Light that sparkfire nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Being Boss. Today we'll be giving a free training on building systems and processes to scale your business. To drop these value bombs, I brought Chris Ransio into EO Fire Studios.
Chris is the founder and CEO of Trainewell, a platform for entrepreneurs to get their business out of their brains by documenting and delegating the systems and processes in their company. Catch more about Chris' podcast books and additional resources for business leaders at chrisransio.com. And today for our nation, we'll share a simple playbook for your policies and procedures, the habits and ingredients to make seven figures in beyond and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors. Have you gotten serious about scaling up your business?
Looking for tips and strategies that some of the fastest growing companies are using, join Trainewell, the software for documenting and delegating for a free virtual event on September 30th. You'll hear directly from Gary Vee Shack, the founders of Bombas, Healthy Com Booty, Coco Kines and more, register for free at playbook2021.com. Now there's a better way to pay for healthcare and it's called CrowdHealth. Sign up today to get your first month free.
Just go to joincrowdhealth.com and enter code fire at signup. That's joincrowdhealth.com promo code fire. CrowdHealth is not health insurance, terms and conditions may apply. Chris, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that a lot of people disagree with.
What's up Fire Nation, this is Chrisransio. I'm excited to be here. Something that everyone would disagree with. Let's see, I think everyone needs background dancers.
That'll make sense as we get into my episode, but everyone needs background dancers. I love you to say that because even on the show a few times recently, because we're doing a nice campaign together and I was like, Chris, make sure you say something unique for this one. I don't want you to just repeat yourself in last episode and guess what's your manage debts splendidly well with a great open hook for the future. So Fire Nation, you know this is a free training, all about building systems and processes to scale, not my business, not Chris's business, but your business.
And you create a Chris, a simple playbook about your policies, your procedures and you're gonna share that with us today. So take it away. Let's get into it. So if you want a playbook for your business, then this is the episode for you.
I know we've had a couple other episodes talking about training and different elements of the playbook, but what we're gonna do right now is break down why you wanna write one of these, whether you're ready to write one of these, how you can get started, how you can loop your team in, it'll be a lot of fun. Get started. All right, first part is, are you ready for this? We talked about in a past episode that an entrepreneur has to be at a certain stage before they're really ready to start delegating in their business.
They have to have some consistency, some maturity to their business. On day one, you're really not ready to delegate because you don't know how to do anything. You're still experimenting, you're still figuring it out. We talked about, I think on a past time that we chatted my framework, do it, document it, delegate it because in a business, you do things first, you learn to do things and you keep doing them over and over until you refine it, until you get it right.
And once you're doing something consistently, that's when you're ready to document it, to write it down and to delegate it, to share it with someone else. So my gut check for everyone coming into this episode is please make sure you are doing things consistently. You've done it the same way at least a few times because I don't want you to write everything down to create this playbook. And then a couple weeks from now, a couple months from now, you're like, all of that is irrelevant.
I do it totally different now. You'll feel like you wasted your time. So please be in a place where at least doing things consistently. All right, so next step is you need to understand why you're going about doing this for your business.
So in some businesses, you may deal with bad Yelp reviews. You may have turnover issues. You may be working 100 hours a week and it's just totally unsustainable. And so your why, maybe correcting some of those things, maybe just formalizing how do we do it here so that we don't have to deal with those bad Yelp reviews so that every service we offer is the best service, is the best version of what we do here.
Maybe it's something more positive. Maybe why you want to playbook is that you want to expand. You want to open more locations. You want to really grow your business around the world.
And that's a great reason too. Or maybe you're just about to hire a ton of people. Maybe it's a seasonal business and you've got this busy part of the year that you're coming up to and you're just trying to put the building blocks in place. But everyone should have a why for doing this because if you don't have a why, then you won't have motivation for you and for your team to get involved.
Now I'll tell you a story really quick about why you need to tell your team the why. So before training, well, I used to do consulting and I would go into a business and interview all their people about who does what, roles, responsibilities, and I would map it all out for the company. And of course, the purpose of this is to help that company grow, to standardize what they do. So one business I walked into was a moving company.
I sat down across from this woman in their break room and she looked at me super skeptical. I started asking her questions about her day, what she does and she says, I'm not telling you anything. What? So I was kind of taking it back like, what do you mean?
