How David Michael Got His Employees To Help Document Procedures and Systematize His Entire Business!

Owen: Hi, everyone. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast where I bring on successful entrepreneurs to come on here and reveal how they’ve been able to create systems and processes for their businesses which now enable them to literally run their business on autopilot without their constant involvement and today my guest is David Michael. He’s the co-founder of North Shore Pediatric Therapy. David, welcome to the show.

David: Thank you, Owen. Happy to be here.

Owen: And so let’s get started. What exactly does your company do and what big pain do you solve for your customers?

David: Okay. Our company provides pediatric therapy services [00:41] specialties for children and the pain we solve is if you are a parent who has a child with a developmental challenge your pain is the fear, anxiety and stress of wanting to find a solution for your child as quickly as possible and that necessarily knowing where to turn to.

Owen: And so how many employees you currently have?

David: We have 85 employees, 65 of whom are full-time.

Owen: Okay. That’s huge operation. And then also my listeners always want to know like what kind of business in terms of the revenue and all that. Sort of if you could know what level of business you are. What was the last year’s annual revenues or like many this year’s? What you hope is going to be?

David: Sure. Last year’s revenue was $5.4 Million and we’re hoping to exceed $5.8 Million this year. We also opened a fourth location this year so we currently have four locations in the Chicago Metropolitan Area.

Owen: Awesome. I didn’t know about the location thing before. Is all the locations in house or you’re franchising some of them?

David: No, they are all currently owned by else in-house.

Owen: Okay. And so this interview is all about learning form entrepreneurs like you successfully created, systematized your business where your business runs without you successfully and so before you go to this point we want to always dive back and understand what the lowest point of the business were and describe how bad it got?

David: The lowest point of the business is when your business as a “mom and pop business” but it’s growing to the level where you already have several employees, quite a few customers and you find that you’re the one doing the interviews, putting edge for the new employees, performing the payroll, the banking, the billing, you’re just getting filed on everything and you’re completely overwhelmed. You don’t have necessarily people in your company, in who you can trust to get a lot of these essential tasks or the most important task completed so you end up doing all of it yourself and you never gone home and you want to quit and you think you’re a slave to your business and you’re not sure if you want to continue. That’s the lowest point.

Owen: At by the time when you started a business what did you think coming in it was going to be like?

David: Okay. First of all I’m not a gynecologist. I’m a physician and I started this business, I co-founded with my wife who was an occupational therapist. So it was meant to be a side business and so we didn’t have expectations of it growing to the level of what it grew to. It grew to such a level that about 5 years after we started it I took a sabbatical as a physician too to learn and become a full-time entrepreneur CEO. So did that answered the question?

Owen: Yeah. So it’s something that you started on the side out of your passion and all that, turns out to be this huge company and then it’s taking you in from what you’re passionate about doing inside of the company you found out it’s something you are asked to supposed run the business. During the pre-interview you said that your days never ended and you have little time to work. Let’s reflect on that light before a few minutes though because I really want to paint the picture of where you’re coming from. What were the typical days back when you were at the low point? What it is to feel like for you?

David: It feels like you never get all your tasks done. You want to work on your company. You want to meet with certain people in your company. There are things you want to, people you want to meet with, things you want to do but you can’t do it because there’s no time in your calendar because there are certain essential task that you need to get done in order for the company to function essentially day-to-day. And so you’re sort of trapped in being able to grow your business because you’re working too much in your business because like I said you don’t have other people we can rely to get the processes done because they haven’t been necessarily standardized let’s say or you don’t feel like you can never delegate to someone because they’re so important. That they need to be done by you and of course that’s a perception, it’s not a reality.

Owen: So how did you solve the problems that you just mentioned at the lowest point of the business? How did you solve it? Let’s dive into first thing you did.

David: Okay. Well, luckily I found myself very good mentors, read lots of books but one of my mentors, Michael Kramer. I remember he told me “Your business has a zero value unless you can disappear from the earth and your business continues.” That it’s not the people.  It’s the process because I’ve complained about the people sometimes. They’re dropping this. They’re not getting that done. He said “Be soft on people, hard on facts. If you don’t have the documentation, you haven’t standardized the process, if you haven’t trained them to understand the documents generate the processes, you can’t come down on the people. The only time you can come down to people is if you have a well-documented SOP or Standard Operating Procedure and they’re not following it, that’s a different issue. But that was a turning point for me, a realization that I needed to start standardizing my business.

