Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hello, folks. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. And in this podcast and in HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with Virtual Assistants without breaking the bank- that means your bank! And I’m Dave Braun, and I’m here with my partner, fantastic mentor, and coach. But most importantly, my very, very good friend, Larry Broughton. Larry!
Larry Broughton
00:00:30
Hello, handsome David.
Dave Braun
00:00:31
What’s up my friend?
Larry Broughton
00:00:33
I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight and seeing our buddies on our weekly Wednesday get-together.
Dave Braun
00:00:40
And I think, it’s my turn to lead and I’ve got a couple of awesome words for us to discuss.
Larry Broughton
00:00:45
Oh, you scare me sometimes when you get so excited about this. Good, good. Well, it’s good to see you. Thank you for being in my life, Dave. Thanks for keeping on track. And you know, the encouragement that I get from you is the fuel that I need. So thank you. Love you.
Dave Braun
00:01:00
Oh yeah. So folks, before we get on these meetings, we talk about our businesses and the stuff we do together and not do together, review them, encourage each other and talk about our own little problems. And it’s like, I was so kind of like, ah, down before we started talking and an hour ago, I kind of down, and now I feel like much, much better. Well, thank you, Larry, for that. Thank you for the advice and thoughts. Whether or not I take ’em that’s another question.
Larry Broughton
00:01:35
Well, I will remind you of that. I’ll play this back. You did thank me. You know you did feel better.
Dave Braun
00:01:41
Yeah, I did. Okay. So the question and the topic we wanna talk about is, how do I get an employee to follow instructions? In other words, how do I get my team members to follow a standard operating procedure?
Larry Broughton
00:01:58
I’m laughing because it was reminiscent. Well, if you’re a parent, you might struggle with the same thing, right? I mean, if you ever had a child and you say, dude, you need to clean your room and they go and clean it every single time from then on. And you never have to do it again. Right?
Dave Braun
00:02:17
No. Stays clean forever. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:02:21
So this is an interesting one. First of all, whenever I get the chance, I’m gonna be an evangelist about a couple of words. And if one here is the word employee—
Larry Broughton
00:02:34
If you call your employees, “employees”, if you treat them like employees, they will show up like employees. Now, I’m not a big fan either of the other extreme where people call them family members. Because they’re not family members, either. They’re team members, they’re on your team. And my feeling Dave, as you know, cause I tend to be an evangelist about this all the time. So if you give me an opportunity, I’m gonna talk about it. Everyone wants to be on a winning team. And the great thing, I think particularly to this question, Dave, is that we all know that together, we have a mission. Let’s say you’re on a sports team and it’s to win the game. But a quarterback is not gonna be a linebacker. The Point guard is not gonna be a center. You’ve all got specific roles and tasks to do, but it fits into a larger framework.
Larry Broughton
00:03:32
And I think that’s one of the keys that we need to make sure that our team members understand is, what does their function do to fit into the overall framework to win the game, to complete the mission. I’m having a conversation— I’m sorry. Gimme one second before I lose this. I was having a conversation with one of our general managers in our ops guy this morning. Just so you know, this guy is a guest service host. One of the team members we were talking about, and I don’t think he’ll ever see this. So I’ll just say he thought that the people who do the breakfast setup, that it would be much more efficient for them if they didn’t have doors on all of the cabinets in the kitchen. And so he took it upon himself to remove the doors on the cabinets. Because why open the cabinet when you can just look and see, okay, here’s what the inventory I desire.
Larry Broughton
00:04:22
Okay. Makes some logical sense. But what happens when you just take the initiative to do something that’s outside of your realm of responsibility without informing your other team members? The quarterback calls a play, you think, well maybe a better play will be this, but you don’t notify anyone else on the team. What I tried to get folks to recognize is that I love the initiative that this team member Chuck, for sure. I love the creativity that he has, I love the problem-solving, but that’s like going into someone else’s home and taking the doors off the cabinets without telling them you’re gonna do that. Now you’ve got somebody that’s in a defensive posture. So where did all this come down to? Well, communication. I think this is one of the things, this is how you get team members to follow instructions.