You're not have to talk to me? And she pointed to my pocket. Out of my pocket, I had this little clear wire and that wire is the part of my insulin pump. So I've got diabetes and I've got this little insulin pump in my pocket and she says, you're wired.
You're recording everything, everything I say. So you can let me go. And I was blown away. It had never happened to me before, but I'm thinking, wow, if this team didn't know why I was here, of course they're skeptical.
They're like, am I gonna be fired? And so when you've got your why, you've got to tell people about it. You've got to get your team involved because really what's in it for them? Does that make sense so far?
Yeah, that was a great story. I love that. I mean, that wire sticking out, she's like, I'm recording everything I can totally picture that. Keep on rockin' about that.
Yeah, like I'm CIA-er. So now that you've got like a why, you know you wanna do this. Now everyone listening to this probably is doing something entrepreneurial, right? You've got a side hustle, you've got a small business, you've got something.
So in your business, you have a ton of responsibility. You've got a lot that you or your teammates are responsible for. And so your first step to documenting anything is to collect everything. You've got to figure out what is the mess, what is everything that we do here so that we can start to pick and choose what to write down.
And so I have a really simple exercise that if you're listening, do this for yourself, but also do it for every one of your team members. Get them involved, have them listen into this, simple instructions. So number one, you wanna brainstorm all of the responsibilities that each person does by simple time period. So if I came into your business and I said tell me what you do every single day, you probably have a routine.
Maybe you turn the lights on, the factory, you check the cash register, you check the mail, you check your email, you pay some bills, there are responsibilities just baked into your day. I could ask you the same thing for your week or for your month and you probably have payroll or reports that you file or meetings that you have. So start with simple time periods by day, by week, by weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and you'll already have a good start. The next way to brainstorm responsibilities, if your business uses email in any fashion, look at your email outbox.
So all of your sent mail, and you might go back to three, four weeks, but if you look through your sent mail, you cut past all the noise, all the stuff that's garbage, all the newsletters, it's actually the stuff you engage with. And so what you'll see in there is the emails you send to other people, you'll see the things that you reply to other people about, you'll see the things you forward to other people, and you'll understand like what are you interacting with in your business through email, tons of responsibilities baked in there. The next thing you do is go to your calendar. So most of us keep some form of a calendar, and on that calendar you'd see client calls, you'd see appointments, you'd see vendor meetings, all of the things that actually make it to your calendar, also responsibilities, so gather those, and then the last piece is the apps that you use.
Maybe you've got a task list, a project management system, just go through and look at all your completed tasks. So I promise you, if you do this, and you have, each of your team members do this, you will have hundreds or thousands of responsibilities for your business, and that's really the raw material, that's where you start. So I'm sure, JLD, you've got ton of responsibility in your business, right? Quite a bit, I'd like to say.
So anyone that does this, I promise you, I say it's the quickest way to outline your entire playbook in 24 hours. Just ask all of your people to do this, and maybe you're sticking them into a Google Sheet, or something like that, but it is the raw material. So that's where you need to start before you write anything down. Now I'm gonna pause here because I've kind of a fun story to tell.
Little background story here, we just shot a music video, and recorded a song with Montel Jordan. I'm sure you've heard the song. This is how we do it. I didn't even have to ask you to say it.
So we started picking Montel because we were like, that is what our business is all about. This is how we do it, that's what your playbook is. He loved the idea, so we started working with him on a remix, so our remix is called This is How You Do It, and it's about showing people how to do the things that you do that you love doing in your business. So I'm out in Brooklyn, New York with my brother.
We're shooting a music video for Montel. We're watching the director chairs, and he kind of waves us over, and the crew, we start joking about like, we could be background dancers for this music video. And so somehow we end up as background dancers in the video for a take, we thought it was just gonna be for fun, and I look over to Montel, and I'm like, hey, Montel, what should I do? I've never done this before, what should I do?
And he just turns and he says, whatever you do, don't try to do what I'm doing. So the lesson here is like, we can't be Montel Jordan. No, we could be Montel Jordan. He's got a unique skill, right?
Because you probably have some unique skill that there's no way you could delegate, but everyone can have background dancers that do other things, the things you don't wanna do. And so that's what you're looking for in this list of responsibilities. It's like, put aside the things that only you're gonna do, because nobody could possibly replicate you. You're not gonna clone yourself, but look at everything else that supports your business, and be critical, because you can't do everything the best.
