Fix the System, Fix the Results: Mapping Marketing Ops for Real Performance with Joe Bockerstette

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals. Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there.

Hi, Naomi.

Michael Hartman flying solo today. In today's conversation, we are going to be talking about something that almost every marketing ops leader has felt, but never, not everyone knows how to diagnose. Why does it take so long to get anything out the door? Why do approvals multiply every time something breaks? Why do teams work harder and still not see better results? It's all about process. All right. So joining me for that conversation today is my guest, Joe Bacherstedt. He's a partner at Business Enterprise Mapping. Joe is a former PwC partner, has led CPG companies, and has spent more than 30 years helping midsize and public companies untangle complex workflows and redesign how their organizations actually function. His firm maps entire business systems, including marketing, to show companies exactly why they're getting the results they're getting and what needs to change. So Joe, welcome to OpsCast.

Thank you, Michael. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today.

Yeah, this is going to be a fun— and I think we talked about this. I used to, I worked at Price Waterhouse and people go like, oh, PwC. I was like, no, Price Waterhouse. Before this year. There was a difference, right? Yes. Yeah. So bringing back old memories. All right. Well, let's, why don't we start with, when I introduced you, we used the term business system, right? And I think probably has a lot of different, like people probably have different ideas in their mind. Like, what does that mean to you? And maybe how is that different, like, from, I guess, documenting just some marketing processes in our business?

Right. So a business system is a collection of processes that fulfills one of the primary purposes of an enterprise, right? So at Business Enterprise Mapping, we define 12 standard business systems. In any enterprise, and that architecture allows us to compare work across industries and size and type, et cetera. So in some ways they're departments, but when you look at actual organizations, it doesn't always match up that way. For instance, marketing department, we would consider a marketing business system. For example, you would have a sales department would be a sales business system. And let's just take sales. Because I know we're going to talk about marketing a lot today. And so the purpose of a sales system is to deliver customers and orders, right? It exists in order to create orders that the operation system's going to fulfill. And so when you look at an overall enterprise, a business system fulfills a key purpose that when combined with other business systems sort of fulfills the entire mission of the enterprise in any A given business system is comprised of a series of business processes that enable that business system to achieve its purpose.

Okay. So this is like, so I'm familiar with something called EOS. You probably have heard of it, Enterprise Operating System. Is it something kind of like that where it feels like that one that I, I'm not an expert at it, but it sounds like it's that one I feel like has a little more bent towards organizational structure as opposed to this.

Yeah. This is more, this is more business model design. If you will, right? Leadership has a responsibility to design the business model that fulfills the purpose of that system, of that enterprise. Let's take marketing, right? We'll just dive into marketing. So we've done a tremendous amount of marketing, both agencies and in-house, and they're all a little different, but I'm gonna generalize, right? In general, the purpose of marketing is to do what? Provide qualified leads. Right? And so all activity in marketing is bent towards handing over to sales a qualified lead that sales can turn into a customer and an order, right? So when you frame the marketing system, where does it begin? Well, marketing as a system begins with a target market, a target community of individuals, entities, whatever, that you desire to turn into a qualified lead that we're gonna pass off to sales, right?

But Some people call it the TAM, total addressable market kind of.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So in a pragmatic manner, we go into a new state, we open up a new state, right? So that state and the profile of our target customer becomes the target market. And our mission is to turn more of those target customers into qualified leads, right? Now, what do we do in order to make that happen? We have a series of processes and it can vary greatly. But it's lead generation, social media content development, content management, web management, email outreach, advertising, marketing campaigns. All of those are examples of processes that would begin maybe with an annual plan. That annual plan would turn into a campaign calendar. That campaign calendar would turn into campaigns. We would execute those campaigns using the various elements of content that informs them, and then would ultimately close out those campaigns with a successful lead generation capability that we turned those targets into qualified leads we can pass on to sales. Okay.

