How to Work Less and Earn More

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of the Process Breakdown Podcast where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. And I’m going to talk about a little bit about the episode who this episode is brought by, but we have Josh Fonger and there’s no better person I know on the planet to talk about this topic actually. Maybe Sam Carpenter, hadn’t had it with you, Josh, but I’m going to introduce Josh in a second. But this episode is brought to you by Sweet Process.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Listen, if you have had team members ask you the same questions over and over again and it’s maybe the 10th time you spent explaining it and I don’t know if you want to club yourself over the head, maybe that’s too extreme. But one of the solutions is Sweet Process and it’s a software that makes it drop-dead easy to train and onboard new staff, save time with existing staff. And they not only do universities, banks, hospitals, software companies, but actually Josh, I discovered that first responder government agencies use them in life or death situations to run their operations, which I thought was cool.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And so Sweet Process is, to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time. You could sign up for a free 14 day trial, no credit card required. Go to sweetprocess.com it’s sweet, like candy, S.W.E.E.T process.com. Now today’s guest, I’m excited and I know today we have Josh who is CEO of Work The System. And I discovered Work the System, Josh, we were talking, maybe nine years ago. So it’s been around for, I mean, that’s just the book. I mean, he’s been around longer than that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So his consulting firm Work the System Enterprises has attracted over a 100,000 business owners from over 50 countries and Josh has personally consulted or coached over 500 business owners from more than 100 industries, small startup businesses to larger $500 million enterprises. And he has the unique ability of developing, implementing systematic solutions to complex business problems. And I want to just point out Josh, the book, Work the System and it’s been a while since I revisited Work the System book and I went to buy it on Audible today and I did not find it. So they’re just going to have to go to your website, I guess and find out all the materials. Because I wanted to refresh my recollection of everything but Work the System is the simple mechanics of making more and working less, written by Sam Carpenter.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And Sam basically said there’s nobody in the world who is better equipped. I’m quoting, by the way, I’m not just paraphrasing here, "Nobody in the world who’s better equipped at helping business owners implement Work the System methodology than Josh." So Josh, thank you for being with me.

Josh Fonger: Yeah, glad to be here. Yeah, definitely excited. And if you want the book, like you said, workthesystem.com, get it for free. To download-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You can get it for free? Why?

Josh Fonger: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: What? I want to pay for it because I want to support your organization.

Josh Fonger: Well, of course you can but it, you can buy it for $25 on Amazon of course. We sell all our books, people like physical books, but I’m saying the PDF version and the audio version we want to distribute to as many folks as possible. That’s really Sam’s mission.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Wow, that’s amazing.

Josh Fonger: He is retired and loves getting the message out there and that’s core to our businesses, is to help as any entrepreneurs get free as possible and so he doesn’t need the money, he gives me his money and his businesses. And so this is part of his [inaudible 00:03:58]-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. But you have three kids so I want to pay. Where can people get it on the website? The audio?

Josh Fonger: Same thing. Yeah. So when you opt in, of course we will be asking for your email address and some other information and then we’ve got coaching and consulting events, we’ve got a bunch of services, but we do want to make sure that you get the book. And I personally like to listen to books as well.

Josh Fonger: And so when you understand Sam’s engineering mindset and I’ve worked with him for 10 years now, he likes to have control and he likes to do things differently and he believes there are other ways. And part of it is by controlling his intellectual property, his book and the audio book. And this is the way he distributes it through our website.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. And so, thanks. Yeah, check out the website. I’m going to after we’re done and actually get that. I was willing to pay for it, but I’ll just have to send you a separate check for thanking you. That’s what I love about, I think the non-sexy thing in running a business that has to be successful is systems. And that’s why I love talking about Sweet Process and Work the System. So maybe just start off with the Work the System methodology and I’m going to maybe have you talk about, start off talking about a wearable tattoo company, but talk about the Work the System methodology for people who don’t know what it is.