You've got a couple of things that you're probably the best at, but be very critical, and everything else you could probably delegate to a background dancer, right? So that's why I said at the beginning, everyone needs background dancers. All right, we're coming up on the last part of this whole thing, which is how to actually document or write down the perfect standard operating procedure. But any questions so far are good so far.
No, I love the stories being woven in here. You gave me a chance to sing today, which is thrilling, so let's keep rocking. Okay, so you've got this massive list of responsibilities, and trying to document every single one of those things would be a waste of time. It would take so much time, because go back to the beginning.
Like I said, you only document something if you've got a reason, if you've got a why, if you wanna delegate that thing. And so from this list of responsibilities, you wanna find all of the little things. Cherry pick the things that you think your business could do better, because you're lacking with consistency, and you wanna make up best practice, or things that you think are really gonna scale, like you're gonna have a ton of people doing this thing, we better get it right, and you wanna start to cherry pick all those things that someone else is going to do, and for each one of those things you wanna document it, you wanna write down a standard operating procedure, an SOP. So there is a recipe, a formula for the perfect SOP, and I'll give it to you here.
So first, every process has a simple name. You gotta be able to find it and understand what it is. And so, you know, maybe background dancing would be a process, it's probably a really bad example, but it could be posting the show notes to this. There is a process, and it's really simple, posting show notes.
Next, every process should have an owner. So, who is responsible for this being done right? Who is quality control? Who is the person to go to for questions?
Every process has an owner. The next piece, every process probably has some tools required to get it done. It could be tools in a physical sense, it could be software tools, it could be passwords, logins, but what do I need in order to get this thing done? Next, how often is this done?
What's the frequency? Is this something you do every day at 8 a.m? Is this something that's a once a month task? So how often is the process done?
After that, how long should this take? Is this a 30 minute process? Is this a three hour or a three week process? Provide some guidelines, that way someone knows if they've done it right.
After that, what's the measurement? Is there a KPI associated with this that we wanna measure to make sure it's done right? So, maybe customer success or responding to tickets, the measurement is a happiness rating. There's some measurement.
Next, after that is the context, the why, that you would do this thing? Why does it matter for the business? And then finally, the steps. One, two, three, four, five, here is how you do it.
So, make sure as you're documenting any responsibility, any process, you answer each of those questions, and that is how you hand off a perfect process for someone else to start to do in your business. Fire Nation, listen, you might be thinking to yourself, what a pain in the butts Chris is talking about right now. And guess what? It is work.
But as you mentioned earlier, number one, you can do the first part of what we talked about in 24 hours, literally, like you can get this stuff done in one day. The other stuff, you can get done over a reasonable amount of time. And the beautiful thing is, once you do this right, the first time you are creating a machine that will run, stop waking up every single morning and trying to create an engine to then putting your car, to then turn your car on and then to drive to work. Don't you just wanna just go to your garage, turn your car on and just already put together and running and you can just drive, of course.
And that's what you're building here with this playbook. We have a lot more to talk about when we get back from thinking our sponsors. As an entrepreneur, finding the right health insurance plan for you and your family isn't always easy. Plus health insurance can be a frustrating expense when you're a generally healthy individual.
Well, now there's a better way to pay for healthcare, crowd health, crowd health isn't health insurance. It's a community of health conscious members who contribute to each other's medical expenses, which can help you save thousands each year. You just contact Crowd Health and they find great doctors who offer great prices. It's like getting rid of the insurance middleman.
So the savings get passed on to you. Plus your membership is a monthly subscription. So you decide when to start or stop. Again, Crowd Health is able to offer amazing prices because of its community of health conscious members.
It's a helping that journey. And unbelievable offer for you Fire Nation. Sign up today to get your first month free and Crowd Health will send you a free Apple Watch after your fourth month. That's one month to try them for free.
Plus the Apple Watch, but only while supplies last. Just go to joincrowdhealth.com and enter code fire at signup. That's joincrowdhealth.com promo code fire. Crowd Health is not health insurance.
Terms and conditions may apply. If you're in the midst of scaling your business, and I mean really scaling your business, then listen up. Train you all, the software for documenting and delegating is hosting a free virtual event on September 30th aimed at helping your business grow. Playbook 2021 is a completely free virtual event for entrepreneurs just like you when you sign up today at playbook2021.com.
