Start With A Win - Follow the Playbook: Systems for Sustainability with Ernesto Mandowsky

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Systems engineer Ernesto Mandowsky is the CEO of CPD Advisors where he helps founders and leaders scale their organizations. His passion is in working with early-stage founders and entrepreneurs to transform their operations by utilizing his proprietary 6P Playbook. Drawing on his experience in management systems and the hospitality industry, he developed his powerful playbook for business growth and sustainability by focusing time and attention on the following six principles: priorities, people, projects, promotion, playbooks, and planning. When working with founders, Ernesto found that many people actually set goals incorrectly. Instead of focusing on the results they want to see, he helps leaders visualize effective goals that put plans into action. Establishing procedures for each cycle a business goes through on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis ensures efficient time management and clear feedback for moving forward. Playbooks also provide concise training and professional development programs that promote the bigger vision of a company. Working within systems specifically designed for your business supports growth in the implementation of both internal and external operations.Main TopicsApplying systems engineering in the hospitality industry (02:00)Ernesto’s 6P Playbook (04:00)Identifying priorities in business (06:27)Maintaining relationships for business success (08:53)Managing projects so they don’t take over your day (12:26)Benefits of video email to build connection (15:27)Promotion strategies for sharing the mission of your business (17:11)Playbooks are repeated, coordinated sets of actions (18:50)Different levels of planning (20:13)   Episode Linkswww.freesystemscall.comwww.ernestomandowsky.comConnect with Ernesto:https://twitter.com/emandowskyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ernestomandowsky/https://www.instagram.com/ernesto_cpd/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Brand Viva Media headquarters here in Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Wow, I like how you did that crescendo with your hands. Yeah, I kind of like that. Yeah, that was good. Did you have a system for that?

I have a system and a process for that. Okay, good. Well, hey, we got Ernesto Mendowski on the podcast today. He's the CEO of CPD Advisors. With over a decade of developing technology solutions at companies like Deloitte Consulting, Myers USA, and others, Ernesto is an expert in designing systems to help leaders scale their organizations. We all need more systems to help us be more efficient. He helps early stage founders transform their operations by designing business systems using his 6P system. I love it. I love it. Ernesto, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you, producer Mark, for having me. That's quite the title. I love the prefix there. It's like Mr. and Mrs. Miss Producer. That's right. And then drop down menus on everything. You should not add that in. There you go. So I'm a big systems fan. Everybody on here knows I'm a business systems fanatic.

I love habits. I love systems. I love creating standard processes for getting things done and sticking to those, especially like playbooks and things like that. Because as you know, systems create actions, actions create results. And this podcast is about getting stuff done through actions. So Ernesto, we're happy to have you on here. Can you give us just a quick flyover of how did you become a systems engineer? Where did all this systems thinking come from? Yeah, well, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go into restaurants.

I wanted to work in the restaurant space. And I thought I wanted to study business. And I asked a mentor of mine, I told him, oh, I'm going to go study business. And he goes, business, you learn this on the job. Study engineering, teach you how to think. And I said, huh, engineering, never really thought about that. And when I looked at all the majors that were offered, it was mechanical and agricultural and chemical, computer, all these like really sciencey.

And I said, I'm going to choose the one that resonates with the most, which was industrial and systems engineering. Okay. And ever since then, you know, everything that I've done, learning about how to connect the dots. And so, yeah, I chose, I chose the craziest place to the craziest sandbox to play in, which is the world of hospitality. So you, you took like industrial and systems engineering and went into restaurants with that?

Yeah, exactly. Fascinating. And you worked at like, you know, big restaurants like The Palm and things like that, right? Yeah, I worked at The Palm. It was kind of a dream job and how it all came to happen. But yeah, every restaurant, I think every restaurant is a system and it is kind of a cluster, a little chaotic and crazy. And it's quite the journey, like quite the fun playground to learn. There you go. And by the way, if you haven't been to the Palm, make sure you get

one of their steaks, fabulous steaks there. And they have great systems. There's always somebody waiting on you well and doing a great job. I want to dig into something you've created here. And this is probably going to be the majority of this podcast because this is fascinating. This is really, really good stuff. Everybody pull out your pad of paper and your pen because we're going to take a lot of notes. And what we're going to talk about is Ernesto's 6P systems and how these things can help you build your business. We have a lot of entrepreneurs on this show, a lot of solopreneurs, a lot of business leaders. But ultimately, people, if we lose track of what we're doing every day and we just let the day happen to us because we're not working our systems,

we are going to not be as successful as possible and possibly fail as a result because we get these blind spots without utilizing our system. So Ernesto, tell us about your 6P playbook or 6P system here. Yeah. So about 10 years ago, I read the book Traction by Gino Wigman, which is another popular framework. He invented EOS, which is Entrepreneur Operating System. And I thought to myself, how could I create my own framework for startups? When I looked at all of my experiences in restaurants, consulting, small businesses, tech startups, every business essentially has the same six core systems.

