EntreLeadership - #367: Do, Document, Delegate with Chris Ronzio

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

If your goal is to grow your business, Trainual Founder and CEO Chris Ronzio—who successfully grew his own company by 500% in just one year—has some advice: If you want to do something differently tomorrow, you’ve got to teach someone else what you’re doing today. In other words, you’ve got to learn how to delegate responsibilities—but that’s tough to do if you never take the time to clearly document how you do the things you do. Tune in to hear Chris break down his do-document-delegate approach that will help you scale knowledge, empower your team, and maximize productivity.   entreleadership.com/podcast Trainual website Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Powerful by Pattie McCord The EntreLeader's Guide to Delegation Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever gotten to a point in your business and your life where you're required to give more time and energy than you actually have? You started doing some tasks and then you took on more and then more and then more, but in the excitement of all that growth, you never actually handed anything off. This can be okay for a season, but as a lifestyle, it's a trap. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today we get to spend time with Chris Ronzio. Chris is an entrepreneur at his core. He's the CEO of the business Trainual, and he and his team of 26 are in the trenches of helping businesses document responsibilities, clarify roles, and scale effectively. And this really matters, not just because of what it helps you achieve, but because of what it helps you avoid.

Well, when you don't document, you don't delegate, you don't pass off any other responsibilities in the business, you basically just get. stuck underwater. And I think that entrepreneurs that can't grow their business and find some ceiling where they're just stuck in the company, they don't like going to work, they feel trapped, that's because they haven't built this skill of being able to pass the baton on certain responsibilities. So I think that a business that hasn't embraced this is just a stressful business. And that's what I want to fix. We call that a lot of times the treadmill of business. And it seems like so often the person that gets started because they're passionate about it, they get caught up in this treadmill where it just feels like never ending

and they're just bogged down. And the phrase that we a lot of times use is, man, they feel trapped by the thing that they built. Yeah. And that's not a fun place to be because you loved it initially. That's why you built it. And when you feel trapped by this thing that you used to love and now you're falling out of love with it,

then you kind of start wondering what's next. And that's when you look for shiny objects. Find that next thing. That's right. Yeah. And the thing that you get excited about is what you chase. I love that you already described what we're talking about today as a skill because I think so often the marketplace looks at it as a personality type. And it seems like, oh, you either have the personality where you can delegate effectively and scale effectively or you don't.

It sounds like that's not the approach you take. No, it's something everyone should develop. And it's not just the entrepreneur either. It's every leader in the business. It's every person that wants to grow in the business because if you want to do something differently tomorrow than what you're doing today, you've got to develop this skill of teaching someone else what you're doing today. And so this is something everyone needs to embrace. And the phrase that I've heard you use over and over again is do document delegate, do document delegate. So explain what that means.

So it came out of this presentation I did and I felt like the alliteration was nice. And so it worked its way into my slides and then I trademarked it because I was saying it so much. So the idea is that You start a business doing things and you're experimenting until you're doing them consistently. And once you can do something consistently, then you have to document. And if you can document it clearly, then you can delegate it and you can know that the results are going to get done. So it's a simple step, but you do it roll by role and thing by thing in a business. You focus on doing it, learning how to do it. You work out all the kinks.

And then you document, you write it down, and then you delegate and you hand it off. Okay. I'd love to focus on the gap in between due to document. right off the bat because it seems so often we work with business owners. They get good at doing the things consistently and then they do more things consistently and then they do more things consistently, but they never actually take that step. In your experience, consulting with businesses and observing businesses and running your own business, why is it that we don't bridge that gap? Well, you can't do everything. You start taking on more and more responsibility until you feel

like you're going to break. There's this burden and you're just, you're spinning too many plates, you're juggling too many balls, whatever it is, you're just going to collapse. And I think everyone that's run a business has felt like that at some point. And so you need to sit down and think, what are the things that are wasting a lot of my time that I don't necessarily need to do or that I don't enjoy doing? Let me find the shiny objects in my business, the things that I want to focus on because they're exciting to me. And so if you've got that to drive you, you know the things you want to focus on, then it's easier to hand off the stuff you don't want to do anymore. Is that selfish? I don't think so. That's It's growth. That's right. Okay, but explain that, though, because that's what I've seen on coaching calls before, that people feel bad handing things off to do things they want to do because they don't feel like it's correct to just focus on what they want to do. Well, that's why we're in business. So do what we want to do. And so you've got to know this is what I want to work on, because if you want to work on something, you'll be more passionate about it, you'll be more creative, you'll have more energy for it. And if you can identify the things that you want to get rid of, it's not because

you want to cast them off and make a burden on someone else. It's because you've figured these things out and now you can empower someone else to do them. Because you know what they say? One person's trash is another's treasure. It's the same with responsibilities. The things that you've done and taken for granted for years are new to somebody else. And they could see that as a step up, a promotion, taking on more responsibility. That's right. At what point, do you know when you are doing something that it's time to start documenting it? Because I feel like there's probably an area where it's probably too early. Yeah, I would say once you've figured it out and you feel like you're just going through the motions. Like when I was consulting, I remember

I spent years developing this process of the questions I would ask, the session I would do with first an entrepreneur, the context of their business, and then interviewing employees. And I got it dialed down to where I had an iPad with these pre-designed sheets and I'm just kind of filling out the boxes. And I remember sitting in a meeting like this where I was just, I was on like page three and I was sick of filling out the boxes. And I felt like I had perfected this process and that's when I knew it was time for someone else to do it. So what would step one be for the person that as you're saying that they're like crud, that's 50% of my schedule right now. It's those things that don't liven me up. It's the things that don't wake me up as a business owner.

