Speaker 1: 0:00

You're a small business with a few or maybe a few dozen employees. You love your team, you love what you do and the value you bring to your clients, but for some reason, you can't find a rhythm. You're constantly putting out small fires nothing big, but just enough to be annoying. You ask yourself what can I do to get my team into more of an execution mode instead of a crisis management mode? How can I give my team empowering ownership so I don't have to be a firefighter and I can focus on my superpower? Well, this is a question that I have asked myself many times over the years. This is a question that I have asked myself many times over the years, and it wasn't until I met my friend, scott Levy, that I started to realize how I could hang up the fire hose for good.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Scott is the founder of Result Maps, a web-based performance platform that helps CEOs mobilize their strategy, drive accountability amongst their team and hit business goals faster. He's also a fellow of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Harvard Medical School. Today, I'm going to pick his brain about our shared interest in Gina Wickman's traction and how entrepreneurs can get their businesses into an unstoppable rhythm of execution. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show the one the only. Scott Levy, thank you for coming to the show, it's a pleasure. So I want to dive right in because you are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to processes and just your grasp of the EOS. Both of us share an affinity for Gina Wickman's traction and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:52

So in my introduction I was talking about the fact that as CEOs, we get caught being firefighters, right, and we're just always holding a hose putting out little fires. And it's just almost to the point where, like how is it that nobody can just figure it out, like we're like, you've been around for X amount of time. Right, you've gotten the, I've got you, you know the documentation I think you should have? Why is it that we, as CEOs, can't seem to get out of the day-to-day minutia of our companies?

Speaker 2: 2:25

I think a lot of it's because early on, the being able to do things for yourself and being self-reliant and coming up with ways around obstacles, that's rewards us right. That's part of what gives us a business that gets to its first level of success. The challenge is, the more we do that as the business grows, the less able we are to bring in other people. So now we're trying to take that self-reliance and add on more and more customers and then we'll start to play this game of like how much pain can I take? And because we don't develop these new skills to learn how to delegate and organize a team and run a team as you need to in order to scale and create an organization that can really take the founder out of it, it just creates this self-perpetuating challenge where we're always being, you know, feel that we have not enough time.

Speaker 2: 3:24

We're on like a hamster wheel. It just keeps coming. And particularly if we want to grow, what's the way to grow? I'll just go work harder, but the founders and CEOs that make that leap I see again and again and again are the ones that are able to take themselves out of the business and begin to stop trying to do everything themselves. But until you make that leap, it's not necessarily intuitive for everyone. It can be counterintuitive because you have to change your behavior.

Speaker 1: 3:56

Right. No I mean, and I think that we like lock so much in our brain that to the point where we think it's just common sense. So when we do bring people in to our team and we're like, yeah, we just need to do that, and then they go, okay, yeah, I'll go. Well, how do you want me to do that? There's five different ways to do that. Well, just get it done Like it's like. For us, it's just like. This is second nature to us, because why don't you just understand?

Speaker 2: 4:19

I'm explaining it to you, right? I see a lot of people they over-index on talking at people and getting angry at them and trying to, and I think I, you know I did this early on in my entrepreneurial journey too. I thought I'm I was initially uncomfortable with having to hold people accountable, and so my way of dealing with that was like it would. It would get pent up until it just exploded. That's not effective either. All the variants of that aren't effective, right, because it's not actually getting in there and creating clarity and visibility for your organization and helping people unleash their superpowers, which is what a great leader does. But it's not necessarily the skill that gets us to that first level of sustained revenue as an entrepreneur. A lot of times that's our ingenuity and we're finding ways to do things that nobody's ever thought of before, or some opportunity and we're powering through. It's a different mindset to start building a business that doesn't require the founder to run it Right.