Larry Broughton
00:05:17
Part of it is communication, right? And you may have standard operating procedures already set up. But I think even before you hire someone and this is gonna sound like a broken record to some of you. We need to do personality assessments to find out, is this someone who can even follow a standard operating procedure? How shocking is that, right? Because this is why you do position profiles. This is why you do job descriptions. And they should see them during the interview process so that they know what’s expected of them. And then you do personality assessments to make sure that they can follow standard operating procedures. Because let’s be honest before we dive much deeper into this, Dave, there are some jobs for sure that you must follow standard operating procedures or it’s dangerous.
Dave Braun
00:06:10
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:06:11
There are other jobs where you don’t need standard operating procedures. You just need results. I’m thinking creative types, how you get there doesn’t matter. As long as the results meet or exceed your expectations. But for someone like me, if someone hired me with the expectation that I was gonna follow standard operating procedures, it would be an absolute crap show because the way I’m built is a Nine quick start on the Kolbe A Index, that measures my cognitive brain, how my brain works. And this is something we struggle with in our organizations and even with you and I, is that we may have amazing standard operating procedures, Dave. But if you have somebody who’s initiating quick start, they don’t even follow standard operating procedures for virtually everything in our organization. There’s a standard operating procedure. And except for the basic ones, it’s very hard for me to follow them because my brain doesn’t work that way. But someone who is a high fact-finder, they live and die by standard operating procedures. Not only do they like creating them, but they like following them. So I guess before I stop pontificating here, I’ll just say this. We need to ask ourselves, is this a task? Is this a position that requires standing operating procedures? And if so, to what degree?
Dave Braun
00:07:34
Hmm, good point.
Larry Broughton
00:07:35
So as far as following instructions, I think between position profiles, job descriptions, those types of things, and understanding what their role is on the team. Those are some of the things, but I’m sorry, I did not have the intention of pontificating for that long but put a microphone in front of me, Dave. I’ll talk.
Dave Braun
00:07:56
No, no, no. That’s great. That’s why we do this, right? This is our podcast. Larry, we do what we want.
Larry Broughton
00:08:01
That’s right. All right. So let’s go back and forth. What are your thoughts on this?
Dave Braun
00:08:04
Well, first off is we did an episode 137 that talked about what are the team member’s roles and defining them and having people follow ’em and the consequences of not doing that. And your example that you talked about earlier was, you know, quarterback or running back, or on a team, not doing their particular roles and it could be a disaster for the organization. So, folks, I wish you would go back and listen to that if you haven’t after you’re done with this. But yeah, one of the things that came to mind as you were talking, Larry, is there’s a particular question that I have when I interview folks and I ask them this for everything. And it leads to a—it’s like an integrity thing for me. When I ask them. So I’m like, the question I ask is, say I hire you and I have you.
Dave Braun
00:08:55
I say, you know, we gotta follow this particular procedure. Here’s the standard operating procedure. Here’s the process that we set up. You’ve got to follow this as part of your job. You’ve gotta do that. And then, okay, you agree to that and everything. But then a month later, I come in and say, Hey, there’s an emergency, there’s something going on, we just have to skip following this procedure and just get this done. How are you going to respond to me? And so sometimes the response is, well, I’ll just do what you say. I don’t like that response.
Larry Broughton
00:09:31
Because you’re built like best, but why don’t you like that response?
Dave Braun
00:09:37
The response that I like is that, okay, I understand that. But I would remind you that we have this procedure here for a reason, and maybe there’s a certain thing that we could skip this time, but we’ve got it there for a reason. And I’m worried Mr. Manager, Mr. Owner, that in the long term, it’s gonna hurt our company. So maybe there’s a couple of things that we could potentially skip, but let’s work together and see what is the impact of those.
