EITR Episode19: Building a Strong Employee Training Roadmap

Oh, Alex, unmute yourself. I, I hit mute. But anywho, other than that, guys, we are freaking back.

Good to be here, man.

Good to be here. Oh, we took a little bit longer of a hiatus. I can't even say the word correctly. But you know, after getting through, uh, the holidays, getting through January, some fun things that we're about to announce, Alex. But, uh, we are back to just doing what we love doing, which is talking to all these MSP folks.

Love it, love it. And it's like, uh, you know, you start building a product and all of a sudden it's like there's stuff you got to do other than stand here and talk to the camera and, you know, play around on podcasts.

Basically what Alex and I are trying to say is we got a job again and we can't just sit here and, you know, play and have fun all the time.

Yeah, yeah, I am, I am a failure at being unemployed. I mean, that's just what this— this is just proof of that.

Well, let's get started because we have a lot to talk about today, man. We've got a lot to talk about. And if there's one thing that we love, it's, it's, it's the MSP channel. It's the people that are involved in it. It's the people that we've seen go from the kid at Starbucks to, right, the mastermind service manager. In some cases, like some of the employees I had at my MSP, they now own their own MSP. Mm-hmm. And being able to nurture that journey is, is one of the most rewarding experiences that you can have And I think this kind of segues into our conversation where, and Alex and I have used the phrase before, we build talent factories here as MSPs, and it's our job to get somebody to the next level. And our guest here is an expert at getting employees to the next level.

Yeah, he's a good dude. It's been really interesting getting to know him. It's kind of funny, as we got started at RejectionCon, um, you know, we started advertising, talking about it, and some random person just pops up in my LinkedIn and says "Hey, it looks like I'm from the same town as you and you guys are doing neat stuff and I'd like to learn more." It didn't take long before "learn more" was, "Hey, we need to talk to you a whole lot 'cause this whole education thing we're trying to build, let's face it, there's folks out there who do it for a living and we're just trying to figure it out like every MSP out there." So, you know, it was great to meet Keith. He has really changed some of our opinions on how we look at some of these education items. Um, it's gonna be a good conversation today. I'm really excited for it completely.

So with that being said, we're going to go ahead, bring the man of the hour on stage, Mr. Keith. We're going to go ahead and, uh, pull you off mute because you are muted. Got to make sure we remind everybody. That's like the bingo card of the month. Mr. Keith, welcome.

Yeah, thank you very much. Uh, you all hear me fine, I assume?

Yep, yep.

Well, thanks, Kyle. Thanks, Alex. It's great to be here today. I've been really excited about this.

Yeah, we're excited to have you. So Keith, why don't you kind of give everyone a little bit of background, give a little bit of where you come from, a little bit on how you cut your teeth in this instructional design world that is a little foreign to us MSPs.

Well, I'll try to do the quick version of it. Years and years ago, I worked for IBM as a software developer, and one of the things I did as a developer was train systems engineers and salespeople on features we'd added to the product. And that led to me being asked to be involved in the sales training organization focused on building content. I thought they wanted standup training, but instead they wanted me to work on e-learning development. So at a time when e-learning development was sort of taking off, I was kind of found my way into that field unintentionally, but really liked it and kind of had a knack for it. And we worked a lot with a vendor called Allen Interactions, a company started by Dr. Michael Allen, who was very influential in e-learning design circles. And over the course of working with them on a lot of projects, I left IBM and joined Allen Interactions' first opening branch office in Tampa, and then as their director of custom services, working with the design and development business at Alan. Later I went to Panera Bread. Panera was wanting to launch an e-learning program. They'd done a little pilot, they had a few cafes that were involved, and they needed somebody that could think through how to build that. And so I joined. It was me and I had 2 direct reports, and over 14 years we built a large e-learning mission. We built some other learning missions around that and adjacent to that. And so really got to see what, what a large spread out franchise distributed organization looks like and work through those issues, which was a lot of fun. Then I went to RingCentral working customer education as part of a great team there focused on helping customers to understand the RingCentral product suite and how to put those to practice in their business. So I've, I've done consulting with a whole bunch of different types of companies. I've done restaurant and retail, done technology, just had a chance, a to see a lot of things happen in a lot of different circumstances.

Fantastic. And I think we could all— when you mentioned customer education inside of RingCentral, I think that's something as MSPs is a little bit of an afterthought at times. And I think there's a fun content in just that alone. Probably not the topic for today, but I even, as of last night, I was talking to one of my clients. I still do a little private coaching and they were struggling with, well, I teach my clients monthly, quarterly on certain items. However, we always forget to reteach the new employees of my customers because after we've said it 3, 4 times, it just kind of hits the back of our brain. But when you have those customers as an MSP where they're onboarding, offboarding employees quite regularly, it's real easy to forget, oh yeah, I should mention to them how to create a ticket, how to interact with us. Oh, the, the, the virtual desktop environment that I give them, uh, probably it auto logs out after a certain amount of time, right? Those little things get missed from your product, but it's, but it's no different when we look at it from the MSP side, right?

An MSP brings on a new product, they train their whole staff, and next thing you know, they grow and they hire on a new person, and they forget that that person didn't get all the training that they got, um, that everybody else got when they brought on the new product, and, and the learning cycle starts all over again. And it, it goes back to what Keith said, like, We do the really strategic training the first time and we put all that energy into it. And then Keith used a phrase the first time Wes Spencer and I talked to him, he said hip-to-hip training. And I went, oh my God, that's how we train every employee in our organization. Like we might do the hands-on stuff the first time around, but after that it's like, hey, go stand next to the smart guy and he'll teach you everything he knows about this. And the more Keith and I have unpacked this and talked about it, the more I realized all we do is make the smart guy unproductive and the new hire unproductive while they stand there and try and figure this out and try and transfer that knowledge. So, you know, it's really an interesting dilemma that we're trying to work our way through as an organization and as an industry.