Speaker 1: 5:28

And then it comes to the point of like documenting right, because it's one thing to have one person and like I liken this to my executive assistant that I brought in about, oh shoot, a year and a half, maybe two years ago, a little over two years ago now and at the beginning it was like I didn't. I knew I needed to get things off my plate. I didn't know what I was going to get my off my plate, so I couldn't like document things before she got there. I needed to document things as we were going through and luckily for me, she's a good documenter. So if I gave her one thing and I explained how to how it gets done, and then she would ask the questions, she would document all that. So now she has her own standard operating procedures for anything. So if something doesn't need to be done for, say say, three, six months and all of a sudden, oh crap, we need to do X, y, z, she can just do a search into her SOPs and go ah, yes, the last time you did it this way, if I have any other questions, dot, dot, dot, right. And so as we were working through that, you know it took like six, seven months until it was like okay, now I'm finally done.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Now, if I ever had to replace her, it would probably still take me another three months because she wrote the SOPs the way she thought she would Right and we know that. You know, we we as owners don't put all fill in all the holes when we write things down Right, like we have when we do SOPs. We got to hand it to somebody and say, okay, now do the SOP blindly. Don't, don't fill anything, just do exactly what's there and see what holes I have left in there. And I bet you you're left out about I. Probably, if it was me, I left out 20% of what actually needs to happen for somebody to do that. You and I talked about this earlier for the show, like using accountability charts. Is the accountability chart part of that communication process?

Speaker 2: 7:13

It is because you use the accountability chart. So if you're not familiar with it, it's the accountability chart. In EOS, I think it's the function and process ownership chart and scaling up A lot of the good business operating systems have some variant and it looks on the surface like an org chart, but where an org chart is more about reporting structures, the accountability chart is much more about what processes do I own, and those processes are best represented a lot of times with SOPs, like you mentioned, so that when I'm saying, hey, you know, I'm going to hire in Scott as my integrator or my director or whatever or whatever role, I'm saying look, this is the name of the seat you're in, here are the processes I want you to own and then, by the way, here are the numbers you're also responsible for. So now you're immediately creating some business clarity and if you're a well-run organization, you're also going to be setting goals regularly to move the business forward and improve the business continually and evolve the business, and in EOS those are with rocks.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Other systems that may be objectives and key results, but you've got those as well. So those three things in your accountability chart really create clarity for the person in terms of what's expected of them, and you can then use that to have conversations on a quarterly basis to understand, you know, along with do they match your behavioral core values, your actionable core values? Is this person a good fit? Are they performing well? And again, when you're just hiring early on, it sounds like you, like a lot of entrepreneurs, may have lucked into finding that fantastic person who is great at documenting SOPs. Right, that you're fortunate. We can't always be lucky like that. Sometimes the person that needs to be explained to them. Hey, I need you to go ahead and do this so that we can build this business and not have it be you coming to me all the time with questions, right?

Speaker 1: 9:21

Yeah, no, believe me, she is one of the last 10 that I've asked for those types of things, and it's amazing how much people, when they write it down and when she started she wasn't even that good at it, it's just the fact she would do it right. You have so many people are like, yeah, I need you to write that down and they they, haphazardly will maybe do it, but then whatever they do is completely just well, look this up, do you know? Do this? No description of anything and no troubleshooting nothing. There's no description here and I think that we have to hold ourselves accountable to holding them accountable for that document. And it's like hey, listen, if you disappear tomorrow and I had to do your job, is this enough? And then actually going through, maybe going through an SOP that they created and go cause I don't know what you, but I like to hire people that are better than me at other things. Right, like I surround myself. It's always the goal.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Right, right and so it's like half the stuff that the that my my employees do. I have no idea how to do it Right, so, but what happens when they get? You know they have to go to the hospital one day and then all of a sudden a client needs something that day and nobody else knows how to do it? Can I take a set of instructions and give it to myself or somebody else in the team and can they follow it?

Speaker 2: 10:45

A hundred percent and I think you know I've got. I've been fortunate to come up in the software world. But you'd be surprised. You would think that like you can just plug in different software developers into other people's code and everything goes great.

Speaker 1: 10:59

I've never.

Speaker 2: 11:00

I've never heard a software developer say, oh, that last guy's code was awesome.

Speaker 1: 11:05

They never do that.

Speaker 2: 11:07

Everybody likes to do it differently, but you use when you run well, and we do. And I had to develop this skill and experience because my teams for so many years were all remote. Even now, technically, we're all in different places Because after so many years of doing this, I'm not worried about whether somebody lives down the street or whether they live in the Philippines or India or South Africa or wherever those down the street or whether they live in the Philippines or India or South Africa or wherever. But it forced learning ways for us to have standard operating procedures that still allowed for flexibility and problem solving. But anybody knew they could jump into anyone else's code they'd written and know exactly how it was organized, know how to very quickly get up to speed in it and I mean like, hey, maybe there was a bug that got reported and we want to.