So this six Ps stand for priorities, which is what you focus on, how you set your goals and how you measure progress. You got people and that's all your relationship management, whether they're clients, partners, investors, advisors, all these relationships that you're managing, all the people. You got projects, that's all the execution side, the project management, your tasks, how you're executing on that offer that you delivered to the market. Then you have promotion, how you share your story, how you tell your story across your

different promotional channels. Then you have playbooks, which are your SOPs. When you document your SOPs, you can build out training programs, you can build out onboarding programs, you can build out training programs, you can build out onboarding programs, you can build out automation delegation. Then the last one is planning, which is arguably, I believe, the most important one, which is your daily, your weekly, your monthly, your quarterly cycles to stay on top of all the moving pieces in your business. Awesome. I love this. How you fit it all into P's, I have no idea, but it worked out pretty well here. A lot of brainstorming.

There you go. What is a P for what we should do? So let's dig into that first one, priorities. This is fascinating because we lose track of our priorities every day. And I think you and your systems thinking, your systems engineering, you specifically identify those priorities and how to work on those. What comes to mind when you sit down with a business and this is the first thing you're thinking about? What do you dig into with them and how do you ask those questions? Well, the first thing I ask is what are your goals? Because I believe in my experience, most people are just kind of operating in this space and they don't even know what their goals are or their goals are. I want to make money and that's it. That's the goal. And that's an outcome.

That's, that's an outcome. And, you know, I think, I think most people actually set goals incorrectly. They set a focus on the outcome instead of the, the action. And so, you know, that's the first like biggest shift that people make when we sit down and talk about their priorities. So you just mentioned something here. I want to jump in. Most people think about the outcomes, not the action. Explain that to me and our audience here. Yeah. So let's say someone said, what's your goal? And I said, well, I want to make $100,000. I want to make a million dollars. That's the easiest said, what's your goal? And I said, well, I want to make $100,000. I want to make a million dollars.

That's the easiest one because everyone's always chasing money. Right. You know, we have no control over the other person, the client saying yes. Like we cannot control that. But what we can control is making 100 outreaches a day, knowing already that we have a certain conversion percentages for every 100 people that you ask, 10 will say yes. And so if you know already that every 100 people you ask, 10 will say yes, and the thing that you're offering is $5,000, that's $50,000 you're going to make. So instead of focusing on the 50,000, like instead of focusing on the hundred, hundred

outreaches, people are like, Oh, I want to make the $50,000, but they want, they need to focus on the hundred outreaches a day. Cause once they figure that out, that mathematics, they could just invest more money into whatever's going to get them more touches per day. Interesting. Okay. I like that. So you're going from, I've heard it also as lagging indicators and leading indicators. You're going to your leading indicators instead of your lagging indicators. Let's jump into number two here, people. We always talk about people and relationships and things like that. Obviously, every business is a relationship business, essentially, unless you've got just some online thing and people click purchase and that's it. There's no interaction with a human being or no satisfaction from a

human being. Why do you have people on here as number two? And what does that mean? I think, yes, every business is a relationship business. And what we fail to do is we fail to maintain and keep up with these relationships. So like right now, we're having a conversation. And I don't know exactly what your process is. But in my mind, you know, you should have some 30 day check in already set up with Ernesto. Like, hey, like, how are you doing? Like, how can I help you in 30 days later, just so that we can continue and maintain that relationship. And that doesn't necessarily have to be you manually sending me an email. But that could be a CRM that is like sending that 30 day check in, or that, you know, we get the happy birthday emails once a year, or we get the, you know, anniversary emails or whatever it is like these kinds of little touch points is what really reminds me like, hey, Adam actually,

he cares a lot. Whether it's him or a robot, at least he's intentional with designing that type of relationship management into a way of doing business. I like that. And you don't want to feel like it's just a generic. I've seen some companies just manually send or automatically send stuff out. How do you avoid from, you know, keeping that or having that be generic and you have that stay personalized? What do you suggest for that?

