⭐️ The Burnout Cure In Healthcare With Trainual ⭐️ MUST WATCH FOR PRIVATE PRACTICE OWNERS!!!

Hello, providers, and welcome back to the channel. My name is Will Humphries. In this video series, I am introducing businesses that I either worked with or I wish I had worked with to help me grow my practice. These companies help solve a lot of our day to day problems and today's business is probably one of the most important. We're going to be meeting Chris Ronzio from Trainual. Trainual is a company that takes your policies and procedures, puts them in the cloud that you can scale and brings them to life. Chris is an amazing human being as well. So you're going to learn about leadership today as well as the importance of documenting what we do so that we can get out from underneath our companies and actually be business owners. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce Chris. All right, well, Chris, thank you so much for being a part of the show today and thanks for creating time. I know you're a busy guy.

Thank you for having me. I always have time for you. Will, you were in my first mastermind group ever. So like, I love thinking back to those days.

Yeah, I do too. And I got to tell you, if you hadn't brought it up, I am so proud, proud of you that I was going to bring it up for sure that I was in one of your first mastermind groups. How long ago was that? Honestly? It's been at least 10 years.

Yeah, yeah, it's probably like 12 years ago at this point. Something like that.

You know, it's been funny to think about our growth because at that time we were very much deep within our businesses, me and my physical therapy practice and you with your film production company and very much like trying to figure out the basics of business. And now here you are, founder and CEO of Trainual, which is one of my favorite companies. Regardless of our experience together, having seen what your company has done for others is something that I'm excited to share with our listeners because I think if I had had that 12 years ago, it would have been a game changer for me to get on top of my business. So could you frame up Trainual a little bit and tell the viewers who are maybe hearing about it for the first time what you guys do?

Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way. If I had this in my video company that I had when we were in the group together, it would have made such a difference. And so, you know, the, the, the, the short answer, Trainual is training manual smashed together. But it's really more than that. It's like we call it the playbook for your business. So as you're growing a business, you have a secret sauce. You have the way that you do things. You have your policies, your procedures, your best practices, the way you structure your organization, role by role, department by department. It's what makes your company unique. So Trainual is a simple software where you can capture all of that, where you can work with everyone in your company to capture what they do. And then you can train and onboard new people and keep all of your people up to speed. So it's that, you know, when you go back to that physical operations manual, the binder that we all kind of wish we had secretly, it's that. Except online.

Yeah.

And I think it's cool that you did this business because when you're again in your first company, that was all of our problems, you know, in healthcare in particular. Chris, I can tell you that our listeners are going to really connect with that piece that you mentioned around like how they like to do business because healthcare is an art and a science. The art part is so hard because they want to make sure they get it just right. But Tranial gives a platform for people like that to be able to create it. So I would love to hear from you, like what was your journey from going from your first company into Trainual?

Yeah, so when I met you, I was already 10 years or nine years into my video production business, which I started when I was 14. So in high school it was really just a side project where a friend and I were filming sporting events at our school. And then it took it started to be like state level championships and regional events in New England where I grew up. And so as we did more and more events, we couldn't be the camera operators at every event. And so we started having to hire crews, camera operators and production managers and film editors to do these events that would happen all at the same day. And so that was my real entry point into training and operations and standardized procedures. It was like, if I can't be at every event, how do I make sure my company and the same experience is at every event? And so I was thinking about it like as a, as a franchise. You know, you've read the E. Myth and I'm sure a lot of people have read those sort of books. You want to build a consistent, repeatable experience. And so my video company was kind of like my test kitchen where I was learning all this stuff and trying to figure out, you know, how to fine tune the way we did things. And so when I intersected with you, I was still flying out to events and you know, like filling in wherever needed. I hadn't gotten myself out of the business, but over those next couple years, as I handed it off to an operations manager and he became the president of the company, I was piece by piece pulling myself out of the day to day and the systems we had. The SOP is in the really the playbook is what enabled me to do that. But we were just cobbling it together. It was like WordPress sites with janky plugins and form tools and a CRM where we would tag people that had gone through training. And I just wish that there was a simple system like this. Fast forward a little bit. I sold the video company, started consulting and as I was going business to business, I saw everybody's got this same need. Everybody has the way that they do what they do. And the best of the best have these three ring binders or.

They'Re still stitching it together with all these documents and weird plugins. And why isn't there a simple software for small businesses now? Enterprise companies, huge conglomerates have these types of softwares, but small businesses don't. When small businesses grow and think of training, you think like bureaucracy and compliance and like, no, I'm a cool growing business. I don't need that. And so I wanted something that was in the middle there, easy to use. But check that box. Yeah.