Well, and it's a funny paradigm as well, because your new guy ends up drowning your experienced guy because of— and you start wondering where inefficiencies come in, inefficiencies start to stack because of all the hip-hip training of no strategy in getting someone from zero to accountable is kind of missing. And Keith, on this conversation, I would love to know, is there any stories or anecdotes from your time at Panera that you guys were really trying to figure out how do we build consistency in those employees?

Oh yeah, the— in fact, that's really how I ended up at Panera. That's how that role was created. As a restaurant company starts small, it's all founder passion at first, like Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 5, close-knit team that's doing that. But as you scale out, you don't always have that visionary perspective in every location guiding people through it. And at some point, what you realize is that how well people learn their roles, how well customers are served because of how well employees are trained, starts to depend a little bit on who trained them and who's in that cafe and how the manager approached it. And we did talk hip to hip is a common term in restaurant training. It is, it's a valid thing if you do it in a thoughtful way. And so it's, it's a, you go hip to hip to coach, to observe and coach and provide feedback, but it doesn't scale, whereas e-learning did. And so that's how I ended up at Panera was they needed a consistent scalable solution that was efficient for the cafes, because up to that point, all of the training was live and in person by trainers with a healthy dose of hip to hip. But Panera had actually had a pretty good handle on live in-cafe training, and they were doing it pretty well. Um, but it takes one of your most talented people out of production roles or out of management roles while they train and coach and teach. And so you run into those scalability issues and consistency issues.

As you say that, I'm kind of thinking through how Kyle got his trial by fire here in the MSP space, right? Um, you know, and Kyle, you can tell your story, but you know, this is the, this is the problem when we become multi-location companies, when we become companies are growing through acquisition and adding different cultures and all of these things. Like, my MSP was, was an easier problem to solve because we were all in one building and it was You know, everybody had a direct line to the smart guy. That wasn't me. They had a direct line to the smart guy that I ask all the questions to, right? And so we could all go, hey, hey, you know, tug on somebody's shirt sleeve and go, hey, come here, give me the answer to this, which incredibly unproductive, but it worked. And we were able to fake our way through it like that for a long, long time. But, you know, Kyle, you cut your teeth kind of dealing with this, didn't you?

Yeah, a 15-year-old kid that jumped the wrong train, almost got expelled from high school and ended up at corporate Best Buy. Trying to roll out this thing called Geek Squad to 1,200 locations because they just thought some nerds could figure out how to do it. Yeah. So when Geek Squad was acquired by Best Buy, they only had like 18 to 20 employees total. And here you get someone like Best Buy that has 1,200 locations, brick and mortar, going, hey, now we need 15 people per location, and can you do it in the like next 3 to 4 months? And since I didn't have a driver's license, they said, hey, here's a supervisor role, here's a manager role. And they had me go to the first store and they said, hey, you did that pretty quick, can you do it again? And then the second store, and by— and Keith, you can probably relate with this— by the time we— I got to like the 15th, 16th store, they said, oh hey, we probably should have done something differently. Can you go back to the first store and re-onboard them? And you turn into this rinse-repeat cycle because that iterative implementation process makes you realize that, hey, we've gotten better at this, but The person in the beginning now has lagged behind. This continuous education thing wasn't built. And I think that's where you're getting with e-learning. So now it has to be brute force. And after getting to like my 40th, 45th, 50th store, we bought an MSP and then I got stuck in the MSP world and that's, that's kind of how the story went. But it's interesting on how we think it's a set and forget when It's really just a part of the journey.

But that, but that kind of leads into one of the things we wanted to talk about and pick Keith's brain about, right? Because this all gets, gets easier when we put some thought ahead of time into what onboarding really looks like, right? You know, how do we get somebody from zero to, to an onboarded employee and really build training as— because let's face it, for us, it was mostly an afterthought. We went, crap, we got this guy standing here. We knew we had work for him to do. Now we have to train him.

Yep. So what— how we really want to structure today's conversation is really what does that employee training roadmap look like? And using kind of my personal brand, I always thought of it, what gets someone to zero to accountable as fast as possible? And that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to kick them out the door. What that tries to embody is what allows me as an owner to understand that this employee has all the tools, training, and resources that they have to actually do a job and do it well to where I'm not afraid to look at them and say, hey, you messed up and you knew you should not have messed up, right? Then that whole idea of mentorship, the follow-through, the trust and verify kicks in. But there's a lot of pre-work we need to do to build the plan and work the plan. So we kind of want to walk through what does building that plan look like? And then what is working that plan from an execution perspective look like? Does that sound fair, gentlemen?

Sounds good.

All right. And Keith, you prepared quite a bit today, so I kind of want to let you drive. And you put a lot of words on paper, so I kind of want you to kind of walk us through your methodology when it comes to building a roadmap. Okay.

And this is, you know, I want to— I'm not recommending a turnkey approach, but there's some principles that are really consistent. Whether you're, whether you're really large organization or a really small organization, there are things that are really valuable. You know, the first thing that we put on this chart was to have a solid onboarding plan. And the two of you did an episode back in November about employee onboarding. And one of the things I thought was really powerful that you talked about is this question of do your employees know how the MSP makes money? Do you understand how this business functions and how it succeeds. Candidly, I think that's easier to do in a small organization than a large organization. You would be surprised at the director level in a large organization how often people don't really understand how the company wins and grows. They understand their piece of it, but don't understand how the parts fit together. So when you're on—

real quick, I'm curious for people on this call, put in chat How many of you have even a rough framework of what an employee roadmap looks like in their first 0 to 30 or 0 to 45 days?