What would step one be for that person? Step one's to make a list of what those things are. So this is something everyone can do right now or today in the next 24 hours, and it's something everyone on your teams can do if it's a business of more than just you. And so what I recommend is people go through first your email and your calendar and look through the last two weeks of your sent email. And that'll show you that things that you're actually engaging with in your business. That's probably pretty convicting. It's crazy. But it tells you without doubt these are the things people are asking me for.

These are the things I'm responding. This is what people need me for. And the things that you don't get energy out of, put those on a list. And that becomes a job description for the next person you bring on. And so out of that, you create the next role. Once you've got this huge list, how do you identify what is the proper role or whether all that list of things warrants a role? It depends on the list. And it depends on the size of your organization.

Because when you've got a small team, you've got a lot of generalists that wear a lot of hats. and it goes from you wearing 20 hats to you and a friend wearing 10 hats a piece. That's right. And then it goes to three or five people and you've all got a few hats. And so it depends on how far you are in this evolution of business to know how narrow that role is. Because if you've got administrative tasks and finance tasks and all these things, that might lump together into one executive assistant or one project manager. But if you've got a business that's 100 people and you've got a bunch of people and you've got a bunch of things, those might get subdivided to your existing team. How often are you as a business owner

intentionally looking at your time and doing the type of evaluation that we're talking about right now? All the time. Really? Yeah. So I keep a, just like you have a to-do list, I have a to-don't list. You know, do you really? You have a list of things that you will not do. Yeah. And it's something that I just add to as I'm doing something that I don't enjoy. What's an example of that, like, that's on that list right now? So we won this grant in Arizona and every quarter we have to fill out some numbers to show the growth of the business to report back to the state. And that just went on my director of finance. We just hired a director of finance. And that went on his list, but it sat on my to don't list for six months.

Okay. So when you say it sat there for six months, what does that mean? Like what warrants putting something on that list? And is that list just a description of things that you're not going to do? Or what is the list? It's a list of things that I don't want to do long term. It's not something that maybe I don't have the capability in the business to hand it off to someone today, but I need to identify and be aware that this is something that I don't want as part of my job description. And so having that list is kind of a working pool of tasks of things that you can parse out to other people or bring on new talent to do.

Okay. So the to don't list is a list of the things that you may even have to do today, but it's not the long term plan for where you're going to be spending your time in the future. That's pretty powerful because we see a lot of times that people get caught up in this schedule of things that they don't want to be doing, but they're not actively creating a plan for how they're going to get out of those things. It sounds like that's what that combat is reactive. You know, you get sucked into everything in the business. And so you end up just in this mode of firing back the tennis balls over the net, you know? That's right. And if you're not intentional about saying, here's the only tennis balls I want to deal with are these ones, then you're never going to get there. What is the greatest blocker as business owners start to take this step to documentation? What is the greatest blocker you think to doing it effectively? I think the hardest thing to do is to delegate something you're good at. And I think that deserves some attention because it's easy to delegate the things you're bad at or you don't enjoy. And that's where you start. You ask me where you start.

But the hardest thing is when you get to having to hand off things you're good at. Because then you're going to critique the person you're going to. you hand it to and you're going to say, ah, it's easier to just do it myself. And if you can't get past that, then you can never grow beyond that. That's where you stop. How did you get past that? I'm still working on it every day. I mean, I would- The daily battle. I wouldn't say I'm past it, yeah. But it's something that as you elevate to a new level inside of your own business, you're dealing with new challenges and you're building skills and you're learning new things. And so as you build those skills, you know, you add the skill on LinkedIn, you say, this is something

I'm good at. It's hard to then immediately shed that and give it to someone else, but you have to blaze the path and say, I'm going to learn this thing. I'm going to do it for as long as I need to, and then I'm going to recognize when I'm not the scalable solution for this anymore. That's almost a hit to your pride and ego a little bit to say, like, I am not scalable. Like, I am a finite resource. It takes a lot of humility to be able to actually reconcile with that statement. Yeah, I agree. I think it's tough because as an entrepreneur, want to do everything and you want to be good at everything. And I think people that are driven to build businesses and be leaders and businesses take a lot of pride in being great at what they're

doing. And when you're relinquishing control of something, you can look at that. Even the phrase relinquish control drives me crazy. Because it feels like I must not be good at it or to an outsider. You know, I couldn't do it. And you can do it, but do you want to. And does it contribute to the future you're trying to create. I think a lot of times, especially when I think about documentation, but then also in the conversations we're having with the owners we work with, it seems like there's this constant tension of, okay, I want the document to be simple and clear enough that I can teach it. But I also wanted to be hyper detailed because I have a really clear picture of how I want this thing to be done. And it's like this constant wrestle. How do you come at that tension?

Well, I think it's best to start documenting in the simplest form, because you can always, always add detail. If you had too much detail at the beginning and you spend too much time and then you have to change it, it's demotivating because you feel like you've done a lot of work for no reason. And so I always say, start simple. Start with a bullet point list. Start with an outline. Start with a two-minute screen recording. Start with something simple that just gets it out of your brain. Give it to someone and let them ask questions. And then the questions that they ask help you fill in the gaps. And then how do you actually roll that out to the individual? Because you're probably not just handing them a stack of papers and being like, this or handing them a trainual app and saying just take this course or whatever what's the proper way

to hand off documentation with regard to a process well so with trainual we have kind of this draft status and it goes through draft and needs review and then published and these phases that documentation goes through so i recommend you just start by drafting you know make it a working document a google doc an ever note a trainual subject whatever it is start just writing down the outline and share it with the person that needs to know how to do that let them ask questions questions, and then you're going to collaborate on making the final process. And I guess I should take that back because there is no final process. You know, I saw when I was, yeah, what's the core value I saw when I was walking in the, shoot, shoot the sacred cows? Yeah, I heard you see on another

