How Traci Bild Doubled Her Company’s annual Revenues for the Last Five Years by creating a Hiring and Training Process for her Employees!

Owen:  Hi.  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 on how they’ve been able to create systems and processes for their businesses which now enabled them to literally run their business on autopilot without their constant involvement.  And my guest today is Traci Bild.  She’s the founder and CEO of Bild & Company.  Traci, welcome to the show.Traci:  Thank you.Owen:  So let’s dive right in.  What exactly does your company do and what big pain you saw to your customers?Traci:  So I own a national consulting firm and our business basically takes a business that is struggling and we turn them around in our niches in healthcare.

Owen:  So is it like the management consulting type of business?

Traci:  Yes.  So we work with the executives, from the CEO, the owners, sometimes the board of directors and they reach out to us when they’re not hitting their budgeted numbers or their projections or they’re having staffing or operational issues and many of the things we go through in our own businesse, that’s what we’re helping them to resolve.

Owen:  And just so that my listeners can understand the scale of your business.  How many employees, full-time employees you currently have?

Traci:  At ebbs and flows but right now we have close to about 15 full-time employees.  Our revenue is right around 4 million from last year.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  The goal of this interview is to see how your businesses transformed all the way to where you’re no longer being involved anymore from day-to-day.  But we want to go back and see what was it like when you’re at one of the lowest points in the business and describe how bad it got?

Traci:  I love that.  I love looking back and sharing.

Owen:  Perfect.

Traci:  So what is the exact question?

Owen:  What would you say was the lowest point in business and describe how bad it got?

Traci:  Sure.  For me, I wouldn’t say it was a low point.  I think I’d hit a wall of growth and for me it was that I was maxed on time so I could only bill the billings as much time as I had to give because about 6 years ago, it was just myself and the company.  I was the owner, I did all of the consulting myself and I had a couple of kids and I realized I was burnt out, I was tired and there was only one of me and I wanted to grow the company but of course I only had myself.  So I was a one-man show.  So that was one of my problems right there as a one-man show.

Owen:  So the listeners understand, is that your business, what people consider you to be as your business coach and basically what happens is you go out there, you coach them and you have like group meetings and all that.  So you really depend on your time and that’s the wall you are talking about, that’s the point you came to.

Traci:  Right.  So people would hire me, I’d come in and speak to the organization, get them excited about changing their culture or changing their sales and teaching them how to sell and then after my advance, we would follow up into a year of business, executive coaching or we would coach their sales teams to success.  And I was doing all of that and I was just exhausted which so many people I’m sure can relate to.

Owen:  And you said during the pre-interview, you said that you kept out like two to three speaking engagements for the clients in a month and six to eight coaching calls per day.  I just want to make sure that reflect on that correctly.

Traci:  Yes.  So I would travel two to three times a month and I didn’t want to travel more than that because I had two small children and I make great money when I present.  But again, I only had so many hours and then yes, I would be on coaching calls from 7:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night every day, Monday through Friday trying to get as many clients and as I could.  And I had a successful business that is very profitable but it was stuck, I couldn’t get any bigger and totally plateau.

Owen:  Dependent only on you.  So let’s dive in to what exactly you did to turn around that problem.  Go ahead.  What was the first thing you did now?

Traci:  Sure.  One of the first things I had to do was ego, let it go and realized that it’s not about me, it was about the systems that I had to offer my clients to grow their businesses and they were proven, they got incredible results and I always had more business than I could handle.  I just couldn’t handle anymore.  So I realized I need to replicate myself.  I need to find somebody and create another Traci.  And for someone in my business being a speaker and honestly, I work with a lot of bunch of entrepreneurs, I mentor a lot of people.  We all seem to think that we have to do everything and we have to do it ourselves and it takes too much time to train somebody else.  It’s just easier to do it by ourselves.  So I’ve decided to hire somebody and start the training process and replicate myself.  That was the biggest “Aha!” moment that started the transformation for me.

Owen:  So what was the very first thing you did at that point now that you decided you’re going to let go of your ego and you said the first person you hired was Julie.  What happened to that?

Traci:  Yes.  So, what I did is I thought, “Oh my gosh.  Who am I going to hire?”  So I thought back to my own coaching student and I thought, “Who’s the best coach?  Who’s the best student I ever had?  That listens and did everything I told this person to do. “And I Googled her and her name popped up in big red letters which I thought was a good sign and she still work for a client, I could not approach her but I called her.  She had moved on to another job.  It had been a year or two since I coached her.  And I just said, “Look.  I’m looking to expand my business.  I’d like to add a business coach.  Is this something you’d be interested in?” and she was.  And I literally flew her into a seminar she’s doing in Detroit, Michigan.  And when she got came out to my car from the airport, I remember looking at her and she’s totally different from what I expected but I remembered she had really good ability to follow direction and she was very goal-oriented.  So I just went on that and it was definitely the right choice.

Owen:  So basically you got her in and then you now decided that you should train her on how to basically take over what you’re doing as a coach.  So you said during the pre-interview, you said you gave her some of your coaching clients.  Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Traci:  Sure.  So the first thing I did is I had her come to my seminar, see all of my systems that I train our clients on then I had her start attending my coaching calls, I didn’t pay her.  I mean, it’s just that, “Hey, come on.  Listen to this call.  See if this is something you would like to do.”  And for me, I think it’s really important to find people are passionate about what you’re doing.  And for me, it was, yes, I was going to pay her very well but more than anything, I want to find someone who caught my vision.
So I had her sit on five, six, seven different coaching calls and listen to me train and she got excited and decided this is something she wanted to do.  So she listened probably for a month and then I just turned over one client after another to her to coach.  And within about 6 months, she had my entire coaching portfolio that she was training and then I was able to take on more.  So we doubled our coaching business very quickly.  And I had people saying things to me like, “We want you.  You are our coach.  You’re the speaker.  Why can’t we have you?”  And I just started saying, “I’m no longer available.”  And you know what I learned is, people would say, “Oh, okay.  So who is?”  We tend to think that people would say, “We just want to work with you.  You’re the owner.”  But they were fine with that.   But once you make yourself unavailable and you start turning the role over to other people even though it’s scary, it worked.  People were happy to work with Julie.