Well, and it's an opportunity. Onboarding is an opportunity not just to, you know, show them where the washroom is and explain the insurance and all, you know, what do we use for MFA, all these things that every employee at every company needs to learn as they're starting, but it's a chance to invite them to be a part of the business. Not just to be tucked away in a corner doing a job, but to say, hey, here's what we're doing as a company, here's what we're doing as a practice, and here's how you're contributing to it now. And then I think what you do is you build on that and show them how they can contribute to it now and a month from now and a year from now, and how they can build a career with you or in your industry. It's not necessary— not necessary that they stay with you, But you can show them a path and now they're a part of something. Now they belong to something.

I think that is so powerful because one of the things that makes me just crazy about our industry is that if you go log into Reddit any given day, there's an engineer out there going, um, is every MSP just a slave driver? I don't understand what I do here other than just crush printer tickets, and it seems like there's no end in sight. And these are people who obviously haven't been clued into how what they do, how what they do impacts the bigger vision of the company. They haven't been informed what a growth path looks like. They haven't been taught that there's something beyond just being the guy that knocks out the printer ticket. And I can see without being super demoralizing and how important it is really just to bring people up from the ground to get them to that next level.

Yeah, and Melissa pointing out in chat that it's your first impression, right? What do we always talk about when we're talking about networking and meeting people and just your personal life, right, is you get one chance to make a first impression. Your employee, you're gonna get them excited to start working for you, and you're gonna go through possibly some rocky negotiation to get the employee to work for you, where you negotiate salary, right? It might not be the best experience because we're talking about money, and money for a lot of people is an uncomfortable conversation. So you need to do everything you can in days 0 through, like, -1 through day 35, whatever the number is, to make them feel wowed, right? It's an experience for the employee.

Well, yeah, I mean, imagine if the day that you bring on a new employee, they show up at the office and there's a company shirt there with their logo, with the logo on it in their size, and business cards with their name and their title, and a little bit of a swag box that kind of kicks them off on the right foot. And then you get to sit down with them and explain to them what the next couple of weeks looks like as you build this plan out for them and as you get them onboarded. It's way better than, oh crap, there's a new guy here, did anybody make his email address?

Right.

Which I think is too often how we start. And I say we because I was probably guilty of that.

Oh yeah, I think we all were.

Yeah, you know, new employees spend a lot of time wondering when they'll get their computer or whatever whatever your version of that is, somebody forgot to check a box or whatever happened, the thing that makes them feel kind of like they weren't expected or don't belong. And we want to be a part of something. We like being connected to things and feeling a part of it. And I think onboarding is a great way to invite people to be a part of the thing. And some of those things that you're talking about, mugs and swag and business cards, if that's appropriate to your business, those things are great because they show that You want them to feel like they're part of the team, but also understanding how the team functions and how you're going to contribute to it. I think that that has a big impact on employees as well. And too often we just hire somebody and put them on a task and don't— we understand it and we don't realize what they don't understand about what's going on around them.

Well, and in our space, it's as easy as entering time, right? I've heard Kyle rail against like, you know, the engineer who doesn't enter their time isn't necessarily an engineer problem. It isn't necessarily a, uh, even a manager problem. It's that we never sat down with that person and explained to them how what they do, and being accountable to Kyle's BAT here, but how being accountable entering their time helps the business achieve its goals.

Well, and it's funny because while normally I'm talking about this conversation of, damn it, just get your engineers to enter time, I think the BAT at this point is geared towards the employee, or the employer, excuse me, and the employer and the manager of that employee because a big component of accountability, right? Everyone tells me, Kyle, how do I make my team accountable? Well, part of it has to be, one, the expectations that you set for them, but also two, the motivation that you build for them to execute your expectations, right? Motivation is a huge part of why people do things. And if you can motivate them and give them that wow experience in the beginning, they're gonna immediately have that dopamine hit that goes, man, I need to get my onboarding done because this is a company that wants to take care of me and wants to see me succeed, then they're not going to stretch your 28 days of onboarding out to 128 days to where you forget to follow through. They're going to knock it out. I remember some of my employees, they would knock it out after hours. They'd be taking their ConnectWise University courses because they're like, dude, I want to get in with the team and I want to help the team out.

Yeah, yeah, we all want to be a part of it. And you know, that first week on the job, you're Everybody's going to ask you, friends and family are going to ask you, how's it going? How do you like the company? What do you think? And the answers you give in that week are not only what people are gonna, you know, their, uh, friends and family are going to think about your company, but it's also what your employee is going to believe about your company because they're reinforcing it to themselves. Man, it was rough. I don't know about these guys. It was tough. I'm not sure they got it together. I might have made a mistake. I think I'm going to keep looking, um, and see if this works out. Like, what you want to say is it was awesome. It was awesome. I've never had a manager sit down with me and explain where I fit in and how I was gonna succeed. Like, if that's what your employee is feeling, then you're off to a great, a great start. And again, the episode that you all did back in November lays a lot of that out and has a tool that can help you start thinking through that. And it's just such an important first step. And I think a big part of that first step is just openness, just transparency, building context. For the person you brought on. And then you, you build on that then by building a context, not just for where they're starting, but where they might go and how the things that they do fit in.