podcast say, like, that's what this is about, right? Like, there is no process that lasts forever. That's right. And so it's a working collaboration all the time. So you're constantly creating that culture of documentation where this is something we're constantly working on and moving towards. A lot of the people that we work with every day would describe themselves as accidental CEOs, honestly, kind of like you were at 14, right? You started a video company at 14. You weren't planning on building a company. You were just like, I like making videos. And more than that, I like making money. But then suddenly they look up and they've got people following them. And a lot of the times, the reason they started a business is because they had this

aversion to being corporate, right? I don't want to be corporate. The last thing I want to be is corporate. That's even our company here. We do not want to be corporate. America. And at the same time, it's like we need to have systems and processes because we're now 900 people. So how do you weigh that balance of like we need to have these processes in place? And at the same time, we don't want to be so process oriented that we take people out of the mix. Well, it's a careful balance. I remember growing up, my dad was in the corporate world. And I would walk into this big corporate center that had a waterfall in the lobby. And you know, it like it felt just so corporate he had this cool office and so i aspired to have a real company you know

something that looks you aspired to have your waterfall yeah i wanted a waterfall we still don't have one but maybe someday and so starting my business at 14 you know it was it was like i was mimicking the big company things like we had the telephone system with like a british voice over you know press press 1 through 9 basically goes to me but just press some buttons and you'll get to me That's right. Which for the record, I do trust someone with a British accent way more than anyone else. Agreed. Absolutely. So, you know, you do those things to mimic the big company, but you don't want to layer on the red tape to the point that it's burdening the people that you hire. And so it's this careful balance where you want to have the organization and the thought that goes into a big company, which comes with processes and systems and policies, but you don't want those policies to burden people. And so it's just a careful back and forth where you've got to establish.

some process. And then it's just got to be simple enough, like I mentioned, the bullet points where your people can ask you the questions and fill in the gaps. When you're rolling out process and communicating to your team or to your people, hey, I know we've been super scrappy for a while now and it's been like the Wild Wild West, but now we're going to have to kind of figure out some ways that we do things every time. What are the best practices for communicating that so people buy in and get on board with the process? You have to share the context. So, for instance, we just rolled out a policy change inside Tranul. And for the last two years, we had had this loose, flexible, unlimited PTO kind of policy,

which I still advocate for small companies. I love the idea of it. But now y'all have 26 people, correct? Yes. And we're growing really quickly. And we introduced things like short-term disability leave and paternal leave and these things that had confined weeks of boundaries to them. And it was hard to know the gray area between where you're unlimited

PTO ended and where these other things kicked in. So we had to establish some boundaries. And as we started that conversation, we were very open with talking to people and saying, here is the motivation behind this. This is not a restrictive kind of policy. This is, you know, to enable you. It's to add more benefits. Make sure everyone's on board.

And then we roll it out. How was that received? Very well. Okay. And we took, we looked at averages of how much vacation time people had taken, made sure that our new policy was over and above what the biggest utilizers were taking. So it's very educated in the way you roll it out. And it sounds like it's not even really a top-down policy.

It's very much bottom-up. It is. It's collaborative. But the bottom-up approach was because those newer things had been requested and people said these are important, we had to figure out a way to make that work. And so went to the drawing board, said, how do we make this all work together? And then we communicate back, almost like I'm. mentioned before, a draft. Here's what we're thinking. Got feedback and then we rolled out the final policy. Policy or direction or vision by committee seems like it could be very dangerous territory.

Maybe, and maybe I'm getting this wrong. But what is the proper way to say like, okay, like I'm leading this thing and I'm casting a clear vision and at the same time, I want everyone to have input and to be able to speak into this so that we're all on the same page. Is that attention or am I overthinking that? No, I think when I was consulting, the people, that wouldn't be able to get feedback and collaborate and go through that process, thought exactly what you just said, that they needed to be decisive and roll it out, and they were inviting too many cooks in the kitchen. But I think you can do both. You invite the feedback. You get all the ideas and you make it this open collaboration. But then in the end, you make an informed decision and you explain why. And you've got some

communication behind, here's why we made this decision. You've got to be the leader and make the decision, but you can't do so by ignoring everyone else's opinions. And there's a lot of, especially with the example you use, you probably have a pretty good hiring process in place that you don't have people on board that are just trying to slack and just not use PTO all the time, right? You're probably hiring the right people so that the people that you're consulting about the policy that you're making is informed by the culture you're trying to create. Yeah, absolutely.

If you hire the right people, a lot else falls into place. You've experienced such rapid growth. I think I read somewhere like 500% growth over the course of a year. Is that correct? Yeah, last year. You're at 26 people now. You're hiring 25 more this year is what's projected. How on earth do you document anything whenever things are changing so fast and you're growing so fast because we know in this economy there's lots of business that they're experiencing that type of growth. What would your advice be for documentation and process when things are just exploding? Well, think of a a skyscraper or some kind of construction project. There is a foundation that's being built where you're putting one brick on at a time, you're putting down the cement, you're building the building at the bottom to be very sturdy, but then at the top, it might go up 10 stories of just beams and things that are just seethru, and you know, you don't know what the final product's going to look like. And when a business is growing quickly, most of your attention is on the beams. That's where most of the labor is. But then you've got a small force of people that are putting

the cement down at the bottom. And that's kind of what we're doing. There are things that are solidified in our business that are subject to change long term, but right now, day to day, they don't change that much. What are examples of that? Like our new customer onboarding, for instance. You know, this is something that when we go from having three customer success reps to 12 customer success reps this year, we can't change the process every week. You know, so. You've got a way that you do it. Yeah. And so you solidify that way, and you roll that out over six to 12 months and have everyone do it the same way. And then you revisit that on a longer cycle. Whereas there's other things like our ads, our copy, our marketing that we're changing weekly

because that stuff's at the very top of the building. You know, that's the stuff that we're trying to get as high and grow as fast as possible. That's right. So it's just a balance. How does something go from being at the top of the building to them being a part of the more sturdy foundation like your onboarding has done? Once you see repeatable success. So I'll use the marketing example. You know, we have certain messaging or certain channels that are really working for us and have worked for the last two years. So we start to spend more and more budget on those areas. And because we're doing them the same way all the time, that gets documented in Tranual. Whereas the things that are cutting edge that we're testing, there's no reason to write that down yet because we're not delegating it.