Owen: And so what did you do next? I mean, after you have Michael Kramer suggested very good points. Your business cannot run without you and you don’t have a business and realizing the value of what he’s saying, what did you do next? Because we want to dive into step-by-step of what you did.

David: Sure. Okay. Well, I wasn’t about to giveaway what I thought were the most important or mission critical tasks because I felt again, I still felt like I needed to do them. So I started with less critical task that had to do with opening the mail, processing tracks that were coming in, answering the telephone and also addressing our technology systems. How do you log into this kind of program? How do you fax something? How do you scan something? It started with those and we started to develop these, they weren’t Word documents, they weren’t any special system.  It was just a Word document with a very simple header. It started with a version. Version, there was the month.thedate.theversion numbers that we kept track of the documents as we would of course edit and you continually see and improve them as you refine your processes and that was our simple process.

And then to file these documents in a particular place in our directory on our drive and we created a special drive on our network called the “O Drive”.  “O” for organization, where I created which I thought was a unique system of basically, it’s an organizational board where we divided that up into departments into sections and then sections into the individual roles where we equate a role with a process. So if we created a mail opening process for instance, SOP, it would fall under the administration section under communications, etc. So if you are the person performing that role, you would know where to find that document.

Owen: Okay.  And we thought we want to dive into the details of the system you created because that’s the next series of questions. How you figured out what starting points to start documenting. You said that you broke it out to critical and non-critical and then you started up by documenting those non-critical.

David: Okay.

Owen: Yeah. What method? How you are from non-critical and then critical?

David: Yeah. Okay. Well, if you want to give up some of your task you typically need to hire some people also. So I think it comes to the point where your employees are telling you that they’re overwhelmed and they need more help and how do you know that they need more help? And if you bring more help in, how are you going to train those people? So that I think was also something that caused me to really think about that is when, “Okay.  If we’re going to bring new people, tell me about the task you’re currently doing.  Document it. I want to know how long does it take and I want a list of these tasks and I want them documented because I want to kind of bring someone else on, we cannot take them off of your plate unless we can easily train someone else to do them.  And if we don’t know how to do them because you haven’t written them down, how we’re going to train somebody?” So we started with tasks that people want to give off of their plate and to unknown plate.

Owen: Real quick, did it started with you documenting your stuff or you started by going to your employees and having them document the stuff they wanted to get off their plates? How did it work, you or your employees?

David: More the employees. Mine came later because again, the things I was worrying I thought were mission critical. Of course, I don’t do any task so even the things like payroll, people can’t see what other people are making. You can’t ever give that to someone else. Your mindset changes over time but there is simple IRA or banking or reconciling the checkbooks. These are things that I thought I’m always going to hold on to them. Of course as your business develops you realize that other people can do them if you have a process and you can add the process. There was a way to check on people making sure they’re doing them correctly and you don’t have to be as concerned. You can create checks and balances as well.

Owen: Okay. So now I understand how you went about it. You first went with non-critical stuff but then you focused on the employees and now you’re talking about what you did with the employees to literally get stuff documented that they were doing. Go back into that first. I want to understand how you did it so go ahead, go back into that part of the story.

David: Okay. So I would take let’s say a particular employee and say “Show me your best fit of roles, the different things that you do. Let’s break them down into processes” and I’m not talking about their title. Everyone talks about their title. I don’t care about titles. I care about “What it that you do is? All the different things and if you weren’t here tomorrow or you left our company, what would stop happening in our company that needs to keep happening?” So we’d have them first document a list of roles and we give each role or we call roles the same thing as a process in our company.

Owen: Okay.

David: We had to give each process a name. So now we have a list of names of processes that this person owns in their bucket. They have sort of developed with them, they’ve created them, many of them and so now one-by-one, next to the list we’d say “Which ones are documented, which ones are in process and which ones haven’t been documented?” and we just go one by one and start documenting each one and as each one gets documented, we don’t just say “Good, let’s file that. We audit it.”

