EP 33 | I Don't Have Any Processes - Where Do I Start?

I have this gorgeous champagne glass. Um, this was a gift from Jared and Sandy gland. It is a Tiffany, uh, champagne glass. And it is gorgeous. But I want to explain why I have the champagne glass at 1017 in the morning. It has water in it. Don't worry. That is not vodka. This champagne glass is important because when we were having our holiday Christmas party in 2019, I made a toast. This was, I believe we had like 8 or 9 full time team members at the time,

and we had all of their spouses with us. And I made this toast and the toast went something like, here's to however amazing 2019 was. I'm sure I read off some stats because that's just how I make toasts. But here's to 2020 and making process sexy. And we toasted. But it was one of those awkward toasts where they're like,

what the frick is she talking about? Well, little did they know that this process that we're about to talk about, which is a process tracker, was about to be rolled out and all that unfolded in 2020 of actually utilizing this thing, making it work, getting our business organized because we knew although we only had 8 or 9 team members at the time, we knew that in order to grow and scale, we had to make it a priority when we were small to start documenting what was working

for our business, how we were doing, what we were doing in order to duplicate our teams, to create more opportunity for each and every one of them to get out of their role because they had confidence that their current role was already being documented. If you do not focus on this as a business owner or as a leader in your department or your company, your business will not be able to scale. It can't. Because just think.

Think about it this way. You have a front office team member, but your aspiration is to have six locations. Right now you only have one. If that front office team member does not duplicate in documentation form, what makes him or her so great as a front office team member? What is your confidence in opening up the second location? You might have confidence for the second location because you haven't actually gone through the process, and the pain of

duplicating when it doesn't work out. If you don't have the foundation, what do you duplicate upon whatever you happen to put in for? The second option is what you get. So let's say you have a great front office staff. You still might. In the third process of duplicating, when you go to your third location, think that process documentation is not important until you happen to have what every

business runs into, which is a poor performer. That front office team member that doesn't smile when she greets patients or customers, or doesn't answer phone calls because she doesn't really like the phone or is not interested in making outbound phone calls because not their job. If you do not know and have clarity around the process for how to not only should in the job posting it, say

this is your job. So that's step number one. And if you want to go deep into what is required to make a fantastic job post to get the type of team you want, you should go check out the previous episode called What Do We Call That episode? We called it How to Write a Job post to get Your Dream Team. That was episode 31. Go check that one out so you have the post, but once you have the post, it's not just that you are answering a phone. How do you actually answer the phone? What

do you say when somebody calls? If that process is not documented, you're duplication of 2 to 3 will will make you lose confidence in your ability to actually scale and grow your business to the six or the ten or the 100 that you are capable of. Do not let your lack of process documentation diminish what you are capable of, and what your potential is with the growth of your business. Don't do it. Just just make a decision.

You're not going to allow that to happen. This is why my toast, my cheers to making process sexy was so important, because what I fully acknowledged is we were not going to allow process to be the thing that stopped Cardone Ventures. And I just have to be honest, I am the the last person in the building that is qualified to make process documentation. If you are familiar with the risk assessment, I am what is called an influencer, not in the traditional form of an influencer. I am

somebody who just likes people. I like a lot of people. I like talking to them. I like just being liked. That's something that is important to me on a day to day basis. I'm not a heavy data person. I'm not heavy, heavily detail oriented in my core nature. So me being the person that processed documents has nothing to do with being qualified. And that's important because my guess is you don't feel like you are qualified to be the person in your organization that process documents for a

minute or for a quarter or for a year. Let's forget what we prefer to do and what we are good at, and forego that for what is a priority for the organization in order to get our goals. This is the same as working out. You can say I'm not a morning person. Great. I know you're not a morning person. It's okay that you're not a morning person. You're still going to get up in the morning in order to work out so that you can get your goal. The goal has to outweigh the preference. The goal has

to outweigh the preference. You cannot just choose to prefer not to document your processes. You have to choose to do it. So now that you're here and you're like, yes, I'm committed. 2021 we are going to make process sexy in my organization. I'm going to cheers to that. I'm going to take a little drink of water here. Delicious. And these glasses are so nice. Uh, now that we've made that decision, let's talk about how you actually go about doing this. Because it's easy to say, I'm going

to do it. And it's challenging when you get back home in front of your computer to say, where the frick do I start? For us, I'm going to do this whole demonstration around the Google suite. So we use Google Suite as an organization. So that means instead of Excel that sheets instead of Microsoft Word, that's docs. I'll do my best to kind of make that differentiation. But let's not get caught up in that. Let's just focus