Josh Fonger: Sure, yeah, definitely. So the methodology was formed out of the real world. So Sam Carpenter, he’s been a business partner for a number of years. He owned a, well, still owns actually an answering service up in Bend, Oregon. That’s where he met, that’s where we the started the company together. And he was working 100 hour work weeks, living at his business. His health was going downhill, as you can imagine, he was really in bad shape and about to go bankrupt. And he has this epiphany, this mindset shift where he sees his business as on a table.

Josh Fonger: So basically the vision is this table and instead of seeing a business, he sees these separate pieces, different pieces of his business, all laid out on the table. And he had this theory, this hypothesis that if he had perfected each of these individual pieces, because individual pieces are easy to perfect, perfecting a whole business is hard. So he though, "If I perfected each piece and put it back together like an engineer, could I create a perfect business?" And so in this dreamlike state he said, "You know what? That’s what I’m going to do."

Josh Fonger: And he was able to round up some money, make payroll and then he put this into action, he actually systemized his business. And so that’s where the whole method came from. There’s a few components to this method. There is seeing the separate systems, we call it the mindset shift or the systems mindset. So if you don’t understand that all of these systems are interacting in your business, you’re not going to go through the rest of the work. That’s the first thing-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: The foundation is the mindset piece.

Josh Fonger: Definitely. Yeah. And it’s a belief in this reality that if you repeat these processes of your business, whether it’s unlocking the doors and the security alarm, making the sales calls, processing payroll, all these different separate entities, these pieces, [inaudible 00:07:07] don’t see them, you’re not going to isolate them. If you don’t isolate them, you’re not going to work on them. If you don’t work on them, you’re not going to document them. If you don’t document them, you can’t train, scale, revise, improve, innovate. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to measure them and you get where this trail is going.

Josh Fonger: But the first thing is you got to see them. And so that’s the first piece. Second piece is the strategy. If you don’t actually have a direction or something where you’re going, of course, you’re not going to ever get there. So we have this one page strategy, we call it the strategic objective, which helps people understand that you actually have to go somewhere with these systems, if you’re going to stay in the same place, you might as well not do it. And so he wrote his strategic objective, the operating principles and the working procedures.

Josh Fonger: So those are the four components, and if you skip a step, you’re going to have major problems. And often what people do, and this is why it’s so fun to be interacting with Sweet Process because I’ve known about them, worked with them, used them with clients for a number of years, is that a lot of times people want to jump right to the procedures. They say, "Hey, you know what? I’m going to just write some systems." But if you do that-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I don’t know who does that actually, Josh, but I feel like they’re smart people if they want to jump right to those things.

Josh Fonger: You know what? [inaudible 00:08:22] somebody and so they write the procedure in the hand of somebody, but then you’re missing all of the other components. And what’s going to happen is that person is not going to probably use it properly, they’re probably not going to innovate or modify it or [inaudible 00:08:35] time. So it’s going to go obsolete for sure. And you are then becoming, you’re basically moving yourself to a lower level where you’re now administrative writer procedures, handing it to someone else as opposed to leading and having them develop and self-generate and innovate the processes that they’re familiar with because they’re actually doing the work.

Josh Fonger: And so our big approach is bottom up. So we want the systems and procedures to be developed from the bottom up, not top down because top down is you become the bottleneck and you actually end up creating more work for yourself. So this idea of building freedom with systems actually is the opposite. You actually paint yourself into this hellish place which entrepreneurs hate, which is where now you are the generator of all the systems and all the procedures and everyone was just waiting for you to come up with the next brilliant idea and then you get stuck and it’s even worse. And we like the opposite to happen.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I love that distinction by the way, because a lot of times people go, "Ugh, I have to document, I have to pre operations," but if you create the infrastructure so that those people can actually document, then it’s so freeing. Right?

Josh Fonger: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Because people will probably automatically, I don’t know if you find it, do they default to, "Ugh, now I have to do all of this."?