You're saving a seat for live Q&As with Gary V and Shaq. Plus sessions that will unpack the scaling stories with the founders of Bombas, Health Aid Kombucha and Koko Kinds. Oh, and talks with the leaders of some of the fastest growing startups around, you'll get that too. Get ready to walk away with a playbook for building repeatable, predictable, scalable operations that will change the pace of your company's growth, whether you need strategies to scale big or marketing ideas that resonate with your ideal customers.
Playbook 2021 has you covered. Register for free today at playbook2021.com. Once again, that's playbook in the numbers 2021playbook2021.com. So of course, we're back.
We talked a lot before the break about how to create this playbook with policies and procedures because so many people fail with the orientation, the onboarding, the treating portion of their entire business. So where do you want to go next? What do you want to talk about for Fire Nation today to make sure that we can get all of these amazing, lovely listeners onboard? So you said it before the break, but this takes work.
I mean, you've got to invest in this and it is a catch 22 because if you want to free up time, you have to invest the time in doing this. Anyone that I talk to that doesn't absolutely love their job, love what they're doing every day, I ask them, well, what parts of your job do you not want to do anymore? And there is your starting point for what you need to document and delegate to someone else. So it's really an amazing opportunity we all have.
It's not a burden to do this stuff. It's an opportunity to kind of craft and mold what we actually want to do in our businesses. So as we go forward here into the next piece, the most common thing you will ever train your employees on is what is your company all about? It's your orientation because you could have all these granular responsibilities that apply to maybe one person or 10 people in your business.
But the thing that applies across the board to everyone is who are we? What are we all about? Where is this company been? Where are we going?
And so I want to focus here for a couple minutes on just creating an amazing orientation experience. So I'm good. All right, so the first thing you want to do as you're welcoming someone into your business, sounds simple. Welcome them into your business.
Like take a second to record a little video of yourself saying, I'm so excited that you're joining us. Like if you're watching this video, it means you went through our hiring process, our interview process. It means that we like to better than everyone else that applied for this job and that we're bringing you into the family. I'm so excited you're here.
Can't wait to meet you on your first day. Something so simple is that a 30 second video that's high energy that you can send consistently to every new person that starts. It means that they're welcoming to your business is the best it could possibly be. Whereas maybe someone starts and you're sick on the first day or you're traveling and you have to just welcome them with a quick phone call or you don't meet them until their second week.
So again, it sounds simple, but just record a welcome that you send to every new person after they accept your job offer. It's the easiest place to start. After you're welcome, you want to get some prep done for their first day. So send them some instructions, whether they're starting remotely or coming into an office.
What is their first day going to be like? What should they wear? What should they bring? What does their calendar look like?
Do they need some tech setup in advance? All of that stuff, answer those questions so that when they get there on their first day, they have enough to stress out about as they're starting a new job. So be thoughtful and really invite them into the business. When we have new people start, the next thing we do as soon as they walk in, bombard them with swag.
So I'm sure you've got a ton of Fire Nation swag as well. Oh, yeah. It's the simplest investment in making people want to post on social media about your company and making them walking billboards when they're at the grocery store, sweatshirts and hats and water bottles and chargers and all these fun things, backpacks. We give them a ton of stuff and maybe it's a few hundred dollar investment.
But when you think about the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of salary dollars you're going to spend on a person, like those couple hundred dollars is so insignificant. And yet some people will look at that and be like, well, I'm not going to buy a $10 water bottle. That's expensive. So I would encourage you to invest in some cool swag for your business because it is one of the things that our people really love.
And if you have some Fire Nation swag, I would really love to receive that as well. I can tell you, we actually go all out on our swag too because I'm like, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right. So people actually wear our swag because it's super comfortable to like gyms and to different places because, hey, if you got to invest in the swag, you might as well have swag that people are actually going to wear. So we got one coming to Wakeress.
All the promo product company listeners that are out there like, yes, absolutely. So next thing we do, I call a welcome interview. So when someone sits down on their first day or they're on Zoom, we talk about why did you pick us and why did we pick you? And it really reaffirms everything they experienced during the hiring process.
That is such a good starting point for their journey with you. After that, we go into training. So of course, we use our own system, but the simplest training for your business is a background on the company, like your story, your history, your mission, your vision, your values, who's your team, what do you guys do as a business with your products and services? And then what should this new person expect 30 days out, 60 days out, 90 days out?