Larry Broughton
01:10:08
Yeah. I think that’s really good. As long as there’s communication about it as well. Right? Oftentimes standard operating procedures are set up to protect against the downside. And assuming that you’re protecting the weak link in the chain. So we need to review them from time to time.
Dave Braun
01:10:32
Exactly.
Larry Broughton
01:10:33
Because standard operating procedures are set up for today’s environment and circumstances, hoping to predict what the future might be. But as things change as the organization change, we need to update our standard operating procedures. Does this still make sense? And so what I like is that when team members set actually like— and oftentimes it’s the new ones because they come in with a fresh set of eyes. I encourage them, hey, as you really do these standard operating procedures. And if they don’t make sense to you, if someone brand new to the organization, raise your hand and ask why do we do this? Because you may not see why we do this but there might actually be a reason for it. You may not see why we do it, but it might be something that we used to do that we don’t need to do anymore.
Larry Broughton
01:11:14
So this is an opportunity for us to update them. But here’s the thing. It takes courage for a manager and leader to do that because we have this—I don’t know either defense mechanism or being brainwashed and as a manager or a leader, we need to be right about everything. We need to have everything perfect. And our team members are just gonna come in and follow what you say. That is not the long-term recipe for success. Right? The long-term recipe for success is encouraging them to help improve the process. And improve the end results. And frankly, your team members will feel more invested. They’ll feel more empowered. They’ll take pride in their work. They’ll feel like they’re part of the team. Why are you laughing to that?
Dave Braun
01:11:58
No, no, no, because you’re absolutely right. I just had something today that happened with, Brian on our team, and we have a particular operating procedure about updating a certain site and how we maintain it. And he’s like, you know, the way we’re doing it is just taking us way too long. I think we ought to revisit it. And it’s like, okay, I think you’re right. And here’s where I think it makes sense to do that and where not to. And so there’s a discussion, that’s exactly right. It’s a discussion. And I think one of the things you hit on was really key and this is what we have in our SOP template that we encourage people to have as part of the Victory Program. Folks, you gotta do that. If you ever hear about it, ask us about it when we’re gonna run it. But part of that template is at the very, very beginning, we say, why?
Larry Broughton
01:12:51
Yeah. That’s right,
Dave Braun
01:12:52
What’s the purpose? What’s the result from this? And so that goes a long way in helping people understand that they’ve gotta understand, or they’ve got to follow the procedure.
Larry Broughton
01:13:03
Yeah. But having the procedures, but not allowing your team members to have access to these SOPs is also a problem.
Dave Braun
01:13:11
Yeah. That’s one of the first things you gotta do.
Larry Broughton
01:13:13
In the old days when I was working at McDonald’s, there was a binder, there was the blue binder. They had all the standard operating procedures in them. So no matter what it was, there was something written out and in many ways, there were beta or VHS tapes that showed you how to do things. Nowadays, we have things like Google drive and all kinds of things. So you can set up a whole library for your team members to go to if they have a question about closing out an invoice or reconciling a bank statement or whatever it is, you could put categories, whether it’s operations or marketing or accounting or whatever. But they need to know where they are and they have to have access to them. That’s really important as well.
Dave Braun
01:14:03
Yeah. And I think another thing related to that is helping them be able to navigate through them. Because if they have that question about how do you close out the evening or lock the doors or whatever, it’s got to be easily findable for them because you’re gonna have like you said, the big blue book. Well, the nice thing about that is that, Hey, it’s on the shelf, I can pull it out, look in the index and find it. Sometimes in our electronic world, we have so much stuff. It can be hard to find and then navigate through it. So it’s important that it’s in a structured way so that they can find what they’re looking for.