I want to ask a couple questions. So If I, and there's sort of a hierarchy, for lack of a better term, of like, you've got the marketing system, the marketing system, if you will. And then within that, it's made up of processes and it's—

Right.

And then kind of the other thing, you gave the example of then those processes get broken down and then I guess you kind of overlay it and the organizational structure becomes a part of how you enable that system to work.

Precisely. So we would argue that you design the business model first, being the workflow model, and then you lay the organization structure on top of that workflow model so that the organization is in sync with the business model itself.

Sure.

Most times when we start work with clients, the organization structure is out of sync with the workflow model. Right? And that's one of the reasons you get delays and approvals and disconnects, waste, right? It comes out of the fact that the org structure's out of sync with the actual work itself.

Okay. So I want— that's good. That's why I'm glad I confirmed that. The other part, you mentioned marketing, primary purpose to deliver leads to sales, especially in B2B, Space. I think that's true. Uh, I think there, I, and I think other people listening might argue that there's other purposes, like, um, 'cause I, I mean, you could, I guess you could link it to ultimately to demand, but like, I think I'm, I'm, yeah, my view of this has changed a little bit. Like the building brand awareness is part of that, right? Is looking a little further out in the future depending on what you're—

Right.

Like, so do you layer that in as well? Like, is that a separate process or is that a subsystem of marketing in the way you think about it? How does that work?

No, it's part of the marketing system. Remember I just said we were gonna generalize at the front.

Yeah, I'm just curious.

Yeah, but I've got no hesitation to adopt brand awareness as well, right? Brand strength, all of that can fall. When you think of the purpose of a marketing system, it can be You know, a half a dozen primary purposes, right? You know, lead generation being one, brand awareness being another, right? But all of the processes that would exist inside those boundaries would be part of that same contribution to purpose. Now, each of those processes is a primary deliverable. So when you think about achieving the purpose of the system, I've got a series of deliverables that need to contribute to that Right. So when I'm designing the business model of marketing, I need to look at what's the primary purpose of marketing, what are the deliverables that we need to produce in order to fulfill that purpose, and then what are the processes that we're gonna need in order to create those deliverables, right? So it's very hierarchically, systematically built so all the pieces of the puzzle fall in the right place in order to generate the overall purpose of our intentions.

Got it. Okay. So that again, glad I asked for that clarification. So you mentioned that you work with, you've worked with both sort of in-house, keep it to marketing, marketing organizations, as well as agencies. Like what do you, what are the similarities and differences that you see between them from that standpoint?

So from the content itself, they're all pretty similar, right? We have graphics, we have content, Management, we have social media, we have web, we have outreach, right? We have campaigns. The difference between an agency and in-house are generally 2 things. Agencies generally have an account management function, the playmaker, if you will, between the client and the shop itself. And so they're funneling communications between the internal production and capabilities and project campaign management to the external customer. They're managing that relationship and the communication and they're the primary point of communications. You don't typically see that in-house, right? The second component that you generally see with agencies are much more cost budget focused. An agency creates a contract with a client, And it strives to make profit on that contract by tracking basically the internal projects that are executed in order to fulfill that contract, right? In-house, again, not so much. We don't generally see in-house agencies so concerned about that project management contract cost relationship that you see in the external agencies.

Okay. It's kind of, it's considered more of a, have a fixed cost for the overall organization as opposed to project-based costs.

That's right. Uh, agencies are basically project management companies who execute contracts with clients, fulfill those contracts, and, uh, leave satisfied clients to create more contracts.

Right, right. Yes. Hopefully.

Yeah. Right. That's the goal.

Yeah. I, uh, yeah. Okay. Yes. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that difference that way in terms of the, um, you know, the, the, like the cost tracking piece, because I think in my experience, mostly in-house, right? When I've been asked, like, can we allocate our costs to campaigns, for example, right? Like we can. But I wouldn't recommend it because anything that's sort of indirect cost is just like really hard to allocate as, you know, the number of things you're allocating to changes, you know, or something gets stopped or canceled or it's just really hard. And like direct cost— Totally fine.