So I’ll have a second person. In the beginning it might have been myself, sit down next to that person, take over the computer and let them read me the steps and I will perform the steps one-by-one and I should get exactly the same results as that employee got and so that’s how we want to end. So their entire bucket of roles was completed. Now you have SOP’s for every single one of the roles. Now you can delegate some or all of those roles to another person.
You also cross-train so it’s important as in the company as you’re growing to cross-train at least more than one person in any particular process because if that’s person is on vacation or leaves you, you still need to know that especially if it’s a mission critical process that it continues. So it’s important to have cross-training and it’s hard to have cross-training if you don’t have documentation. And we believe that whatever you don’t have cross-training on is the bottleneck in the organization. It’s a potential bottleneck not having a particular process cross-trained.

Owen: And I love how you do this system of yours. You’re making use of your employees to create this system but then there is the other part of the argument where the employee was the one trying to get tasks off their hand.

David: Yeah.

Owen: Now this is the one now responsible for creating the task. So I got the first thing where you told them “List out all the things you’re doing.” You call them roles.

David: Right.

Owen: All the roles you do and then now you said, “After listing it out, then you can now take one a time” and new employee starts documenting it. Then, there’s a sort of argument that the person who’s doing the work on an ongoing basis and now you want them to document it, is there another struggle of where are they going to find the time to actually document it and might not even find the time to do the work? How do you deal with that?

David: Okay. Because we made a rule on our company that every process has a process manager or a role manager, there are synonyms in our company. So if you are the person doing a particular process, you’re the manager of that process. If you’re the person who let’s say files all scanned documents into our scanning technology, then you are the manager of that process. Therefore, you are responsible for documenting it. You’re responsible for improving it, okay? And you’re responsible for cross-training in it. So you own it. And if you’re the owner of it then you need to document it and that’s just the company everyone knows that no one else is going to document it for you. You’re responsible for document it and you have to find the time for it obviously. It’s not easy but you have to find the time.

Owen: Okay. So I’ve already documented, the next thing was after they created a list, they bought into the idea that they own it, they take ownership and they’re responsible to make the time to even document it. When they document the next thing after what it was, the auditing part of it where someone else was responsible for looking at each of the steps and each of the procedures they create to make sure that “Okay, if I come on the steps as an outsider, I can achieve the same results that you are talking about.” That way you verify that they’re not just writing up crap.

David: Right. Absolutely. And you know until you right an SOP even for the simplest of procedures, you realize how steps there are. You can get really detailed in some of these processes. So some processes you might want to break up into smaller processes so that they form a group and so that’s something to think about as well. If it gets too long it can get hard to follow.

Owen: And another thing I was even curious about is you mentioned that for the most part you’ve got the employees to do the stuff that you think were non-critical but then how do you document the stuff that you held close to your chest that you felt were critical?

David: So I’d file the same victim I have of the employees, I started to document my own procedures and basically, we have two screens, all of our admin people. So that’s very helpful to have two screens in your computer. So on one screen I have the process opened that I’m performing, on the other screen I have a Microsoft document or whatever it is I’m using for documenting our processes and I’m literally typing out my procedure as I’m working on it step-by-step. I found that to be the easiest way to go about it.

Owen: Wow. I like that. Was it a thing where as you’re doing the task you are just basically listing out what you are doing but maybe you are not necessarily putting out the full detail? At least when you have version 1.8 with version 1.0 with all the highlights of what it is maybe the next time you can call me and then put in more details and more details until it becomes complete, is that how you are going about it or when you do the task you want to complete everything at once?

David: Well, some tasks are a little complicated and long and they didn’t get done in one sitting. So that’s true. There are some complicated things that we have to deal. Some of our monthly and so it just takes a lot of time so you just document it. Parts of it as a time so I guess it’s completely filled in.

Owen: Okay. And so I think one of the things that my listeners would love is when I can ask you this question. Basically, imagine your business as kind of like a conveyor belt where one side is the customer, not a customer yet but like a lead who’s interested in the service on the other end of the conveyor belt is that customer transformed into a happy lead transformed into a customer where goods and service delivered. Walk is behind the scenes now that you have system in place how the different parts of the conveyor belt connecting to one another, to leads from that lead to customer on the other end, that way we can see behind the scenes.

David: Right. Because the whole customer experience is based upon standardized quality, a vision that you’ve created, so the owner or the team has created this vision of what this brand experience is going to be for the customer from the time they’re greeted.

