Here’s the cleaned-up transcript with timestamps and “Unknown” labels removed:

A lot of times we work with companies that within visibility, they may have. And this is a natural part of the way companies grow is business owners have grown and they hit a problem where they’ve needed to add a new part of their business, add a new process, add a new team, and they need something to help organize that team. So maybe they build an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe they buy a new tool and they come, they realize they wake up one day, they realize I’ve got ten different tools running my business. And to get the answer of how is my business running from A to Z? It takes my team a week to put the answer together. They don’t have clear visibility at a glance on how their business is running.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslow motion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life.

Sam: I’m your host, Sam Donaghy. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Fast Slow Motion’s Director of Growth, Michael Johnson. Michael, it’s so good to see you today.

Michael: Sam, it’s great to be here again. Second time. Excited to be invited back. I’m glad I didn’t ruin things the first time.

Sam: Well, Michael, you know, growing a business is not easy, right? In fact, growth is really hard for companies to achieve. Scale in a business requires the proper strategy. You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or a publicly traded company. The challenge remains the same. The scale, the business and you’ve had the opportunity to help hundreds of business leaders scale their businesses. And it doesn’t just happen by accident. For the most part, there’s a process. You need to be intentional, you need to have foresight, and most importantly, you need to be able to execute on the strategy. So in today’s episode, you’re going to be unpacking the scalable business framework and helping people to systematically scale their business. So firstly, how did you come up with the concept of the scalable business framework?

Michael: That’s a great question. What we do at Fast Slow Motion is really help businesses build systems, scalable systems to scale their business, to grow their business. Thinking about our process and the things we do, the things we help people with — over, like you said, hundreds of clients — the scalable business framework is really a good distillation of that process that we do every day and the concepts that we think about without even consciously really thinking about them as concepts, in order to set businesses up to scale and grow. It’s like a sense of observation across several hundred clients, and it really comes down to three core principles that we found after working with hundreds of clients. A scalable business has three things in place: processes, automation, and visibility. Processes, automation, and visibility — those three core components are the scalable business framework.

And what makes it scalable is that it’s iterative. We use that visibility principle to understand our progress and what we’re learning, and that goes back to the processes to adjust them and then continue the scalable portion. So we’re always learning, we’re always iterating across our processes, we’re automating, we’re checking out the results through visibility — internal and external — and we’re making adjustments, and that’s blessed scale.

One of the analogies that I use all the time for the scalable business framework is the human body. Within our body we have multiple systems. The first is the musculoskeletal system, like your muscles and your bones. This is like processes in a business — without your bones and your muscles, you can’t really do anything as a human. You can’t go out and go to the store, much less work or do anything. You’d be an amoeba. And same with the business — if you don’t have solid processes, you couldn’t function as a business. There’s no chance you would even have a chance to grow and scale.

The next, with automation, that’s similar to the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the body that controls your respiratory rate, your heart rate, your breathing, your digestion — the critical functions in your body. But you don’t think about it. They’re on autopilot. And that’s the beauty of the system — these things are needed for survival. But you and I are sitting here and we’re not thinking about it. I’m not thinking about the breakfast smoothie I just had — it’s digesting. And so I can really have this conversation.

But a lot of times in business, we work with clients where these critical functions for their business are not automated. They’re thinking through these critical things they have to do as a business — consciously going through them every day. And so what happens? They can’t function at a higher level. They can’t achieve higher-order tasks. The people are really stuck working on things that are highly repetitive, critical functions, but things that could potentially be automated.

So you’ve got processes as the foundation — your musculoskeletal system. You’ve got your automation as your autonomic nervous system. And then visibility — that’s your senses, your five senses, your taste, touch, smell, all of that. That’s the ability to see the external world, the internal world, make adjustments. I touched a hot stove — I’m going to move my hand, right? Same with the business. We can look at external data, internal data, get results, and then based on that we adjust our process. That’s what makes it iterative, that’s what makes it scalable, and that’s what makes it a powerful model within the scalable business framework.

Sam: Yeah, and it’s such a powerful analogy to use, really, because you can visualize it — particularly for a layman. But thank you so much for that definition of the framework. So could you give us some examples that you’ve commonly seen where a business has one or more deficits of the three principles that you mentioned?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. One thing to really point out about the model is if you have a deficit in processes, automation, or visibility, you’re going to essentially stunt your ability to grow. And the model’s a really good way to look at a business analytically — through a lens — and see how much you’re cutting yourself off, or how you’re setting yourself back from growing.