We're not handing off those responsibilities. We're still in the do it phase. That's right. Does everyone in the organization have free reign to audit or adapt a process? or how does that work with regard to the things that are movable and are not part of that foundation? 100%. Really? Yeah. I think that that's something that every business should empower every person to be creating process. And what's strange is that historically, a lot of the documentation of playbooks and, you know, learning, management has been this small HR department or small learning and development team inside a huge company. Yeah. And it's those few people that are constructing this whole thing and rolling it.

out. That's kind of insane. It's kind of insane that it worked. Like sometimes it actually works just probably not very well. Yeah. It's amazing. But I think we're moving more and more toward a culture where everyone is responsible for that. Because growth is not something that happens just at the company level. It's an individual level. You know, once you get handed something that's your responsibility, you might change it. You come up with a new best practice. And so it's your responsibility to redocument how it's done. The person that delegated it to you six months or 12 months ago doesn't know the new way to do it. You do. And so now the burden's on you to write it down. Have you seen, I mean, you literally wrote the book. You built the program that people can build out these processes and

label these documentations freely and easily. So I sure hope your culture is like that in your organization. Is there examples of small businesses that you've worked with where you've seen not just the owner take train you'll and use the program, but you've seen a other team members create and adapt and change the processes as they go. Yeah, so many examples. I mean, what's cool is we have thousands and thousands of companies using this in over 100 countries now. And so we get case studies from all over the world about how, you know, someone was taking

maternity leave and they used the program to write down everything to the person they needed to hand things off to. Or I think back to when I was consulting and there was this daycare I worked with. and there was a teacher at the daycare that said, I've been getting job offers for years, and I'd make more money and have a better situation, but I feel so loyal to the people here that I just can't leave. I don't want to put them in a bad place.

And imagine that pressure as an individual to be stuck in your job because you don't want to put the company in a bad place. Pressure that could become resentment or bitterness. Yeah, bitterness, yeah. And so I think the opportunity here is if someone has a place in a format to write down what they know and train others, on how they do what they do, it opens up their opportunities. Whether it's in the company or outside of the company, they don't feel so guilty about moving on.

And then your business is not centered around individuals. It's centered around processes and processes can be scaled. Yeah, absolutely. It seems like maybe one of the blockers to doing the things, especially with regard to a culture of documentation like we're talking about, maybe one of the blockers is a hint of perfectionism. Like I want everything to be exactly the way that I envision it. And I know every time we hand off something a little bit further down, it gets a little bit less than what I originally envisioned it as. How do you fight that tension or how do you fight perfectionism?

I think perfectionism can hinder progress. And if you focus on everything being perfect, then it's hard to delegate. It's hard to hand off because it's that same conundrum where if you feel like you can do it better than someone else, then you'll never hand it off to someone else. But people need the opportunity to take something on and be mentored into a place where they're doing it better than you did it. And so it's kind of just a timeline of saying, yes, it's not perfect out of the gates, but here's what perfect looks like. And I think when you're documenting, you should have examples of here's how it was done before. Here is perfect.

Here's the KPI or whatever it is that we want you to hit. And then you can measure toward that. That's the goal. Measure towards the ideal, but don't necessarily expect the ideal right out the gate. Not from day one. Yeah. And so how do you calibrate expectations? Because at the same time, although we're not expecting perfection, we still want to guard

quality and certainly want to guard customer experience. So how do you make sure you're still being vigilant towards those things while giving your team the freedom to learn and grow at their pace. So I'll give an example from our company. You know, the customer success example where we have multiple people performing the same role, which is onboarding customers, getting them familiar with the platform. We're not just handing those keys over to one person to start doing and expecting that they do the whole thing. We've got a team that is largely serving the customer base, and we know how quickly that customer base is growing. So when we start training the next person with a plan,

to get them up to full speed by 30 days in, we know that they're not going to be more responsible than they need to be, and they can maintain the level of quality that our customers expect. Okay, so you're setting expectations properly for them on the front end, but then at the same time, you're also setting expectations for yourself on the work that's going to be produced and how it's going to affect the customers. Yeah, because not everyone will be perfect out of the gates, and so you need to give people some time to ramp up. And if you've got a system where everything's documented and you can communicate it more quickly, that of course reduces that ramp up time. How do you get people to start adopting

the documentation that you're creating and making sure they're taking it on as their own and not just as something that I'm being forced to do? Because I think that's what causes disengagement. Yeah, I think it's that you're empowering people. Okay. You know, it's when you initially get assigned something in our system, I think part of what makes it different is that it, It does have the accountability side where it's tracking 100% you've gone through it. But then anyone can tweak that policy, can edit it, and then reassign it to the whole company or to the whole department. And everyone drops from 100% back to 95% or whatever it is. And that's the goal is that you're always up to 100% on the newest version of things.

And so I think that it's an empowering thing for people to say, I've got a new way to do this. Let me change it. Let me get it signed off on. Let me roll it out to everyone. and then they see the impact they're making. What are you looking for in terms of delegation? So once we've documented things, what are the things you're looking for in the team member to say, okay, that person's up and running at the pace that I need them to be running for me to go ahead

and take my eyes off that baton and now focus on other things as the owner? So I think you're looking at the outcome, you know, the measurables, which, again, there could be numbers that are tied to. Like for us, how many tickets is someone able to manage? What's the health score? of their batch of customers they've worked with in the last 30 days. You know, we've got some very measurable things. In some smaller companies, you don't have as many measurables,

and the thing you're looking for is the time it takes off of your week. Okay. You know, and that's a great place to start. You know, I remember when I hired my first employee, her KPI was how great my life is. Really? And that's what you're measuring. Yeah. And that's what we talked about it.