Owen:  And not only that, during the pre-interview you mentioned how not only did you give her your coaching plans for her to coach.  You also trained her on how to handle speaking professionally.  Go ahead.

Traci:  That was the most terrifying thing, you know to have someone take training that you’ve trained up for 20 years and turn that person over to the audience and I know you’ve studied many presentations.  People are very particular there, expect a lot from presenters and I was terrified.  But I realized, I think I’ve realized at this point, if I cannot train someone to do what I do, I’m never going to step into my destiny, I’m going to stay small, I’m not going to go big.  I just need to buckle down (Gran and Barry?) and that’s what I said in the first seminar.  It was okay, it wasn’t great but what I realized was, it was good enough for the audience.  They liked it.  It wasn’t me but they were fine.  And today she’s probably gone 500 seminars.  People love her.  She’s a guru and she does 80% of our trainings now.

Owen:  Wow.  And since that’s the time to you, I think you also mentioned that now you expanded to like 5 speakers and 8 coaches?

Traci:  Right.  It’s about a quarter really—five trainers, we have bright people on the road and we’re down a little bit right now since we’re changing our business again but we had 10 coaches.  We’re down to about 7 because we are just changing the dynamic once again of what we do and becoming more profitable, presenting larger consulting packages to our clients so we’re not needing as much staff.  We’re getting leaner and leaner now.

Owen:  And during the pre-interview you mentioned that you’re growing now and you’ve added more coaches and you have a system on which like a hiring process.  We’re going to dive into that.  What specific systems you had in place right now in business and let’s talk specifically about hiring persons for instance.

Traci:  Sure.  I love it.  You are talking systems.  Everything we do in our business is systematized and our motto is, “If you do that more than once, it needs to be systematized.”  We want to be efficient and also, we live by the rule that if something should happen to somebody, another person needs to be able to step in and fill their role.  So in our hiring process, we definitely are very systematized and we’re very tough about the people we hire, making sure that they are going to want to do the fine work and the ground work.  So basically when we have a recruiting division internally that locates the individuals and they will do what Julie did.
So when they come to our process, it’s kind of on-the-job training before we hire them.  We get them to experience what the job is.  I’m sitting on the phone for 7 to 8 hours a day.  Coaching people all over the country can be exhausting.  So we want to make sure before we actually hire them, they’re cut out for this task.  It’s almost like apprenticeship training and I think we need to get back to that a little bit so we make these hires as business owners and when they don’t work out, it’s disrupted to the business.  So we put them through at least a 30-day process of on-the-job training where they sit on the calls with Julie and they observe, they listen for the first week or two and then they start to participate.

Owen:  I’m sorry I interrupted you.  Before we would go into the point where you’ve already accepted them into the program, you mentioned there’s a vetting process that it go through first of all and I’m starting to figure out, because you want to make sure they are the right thing before they’re going.  What is that?

Traci:  A lot of not fun work because we don’t want divas.  We want people who are going to work hard and that really want to work here.  So we have them do things that aren’t fun like mystery shopping which means we’ll make them call like 10, say hospitals or our clients are skilled nursing facilities, they’re assistive livings, hospice and help.  We’ll have them shop and act like a consumer and then share with us what that experience was like as the customer and talk to us about how that business handled our call as a potential customer.  So we’ll have them do things like mystery shop their future customers which not even you’d like to do.  It’s nerve-wracking.   You have to act like you’re buying when you’re not.  You are really seeing work experiences.
We have them read two of my books and what we do is we see if they take the initiative to actually go order the books, we make them pay for them and buy them.  If not, that we couldn’t just give it to them but we want to see if they’re going to take that initiative to spend 12 bucks on a book to actually order it, to read it or they’re actually going to do this mystery shop.  So we have about 6 steps, we put them through and really just to see what their followed through skills are.  And if they really want the job, are they willing to do these things that aren’t glamorous and are not fun because ultimately at the end of the day, their job is very glamorous and they are exciting as consultants.  But we want to know when it’s not glamorous, are they going to see these process through?

Owen:  So now they’ve come in and going through the initial screening process that they come in, in their wanted phase.  Are we on phase one now?
Traci:  Right.  So phase one is kind of seeing that they have what it takes that they really want to work here by kind of going through, we call it the grant work.  The work that is not sexy, not kind but if they follow the directions, then they’ll make it to phase two which is where they start listening in on coaching calls.  We also though as part of that first phase, I want to say, we use behavioral assessment test.  So we use a DISC Assessment, the DISC Assessment which we can look at what their natural behaviors are, their adopted behaviors would actually bench mark the best coaches in our company and we measure them against our best coaches to see what their strengths and weaknesses are behaviorally and that’s important to us and that’s about 30% of our decision.  If they performed poorly on the DISC, we’re probably not going to hire them.  That’s a pretty heavy factor.

Owen:  So now, are we moving into Phase 3 of the process by doing amount of coaching calls and shadowing coach?

Traci:  Yeah.  So we’re shadowing, yes.  And they can be on those for 30 days to 90 days depending on, we start letting them bring that process, start participating one of the coaching calls so we could see what advice they would give to our clients, how quick they are on their feet.  So it is, that’s why they get apprenticeship where they’re learning or observing or write ideas.  So we don’t seeing any much of client relationship.  And then the next phase is we give them a couple of their own calls and then Julie was listening on them without talking and then after the call, she will critique them.  So it is about 4 stages before they’re fully-built, certified as a consultant.  But again, our goal is that these people are going to stay permanently on this road.  It’s a lifetime gig as we say around here.

Owen:  What you mentioned during the pre-interview was that you also have an incentive for the coach who is training them to make sure that they are successful as coaches to get all the way to the end of the training program.

