#376: How To Finally Get Your Processes Down On Digital Paper w/ Owen McGab Enaohwo
Episode Description
Owen McGab Enaohwo is the CEO and Co-founder of SweetProcess, an easy-to-use software that enables company executives and their employees to collaborate together to quickly document and/or improve their standard operating procedures, processes, and policies. Owen was previously the CEO of Hire Your Virtual Assistant (H.Y.V.A.), a virtual assistant service for small business owners. His specialties include business development, negotiation, operations management, and more.
Get Your Free 52 Sample Standard Operating Procedure Templates: https://www.sweetprocess.com/sweatequitypodcast
Connect with Owen on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/OwenMcHabEnaohwo
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
document, task, people, employees, process, procedure, manager, software, Nigerians, company, owner, production, podcast, sweet, build, income generating, create, parents, place, thought
Law Smith 0:09
You can have it not the other day my sister or his son we used to talk about back in the day was the pity party of concatenating all this shit. I have to do so much stuff it's social life. Yeah, I'm gonna get over. Yeah, you're gonna have to do Hello? Hello sir.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 0:47
I see you guys what's your what we call I call it singlets but definitely America they call it white beaters or what they call it.
Law Smith 0:55
I think that's a vestige of the past. Yeah. I always thought that was your name for like any white undershirt right? Tank top
Eric Readinger 1:06
shirt. A T shirt a as an Apple as an apple. You wouldn't call either one of these like your lizard. This is what gets
Law Smith 1:16
Florida borderline Yeah, that's a Florida. Yeah. So anybody not listening. It's one of those things were you take a t shirt and you make it into a cut off tape job to work out. Right It always looks really never looks like good. It's so hard and it's so hard to get it even on your own. Oh, yeah. What Oh, you want to be up to your nipple? Triangle. You gotta JCVD shirt I got I'm wearing our merch This is our swag tank.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 1:48
Oh, nice. Nice. Last year I checked out on the website. So yeah, so before coming in. Yeah. So usually
Law Smith 1:54
we usually people come in very, very rough raw.
So did you get to this point? Did you get to listen to the episode?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 2:08
So I did look at some of the episodes and just get the team or the theme of what's going on. It's basically you guys are you said it's a small business comedy shows. I mean looking forward to get some laughs out there and also educate the listeners as well.
Law Smith 2:24
Yeah, we want to be the the anti LinkedIn newsfeed right where everything's very PC and when you really get offline and talk to anybody in business, it's
Eric Readinger 2:33
Yeah, opposite, right? I mean, only fans, we want
Law Smith 2:36
real talk. Business and you know, I look I think we got if we really push this, this genre further, I don't know anybody else doing this genre in this from the stand up world at least in podcasting, man either. And then the business side. We're not Gary Vee. You gotta get in there.
Eric Readinger 2:58
Yeah, we get tired.
Law Smith 3:00
You say? Yes, I'd love some days because I know Monday's around Adderall.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 3:07
Yeah, you're gonna break down. You're gonna break down very easily if you do all that stuff.
Law Smith 3:12
Let's start. Looks like we're rolling. By the way.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 3:18
I saw it was pre recorded. Like okay, let's go ahead. Yeah,
Law Smith 3:22
we like to keep it works at all. We'll go with our main question first and then kind of work our way to talking about the sweet process. What advice would you give your 13 year old self
Owen McGab Enaohwo 3:37
huh my toe to self I will travel
Law Smith 3:39
back in time. In a tent Guillen Ted telephone booth. We can go back in time. You can get yourself by the lapels or the Polo golf color and you can tell yourself something.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 3:55
Yeah, it's tricky because if you believe in that whole thing of how time is you know, it's not like future past and present. It's more like a circle. If you if you go back in time and make certain changes in terms of telling yourself certain things I wouldn't be here today. So I believe that will cease to exist your butterfly affecting us. Like yeah, because I mean, like your decisions make you where you are today. So if you impact those decisions, you will end up not being where you are, at least this iteration of where I am today or this version of where I am today. Yeah, CCA T. Yeah, the thing Yeah. So we can get really crazy with this because I also believe there's multiple different versions of us in different instance, or different universes as they would like to say, oh, yeah, let's talk yeah. It goes crazy like that. Yeah, so
Law Smith 4:50
All right, so what do you can't you can't bear the lead. Oh, yeah. One more what do you believe thoughts? Do you believe there's multiple versions? Of
Owen McGab Enaohwo 4:59
course, I mean, if I believe okay, if you if you allow me to talk about my beliefs, I believe in God, right. And so if you're, if you're God, knowing that human beings potentially, you know, flawed creatures, will you just create one version of them? I doubt that you will create multiple versions and let them know different versions play out and see which one gets to be what you want it to be. Hence, Maathai. Versus
Law Smith 5:23
I never thought of this until now. Is there a god for every universe and then the convention?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 5:31
What was it goes above my paygrade? So I don't know but I just assume that you know, you have the whole idea of like deja vu where you feel like you've done something. How does that happen? You know, some people say it's probably because there's some connection to an instance of you has done somewhere so, but it's a bunch of
Law Smith 5:52
fears. Yeah. Well, I want to believe that why not believe it? Well, because I think it's stupid. It's more likely that it's something your brain it's more psychology based, probably the more likely it's having you know, I'm saying this is my most likely thing is
Eric Readinger 6:11
this. We're on a computer right now.