Speaker 2: 11:57

We actually try to address a lot of bugs same day when we can. We can't always, but we always want that opportunity and so somebody has got to be able to jump in and look at it. And we try to do that same exact thing in all the areas of our business as well. It doesn't have to be a grinding activity where you hire an outside consultant document all your processes and then they go away and nobody's looking at them. As you say, it can be a living, breathing document that gets evolved, and one of the great questions I like to ask if something doesn't go as expected is hey, is that one part of our checklist?

Speaker 2: 12:36

We like checklists for our SOPs.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Was that one?

Speaker 2: 12:38

part of our checklist? No, should it be. I'm not saying it always should be, or it just leads to much more constructive conversations when maybe an expectation wasn't met Right.

Speaker 1: 12:53

We use playbooks so, which are like pieces of an SOP. So instead of so like at one point I went through I think it was called clockwork Mike Michalowicz a real book called clockwork Right and he talks about, you know, documenting stuff, and so it's like make videos and just have google sheets and spreadsheets and like you have all these things. And it was like we went into some program I could train you. Well, I think it was what we used and I everything, because I had gone from a brick and mortar to a completely remote. Now my brick and mortar, we had a manual that was two inches thick and a big two inch thick binder Right. And then you, the employee handbook was about maybe three quarters of an inch thick Right, and so it was like I had to take all of this knowledge and then say, okay, we're not doing some of it, so somebody's got to get thrown away.

Speaker 1: 13:44

But then it's like who's reading this at the remote level? So I finally decided it's like, hey, listen, we'll have. Like, these are the procedures you do. But the playbooks are actually built into our project management system, so they just fire. So there's some playbooks that fire every month, fire every two weeks, fire when we bring on a new client fire, when we bring on a new employee fire, when we're offboarding a client fire, when we fire an employee, like they're there, they're boom, boom, boom and it's like there's the amount of time it should take. There's going to be the notes that you need, all of their stuff, and we're actually finding that to be really effective and we have a small team of eight. Right, we take care of over a hundred companies every month.

Speaker 2: 14:28

It's outstanding. Yeah, we've got those same features in Result Maps and they are very powerful, very powerful to have. They really let you-.

Speaker 1: 14:35

Talk to me a little bit about, like the Result Maps. What is that?

Speaker 2: 14:40

So Result Maps is our software platform. It helps CEOs, founders, business owners you know scale to. Whatever their next level is their next level goal, what they want to get out of their business. So typically they're using result maps because they either have an execution problem, they're trying to hit some new target of revenue and the business needs to adapt so that they don't start dropping customers and clients, or they're prepping the business so that either the CEO and leader can take themselves out of it or they're getting ready for a sale. And it helps.

Speaker 2: 15:15

Take a business operating system like EOS and really get it into the organization faster, get it deeper into the organization and give everybody the help they need communicating and collaborating that we really feel like software ought to do. That's one thing I think people miss. It's one thing to have a business operating system, it's another to get everybody to use it and most of what we have seen that was out there, that is out there currently amounts to sort of a checklist as to whether you've implemented the system, but it doesn't actually help you do work day to day. It doesn't help that work've implemented the system, but it doesn't actually help you do work day to day. It doesn't help that work fit into the system. So, while we have checklists on whether you have implemented the system, how do we actually get your team using the business operating system to do real work day to day, versus making that a kind of a checklist activity that they don't really understand? And we really focus on time to value. So, using the lessons we learned because I've had remote teams now since the early 2000s we had developed this from the ground up around action and how we prioritize the action we take and make decisions and how those actions fit into larger outcomes, and that gives us the ability to help people adopt.

Speaker 2: 16:38

These things remove a lot of the friction of changing, which is what you're usually asking a business to do. If you're trying to grow, it's going to require change. Very few businesses are ready to scale because scaling is like you're, you're building, you know you're building as you go. It isn't. Oh, we just we press these three buttons and it just gets bigger after operations. People have to change and, as I alluded to I can't remember if it was an earlier conversation or this one as a ceo, at each level you go through of your business growth, you have to fundamentally change how you interact with your company and your people in order to get to the next level. That comes up again and again and again when I'm working with CEOs, and I've talked to and worked with so so many. The ones that have made that journey really change what they do, how they lead, the things they think about as they grow. And the ones that don't are the ones that are stuck in that firefighting mode, at whatever level they're at.

Speaker 1: 17:39

So I, yeah, so I'm hearing like so for this, for your the map software that you have it it really is has an accountability piece to it, it has a reference piece to it. It literally has a map that you can follow. What's the result?