So I think then for those that are taking notes at home, right, we've covered a couple of things that we need to keep in mind about your employee roadmap, which is that pre-onboarding experience of, hey, here's what to expect. Hey, here is what you need to be prepared for. And hey, welcome. We're so excited to have you go, right, that motivational, we care about you. But beyond that, it's the transparency of here's what we expect you to accomplish in a certain amount of timeline, right? That's gonna be very important. Explain to them what they're gonna be accountable for and, right, show them that feedback mechanism that lets them know, hey, you're doing a good job or not. So I think that's a, it's an important pin to put in on that, that, exact topic. So kind of moving forward here, Keith, um, talk about a little bit about kind of the actual process of building the roadmap, the tacticalness that I know a lot of people in the crowd are starting to probably wanting to unpack.

Yeah, so it's like, this is a really intimidating thing at a lot of companies because it really is complex if you have many aspects of your operation at all, you're like, there's a lot to map if you really want to understand the school— the skills that it takes to run your business. Large companies have some resources and some economies of scale so they can invest in these things, but smaller companies look at it and it just feels like too much. And like a lot of things in life, don't worry about the whole thing. Just pick the piece you can deal with, pick the piece that's valuable to you or most valuable to you in the moment and start to work on that. And so this slide talks a little bit about, in very simple terms, how to start understanding what your skill needs are in the company. And we, we often want to think from two perspectives. We want to think from the perspective of the employee. What training do I want the employee to have? And from the expected or perspective of knowledge. What do they need to know? And it's better to say, what skills does it take to run my business? What skills and abilities and experiences make it possible for the people at this company to serve our customers in a way or to land new business or to innovate a solution that allows us to be more efficient? Like what skills and abilities does it take to do that? And don't ask yourself, what do I need to know to do that? Ask, what do I need to do? So for, uh, and on the handout, there's like, uh, that goes with this session, there's a visual that kind of maps that out. But if you look at it, take a role in the company, you can probably easily identify the 3 or 4 or 5 most important things they need to do, the things that really impact their success in the role and your customer success in dealing with them. And so you start with, what do I need to do? What is my action? And then you say, well, what do I need to know in order to do that? What has to be in my head for me to be able to do that? And then you ask, what do I need access to, to be able to do that? There's a lot of things we think our employees need to know that they don't need to know. They just need to know how to find it. They just need to know that where it fits in, and then they can look it up. Or maybe it's a skill that somebody else has, and it's more appropriate to ask that other person. To do a part of the process for you. So if you start with what does this person need to do, what do they need to know, what's got to be in their head for them to do it, and then what information do they need to get access to along the way, it starts to kind of map out like it, like it is on this sheet, and it's manageable. You start to see how things fit together, and you don't have to be super granular. You don't have to— like if I was teaching you to to make a list. I don't have to explain the QWERTY keyboard to you. There's certain things I can assume you already understand, but I can focus on where do people make mistakes, or what is— if this step is missed or messed up, things go sideways quick. And I can focus on those things and make sure that those bases are covered.

Well, and I'm such a huge fan of iterative improvement, right? If we have all this written down and documented, it's real easy for us to go back and go, hey, the last 2 or 3 people that started really struggled right here. I can go back and clean it up, right? I can add a little more information or clarify something that helps the next person and the next person just hit the ground running a little bit faster. And that's so similar to every other process we build in the MSP space. Like, we got to build the process, got to run that playbook, but then we got to circle back and iterate on it and make sure that we just improve it every single time.

And I'm curious, Alex, like, what did you find yourself when you're running either Lifecycle or your MSP? What was the thing that you found you guys most successful on iterative improvement? Was it, was it on the engineering side? Was it on the tactical side?

For us, I mean, at my MSP, it was, it was really the, um, I guess there were two things. Um, our client onboarding was an iterative process that probably, um, we met and talked client onboarding once a quarter, um, and, and iterated and updated that framework in ConnectWise. And we had, you know, ConnectWise pathway plan that popped up and 27 things we had to do in that, whatever that task list was called in ConnectWise. I'm getting fuzzy on it now. But, you know, we had that whole roadmap that we had to go through to get somebody onboarded, and that just continued to change. And so we just continued to iterate at it, you know, as more things moved to the cloud and people went to work from home and life just continued to change. But on the sales and account management side, it really was when we— about the time we started building Lifecycle Insights was when we finally committed to we're going to have a repeatable process. And until then we had been winging it. And I saw the biggest improvement in customer satisfaction and, and closed projects and, you know, increased revenue at existing clients. So all of that through just having a process where every single time we had a QBR, we spent 15 minutes afterwards to take that call apart, what worked, what didn't work. And we did the traditional like, stop doing this, start doing this, keep doing this. Stop doing, start doing, keep doing was just super powerful for us. And you know, you could walk away and say, hey, I said these words and the person sat back in their chair and crossed their arms. And okay, I'm never gonna say those words to somebody ever again. Like, we can figure this out.

Well, and you can actually systemize the iterative improvement process. For a lot of you guys that use a business operating system like a Scaling Up, a Pinnacle, an EOS, what I always found is you'd work on these rocks, right? That Stephen Covey term of a sprint to accomplish a task. Well, what would happen, and this is going back 6, 7 years ago, I remember seeing this happen, is we would start working on a problem and they'd be like, hey, I completed the rock, I got it done. But we never had a follow-through or iterative improvement rock to say, hey, now that you've got it done, maybe we let it work for a quarter, right? 90 days of data to say, did we get something further? And pre-plan a rock 2 quarters after the initial rock to go look, did we get an ROI from that project? 2, did we drop the ball and half-ass that project? That happens way too often because we never double-check the work. And then 3, can we make the next version 1.1 or 1.2 upgrade now that we've gotten a little bit better? And we're always so concerned with moving the goalposts. We think that it's going to aggregate— aggregate people, right? Because you've moved the goalposts on them. But it's a part of the process that it's the only way you're going to improve your business. To achieve economy of scale, I have to move the goalposts.