Law Smith 6:13
I'm not saying it in
Owen McGab Enaohwo 6:15
an absolute way we could be in the matrix to exactly all plugged in somewhere.
Eric Readinger 6:21
What are the odds are we get born and we'll get all the technology around us.
Law Smith 6:24
Wow. All right. So what I'm saying I'm not saying in an absolute way, like this is how it is I'm saying this is my thought process. It's more likely it's like the psychological thing of me thinking I thought earlier of dying now. No, I think
Eric Readinger 6:44
future and just remember that you thought the future is gigantic.
Law Smith 6:47
I do have premonitions, but I get premonitions every now and again. But they're always very useless. Show useless like I picked up a pot the wrong way or something is going to be explained right. And I knew it's It's nothing I can tell anybody because it's so boring, but I'll
Eric Readinger 7:05
go did you get that maybe like, expired like Yes that
Law Smith 7:09
one a year and I'm gonna clean that I know I thought about it. Sure. Yeah. Um, so where did you what where did you grow up? Like, where are you from this universe? You love doctors.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 7:28
Okay, so I grew up in Nigeria, and came here for I think was 2002 for college. And after college, you know, stadia got roped in by my wife, so I stayed. She was my girlfriend at the time. So yeah, decided to stay here and I've been here ever since. Yeah,
Law Smith 7:49
they put a ring on it. Okay. We recently had another guest that was from Nigeria. Can he kind of give us a good answer? Why why is Nigeria so entrepreneurial?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 8:04
Hmm. You cannot not come from Nigeria and and not be entrepreneurial. You just wake up and you go out every buddy is trying to get something and it's not as if he's in a bad way. So you you you become having that in your system that you know, you gotta go out there. You gotta you know, perform and get what you need to get. And that is good. And also there's also bad elements as well. And also, you know, most of the parents are always like, you know, on top of you for your education. That's one thing that Nigerians don't even, you know, play with the parents especially. And so you you know, going out that is a competition you got to go into school, take your schoolwork seriously. You come back and you have like, you know, a second out of everybody like your parents like what happened to the person who came first? Did they have a special head or special brain that is different from yours and stuff like that? And because of that you knew that you know, you have to always be stepping your game and that's how we are by default. And then you come here, and there's a lot of these in terms of the systems and all that that I set up in place here you'll begin to see okay, I can probably take advantage of some of these things that are in here and Excel.