Traci:  Yes.  And it’s crazy but she would.  I’ll leave it to her to recruit these candidates and to vet them out, it’s very tedious.  People say they’re great as most business owners know but they’re not always great.  So it’s a long tedious process to bring in coach to full-time.  Once this coach goes through this process and had a full calendar which means she’s a full-time coach.  They can generate about $200,000 revenue for us, I give her, Julie a $5,000 bonus.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  With all the work.

Traci:  And it hurts.  It hurts to write that check but then again, I go now look.  I am growing [15:37] to see this through and it’s a win-win.  She’s trying and not me.  I don’t want to train them.  I don’t have the time to train them.

Owen:  And you said that all the training, just like when you went to the process, you also have like systematizing that checklist for every step in it.

Traci:  Absolutely everything.  Correct.  All of our training documents are in PowerPoint.  They’re all saved on the Egnyte File Sharing System.  And so, anything, you know, we realized that to attract great candidates, we need to be organized.  And early on, when you talked about these dark days, we weren’t organized, we were so busy.  We were just recruiting people and thrown them to the wolves, nothing was documented.  We didn’t have any kind of online file sharing system.  It was like, just get on the phone, train the best you can with our systems and go for it.  Whereas, we realize we’ve grown up.  We need great systems.
So now, every system that we train, our clients, even our coaching calls at 30 minutes, what happens on the first 5 minutes of that call?  So we outline what a billed coaching call looks like.  We get all the modules they can pick from.  So everything is in our Egnyte File Sharing System and organized for that new coach so their job is so much easier.  And then also, one step further, our entire company, we use to train the same things over and over and over and now what we do is we sit at our computer and we had it recorded.  We have recording software.  It’s incredible.

Owen:  One more thing I want to do is I want to dive into that section that you want to talk about specifically later on in the interview.  I’m just curious too because I’m trying to give the listeners overview of other systems that you had because you just mentioned the hiring system you have.  What other systems can you talk about that you have in the business?  I think you mentioned something about like Sales System, 5 steps.

Traci:  Of course.  What we do well here and I’ve learned with over 20 years of training is sell.  We know how to sell because we have incredible sales systems and that’s what we are actually hired to do.  So clients will call us because they’re not successfully reaching their sales goals and we’ll come in and teach our sales training systems to them or this package of consulting.  So we’re teaching them the systems for making an outbound sales call to a prospect that might buy their services, how to follow up their appointment planning system, how to really create a solid appointment, how to double their average sales per appointment.  So we’re teaching the entire sales process that the customer has to go through.

Owen:  I get that, that’s the offer that you’re giving the customer.  I was wondering if you also have a system, other system that you use within the business to handle what you guys do?

Traci:  Yes.  For sales, for us?

Owen:  Yeah.

Traci:  Yes.  So the software we use is Salesforce.  You’re probably familiar with that or maybe not but it’s an incredible program first of all that we have key performing indicators.  So for me, as the CEO, I can turn on my computer and every morning I can pull up what is our sales goal, where are we, the sales goal, what’s in the pipeline for sales and that software is critical because when we can’t sleep at night as business owners, I can just turn on the computer and see what our projected sales are.  And then of course we have a process as far as generating leave.  I don’t know how far you want to go but our system for generating leave is a 100% referral.  So we generate all leads through speaking at association events in our industry and then repeat client business.  So it’s a two map heads we use consistently to generate our revenues and sales.

Owen:  So one of the things I try to get, let’s say customs, all the guest we have on the show to do is to picture their business like a conveyor belt.  On one end in your case now will be, the association is trying to hire you on the other end, they don’t know who you are right now.  They have interest but they are happy, they are excited, you guys are going to implement their things for them today and now working on with their coach.  But we want to see how to do they go from that Point A to Point B and what are the different systems inside of the business?  Talk to them and move them in the right direction.  Can we talk about that?

Traci:  Yeah.  Excellent question.  So the way get our lead to be, when I speak, one of the systems I have is I have an evaluation that is like a goal.  So the end of every presentation I tell people I want a 100% of these evaluations filled out please.  As your speaker, I need to know what you thought.  At the end of that evaluation though, it says, “I’m interested in a new website, training, all of our services.”  I take those leads and I hand them over to Seth who is my Head of Sales and then he will follow up on those leads within 24 hours.  We are very much about urgency.  So we take those leads.  We also get leads from our website.

So most of us have the opportunity to generate leads on our website where they might often to get our newsletter.  We actually call those people the same day, they sign up for our newsletter.  We feel like if somebody is on their website, they are there for a reason.  So whether than just sending them our newsletter, we’ll call and say, “Seth here calling.  I noticed you’re on our website at Bill & Company.  And we just want to know what it was that made you decide to come check us out?”  And then he’ll ask to see if he have open-ended questions and the goal is to figure out why they were there which usually needs or having some sort of pain.  They’re looking for a solution.
If it’s a viable decision-maker, then we’ll move them to an appointment where we call in on our first stage of our sales process with our clients to drill down and ask lots and lots of questions we’re believers that you have to really understand where the pain is for your customer meaning, you have to get inside their heads and ask a lot of great open-ended questions.  So we have what we call Connection Sheet and it’s a systematic tool.  So we fill that out while we’re on the phone so that we don’t miss anything and we put in the Salesforce which is our CRM and then of course we use that to follow up.  And the second step is we prepare a presentation for our client and we use an online screen share.

Owen:  And in the presentation, is it like you’re sharing with them what solutions based on what he told you that you’re going to be offering?  Is that what you’re doing?

Traci:  Yeah.  We use free screen sharing and we go on and we do a live presentation.  They can’t see us but they can see our screen.  And so, we prepare the proposal then we do screen sharing and we take them through the presentation so that we can close it right there on the phone at the end of the presentation.

Owen:  Okay.

Traci:  And so, it is the same system every time, it never deviates from this method and it’s great because we can really measure and especially by using Salesforce.  You know, this is how many contacts we had, how many proposals and out of those, how many we closed and we have a very high conversion ratio of about 95% of proposal to close and you need tools.

Owen:  Definitely, and I agree with you too.  The person most likely listen to this might have a consulting business too and want to also figure out, “Now, I understand the sales aspect of the business.”  But there is the operational spot where you are actually delivering what you just proposed.