Yes.

Whereas agencies probably need to do that.

Agencies, really, that's their business, right? That's their core value proposition. The other thing I'll mention that I think is different about agencies in my experiences, are much more focused on the metrics of client satisfaction, internal waste, lead time, cycle times, much more focused on the operating metrics of performing well against those contract requirements and testing the temperature of client satisfaction on how they're doing.

Yeah, makes sense. So I remember when we talked before, you, there was an idea that you phrased, let's see if I get it right, every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Right.

So what does that mean when, and then maybe especially for a marketing team that's maybe, for a marketing ops team, and considering that's our main audience, frustrated with their own skewed performance?

Yeah, so that quote goes back to a book called Designing Organizations for High Performance by David Hanna out of Procter& Gamble. Back in the '80s or '90s. I worked a lot with Procter& Gamble when I was with PwC. And the quote is, all organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. And I still use that quote, obviously, frequently today. And here's the implications of it. As leaders, it tells us that we can understand the reasons we're getting the outcomes we get. Right? Like, the frustration is, I don't understand why things don't work the way I want them to. I don't understand why it takes so long. I don't understand why it costs so much. I don't understand why it's not better, right? So in understanding that organization design underpins performance, I can diagnose the cause and effect relationships between why things aren't working the way I want them to and what I need to do differently to make it better. So that's the one side. Concurrent with that, however, comes the responsibility for leadership to do something about it, right? By understanding that there are reasons behind it and these reasons can be addressed, it's now my responsibility to address those reasons, create a different and better organization design that overcomes the problems I'm experiencing and gets the performance I desire to get.

Yeah, this is, it's funny. It reminded me of Bill, Bill Parcells, the football coach, coached the Cowboys for like 2 seasons or whatever it was. And he, I think he had something that was like, um, your, your, your, uh, performance is, you know, in this case, right, your standings, right? What your win-loss ratio was like is really Who you are, right? Yeah.

You are what your record says you are.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it. Um, and so it's, it's, it sounds like a parallel to that, right? I mean, it's interesting. So what do you think about this? So, um, 'cause I've seen this before where it's kind of obvious that there's problems within an organization. And I often, like, I've coached some people personally, you know, who are struggling with how do I deal with this situation? And it becomes one where I go like, either the leadership doesn't see the problem or they see it, but they either are, they're afraid to address it, they don't know how to address it, they like, but they just ignore it, right? Either, like in both of those situations is bad.

It is. Yeah. So we know from experience about 70% of all problems relate to process deficiencies, right? And from a leadership perspective, it really comes down to 2 sort of One is we accept the way it is is the way it is, right? Like, there's nothing I can do about it. It is what it is, and I'm a victim of the system, and there's nothing I can do about that system. And then secondarily, I'm overwhelmed by the system and don't know how to get started, right? We have some great examples. I had a product development system example, very large CPG company. We were on the front end of scoping and planning, and we were there couple of days, and the head of product development says to me, you've done more to solve our problems in 2 days than we've been able to do in 2 years, right? Because they didn't have the template, the model to attack the problem. Like, you look at it, you throw your hands up and say, I don't know what to do, and I don't know where to begin, right? Well, that's our business model, is attacking that sort of complicated, overwhelming, intimidating, large workflow that we can't wrap our arms around and wrestle to the ground. So that's, you know, we've been doing that for over 30 years now.

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people get stuck and they can't, they, so the imagination of what could be possible, they've lost that muscle a little bit.

Right, right.

Yeah. So one of the things that I've seen, I think probably people listening have seen too in marketing, is let's say you've got a process that you think is working smoothly and then inevitably There's some sort of mistake, you know, a, a, a, you know, bad launch, email has mistakes in it. Um, and the, the reaction from the organization is to just put in more rules, more reviews, more approvals, like all these kinds of things that I think, um, I get the, the, the instinct to have that kind of reaction, but to me, that's usually made things worse instead of better. And so, right, to be able to actually, like, do you see the same thing and do you have any recommendations to avoid that?