Larry Broughton
01:14:43
You just have to find out what works best for you and your team at the time, because you know, you may have rockstar team members that like it one way now, but later on, the new team members might prefer it another way. Again, it’s the whole communication thing. We really need to go back and forth on the communication with our team members about this kinda stuff. And I would throw in there as well, is that we have project management tools in our organizations. And I would make sure that when possible there’s some kind of connectivity, whether it’s electronic or whatever between the two so that things get updated. But whether it’s to-dos or whatever you may have in your SOP: Hey, when using slack—which is a project management function or communication tool—if you stop using slack a year from now, you’d better update your SOPs. That would be a good, good thing to do, right?
Larry Broughton
01:15:51
This is not one of those things, Dave, where you can set it and forget it as Ron Popeil used to talk about. You can’t set it and forget that these are living documents. Okay. So, when we have run franchised hotels, when I’ve worked in franchise restaurants from time to time, you had to do continuing education credits. You had to go back and retest and re-associate or not re-associate —what’s the word I’m looking for? Anyway, you had to go back and review stuff that you had already learned through SOPs before and initial it, sign off on it, take a quiz, or whatever it is. These are things that you can easily incorporate into your organization to assure that people are up to date on SOPs.
Dave Braun
01:16:33
Yeah. Yeah. Those are great ideas. And you know, the other thing, and I think is fundamental to them is gonna be, you, when the occasion warrants it. Larry, you talked about being a nine on a quick start, but when the occasion warrants it, you as a leader have got to follow ’em to a certain extent.
Larry Broughton
01:16:55
Oh yeah. So, Listen. If I walk into a hotel and they’re slammed at the guest reception, I know enough I can jump in and I know how to do the greeting. There are basic standard operating procedures. I know about privacy and security. I know how to make sure that they get a card key. I know the steps that need to be taken, but I can’t do that day in and day out. My brain doesn’t work that way. I can do it for short sprints. So my point is if you hire someone… if you have a role that needs to be someone who definitely follows SOPs, you just need to be very careful about who you put into that position. Most people can do it for a short period of time, but day in, day out, I would get burned out.
Dave Braun
01:17:44
Yeah. Good point.
Larry Broughton
01:17:45
That’s all.
Dave Braun
01:17:47
One of the things that I wanna go back to is when we talked about putting the why in front of the SOP, I think that is such a critical step, and the reason why you want a why—the reason why you want a why is because if you, as a leader or whoever’s writing it, can’t articulate the why and do it to where people can understand it. Then why the heck are you doing it in the first place?
Larry Broughton
01:18:10
Yeah.
Dave Braun
01:18:11
Yeah. So, that’s a very, very, very critical piece.
Larry Broughton
01:18:16
Well, it’s not just the why of the SOP, but how does that fit into again, our job—let’s say if you’re on a sports team, for instance, oftentimes it is not your job to win that match or win that game. Your job is to win the championship, right? It’s the long haul. Now, many organizations, you need to get a bunch of, you know, you might have to go into undefeated, but if you look at a baseball team, for instance, no one goes undefeated in baseball, you lose a lot. You lose a lot every time you step up to the plate. Most people strike out, never make it to first base. You lose a lot of games throughout the season. But they know that the job is to win the pennant. And when, you know, get to the world series. That’s really the end goal here.
Larry Broughton
01:19:04
So not only need to understand here’s why this SOP is gonna help me complete this task, but this task is then going to help me do my job better. And my overall performance is gonna help us do whatever, whatever the goal is of your organization. Why your mission is so important. They need to understand, ultimately, if I don’t do this, for instance, if I have a guest who walks into the hotel and I’m rude to them, and I don’t take a credit card from them upon check in. And I don’t double check to make sure that the room is clean, I’m still gonna get paid for this hour that I’m working. But it’s not gonna help me help the manager, the leader, the owners, the management company, win the championship, which is getting the guest to come back, to write a positive review online and actually put money into the bank so that I can pay payroll. It all fits together.
Dave Braun
02:20:06
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:20:06
Make sense?
Dave Braun
02:20:07
Yeah. Totally.