Because every day could turn into calling, you know, a whole bunch of people to say, hey, Ernesto, happy birthday. Hey, producer Mark, happy birthday. Hey, producer Mark, happy birthday. Is there a way to not make this just seem... Bland? Yeah. Every company is different. Personally, my mission statement in our CPD advisors is to build the funnest business systems training company in the world. I like that. Inside of my mission statement,

it's saying, Hey, this is going to be fun. So it goes, it ties back to like, you know, without sounding generic, but like, what do you value and how do you, how do you design those communication interactions? You know, you could hire an amazing copywriter to like write a really awesome happy birthday email. And yeah, it is automated, but it's awesome and it's fun. So let me ask you this then. And I'm throwing this out rhetorically, obviously. Am I reading too much into that? Am I going, I'm making it boring, but it's not for you? Because you're the one receiving the phone call. I'm like, dude, happy birthday. And you're like, oh, thanks for calling. Everybody else just sent me some garbage on Facebook saying happy birthday. I mean, are people that are sending it,

reading it wrong versus people that are receiving it? Because I mean, how to win friends and influence people, the things we can't give ourselves, personal attention and appreciation. You're getting both of those, right? Correct. I think, I mean, there's definitely a sense of someone already kind of expecting like a generic email, maybe not like excited about it. But, you know, whenever I start a relationship with someone new, I, I try to like, just set the expectation at the beginning. Like, I mean, you saw my LinkedIn photo and you immediately thought like orange glasses, cool. Like great glasses, man. You already want to set that from the

beginning. Yeah. So, you know, some people start with a win. You want to start with fun or start with that good impression. A connection, right? All right. So let's dig into the business here. Projects. Everyone's like, ah, projects. That means a meeting. That means, you know, some assignments and stuff like that. Tell me about projects and how do we not let projects run away with our day and our business? Because too many people are like, we're going to have a project meeting. Project management, we're lean, which basically means that we're trying to be cool in our projects, but we're just giving a reason for having another meeting. I don't know. Tell me about projects. Well, I, I hate meetings. I know.

I love it too. I hate meetings. Uh, I think, I think if you could come up with really good communication agreements, you don't need meetings. You only need meetings to like troubleshoot and unblock. So projects is all around execution, execution for your client projects, execution internally. Also, there's two types of execution. There's external and there's internal. Usually you do internal projects so that you can scale, you could like execute more effectively, you could implement your CRM so you could manage those relationships. But when you boil it down, projects is just a set of coordinated tasks on a timeline. A set of coordinated tasks on a timeline. That's pretty simple.

Yeah. Let's not overcomplicate those people. Yeah. So I too dislike meetings. For anybody who's having too many meetings in their life, here's my secret. Set your meetings between like 9 and 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then block out the rest of the week and watch people squirm. They're like, hey, I need to meet with you on Monday.

You're like, no, no, no, Tuesday, 9 to 11. That's all I got. Yeah. It's funny, but everybody starts fitting into that bracket. Granted, if your boss wants you to meet a different time, you might want to consider that. But the reality is meetings will expand to fill the time you give them. Correct. And how we came up with this hour-long meeting BS is beyond me.

I mean, most of this stuff can be done in like five to 10 minutes. Totally. What do you need? Let's do it. Yeah. I mean, even with emails, like I don't even write text, so much text and emails. I use Loom and I'll use Loom and record a video kind of explaining the, this, you know, cause it's not a one liner. It's a couple minutes explaining the issue.

Right. And I eliminate meetings with Loom. I love it. Cause you know. So here's a question for everybody. Again, we have a lot of people on here that use video email. I know a lot of you because I get your video emails. Why don't you, if you don't use video email, folks? Let's hold up the mirror here and take a look at this. Loom is a great example of that. A lot of our listeners use BombBomb as well, which is a great video email program. Shout out to my friends down in Colorado Springs there at BombBomb. But also, you got to think about this from a connection perspective. And Ernesto's talking about using video email because it's not looked over like every other email. It's actually

absorbed with the different senses. And when you think about it, here's a great case study. So a lot of car dealers started using email when you would about it, here's a great case study. So a lot of car dealers started using email when you would take your car in for service. Their service advisor would send you a video email and it would list the things below saying, here's what we found, but they would shoot a video and go, hey, Mark, it's Adam. I've got your land cruiser here and I just noticed the brakes are at 830 seconds. These are good, but your tires are a little low here. You can see it right here.