Law Smith 9:13
Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of grit but I feel like a lot. I only know it from the Nigerian, like
Eric Readinger 9:21
the other guests
Law Smith 9:21
we have no, no, the parents of their parents. Like the kind of joke that they're pretty much Asian American parents, Nigerian parents in America like, it's like, yeah, well, they're very hard on kids. Like, but I only know from the American experience side, I don't really know it.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 9:39
Oh, yeah. There might be some similarities in terms of how you know, the parents behave and also it's very, like familiar structure thing where you know, this is just tight units to the family that's familiar bones and stuff like that. But yes, sometimes kids can't wait to get out of the house and beyond their home, back home for the most part, you know, you stay home, you're part of that tight unit. And usually, you go on your own when you're married. You know, usually that's how it is, you know, maybe teams are changing now. Do you find
Law Smith 10:10
in a very general sense that that you have opportunity because probably a lot of Americans are not have that that hustle mentality, even though they might tweet or Instagram about it.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 10:26
So there is the additional bonus of having that, you know, hustle mentality across the board. Most people do have and when I say hustle, people should not misconstrue that for anything bad. It's just somebody who Yeah, works hard and sees opportunities where people don't see opportunity usually. And so when you come here and then then you also you're able to see and identify things that people might be complaining about, or grumbling about. You just take advantage of it. And yes, things are not gonna be any easier for you just because you have a hostile mentality, but because you grew up that way. You know, it's part of the process. You just got to get in the grind and do what it takes. You know,
Eric Readinger 11:05
why do you think that is the Nigerians can pick out what people I mean, it seems so obvious. No, I mean, that's what
Law Smith 11:14
we're talking about nobody. You Nigerians it sounds accusatory, and I think that that's the question
Eric Readinger 11:24
that is that you're able to identify that, like the needs that people have, because it sounds so obvious, and easy, but nobody does it. I mean, we're gonna do it or like, Thank you sometimes
Owen McGab Enaohwo 11:41
sometimes it takes getting out of your environment, to be able to identify things that, you know, literally opportunities that you know, you didn't see before. Right? And a lot of times I feel like, I'm not trying to generalize but maybe a lot of times people will hear they're probably not traveled and so they're so used to how things are here. But, you know, by go exposing yourself to different cultures in different places, you begin to see opportunities that you might not see. So that helps with the fact that you know, we're coming here to a whole new different land, and you're seeing a whole bunch of opportunity, but is because you're you know, coming from a different background coming to a new place. And so your perspective is totally different on how you engage stuff. So that helps to
Law Smith 12:26
re re share a previous client whereas mucins over in periodontal
Owen McGab Enaohwo 12:36
periodontal, yeah, they have a videotape on your on our website. Yeah.
Law Smith 12:41
Yeah, I was I was on your site, checking it out. Sweet process.com If anybody wants to look at it, but
Unknown Speaker 12:51
But it's, that was okay.
Law Smith 12:53
Yeah. So this is just I was actually doing some pre production work and looking you up. I think when we have the 32nd but more than originally scheduled earlier this month. I was doing that research. And I was just checking out the site and I was like, oh, that's that's interesting. Yeah. I helped them I think primer 2016. Oh, nice. So oh, so tell us about sweet process. I'm guessing you're a work methodology guy. You're an ops guy, your automation kind of
Owen McGab Enaohwo 13:31
any of those things. I'm just basically su process. It's a software that basically makes it easy for intrapreneurs. Basically, management, even the managers anyone employees on the ground, to come together online and collaborate on documenting procedures, processes, and even policies that show how work is done. So there's one single source of truth where people can go online to find instruction on how work is done so that at any given time someone wants to do work and like how do I do this, instead of spending time trying to remember how it's done because that happens a lot or trying to bug somebody else to find information on how that how to do the work, which now is harder to do because people are working remotely. You just go to one single place and you can find the answer and on top of that employees can ever say I don't know how to do the work because before you assign a task to them, before you assign a task to them, it's based on an underlying procedure that you've documented. So as they're doing the task instructions is right there in front of them. So change
Law Smith 14:31
management blueprint, process blueprint.
Eric Readinger 14:34
I will be talking to you after the show. Yeah, I mean,
Law Smith 14:38
every every slide business deals with this at some point you know, if they make it to a certain growth phase, and they all suck it up and it's like,
Eric Readinger 14:48
how do we do this? Well, they're not here today. They're sick. Oh, right. Oh, okay. I
Law Smith 14:53
guess we just don't do it them or more. More than not, I've experienced the owner knows how to do it. You got to figure out how to extract that out if you're a good employee or gatekeeper, right. But I'm like, what if that person gets hit by a bus?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 15:07
Yeah. And if that person leaves the company, the whole knowledge is gone with them. And on top of that, think of you from the perspective of someone who's new coming to the company, and they don't have anything in placed on how to you know, ramp up. And so, onboarding becomes a nightmare. So that's a so there's so many different reasons why, you know, you need to have you know, stuff like this where documents are, you know, procedures and one place you can go find them from a standpoint of the worth of the company. If you were an investor trying to buy a bunch of companies in the same industry. Which one will you prefer the one way if the the the owner leaves the company, everything crumbles or the one where everything runs very well without, you know the owner because everything is documented, people know exactly what to do. You can replace people when you need to replace people I people, because everything is all documented. So it brings this this value to that as well. Yeah, so the company valuable.