Well, and what we found was MSPs are so busy, or at least we as an MSP were so busy, it was easy to forget those things. So the last step in most of our processes was schedule the follow-up meeting, and we would just schedule 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever, to talk about, you know, Bob's Plumbing's onboarding. And the last step in the onboarding was schedule the follow-up and let's go talk about it. The last step of all of our QBR process was, you know, let's take 15 minutes and just see how it went. We'd walk out of a sales call and literally pick up the phone and have the conversation right then and there. Hey, I just left a sales call. This is what went well. This is what I should never do again. And so just intentionally making the time for it ahead of time. Like, if it's— if you don't want to revisit it for 90 days, that's fine, but schedule it today so it can't fall off your radar.

Well, the postmortem process, and I would love your opinions on this, Keith, it can become so powerful as well. And Well, this can go into client onboarding and we can have a whole conversation on how to postmortem a client onboarding. In employee onboarding, you can postmortem to talk to the employee. Hey, what did you like? What did you not know? Where did you find that you didn't have something to do what you need? Or where did we forget to tell you what to do? And I think this goes back to Keith, kind of your, your graphic that was way too small. And for everyone that didn't see in chat, we are going to send that PDF at the, at the end of the show. So you all have access to it. Keith, together a fantastic document for all of this. But I think there's a level where you don't know what you don't know. So when you see all those dos on the top row, I think the quest becomes to expand it over time. And the only way you're going to know how to expand it is with that direct feedback.

Well, it does. There's, there's kind of two sides to it.

There's—

and I really stress that you focus on what you want to happen or do not want to happen in the business? And then how do skills and activities and processes and behaviors and attitudes— like, how do all those things relate to that? But since we're talking about skill development, what skills does it take to get the outcomes you're wanting and to not accidentally get the outcomes you're not wanting— angry customers, whatever they are? And, um, when you map that, when you map that out like that, now you understand what the business needs from it, and the employee can can add a ton of that. They say, well, you know why we mess that up all the time? Do you know why that's hard? And Bob makes a good point in the, in the comment that you can identify pain points, and sometimes you have the opportunity to design the pain away rather than train the pain away. And that is preferable. If you can design the pain away, then you can invest that training time in things that can't be designed away. And so you can improve a process. Like, years and years ago, the ISO 9000 process was all focused on process improvement. All that mattered was that you understood your process and you understood when it broke And you fixed it each time it did so that it was constantly getting better. And we can do the exact same thing with our learning programs and our skill development programs if we understand. That's why I'm such an advocate for, even in simple terms, mapping out the key things skill-wise for your, for your organization, because now you know what to focus on. You know what to ask employees about it. They'll tell you why it's hard. They'll tell you why they why they messed it up. Maybe it was because they weren't trained. Maybe it was because the process is designed to fail. And then you just, you can just work through it and you can iterate your way through ongoing improvement.

So Keith, we have a question in comments and I would love your thoughts. So Joe asks if you think that there should be a different approach to onboarding or training, in his case MSP employees that already have experience in MSP, should there be a different plan, or are they— should they all be working the same plan for consistency's sake? And I think your experience with RingCentral and Panero are pretty similar because it's just basically someone that already knows how to do the job. Do I just let them go?

Well, I think, I think the answer is both. And but so let me, let me just kind of explain it. Like, Kyle, you made a great comment in the, um, in that onboarding episode. And for people that are here today, if you didn't watch the onboarding episode, it's, it's worth your time.

Um, but you made a good link to that in the email we send out after, just in case somebody needs to catch it.

Yeah, yeah, it's a starting block in, in this whole process. And, um, but you make a point about checklist training, about knowing things that people need to do, making sure those things get, get checked off. And I think of it— I think that's exactly right— and I think of it kind of like a bingo card. So a bingo card doesn't get filled out in order, you know, everything's done sequentially. It's you, you, if the number gets called, you check it off. And so you fill in the bingo card as you go along. So some of your employees are going to walk in the door with boxes checked off on their bingo card, you need them to do these 3 implementation tasks, they did that at another MSP, they understand how to do it. You still have a piece of it. You need to make sure that the way they do it is the way you want it done, that you're getting the level of service that you want, and you need to make sure that if there's things in your environment that they would need to understand to do it in your environment, that that gets done. And then somebody else walks in, there's not a box checked off on their card. You know, like when I, I went to work at IBM, I had 2 years of college. It was kind of a weird situation that I ended up with this full-time job at IBM, and my card was blank. Like nice guy works hard were the two boxes that were checked. And both of those, you know, were the subject of some debate. But, you know, other people came out of, you know, with a four-year computer science degree, and they had some other boxes checked off. And so that's why I like transparency. That's why if you lay it out to somebody and say, here's, here's like what you need for the role you're in, and here's usually the next step and what you need for that. Then they can say, well, you know what, I'm actually really close on these 3 things, or I do have this experience here, and it becomes something you work on together.