Traci:  And that’s the magic.  Yes.

Owen:  Feel free to share with us what you do in there because they want to understand behind the scenes.  That’s what Process Breakdown needs.

Traci:  Sure.  And I also want to say real quickly behind the scenes with the sales process.  You know, as an entrepreneur and I’ve been one for 20 years, it’s so easy to sell what we have and we have to remember in my true belief is, if you listen and ask enough questions, people tell you how to sell them.  They will close themselves.  So we have to stop talking.  Just ask great questions and listen more.  So that is so important.  And then on the delivery side, what we do is we create a project plan and it’s typically on Excel.  We’re actually looking for a new system right now, project management software.  Our projects are getting more and more complex and utilizing all of our different divisions.  But we’ll create a project plan with timelines and accountabilities.
So it’s so important that we over-deliver, under promise over-deliver.  And so, when we put that project plan together, then we have to assign which department head is responsible for which task in this project.  So we have recruiting divisions, marketing division, training division and a research division.  So we might be going into a market and doing research on a client and then we’re branding them as a company and then teaching them how to sell, even starting out entire training departments for them.  So everybody has the role.  So we work with the leader of that division and make sure they understand the client, we make the introduction to the client but one person sees that project through from beginning to end.  So the client really has one person that is their point-of-contact, they can talk to every week, that too and then with all the other staff working behind the scenes to make sure we’re delivering properly.

Owen:  Awesome.  I just wanted to get the listener to see behind the scene what’s happening not only on the sales side but also the delivery side of the business.

Traci:  Sure.

Owen:  And also, we are talking slightly early on about the challenges that you experienced initially when you tried to create systems for the business.  And also, I also want to talk the decisive challenges and how did you solve them.  So let’s get started.  During the pre-interview, when you started hiring people, it was a little bit disorganized and let’s talk with that.

Traci:  Yeah.  Well, I’ve always love to sell.  Some of the things that we’re good at because we teach that, so one of the things I’m kind of known for is, I’ll go out and get the business and then we figure out how to fulfill it later.  So you know, I might go sell $500,000 in business and we don’t have enough coaches that are fully-trained to facilitate that business.  So then, we’re stretching our people really thin.  They’re on calls, you know, coaching, they’re travelling 20 days a month.  And what I realized just from the down side of that is you’re going to burn your best people out and they’re not going to operate at their best performance.

So when we look at the mistakes and the learning, it is sometimes good… you know, there’s a phrase, “Ready, aim, fire.” and a lot of people do “Ready, fire, aim.”  I’m the “Ready, fire, aim.” person.  But I realized that worked when we were getting from, let’s say up to millions of dollars in business, that worked.  And I read a book long time ago, it said, “Getting to a million dollars is the hardest thing any entrepreneur is ever going to do.”  And I have to agree with that.  Once you get to a million, I want to just encourage your followers.  Once you get to a million, the book I had read said, “It’s easy to go beyond.”  I never believed it but it’s true.  Once you get from a million to two, from two to three, three to four.  One year after another, it blew my mind.  But to get beyond that I realized, you really have to start systematizing your business and I say to my staff, “We no longer are kids.  We have to grow up.”  And that sometimes painful but we have to learn new systems, we have to be more disciplined, we have the policies and procedures.  We can’t just, you know, fly by the seat of our pants anymore.

Owen:  And so the challenge is was that, it was not organized.

Traci:  No.

Owen:  That the coaches feel like they’re just being thrown into, I think you solved business now.  You have to go get the coaches to get in to deliver and that they felt like they are getting thrown into the fire.

Traci:  Yeah.  I actually interviewed one of our coaches who was unhappy and she was leaving us and I just said, “You know, can you tell me about your experience?” and she love the company but it really woke me up.  She said, “When I came in, it was crazy.  Nobody taught me anything.”  You know, she said, “I just had to get on the phone with clients.  I didn’t really understand what I was responsible for doing this.”  It scared me.  I can’t believe she felt this way but she did.  And we were so busy and everybody was just doing the best they could to keep up that we just assumed she knew what she needed to know and she knew our training system, she use them, we always recruit people that have used our training because they could speak from my experience but she didn’t understand how our business worked and she was very candid.

And one of the questions I ask my staff every single month, my managers is, “On the scale of 1 to 10 with 10 be on the highest, how would you rate your level of happiness with our company and your job right now?”  And that’s a great question I ask over and over and over because sometimes I’d say, “Oh my gosh.  I’m a 10.  I love it.”  Sometimes they’ll say it’s a 7.  And I’ll say, “What needs to happen for you to make it a 10?”  And so that’s how I found out about this break in our training process and her name happens to be Traci as well.  She said, “Well, the on boarding process was like a 5.  It was stressful.”  She said, “I was crying all the time.  I was overwhelmed.”  There was no organization, files were everywhere.  We didn’t have an online file sharing system done.  We didn’t even have PowerPoint really that they could use in their training.  It was just, come on do your best and it worked.  It did work.  It got us to where we are but it doesn’t work now.  We know better now.

Owen:  One of the things that also have people tell me is, it’s one thing to in fact systematizing the business or everyone started the journey to do it.  But then, when you actually are doing it, there are challenges you face actually and you just mentioned one challenge.  How did you stay committed to the goal of moving forward and you continue the progress in this new direction?

Traci:  Well, I’m kind of known in my company.  I’m a big believer of investing in training and education, of how I’ve gotten kind of where I’ve always gotten faster.  So I always hired coaches and consultants even though I am one.  I always would go out.  My plus is I don’t know how to do something.  I need to find somebody who does and hire them because my thought is, I don’t want to sit around and learn and take 5 years to learn.  I want to learn now so I can grow my company, right now.  So what I did is I hired and it was a big reach.  I spent $200,000 on a coach for my company and it was scary, it’s a lot of money.  It’s actually a little bit more than that but this time we’re adding new websites and everything.  But I needed the knowledge and I didn’t have it.
So I hired someone to come in and look at our company objectively and help me as a CEO understand what I needed to do to take my business to the next level and it was hard.  People wanted to quit, everybody was mad at me because it was very uncomfortable.  But today, we’re benefitting from all of the systems and processes.  So when you say the discipline, I like to hire people to hold me accountable when I don’t have the strength to do it on my own because I’m too busy.  Today I have a really great mastermind group I’m a part of.  I’m always part of the mastermind or have an accountability kind of business partner of some sort.  Not in my business but another entrepreneur where I can lean on and we hold each other accountable.  It’s really important.