Larry Broughton
02:20:08
Like building blocks.
Dave Braun
02:20:10
Yeah. Understanding your part in the entire vision and mission of your company, right?
Larry Broughton
02:20:16
Yeah. So I think what we need to do is you need to check up on this from time to time, probably, informally during each of your team meetings, like a lot of organizations will have monthly team meetings and you can bring up certain SOPs, Hey, we’re doing really well in this area. Just informally. We’re doing not so good in this area. So let’s tweak that a little bit. Right? You can do quarterly trainings. You can do twice annual reviews, whatever it is, but it’s gotta be institutionalized. This kind of stuff, Dave, needs to become part of your institutional DNA in the message. I would say we’re doing this because perfection is evasive. We will never be perfect, but excellence is the standard. We will achieve excellence if we follow these SOPs and we communicate effectively and we’ve got everybody sitting on the right seat on the bus as Jim Collins likes to say.
Dave Braun
02:21:11
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:21:12
Right. But again, communication, communication, communication.
Dave Braun
02:21:18
Yeah. Now, Larry, we’ve got—we talked about setting ’em up and the whys and communicating and all that stuff, but what happens? What do you do when you’ve got this SOP and you’ve got it in place and you think it’s great, you’ve explained the why’s and it’s a critical part of the business. And then you find out that somebody is not following them and you will find out because there will be a consequence at some point, like one of the examples for us, we’ve got certain a process when we do web maintenance, bringing and securing sites and all that stuff. Right. And we’ve had some times where somebody has not followed the procedure and it’s led to some pretty disastrous consequences for clients. So, what do you do at that point?
Larry Broughton
02:22:10
I just make sure and say this to them. The beatings will continue——Well, I guess it depends on the team member and what the phase is that they’re in during the company. So if it’s someone who’s brand new to the industry or to your organization, there’s a training period and there should be some peer to peer mentoring going on. They should be shadowing someone. And just like any new person doing anything new, there will be mistakes. But there needs to be some victories along the way as well.
Larry Broughton
02:22:53
Tons of studies have shown not only in the human arena, but in the, you know, in psychology where they study Bonobos and chimps and mice is that if they are slapped down every time they make a mistake, they just stop doing. And it’s the same thing in the human kingdom. So we have to allow people to make mistakes, but it’s how do we respond to those mistakes? That’s really key. Do we turn it into a learning opportunity or did it become punitive? Now, I’m trying to come up with a quick life safety example, right? If it’s someone, let’s say that it’s a guest service host at a hotel and it’s their very first day, and worst case scenario, the fire alarm goes off. There’s a fire and they don’t know what to do. I’m not gonna terminate them because they just started.
Larry Broughton
02:23:52
Right. But it was a manager who’s been there for a long time. They’ve gone through the training and they don’t know what to do. We’re gonna have a different conversation, right? So the first few times are mistakes. If they continue to make the same mistake over and over again, I’ve gotta be reflective as the manager, let’s say that they report to me, what have I done, that’s leading to this? Is my training been effective? Have I been communicating effectively on what’s expected? What are the last conversations I’ve had with them about this? And if I can say, Hey, I’ve done the best that I can. Then, you know, they’re saying that the first time is a mistake. The next time is a coincidence. Now you gotta start ratcheting it up. If I’ve done everything that I can to make sure that they’ve been trained, they’ve gone through the training process. They’ve passed the quizzes that they need to pass. Whatever it is, the first couple of conversations are gonna be reminders for me.
Larry Broughton
02:24:51
I would say, number the second conversation gonna be, Hey dude, listen, you’ve done this. And this is kind of a silly thing, but I’m gonna be really direct with you for a second, Dave, this would be a silly reason for you to get written up. Let’s not do that. Because that’s the first step to actually losing your job. And I don’t want that to happen. It’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it. So I set the expectation is that excellence is our standard. And if we keep making these types of mistakes or falling short here, that’s not gonna help us reach our standard of excellence. But once they keep doing this 3, 4, 5 times, that’s a pattern anywhere that either that’s malicious or it’s—What else could it be?
