Business leaders are like MacGyver. MacGyver was a guy that the whole premise of the show was he was put in situations that seemed impossible, and he just engineered based on what he had solutions to get out of the problem. He was trapped somewhere. There was a bomb in the room, and he got some chewing gum and a paperclip and disarmed the bomb. Like, that’s the whole premise of the show in 30 minutes or less, right? And as business leaders. That’s what they do. As their business grows, they’re successful. They hit a new scale. And so that’s exposed new problems. And so they’ve in this scenario, onboarded a spreadsheet to fill a gap, to build a new process, to collect data or look at data in a way that they didn’t have access to. And it’s it’s gotten them there, but it’s not gonna it’s not going to get them to where they want to go.

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 fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life.

I’m your host, Sam Donaghy. Today, we’ll be continuing our conversation with Fast Slow Motion Director of Growth Michael Johnson about the scalable business framework and how we can help people systematically scale their business. So let’s dive back in. Well, lastly, let’s move on to visibility, because you’ve mentioned it throughout, and it seems to close the loop on the three principles. And it sounds like it’s going to be super important. So I’m excited to hear about visibility and why it’s such an important principle.

Some of the questions that we ask within this automation portion of the framework. We want to take a look at the business process and see is there anything eating into the team’s time? What are the constraints that we can we can automate around. And then really what key behaviors can we prompt for the team. So here’s a great example. We determined that Fast Slow Motion that if we followed up on a project that was sold 2 or 3 weeks after it was sold, it drastically reduced the potential for an expectation gap at the end of the project. A lot of what the services business is is managing expectations, and it’s possible you could kick off a project 8 or 9 weeks go by. Everybody’s just moving along. And then at the end, you know, you’re working with the team at the end you say, okay, we’re wrapping up the project. And then someone says, well, hey, I haven’t gotten this thing done on it. And then, you know, the service providers say, I had no idea you wanted that. And that’s not that’s not something we expected. So there’s an expectation gap there. And so we identified if we follow up 2 or 3 weeks in, the salesperson comes in and says, hey, are we’re matching your expectations. Are we doing everything that you want right now? How’s the project going? That allowed us to discover issues earlier and allowed us to put measures in place to really squash those expectation gaps, and drastically improved the success of the team. And so we wanted that to happen. We built it in the process. But then to ensure that behavior occurred, we built some automation. And so it was just simple, just a simple piece of automation. You sell a deal. Three weeks later you get a popup that says follow up on this project and see how it’s going. And so you go to the project and there’s an email template there. Says exactly everything you need to say. And the salesperson goes in, they customize it. They make it personal, but it takes far less time. They don’t have to remember they’re not using a sticky note, automating and building systems around that, around that reminder. So that they can go in and execute this critical, critical part of the process. So identifying things like that, what are the behaviors we want to do in the process? How can you build automation to support that. And then simple as that by so that’s been really simple. And then sometimes we want to support this visibility portion. We want to support the ability for the team to understand the success of the process, the success of their automation. And so we want to make sure the data is in the right place. And we want to make sure we’re capturing the right data. And so sometimes we use automation to do that. We may build an integration to pull in data from an external system into one place. So we can see everything in one place. We may build automation to capture additional data to check critical metrics. An example of that would be to timestamp as we move through the stage on a process. How long it took to go from stage two to stage three, to identify bottlenecks. And so we can then use where we were in the visibility portion. We can then build reporting around what’s the time per stage. And we may see patterns and we see that stage three is just has a huge bloat in it. Then we can go back into the process and see what can we do to make this faster. What can we do to cut down the time? So automation can play a big role in that data capture portion as well.

Can I ask you, you know, terms of like having a single source of truth. Is it an important aspect of having visibility within the business?

Yes, absolutely. A single source of truth. You’ve got to have it to understand what’s going on. I had a client that if you ask the sales team how much was sold at a quarter, they would give you one number. If you ask the delivery team, the production team, how much was sold in a quarter, they would give you a different number. And they used two different systems and they had two different definitions. And it was it became a problem. At some point they didn’t even know the truth. And so what we did was we helped combine those we built, we built an integration in that case to pull the data together. So the management team had one place to go and say, okay we’ve sold X right by the definition. So have it in one place. It’s a critical portion of that that visibility component in the scalable business framework.

So when it comes to iterating, how often should companies revisit and iterate on their processes and their automation and the visibility to basically mean you continue growing, I suppose.

I mean, constantly the visibility, once you get into the visibility portion of the framework and you build out the metrics that you need to understand how the business is operating, that gives you insight into your results, understanding why you win okay, then update the process and make sure we can repeat it, or understanding why we lost or failed. Well, let’s go to the process and and update it. So make sure we don’t repeat it. If you don’t have visibility you don’t have the ability to do either one of those right or prevent your losses. That’s a that’s that’s a constant thing. We’re constantly once we build visibility on top of our process with our automation to build visibility, we can see how the business is operating. We truly make adjustments with everything in one place. We have a full picture of how the business is operating and we can we can adjust on the fly constantly.