Owen: Can we talk about how it is that conveyor belt for your business because we want to learn from how it is working in yours now?

David: Okay. So a person answers the phone, there is an SOP for how the phone is answered and what’s spoken and how to handle different situations and different parents on the phone so starting with that. Then, when we’re finished on the phone we want to send a welcoming packet. There’s an SOP for what goes into the welcoming packet, how is it sent, when is it sent, again all part of the experience. There is an SOP if the customer has a bad experience with you on the phone or has a complaint. We have a “Thank you” card, a “Sorry” card that goes out, how it’s written? When it’s written? There are samples of it. Again, there is an SOP for that.

They finally come in, they meet their therapist.  How does a therapist greet them? Do they greet the child first or the parent? There is an SOP for that. For greeting and attending too and also they get a tour. All of that is part of the customer experience in a different people of different roles and that whole experience and they know exactly what to do according to their SOP. Then there’s an SOP for the evaluations and how they’re written up, how the files are stored and of course they have to get build. That has the good experience. They have to be accurate.  They have to be on time. All of that has to be documented and finally, even the closing. How do we keep in touch with customers after they no longer need our services? What’s the interval? How was that tracked? Who’s responsible? Who throws that and how is that performed? All of those from start to finish create the brand experience. All of your SOP’s when they are followed, ensure that your customer will have a consistent experience according to the vision that you had set.

Owen: Thank you for doing that because what I like about that is when I get my guest like I’ve got to share that, the listener can now see that the customer on the other end that comes in as a need, that doesn’t have the expectations yet but then on the other end is a happy raving customer. In order for that pause to get into that point someone had to design that experience and that is why you’re designing the different SOP is connecting them to one another so then getting to that other end where they are happy leaving customer. Thank for sharing that.

David: Yeah. And by the way, your employees are also happy when you create a standardized SOP’s because you’re leaving the guess work out for them and they get to do their job and do well and do it consistently because they’re not trying to remember each time how do you do a specific task. Once it’s been documented they have the recipe and if they filed the recipe they’re going to get a good product each time and they’re going to be happy, they’re going to be fulfilled in the work and satisfied and they’re going to get good recommendations from the supervisors.

Owen: I have spoken on the people where they say they went out and hire consultants which I call systems designer or the process designers to come on in. They pay them a fee to do that. But in your case, you actually made use of your employees which I think is kind of brilliant. Is there an additional cost? How did you track that cost of having the employee not only do their work within their role but also spend a time to document the procedures? Did you think of how did you write? You understand the question I’m asking because it’s kind of the same thing.

David: Yeah. Honestly, I didn’t do an actual analysis but I can’t imagine it any other way I always told the employees, no one knows and no one understands your job better than you the frontline person doing that job. I can’t imagine any other ways.
Someone coming out is not going to understand all the variables that that person experiences. And not only that it’s empowering to the frontline employee, it makes them feel important and when you give them that authority and autonomy to write up their own SOP it only increases their ownership of that task that they’re doing. They feel like they own it and they do own it because they created it, they maintain it. If you bring someone from outside, it’s like they don’t know this, someone else is telling them what to do. No one likes to be told what to do. People like the autonomy of doing things the best that they know how to do it and typically, they will do it better than anyone else because again, they’re the ones doing it. You have to trust that they can do it better than anyone else.

Owen: And this interview will not be completed without talking about the challenges that you had with this whole process of systematizing your business. Now you’re enjoying the benefits but let’s talk about the challenges you had when you got this mindset and you started implementing the whole thing of creating systems and not only you want to talk about the challenges but like how did you solve the challenges that pulled that yourself? So let’s go ahead and talk about challenges.

David: Sure. Initially, if it’s something new in your culture it’s a cultural challenge because look at it and they say “you’re micromanaging me now” you’re telling me to write each step and if you bring new people in, they call it “Micromanaging.” That’s gone away. By the way, no one ever calls that anymore but that was one of the challenges in the beginning was the way people perceive this. So you have to explain the “Why?” People have to understand why are they documenting everything and another challenge the people might feel like if they document their procedure well enough that they no longer critical to the role itself that they’re easily replaceable and the fact of matter is they are easily replaceable but that’s what you want as an owner of a company. You want plug and play. You want to be able to make sure that anyone in the organization, including yourself is replaceable. Otherwise, you don’t really have a real company. You still have a “mom and pop” company. So that’s one of the challenges, is to help your people understand why.