Larry Broughton
02:25:41
It could be incompetence. Either way, that’s not a good thing. And so at that point you gotta ratchet, ratchet it up from there. Then you do formal coaching, coach them up, or coach them out of the organization. And again, you’re gonna treat somebody differently who’s been with you for five years or is there someone who’s been with you 60 days. So if somebody been with you for five years and up to this point, there’s not been any problems. You need to start asking yourself, okay, what’s changed in their life or in the organization that’s causing this to happen. So I guess my point in all this David is we need to be human as well. Again, it goes back to communication. How do I find this out? I’ve seen so many of these managers and I’m on so many online forums management and leadership forums online. And I hear these managers talking about their team members like to call ’em idiots and how anything gets done. I have no idea. And I was like, damn, I would never wanna work for you because some kids I go on and look at these forms because I wanna see are people doing right? And what are they doing wrong? You know, I wouldn’t wanna work for you either. So guess what? I’m not gonna do
Dave Braun
02:26:49
Do that hope. That makes a little bit of sense. No, it does. So, so I think you gotta get to a point, Dave, where you set your expectations. If they’re not meeting the expectations you coach ’em up or coach ’em up and I don’t wanna get into a whole, you know, dis progressive disciplinary thing on, on this conversation. But I would just say generally, that’s, that’s the approach I would, I would do that. I hope that it makes a lot of sense.
Larry Broughton
02:26:50
I hope that makes a little bit of sense. So I think you gotta get to a point, Dave, where you set your expectations. If they’re not meeting the expectations you coach ’em up or coach ’em up. And I don’t wanna get into a whole, you know, the progressive disciplinary thing on this conversation. But I would just say generally, that’s the approach I would take.
Dave Braun
02:27:10
Yeah. That makes total sense. In fact, I had to do that recently with a team member who— Wow, it was multiple, multiple, multiple times and they couldn’t follow and were making some really fundamental mistakes. And it was like, I didn’t know what else to do. And it was like, well, I think this is this, you know, our organization is just probably not the right place for you at this point.
Larry Broughton
02:27:40
There you go.
Dave Braun
02:27:41
So we had to do that. And it was tough but the good thing about it was, as what we talked about before, we need to do an episode on terminating or freeing somebody. I don’t know if we’ve done one yet, but one of the good things about that was, is when we were having the conversation, the person said, I kind of felt like this was coming.
Larry Broughton
02:28:04
Yeah. Well, that’s the interesting thing. Right? I’m glad that has sunk in, Dave. I’m a big believer in setting them free. Everyone wants to be on a winning team. Everyone wants to feel good about themselves. I mean, for crying out loud, we know this through the State of the American workforce survey, which they’ve done constantly. They wanna feel good about their own performance. And if you’re being direct and honest, they’re gonna know that they’re not performing. And if you’ve coached them up over and over again, then clearly it’s just not a good fit. And so you encourage them to go find a place that’s a better fit for them. I’ve had like, whenever we do a termination, we have a witness in there and I’ve had to frankly, part ways with—
Dave Braun
02:28:50
When you’re doing it in person,
Larry Broughton
02:28:52
When you’re doing it in person. Yes. For a couple of reasons, one is it’s nice to have a witness. But number two, it’s just that there’s moral support for both the person who’s the leader who’s letting someone go and the other person. Because sometimes I’ve seen, ’em go off the F and rails where it turns violent. But I can’t think of a time where I’ve ever terminated someone and they didn’t know what was coming.