I love it. You mentioned three core concepts in visibility. Can you unpack each of those for us?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s critical to have good data structure with it for visibility. And that’s why we use Salesforce and HubSpot specifically, is because the way the database is structured, it allows this clear line of sight from the top all the way to the bottom. So good data structure and having your data at relate is critical. The other portions are how frequently can you get your data. So frequency of data. Well a common practice is we need month-end reporting. So a team will someone on a team will spend three days putting together a spreadsheet on what were last month’s results. And that doesn’t give us the frequency that we need to really run the business. We build visibility for the management team to go in every single day and understand what their critical metrics are and where their pacing. So the data structure is critical for that and frequency of data and then availability of data. How easy is it to get the data. Or can you even get it in this kind. This goes back to our processes portion. Are we capturing the data. We need that portion and acquiring it so that we can report on it later. And so that that’s it’s the frequency of data. Availability of data. Data structure that allow you to, allow you to understand what’s going on in the business. And those are the three big components of this visibility.

And is there a difference in how you structure these things in terms of how far in the future you might be able to report on and project?

There’s several categories of data visibility and reporting that we utilize. So what is lagging indicators. These are very traditional. What do we sell last month. What was our closed rate last night. You know what was win-rate. All the all that stuff. What was what happened last year. Year over year. Things of that nature. So that’s lagging indicators. And then we also look at leading indicators. These are inputs into our process. How many deals are sold. How many leads are we getting. All things are consistent. Our close rates consistent. And our process is consistent. If we’re closing 50% of the of the leads, we get, we get 100 leads. We’re closing 50 of those three months from now, however long our sales cycle is. So that leading indicator can be a good predictive measure for what’s going to happen in the future and allow us to make adjustments. Talk about lagging and leading and then, exception management is really critical for in process understanding what’s going on process. If you remember what processes I talked about that 85% of 90, 95% guarantee what exception management reporting is understanding when things fall outside of that process. And that’s that 5%. That is like an outlier, basically, that you can’t account for. And so we believe because the visibility into what are the outliers and then expose it to the team so that they can go in and manage those. This is really powerful because it allows managers and leaders to work with their team collaboratively to to help them. It allows employees to know or team members to know when things that they’re working on or outside of the process, that they wouldn’t have been exposed to. And it allows you to squash those, which really helps guarantee results. It helps the business perform in a much higher level.

Michael, I mean, is there anything else that you would like to add at this point that you can think of? I feel like we’ve covered so much.

You know, I think when we think about visibility, there’s a few key questions that we want to ask to make sure the businesses can take. And they look at their system, which is collection of processes and they can ask these questions to see if they’ve got the right visibility. So this is based on things we see all the time. Are we generating reports or are we building them when we need them or able to just go in and get the report or do your current reports capture everything you need? Are the metrics missing that you wish you had in order to gauge your own success? This is a big one. What is central metrics? Are you managing in a spreadsheet? And I think, look, Sam I love spreadsheets. Yeah no hate on Excel. No hate on Google sheets. I haven’t run our business in a spreadsheet. That’s indicative. That’s a symptom of a problem. Okay, so maybe we have our data is disparate and we need to combine it. Or maybe we have a process that isn’t well-defined. And we need to build into a scalable system. So that look within the visibility portion. A lot of times we’ll see people using a spreadsheet is because of combining data. It’s not in the same place and trying to get to that single source of truth. And so just identifying that and understanding, okay, there’s something to solve here. Another key thing and this is from I’m stealing this from EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system framework. But is this concept of this every team member know their number. Have we defined our metrics at a high level? And then as we roll those down across the organization Sam, do you know your number? Do you know the meaning of what it means to be successful and unsuccessful in your role? Do I know what I need to do to to be successful or not be successful for a metrics standpoint? And can I do have access to gauge that? Asking yourself as a business, does my team have that? Do they know they have visibility into whether they’re successful or not in their role, and how can I build that? And then really, do you have the data that you need at your fingertips at any point in time? Can you log in and get every metric that you need as a business to to gauge your success, or do you have to wait or do you have to put it together? That’s just that’s just a way to to ask those questions. Look at your business, look at your reporting and see, okay, there’s some potential for growth here.

This might be a side question. How often have you seen with clients that, you know they’ve been operating from Excel spreadsheets, let’s say. And they’ve got a ton of data. But when you come in and you build better processes with them, and then you get visibility and you start tracking the data, you find that the data is not good. And and it hasn’t been utilized correctly, or has there’s been bad processes or what have you. And the whole thing is a house of cards. Do you? Have you ever seen that?