I said, you know, you're making my life better this week. That's fantastic. And then as you grow, you get more and more fine-tuned on the measure. Okay, so paint for us an ideal. How are you looking and measuring the way you spend your time compared to the ideal that you have for yourself right now? Like, how do you keep your thumb on the pulse of what's effective for you as the owner? So now we have a board. So I get to report to them. Okay, got you. And so how big is your board? Five people. Okay, got you. Yeah. So we have quarterly objectives. We've got the forecast that we're trying to hit. We've got hiring plans that we're trying to hit. We've got partnership initiatives. And so there's a handful of things that are my big priorities every quarter. And so for me, it's about am I hitting those goals. Yes. That's pretty measurable. So how about the business owner that is still very much on the treadmill and maybe a little bit by just the nature of the stage of business they're at, but also a little bit by kind of the work that they've brought on themselves, they are kind of trapped doing a little bit of

everything all the time and constantly putting out fires. What would be step one just to bring some sanity to that chaos. So step one, like we talked about, first thing, is that you've got to make the list of what needs to get off your plate. And maybe even before that, you've got to have the context of what goals are you trying to hit. And so I've always been, you know, focused on this, setting big goals every year, revenue goals, income goals, team size goals. You know, what are the big milestones we're trying to hit this year? And I write them out on a whiteboard at my house and a whiteboard at the office so that I'm seeing them every day. So as I was, You write them down every day or they're just listed for you to see every day?

They're listed. I actually have them on a posted note on my mirror in my bathroom. You know, they're everywhere. Like I can see these things very clearly. And so I'm looking at them constantly. They're always top of mind. And I think if your goals in that context is top of mind and then you're intentional about writing down the things you want to do and you don't want to do, and then it becomes easier to start to hand things off. How often are you saying, those goals. You said they're quarterly goals or what are the goals that you're seeing every day? Are they annual? Are they quarterly? What's the, what's the time? Annual and monthly is what you're looking at every day. Yeah. So I've got big annual goals and then I've got my monthly priorities that I write down everywhere.

At what point did you start as a business owner initiating that process for yourself? Let's see. It was about nine years ago. Nine years ago. Okay. And what was the impetus by like, I'm going to start doing this and then suddenly your goals are everywhere and you've done it now for nine years i think it was the book think and grow rich okay very good and i had a little book club with a couple of my friends and it said in that book you know write your goals down i think put in your wallet put it on the mirror and i just started doing it now my wife does it too oh legit it's great yeah and so are your kids doing it yet not i have i have a two-year-old and a five-year-old and they're just kind of we did an annual planning with my five-year-old and he said

he wanted to be in the NBA this year so that's like that's like where his goals are so we got This year. Wow. Very ambitious. So we'll see how that pans out. That's awesome. But I think that's really good to circle back. If someone's on the treadmill, list the things they don't want to do. But I think there is something powerful about what is the thing that you're actually running towards. Totally. Because, I mean, it takes a lot of resiliency to do the extra work necessary to start handing those things off. And, I mean, is seeing the post-a-note and seeing the wipe. board. Is that what kind of gives you that discipline and that resiliency? Yeah, it's motivation because

you know where you're at. And if you see where you're going and where you're at, you've got this gap that's very visible. And I don't like that gap. So every day I'm being reminded about the gap. And if I'm not making progress toward it, the gap feels like it's growing. And so, you know, it's just something I've kind of a habit I've built every day. What advice would you have for someone that has maybe felt the stress and pain of that gap for a while, but they feel stuck. They feel like they're not making progress. What would you tell that person, Chris? So if you've got the gap identified and you know where you want to be, you've got your context, then the thing that you've got to collect is the chaos. It's funny. When I was consulting, my company was called Organized Chaos.

Brilliant name. I had this three-step process. You know me. Love alliteration. So it was context, chaos, clarity. And so, I love it. Very good. Now I moved to the three Ds. But so context, chaos, clarity. Context was all about where you're going. So we would ask questions like, you know, in three years, how many hours a week are you working? What types of things are you doing? What kind of family vacations are you going on? What's your income level look like? What's your family look like? What are you doing to volunteer? You know, you're painting a picture of life, not just at work, but at home for your whole life. And as you're asking those questions, are you asking people to envision what they think is practical?

Are you asking them to dream about like what would you really want three to five years from now? I think it's push the envelope of what's practical. That's good. You know, I had one client that told me he wanted an underwater city with a hotel and, you know, this like crazy thing. And we had to bring that back a little bit, you know. But then you've got someone else that's like, oh, it would be. be great if I had two more employees or, you know, worked five less hours a week, and you want to push that a little. So you've got to push what's practical, but then set some

achievable goal that makes you feel like a little shudder, you know, like a little, a little scared of it. A little scared. Yeah. And so that's what the context is all about. But if you've got that and you're stuck in this gap, then chaos, the next part of my process, was actually interviewing all the employees, interviewing the entrepreneur. And what you're looking for there is bottlenecks, things that are getting in the way. Because if you want to get to the next level, you've got to free up capacity. Think of when you're stuck, you're at 100% or more capacity. You just can't take on more. You can't do more. And that's when you're in this hamster wheel. And so if you can't get down to 80% capacity or 70% capacity, you can't start trying new things

to rise above where you're at. So you have to free up capacity and you do that either by being more efficient in the way that you're doing things, or by delegating and bringing on someone else. And so for every company I worked with, it was a process where we would map out their workflow, how they did things, step by step by step, what systems they used, tools they used, what their people were saying? You know, what would break in the business if you had twice as many customers as you have today?