Yeah, well, until Melissa's great, we don't know who has good habits and bad, right? Yeah, that's the, that's the thing. I'm sure when Chick-fil-A hires somebody from McDonald's, they do a little extra sanity check on some of those skills that the person says they bring to the table, right? And I think Chick-fil-A and Disney both kind of operate in that we'd rather hire somebody from zero who has no bad habits and teach them everything than we would out-train those bad habits. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

If you're— if you're spent 5 years as a store manager at Chipotle and then you're hired to be a store manager at Panera or any other chain, you're going to go through the same manager training program, and usually it's called MIT, Manager in Training program. Um, in either case, because you've got a great skill set to build on, but it is important that you can execute the brand. It's important that you can do things the way that needs to be done. So the person that has some background needs some training, but they may learn it much quicker, or maybe they just need to understand your expectation. You know, we've got a 24-hour SLA, not a 48-hour SLA. It may be as simple as just explaining expectations. So you work through those things person by person by person.

And I think—

go ahead, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say that when I ran my MSP, we were onboarding anywhere between 2 and 3 employees a month during our hyperscale period. I can't tell you how many times, and this is to Melissa's point, that we'd get someone saying, oh, I know how to use ConnectWise, and I would put them— I would just force them to take ConnectWise University for whether it was Lab Tech or Manage, and almost 90% of the time, and I confidently use that percentage, they'd kind of walk in my office and go, I was kind of annoyed that you made me take these stupid video trainings, but I completely— I had no idea that in Automate I could put a PowerShell script here, or I had no idea what the search function was for. I just had learned it through experience, which made me feel like I knew it. But now that I've taken the courses, I realized I didn't know jack shit. Mm-hmm. So is there, is there a method, Keith, to, or is there a best practice to, when you mentioned checking off the bingo card, how do I know I shouldn't check it off the bingo card?

That's good. I, I think demonstrate the ability to do it. So like, I went for a critical skill, I don't know that I would put somebody in a position to do it without assistance, without support, with— and just hope that they do it the way that I want. Sometimes with hiring you do, you look for that and you can kind of get in the neighborhood, but I think you want to validate performance. One of the things that happens in training is we think of training not in terms of performance enough, and performance comes through practice. If something doesn't need practice to become good at it, it's not a skill. It's, it's a procedure. And so it can be handled in a different way. But any skill requires practice to get good at it. And observing that practice is, is one way to understand how well people are doing it, how prepared they are. One of the things that happens, people come in and we do this in interviews all the time. We say, on a scale of 1 to 10, what's your proficiency in such and such? But that person doesn't know. They, like, I used to use an authoring tool at Allen Interactions years and years and years ago. It's not on the market any longer. It's called Authorware. And I would ask somebody that question, and they'd say, I'm an 8 or 9. And we'd run them through a set of tests that we did, and they were a 4. But that poor person, they didn't know that they were a 4. They had never seen a 6. And so they had no idea. And so when they said 8 or 9, in their shop, they were 8 or 9. Because they didn't know the world that existed out there. And so you got to take that into account. You got to find ways to, to understand where people are and then find ways to get them where you need them.

Well, I love, I love the word you used. Your, your specific word choice was demonstrate, and I actually scribbled that word down on a piece of paper because, um, you know, I was thinking, you know, learning checks and these kind of things, but I just think that word is so specific because it's not just have them tell me they can do something. But maybe in some cases have them show me they can do something. Maybe in other cases have them go update the documentation or write something that says that they understand the process. There's a lot of different ways we can demonstrate something, but that's way different than passing a knowledge check that just says, yep, check the box, stamp my bingo card, move it on.

And I almost want to repeat it because Keith, when you said it, I literally took a clip and put it on LinkedIn. That's why I was a little distracted, is a, a skill that doesn't need practice is just following a process like that. If there's one thing to take away today, oh man, right there. And I think most MSPs require people with skills that they just can't follow blindly. Like, we can't make processes for even some soft skill interactions, right? Because it does require logical and imperative thinking to your response. And that does take time to build, right? And there's that Eastern approach of 10,000 hours to be an expert, right? It's discussed because if you truly want to be a professional in the technical world, well, we got to take swings at the bat and sometimes we're going to miss. And that's a whole conversation on resilience, which I don't want to get into today because to me it's fascinating, but it's an interesting way to take that phrase.

So I turned around because there's a book on my shelf. And I couldn't remember the author's name. It's Atul Gawande. And it came out years ago. It's called Checklist Manifesto. And he's a surgeon. And the book lays out the power of process and how even someone highly skilled like a surgeon can take some of the things that maybe out of pride, they would like to do from memory and boil those into checklists or processes. And that frees up their thinking time, their practice time, their development time to focus on things that don't boil down like that, things that really do involve their expertise. And so one of the things that you can do, and again, it builds off this idea of first understanding what skills it takes to be successful in your company. You can look at those and say, well, I could checklist this one. I don't have to teach them to do this. I could checklist it. If you can checklist it, you might be able to automate it. And so you just kind of work through it and then figure out like what human performance makes a real difference in your business, and then start deciding how you're going to develop that performance.

I feel like you buried the lead there, so I want to take a step back because you said these words really fast and flew by them. If you checklist it, maybe you can automate it, right? And this is something that we talk about all the time in this space. We're literally building jobs called automation engineers. And the goal is that we take these things that are repeatable processes and we refine them until they're perfect. Then we get a machine to do them for us, right? This is, this is where some of these tools have real value. And Kyle and I go back and forth arguing over, you know, is the value of an automation tool that it can replace a human being? Is the value of an automation tool that it gets you the same result every time? And I love that answer. I think that is the power of an automation tool. We were all sold an RMM tool and told it'll replace a Tier 1 engineer. I always tell everybody, yes, I replaced a Tier 1 engineer with a Tier 3 engineer after buying an RMM tool. But what I did was develop a lot of things that I could now right-click, go baby go, and run a script that would now give me the same result every time. And Calvin's been doing it over at CIPP, right? How do we offboard a user out of 365? Well, it's 47 things that every engineer has to do the same way. If we build the checklist and we know it's right and we know the process is there, number one, that's important to train so that people have the checklist so they can sanity check the automation and make sure it did everything it was supposed to do. But second, it's the, it's the, the kind of the gateway drug to being able to go out and build those automations and streamline your business and make sure that when we offboard a user, nobody gets left behind. Like nothing gets stranded in a system that they still get access to something they shouldn't have, or, you know, set up a misconfiguration that's a vulnerability that leads to a breach later. And these are powerful.