Yeah, so we do see that and a couple of implications of that. Number one, it slows everything down. Number two, it introduces as many errors as it fixes. Number three, ultimately folks go around the system. I can't tell you how many clients we start work with where the final approval sits on the executive VP's desk, but the project's already gone. Right? Like the VP's waiting to approve something that executed a week ago, because nobody waits around for it anyway, right? And so it just introduces more reasons for things to go wrong, basically, in the flow, right? See, you know, when you're designing for high performance, right, it begins with that primary purpose that we talked about at the end of the stream. What are we trying to accomplish? What are the deliverables that will facilitate accomplishing that? Now, let's start with those, right? What are the specs on those deliverables? How are we performing against those specs? How will we measure how we're performing? Most of the improvement comes at that stage. Who's my customer? What do they want? What am I providing? What do I need to do differently? And let's go fix those problems. That's always a great place to start. In a marketing system, you're generally talking about 20 or less processes, even in the very large ones. And we've worked with some of the largest Sure. In the world, you're talking 20 or less processes. 20 or less processes are producing, you know, well under 50 primary deliverables, maybe even 25. So the point is you can wrap your arms around this and really focus on doing the important things well.

Would you say that number of deliverables, you mean the types of deliverables, not—

No, I mean types. Yeah, a final report, a written Blog pages, yeah. A website page, right? Okay.

Maybe multiple of those are the— I just wanted to confirm. Yeah. Okay.

Right. But it's hype. Yeah. That's fair. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's, that makes sense. My dog agrees. Um, she's, she's helping. Um, okay. So I'm curious what, um, so one of the things that I, 'cause I've seen this before multiple times, Maybe, maybe walk us through them a little more in the detail about your, the, the approach for mapping. And one of the, one of the struggles I find is when you get this, whether it's an overreaction or I walk into a place where it's already got this like highly structured, lots of approval levels that you're saying, point somebody expected to do it, to approve, but doesn't, basically never does. Like, how do you get into things like defining the processes, steps or tasks that go into it? Do you do anything like a RACI?

We don't.

How you measure it.

Yeah.

Well, let's think, how do you do that? And then what have you found surprises people most when you go through that with them?

Yeah. So when you, let's just take a marketing group. Let's say there are 10 processes just to pick a smaller number, round number. We would produce what we call a process playbook for each of those 10, right? And we would identify a process owner and a process team to work with. The process owner understands how the process operates today. The process team might be users, subject matter experts, whatever, right? We will facilitate sessions. We generally work on remote at this point, Zoom or Teams. We'll facilitate sessions to map, document how the work is done today. We do it real time. We use Visio as the mapping tool. So just like this, podcast, we would be mapping on the screen while we're facilitating the group, right? That takes about 5 hours over 3 sessions per process. So, and we do this as a project. So 10 processes, we'd be putting in about 50 hours getting the baselines built, right? We then take you to what we call a system alignment workshop, where we bring all of those process owners together. This tends to be on site. We put all these flows up on posters and then we troubleshoot the disconnects, the misunderstandings, the duplications, the gaps, all of the issues around the larger flow. It starts with that target market, ends with that qualified lead, and everything that's taking place in between. We then go into a series of analysis, right? We analyze the customer-supplier relationship. Each of these processes has a customer. Who is that customer? What do they want? What are we providing? What do we need to do differently? What information is being used by that process? How does that process interact with technology, hardware, and software? What's the RACI diagram? Who's responsible for what in that process? What are the red clouds? So we identify what we call red clouds when we map a process. Red clouds are the problems and opportunities getting in the way of what you're trying to accomplish. Right? And the metrics, what metrics are we measuring or not measuring in that process? And so it's a very extensive analytical exercise once we've created and documented the process itself, ultimately yielding a process improvement plan per process of quick wins. Quick wins are red clouds that can be solved in 90 days without a budget request, right? The dumb, low-hanging fruit, right? So if you've got 10 processes, you're going to have about 25 task or process, about 250 tasks, you're going to have about 300 red clouds. About 150 of those are going to be quick wins, right? So there's plenty to go work on right away. And then we do an overall system improvement plan that puts together a plan over the next year or 2 to improve the whole system with opportunities that are larger than just process-level quick wins, right? And so, and we can do all that really well inside of a couple of months, like from the point you would start a first conversation to having an entire system fully mapped, implementation plans in place, and starting to implement is well under 90 days.