We work with businesses frequently that come to us and maybe they don’t have their processes well-defined. They don’t have very prescriptive processes. They’re afraid of being what they would say is “too rigid” because they want to give their employees freedom. And what they don’t realize is that by giving their employees a defined process — giving their team a defined process — they create freedom for their team to execute well, because their team wants to do well. And they create freedom in their business by guaranteeing the results and giving themselves the ability to grow and expand.

I kind of gave you an example of automation earlier, but again, we work with businesses that maybe are afraid of automation or they’re afraid of losing the human touch. They want to continue to write every email. And I understand that — there’s a way to balance automation, because certainly one of the values that people have is the human touch and connection. And so we can automate the right way and the right things, but still get the benefit of that automation to extend that baseline that good processes give.

And a lot of times we work with companies that within visibility — and this is a natural part of the way companies grow — business owners have grown and they hit a problem where they’ve needed to add a new part of their business, add a new process, add a new team, and they need something to help organize that team. So maybe they build an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe they buy a new tool. And they realize — they wake up one day and realize — I’ve got ten different tools running my business. And to get the answer of how is my business running from A to Z, it takes my team a week to put the answer together. They don’t have clear visibility at a glance on how their business is running, and their team doesn’t have a clear idea on how they’re measuring up to a benchmark within each part because everything’s so disparate — the data is disconnected.

So that’s a frequent problem we see. And so we work to bring everything onto a single platform. We use Salesforce and HubSpot as those platforms, to bring everything onto a single platform so the business can continue to grow and scale.

Sam: Okay, so great examples there for each. Why don’t we unpack each of the principles a little bit deeper. Tell us more firstly then about process. What can you tell us about process and why is it one of the principles?

Michael: Well, first, Sam, I wish I could say “process” as cool as you — I’m not going to try. Process is critical. Process comes first for a reason, because it is the foundation and you’ve got to have good processes to run a business well. Without good processes, you get a lot of variance in how the operations are executed within a business. When you have variance, it’s difficult to repeat results. And let’s say one day if you’re a business owner, you want to exit the business — that’s one of the first things that companies looking to buy look at: how repeatable are your results? Because they want to guarantee good results in the future. But if you don’t have repeatable processes, repeatable results, if your systems and the way you operate are highly dependent on the internal knowledge of team members, then that’s not an attractive model for a buyer and that’s not a growing, scalable business.

And so it’s important to take all this internal knowledge, all this expertise, and really work with the team to build a system, because it’s the way you can repeat your success.

Sam: I suppose a follow-up question for that would be how do you know that your process is working, and to what percentage would you say a process is well-defined and you’re executing it well? Like, is it 70% of the time you win business? Or is it like 100%? What are the metrics? How do we define that?

Michael: That’s a really good question. And I think a lot of people, when they get here, they put up this barrier before they define the process because they’re afraid they don’t have all the details. And it’s important to just get out there — don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get started. Get the process defined and see if it works. And if it doesn’t work, you can always adjust it. But if you work with your team and you get the results — I mean, I think it’s this “good enough to move on” principle.

If you get a process defined that covers 80% of your use case and you can manage the other 20%, I think that’s great. You’re going to correct that in improvement. Really, if you think about what a process is — it’s a series of steps towards a goal. We’re proactive. We think about how critical it is to define our processes. So we set aside time for it — that’s the first step. It’s just getting started. And then we think about the end goal: what do we want to accomplish? Now that we have our goal identified, what are the steps to get there? We work backwards. We think about what are the ideal steps along the path to get there. We define it. We work with our team to fill in gaps and cover details, and that lets us really define that good first draft of that process.

And the reason this is important — the consistency that you get by defining this process and following through with it — consistency really compounds. Teams get better the more they work a process, and you’re going to get 1% better every single day. You’re going to learn things along the way that are going to improve this process. So it’s important to get it started and just knock those edges off — round that process off — because it’s never going to be perfect. If you feel like you’ve got the perfect process outlined, you’re missing something. There’s always a way to improve. So just get it out there and get started.