Owen:  And you mentioned you brought somebody in to come in and look at the business.  I’m assuming that person came in to basically help to create systems for the business.  That’s like a process designer or something?

Traci:  Yeah.  Well, they…

Owen:  What do they call themselves?  Was it systems consultants?

Traci:  It was a business consultant and they helped us really to just walkthrough our business and create. I think a great coach I will say the answers are inside of us.  We just need somebody to pull them out.  So I would have weekly calls and they would just say, “What do we want to work on this month?”  We had a plan from the beginning of what my goals were and then just week-by-week, we had calls twice a week and then my management team also had calls with these people and we just walk through the challenges.  And then on a being that a lot of my managers hated this firm, I’m going to be honest.  Because you know, that’s why I’m the owner and they’re not.  I knew I had to see it through.  I couldn’t bail.  So I stuck through with it and it was painful for me too especially financially but once I got it, I know as a trainer that if I can do what they say, I am going to come out the other side being more successful and that’s what happened.

The thing we’re doing right now that could be of interest to people is, we hired a couple, a really smart intern but I don’t know his degree but he’s doing business workflows, he has masters and he’s doing business workflows on our entire company.  So he’s looking at 10 divisions within our company and is interviewing every person within each division about their daily workflow in their job and that he’s mapping it all out on CATA, whatever program he’s using.  And what we’re going to do with all these information is go around and look for redundancies and inefficiencies and see what we can further systematize.  I haven’t seen all the results yet.  The president of my company is working on that but that’s what we’re doing right now to continue to further our ability to systematize and get better.

Owen:  Let me see if I can break this down.  So the first part is when there was chaos especially on the hiring part.  You went out and hired consultants who I personally would call systems designer or whatever to come in and look at the business and help you figure out how to create systems like, I don’t know, if an additional framework of the different part of the business.  And then now the second part is, now you have a system.  You now hire, the internal job is to really help to come up front to improve upon the system you already have.  Am I getting it?

Traci:  Yes.  You’re correct because what happens is in that time, we grew our business by 300%.  So we needed new systems.  So this systems we had were kind of like what you would say, we call it Build 1.0.  This is Build 1.0.  This is Build 2.0.  We’re bigger, we have much larger clients with a much more aggressive workflow and scope and lots of the moving parts.  And it’s funny because I am a consulting firm and I think it’s important for people to remember.  You think I could do this on myself?  I go do these for clients everyday but I find that it’s really good to have some of an objective look in the window of your business and point out things that you don’t see and again, you have to put your ego aside and not to take it personal.  But in this year, what we did, so we have the business designers but then I hired someone last December to groom to be the president of the company.

So that’s Seth and he’s been working with me all year and I said, “Look.  When you came in, you’ve got to earn this position.  You have to step-up and make people see you as the leader.  They’re always going to look to me as the leader.”  And he did that.  He spent the last year really further systematizing, elevating all of our leaders, stronger, looking at our business and challenging us to raise our prices, to do things better and he’s done phenomenal.  So he is officially being promoted to a president at the end of this year.

Owen:  So we’ll also going to talk about in detail in the next couple of minutes about what Seth actually is.  So Seth is more like a Chief Operations Office or that thing?

Traci:  Yes.  Well, I’ll be the CEO but he is officially running the company who will be officially the president of the company, yes.

Owen:  My listeners always ask for resources.  You mentioned you hire this business consulting to help you systematize.  You converge on one point of the business.  What do you call it, because they might want to know.

Traci:  Sure.  I use, it’s not for the [00:35:40.06].  It’s very expensive.  So I use BBI which is Tony Robbins Company.  It’s better.  It’s BBI.  It’s a division of Tony Robbins Company and I work with a consultant named Trisha Ahlman?.  And I’m happy to connect anybody to her.  So I think in the last 5 years, I’ve used 5 different type people from coaches to high level business consultants in business.  So I’m happy to you know, I’m trying to think off the top of my head but it’s very important to vet these people out I do want to say and check references, not the ones they’ve given you, the ones you kind of fish out for looking online and make sure they really know what they’re doing.

Owen:  Definitely.  And so, let’s dive into a question where we talk about what systems do you have still in place that enables your employees to know exactly what they need to do?

Traci:  Sure.  Very importantly is how we have smart goals every week.  So every department head is who Seth and I work with and then our department heads work with their team.  We have smart goals which is just one kind of game changer goal that they have to share with the other division heads every week and then one of the actions are going to get them there.  So I use to set annual goals and monthly goals and I’ve got to tell you, we went to weekly game changer goals that changed the state of our business as well as with our different leaders.  When you have to really challenge yourself, what am I going to do this week?  That’s a game changer for our business.

One thing, it really makes you think and be proactive about how you’re going to manage your week and what your outcomes for the week going to be.  So we manage from those smart goals weekly.  We send out a weekly leadership update where we list the goal of each department head and where they are relation to, not just their goal but their various projects and we like it to be right there where everybody can see it in the management team because it creates competition.  Also we want to feel good for doing such a fabulous job and we want their peers to see.

Owen:  And also, I think you also mentioned that you have an internal eLearning platform.  Let’s talk about that.

Traci:  Yes.  That was a tough one to sell to my team but one the things I asked them to do is that because all I heard was people didn’t have any time.  We are growing so fast, we are training lots of people, they’re saying the same thing over and over and over.  So we created an internal policy that if it’s something you train on more than once like setting up your Outlook, your new employee to set up your Outlook.  You need to stand on your computer camera and we get this through an eLearning provider we work with.  The technology is out there.