So, I'm curious about, like, one of the things that I've seen that I've diagnosed is, like, unclear roles and responsibilities, specifically around review and approval.

Specifically, you got it, right.

Yeah. And then, in particular, like, Having the same level of scrutiny, um, regardless of what the, um, whatever is being produced. So, right, right. When you think about that, do you, so, and then with racies, I've always struggled with getting it, like some people try to, yeah, at such a high level that they're almost useless. And then you, right, you know, multiple people with the, the same kind of role, racy role. Oh, all good.

All, all good.

Double detail, like what's the right level of detail and how do you deal with like this?

Yeah.

So here's— Do you have multiple levels of approval and— Yeah.

So we do RACI at the task level, but let me broaden the question a little bit. One of the paradigm shifts for marketing that we often lay in place is marketing is a project management system. Right? And it is the management of campaigns or the management of client contracts. It's the access of a variety of content contributors and bits and pieces that contribute to that project or that campaign. But ultimately, it's the overarching management of work through a flow of a requirement that gets fulfilled, right? And we're often putting in place review systems, milestones, right? Stage gates, elements of commonality and logical review to sort of take out the unclarity of who's responsible for what, when, right? I'm just to make it up. We may have a 1-month stage. Let's say it's a 9-month relationship, just to pick some sort of timeframe. We may have monthly review cycles. that include what deliverables are being reviewed by that month, who's in the meeting, if you will, who's responsible for approval, and what's the criteria for approval, right? So that you formalize that in a way that is very clear who's doing what, when, based on what criteria, right? As you mentioned, every time we walk into a marketing group, Roles and responsibilities are unclear, without question. And largely because the work is not organized into project thinking or campaign thinking, it's sort of disjointed work all being sort of thrown out there to be picked up and moved along as available, if you will, not driven by calendars and driven by sequencing and driven by approvals and responsibilities.

I think you just, you said something that really caught my attention there, because I, I love the idea of being clear about who can approve versus who has input in there. It's not—

Precisely. And what's the criteria, right? What's the pass, what's the pass/fail, right?

I had not really, I mean, I probably intuitively thought about, but like we asked what, what constitutes something that can be approved or not? Um, and what's the timeline and what happens if that person, like if there's somebody who's expected to review and approve. And the time window, like, what do we do? Like, those kinds of things I think need to be clearly stated. Um, and, and I, I mean, what I've found is that 2, 2 things most commonly happen, right? One, it's really unclear. So you got, instead of an approver, you've got 3 or 4 people who all have veto power, right?

Right.

So things go through—

Exactly.

—rounds. You don't know if they have conflicting feedback, and then you're really screwed because—

Right. And then it sits in somebody's inbox for 2 weeks because they didn't get to it. And then, you know, yeah.

And then people get, and then the other, on the flip side is people get crushed for a mistake or something that's considered a mistake. And some of it's objectively a mistake, put the wrong date on a webinar, right? Wrong time for work. Some of it is subjective mistake.

Interpretation.

Yeah. I didn't like the way that this looked or who it went to and they get killed for it. So at that We actually like, oh, now we need even more review approval.

Right. See, the point is, if you intentionally design these sort of big elements on the front end, it makes it easier to run the system, right? If I know what deliverable specs are, if I know what go/no-go means, if I know who's approving it at what points, just to use that example, then I can operate the system in a standard repeatable way, right?