The reason I think it’s really important to mention this earlier is it provides clear direction for your team. Process is a way to be kind to your team. Clarity is kindness. And having a really defined, prescriptive, detailed process so your team knows exactly how to execute — it’s a breath of fresh air for them. They can come in, knock it out, and know that if they follow these steps, 80–85% of the time it’s going to be successful. Yeah, the other 15% — they’re going to get help with.

And again, I can’t emphasize enough partnering with your team, letting this process be collaborative, giving them the freedom to say, “Hey, step three here — we’re missing this detail,” or “Step four — sometimes this doesn’t quite work,” and just continuing to update that process. This really establishes a baseline and allows you to build your company to scale. It allows you to guarantee these results. And so we can then move on to the rest of the framework towards automation and extend that baseline even more. But you’ve got to have that foundational layer before we move on to the next principle.

Sam: When it comes to working with our clients, what are the steps or the stages that we use to help our own clients create effective business processes?

Michael: I think it really starts with helping them identify what the end goal is and helping them work through this collaborative process of defining the steps. We help them figure out what the ideal behavior is to accomplish the goal — not just the steps itself. On a business process like a sales process, when we think about a sales process, we think: discovery call, go to proposal, send the proposal, close the deal. Okay — that’s just your sales process in a nutshell. But there are so many behaviors and things that you want the team to do ideally throughout that process that may not be just those single steps. There are certain emails you want to send, certain internal processes, and some ways you want to build documentation — that needs to be defined as well.

And so we work with teams to pull all those details out and put them in Salesforce or HubSpot — in a system that’s highly customizable, that can grow — and put them in a place where the team can easily access. And the other thing to think about with ideal process and ideal path is data integrity — the availability of the data and making sure that you capture everything you need in the process so that you can measure it later.

This means that along the way we’re requiring data checkpoints for the team. Going back to that sales process analogy — if someone says they’ve had the discovery call and they want to build a proposal, what do we need to know from the discovery call? What’s the client’s goal? What’s their timeframe? What’s their budget? Requiring that data from the team. And then — what do we need to get started on the proposal side? Well, you may need a sales engineer, so requiring a sales engineer to be assigned. You may need a template to begin to fill out, so requiring a template. And so these are what we would call entry criteria and exit criteria between stages. Capturing this data allows you to cohesively accomplish the process well, but also allows you to capture data that you can report on later in aggregate — understand how your process is running, where you may have leaks in your pipeline, and why you’re winning and why you’re losing. Those are critical things to know.

Those are some of the ways we help. We pull out detail, we require data, we have them understand the behavioral portions and ideal path. And lastly, I think we identify bottlenecks — we help them identify constraints and really highlight those. Sometimes you’re just going to have those, and we can use automation or other parts of the framework to really bolster that and make those less of a risk. But you’re going to have constraints and bottlenecks. So let’s identify them and build tools around them to support the business and help it grow.

Sam: I suppose a follow-up question would be how often do you see clients or businesses in general that are trying to build technology on bad processes? And how often do you come in and help clients to build better processes? Is that a common occurrence?

Michael: We’re blessed to work with clients that I would say about half the time have really good processes and understand the need for a scalable system, and they just want to build something better. Or maybe they come to us and it’s well-defined and they just need some help with best practices in building it the right way.

A lot of times though, we work with clients that are starting from scratch and maybe the process isn’t as defined — maybe it’s in a spreadsheet, maybe it’s not laid out. I’ll give you an example — I worked with a client one time, a CEO, who knew the process and had growth ambitions, but the way he was running the process was essentially a deal spreadsheet. He had this one spreadsheet where everybody was supposed to go in and enter the deals they were working on, follow up, and give updates on the spreadsheet, and then he would look at the results. Well, what he found was: we got a lot of new deals and then we got a lot of closed deals. We didn’t have anything in between. The team wasn’t tracking anything in between because there was nothing holding them accountable to track.

Each salesperson had a different process and the way they went about it. So part of it was working with the sales team, working with him, identifying what the actual process is, setting it in stone. We built it in Salesforce for them, and then with that, at any point you could see deals in stage one, stage three, stage four, whatever it is. And he understood the full pipeline. Not only did he not have visibility into what the pipeline was — we discovered there were seven different versions of the spreadsheet floating around. And so we were able to really standardize key data in one place, define the process, and get them off to the races.