Eric Readinger 16:00
Yeah, just like what do you say? Oh my god, I'm like my mind blown. Can we get a live demo? How do you do?
Law Smith 16:08
You can try for free on the sites we process.com It's the thing of, here's, here's how I go about it to incentivize myself. I don't want to use I don't want to have to create. I template as many things in my life as I can. Right? Of course, I don't. And once I started thinking about it that way, it will free you up to make those creative business solutions or creative, right creative creative, like
Eric Readinger 16:37
relearning stuff over and over again.
Law Smith 16:40
Right. I constantly put stuff in Evernote like, Here's how I did this or at one time in our office. I used to just as soon as I figured something out. That was difficult. I'd record me on Zoom, just showing myself how to do it. Speaking of time travel, like the future me needs this. I know that that I don't or if Eric needed to know it. I could just send him that in like a Oh, this is how you do this kind of COVID at work, I just ignore you. Right. Even if I hit play, that's a management problem on the interpersonal level, but but in a project management system, we're we're all kind of if we are all working remote, you have to have all these things set up. And if you've been on the other side of that we're trying to figure something out to help you help the company systematically. You might not know where to start. So is this like a not like a knowledge base meets like, kind of expert kind of community.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 17:40
So I would say is more of a business process management software, because for the most part, if you don't have basically an understanding of how you do this repetitive tasks, meaning that you've done this task, and it's something that you do on a recurring basis, then it's something you now need to have documentation for like procedures for any condition put it into a software like Oh, but if it's something you do, like once you never do it again. Maybe that's you use like a project management tool for so there's to add to a large estimate that needs to be a lot of these tasks that are recurring, and you do quite often over and over again hands Yeah, yes. Hence why you need it documented. One of things I would love to do on this call if you permit me is teach the listeners a framework on how to even document procedures regardless of whether they use reprocess or not. That way they look good. Okay. If you haven't done fantastic Well, no, no, we
Law Smith 18:30
definitely down give us a chance to work methodology.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 18:36
Okay, so, first of all, the listener who's listening to this, I'm assuming it's the small business owners have a bunch of employees and you know, you're you're trying to scale that the company and your institution where you know, you might be a bottleneck where,
Law Smith 18:49
let me let me do this for me make a wide net for the whole audience. Okay, good. You should process everything in your life, right? You're you might hook up with someone put
Eric Readinger 18:59
you just cut the man off yeah.
Law Smith 19:15
Morning this toward small business owners and I go, let's get your answers. I'm trying to make a case for making everything you already said that okay, well, necessary customer. Well, I was gonna make a joke and then he just stopped Oh,
Owen McGab Enaohwo 19:31
no, I want to I want to get
Law Smith 19:37
so upset. Okay? No.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 19:45
Okay. Okay, so let me get myself back in it. So you basically need to have these documents in place because you've realized that you are bottleneck and employees are asking the same questions over and over again. So the first thing you got to do is people will think okay, I want to start documenting everything. My answer to that is no, you don't need to document everything because there's this whole issue of tribal knowledge how we've always done things here. And if you're going to go ahead and start document everything, you're going to document some things that don't even need to be in the system in the first place. So the first thing I want everyone to go through is
analyze everything you're doing on a recurring basis, and then determine what needs to keep going that same way what you need to have as tasks you need to document because if it's something that you don't need to document at all, because you probably need to get rid of the task, just eliminate it altogether. So all you're left with is the tasks that are required and recurring right now we're left with a task that required a recurring. Let's break that down in Florida a little bit. So we have the income generating tasks, the things that bring in revenue, the sales and marketing related stuff, that's basically sexy stuff people love, you know, intrapreneurs love to talk about but on the other half is the production stuff, the things that you've promised your customers when you brought them into the things that you got to do to deliver to customers, the production side of things. So I would say instead of documenting the sales and marketing side of things, but it was just exciting. Focus on the production side of things, because this is where most of the nightmare actually happens. And imagine if you documented the income generating