Yeah. No, I think that's great. And it sets a— I'm a huge believer that what you need to do is have a lot of that in place. The struggle I'm having with what you described is it sounds, that level of detail on that kind of stuff, it to some degree sounds onerous, like it's almost a burden. Whereas, but it could be my perspective. So the way I like to think about these is like, I'm a big fan of having processes defined and things like that.

Right.

But I want them to be defined at a level that allows for essentially more like guardrails.

Yeah.

Unless it has to be explicit, like you must do this, right?

Yeah.

There's very few things where that's the case, right?

Right. Yeah.

But the thing with guardrails is letting people interpret it and move things along.

Right. You got it. So let me explain, right? So our process maps are at the task level, right? So it identifies the steps in the process, if you will. How that task gets accomplished is not defined unless you want it to be defined through a task instruction. So the opportunity— take graphics, for instance, sort of a creative area. There can be a task called design, right? And then your 6 graphic artists can design in their own sort of creative way, fulfilling that task. Now, there may be tasks where you want specific instructions defined, right? Like a lab test, just to pick something that's different, right? So it's all available. It can be as flexible or as thorough as you want it to be. But what you definitely want is you want to understand the processes inside that system, what the primary deliverables are for each of those processes, and what steps are required in what sequence to make those deliverables happen.

The other thing that you said that was interesting, you said it multiple times in our conversation already, is Describing marketing as a project management function, which is interesting because, so our audience being marketing ops folks are probably nodding their heads going, yeah, well, that's what we do. And in fact, if Mike was here, my co-host, Mike Rizzo, he has been advocating for a view of marketing ops specific, so, you know, the technology and execution—

Right.

Of being almost like, being treated like a product management function.

Right. Yeah.

Does that make sense too?

Yeah. Yeah. It is the execution. I always use the term campaigns as a marketing term, but you can call us— is the execution of an intention, right? And there are a series of steps and deliverables to execute that intention, right? We've worked very, very large public company in marketing ops where they were executing email and phone campaigns. And every little digit was essential. If you screwed one thing up and the whole thousands of people get the wrong thing, right? And so it is the execution of projects, right, with specific requirements and very, very tight tolerances in that case. And you gotta have a scripted process flow and an understanding of the guardrails in order to make that successful.

Gotcha. So you mentioned that term red clouds, and I like that. That's interesting. Like, it's very visual, right? So it makes sense.

Right.

So if you think about the work you've done with marketing teams, if you think about it from an ops lens, ops and technology, what are some of the common things that you've seen where opportunities are identified Within that space that you would call red clouds?

Yeah. So really across industry, across even functional, the red clouds tend to be pretty common, right? Undefined process would be number one. Process variation. Most clients I work with have multiple departments or locations where different people do the same things different ways. Right? Very, very common in the work we do. Undefined deliverables, that customer-supplier relationship. Who's the customer? What do they want? What are we providing? Are we getting it right or not? Unmanaged data. It starts out inadequate on the front and just gets pushed through the whole system till it crashes at the back. Very, very common, right? Missing performance metrics, right? We're not measuring our performance. Our org structure is out of sync with our workflow. We've got really goofy responsibilities. The implication of all this is you can't hold people accountable, right? If you don't have the foundational elements in place, then the idea that I'm going to hold you accountable for your work's a little silly because so much of it's out of your control. What are you going to do about it, right? Let's see. Lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities, very, very common. Sort of comes with that misaligned org structure issue. You can find inadequate information system matchup, right? A system doesn't match to the real needs of that business, right? And so you've got a, you know, one of my favorite stories, we worked with a bank where over 50% of all their tasks were either Outlook, Word, or Excel. Right? So what that tells you is they spent all their time working around their ERP system, right? Because it wasn't a good fit for what they were doing, right? So you get this sort of automation can enable or hinder what you're trying to accomplish, right? And we find it hinders more than it enables.