Owen: I want to play devil’s advocate here because I understand the selling point of having plug and play and replaceable, everybody replaceable including yourself as the CEO from yourself as the owner of the business but I’m playing devil’s advocate for employee. Now, how do you solve and this should be replaceable? There was something you said during the pre-interview that I want you to get that point across the listener.

David: Right.

Owen: Yeah. Go ahead and see if you can help me. Yeah.

David: Because the other side of the coin is that if they’re not replaceable they’re also not movable. So how can I move them up to the next level or give them other task or more important task or different roles if they are the ones who have a silo of information and no one has access then they need to keep doing that role because no one knows how to do it? So they’re stuck in that role wearing that hat. They can’t switch, they can’t be promoted because they haven’t documented it. So that’s the other side of the coin. So that’s how I presented to them and they understand that.

Owen: I like the way you sell it. In order to move forward in this company in advance you need to make sure that before you leave, everything and most of the next level, everything you’re doing here someone else can replace you.

David: Right.

Owen: You cannot replace them if they are unmovable. Go ahead.

David: Absolutely. I also tell people that their value to the organization is proportional to the number of roles that they have but also more importantly, the number of roles that they’ve documented, improved, mastered. So it’s not that I just to replace people. They only become more valuable and an employee becomes more and more valuable the more that they take ownership of their role and document it well because they’re wheeling the enterprise value of the organization itself and I recognize that.

Owen: Does this other issue of how you mentioned during the pre-interview that writing or documented procedures sometimes is not fun, how do you solve that problem?

David: Right. I don’t know, put a headphone one and listen to some music. It’s not fun. There’s no answer to that. It’s really not fun. I can’t stand it myself. It was very hard for me doing that and so but you know what, the owner should do it and still because then you have sympathy for your employees and you understand. You understand how much time to give, how much patience to give but you have to give it a time. It needs to get done but the reward is afterward. The employee feels great as passion having documented it especially if you give recognition for it. So give recognition. Give a recognition plaque or a recognition reward or a Starbucks card or something for every procedure that gets documented.

Owen: I like that idea. Basically recognize them for taking ownership and let someone who’s using that procedure know that “Hey, this is the person who documented it. That made it so useful for you.” Give them praise.

David: Exactly, maybe a reward.

Owen: Go ahead.

David: Maybe a reward, a yearly reward for the most people who’s documented the most procedures.

Owen: And then there was another challenge that you mentioned that okay, now you sold them on the idea of “If you’re not replaceable, you’re not promotable” and then you got and now you’ve made them understand that “Okay.  It might not be fun but let’s do it because this is the end benefit that you now believe in the benefit.”  But then there’s another big issue that the actual documenting of the procedure is like you might sometimes feel like it’s an impossible task. Remember how you mentioned that when you got started you told people, each employee to list down all the different roles, right?

David: Right.

Owen: So I’m assuming that when they do that now is like maybe they come up with 10 different tasks that they’re doing in recurrent basis is that “Okay, it’s impossible now to now start,” that’s the mindset they have not that it’s not important, not that it’s not possible but how do you deal with that challenge when someone sees 10 roles that they’re listed out that they have to document and now you say “Okay. Let’s get started with one of them.” You understand exactly I was supposing?

David: Sure. I mean you know, say you break it down one step at a time right. So I would sit down with them and get them involved in the process. Say “Which role you think is most mission-critical that if you were then up here one day, we would need to be able to train someone very quickly.” We’ll start with the roles or wishing that they could get off their plate and then passed on to someone else. That’s also a motivator to get somebody documented because again, they’re not promotable as to replaceable so that’s a motivation for wanting to get certain tasks documented but you just have to start somewhere.Set a calendar so it spread out a good amount of time. Maybe set aside only one hour per week that they’re going to dedicate to documenting it and if they agree to that so they carve out one hour per week out of their schedule and then that becomes manageable and they don’t do more than one hour per week.

Owen: Okay. So one of the things that people listening to this right now we’re like “Okay. I get it. You’ve started documenting procedures of team.  I’ve already done that.”  But what systems you have that you’re currently using to do that? Can we dive into like the infrastructure that you have for the system? Yeah.