Speaker 2: 17:56

we want. Yeah, that was the idea. What's the result? What are our maps to get there? Because we may be in different places throughout the company, so we may have many maps to get there, but we all need to get to the same results, and how small of a business could use something like that results, and how small of a business could use something like that.

Speaker 2: 18:12

Oh, we've seen value with two people. A lot of you know the markets we tend to serve the guys that are and by guys I mean the gender-neutral version of companies that are most ready to jump in there and use it tend to be usually around more than five people as soon as I say that I, I'm like oh, but we have this customer and that customer, yeah right.

Speaker 1: 18:35

But I think that if you start using a program like that when you only have you and maybe two other people, I think it's a lot easier to adopt that type of software and then grow with it right, Instead of like, okay, now we're at five, Now we got to transfer all of the knowledge that we've been storing in checklists and all that other stuff, and then we got this overwhelming process of getting it into this thing and then everybody adopting it all of a sudden right Versus just growing into it.

Speaker 2: 19:04

What we do with result maps, like the approach we take, even when it's a larger company. Even if it's a larger company, even if it's a 50 or a hundred person or 200 person company, you're not going to do all that stuff overnight. So, from a feature standpoint, like if you were to look up EOS, they have their foundational tools, which we support all of and we support most of what they call their toolkit. So there are a lot of different elements to it, but if, if I just bought you this big toolkit and dropped it off at your house, if I just bought you this big toolkit and dropped it off at your house, you're not going to learn to use it all overnight. So we really focus on what are the essentials you need to start with so that you can begin to install all these other things, and there's basically three things. You need some visibility into what is our vision, what's the path we're taking to get there. So an.

Speaker 2: 19:50

EOS. That's your vision, traction organizer, if you just use general business terminology. What's our vision, what's our strategy, what are the goals we're setting. That gives me visibility into where we're going. We need a weekly practice of checking in so that you're seeing what issues are coming up, what challenges are coming up. Oh and, by the way, you need to start to make those visible as well. But in that weekly practice, in EOS, it's the level 10 meeting.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Different systems have different names, but the fundamental principle is sound, whatever system or flavor system you like, checking in for about 20 minutes just on where we are in terms of the score and progress on our goals, and then 60% of the time spent at least solving the problems you're facing. Do we need to improve our SOPs? Has an unexpected issue come up? So that's the second component, this weekly alignment Visibility here, alignment here. The third element is ownership from everybody and we put a very specific, simple, daily practice in place. It takes 90 seconds a day, which, if you add it up, ends up being seven minutes a week.

Speaker 2: 21:02

That together, these three things, they start to remove the very common causes of delays, the need for extra meetings, all the different challenges that arise. Get those three habits in place and you can start to install all the other parts of the different operating systems out there or build your own. But what we find is get these three things installed, which is a big part of what our software does like. Start you off with these three things. Now you can start to grow as you need to into all the other areas, so that it isn't like, oh my God, I have to adopt a whole business operating system for a 50 person company, but we're only five people and, by the same token, we're a 50 person company. How do we start to get immediate impact from these changes?

Speaker 2: 21:50

Well, get these three essentials installed. That's how we approach it and what I think is the difference of end result maps. Certainly, what our customers tell us is the difference.

Speaker 1: 21:58

I love it. So if somebody is a smaller business say that they're under five employees what do you feel? And they're dealing with this like firefighter syndrome, where they're just having to put out these small trash fires what is the first step that you would suggest that type of CEO or a CEO that's in that situation, what's the first step to solving their firefighter problem?

Speaker 2: 22:34

fighter problem? Great question Step one is get it out of your head. Stop storing that information in your head and on your paper lists. Paper lists are fantastic for sharpening thought At the writing exercise. They're lousy storage devices and they're limiting. You can't share them.

Speaker 2: 22:45

So get the to-dos, the issues that you're facing, the things you're worried about. Get all that out of your brain, because what research shows again and again, our brains are great at problem solving, creative thinking and lousy at managing resources. So, in other words, our brains can only do so many things at once. We can't make decisions that are good while we're trying to juggle all this information right. Get it out of your head into a system that makes it all visible for you, and now your brain is freed up to do what it does best, which is make decisions, be creative and all those things. So yeah, step one we always have people and you know if you're not using result maps, you use whatever system you want, but get it out of your head. Where it's documented, you can see it. So now you can at least look at the problem versus imagining the forms the problem might take. We don't realize how much our imaginations color our decision making. So that's step one.