tasks, and you're able to come in and get new employees to come in and take over those tasks because now you have it all documented. Guess what's gonna happen you're gonna get more customers coming in into bottlenecks more headaches, right? Because production is crazy, right? We don't want to do that. So at this stage, yes. So focus on the production side. So let's now identify what is the biggest bottleneck of tasks on the production side of things. It might be the task that anytime someone tells you a how do I do this? It just drives you crazy or it might be one way is ticking the most time. So figure out what is the biggest, biggest bottleneck tasks? Start with that. And now people were gonna ask, okay, how do I document that task? What? What do you might know is that if you're doing a task on a recurring basis, let's say you do it every one month or every three months, whatever. If you don't have documents in place, you're going to spend some time trying to figure out how the work is done, because you're gonna have to remember how to do the work right. So I said the best time to document this task once you've decided that this is the biggest button it is when you need to do the task. The minute you need to do the task is the minute you need to document it. And people are gonna be scared like oh, do I have to document an encyclopedia right there? No. First thing I do is just document the title, the task and title of each of the steps as you're doing the work. So when you're done, let's say you have a 10 step task. Once you don't work in on the task right now, you have what I call a minimum viable procedure, which is just a fancy way of saying a skeleton outline of the procedure, right? Title, procedure and 10 step the title of the procedure and title, the 10 steps. Once you're done with that, how do you go from Habitat outline to something with details filled in with the flesh or meat filled into it? Well, you might have employees managers or people on the ground who you know, verbally trained on the task before. The goal is the next time they're working on a task for them to have that outline in front of them. And at most put in some details into each of the steps. It could be just some text, it could be a screenshot, it could be a video, whatever, just something so that it goes from that outline is something with some meat and potatoes in it, but not as much here because one of the things is very important at beginning of this project, you got to install in the minds of everybody that this is a continuous improvement thing where once we all agree that is a continuous improvement thing when we agree that version 1.0 Well, what we want in this case, version zero is not going to have as much stuff but we're going to keep adding to it as we go. So the idea is every time someone is working on that task, take that document that has had some additional information in it and add some more thing in there especially the things that are not entered earlier. And so what happens is every time you enter some information to the document, you as the owner of the company, you're kind of monitoring what's going on and you're reviewing the additional information that is added into it. So that over time that document goes from what I you know the outline to something with more details. As long as like why is it important that when they are working on a task for them to have that document is because a lot of times the insights that come with oh, we need to add this stuff that we're not accounted for. Or maybe now we go to a new better way to do things and we don't need to have 10 steps we can break it down to eight step instead. Insights happen when people are actually working on the task. So that's why I always encourage people to have the document right there while they are working on it. Right now you don't have for the first task. Look at the next biggest bottleneck. Do that dance again. You know the whole dance I explained earlier. Do that until you've gone through all the different production tasks have documents in place for each of them. Now you can start looking at those, you know, sales and marketing, the sexy type of tasks that intrapreneurs like to talk about and do the same thing for for that as well. And what's going to happen is at this point you can start bringing in employees who are going to take him on to on those income generating tasks, knowing that the production side of things is covered. Because at any time you can get employees to come in and take over those tasks. If you need to build up a scale up and know that production is not going to be an issue because onboarding will be much faster. These new employees will can even take on this production task, following those instructions, instructions that you have in place that you've built over time. So that's the way to go about, you know, documenting procedures. So it involves yourself and your employees and everyone on ground but let's say your employees might not have time to do this. They're also people call process consultants, a third party you can bring into your company and all they do is they come to your company to look at all the systems you have in place and then help you go through this whole process to document that procedure. So you also have the option as well where you're hiring on an expert to come in and do this as well for you.