David: Okay. Great question. First of all, having a system you have to have a system. I don’t know if one system.  Every system is going to work differently for different people. We have a system but it’s not a true system like some of these excellent platforms that are out there in the internet but ours was simply Microsoft Word Document that we file in a certain filing system that we use on our drive that’s accessible on our network. We’ve been doing this now for 10 years.

Okay, so 10 years ago there were necessarily platforms out there that we’re thinking this advanced that people are creating actual piece and how are they going to store them? How are they going to alter them? How are they going to retrieve them? So we’re still stuck with the system that we had 10 years ago. It’s working for us and one day there’s always a list of things that you’d like to advance in your technology. It’s not highest on our list right now but certainly one day it would be nice to have a place to store these SOP’s. They’re easily, more easily retrievable because there are sometimes difficulty finding them. Also so that you can ensure that there are multiple copies of different versions around that is always the problem. So there are some. There are always things that we need to improve on. That’s the area we could definitely improve on.

Owen: What I get from that is that for you it’s not necessarily the tools you use. It’s more about first of all having a system but then having this so that you have a place where everybody can get access to the SOP’s and also making sure that when the SOP’s maybe for some reason a specific SOP is not able to carry out a task the way it usually should have, then they have the ability for them to go back and then update so that they can improve this ongoing thing.

David: Right. We also want to make sure that only certain people can update it because there are some people you want to be on the read-only. So we have a roundabout way of doing that with Microsoft, whatever on our network that our IT people help to setup. But again it’s not the idea a little complicated but it’s been working for us. Certainly, the first step is have a system that works for you but certainly it would be helpful to have technology that helps you organize them and retrieve them easily and share them and make sure again people aren’t seeing in multiple versions, people who don’t have access to, write and only read so that they don’t ruin the SOP’s and copy over them even accidentally.

Owen: Yeah. I definitely understand and so resisting that I should give a plug for Sweet Process at this point let me go up to the next question. So how do you track and verify the results that your employees are delivering?

David: Do you mean how you track that they’re actually following the procedures exactly the way they are with?

Owen: Well, I’m assuming that you are doing it based on the result they are delivering. So whatever system that you use to really track, I want to know what system you have in place for tracking that the results are being delivered by the employees currently.

David: Right. So currently, we don’t have a the way to track if they’re following the SOP exactly the way it’s written but we do have systems to track the results. So if it’s in our medical billing department, we can use our practice management software to run reports and that will show us we’re getting the results we expected. We can use our phone system to track the certain amount of time that calls are being taken or being answered. We can track our net promoter score and make sure our client satisfaction is working well and we’ll just assume it’s a sum total of the different SOP’s that are being filed in our client, experience department because they’re filing their SOP’s so the client experience ratings are going up. So we have only indirect ways of tracking that the SOP’s are getting done correctly, so I know it’s a part.  On the payrolls, no one is complaining if their paychecks are incorrect. Then they must be filing the payroll procedure correctly.

Owen: And I like the fact that you mentioned that because the reality is that if you spend your time as an entrepreneur as the listener to design the outcome that you want for your customers, even the outcomes you wants for your employees where they’re all based on procedures that you’ve created. Well now, you have a means to verify the results of each step you’re just looking at “What is the end result?”  If the end result is not what you want then something is broken in the SOP that we got to figure out what is broken.

David: Right.

Owen: And I’m just curious what tools are you using for this stuff? Because we wanted to share as many resources as possible, like you mentioned something that using practice management and the other one for tracking of net promoter score and stuff like that. Share the tools you’re using.

David: Okay. So like practice management, we’re using Advanced MD for our practice management software. We’re using lot of Excel Spreadsheets. That’s actually the majority of our tracking tools, the Excel. So people have to go into Excel into a specific tracker and they’ll have to document whatever results we’re looking to get into Excel and we have them all over the place. Again, that’s a little antiquated. I know there are systems out there whether its SharePoint or just different systems that is web-based that people can utilize to make things a little more efficient. We’re not very up to technology but we do have a system but it is mostly Excel or our practice management stuff like I mentioned. Those are the main tools overviews.

Owen: Okay. So that we could put more concrete layer to this whole thing of tracking, you mentioned during the pre-interview that you tracked the results or their goals based on the roles that they are involved in? So let’s take a couple of them and just give the listener a couple roles that you have and then a couple ways that you track the results is what I’m trying to get at.