Josh Fonger: Yes. Yeah, they love the idea of the freedom because what’s going to happen is you’re going to have more time, more money, more everything good when this is done. But then they say, "Wait a second, does that mean I have to do this?" And then they immediately say, "Well, maybe there’s something easier," and then they jump to the next new idea, the next new shiny object because this just seems like hard work and it does not fit with the typical entrepreneur DNA.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So repeat those four again. So there’s the foundation piece, which is the mindset, the strategy.

Josh Fonger: Yep. And then there’s the operating principles. So you want guidelines for decision making for all of your team. So you’re not going to write a procedure for how to clean up a piece of trash that falls on the floor. Because if you go to that level, you’re going to write a million procedures because you’re going write a procedure for how to walk, how to talk, how to open the door.

Josh Fonger: So what you want to do is you want to have these general beliefs, values, we call them operating principles that guide the interactions, the millions of interactions that happen all day, every day, which guide the work. So what do we believe about time? What do we believe about money, profits, speed efficiency, systems? All these things that they’re subconsciously guiding your decisions as the owner. But what happens is you grow a team, each of those people have different belief systems that guide how they interact in the workforce.

Josh Fonger: And what you want to do is actually have control and parameters and boundaries so that everyone, as the analogy goes, is rowing the same direction and is guided by the same system of beliefs. And therefore it’s really efficient. And you don’t have to write a procedure for every single thing because they naturally know how people are supposed to conform in terms of the way they make decisions. So it’s really efficient way to guide the, we call it the core HR document of your business is those operating principles.

Josh Fonger: And the last one is working procedures. And so for us working procedures would be checklists, guidelines, process outlines, anything that is going to guide the operations of the business and anything that involves action or movement is an operation. So sales, a sales calls and operations, answering the phone is an operations, asking someone to pay bills that are late is an operation.

Josh Fonger: Asking someone to change the oil in your car is an operation. So everything is an operation. And so we want those operations to be isolated, separated into simple pieces. And each piece then can be handed to somebody and say, "Hey, let’s write a system for the surplus processor procedure." And that’s when you accumulate this wealth of information. It’s like the, I’ve heard it referred to as the Wikipedia for your business or the brain of your business. And in most companies, the brain of the business is it’s you, it’s the owner, the owner has to house the entire knowledge bank of the business.

Josh Fonger: And what you want to do is to have a duplicate brain that actually never sleeps, that is better and faster and smarter than you, separate from you. And therefore everyone can access that separate brain, and that brain gets bigger and bigger and that is creating real value and scalability of your business as opposed to you. And I think most entrepreneurs have hit a point where they realize that if the business is them they’re finite and they’re tired and they’re getting older and they really wish that they could get out of that position.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. And that’s the thing. If they think about, even sometimes we think we need to do everything because I’m the best at doing it or whatever it is. But even if someone handed off one piece of what they’re doing, it may be game changing for them. And, to your point, what you said is, what’s always been said to me is like, "Well, what if that person gets hit by a bus tomorrow and it’s all in their head where you’re left at zero?"

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You have no documented system, you can’t hand it off to anyone. And that’s a morbid example but the person could leave, they may get sick. I mean, there’s a number of things that will happen that you don’t want it to affect your business.

Josh Fonger: and it just so people know, it will happen. Bad things. I mean, the stats. I mean, what is it? 96% of companies aren’t going to make it 10 years. And the ones that do make it 10 years are usually worth nothing. And it’d be better if they just had gone out of business anyways because the owners were slaves to their jobs anyways, they built themselves a horrible job. And so we don’t want that. The odds are against you and you have to do things different, you have to be different than other people. And I’ve had two of my clients that had people die in their business. I mean, it’s unusual but when you have enough clients, you know bad things happen. And so you should plan on people leaving because they will.