Law Smith 26:07
How does that look
Eric Readinger 26:08
with sweet process? What does it look like at the end? Do you video how crazy to get with it?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 26:14
So great question. So one of the things we did when we first started SP process was before we built this was back in 2010 for we built it we wanted to make sure because there's a backstory as to why we did this interviews, but we did some interviews with about over like 50 or so potential customers. We were trying to understand the problem that it comes to when employees when owners of business are trying to get employees to collaborate to document procedure, what are the challenges or the roadblocks they they they experienced with this stuff? So we took all our findings and that use that as the means to build the software. So first of all the key needs to be simple and easy to use because let's face it, document procedures is not the most sexy thing to talk about in business right so now if this thing we know already going in is not the most exciting thing is hard to use because your software is hard to use. You're not going to do it. So number one, the software has to be easy to use. Number two, it needs to be a thing that employees, everyone is empowered to be part of it. Right. It's not a thing where it needs to depend only on the owner or only on the manager, every buddy who has access to the document needs to be able to see a change and make a change. So one of the things we free process is that even though I'm the owner of the document or maybe I'm the manager of this department and I'm in control of approving all documents, as long as you are part of this team that you are part of the team is reprocess. If you see a change, you can actually go into the document, make a change while giving the manager oversight, that oh, the manager can actually see the changes you make and then go ahead and prove it approve the document and if he approves the documents now there's a new live version of that document. And even when employees are working on a task based on an underlying procedure, if they come across something that was not covered or encountered for they can passively pass that information back to the manager and say, hey, you know, you know some step here didn't have this information on while I'm on the field on ground here. I'm seeing something that we don't account for. The manager can go ahead and take that feedback, build, you know, make the updates to the underlying procedure that the man is the person is using to do the task and that will be updated or the employee can be proactive instead of passing the comments by can just literally click a button and go into that document and make the changes. take screenshots, take videos so on I think we learned and this is very important. To answer to the question is that people will learn in different people have different styles of learning some people learn by tech like by reading text by reading some people learn by listening Some people learn by watching actually watching videos some people learn by actually doing the work and aesthetic learning where you learn by doing so why things we had to do was whatever you have in your industry process is flexible for you to create in a way that appeals to all styles of learning. So you can have text in the way I have screenshots you can have videos, and even importantly, people who learn by doing you can actually assign tasks to them so that they can go on there and start doing real work. And the instructions are right in front of them. And they are practicing their way to learn how the work that they're about to do is done. So all styles of learning is important for the software to cater to and we incorporated that into the software as well.
Eric Readinger 29:22
Well, I just got an email from Sweet process team. Yeah, we
Law Smith 29:24
signed up while you're giving. Yeah, but I want to check it out. You know, before we let you go and that was great, by the way. Oh, and you're you're not an ops guy. Not yet sounds a lot like traffic or protocol.
Owen McGab Enaohwo 29:45
And I can tell you how I came across three processes. So first of all, naturally, I'm someone who you know, I like to watch how things are made so people might know. See, you know, some like food now whatever and get excited by the food. I get excited by the you know how its manufactured. The process will make Yes.
Law Smith 30:08
Pick up produce. I go this travel Yeah. Through a different interviews to get to here right. How are they making money off of this right?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 30:16
I go to a restaurant and or like a hotel and I get a lovely experience. Like I've like in my mind. I'm not I'm not wild by the experience. I'm like, what did they do to make this happen? So that's the way my mind usually works. I could know behind the scenes, but
Law Smith 30:29
it's like a heroin addict show up in the back. Oh, I
Eric Readinger 30:32
don't do that in a restaurant. You guys yeah. What is whatever you do in one place, I don't do the lobbies.
Law Smith 30:38
I get my preheaters it's a power move. That's all that's the loading dock and target if I won't do
Owen McGab Enaohwo 30:44
so why I mentioned is is that before speed process I used to have an agency where I would provide intrapreneurs here in the US with back office staff from the Philippines. And you know, they would read these books like The Four Hour Workweek or the world the world is flat and automatically just imagine that, you know, they can get someone from a different country, different culture, different timezone to just come in and magically know, rainbows and fairies and just do all the backup work. Yeah. So so we had to spend the time to educate our customers that hey, in order for them to do the work the way you're currently doing it, there needs to be time spent documenting how the work is done currently, and then we can take it from there and figure out ways to improve it. But one of the issues I was having Dan was the software that was in place to do this was either hard to use the enterprise level tools and so it was difficult for us to use all the client all we were hacking to get a bunch of different tools. Long story short, I went on a podcast you might know Mixergy Andrew Warner's podcast and I did an interview talking about sim sim like similar to what I was talking about here like the framework for document and all that my co founder from, from Australia Jervis listen to the podcast is a program I say hey, I love what you're talking about. I beside you have a software I'm trying to work on. And I said dude, isn't just telling you how you know the pains I'm having trying to do this for my customers. Why don't we go ahead and build a software together. And so that was the story of how supersets got started. But I wanted to give you like, you know, the full story, ya know,
Law Smith 32:12
you're you're one of the best guests we've had cuz
Eric Readinger 32:16
I printed the transcript out and study it.
Law Smith 32:20
We have shared frustration, working in places where it's like, we have no process like please someone like I don't want to have to ask you like for something I didn't know it was gonna come up. Now my last question, you got some? No. Last question I've got is you're basically implementing a habit that people write when they use your software, of course, oh, how do you get them to do that? Because it's, it's like making a rule like if anything's on the ground, don't think about it five times before you pick it up. Just get in the habit of picking it up. Right. That's something I've had to like train myself, right. That's something I'd write down in the morning to train myself sometimes to get in that habit. How how do you get people to take that extra half second, to think while they're doing the process to document it?