Owen:  What’s the name?

Traci:  Sure.  It’s Redi Learning.  They’re awesome and out of West Palm Beach, Florida.  And as part of our eLearning platform as the CEO, I could set up my desk right now, hit record and I can record a message to my team, a video message and then it goes out.

Owen:  Okay.  And so everything is stored in there, the eLearning platform.  So Traci, before we got disconnected and now we are back, what I was asking was basically, what systems have you set up to enable all your employees knew exactly what they have to do and I think you were talking about an E-Learning platform that you have.  So let’s get started on that.

Traci:  Sure.  So we have an internal eLearning platform and one of the things that we have, the division heads of each department do is whenever they are training something new, we ask them to record it on their desktop and we use software where we can literally just record from our laptop, sitting at our desk and then they walk the training through the process.  They record it and then they load it into our eLearning platform so then all the training we’re doing is being captured, put on eLearning and then the time we spend with our staff can be spent coaching on how to actually use the training.  So it save us that’s a ton of time.

Owen:  You also mentioned how, like this training platform, what’s the name of the platform because they might want to know.

Traci:  Sure.  We use Redi Learning.  It’s in healthcare but I’m sure it’s probably the most advance eLearning platform out there.  People are looking for something like this.  I’m sure they could help them.  Just you know, it will look like, it’s only healthcare but they can do any kind of eLearning.

Owen:  So what also happen, is you mentioned during the pre-interview that it has the ability for you to monitor who actually sees the new content and then has the ability to quiz and test them to make sure that they know how it works.

Traci:  Right.  So if we put, let’s say I sent out a message from the president and I want to make sure everybody has watched that message, we could actually just with a click of a button pull up, have everybody watch it and if we want to apply a test to it with 10 questions to make sure they paid attention, we could.

Owen:  Okay.

Traci:  And then this can be done via laptop or a computer or anything.

Owen:  You also mentioned that because you guys I guess is a virtual company kind of, right?  And you have consultants working around the US and the globe I guess.  So the thing is you make use of an online sharing tool to share files.  What tool is it?

Traci:  Correct.  Yeah, we tried many things but what really works for us is we use two things together.  One is OneNote which is a Microsoft product that is great, like online file cabinet.  It’s actually it’s on your computer but then to share those documents, we use Egnyte.  It doesn’t know and it’s phenomenal.  So it’s like being the same office.  We can all go in and pull client information, training, whatever we need is right there organized.

Owen:  And you mentioned that OneNote has all the client’s information and anyone can stay onboard as to where the status is and like status reports for the clients.  Is that the good of having that?

Traci:  Correct, yes.  So in OneNote, we have folders set up and within those folders, we have files and we track them by date.  So any kind of communication we’ve had with the client would be in the file by the date of the communication we’ve had.

Owen:  Yeah.  Let’s talk about the meetings with the department heads, the weekly meetings that they have with the staff.  Can you talk about that?

Traci:  Sure.  So we have one, usually but now it’s Seth who is running our company.  He has actually being officially promoted as president in December but he actually has a weekly meeting with our department heads and they are held accountable each week to what we call “smart goals” and it’s just a very focused 2 to 3 goals that they’re going to hit in that week so that they are very focused and accountable to very specific results and we find out when we don’t have the smart goals.  As you know, people can be busy but not getting a lot done.  We want to make sure that they’re very aware of what specific, kind of game changer or bigger picture task they’re going to accomplish in that week.

Owen:  Yeah.  You also mentioned that because in your company, you have the coaches who are find space and then helping clients and then you also have the non-coach employees use the smart goals with them but it’s not with the the coach employees coaches to your client, then you have the different way of measuring results that they deliver to your customers.  Can we talk about that?

Traci:  Sure.  So our head of training Julie, he’s our Executive Vice-President of the Training Division.  She’s responsible for the coaches.  So she, every week has a training call with them to make sure that they are feeling really good about their job, getting updates on the clients and all these, she knows already what’s going on with our clients, going to talk to the coaches and review the results with them and all of that is also kept Egnyte and OneNote so that as the owner, if I want to go in and look, I can.  And then, their results are really tied to the client’s results.  Are we getting them business growth?  Are we solving their problems?  And she also does a lot of role playing.  With them, on a very difficult conversation they might need to have with the client that is not comfortable and she also listens in on One Coaching Call Week of our coaches, even our best coaches because we want to make sure no one is getting uncomfortable, that they are getting uncomplacent with their job.  We want to make sure they’re constantly at the top of their game and then she uses that to critique them.

Owen:  And since you have systems in your business right now that allows you to grow successfully without you.  What’s the longest time you’ve been away from your business?

Traci:  Sure.  The longest time I went away was 2 years ago.  I went and lived in France for a month with my family and it was something I always wanted to do and prior to that, I had been positioning my company to run without me and it was a really big goal of mine.  And I felt like this was the ultimate test if I could go away and everything stayed strong that I knew my job had been well done and I at least expected to work a little bit but they were so amazing, I never even had to work a single day.  It was amazing.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  Let’s talk about what the company was initially where you were handling everything.  Let’s see how the company or the business has transformed now as a result of systematizing your business.

Traci:  It’s unbelievable.  So it used to just be me.  Years ago, I would do 10 seminars a month which is 20 days on the road to travel.  Of course I did everything from bookkeeping and marketing and sales and speaking and coaching and then I realized when I’m getting kept out. I start to get burnt out and a little bit depressed because I felt like I’m never going to be able to grow because I only have so much time.  I can’t take on anymore clients, I can’t speak anymore and when I had my daughter, I realized that something has to change.  So I then thought I had to replicate myself and I know that it’s difficult especially when you’re a professional speaker and people want to hire you.  But I knew, you know, anything you set your mind so you can achieve.  So I started training someone to take over to coach as a first step and then I started giving her my coaching clients which allowed us to double our book of business for coaching and then I teach her to speak and she started going out speaking.