Josh Fonger: People come and go even they’re great people, I’ve had a lot of great people in my company and they’re not with me anymore, just because life changes, lifestyle change, they had a baby, they moved. People are dynamic, but systems, you want to provide the stability and the resilience and the rigidity of your business that is necessary. And if you never do that, you are going to constantly be in the state of I’ll bring a good person, get got a client, you grow up and that good person leaves and then the client leaves and you’re going down, and you go up, and you go down. And you never actually go anywhere. And we call that a yo-yo business and that is by far the normal thing out there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So the foundational mindset, the strategy, the operational procedure. What was the last one?

Josh Fonger: [inaudible 00:15:37] are just working procedures. Yeah. So some people would call them SOPs or documents. I’m not sure what Sweet Process calls their procedures, if they call them process documents but those are the isolated nuggets of information, the programs that are used to run your business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Okay. And then, so I want to talk about an example and I figured that will kind of demonstrate all of these pieces and bring it together.

Josh Fonger: Sure.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Talk about the wearable tattoo company and what were they experiencing at the time and the how the system helped them?

Josh Fonger: Sure. Yeah. We were just chatting before this call and there’s a lot of clients that I’ve worked with and we were just throwing, spit balling names of companies and this one in particular was a startup company. So she had developed this wearable tattoo and, this is years ago when this was an innovative idea and it was taking off, it was really high end tattoos that celebrities were wearing, movie stars were wearing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And it was removable though.

Josh Fonger: You’d stick it on, it would stay there for like a week or so.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: It’s temporary. Okay, gotcha.

Josh Fonger: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so we basically said, "Hey, you can’t do it all yourself. You’re going to need, distributions in marketing, copywriting, design, distribution, you’re going to need a fulfillment center." And so we just started to grow the team based on a clear strategy, knowing that she was the bottleneck and then document her systems. And that’s why she broke a million dollars her first year in sales because she knew that she was never going to… She actually used her husband, her husband was a good writer, so she was more of a leader, husband was more of the writer. And then they brought on a team that way. Once they gave the framework of the systems to the team and they started to generate their own procedures internally.

Josh Fonger: And it was as natural as that, and so I use that as an example from the small end, is that if you had the right vision and you have a product that’s hot, you can do this very quickly, which is was she did. And there’s also the opposite where you have a, a large company. And so we were talking about this fertilizer company I’m working with in British Columbia. And in their case they were doing $50 million in sales. They were already a large multinational company, but massive disfunction and waste because nothing was documented. So every time a person left, you’d lose that knowledge. You had different issues. Here’s an example because we’re doing zoom right now is their San Diego office love to use, I’m going to get this wrong. I think they use the software called Join.Me to do web based meetings.

Josh Fonger: And then their Chicago office use GoToMeeting. The one in Canada, I think they use Google Hangouts and then-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: There’s no standardized procedure for this.

Josh Fonger: Yeah. The one in I think in London uses WebEx. So they all use a different meeting platform and it was just like, "Well, we don’t even have that right," and that’s just a small example. And most people would say, "Well, what does that matter? That’s just a little thing." Well that little thing was started from not having a strategy that involved systematic solutions and not having anything written down. And the owner of that company, brilliant man, he said, "You know what, Josh? Let’s get down to the details because disfunction is gold and we are mining for gold right now."

Josh Fonger: And each little system was, we found a little bit of gold here, it was money that was in our business. We just didn’t know it was there. And so let’s just keep finding this gold and that’s the way I did it. So that was a really fun project to work on. Of course it takes longer-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s your next title of your next book, Josh. Finding the gold.

Josh Fonger: Dysfunction is gold.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, something like that.

Josh Fonger: Yeah. It was a great quote.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Because it’s true because you probably saved them, even they across, I don’t know, let’s say someone has a 100 staff, you save them an hour a week. Well that’s 100 hours, that’s four 500 hours a month you’re saving the company. If you multiply that across how much each person makes, how much money are they saving?