Well, it just makes, it accelerates bad processes, right? It just—

It makes it, you know, a good process makes it easy to do the right thing. Right? A bad process makes it difficult to do the right thing, and we see far more of those than good ones.

Okay. So I want to go back to my reaction to this as being, feeling a little bit overwhelming or burdensome, because I think a lot of the people who are listening to our podcast are at smaller firms, right? And even growth startups, things like that. How, and it can, you know, afford maybe to bring in consultants for this. And how would you advise or how would you suggest they start if they said, oh yeah, we need to be better about having clear roles and responsibilities and understanding our process, yada, yada, yada. So how would you guide them to it? If you need to go do, what's the first thing to do and the second thing?

Yeah. So, um, I would say this, the first thing to do is, and we're talking about marketing, let's say specifically marketing, the first thing to do is let's identify the primary purpose of what we're trying to accomplish with our system, right? Whether it's brand awareness, whether it's lead generation, you know, marketing and sales often get sort of scrunched together today. So it can be a sale, right? If you put marketing and sales together through an online strategy, for instance, it can all be But the point is, what are we trying to accomplish? What deliverables are we producing inside this system today to accomplish it? What shape do we think they're in? Where are things going wrong? What processes would need to exist in order to do this well? And sort of where do we stand? What's our landscape relative To that intention. And then lastly, look at that organization structure. I see so many organizations where people are responsible for stuff because that person's a hero and we know we can throw more on them and they'll do a great job and things get cobbled up, right? You want your organization structure to perfectly align with your workflow so that you can manage it well, right? If you don't have somebody responsible For, let me just pick an example, client data, which is something we find in bad shape almost everywhere we go. Well, if nobody is responsible for the client data setup, let's say it's being done in 6 different locations by 6 different people, what do you expect? It's gonna be bad, right? And so you're aligning all of those elements into what do I intentionally want to accomplish and where do I stand today relative to that intent? Yeah.

So, um, maybe this is, so one of the things that I have done in leadership roles and I've coached people on is, 'cause they're trying to understand the capacity of the team and who's got what, you know, watching out for where like we've got a single point of failure, for example, is like literally, like it feels like this could have been a step towards what you're describing. Like I'll make a list, like these are the types of tasks my team is responsible for.

Right.

And then here's, yeah, here's the team across the top. I'll, you know, we'll admit it to the matrix. They're like, who's the primary person or primary couple of people who are secondary?

Right.

Because it usually, what it reveals is there's gaps, right? Tasks were expected to be done and we don't have somebody currently who's the primary person for that or secondary at all. And so it helps, it helped me kind of go like, okay, where do we have gaps? Right? So if So it helped me fight for budget for headcount, for example, which is—

Exactly. Or reorganize.

Yeah. But more importantly, it was, hey, like, what are we not able to do today without, you know, potentially burning people out because they're just getting crushed or something? And then making sure that people could take time off, right? Because there was somebody who could back them up, even if that was me.

Yeah.

So is that a step, like a part of what you're talking about?

It is, right? So you would call that a system skills matrix, right? And you would be matching up the available resources with the content of the work itself, right? Very, very common and typically run out of HR, right? But, you know, it varies greatly across—

I don't think they understand the domain well enough to be able to do that. I wouldn't— I mean, I've worked with some good HRs, Partners, but I don't know that they even know it deeply.

Yeah. If I remember, HR's responsible for more than, right? So they've got that same sort of challenge across the whole enterprise. But yes.

Yeah.

And you're well positioned to do that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's not to dismiss their help, but I wouldn't—

But I get it.

I wouldn't expect them to do that. Like, to me, that's like, that's part of the job of being a leader Mm-hmm. To anticipate that and do that. It's interesting. Okay. What, this may be fairly tactical, but when you guys do the process mapping piece, is there a particular format that you use? Do you do, you know, you say, is it, so flow diagrams, you use swimlane stuff? Do you do We do not.