So today, I speak maybe once a quarter and my max is twice a month.  I will not go out.  For me, it’s not about money.  I don’t care what they pay me, I’m not going because I want to be with my family.  But we have 5 people that can go out and speak today.  We have anywhere between at any given time 5 to 8 coaches.  It’s ebbing and flowing because our business is changing on how we’re doing things.  But it’s great.  We doubled our business revenues every year for 5 years.  It’s been incredible.  We just went on Inc Magazines as fastest growing companies and I wouldn’t have made that decision, it’s still be something like half a million a year.

Owen:  Yeah, definitely.  And so now, let’s talk about your personal life.  How is your personal life being transformed as a result of systematizing your business?

Traci:  It has given complete freedom and I feel like we can be a prisoner to our business and I often say, we’re really prisoners to our minds because we think that only we can do these things and I’ve really learned that the test of a great leader is someone who is able to give their job to others and trust them to do it even better with the right training.  So because of the systems, I’m working in my business, I mean I only have to work maybe a day a week.  I love to work.  So I work in my company, building company.  You know, two days a week and I started another company and I’ve written a book called Get your Girl Back because I’m spending some time now about one day a week.  But what’s nice is I’m out of the pressure.  I don’t have to be in the office from 95.  The company is running well without me.  So now I’m really just casting the vision and I work very closely with the top 2 to 3 leaders of my company and then they just run the show.  It’s amazing.

Owen:  And one of the things you mentioned during the pre-interview is, how now, as a result of systematizing your business, personally you can also focus on mentoring other women so that they can obtain work like balance.

Traci:  Oh, my gosh.  Absolutely.  I’m super passionate about that.  And 10 years ago, I started writing this book and I finally like in the last couple of years, finished it.  And you know, for me, what I found is that, we always have excuses and we have so much great potential and for women in particular, it’s like guilt around being a business owner, you’re trying to balance your marriage, your children, your business, we live in guilt.  So I started mentoring women and teaching them how to balance their lives.  They have that work – life balance.  I mean, in truth, I built a $4 million company on 24-hours-a-week and I worked 24 hours for 10 years.  So it’s not like it just started yesterday and I had to get efficient.  I had to systematize so there’s no way I could ever done them.  Prior to my kids, I was working 60 hours a week travelling all over.

So I totally made the decision to build my business around my priorities with my family being first and what I found was, I was actually blessed more.  Once I’m really owned of priorities and stepped up and started building that business properly, it’s just I had found incredible balance, I had more time, I had peace, no stress, I’ve learned if I don’t have to check my e-mails every 5 minutes.  The call can wait.  So I checked my e-mail 3 times a day instead of every 10 minutes.  So it frees me up so much time.  So for the women, yes.  Get Your Girl Back is really obviously for women but I know you probably have a lot of women followers and it’s just really incredible to support them empower them to make decisions.  Sometimes they won’t do on their own.

Owen:  To me, what we just gone through, it just makes a sense to me where like, you focus on building a business that can sustain you first and then once you’ve done that, you can now focus on doing stuff that you’re more passionate about.

Traci:  Right.  And I’ve actually have to really get honest with management team and just tell them and finally even just this week we had the conversation.  Seth, he said, “Okay.  I’m running your company.  Go do your thing.  Focus on what you love.  Change the road of women.  Go be with your family.  The company is running great.”  Sometimes, we just don’t give ourselves permission so I said, “Okay.  Let me repeat what you just said and make sure we’re on the same page because I’m going to go do that.”  So it felt good to not play games and not try to act like them working when I’m not.  I’m always working and I love to work and I love the mind.  I’m a visionary but I’m not free to shape the future of our company.  Now, we’re very involved in healthcare.  So I’m really setting the hospital market and the healthcare Law and how does our changing without pressure while business is running.  So that’s kind of the future we want to take on with McKinsey & Company.  And then of course, I’m spending a lot of time on the Get Your Girl Back movement for women as well.

Owen:  That is awesome.  And so, with all these free time, where do you find yourself focusing more of your energy on now in your business?

Traci:  Between the two, do you mean?

Owen:  I mean, with the free time you have and not having on to be into day-to-day, where you find yourself in the most time on?

Traci:  It’s thinking.  And I always say, you have to take time to work on your business, not just in your business and I’ve done that for years.  I’ve always gone to Starbucks on Fridays to spend a couple of hours working on my business.  But what I find is, when you step into this role that I’m in and that probably many people should be in their companies.  We get more done, we take the time to think and strategize and even in working with my management team.  What I found is they always feel like they have to be checked and think off the list and working, working, working.  And I’m even trying to teach them, “You have to take time to strategize and just think and work on your business.”  You don’t always have to be like on your computer or solving a problem.  And so, a lot of my time is spent kind of shaping what’s next for our company because you know, we’re worth $4,000,000 now but we want to get to $20,000,000 in the next 2 to 3 years.  So obviously, I’m going to need to shape that vision and that’s fun for me.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  And so, the person who has been listening all this time to this point of the interview, what do you think is the very first step that you need to take in order to get started with the process of getting their business to run successfully without them?

Traci:  Okay.  So, what I would say is, interview their A players.  So if they have 2 to 3 people that work for them or maybe 50, you know, I would say, “Who would you identify that are your A players?”  Like if something happened to them tomorrow, this person would have the ability to step up and try to run the business.  And then I would interview 2 to 3 people and ask lots of independent questions about, “What do they love about the company?  Where did they think it’s going?  What are the talents that they have that maybe are not being utilized on a job?  How would they feel about stepping up into a better role or a more managerial role or the next level?”

So for me, it was, when our business really took off, it was taking the time and it might be 10 minutes but it’s just asking the questions to figure out how to leverage people’s talent in your business and then identify that person.  And then you come to agreement that I’m going to start grooming you to be me and you’re going to become better than me and I always say that.  I want you so good that when I leave my business, it does better and you make me look bad.  That’s what I want them to be able to do.
And you’ve got to tell them that because it’s good for their confidence.  And then start giving away your jobs.  So it might be one thing that you do, the lowest item on the list that you take your time but you’re willing to start giving away.  And then every week, train them on one other thing that you’re doing that they could be doing for you.  And I’m not telling like just little things like checking e-mails, answering phones but what’s a project that they could do that takes you 34 hours a week.  It could be giving them a couple of clients to serve that you usually serve, introducing them.  And then, as you build your confidence in their abilities, you can give them more responsibility.  The greatest challenge that people are going to have with this is thinking that no one can do it like they do.  You just have to let that go and say, “They might not do it like me but they’ll get the job done and it will free me up and the client is not going to know the difference.”