And it totally is. I remember those days.

I remember you flying out to like Olympic events.

Like I remember that.

And I was so proud of you. Then I'm like, oh my gosh, this guy is the film production company of some Olympic ice skating or whatever it was. It was so cool. And like the whole thing about how you started this is powerful because you know, I went personally as a business owner, I had the same thing where I was using Google documents and all those kinds of things just to help organize my thoughts. And that was actually something because like you mentioned the book E. Myth Revisited, which I'll put in link in the description below. Everyone who's listening to this has to read that. Absolutely first and then you'll totally understand what your next step is in your company and why train you'll so important because once you start putting it in a area where it can be shared, it can be scaled. But do you know what I love about Tranul is I love in addition to it's, it's easy to use format, which I am not like you, I am not a tech guy.

The fact that I have a YouTube.

Channel is kind of a miracle for Me, for me, like, I can use TrainingWell, and you have this robust support system to help people get started. It can have video, it can have all these cool features with very little effort. And you can track it. Like, you can track people's performance in it without having this nightmare headache as you grow and hire more employees around how that works. So why do you think people don't, like, document their policies, procedures, or put them online? What do you think limits business owners from going to that next step?

I think that it's a stage, it's an evolution of a business. You know, at the beginning of a business, everything's on fire, right? Like, you're just trying to fix everything that's broken, or you're experimenting, you're testing. And so the right time to document is when you need to scale, when you know that you've got something that's working. And so when I was consulting, I used to ask people before I'd work with them.

Do you have a marketing problem or do you have an operations problem? Like, are you trying desperately to get customers and you need to focus on customers and sales, or do you have people banging down your door and you just can't fulfill them quick enough and you feel like you're working too many hours? Because those are very different problems. And so for an early business that's focused on marketing and sales, you're not, you know, the operations is. It will come. But you can have a messy business when you're trying to fill a schedule, you know, but then when you get to a point like I remember you were at in your business, where you're like, I don't have enough hours. I can't be on the floor every day. Like, that's when you start to realize, I've got this responsibility that I no longer have time to do, and I need to offload that to someone. So how do I make sure that I'm setting the right expectations for them, that I'm setting them up for success? You know, that's why you would document and write something down. And so a lot of people find themselves in this catch 22, where it's like, yeah, it'll take me some time to write it down, so I'll just do it myself. And if you're in this, like, you know, that. That hamster wheel almost, then that's where you're going to stay. But if you can invest in. If you can see a bigger future and you invest in the training and writing things down, then once you're free of that responsibility, it's just so enlightening and then you get addicted to it.

Yeah.

It reminds me of something you just posted recently on LinkedIn. I loved it. You were talking about how in your post you were saying something along the.

Lines of, you know, I am, My.

Company is exponentially bigger than my video production company is, but I am actually working less in it because I have these policies and procedures. And I don't think that's something that I understood. Right. Like the idea that if I wrote it down and someone else had somewhere else to go besides me to answer questions, it started creating freedom. And that's one of the core things I'm trying to create now is increasing income impact and freedom. So could you speak into that a little bit? You know, let's talk about, like, when you were consulting clients. I love that bit of like marketing or operational problems. So what were some of the key things that you would pick up on.

Other than just how busy they were.

To see if they really needed more of a, of a trainer type solution? Like what was the symptoms of the problem that you'd pick up on?

Yeah, so if they needed, if I had an operational problem, it was because all the hours in the day were filled. They were trying to find capacity, like, how do, how do we free up enough profit or free up enough time to go into this stuff that we want to do and don't have time to do? And I think any person in your business could be feeling like that too. So one of the things I always would ask is I'd ask you everybody in the business, and I would ask them if you had, you know, a secret assistant or someone that worked like under your desk or at your house and nobody knew about, like, what are the things that you would offload to those people? And then I would say, all right, great, you just bought yourself 10 or 20 hours. Like, now, what do you want to do at that time? What do you wish you had time for? And the gap between the high level stuff that people want to do and the low level stuff that they don't want to do. There's your profitability.

You know, that's a good point.

And so it takes that intentionality of understanding what are the things we need to automate or delegate or build systems for in the business. And then that's what you focus on. You don't have to document everything. You have to document the things you want to delegate.

So, okay, so when I see all this now we're kind of getting to.

The cause and effect of it all.

What has it been like for you?

What are some of your customer experiences around implementing their policies and procedures, getting free of their business?

Because ultimately that's not really, you know.