It doesn't—

you—

the automation piece doesn't have to feel as threatening. I know with, with all the AI conversation and things that are going on, it can feel threatening to people. But like, nobody sits around and says, boy, I wish I had to do all this math by hand. Like, we're quite happy throwing that in Excel or putting it into the calculator on your phone or whatever. Like, nobody is saying Oh, somebody that knows long division lost their job because we invented this. It's just somebody who has the ability to do long division is now applying that mindset and skill set to a different, more difficult problem.

I'm just gonna say, if not for a calculator, Connor Swalm could be doing long division by hand instead of being a CEO, and he might prefer that.

He's the smartest guy you'll ever meet.

I, I suspect with Connor that there's like a Long Division Thursday or something where he just It's what he does while everybody else is doing Sudoku.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and you guys are kind of talking about this, and right, Alex, we— you do commonly make the joke of, oh, I replaced my Tier 1 engineer with the Tier 3 engineer. But I think there's some validity where there are some things that are more tactical that do need to be automated, but then there's some things that are more transitional or transformational that still need that human automation component, maybe not software automation, and right, that human automation phrase. And I think this goes into the Checklist Manifesto, Keith, that you're talking about. It allows someone as a human being to manage a people process in an automated way. And I think sometimes we forget that human automation is a component to upskilling and scalability. You're not going to just throw them a bunch of training and think they're a Tier 3 engineer day one.

And I think that at the heart of it is, is leverage your humans for things that humans are good at and that machines are not, for one thing. And so if you can take— like, everybody complains about the scut work, nobody likes, you know, all the admin work that goes with things. Anytime you take that admin away, you've got a happier employee, especially if you're giving them a meaningful problem to work on or a task that where they know they added value in, in doing it. And so I think there's a lot of, um, a lot of benefit. That's why, you know, I, I will talk a lot. And, you know, Kyle, you and Alex and I've had a lot of conversations, um, over the last several months. And, um, so I'm excited to be, you know, broadening my contribution to the conversation to the folks that we have, um, today, but I, I focus on operational thinking when it comes to training. There's a challenge both on the training and non-training sides of the business that people think of training as kind of a luxury, as a nice to have. And in reality, it should be really tightly linked to how you operate. And I think that, like, we had a conversation about accountability, and I like operational accountability more than I like administrative accountability Even though administrative accountability, which is reports and checklists that— I mean, did you take your training? Things like that are good. But operational accountability is, am I able to use the people that I have to operate the business? So I'll give an example from the Panera world, and anybody that's worked in a restaurant in a management role might be familiar with this, but there's this, this concept of cross-training at Panera. And so in a Panera Bakery cafe, just to make up kind of round numbers, let's say you have 50 associates that work in that cafe. The— some of those are, are certified in sandwich making, some are certified in salad making, some are certified to be cashiers. So like, you have to be trained to work these positions. So that's— there's a training component to it, but operationally to cover your level of sales and the number of hours you're open, you need a certain number of cashiers, a certain number of sandwich makers, a certain number of baristas to cover that. So the operational accountability lies in this cross-training report that shows me, of my 50 associates, how many baristas do I have.

So, so for the MSPs that are on the call, does this feel like your Microsoft relationship or your SonicWall relationship or whatever, right? We have to have a certain number of people certified in a product that says, now I maintain my relationship with this company, right? And Keith, you're, you're from a little outside of this world, but these guys have to have people certified in products to maintain relationships and get paid from Microsoft and some of these other vendors. And there's a certain number of humans that they have to have to reach competency, so they get paid better if they have 3 people that do something instead of 2. It's a— this is very important in our space.

And so the operational accountability there is not just, do I satisfy the requirement today? It is, am I looking at my team and what might happen to that team? Somebody's going to quit, somebody's going to go to college in another town, somebody's spouse is going to get transferred. What's going to happen? And does that— do I have to drop everything to get somebody certified, or have I thought through it ahead? If I need 3, can I have number 4 halfway there. So if that does happen, we can finish it. And so that's what you did with cross-training in the bakery cafe, is you looked at it and you said, oh, the end of August, we're going to lose some folks to— they're going to go to college in another town. I better get me some sandwich makers now so when they leave in August, I can still operate the business. So again, I, I like to look at your accountability through the lens of what How well are you operating your business? And then that administrative accountability can come in there. Like, I wear a Garmin watch, it keeps track of my steps. But the operational accountability is, am I maintaining a level of health? Am I actually getting out there and doing it? And then the administrative accountability is, I look to see how many steps I got each day of the week for the last month.

So real quick, I want to keep on this topic, but if you have— guys, we're coming up to— we have about 8 minutes left. If you have any questions for Keith, please put them in chat. Again, I'm going to send the deck and the the PDF guide with this to everybody that's here today, all, all of you that signed up, all 145, which is fantastic. Is if you have questions, put it in chat. But Keith, on this slide, you have something interesting, which is limit single source of expertise risk in mentorship. And I'm a big fan that mentorship is a key component to accountability. It's honestly a prerequisite in a couple of ways. What do you mean by that?

