting, E is for engagement, A is for automation, M is for migration. So first, D, development. That's for personal, professional, and product. So we want every— we want our goals to stem up to these things. We want our team to get better. We're spending a lot of time focused on professional development, personal development, just helping our team become better people. My mission for any employee that comes here is that they're going to leave here better than they started. And that's just not on a professional level. My hope is that we can have an impact on them as a person as well. And some of that means, you know, talking about wellness, some of that's talking about your faith, some of that's talking about your, you know, how you serve your family, how you show up for people, how you take care of yourself., you know, just depends on the individual and where, you know, if they want us to plug in and can we plug in. Uh, professional development's very obvious. Product development's very obvious. R for recruiting, adding to the dream team. So big focus when you're trying to add, uh, I think we're going to add about 15 people this year. So when you're adding 15 people and you're a pretty small business, that becomes a high level of focus and something that we've, you know, in the last 5 months put somebody into a role where where we used to just post roles and wait for applicants to roll in and kind of recruit only when we had to. You know, the focus now is on outbound recruiting and less on just waiting back for candidates to show up. E for engagement, taking great care of the team. Like, we just have to take care of our people. We have to continue to make this a great place to work. It's, you know, from the start, the vision has been create the kind of place you want to work. I have not worked very many places where I left and I was like, man, I'm going to miss everything about that place. And nobody's going to ever leave here and be like, man, I'm going to miss everything about that place. But we can create the type of place where people are going to really, really, really be pressed to leave here because, you know, it's going to take some substantial offer, some life movement, something to leave here because we're creating an environment of both challenge where you grow as a professional, but also comfort where you understand that we care about you and you continue to care about your team because we're all working together towards a common vision. Automation. So we're at D-E-A— D-R-E-A of DREAM. Automation. We want to make people's jobs easier. We want everybody here to have a robot. We want everybody here to automate the junk that is time-consuming and is not exercising their top talents so that they can spend their time and energy doing the things that they only they can do. And then finally, M is for migration. We are moving everyone onto our platform before year-end. We have a handful of legacy platforms in the process of building out our software stack where we're going to migrate all of our clients onto a common, uh, tech stack, being that which we own by this time at the end of the year. So dream, Is big for us. And then, so we took each one of these and, you know, under development, under recruiting, under engagement, under automation, we just started brainstorming. What are the things we need to do around each of these areas? What are some ways we can move the ball forward? Then we, as we're brainstorming, we're taking those and we're prioritizing and moving some up, killing some, pushing them for later. Then after you get that list culled down, then we review it as a team and go, all right, who's grabbing what? And can that be done this quarter? If it's a higher priority, is it done this quarter? Is— can this be done in a quarter? And then, so we kind of go through these and we distribute them among the team and people grab what they want off here. Sometimes things get assigned, but ultimately we're going to make that progress towards each one of these rocks. As the quarter's going on, the leadership team every week is reviewing these rocks we ultimately have. So we took them, we boiled them down into the categories. Then we prioritize them, then we distribute them, people grab them themselves, and then each leader is responsible for each, a different batch of those rocks. And so then each week as a leadership team during our Level 10 meeting, which is a pro, uh, part of the EOS process as well, we're saying we're tracking against those rocks. How are we doing? Where are we behind? What do we need from a resource perspective? Are we on target? And that way we know where we're at and where we might need some additional support. Now, some of the things I've learned along the way there is, this is kind of silly, but what'll happen is you'll write a rock down, like automate 23 things in '23, and then you maybe won't put enough description in there. And when you come back to it later, you go, ah, what did I mean by that? And that one's not a very good example 'cause it's somewhat specific, but We have it come up at the end of every single quarter where you go, did I really do this what I was expecting that I was doing when I wrote this down at the beginning of the quarter? So I'll say don't spare detail once you decide on what they are. For us, we're starting tracking these just in a Google Doc, then we're moving them into a system called 90.io, which is, which I don't think that the Traction people developed it, but they have a relationship with the Traction EOS people and it tracks it. It has all steps for managing the EOS process inside of the platform. So it follows the Level 10 meeting flow, it has a space for rocks, it has a space for the accountability chart. All the stuff that the book promotes can be tracked inside of there. So that's a big thing for me is I have a tendency to like miss the target a little bit sometimes because I was not descriptive enough early on and then realized, oh, wait a minute, what was I meeting there? That was 3 months ago, I forgot, and I might be slightly off target. So just make sure that you're taking the time to go through and do that. All right, so once we've got that, now we're checking in with our team regularly. Just this morning, talked through with my team. Great. Hey, here's, here's the rocks we're working on for the quarter. What's progress like? What do you need? What are next steps? What are potential obstacles? Let's keep moving that ball forward. And the thing I love about this process is, as you start to look at these small wins, because not all of them are huge. You know, and I'll give you some examples of what some of our, you know, what some of our, what's on my rocks are for this quarter. So finish the commissions automation and workflow and then train all teams. So commissions