David: Okay. Well, we track for instance the therapist has a certain number of children productivity that I need to see in a week. We use Excel Spreadsheets and later we track everything from the whole experience, how many kids and which kids need referrals, which kids are getting cross-referred? There’s SOP’s for each one of these actions that they’re doing but again, we use Excel to track the actual data.

Owen: Okay, great. And so now that we’ve established that you basically have systems in your business that literally allows you to run successfully without you, I’m just curious what’s been the longest time you’ve been away from the business?

David: I’ve been away from the business since August 14, 2012.

Owen: That’s almost a year now. Wow.

David: Yeah.

Owen: It’s more than a year at this point. That’s impressive and how do you say that your business has been transformed as a result of systematizing the business?

David: It’s been transformed into a real business. A business that functions where I actually need myself replaceable and I followed the advice of one of my mentors for many many years ago that unless I can teach the earth and the company doesn’t continue, it’s not a real company. So I’m actually over 6,000 miles away. I’m basically removed from the business so it’s truly been a dream comes true. It was a vision that I had with my wife and then the family and if you stick to what you need to do and you put the work and the timing to it and the effort, it will definitely pay off and standardizing your business and systematizing it is one of the most important secrets to building a business. That again is a process, it’s not the people. You have to document, standardize every single process in your business and that’s the value of your organization.

Owen: And I think you mentioned during the pre-interview that not only you guys oceans and miles away from the business but every year you’ve been increasing revenue 20%, that’s impressive.

David: Yeah. Now would have actually had higher revenues this year but the initial CEO that I hired when I left didn’t work out and actually that person started to unfold a lot of our processes, changed them and that was causing a lot of problems in the business, financial issues. So I ended up promoting someone from within the business who understood the culture, understood the philosophy, went right back to where we were with the systematizing, reinstated our all systems, continued and enhanced what we have and we’ve bounced back tremendously. She made up for a lot of loss that we had. So we’d be even a lot higher this year so I anticipate that next year, we’ll continue on our 20% revenue growth that we have been experiencing for many years now.

Owen: Wow. And I always want to find out like personal life transformation and since you’ve systematized the business, what’s that looking like? You’ve already given us some insight, if you want to share more on that.

David: Yeah. Well, one of the books that I’ve read was “The 4-Hour Week” by Timothy Ferriss and the truth is I can work as much as I want or as little as I want. I work about 20 hours per week on this business. That’s what I choose to do. I feel like wherever I’m putting my time I’m contributing the best that I can. It’s mostly coaching and mentoring the next generation of leaders in my company. That’s where I feel I best serve the company. But at the minimum I think I would I think one to four hours would be all I would need that really just checking in with my top level executives and getting reports and seeing where things are at and asking key questions. But again I choose to do more than that. I want to be a little more involved in just a couple of hours a week but I have the choice.

Owen: And now with all this freedom and as you say with the choice you have, what areas of your business you find yourself focusing more and more and why?

David: I find myself focusing more on opportunities. Work and then business go. What are things that are customers hate with our competitors that we can try to alleviate and make us even more differentiated and we have some new services or product line we can get into that will increase in the revenue, streams new revenue opportunities? That and again, mentorship, coaching, I really enjoy that. I also enjoy just watching what’s going on the business and finding opportunities to raise different employees for different winds that they’re getting. We call them “magic moments” things that are going above and beyond I like to give a lot of recognition. That takes time but I enjoy doing that.

Owen: And also this interview has been how you got your employees to help with creating systems for your business, what is the very next step that’s someone who is listening to this interview should do in order to get their own employees to help with creating systems for their own business?

David: Okay. Step one, sit down with your employees. Let them know that whatever role process that they have in their bucket, they’re the manager of them. So first, have them listed out. Know what they’re doing. What does each individual process that that person does in your company? And then again reinforce that if they’re the ones who are primarily doing it, they’re the manager of it. Next, let them know that you’re now going forward giving them the autonomy to manage and improve those roles. In fact, they’re responsible for continuous improvement of those roles. In addition to that, they have to document how that role is performed and again, break it up, give them some opportunity to be a partner and decide which roles they want to start with. Is that a calendar? So it’s achievable and a time frame. Maybe it’s one hour per week and then start with that.