Owen:  Awesome.  Also, my listeners always trying to find out books that had influenced you the most and why?

Traci:  That’s a great question.  Well, the E-Myth is when I had major transformation and really started systematizing and stepping out of my business and you know, because it just made me think.  That book talks a lot about what’s your exit strategy and it really positioned you even if you don’t want to start your business.  After I read that, I started building my business as if I was going to sell it.  And even today, I have no plans to sell it but I could if that’s systematized.

Owen:  You want to have the options.

Traci:  Right.  And I want people saying, “Well.  It’s your name.  This business can’t run without you.  I could prove it can.”  So, E-Myth was huge.  I would say that one book that’s really important is John Maxwell, it’s Failing Forward.  So many people are afraid to take risk because of the potential failure and I realized years ago, internally, that was a huge fear of mind and that book just gave me permission to fail.  And my brother always says, “You’re so naive to failure.” and now I am.  I just go, go, go, if I fall, I go back up.  I really don’t care because something is going to stick.  So, Failing Forward is a great book.  And there’s another one, it’s called Zero to a Hundred Million.

Owen:  By who?  Who is the author?

Traci:  I actually had it by my bed last night.  I don’t have it here with me but what I love about that book is it talked about you get from zero to a million and it’s like a formula.  I use that.  And then when you get to the million, it’s like, “How do you get from 1 million to 10 million?”  I’m in that phase now.  But last night I was studying how to get from 10 million to 50 million because I want to know what’s ahead.  So that book is like incredible.

Owen:  I’m going to have to check out that book myself as well.

Traci:  Yeah.

Owen:  And so, how does anyone who has been listening so far can they get and connect with you and thank you for doing this interview?

Traci:  Sure.  My e-mail is my name, it’s tbild@tracibild.com.  My website is TraciBild.com for my healthcare Company.  My Get Your Girl Back, if we have women listeners or men whose wives have lost their girl, their mojo and they want them like to become empowered and feel good again and really just, get that girl back.  That is GYGB.com and that, for women is just incredible and they can sign-up for my blog or notes from me as a girl but I do want to say, you know, if anybody really is looking at their business and wanting to grow and they need help, I can’t get undated but you know, we could take a couple of people and give them an overview of their business.  We’re happy to do that and maybe help them.

We’re going to have to see what their business is like and we could just do that.  I don’t know how many followers you have, God forbid like a 100 people called but you know, I would say, he who has the balls to call, we’ll help, right?  If somebody wants to reach out and love to look at my business and give us a little of background on the business, we could just do as many assessment and tell them, give them some advice if they want to go further and look at coaching with us to grow their business, we could look at that but you know, I could point them in the right direction.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  Is there a question that you wish that I probably would have asked you and for some reason I haven’t asked all this time during the interview and if so, pull that question and then let’s talk about the answer.

Traci:  You’re very good and you’ve asked me some great questions but I love just to talk about business because it’s so fascinating to me.  I would say, the question might be, “What’s the biggest fear that keeps businesses from growing or being successful?  What is that big barrier?”  Maybe that’s the question and I don’t know if we address that or not but I know for most people I know in business, they’re always saying, “How do you keep growing?  How do you always generate sales?”  These are about revenue, none of us or anything.  So that might be a good question.

Owen:  Go ahead, let’s talk about that.

Traci:  I would say that, anybody that owns a business has to come to terms with the fact that they have to sell and I think nobody like sales, most people don’t, I love it but most people don’t.  They look at it as though maybe it’s sleazy.  You know, sales people had a bad name and it’s because there’s a lot of bad sales people are out there and they make good people look bad.  But the fact is, it’s so much easier to grow a business and people realize and that is, you just have to pick up the phone everyday or get in front your prospects everyday consistently and tell somebody else can do that but the fact is, I’ve been in business for 20 years, I’ve always had to sell up until this year.  I finally replicated that, it’s the final missing piece of my business.  I couldn’t find anybody to do it right and now I did but get over that thinking that business is just going to come, the phones are going to ring because the most cases, they’re not.  You have to create that business.  You have to make it happen.  And I would say, the business isn’t coming, we need to be out there getting it and it’s just so important that people understand that.  I know sales really are helping people get what they want.  So ask lots of great questions.  What is that people need?  What do they want?  Where’s their pain?  And then show them how to get a solution through your product or service.

Owen:  That’s awesome.  And so now, I’m speaking to you, the listener right now.  If you’ve enjoyed this interview and you feel it was awesome, please leave us a positive review on iTunes and the way to do that is to go to SweetProcess.com/iTunes.  Two reasons to leave us a positive review, first of all, you’re going to get more people interested in this podcast, the more people interested in it, the more exposure we get and the more guest we can also get because people want to get interviewed with their business systematized like Traci’s business.  And not only that, when you check out the link I just gave you, feel free to subscribe so that anytime we have new interviews, you will be aware.  And one more thing, if you have find this interview useful, please share it with another entrepreneur that you know and finally, I want to offer you a free access to the 14-day trial of Sweet Process.  If you are at that point of your business where you’re tired of being the bottleneck and that you’re the only one that knows how stuff gets done, please sign up for a free 14 day trial of Sweet Process.  Traci, thank you very much for doing this interview.

Traci:  Thanks.  I feel like I know you.  So thanks for inviting me on.  Let me know if I can help you any other time.  I enjoyed it.  It’s a lot of fun.

Owen:  Thank you very much.  I had to run a long [01:01:52].  It didn’t go as I plan but anyways, it was wonderful.

Traci:  That’s great.

Owen:  And we’re done.

Traci:  All right.  I’m glad that recorded.