Training well in the policy procedure business isn't really what you're into. You're about creating freedom and creating this like cure for burnout. And I'm hoping my listeners will hear that, like this is the cure for burnout in healthcare, is standardizing these things and growing. So what's that like for you? And do you have any examples of people that you've talked to who've been able to grow by doing that?

Yeah, man. First of all, cure for burnout is gonna be one of our slogans now on our website.

I wanna do one of those like late night infomercial.

About like, have you been struggling with burnout? And like there's now a cure for burnout. But thank you for that idea. But yeah, that's absolutely what it is. I mean, so, so I'll give you just a couple examples. Like there is a.

Maid service that has, you know, just exploded over the last, you know, as cleaning and Covid cleaning for Airbnb rentals and things like that has become such an important part of just society. There's this, this maid service that uses trainual to train people that have just been hiring like hundreds of people a month and blowing up. And the has sent us messages like, I have no idea how we would have been able to capture this demand if I didn't have a way to train people. Because before they're like meeting everyone one on one in the office or doing hour long phone calls with people. And when you start to think about, like I was on a show earlier today and the guy said, you know, start thinking about what happens if this works, you know, like what goes well. And it's that sort of prep that like, if things really start to scale, that's when I'll be kicking myself that I didn't actually write this down or document this in advance. And so that's kind of what you're doing. It's when you've got the hint that success is coming, that's when you need to formalize this. Because if you start getting a lot of people doing something and doing it the wrong way, it could either go really bad or it could go really well. And how prepared you are for that is what makes a difference.

Yeah, I think another way that it reduces stress in the process of getting.

To that point is that when you have out points in your company, like someone's doing something wrong or you're having that discussion as to why they're not producing the thing they've been hired to do. Having a documented gives you the power, I noticed, to be able to sit down with the person and objectively show them what's going on. It becomes about managing through agreement versus expectation when it's written down. And so, you know, for me, one of the things I loved about what you're promoting is that in my world I didn't think I'd ever find a day in healthcare where I would be a business owner who worked less than 10 hours a week but was growing a company more than ever had just what like you've done.

I would love for you, this isn't.

Like you, but I really kind of need you to brag a little. I want to. Can you tell us like how many, you know, brag about training will tell me about the growth and like who all that you're working with. Not clients specifically, but you know, your impact at this point?

Yeah, sure. So, so we have over 5,000 companies using the tool at this point. Hundreds of thousands of users in over 130 countries now. And so.

It'S really become.

Really cool to see and that's, it's a self serve product as well. So people sign up and they'll send us messages.

And thank us and we'll do case studies and so we have anecdotally a lot of really cool stories. But just looking at the numbers on the little ticker that keeps going up, it's, it's inspiring to think about the impact beyond the people that we hear about. Because what you said there about, you know, the cure for burnout, it's not just for the founder, the owner, the person at the top, it's for each individual person. You know, it's anytime someone goes from doing 10 things to now being able to take two of those things off their plate and give them to someone else, it moves them forward in their career and it's less stressful. And so I felt it myself. Just as we've grown and we've added people, I think the LinkedIn post that I put out was just that the business almost doesn't need me. I do a lot of these shows and stuff like that, but it's kind of cool to think about that the business could run totally without me. I could take a month off and everything would be fine. Hopefully they'd miss me, but everything would be fine. And I think that's the dream of where you want to get to, well.

And I know you personally, I know.

That you are a leader of leaders. Like there's no way that you wouldn't be missed. But I think it's also cool, and I think it's cool that the business that you run is the very thing that's helped you be successful. This thing called documenting and growing leaders. Something that you said really sparked something in me as a memory is like when I wasn't writing things down as a healthcare practice owner, it was always like these a players that I was fortunate and lucky enough to hire that I leaned on. It was a people run company versus a process run company. And so my world kind of shifted. Whenever their world shifted, if I ever burned them out and they left, it was like I had to reinvent the company from scratch again. And I never thought about that. When you put those policies and procedures, it's almost like we're giving a gift that has nothing to do with us. It's a way of not being the center of attention always because then they look at what you've built as a legacy and they can grow. So I love what you said.

Yeah, I remember one of the companies I consulted for was a daycare and I went in, I used to do these confidential interviews with everyone. So I was interviewing a teacher and it was during the kids nap time. And so we're sitting in these little like 18 inch chairs, you know, like the little preschool chairs and talking about the business. And she confided in me like, I've gotten so many job offers. You know, families come through here. I could be a nanny, I could be, I could work at other schools. I've gotten so many job offers that would pay me more than what I make here. And so I'm like, well that's great. She must be so loyal. She must love this place. I said, so why, why didn't you leave? And she's like, because if I left, this place would crumble.