Josh Fonger: Yeah. And this is the example I’d love to share is it was a small parts factory in Michigan that I was working with. And so he, already engineering guy who’s been in business for probably three decades already so he’s an older guy and he’s like, "Yeah, this all makes sense. But I’ve been through a lot of engineering programs a lot. And I’m running things systematically, we’ve got a nice production crew." And I say, "Let’s just humor, let’s just try, let’s just some pick some system, let’s just see what happens."

Josh Fonger: And so he had a first shift, 20 guys in the line and they did a second shift with 20 guys in line and he said, "Let’s pick the procedure, which is a shift change, first shift to second shift." And all he did is wrote the procedure for how to do it, each of them was a one page procedure. Probably took him an hour of work to produce these two procedures, how to end a shift, how to start a shift. That was it. And they’ve been doing this for years. It’s not like this is some innovative thing. And I said, "What’d you find out?" He’s like, "Well, I wrote down what we should and some improvements, a few things." And I said, "Well, how much time did it save you?" And he’s like, "Well, it was a little bit of time here, a little bit of time there."

Josh Fonger: And I said, "Okay. So your shift changed. How long did your shift change used to have an overlap of staff? First shift kind of ending their workstations and second shift coming in and recalibrating and discussing and coordinating what projects they’re on and all the numbers?" And he said, "Actually with the new procedures, it was a five minute overlap instead of a 15 minute overlap in payroll in terms of the staff," and then we ran the numbers in terms of the team and how much we were spending per hour per person and the waste of time in overlap and he was like, "Oh, that’s $100,000 I just saved a year." He’s was like, "I wish I would have done that a long time ago because-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Just by going from 15 minutes to five.

Josh Fonger: Yeah. 10 minutes of wasted time for the staff every single day for a year, that’s a lot of money. And he just never really realized it. Then he was pretty excited about getting to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Mining the gold.

Josh Fonger: Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. I love it. What’s another key procedure it could be with a fertilizer company or whoever, that you saw someone, maybe it was small like that, maybe it was larger that they discovered. I mean the huge inefficiency of everyone have different meeting softwares they’re using is an obvious one. And obviously I love the examples. Even if you change a small thing, how much of an impact it could have. What’s another example, like what someone changed?

Josh Fonger: Yeah, I think this is a good one for anybody because I don’t think [inaudible 00:22:26] getting a virtual assistant, getting somebody to help you with administrative things as an owner because it just piles up. And this was a one for me and I teach this stuff, for years and it must’ve been, I think it was four years ago. And I get lots of procedures from lots of companies all the time. And there’s ways to automate things, but I like to see them, I like review them and give feedback to my clients. And so they’ll send it to me and I’ll review them and give feedback. But what I would do is I would take the procedure and then I would find their folder in whatever group, because I usually have 50 clients at a time or more.

Josh Fonger: And then I would save it in their particular folder and it would take me about a minute or two every single procedure. And if I’m getting 50 or more procedures a week, every week and I’m saving them. And every time I was like, "Oh, it’s no big deal, I’ll just save the procedures, no big deal." I did a time map on that and I realized I am just blowing so much time and I realized what my time is worth to the business and how essential it is. And a couple minutes here, a couple minutes here, that’s like 100 minutes a week, every week, every year. That’s a ton of time. And what if I had an assistant just save my files for me, which of course is obvious to most people.

Josh Fonger: I never thought about it because it seems so minor. And just doing that, I did the math and I was like, "This is like a massive savings of time and money for the business. Why didn’t I do this sooner?" And that’s one of the exercises we have all entrepreneurs go through is we call it the making time sheet. And people hate doing it unfortunately, but it’s very tedious and if you just write down every single thing you do throughout the day you’re going to realize there are so many things that you could delegate, should delegate, should remove from your life, but you just never took the time to see the separateness of your life, of your separate systems. You just say, "Gosh, I’m really busy."