on how we actually put this in place. The first step, like we're going to go through these and baby steps. I was trying to figure out how I want to do this podcast because it's going to get really nitty gritty. But um, there's no other way besides literally talking about opening up an Excel document and putting a framework in place. So let's roll with it. The first step is creating an Excel or Sheets document called Process Tracker in your

shared drive. As an organization, you should also have a folder that has this process tracker as an item, and then you break out your departments underneath those that tracker in folders so that each department can go into sales or marketing or finance. They don't have to look at this long list of all of the different departments processes. This keeps things organized for new team members. It keeps

it organized for cross training. Meaning if your sales team members also do some pieces of marketing potentially, or they're interested in moving from sales to marketing, it's very easy for the entire team to know what is the process for X, y, z. The other reason that this is important is sometimes a lot of times processes are cross department, but there should be one part, one department that actually owns the move forward of every single process. That's the

department that you put that process in. So for instance, let's say your organization runs events. There are lots of departments that touch events. You have to sell the event. You have to account for the event. You have to prep the team who's going to be on site at the event. So just in those three areas, there are three different departments that that touch. It's still an events process, but you tie in these other departments through the steps

which we're going to get into. Don't get too overwhelmed. We're still at opening up a document on your computer that says Process Tracker and putting a centralized place for processes to get created. Think of this as your container. I don't want to just breeze past this because in you creating a container, you are going to be able to organize the thing that comes up. What I hear most from business owners is the frustration of I don't

know where to put this. So the overwhelm of a situation where something didn't go right, a team member didn't do what you wanted them to do, but there is no way to be able to say, here's how to actually do it. That feels like you could easily slot it in to a container that always gets tracked back to that people know to go to when updates and changes gets made, is where business owners don't even start the process of documenting, because it's always the little tiny

thing that emphasizes the need for this big structure. But then the big structure is overwhelming. If you do it this way and you split in this tracker, so you have your it's literally like a sheet tracker. You have sales that has a section, you have marketing that has a section, you have finance that has a section. That way, you know, okay, right now we're only going to create one sales process. Like we have this problem with sales. At this moment we are only going to create one.

We know that there are multiple sales processes. This is not to say that there are not more, but these are the locations of the ones that we do know exist. Once you have this in place, it's going to be so easy. It's like clockwork when an issue comes up and a client isn't handled properly, or there was a ball that was dropped. Yes, you have to address that situation in the moment to fix it. But then, you know, okay, I'm going to put a process. This is where it's

going to go. This will save you so many headaches as you scale and grow your business. I promise this will take you less than 15 minutes originally through the exercise that we're going to work through to set up. And then you just know to always go back to that as soon as an issue arises. I don't want to make this overly complex and have you guys feel like, oh,

this is so overwhelming and it's so much work. The starting point is the easy part, the the issues with your team individually and not being able to scale and grow your business and you losing confidence in the opportunity. That's what's hard. Process documentation shouldn't be that hard. Okay, so you have in your columns of your Excel or Sheets sheet, you have the department in column A, column B, you have the process name. Column C is the link

to the actual process. Those are the only things that are in the tracker. I'm going to repeat that column A is the department. Column B is the process name. Column C is the link to that process. Depending on how much time you have, you can brainstorm with your departments the processes that you know need to be created in order to kick start this. This is what I

did in 2019. It's like, okay, let me sit down for five minutes with each department and rattle off all of the products or services or things that I know need to have a process around it. And once I created just my brain dump, I then went to the department head and we prioritized which ones were going to be written first, based on which area of growth the business was going to have. The biggest pain point in. You don't just randomly start creating process for process sake.

You should start by creating the processes that absolutely need to be documented that will allow for growth or funneling any sort of activity, whether that be client or team activity. Through that process. So if you go through each one of those departments, that's pretty straightforward. Let's say you have eight departments in your organization times five minutes. Uh, what is that, 40 minutes? Yes, that's 40 minutes. I'm not the best at mental math here. Will just like, nodded

his head like, yes, thank you. 40 minutes. So now we're up to 40 minutes. You created it. You put your folders in place and you did 40 minutes of prep work. You do not have to do that prep work. If you are strong with your department heads and you feel like this is something where they can have the opportunity to have transparency into their thinking, you can put this structure in place and then send it to them

and say, hey, I want you to spend. If they're the department head, they should be spending at least 15, maybe 30 minutes going through and listing out the processes that are within their department. So once they've done that, all of a sudden you're back down to all you

had to do was create the framework and process. So again, these are different options to be able to lean into your existing team or to give enough framework so that you've kind of you've not stopped yourself from having to have multiple conversations with every single team member about how this is supposed to work. If you are going to send it to your team to have them fill this out.