Owen McGab Enaohwo 33:14
Okay, so first of all, there's been studies that say a habit takes comments into form of shaping the person's mind after like a bunch of 90 days right of doing something. So if you know that that's the science behind it. You the manager or you the owner, whenever whenever an employee comes to you and say, How do I do this? The answer is have you checks we process? Well, if you've not checked the process, that's the first place you should start right? And they go into the process type whatever query they think know how to do this, and it pops up to them and now is in the upgrade, okay, I don't go to my manager or my boss anymore for something I have to check through process first, over time of doing that over and over again. It becomes a thing where they now know if I don't know something, I need to go to the one source of truth to go find it. And guess what, see process where we build it such that when we keep searching and you find something? No they can see what people are searching for. So they know you know which way things are getting people's excitement and things to improve on. But when they go look at the data and see okay, what people aren't searching for and not seen. It's also an opportunity for the manager say, hey, people just search a bunch of things just now and didn't get any results. Right. And we're training them that go to sleep process first right now that's now a trigger for the manager to know, hey, I need to go and create that document. Because if it's so it was so important that the employee had to ask, not ask them but go into the process to ask search for it and didn't find a result. Now I gotta go. My task now is to go and build that document. And so that's what happens. They go there and check and never bother the manager or the owner again. And then with regards to how do we even get them to want to get involved in the documentation. So you were looking at a document you see that? Okay, your your colleague suggested some updates to it. And it was approved and it seems like everybody's excited about it because you can see instead of the comments because this for every document is comments so you can see the history of what's going on. If you're seeing that this company is a place where people are all encouraged to be part of the innovation and encouraged to be part of updating stuff. As you are reviewing these documents. You will at a certain point, get an aha moment while you're doing a task. And you will be encouraged to go in there and do yourself so that you can have your own say, into what's going on on the work that you guys are doing because all your work is documented. Now you can go in there and make changes yourself as well. So this allows people to change your habits. All this
Unknown Speaker 35:43
together. guy should have
Eric Readinger 35:45
t shirts that you give to the manager to say have you checked sweet process?
Law Smith 35:48
Yeah, I've definitely been that guy where you're like, did you look at the thing that was put in loves you feel like a dick the first couple of times, but it's just like the decision makers love that. It's almost a habit for yourself. But we'll have to We gotta go. But of course, you came up with a better tagline for your own site. You're the one source of truth. That's that's got to be your tagline, right? Like you said I mean, you said it kind of like with real passion behind it. That's all I'm like, What is going on at your side? I'm like that put that tagline. I mean, that is a centralized knowledge base. Right? Of course of systems. Thanks for coming on. That was an amazing explanation. Yep. And we can tell you're passionate about it because I don't think you took a breath in my technology. I
Owen McGab Enaohwo 36:40
know I talk very fast, but will you permit me so usually when I do this course, listeners, you know, I train them on the framework, but sometimes they won't have something handy in front of them. So we do have a 56 standard operating procedure templates that if the listeners one, if you permit me I can give them the link to go get it. Absolutely that's a great way to Okay, so they can go to Sweet process.com forward slash sweat equity podcast so basically your podcast name so sweet parse sweet process.com forward slash sweat equity podcast and they will be able to download it. Yeah, or where it's for for right now because I've not created it but after this interview, it will be live right away. So it's gonna be live
Eric Readinger 37:25
right? Like, maybe we'll do it later. Thank you very much. All right. So are we still recording? Are we good? Stop the recording.
Law Smith 37:43
Sorry. I gotta keep
Owen McGab Enaohwo 37:46
Okay, should I still stay online or you guys have another interview?
Eric Readinger 37:49
That you're good over? I mean, we're getting out of here. So okay, well, we appreciate it though. Me. I'm for real. I'm very interested in what you can do. Of
Owen McGab Enaohwo 37:57
course, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. It was fun. As soon as I get done with this call, I'll create an interview. The link I created. I mentioned so you guys can share with your audience. It's gonna be with you guys in 15 minutes or less.
Eric Readinger 38:09
All right. I appreciate it, man. Have a good day.
Unknown Speaker 38:12
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