Great question. Because you start thinking, all right, well, this person definitely couldn't handle twice as many customers, but this person could. So now you know which department to focus on. You know, I would ask people, you know, at every level of the company, if you had a secret assistant that worked under your desk and no one knew about it, like, what are the things you would pass under the desk to have them do? I think of George Costanza from Seinfeldon hiding under the desk. That's what you're talking about. Yeah.

So it's such a simple question. It's not obtrusive. But they come up with great ideas to say, well, this report takes me 10 hours of. week and I hate doing it. But why is it that that question is the one that's effective in getting those answers? Because it's not threatening. I've had other people I interviewed where they're worried about their own job security. Okay. So you're interviewing team members whenever you're asking that question and they're worried like, okay, well, if I tell them all the things that I don't want to be doing, then they're going to say, you're not a good fit for this team anymore and

I'm going to lose my job. Right. And so people want to hold on to their responsibilities. If They're threatened in that way, unless you show them the path for here's the things I want you to work on to level up your career. And let's find out how to free up the capacity for you to do that. That happens at every level of a business, not just the entrepreneur, it's for everyone. That's pretty powerful. So it's just like the goals on the mirror and on the whiteboard, you're saying, let's not just talk about the things that we want the person under our desk to do. Let's create a vision of the compelling future that we're moving towards. Yeah.

Okay, so it's context, chaos, and then what was the third piece? The last one's clarity. Okay. And so the clarity piece was once I'd work with a business and we'd have two or three hundred action items that would come out of this process, we would sift through the list. And the first thing we'd do is find the quick wins. And these are kind of like, you know, Dave's snowball thing.

Absolutely. I identify with that so clearly because if you can knock off a couple quick wins in the business, just like paying off your smallest debt, it creates this momentum that gets everyone and energized and shows you that you can do it. And so quick wins in a business might be pay $200 for an extra monitor screen so someone doesn't have to cycle between six programs all day. It frees up a lot of productivity. It makes them feel good that you invested in them and it cost you almost nothing. That's right. So do those quick wins. We would always carve out quick wins. And then you move on to the big things that are going to move the business forward. And we would usually pick three to five things to do

over the next six to 12 months. Okay. So that's the process that you would walk through with business owners and their teams, context, chaos, clarity. What is a way a business owner that says, man, I like that, Chris, is there a way that I can just do that for my business on my own? What would be that process? Of course. So you can do it one or two ways. You can do what we do, which is just have those meetings with each person, not confidential, but just face to face, ask them hard questions and expect real feedback. And what are some of the? And what are some of the things? And what are some of those questions? The ones I was mentioning, you know, what do you want to get off your plate? You know, you set the contacts up front again and say, here's why we're doing this.

This is not to do layoffs. That's right. You want to get off your plate because you're gone, right? This is the reason we're doing this is because we want to free up everyone to have some extra capacity to tackle big things. So where do you want to be? Let's talk about that first. And now let's talk about what we need to get off your plate to get there. And you unearth all these great things. You can do a face-to-face or you can do a simple survey. You know, use one of the survey tools, send it out to the whole company, ask these questions. The other ones that I asked, so I mentioned the person under your desk and the, you know, their three wishes. You can get a lot of good quick wins if you say, if I gave you $500 to spend here at the office, what would you

do with it? Oh, that's great. Yeah, because it's probably going to be things that are related to efficiency for people. Absolutely. Maybe an espresso machine too, but that also increases efficiency same product. Yeah. But it could be things like, you know, fixing the sink, it bothers everyone. Or it could be, you know, like my chair doesn't recline anymore. It could be, you get these little things that you just might not have heard about otherwise. And it's really powerful to just solve 10 of those problems.

Gosh, that's so fascinating. I love that you're here on our campus right now. You know, we just built this building. The ground is being broke for the other 900-person building that's going to be right next to it. And it was crazy. They made an announcement about the development. in the new building just probably two or three weeks ago. And it was announcement based on the feedback that we've received about this building.

And it's so funny that you use that example because literally one of the things that the person that was giving the update said, she said, hey, we've received a lot of feedback from the team members here that in the bathroom there's these sinkheads that kind of splash a little bit all over the place. And you said you wanted a single stream instead of multiple streams. And so she said, we want to let you know that in the new building, there's going to be single stream sinkheads in every bathroom. And you would have thought they just give away a thousand dollars to every person. Like, people clapped, Chris.

It was like, what the heck? But it was, I think it was more than just sinkheads. It was that, okay, you took my advice and you did something with it, and I'm going to see tangible results. And that's a big thing for an organization that's growing up. Yeah. How much trust does that create that, you know, if you're going to fix a safe, Sinkheads based on my recommendation. What else will you do based? I know I can go to you with ideas and you're going to actually implement them. That's a powerful thing for a company. That is. I love that you said sinkheads because I would have never thought of that otherwise. But I remember sitting there and thinking like, this is really weird. People are clapping about sinks right now. But it's what you're talking about. It's so much bigger than sinks.

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So you said ask those questions or send out the surveys and get really, really honest, clear feedback about what's going on in the organization. Yeah, so you can do this process yourself. You know, you can go through and do this vision, dreaming, exercise, your vivid vision of the future, write it all down. Then you can survey your whole team, get those ideas. And then maybe you assemble a little committee or group of people that goes through those ideas. And we do this awesome process at Train. You will feature ideas where these jam sessions, we bring in people from all different departments. We put all the ideas up on the walls, post-it notes. Everybody gets a different color marker. And you can do one to three dots on every one of the postings. it notes and it creates this like heat map of where is the biggest. Oh, there's like your votes. Yeah. Where's the biggest impact? And you count the dots and we see right away, these are the ones that we should focus on. And a lot of times are they super expensive changes or things that are going to take a ton of time or energy? All over the place. Sometimes they're really big things. Sometimes they're small things. And that just determines where they get slotted on our roadmap. Yes. How would you advise people make this step towards being?

as collaborative as what you're talking about because it seems like sometimes if you've grown a company to maybe 10, 15, even 20 people and you are now recognizing that you're the bottleneck because you haven't been as collaborative as what we're talking about, it's hard to make that shift. All of a sudden, we're going to collaborate and we're going to place dots and I'm going to take your feedback and we're going to do this together. So how do you, how do you bridge? Yeah, exactly. That would be very dramatic.