My strong recommendation would be for you to do one of the departments, like if you are a leader, but you also, um, but you also have your own department. If you're the business owner and you have your own department, you would do those examples so that they can actually see and have reality on what that looks like. Okay. Once you have your process names, then the next question I always get asked is what does process documentation look like?

What am I actually supposed to be documenting in these processes, and how do I standardize this? I will caveat this by saying there are different businesses that listen to this podcast that have different flexibility around how stringent process documentation should look like. I'm going to introduce you to a framework that we create all processes in, and I've never come across a process that cannot be put into this framework. But if you want to try me on that, I

am happy to review your process. If you want to shoot an email to info at Cardone ventures.com, I'd be interested to see if there was one that just couldn't fit into this framework. I have not found one yet, but that's okay. You might be the first. So back to our process tracker. The very first row should be a link to the template. So you have like literal row one says template with a link to click on that template. So this is what's used in column C

to link out once it's customized by the process. So you have the template the department head or you goes into that template fills out their process. Then they link it in column C. So at the end of the day you have the department filled out all of the, uh, process names filled out, and then you have the actual links that tie out. But when you first start, you're going to have a bunch of empty links. Now we need to work on how you create a process template

that works for your organization. So let's just dive right on in. We have this concept called vision, commitment and execution plans. These are used in a variety of ways in our organization. But one is in order to process document. Every single thing that you put into a department has a reason that you were doing it. You are not just some sadistic person that likes to create process for

processes sake that has no value. What you recognize as a leader or as a business owner is it has immense value, and that's why you are spending your resources to create this. But oftentimes a process as somebody doing it gets lost in the bigger scheme. Like, why is this important for the organization to be able to uphold this process? And so this vision commitment, Execution Plan framework allows you to frame for any team member, even if

you only have eight right now. When you have 80 team members, it's going to allow you to frame for them why this thing that they're doing is so critically important. In order for the business to function and serve its

clients the way that it needs to. This always feels a little weird for smaller businesses to start implementing because it feels like too grandiose, but you have to put your yourself in the perspective of somebody who's never likely talked to you as a business owner, or if you're a department head and a leader, they've never talked to you because there's different management layers in between you and them.

That's just the reality. So knowing that, how can you leave these impactful messages, so to speak, to these team members for why this is so critical and why you've had this role to begin with? So the vision statement, every single process that we have has a vision behind it. So I could pull up a couple and give you some examples towards the end. But I want to make sure that you understand this is like one maybe two sentences. If it's an events process, the vision would be something like.

This process was created in order for every client to have a remarkable experience. When they meet our Cardone Ventures team at an event, and ensures that the details will be smoothly taken care of and deliver to them a ten-x experience. That's the vision. So all of a sudden when you're that role, you're not stuck in, oh, I have to update this tracker and I have to take out the trash in this area, and I have to send out this email communication because that's the nitty gritty.

But the purpose of those nitty gritty things are so important because it allows the client to have a remarkable experience, which is important for the organization to hit its goals, which then means it's important for the team members to hit their goals through working with you. Vision statements. Important commitment. So commitment has two parts. What is the team member's

commitment and what is the leadership team's commitment? The leadership's commitment is giving the right process and training to the team member, so they have confidence in their role. This is a step that's often missed. So many business owners just get mad that their team doesn't do the things that they want them to do. But then when you ask the question, well, how did you tell them to

do that? They don't have an answer. Well, this is how you tell them, and you provide them the assurance that this is what this is supposed to look like. And I'm detailing out what my expectation is. That way, if they don't do your expectation, you can go back and say, well, this was listed for you, why didn't you read it? And they're like, oh, I didn't think it was important to read it the second time. They

do that wrong. And you've already gone through the training because it was your commitment to train them on them. And they say, oh, well, I just forgot. That allows you to not let that person be a team member in your organization because it's a willingness to learn. It's not a skill issue because you provided them the skill. The commitment on their end is to learn the process, to master the process, and then ideally be able to train other people on this process. So that's two steps.

Their commitment, your commitment. The execution step is much more traditional process documentation. This is the actual things that need to happen in ideally a sequential order for the business to move this process forward and for somebody to have clarity on these things. In most of our documentation, we include video links to the process. A lot of our work is done on a actual computer, whether it's client calls or financial modeling or putting together a marketing budget.

So all of those things exist on a computer. Therefore, we can have somebody narrate, this is what I'm doing, this is where I click to find that blah, blah blah, so that there's just additional context that's given and there's no wiggle room for somebody saying, oh, I didn't know you were supposed to click on that. Well, it's in the video. Uh, the second piece is because it's on there, we detail what the process step is, and then we take a screenshot of it so it serves as a guide.