I’d say about half of our clients have a well-defined process. Some of them we help because they just built the plane as they flew it — this is where business owners are — and they just need some help, some best practices, and stepping back to get that defined.

Sam: And a client like that, I mean, the scalable business framework is going to be absolutely transformative, isn’t it. Super interesting. Well, look, let’s move on to the next principle, which is automation. So why have you included this as one of the principles? Let’s unpack automation.

Michael: Automation is a critical part of the framework that gets overlooked. It’s an undervalued portion of the framework, but there’s a lot of power in automation. And a lot of times when we talk about automation, people are a little hesitant — maybe they’re thinking AI, maybe they’re thinking an expensive integration with a system. But there are really simple things that you can do to automate within a business that add a tremendous amount of benefit.

But foundationally, you’ve got to have good process first. This is why automation is number two. If you automate a bad process, you get a lot more bad to automate. Automate a good process, you get a lot of good. And automation is a way to extend that baseline. We talk about that 80–85% within processes — automation is a way to extend that baseline and maybe get to 90%, 95%. It guarantees your results just a little bit further. And so it makes the process and the whole business operations even more guaranteed.

Sam: So as you mentioned, automation built on processes increases the results. So how would you help a business to build effective automation that yields good results?

Michael: I think really helping the business to see the vision first of what automation can do. I talked about the benefits and extending the baseline, but honestly, making it easy for their team is a huge benefit. We’ve just gone through this process of building a very detailed, descriptive diagram of what they need to do, and that can seem pretty hard. And so helping them see — all right, let’s go through this and figure out what we can automate to make it really easy for the team. We want to empower the team by making their work enjoyable so that they can continue to execute well and enjoy what they do. And most importantly, we can get more value out of them.

This is where the balance between efficiency and effectiveness comes in. A lot of folks think about automation and they think, “Oh, we’re just going to make everything more efficient — things faster, get more things done in less time.” And that’s true. But the question — the balance — is we want to build effectiveness. We want to build the ability for the team to put their time and focus on value-added activities that move the needle for the business. And automation is a huge part of that. We help focus the team’s time. We take away a lot of the mundane, repetitive activity — we automate it — so that the team can actually rise above.

Going back to the analogy on the nervous system, we help them focus less on the heart rate and the breathing, and more on how much value they can add as a team. So we look at the process and we say: where are the constraints? What can we automate around those? What’s repeatable? Where do we need additional data? What kind of communication do we need to automate? What behaviors do we need to automate? And so we take a look at that and rebuild it out. It could be a workflow within Salesforce, a flow or workflow within HubSpot. It could be something as simple as an email template or a quote template.

We work with folks that are typing every quote email, building every quote template every time. We can build processes and systems that allow that stuff to be — I would say like 95% — the same, and then we customize a little bit for the client for specificity. That saves so much time. So that’s how we help businesses — we dive in, we look at what’s repeatable, what can be pulled off the team’s shoulders so they can continue to deliver value.

Sam: And then how would you measure the impact of the automation on the company’s efficiency, effectiveness, and ultimately that growth? What are the metrics that you’re looking at once this is implemented?

Michael: That’s something that on the visibility side of the framework we’re going to measure a lot. But we want to find out what are the critical metrics for the business overall. That’s defined in process, and we’ll come back to it in automation. We want to know what the critical metrics are because we need to know what to capture. So we define that process and everything we do in automation should help us accomplish those metrics. It should help us honestly just get more revenue — and that’s what businesses need. We can focus on a lot of things. We could focus on speed of the deal cycle, or we could focus on close rate. We could focus on a lot of stuff as a business, and all that’s good. But we just need more revenue.

The lifecycle of the deal, the length of time, the close rate — these are a function of us getting more revenue. Automation is one of those components. If we can move the deal faster and have our team spend more of their time focusing on the right deals, that’s going to move that revenue needle much, much more than just doing the same things over and over and spending a lot of time on things that don’t add value.

Sam: Michael, I’ve loved our conversation so far. It’s been great to start learning about the scalable business framework with you. For our listeners, join us for part two as we finish unpacking the framework and learn more about why this concept can be such a game changer for business owners and leaders. If you’re interested in connecting with Michael to learn more about how you can use this model to build a scalable system and grow your business, his profile will be linked in the notes section of this episode. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslow motion.com/podcast.