So what does that look like? How do you make that transition? It can start small. Okay. Like we have an annual retreat that we do this year, and this is the first year I haven't been involved with it at all. Congrats. Thank you. And it's just, you know, we had a few people that showed some interest.

They wanted to collaborate. They made a little team out of it. They're planning it. I just approved the budget, you know. And it's an annual retreat for the team? Yeah, for the whole company. And that's just one example of it's a project that you're, like we talked about earlier, giving up your control. You're releasing the reins and saying, I trust you.

to the rest of the team that you can take this to the finish line. Because I think collaboration is about trust, you know, getting opinions from everyone, soliciting feedback, implementing that feedback. It's all about showing that there's this two-way street in the business. And if you can step out of certain things, even if it's just one project to get yourself started down that path, you're starting to build that trust where people see you don't need to micromanage me. You don't need to watch everything I'm doing.

And in your experience, do people rise to the occasion? Yes, every time. It's interesting. There's an annual retreat for your entire team to talk about probably the year that's occurred, the year that's ahead. And you as the CEO were not involved, right? Like, that's pretty remarkable. Was it a growth process for you to be able to hand off something that big? Because that seems like a pretty big deal.

Yeah, I think it was that I was doing so many other things that it felt like a relief to let something go. And because I was focused on, you know, that annual retreat wasn't on my list of priorities for the board, you know? Yeah, that's right. And so when you know what you're supposed to focus on, it becomes easier to let go of the other things. If people struggle to get really, really crystal clear vision about what they want to be focused on in the future and what they're driving towards and the three to five year plan and all of that, what would your advice be to that person, Chris. I would say if you're struggling to know where you want to focus in the business, you need to talk to some other business owners. You need some other examples. I've been a

part of mastermind groups and peer groups and conferences and I've had coaches and great mentors. And it's through watching them operate that I've seen an example for how I want to operate. And you know, you can learn a lot trying to copy other people's examples. That's right. And it's amazing that, I mean, even listening to you talk about this, I feel like people are probably getting a little bit of spark of inspiration just based on the way that you are leading yourself and your team. But it's amazing that when you see other people doing things, you start to get a vision of what's actually possible. Right. I had a great mentor the last 10 years who he built this big company. He moved away from his company to, you know, with his wife. So it was operating

on its own. He went from CEO to passive investor, he said, in his own business. And seeing that example, watching him facilitate mastermind meetings while he had this company running in the background that was a nine-figure company just blew me away. And seeing that example showed me it was possible. That's what's crazy too. That's one of the biggest things I've learned doing these interviews with, I mean, remarkable entrepreneurs like yourself, whenever I started doing this, I got really, really excited about it because I was like, I'm going to meet all of these like world class rock stars that They're absolutely amazing next echelon type people. And then we've sat down with all these remarkable entrepreneurs, and they are amazing

individuals, but they're also regular people. And what's crazy is you realize like, oh, my gosh, if they can do that, maybe I could do that. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy like sitting down with you. Like, Chris, you're awesome, but you're also a normal guy. And that's almost more inspiring to see that, though. Yeah, it was the same for me.

You know, when I was consulting almost 150 companies that I worked with, and as I worked with the CEOs of some really big companies, I thought, you know, if they're doing it and I'm hearing this from their employees, I'm just taking notes on how am I going to do it better? That's right, yeah. Because you interviewed over 2,000 team members, correct? Yeah. So at those companies, I'd go in and I'd schedule a day or two or three days and interview dozens of people. And that was the best experience I ever could have got better than college, better than running my first company. It taught me so much about business. Okay. So what are the biggest three lessons that you learned from interviewing thousands of team members of business owners that you try to keep top

of mind in your leadership style today? Three biggest. Well, we talked about one, which is how important it is to execute on the feedback that you get from people. So that was a big one. The next one, I would say, is there's so much gray area with roles and responsibilities, especially at growing companies. You know, as a company grows, responsibilities shift.

You're taking those hats off. You're bringing on more people. And then there's this confusion about who does what. And I found myself so many times going through these roles and responsibilities exercises where people had been hired with one job description. And that had changed dramatically since they were hired and they never had a new job description. And I think a job description, you know, a living, breathing job description, that's kind of

what we're building intranial. It's like, here's what you're responsible for. here's how to do all the things. You're the keeper of this, you know, to edit it at any time. Okay, that's pretty good, though. You're giving them responsibility for their work and their job. Yeah, because they are, like I said, coming up with the new best practices. They're, you know, front and center where you're not looking at their job anymore.

You're not doing their job once you've delegated it to them. And so the way that they start doing it could be different. That's why when someone puts in their notice, what's the first thing that happens? You say, can you spend the next two weeks writing down everything you do? Like, I have no idea what you do anymore because I've just relied on you. Or like, oh, shoot, you're pregnant? What on earth are we going to do? Like, how are we going to handle this?