Josh Fonger: But then you look at the way you do breakfast, you’re like, "I could do that faster." You look at the way you drive to work, like, "I could actually make this better," and then you realize that every single thing you’re doing, there’s all this waste in your life, in your day. And that’s where the freedom happens. But most people, they’re just too busy to slow down and be serious about the systems.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So just where should people start? Should they start with just documenting their day? I know people who actually hired someone else to look over their shoulder the whole day and write everything they do because they knew they wouldn’t do it. So they, I think, I guess outsource that process that you’re talking about. But where should people start and what do you recommend they do as far as what you just said?

Josh Fonger: I think that they need to start with, and if you would have asked me this maybe seven, 10 years ago, I would have said something different. I would have said, "Yeah, just start with the most important procedure, write it down, get to work and off you go." I know that doesn’t work for sure. Because you’re going to sputter out within a few weeks if you do it that way. You’re just going to say, "Okay, I’m on to something else." Because the results are in the accumulation of the systems and the strategy and if you aren’t going to stick with it, it’s going to fizzle out and be useless.

Josh Fonger: So I don’t even recommend people to try it because I know what’s going to happen. I think it really starts with a mindset shift and maybe you’re getting that right now from this podcast, which would be great, but then it starts with a strategy which actually has a bigger vision, a bigger ambition, a bigger goal for you. Because I know when I work with my clients, if their goal is just, I’d like to work maybe a couple of hours less a week and maybe a little bit better company, they’re not going to do it.

Josh Fonger: There’s no point in doing it. They don’t have a bigger enough ambition, a big enough goal, a big enough vision that necessitates you must do this. If you want to go from a half million a year to 20 million a year, you have to do this, you’re definitely going to do this. There’s no way around it. If you want to go from wherever you are to a 5% increase, well, then maybe you just tell everyone to work a little harder and you’re not going to go through it. So I think that [inaudible 00:26:37] the systems and having that strategy that requires and necessitates these systems is what drives people to finally click, make the decisions, say, "You know what? I’m going to do this no matter what. Whether it takes me six months or six years, I’m going to do it."

Josh Fonger: And it doesn’t take six years by the way. But those are the companies that it really make a big difference. Because this, this is not just a little systems hack. This is not just a little how to-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s whatever wants, Josh. I mean, they go right to probably three and four, the operational procedures and SLPs because if I just change it, what’s the one system that will give me back $200,000? But you’re saying, that’s why we’re I guess harping on this a little bit, if you don’t have the shift, mindset shift and in the big goal and the strategy, then you won’t have the motivation to do the other two is what you’re saying.

Josh Fonger: %100. Yeah. I wish it was that easy. And I used to be all about techniques and tactics and getting it done fast. But I just know it’s not worth it. It’s not going to last. And you’re right, we had to shift our strategy and part of it is we just say we only work with mature business owners. If you’re not going to be mature in your thinking and be willing to not chase shiny objects, we can’t work with you, we just can’t help you.

Josh Fonger: You’re better off just reading the top 10 hacks to productivity and going to bed earlier and drinking more coffee. I don’t know. Those are going to help you better than we will.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, I guess, it’s a mix of giving people a quick fix and realize the huge change and then giving them almost the foundation mindset and then the strategy. Because even I default to this in this conversation like, "Okay, what’s the key procedures that people should put into place so that they could save 20 minutes across everyone?" Even my mind defaults to that and I know that the strategy and everything is what it needs to be.

Josh Fonger: If I was to give somebody a key thing to write down, to really make the biggest difference, it would be write down every single thing in your life that you hate because you’re stuck into your business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s a great one.

Josh Fonger: And then depress yourself and make yourself cry.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s a good one.

Josh Fonger: And then put it on the wall and that’s going to be your best procedure.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. It’s true. But that also will create a mindset shift.

Josh Fonger: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: If you write everything that you hate that you just can’t stand doing.

Josh Fonger: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that is unfortunate, but you need to come to grips with your reality. Look in the mirror, you haven’t gone anywhere in five years. Are you okay with that? No. Some people, they are. They’re like, "Yeah. I think it’s great." And as you probably know, the stats, 96% of the companies never get over the million dollar mark." So most companies, they are just owners who have made a job for themselves.