What I've been talking about is in these execution steps. But as a framework for execution. I'm just going to recap this. We start with vision, which has one statement. The template then has commitment, which has two pieces the leadership teams, the team members. Then in the execution steps, you can add little places to put a video overview and to put screenshots. The bulk of the steps as a framework should always follow a pre, during and post framework.

Think of this as any activity that takes place in your organization. I'm just going to continue to use this events one, because I think it flows nicely before somebody attends an event. How many things need to happen in order for that event to run smoothly, like a 25, 30, 45? Quite a few. All of those things should be documented. The pre steps to making that act successful need to

be documented in sequential order. Then the during steps, what needs to take place to create a remarkable experience for that event. Everything that happens during that then needs to be documented as well. And then the last step is post. So you don't just have an event, everybody just doesn't show up and then leave and have nothing happen. There's surveys to be sent out. There is follow up with the venue to make sure that everything went well. There's

the invoicing, there's the tracking, there's the testimonials. Like there are steps that should happen every single time to ensure that we're capturing what we need to capture after it takes place. Most people just show up when they do a process documentation, and they only think about what needs to be happening during the call. I'm going to write a sales script for the call, but then they entirely neglect what happened to prep for that call and what

needed to happen in follow up after that call. So they missed the pre and the post and everybody focuses on the during. The other mistake that everybody makes is just focusing on all of the steps and not framing why it needs to happen and what my commitment is as a leader and what their commitment is as a team member. The execution. Like if you're looking at your current process documentation, What I would encourage you to do is say, okay, I already have scripts for a salesperson.

That is the bulk of the during. That's great. Plop that into this framework, but then add the context for the pre, add the context for the post, and then just write a few statements for why it's important and who's responsible for those two things. Last piece of the process documentation or of the template is creating a matrix for who created this document, who approved this document when

it was created and when it was last modified. This will allow changes to happen all the time because as we talked about when we first started this, the purpose of process documentation isn't to put something in stone and like print it like in a book like you do. You never have a printed book in 2021 because technology changes, the requirements change, a new idea comes up. You need to have flexibility around this, but you also need to be able to track that flexibility so that it doesn't

just get lost. So this last rubric is really helpful so that if it was a previous employee that no longer even works with you, you can. And maybe they weren't even all that great of a performer then, you know, oh, I need to go back and relook at this to make sure that this is actually the right way to get this done. To create context, the next steps in our document says send to approver for approval and then update Process tracker with new process name link and appropriate folder.

So the team is now trained to just put back this process tracker. It's always to put back this process tracker. Well an additional note on this. Depending on the size of your business, we've been able to manage this all the way up to the 50 employee mark. One person should be in charge of making sure that every single one of these processes is approved in a standardized format, so that that can then be duplicated with teams. Beyond. What this means is, I am that one person in

this organization. So regardless of if it's sales or marketing or finance or operations or learning content, I am ultimately going to be reviewing these to make sure that this is exactly the way that it needs to be done, and that this tracker has continuity to it, so that when new team members join, there's one way that we do things and it's grooved into the organization until the organization is actually ready for the department to take this

on itself. If you don't have one person approving processes and you allow this looseness to take place, what you're going to find is inconsistencies. And in order to create confidence, remember, process is all about creating confidence. In order to really create that confidence, one person has to have visibility into this project. Now, eventually I will hand this off to one other person and that will likely scale until around 200 to 250 employees for the management of just the processes.

But that is resource well spent in an organization because without it, the business doesn't have the operating manual for it to work in. All of a sudden you're going to hit these break points. When you hire your 80th or your 120th employee where there were things documented, but they're not really updated any longer. You just have to be diligent about it. And this is why I made the toast of we're going to make process sexy because this is not fun work. There's nothing fun about this

unless you are a freak. I do not find this fun, but I find it useful. And I find it to be the thing that needs to happen at this stage of the organization. So when you make a funny toast and you provide lightheartedness to something that isn't fun, that's also you demonstrating your leadership abilities because you as a team need to do not fun things in order to

scale and grow your business. When people on social media make it seem so fun and exciting and you know, people driving around in nice cars and having big meetings, That's like 5% of growing and scaling a business. The 95% is this type of work. And when you can add light heartedness and make this work feel fun and get enthusiasm and excitement and explain why it's so important to your team, ideally you can get their buy in and influence them so that it doesn't feel as dreadful as

process documentation oftentimes is. So with that, I hope that you enjoyed this. If you have any questions at all, feel free to shoot me a DM. I would love to answer your questions. This is something that we go pretty deep into at the Ten-x 360 event, where we talk about the importance for KPI trackers. We talk about the importance of your financials, tying out to the processes that you're creating, and how you strategically prioritize those resources.

So if you're interested in getting more information on that, go to Cardone ventures.com forward slash Ten-x 360. Guys until next week. Make it a great one.