Owen: Good. I like that. That gives them kind of checklist of items of what they should do. And we’re getting to the end of the interview and I’m just curious because my listeners always want to know what books have influenced you the most, especially with this line of thinking and also what tools have influences your business as well? So feel free to keep additional resources at this point.

David: Sure. Especially related to systematization, I like “Hardwiring Excellence” by Quint Studer. “Hardwiring Excellence” I’m in the medical field so he’s a medical CEO but of course it relates to any business. I think that’s an excellent book relating to systematization specifically. So the whole idea of “Hardwiring Excellence” is that everything from how do you do performance reviews, how do you greet the customers, how do you praise your employees and how often, walk in the hallways. It’s basically creating habits that everyone from CEO down to every level in the organization performs habitually but it’s hard-wired into the process. This is how behaviors become hard-wired and so I think it’s an excellent read.

Owen: Yeah, any other tools? Feel free to share another book that might not even be system specific that has a big influence on you personally.

David: Yeah. One of the earlier books I read was “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. That book kind of opens up your mind and lets you think beyond your current constraints. So for instance, I would listen to webcast like this or go to speakers and take “I’ll never be like that. That will never happen to me.” But look with time, if you follow, if you devote good habits for yourself, one of the things I did talking about books, I set aside as part of my daily habits one hour every single day at noon, from noon to 1:00. I’d walk over to a Starbucks near my office and I would read a book and other business books.

So I was constantly reading business books. I take notes on the Starbucks napkins, the things that I want to implement. You’re moving yourself in the business physically. You open up your mind and you start thinking about your business and you work on your business during that time and you get to take in new information. It’s really important to constantly, to set aside time, to bring in new information, new ideas into your head. So one of the things about “Think and Grow Rich” is that it helps you think beyond the constraints that you have about yourself or your business or some people think they’re destined to make X number of dollars. It’s a good read.

Owen: And thanks for sharing that and so what’s the best way for the listener to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview?

David: Sure. Anyone can e-mail me as they like. My e-mail is david@nspt4kids.com.

Owen: And also last question, I’m curious, is there a question that you wish I asked you during this interview that for some reason I forgot or didn’t even pay attention to ask you? If so post that question and we could talk about it.

David: Yeah. Let me think about that.
I had one written down. Go ahead.

Owen: Good and just so the listeners wonder why they’re in paper, one of the things we do is we try to do pre-interview so that the interview at least we’d go and get as much details. Go ahead.

David: Here’s my question. Okay. I wanted to look it up because I thought it was good credit. How do you know when you’ve achieved success? I think that’s a very important question for people to ask and ask to themselves because you meet a lot of entrepreneurs and now their businesses have grown. You look at them, you think they’re successful but you talk to the entrepreneur and they say “I’m not successful.” They’re either looking at other people or seeing what other people achieve and they never seem to find happiness.

It’s really important to know what your vision and what it will feel like to achieve success because a wealthy person as he was happy with his life and I think it’s very important to know. I feel like personally, I’ve achieved success, I’m happy where I’m at and I think that that is what success is all about. For me it was standardizing my business, having my business run on its own without me having to manage every day-to-day activity and earn a decent income and have certain freedoms, that’s what I have. Thank God today, some years later and it’s achievable and then we can do it and I think it’s important to define what success looks like for you so you can enjoy it when you get there.

Owen: That’s awesome. And so speaking to the listener now, if you have listened to this interview all the way to this point, one of the things I want you to do is go ahead and leave a review, hopefully a positive review for us on iTunes. That way all our entrepreneurs can get to know about this Process Breakdown interview. To leave a review on iTunes go to SweetProcess.com/iTunes and one more thing, make sure that after you leave a review make sure you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. That way you know anytime we have a new interview.

Also if you know other entrepreneur who you feel might find this interview useful please share the interview with them. And finally, if you are at the point in your business where you’re tired of being the bottleneck in your business, you want to get things out of your head and document step-by-step procedure about how you get stuff done so your employees know exactly what you know, sign-up for a free 14 day trial of Sweet Process. Well David, I really appreciate you doing this interview. Thanks for doing this interview.

David: Thank you, Owen. It’s great to be here.

Owen: And we’re done.

David: All right.