It’s very common when a spreadsheet is a critical portion of the business. And this is the case because there’s not the validation and some of the accountability that you need to really record the accurate data. Maybe if I have a deal, if I’m a salesperson and I have a deal that I’m working, that I might have a 10% chance of winning. And I just don’t want to put that in there because I don’t want to hurt what I would consider not win. Right? So we see that a lot. This goes back to processes. If you’re running a process on a spreadsheet, your team can accomplish the process without using a spreadsheet. That’s not a that’s a broken process. If your team can go from A to Z and accomplish the goal, the process without going through the actual steps without using the tool, then it’s broken. Your team. You’ve got to build in a way that the team has to have to go through the data you need, follow the prescriptive steps that you’ve designed so you can get reporting on it. You’ve got to build it that way and hold the team accountable. And so what we do often find Sam, when that’s in play when our spreadsheets and play that, the what’s actually in the spreadsheet is only either a partial picture of what’s going on, where the data is inaccurate. And it’s so funny that you asked that I work, I talk to businesses all the time, or what I do, I go, I speak to groups of business leaders, and I ask this question every time I meet. And it’s it’s just like a fun thing we do is a fun exercise of how they how they utilize a spreadsheet or Google Sheets in their process. It’s a it’s on a scale of I don’t use it at all, which means I’m not tell the truth because everybody does right. And then on the other end is I run my entire business on a spreadsheet. Okay. And so we get it’s really like a normal distribution between those two. And usually the most popular answer is I have one critical spreadsheet that I can’t live without. And then the second most popular answer is typically I’ve got some non-critical metrics or non critical process with that track on a spreadsheet. And that’s really common. We see that a lot.

So and what’s happened there this is just indicative again the life cycle of the business. Business leaders are like MacGyver. Did you ever watch the show MacGyver?

I think I heard it from The Simpsons. Maybe.

Yeah, that’s a MacGyver. MacGyver was a guy that he. The whole premise of the show was he was put in situations that seemed impossible, and he just engineered based on what he had solutions to get out of the problem. He was trapped somewhere. There was a bomb in the room, and he got some chewing gum and a paperclip and disarm the bomb. Like, that’s the whole premise of the show in 30 minutes or less, right? And as business leaders, that’s what they do. As their business grows, they’re successful. They hit a new scale. And so that’s exposed new problems. And so they’ve in this scenario onboarded a spreadsheet to fill a gap, to build a new process, to collect data or look at data in a way that they didn’t have access to. And it’s it’s gotten them there. But it’s not going to it’s not going to get them to where they want to go, you know. And so that’s that’s where we step in and help them understand how to bridge that gap with good process, good automation, good visibility. Put them on the scalable business framework and really set their business up to scale. Small to medium sized business owners are typically starting out with they’re good at what they do, right. They’re very good at what they do, and they’re focused on that. And then the scaling, they’re doing well, and then suddenly they find themselves in the position where we might be losing deals. We might not be as efficient or as effective as we could be. And this is where the scalable business framework really, really comes in and plays a huge part.

Michael, if we have a listener who wants to get started, what would you recommend? Are there any tools that they can use?

Yeah. Sam. Absolutely. You know, before you get started on any journey, you need a map. You need to understand where you are, where you want to go. And the best way to know where you are is to take what we’ve called the growth readiness assessment. You can go to fastslowmotion.com/grow. And we can put the link in the description here of the of the podcast. But fastslowmotion.com/grow. It’s a quick 15 question assessment to understand where you rank on the scalable business framework and help you diagnose is it processes is it automation? Is it visibility where are you maybe falling short and understand the next steps to get going on your journey?

Well, Michael, I mean, it’s just been so interesting to hear you talk about this subject. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So as you know, we always like to wrap up each episode with a quote that’s been meaningful or instructive for you. So do you have something that you’d like to share?

I love Stephen Covey, and I read all of this stuff, and he has this quote that I think is really, really powerful. It says, I’m not a product of my circumstances. I’m a product of my decisions. And a lot of times we find ourselves feeling like we are a product of the things that are happening around us. And I would love, Sam, if there’s a business owner or business leader listening to this right now that feel stuck, that feels like they’re out of control in their business and they’re trapped. Understand that you’re not a product of your circumstances. You’re a product of your decisions. And that while things may be a little chaotic around you, you could take the steps today to define your processes, build automation, put some visibility around it, use that scalable business framework to really create freedom for yourselves. And that’s the ultimate goal that business leaders and business owners create freedom from themselves. To go from working in the business to working on a business that has ripple effects in life, that makes people better husbands and wives, better fathers of mothers. It has ripple effects in the community because you’ve you’ve released this high powered individual to have an impact on those around them. And so if a business owner is listening to this and they feel stuck or trapped or they’ve got a lot of their net worth, like most business owners do tied up in that business, understand that the scalable business framework is a method to create freedom. And lift people like me as people like fast slow motion want to help you get out of that and build build a business that you love.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us, man.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sam. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks again to Michael for joining us. For our listeners. We hope that you enjoyed hearing Michael unpack the scalable business framework. 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 fastslowmotion.com/podcast.