Like I just feel so, so I'd feel so guilty. And I left that room feeling so bad about like, you know, this a player like you just said, is so important to this business that she's just afraid to make decisions that are good for her own career. You know, like she can't advance herself. And so it's really something that's great for everyone. It's like everybody should want to be replaceable. Whether you're the owner, any employee. If you're replaceable, it means that you can move up. It doesn't mean you move out necessarily. It means you can move up.

Yeah.

And in that growth of moving up.

Is where the profits occur. Because if they're not feeling like if they leave, the whole thing crumbles. But it's more like if I stay, it's the narrative shift, right? If I leave, this thing's gonna fall apart. But if I stay, it's because I can grow with the company that's encouraging and incentivizing because everyone wants that. And so that's the power of having it all written down. So I wonder, what's your vision for trainingal? I'm sure. You know, I almost wonder. You've done so many of these interviews, I just kind of wonder if this is all redundant. But I still want to know what's your vision for training?

So the big vision is that every small business would have one of these playbooks. You know, it's, it's sort of in line with how I think Microsoft or Apple or someone says like a computer on every desk, you know, like that sort of thing. Because that was the far out vision that just didn't seem possible or practical at the time. And then as technology advanced, it was very practical. And so it's the same with a playbook, with operations manual, whatever you call it. The reason businesses don't have these is because it takes so much time and effort and expertise to put one together. But if we do our job with the software to make it so that the playbook almost writes itself, you know, things, it understands how you're growing, it sees how you're adding roles. It's got built in templates, it's industry specific, it's got a recommendation engine. You know, you can imagine a future where wow, I just sign up for this thing and over time it starts to be extremely valuable because it's collecting the knowledge in my business.

Yeah.

And it is extremely affordable. And I have to say real quick, as a disclaimer, as the time of.

This records, I get zero financial gain if you guys go to training. I'm just a big believer in Chris, you know, Pace the leader, pace the pack and this company that has on its own proven its worth. I just think healthcare providers get into a place when it's a service based industry where they don't come up for air. They're so busy being burned out. So the people who are listening this in their car, who are watching this on their phone at night, you need to understand that as Chris's vision is to put this in every single small business in America or the world. My vision is that every private Practice in the world has trainual in it as well. I haven't seen anything as good as you guys at all. And that's not just because we're friends. It's the most efficient and effective way of growing and scaling and getting unstuck. So as you grow in scale and as I grow my vision of healthcare, I hope that we'll continue to overlap, Chris, because what you're doing is just phenomenal.

And likewise, watching you go through your journey with your business and now helping others, I mean, it's very parallel what we've been doing here.

Our paths have been very parallel, except that you're about 10 years younger than me, so I try not to remember that. You just figured it out so much earlier than me. But it's okay. It's not the age, as our common friend Scott says.

It's the stage of our business. Right.

Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here. I will put the link to learn more about tranual in the description below. I have used them for years. I am a big fan. But before we go, Chris, I got to ask you, is there anything else on your mind that you would like to share with healthcare providers at this.

Point who are feeling burned out? Anything you would want to say to them?

Yeah, anyone that's feeling burned out Again, back to the cure for burnout. You know.

The chaos comes from the lack of clarity. And again, to throw back to my consulting days, what I did to eliminate chaos in a business was really just to unpack what all that chaos was and start to sift through it. And if the chaos for you is that you are working too many hours and you just couldn't possibly support a larger client base or whatever it is, just sit down and start to map out the difference. The things you really like doing and the things you really don't want to do anymore. Because that's the beginning. And until you see that gap, like I mentioned at the very beginning, you can't really do much about it. So start there. Figure out what needs to shift, what roles you'd create, what responsibilities you'd pass off, and that's where to focus.

Very wise words. Thank you, Chris. You know, the last thing I'll say on the way out is to remind you guys the importance, especially in healthcare, that you are the service, you are the product of what you do. And so often we get wrapped up in this idea that, like, we have to do it ourselves. We can't ever hire someone quite as good as us. But what we've learned here today is that if we are able to write these things down and if we're able to train people in our style of doing things, we can create something bigger than a business that runs us. We can create a legacy that's going to impact way more patients and those wonderful employees who are wanting to learn what you have already figured out. So by all means, read the book Emyth Revisited and remember that phrase that Chris mentioned. Through clarity, you can distinguish between opportunity and distraction. Clarity is power. Chris, thanks again.