Josh Fonger: And if that’s you, then enjoy it and that’s fine. But if that’s not you and you want to go further, you’re going to have to make a shift. I think part of it is making that list of, you know what? I guess I don’t want to be doing work on the weekends. I do want to spend time with my kids. I do actually want to do this with my spouse. I want to buy this to give back. Whatever it is, you’re stuck unless you do something different.

Josh Fonger: I think understanding that stuckness helps, understanding that there is a way to get freedom and then making a big commitment towards it. And if you’re not willing to do that… And I think also setting of the goals of I want to be here in a year, two years, not I want to save a bunch of time in the next week. Well, if your goal is only one week down the road, then whatever we do is not for you. And I would say, probably Sweet Process, the software is designed for people who want to invest in the infrastructure that’s going to build a great company and it takes an investment. If you don’t have an investment mindset to start, it’s going to be disappointing for you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. So first of all, Josh, I’m going to be the first one to thank you. It’s always a pleasure chatting with you and hearing your expertise and I see no sexier topic than systems because it actually makes things run efficiently. And it makes people more productive and happier ultimately to make things easier. When I hand a system to someone, a staff member, they’re so much happier because there’s not confusion, there’s not frustration around it too. So I think it’s not just a time thing, but there’s a happiness factor there.

Josh Fonger: Definitely. Yeah. Employees are happier. I mean, I remember when I was an employee, I worked at a real estate development company before I got out into consulting. And they got rated of the best place to work for in Phoenix. So maybe that’s, what is that, 5 million people? And the reason why they were the best place to work for is because they had documented systems for every single piece of their business. They were able to have me in my early twenties doing a six figure job for them, building large construction jobs because they had systems for every single thing. And they gave me a manual this thick and they said, "Josh, here’s what you do day one, day two, day three," on a two year project to create a $7 million project. So they, knew the steps and the systems.

Josh Fonger: And because of that it created freedom, it created responsibility, it created autonomy, created innovation, it created massive profit margins which yielded to massive paychecks, which yielded to it’s a great place to work because they can reinvest in their people and the community. So it came down to a strategy of building systems. And so I got to see that firsthand in my early twenties and I said, "Wow, this company is doing amazing things for their employees," and I had worked at another real estate development company across the street a few years previous and they had nothing documented. It was hellish, it was chaos. I worked twice as many hours and got paid half as much money. And so I got to see firsthand very young that, that there was a big difference between companies that are based on systems and ones that aren’t that’s awesome.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s awesome. So check out Work the System, Check out Sweet Process. Last question. So everyone, I would say listen to this episode and those four things and maybe start with writing down all the things you hate in your job or your work life because that’s the gold, that’s mining the gold. That’s the big opportunity that you have and will motivate you to actually, do the mindset, the strategy, the operational procedures and SLPs. Josh, any parting words? Anything else that we didn’t talk about that would be good to mention about Work the System?

Josh Fonger: I mean, we covered a lot of great stuff here, so this has been a great interview and I would, yeah, just say it that there’s going to be number of steps you have to take to make this change happen but just take the first step. The first step in my mind would be to download the book, get the audio book, like Jeremy’s going to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 100%.

Josh Fonger: And just kind of start to immerse yourself in it so you can change your mind about the future and dream big. Think big. It’s all possible. Sam Carpenter proved it in the book. He has got no degree, no special privilege, no nothing, just a few employees, and he was able to grow an amazing lifestyle and business based on his methodology. He’s just a regular guy.

Josh Fonger: He’s got lots of tenacity but just a regular guy, like most entrepreneurs. And so if you’re going to work hard, you might as well work on the right things. So I would highly recommend that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Check out Work the System. Josh, thank you.

Josh Fonger: All right, thanks Jeremy.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14 day trial of Sweet Process. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk free 14 day trial.