Just set that groundwork. And if you write that down and record it once, you use it over and over and over again. After that, some simple social time, get to know the person. Do scheduled check-ins with the manager, with the boss, with you to really get to know them and then celebrate when their training is over.
And at the end of everyone's orientation, we have things that automatically go out on Slack and everybody celebrates like, you did it, you're through, you're up to speed, congrats on accomplishing the first thing you did. And that is how you make someone successful. If you do that in their first few days, imagine what the rest of the journey with your company looks like. Fire Nation, we talked about the orientation, we talked about the onboarding.
Let's finish strong with that training portion. All of this is training. This is documenting your responsibilities, documenting your orientation, writing it all down is the manual part of training. When we came up with a name, it was just slamming training and manual together.
So you write your manual and then you train it. You give people that experience. And so just being intentional about all of this, that's training. You're investing in training by writing it down and thinking about how you deliver it.
So you have something that's coming up that I wanna just label right off the bat as a can't miss, playbook 2021. This is actually an event and it's for entrepreneurs. So Fire Nation, take notes. Can you finish strong today by talking to us about the playbook 2021?
Yes, all right. So this is a two day event that we're hosting at September 29th and 30th of 2021. If you're listening to this in the future, I promise there will be prerecorded events and we do this every year. But if you're listening right now, September 29th and 30th, it is a two day thing.
The first day is just like Apple's developer conference. We're running out a ton of updates, training sessions, how to build training in your business. And so if you're out there listening, maybe you use our product, maybe you're looking at it and you just wanna get to work and start to make this happen in your company, that first day is all about how to do it. And we'll hold your hand the whole way.
Day two is for the general public. This is for anyone at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey that just wants to learn about systems, processes and the playbooks that have made other businesses successful. So we've got a live Q&A with Gary V, a live Q&A with Shaquille O'Neal, which if you don't know, he has like 400 businesses. He should be on the show.
He's incredible. We've got speakers from Loom, from Bombus, the song, I'm wearing their socks right now, from Coco Kine, from Health Aide, Kombucha. And we also have a special musical guest that if you were listening earlier, you could probably think who it might be. It's gonna be an incredible event.
So if you're around September 29th, 30th, go to playbook2021.com. We'd love to see you there, totally free. Playbook2021.com. We're talking Shaqu.
We're talking Gary V. It is an action-packed event. It's gonna be Montal Jordan singing, this is how you do it, not JLD singing, this is how you do it. So just keep that in mind.
So I think that'll be a little more appealing for my audience, believe it or not. Take it home, Chris. What's one thing you really want to make sure for Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today, give us that final call to action one more time, and then we'll say goodbye. So we started this off talking about background dancers, right?
But think about when you're building your business, how do you have a support system so that you can be at the front of the stage? What do you do uniquely well that you can keep doing? And how can you build this training, build this documentation for everyone else that's gonna support you? So I would encourage everyone to do that exercise, to map out the responsibilities in your business for all your people, and then go have a laugh watching me and my brother in the background of that video.
Just search, this is how you do it. On Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, anywhere that music is. Fire Nation, you heard it from Chris, and I want to say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with CR and JLD today, so make sure you keep up the heat, and head over to eofire.com and type Chris in the search bar, the Shonas page will pop up and you will get everything you need link wise from there.
And I just want to say Chris and I have done a handful of episodes over the past few months. They have all been straight fire. So going a little Chris JLD binge, listen to them, your systems, your orientation, your processes, your onboarding, your training will improve vastly. At the very least, Fire Nation, have your team that's in charge of this go over these episodes.
These are key for you in your business. Chris, thank you for sharing the truth, the knowledge, the value that you have with Fire Nation. Today for that, we salute you, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks again.
Hey Fire Nation, today's value-bomb content was brought to you by Chris and Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals, which is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days, step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com and I will catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. Have you gotten serious about scaling up your business? Looking for tips and strategies that some of the fastest-going companies are using, join Train You Will, the software for documenting and delegating for a free virtual event on September 30th.
You'll hear directly from Gary V. Shack, the founders of Bombas, Healthy Kombucha, Koko Kines and more, register for free at Playbook2021.com. Now there's a better way to pay for healthcare, and it's called CrowdHealth. Sign up today to get your first month free.
Just go to joincrowdhealth.com and enter code fire at signup. That's joincrowdhealth.com promo code fire. CrowdHealth is not health insurance, terms and conditions, it may apply.