process for us has some pieces that are a little bit more manual than I'd like. And so continuing to automate them, continuing to hook them up, you know, from our accounting system to our CRM,, to, you know, the payment of them, and then a dashboard that's working properly to track all that. And then training the team on which fields impact the dashboard accuracy is always another big piece. So that was one for me, and it requires multiple people to get that done. And so you can see how that's a, a big project to get done because it's going to impact sales, finance, operations, and kind of everybody in between. And so, you know, we've got potential obstacles there and, you know, just having the right manpower at the right turns, making sure there's clarity among all people involved. But that's a big project and one that we are, you know, making great progress on, but we've got to keep up on. I mean, we're already in the middle of May and, you know, it's May 9th, 2023 when I'm recording this. And so, you know, but I've got till the end of June to get this done. And so I need to make sure I can't wait. It's such a big project, you can't wait until June 1st to get it started, right? So also make sure you understand kind of stack ranking priorities, timeframe on how long these things are going to take. But we've got a bunch of these and then, you know, I've got 5 under me. Jason has 3 to 5 under him. Zach has 3 to 5 under him. And then we've got, you know, our team kind of working on each of those. And our existing leadership team consists of 3 people at the moment, and we're adding to that. And, you know, we've all got teams that tree up to us. And so we've got the responsibility of not only helping them to achieve their personal goals for the quarter, which is another element of this is, you know, what do you want to do for training? How are you trying to grow as a professional? How is that going to help you long term? And that is a way that we also stay committed to the training and development component of it, is we want our team to own their training plans and review them with their leaders every quarter. All right. So now we've gone through that. We've gone through our quarter-end review. We've cast the vision. We've shown everybody 10-year, 3-year, 1-year, boil it down to 90-day goals. Now we've got those 90-day goals. We're plugging along on them. We're tracking them every week. And like I said, the wins start to snowball from there, right? And so as long as I have a clear 10-year vision, that helps my 3-year vision to get even clearer. That helps my 1-year vision to be crystal clear., and that gives me exactly what I need to do in 90 days. So that's our process. Again, just bastardized from EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, with Traction. It helps make all decisions easier because if I look and I say, oh man, this company really wants to, you know, offer, help us offer this service, or, you know, here's a good example for us. One that we always have to fight against is, you know, here's an opportunity to go out and sell 400 life groups and, you know, we're going to roll out this new platform that's going to help us to go upmarket. Our vision is not to go upmarket. Our vision is to dominate small business. And so easy decisions to be made when it— if they don't align with that vision, right? And so that's why I emphasize it. That's why I think it's important that you have it. And I think whether, again, you know, none of this has to do with being a payroll company or a you know, telemarketing company or whatever you are, these are all things that you can do to help dial in. And, and just clarify, as we're growing, I know some of you listening are much larger than us, much larger teams. Some of you listening are solopreneurs and everything in between. You know, we were doing this when there was only a handful of us. We just didn't roll out the whole thing. Like, you know, we're working on the accountability chart right now. We did it a couple of years ago. It got stale. We've got to revisit it. It's okay. As much as I'd like to be more consistent and have everything plugging and working all the time, that's just not realistic. And so find yourself where you are, grab the pieces of a process or system like this, and there are others out there like EOS. I know Small Giants has a system. Is it the Rockefeller Habits? There's, there's another book based on that as well. And there's a bunch of different things out there, but I will say following a process that gives you that clarity of vision makes every decision easier as you continue to grow. And that's how we goal set. If you've got feedback for me on how we can improve that process, I'm wide open. You know, one of the things that I love about working with other small business owners, other entrepreneurs, other payroll providers is just how, how sharing and caring everybody is, right? I think we all know a rising tide lifts all boats. If you're listening to this, it's unlikely that you and I are going to be competing for anything, and our job should be to make the pie bigger, not to try to take from one another. It's not a zero-sum game out there. There are tons of people to be served. There are tons of opportunities for all of us, and we have an opportunity to grow the pie together and to help each other to grow and improve. And so I appreciate everybody that's poured into me. I know many of you listening, when you hear this in your earballs, you will know that you have helped me to grow. And now to wrap it up, I'm going to steal something from my favorite podcast and get your guys' feedback on it. But we're going to call this the gentlemen's and ladies' agreement. So My First Million podcast, I love. If any of y'all out there are listeners to it, hit me up and let me know. We can talk shop. I listen to it way more. I never miss an episode. If you haven't checked it out, you may or may not like it. I think it's pretty divisive. It's a couple of tech bros talking shop about stuff going on in the tech world. But they have a ladies' understanding and a gentlemen's agreement, and that's I'm going to provide all this content to you for free. I have nothing to ask of you. You know, you don't pay to listen to this. All I ask from you is that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and make sure that you comment on the video if you've watched or listened to this. And let us know that you are signing off on the gentleman's agreement and the lady's understanding. I don't think it's too much to ask for me to put in multiple hours every month to create content for you to simply click subscribe, to leave a comment and let us know that you love and care for the show because we love and care for you. And I appreciate y'all a ton. I hope you have a blessed day. Thank you.