Well, so I'm thinking of it in two ways. One is, if I asked you, let's say you have a team, team of 10 people, and I asked you how many people on that team could coach other people on an important thing for that team. And if you tell me 2, like operationally, you might not be where you ought to be. If you tell me 6 and a couple will be there, you know, by the summer, then that's an indication of how well and how robust your team is, how, how prepared you are to withstand things that might happen.

But think of—

this is how we defeat that genius with a thousand followers thing, right? The, the, the one human being who can, who can bring down the organization if they're not there.

Well, think of how often, like, if somebody in your organization gets a great opportunity somewhere and you like that person Wouldn't you like to be happy for them? Wouldn't you like to celebrate that they got this great opportunity instead of saying, oh no, my business is ruined. Like, she's the only one that knows how to do this. And so that's the other thing is you look at it and say, well, how do I keep this from happening for that person's benefit and for the business's benefit? Some people feel like their job security rests in being the only person that knows how to do that. And that's indicative of some other problems. But you as a manager ought to be looking at it and saying, well, I don't want, like, I don't want her to feel like she can't leave. I don't want us to feel like she can't leave. So how do I prepare for that?

Hmm. Yeah, interesting.

Did that, Kyle, did that get to what you were thinking in that question?

There was an emotional minute for me right there because I went, oh crap, I remember when that employee left early on in my MSP and that hurt really bad. Like, there's a little bit of, oh, he's talking to me. So if you're in the crowd, you're not alone.

I had to leave at Panera and it broke my heart, but it shouldn't have. It was just because she was really, really good and I knew I'd lost a valuable piece, but I should have been really happy for her. And I mean, after my initial reaction, I was, and it was all great. But in that moment, it was like, oh no, she's the one that can do this thing and I shouldn't You shouldn't let yourself get in that position if you can avoid it.

Well, and I think there's the toxic side of this. So back when I was doing a lot of coaching, I used to tell my, my clients that don't be, don't be concerned if you bring me on board to coach you that you're gonna lose 15% of your employees. And right, they would all kind of like look at me and go, well, what do you mean? Well, a lot of times we have created standards, expectation, and training based off of an unbuilt plan. That people have used to create job accountability or survivability, really, to where, hey, you can't fire this individual because they hold all of the keys. And Alex, you know exactly what I mean.

Oh yeah, I remember that employee too.

Yeah, right. Where I need to create an environment where everyone has a chance to succeed, which means everyone needs to give up the knowledge, which means everyone now needs to have a new expectation. And changing expectations on an employee that's been with you for so long is going to be aggravating. Or just not a part of the career that they want to work or the roadmap that they want to be on. And it's your job to be confident enough to say, hey, this is what we are going to transact, this is how we are going to operate, this is our culture, and this is what we expect every employee to do. Not just you that thinks that you can hog all the tier 3 tickets or the tier 2 tickets. It's your job to write all of those items down and document what you've been doing so other people have a chance to succeed. And if you don't like that, then there is the door.

We had a rule in my MSP that if somebody had to ask you a question and your answer wasn't, let me show you the documentation, then once you answered the question, you had to go build the documentation. Well, because we were really bad at IT Glue, and that's kind of how we fixed it.

Well, and I think this kind of comes to Empath at the end of the day, right? Here, here's the shameless plug of, I think this is part of starting to create those processes and why we've really said, hey, this needs to become an open-source way of training employees. And I think we can kind of firmly say, and I think it's pretty obvious, we're so excited, Keith, for you to be a part of the MPACT team as our learning advisor so we can start to build out these mechanisms in a very methodical way and teach MSPs how to train their employees not through premade content, but through the differentiators and values that their businesses have. So we don't look like a bunch of cookie cutter MSPs and an economy world kind of starts to lose that special sauce that allows us to stick our head above water in a crowded market.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I just want to say to everybody who's here and watching, thanks for showing up. I'm super excited. Just to get to show the world the little secrets that we've been keeping as we've been building Empath, right? You know, Kyle and Wes Spencer and I run around and make a lot of noise. It's so cool to be able to share with you guys some of the smart people behind the scenes that are making us smarter and better at education. Because while we have done a lot of hip-to-hip training over the years, we've done a lot with our employees and tried to find better ways. Empath is a monumental journey in changing the way that even we had access to training at our MSPs. It's solving a problem that Kyle and I both experienced firsthand. And I just wanna say we couldn't do it without people like Keith who bring a little bit of experience from outside of the MSP space because typically our industry, we're just a little immature and we need a little handholding from an industry that's kind of been there before.

Well, and I'll just say for my part, like one of the reasons that our early conversations were so interesting to me is even though I wasn't from the MSP space, you know, RingCentral is a little MSP adjacent because of reseller arrangements and things like that. But even though this is a new space to me, like, the issues are real issues that we see in other businesses. And the thing— it was so obvious to me the way Empath is creating value and, and is going to grow that value that every time we talk about what could be done or what is being done, it's kind of exciting to me. So I appreciate being included.

All right, well, with that all said, Keith, thank you very much again. Alex, another one on the docket, another one in the books. This will be again publicly available. We'll send the email by the end of the day. That being said, guys, stay tuned next episode where we're, we're planning out a series for the next episode, kind of walking through some MSP structure and the fort. And other than that, see you guys at Write a Boom, hit us up, and then on LinkedIn.

Thank you. Yeah, if you're gonna be at Rider Boom, we have Wes Spencer's credit card, so come drink a beer with us. All right, thanks everybody.

Thanks everyone.