Would you like me to replace those for you today? I highly recommend it, probably in the next couple hundred miles. You have this broken bolt right here. You can see it wobbles. Would you like me to go ahead and fix that? And it's interesting because in reading these different surveys and talking to these car dealerships, their service increased like 130% because video email instead of somebody just brushing over the written stuff. Have you found a better connection with your video emails? Yeah.

Well, I mean, people – we're distracted, right? I mean, you're reading an email, but you're thinking about your kids or your wife or something. Or you're watching a video, right? I mean, you're reading an email, but you're thinking about, you know, your kids or your wife or something. Or you're watching a video, right? watching and like that prefrontal cortex is literally focusing on whatever is in front of you versus thinking about whatever is in the background. And because you're more engaged, you're more present and you're probably more emotionally connected to whatever's happening. You could really like get bought into what people are sharing with you. All right. I love it. Let's jump into promotion. Promotion. Obviously, video email is a great promotion, but talk to me about other promotion aspects that you utilize. Yeah. So promotion strategies differ across... I mean, there's so

many... So much out there. There's obviously social media. There's pod. I mean, here we are on a podcast, recording a podcast to promote what we're doing. You have webinars, automated webinars. You have Instagram lives. You have streams. You have in-person events. All of these experiences are just different ways of sharing the mission of what you're doing. Sharing the mission through experiences. Let me ask you this, Ernesto. You have a client come to you that's a solopreneur. I have a service business in a small town. Give me one great idea for promotion. What would you tell them? Start recording videos. Okay. I love that. Start recording two and a half minute videos

of bite-sized wisdom of what you're doing. And do what with that? And put it on YouTube or put it on Instagram or put it on or put it in a course and stop working with people until they do your course. I mean, there's lots of different things that you can do with that content. But yeah, it basically take the top 30 most asked questions that you receive and turn them into video responses. I love that. Top 30 most asked questions into video responses. And you know what? Even if you don't know the responses, I'm sure chat GPT can tell you the answer to those things. All right. Let's talk about playbooks. You're a big playbook guy.

You've got playbooks and planning as the last two. Don't those kind of play together a little bit? Are they different? They do in a sense. Your daily, weekly, monthly meeting, those cycles are a playbook in and of itself i define playbook as also a a coordinated set of steps but these steps are always repeated no matter what when you clarify these steps that need to happen over and over again that's when you can train a virtual assistant or a head of marketing or a coO. You could train them in what you expect

and what the company expects to complete this successfully. Gotcha. So everybody that's listening to this, pull out your playbook. We're waiting. I hear crickets. Here's the reality though, folks. Write down what you need a playbook for. Just grab a piece of paper or a notepad or a page in your Apple Notes or whatever it is and say, playbook, and then write down everything you should have a playbook for because what you're doing is you're missing systems and processes that save you time and money. These things are measurable when they're written down this way. So this is incredibly important, what Ernesto is saying here. Let's

talk about the last one real quick, Ernesto, as we wrap up. Planning. Planning. How often should we be doing that and what does that look like? Well, you're getting feedback every day. So I think you should be on a daily basis, different levels of planning. So at the day level, you know, what are the top three things you're going to get done today? At the week level, what are the top three things this week? You know, you also are looking at who do you want to connect with each week. And at the end of each week, you want to look back and say, Hey, I said I was going to do this, but this is still open. Okay, let's recommit to it next week.

Awesome. Thank you, Ernesto. Ernesto Mandowski, CEO of CPD Advisors, systems engineer, helping companies get their systems together. Ernesto, I have a question I ask all of our amazing guests on Start With A Win, and that's how do you start your day with a win? You're a systems guy. You probably have one for waking up in the morning. Totally. I start with a win by going to the earliest CrossFit class that is available on the schedule.

I start by releasing just tremendous energy through fitness to really get me prepared for the day. Get ready for the battle. Awesome. Awesome. Ernesto, thank you for being on Start With A Win. Have a wonderful day, my friend. Thank you, Adam. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. Hey, if you've enjoyed this content, please feel free to follow this podcast, whether that's on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen, follow the podcast. And if you enjoy it, leave a five-star review and that would be really helpful. Also,

if you want more great content, head over to adamcontos.com where you can get access to all the things Adam's into. So until next time, remember, start with a win.