So we use a method we call Perigon. So Perigon is our name for what we do, P-E-R-I-G-O-N, which is a 360-degree view of an object, right?

Okay.

We use Visio with a Perigon library of templates, tools, icons, stencils, like it's our own language. Our map is a vertical map, very easy to train, very logical to follow, and it stood the test of time for 30-something years now. It's amazing to me. It was invented by an electrical engineer who used schematic methodologies for workflow, right? So it's very, very sound. We're the only ones in the world that do it the way we do it, and it's more detailed, more thorough, and more Illustrative than other maps, much easier to follow. And then for the backside of the playbook, we use Excel because everybody can use Excel. And our method is based on the idea, it's not that hard to figure out what's wrong. You just gotta ask the people doing the work. Like, there's plenty to work on. We ask somebody, why does this order entry not work?

Yeah, exactly. Right?

Like, why does order entry not work? Well, oh my God, I can't believe nobody's ever, you know, And it just starts spewing. And so we have no problem figuring out the cause and effect relationships between why things are going wrong and where, right? And so you're producing a playbook per process and tends to be 30 to 50 pages, although it's digital.

Okay.

And it's easily updatable, right? It's also easily transferred. Like, we'll train clients to do what we do. And our goal in general is to start the really work, get the ball rolling, and turn it over to an internal client team to take it and run with it.

Got it. All right, let me, let me, like, one more question and then we'll wrap up. So I'm curious, so maybe tied to the people I talked about who are in, like, growth companies. So part of this is going to be a challenge, like, going from where they are and then they need to scale over time.

Yes.

How, how, what are, what are signals that they could be looking for when it's time to Rethink the system versus just sort of throw more bodies at it or power through it?

Yeah, that is a great question. The majority of the work we do in all business systems is that, right? We are growing rapidly and we've got to do something. So a couple of signs would be we're fracturing today. Let's say we're on a large growth path and our people are stressed and overworked and we're seeing some busts in the system. And we're really at our limit. And so I'm faced with, I'm going to say doubling by next year just to pick a big number. And if I don't change anything, that means I've got to add 50 people or 100 people. And it doesn't make sense to me, right, that I've got to double my workforce to double my volume, just to again, pick a number. There's got to be a way to scale that I can implement to prevent the need for me to, like, you know, I can't absorb 100 people next year just to pick that number, right? I've gotta find a way to get the work done without that. And so that really triggers the idea we've gotta look at process. And so we've got to understand our process, we've got to standardize our process, then we've got to automate our process in a way that allows us to super scale. Without adding a bunch of people.

Yeah. That's, it reminds me of a project I did years ago at a big semiconductor company where I was asked to go figure out how could we, how could we enable technical support to support more customers, um, as revenue was growing at a certain pace without, because historically it had grown at the same pace and they wanted to capture more of the profit from that, right? So they like bent the curve, if you will.

And yeah, the one other point to add on that is if you just throw software on top of that without really understanding the system and the requirements and what your business model is, it just makes a mess and it ends up being more of an inhibitor than an enabler, right? Because I don't put the right switches on, I don't make the right decisions about A, B, or C, and end up with something that really makes it difficult to do the right thing.

Yeah. Oh, it's interesting. It's kind of going back to my, the roots of my early consulting career doing process.

It's a fun business.

Yeah. It's, you know, to some degree these, like, these are, it feels like a little bit of the fundamentals, but it's good to see it at the, so like a little more structure for it. Yeah. Joe, been a pleasure talking to you. If folks want to, if they're interested in continuing the conversation or just want to learn more about what you're What's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so it's www.businessmapping.com and my email is joe@businessmapping.com. Just feel free to reach out. It's been a pleasure.

All right, good. Well, I appreciate it again, Joe. Thank you. Thanks to our audience out there for continuing to support us. We appreciate it. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest like Joe, please reach out and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye everybody.