Dave Braun
02:29:26
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:29:26
You know, I think they’re— because you take them on the journey. And even if it was somebody who had a great performance today, but they’re being terminated tomorrow because like an ethical thing, they probably knew it was coming. If they slugged a client, put them in the throat or they stole from me because we talk about this cultural stuff. It’s still not a surprise. Our CFO used to have his office right next door to mine. And so there were a couple of times if I was like—I was the only person in the organization who could terminate executives, VP level and up. And so there were a couple of times where I had to do coaching sessions with a fellow executive. And so I bring our CFO in and there was a time where I was actually letting go of one of our VPs because we went through the whole— everything that we talked about today.
Larry Broughton
03:30:22
And we went through the whole process, but it still wasn’t working. And so the CFO was very nervous about this particular one. And he told me that I’m like really nervous about how this is gonna go. I said, got this. You just need to sit here. So when the termination was completed, the guy who we were letting go, gave me a hug on the way to the door. Because he recognized too that he was gonna do better somewhere else. And he did. You know, he called me and said, Hey, what do you think I ought to be doing with this organization? Do you know somebody that might be a better fit? I gave him a couple of recommendations. He got hired at one of these places. I knew the owner of that company. And he was there for like four years before he moved down to the next place.
Larry Broughton
03:31:11
So we gotta think about this. We’re setting them free, Dave. And you’re freeing your own emotional baggage wrapped up in this damn thing. We were talking earlier today. You’ve gotta feel good about your business when you start hating your business or your role in the business change needs to be made. And if you’re constantly putting out fires around the performance of a particular person, change needs to be made. Because every minute you spend supervising or micromanaging someone because they can’t, or won’t follow instructions is a minute that you could be doing something else. And everyone around them is watching. That’s the thing that we forget sometimes. If you keep low performers in your team, Dave, your high performers will leave. They will get demotivated. But they’re high performers usually leave because they’re like— I’ll say it again.
Larry Broughton
03:32:15
People wanna be on a winning team. I love your idea that we should do one on actual— getting deep on the termination process and maybe sharing some stories on it. But I think, as we start to wrap this thing up, I think the best organizations Dave when I go back to my days at McDonald’s, we had to do periodic audits of every SOP. And there was a date on there. So to say this SOP at the bottom was created on this date. And so some will need to be audited more frequently than others. Like life safety issues. Those should be reviewed at least annually. If you’re in a brick-and-mortar building, what’s the exit strategy? What do I do if there’s a fire? What do I do if there’s a death in my business?
Dave Braun
03:33:07
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
03:33:08
Whatever it is. So you’re gonna have to be the one to determine how frequently things need to be up to date. If you are implementing a new system, new procedure, or setting up a new department, those SOPs need to be reviewed more frequently than a more mature system because things change.
Dave Braun
03:33:32
So let’s give everybody an action item right now.
Dave Braun
03:33:36
An action item, is you pick will give you two choices, either quarterly or every six months, put something in your calendar that says, I’m gonna do a review of our SOPs, at least do that and get started. And then at that point, you can choose if you wanna do the most critical ones, if you wanna do an older one, if you wanna just review the structure, just maybe have a half a day meeting or a couple of hour meeting with your team. Do something. But schedule something in your calendar today that you’re gonna go and do that.
Larry Broughton
03:34:13
Okay. I keep going back to the McDonald’s thing. But this is just something as an example, we used to get basically informal one-page monthly QSC reports, quality service, and cleanliness reports. So we would come in and act like there’s a guest, order their burger, how many minutes did they stand in line, how quickly did it take to get the food, how long did it take them to get their food, what’s the quality of it. You know, walk the property—they’re doing it from a guest perspective. Quarterly, there were more in-depth ones. And then annually, there were deep dives, where a whole team would come into the business and check are all these SOPs were being utilized. And oh, by the way, you said that you were, again, staying with McDonald’s. You said you were doing quarterly checkups on your ice cream machine
Larry Broughton
03:35:04
that always breaks down. Show me, show me the maintenance records of it. Like they go deep on this. And so what you can’t do on that process is wait to the 30 days before the end of the year to get all this stuff done. And so you have to plan ahead. So if you choose quarterly or every six months, I would recommend that you do not do all of them quarterly, but you pick this function. I’m gonna go through all of my operating SOPs at the end of the first quarter, I’m gonna go through all my sales and marketing SOPs in the second quarter. I’m gonna go through all my, whatever it is. So that everything is getting their review every 12 months, instead of doing—I’m gonna do all my SOPs in one month. That’s just overwhelming.