It's a panic. Yeah, exactly. And so if you can put some ongoing attention into this, it's much less of a panic. So, let's see, those are the two front and center ones, the feedback and then the roles and responsibilities. because I think people just want to know if they're doing a good job. Like, how do I measure if I'm doing a good job? And I was blown away how much that came up. Patrick Lynchione talks about the three signs of a miserable job are in measurement,

irrelevance, and anonymity. And it's like that's everything you're talking about right there. If you can give people clear job descriptions the way to modify what they're doing so that they're actually engaging in best practice oriented work, it's going to kill a lot of those signs of a miserable job. Yeah. And I think another thing that creates that misery is micromanagement. We touched on it a little earlier, but I saw that come up in so many different forms through those interviews. And, you know, I'm such a fan of process and SOP is and all of this. But a lot of times people go down that path and they think checklists. Let me make a ton of checklist. Let me build out

my project management system. Yes. When I was running my video company, we had this project management flow that was about 150 or 200 tasks to execute an event, a youth sporting event. Oh, my word. And they would be assigned to all different team members. And, you know, it was great when we were doing six events, but then when we were doing 200 events, this thing was absolutely unmanageable. Yeah. Because each person would have thousands of tasks assigned to them, most of which were totally irrelevant to what they needed to focus on right now. Oh my gosh. And I think people, you know, it's funny, you have a tendency to want to manage by checklist to know that people are checking off these tasks. And when people feel like they don't have the ability, the autonomy to just do their job, if someone's always

watching, then that's a motivation killer. Yeah, no kidding. So how do you intentionally guard against becoming the micromanager? Instead of delegating tasks, you should delegate responsibilities, areas in the business that they can take some ownership of and clear measurements to know how they're doing a good job like we talked about earlier. You've hinted a little bit about the fact that that creates a more palatable or certainly more engaged work environment. Why is that type of work worth it in terms of the outcome that it creates and the team members that you employ?

Well, when everyone's happier, they stay longer. You don't have to put so much energy into replacing people. Yeah. They want to recruit their friends. so it makes recruiting easier. It just is a much better environment to be a part of. And so I think the more you can do to invest in your people and to invest in systems that help your people do their best work,

you're paying dividends throughout the business that most of which you can't even count. As I was thinking about our time together today, I thought about something I heard Jim Collins say, but he was talking about Peter Drucker, and he said Peter Drucker, father of modern management, obviously. And he was saying that he believed that Peter Drucker devoted his entire life towards answering one question. And that question was, how do we make work both

simultaneously more productive and also more humane? Oh, I love that. And so, I mean, that's so much of what y'all do at Train Yule. That's so much of the conversation that we've gone through today. But if the reaction that people listening have to that is the same as what you just did, where they say, I love that. I want to be a part of that, making work more productive and more humane. What would be the first pieces of advice you would give them as someone that is deeply passionate about this topic? Talk to your people, you know, have those conversations. We have randomly assigned one-on-one meetings every week that we go for walks. We have team lunches, lunch and learns. We have department outings that we do. We do the retreats. We have so many opportunities to talk and collaborate

and build relationships, and that fuels the business. And I think if you're just punching a clock and showing up and doing the work and you have no connection at work, then you're not going to have the buy-in for your business. You won't have people wanting to stick around. It's just a paycheck. I think that you have to enable your employees, empower your employees. Or maybe not even, let me take that back. I just read a book by Patty McCord.

Yeah. Have you read that powerful? Netflix? Yeah. Was she director of HR at Netflix or what's her rule? Okay. Yeah, we had her on this program. Oh, amazing.

So it just finished her book and the end of the book said, you know, it's not up to leaders to empower employees. It's, you know, they're already powerful. Like, recognize that they already have the power. And I think that's the culture that businesses need to build if they want to be competitive and successful. My final question for you, what is the biggest thing that you are learning as it? business owner and CEO right now. Wow. The biggest thing I'm learning, I would say, I would say the biggest lesson has been to find the lessons everywhere. It's a little meta, but, you know, this morning I was running on a treadmill and I got off and shot a video about, you know,

to the chasing targets and KPIs. And I've trained myself to find the lessons. And there's so many takeaways I have just from talking with you. And those proliferate through your company. You share them with employees. You share them with your customers. And I think that if you want to continue to grow as a CEO, you've got to always look for the lessons. That's so good. And incredible use of the word proliferate too. That was fantastic. So Chris, thank you so much for your time today. But more than that, also thank you for making the trip to Franklin, Tennessee. We're grateful for that. But also, thank you for not just having a great message, but for living that great message with the team members that you lead every single day. We are huge fans of Trainual here.

I can't wait to see what you're going to do with this company moving forward. So thanks so much. Thank you. I am a huge Chris Ronzio fan. And I'm a fan of what he and his team have created in Trainual. That's how I found out about Chris. I was on so many coaching calls where people came to me and they say, I found the thing that solves our problems. We kept all of our training in Google Docs.

And it was an absolute mess. And now this thing called Trainual has helped us bring it all under one umbrella. And I finally told the team, I was like, we've got to find who created this and get them for a podcast conversation because they're helping business owners. And so we wanted to make sure we provided the link to Trainual. If you want to go check out their website, the link is in the show notes of this episode. And hey, one of the things that I love about that conversation is that it highlights the fact that delegation is a process. It doesn't occur overnight. It doesn't occur when the leader feels like it.

It occurs when the business owner gets deliberate and intentional about really handing off real responsibility the right way. And that's why our team created the Entree Leaders Guide to Delegation. It's a free PDF resource that is going to walk you, the business owner, through the Ramsey way of effectively delegating responsibility. So if you want to download this free PDF, text the word delegate to 33444. Again, that's the word delegate to 33444 or just click the link that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show notes.

And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team. Thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Ramsey Show. We want you to take control of your life and money once and for all. I'm Dave Ramsey, and along with my co-hosts on The Ramsey Show,

we'll give you straight talk on everything from budgets to career to relationships. Join us as callers from all walks of life, learn how to get out of debt, and start building for the future and how you can too. Listen to the Ramsey Show, wherever you listen to podcasts.