Dave Braun
03:35:48
Yeah. That’s true. That’s a good point. So really what you’re saying is set a calendar for every quarter and pick a category—every business, subcategory.
Larry Broughton
03:35:58
I mean, that’s one way to do it.
Dave Braun
03:35:59
Yeah. And try it. Everybody try it.
Larry Broughton
03:36:02
Well then becomes part of your DNA. If you say I’m gonna do it once a year, what happens when you say, Hey, I’m gonna do it in June and then June gets super busy.
Dave Braun
03:36:11
Yeah. You’re gonna say, well—
Larry Broughton
03:36:14
I’m gonna take the can down the road. But if it’s in your DNA, that every quarter we are reviewing it, it’s fewer things to do, it’s more likely to get done.
Dave Braun
03:36:23
Great point. You know, you talked about the McDonald’s ice cream machine. We went to a wedding in Palm desert this last weekend, a niece’s wedding, and stopped at McDonald’s on the way. And we’re like, Hmm. Let’s order ice cream cones. Okay. Sorry. It’s broken—
Larry Broughton
03:36:43
So, this is an insider here. There is a YouTube video on why that’s the case. And it’s a little bit— it’ll explain. Go to YouTube and have, why are ice McDonald’s ice cream machines always broken. There’s an issue, off on why.
Dave Braun
03:37:01
But it was, it was so funny that you brought that up because I would just experience that. All right. Well, I think we’re done with this one. Are you ready to end this?
Larry Broughton
03:37:10
Let’s end it.
Dave Braun
03:37:11
Okay, thanks everybody for being with us today. And remember, building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And we’re here to help with our course and community and our White Glove service where we find the Rockstar VA for you. So 3 things we would love you to do, and we’d really appreciate it. Number 1, subscribe to our podcast, if you haven’t already done so. Either on your iPhone or your android phone, and then of course on YouTube, subscribe to us there. And then number 2, give us a rating. Preferably a 5 star, or leave a comment below the video in YouTube, anything that you’ll put in to help us get the word out more. We’ll be there and we’ll answer it, and appreciate that. Give you some thanks. And then, the 3rd thing is go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community, our White Glove service, and where you can also get our free Checklist- a very comprehensive checklist to learn what you need to do to properly prepare for, hire and thrive with a virtual assistant. And remember without experience, using our program, our course and community, you will learn how to prepare for, hire and thrive with virtual assistants. You know, Larry and I continue to help folks, just talking to satisfied clients the other day, and it’s just rewarding to be able help other people, make a change and difference in their lives- working properly with virtual assistants.
Larry Broughton
03:38:33
Yeah. And it’s funny how many of these clients are actually coming on board with the intention of hiring one VA with end up hiring four or five or in one case nine VAs. Right? And if you’re still around, if you’re still hanging around to the end of this video or this recording of this podcast, thank you for doing that because sometimes our little nuggets that you can get here at the end, and I’m just gonna share a couple of things from this awesome book called Flashpoints. And it kind of ties into what we were talking about today. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of a crowd. In this case, the crowd is your team. There’s a lot of intelligence on your team. If you will only ask and tap into it, please do that. And funny thing is how this kind of ties into it. Another one is the key to success is to never stop learning. The key to failure is to think we know it all. We don’t know it all. And sometimes that knowledge is just that team member standing next to you. If we would just ask. Okay. So with all of that said, God bless you folks. I’m glad that you’re on this journey with us. So do me do me a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor, do something significant today. God bless you. God keep you God hold you. We’ll see you next time. Bye. Bye everybody. See ya.
