If you know how to unlock scalability, you already have the key to building a successful consulting business. What is the right way to do this while managing market competition and dealing with challenges in brand building? That’s what we’re here to find out! In this episode, Michael Zipursky is joined by Chris Ronzio, Founder and CEO of Trainual. He shares how process unlocks scalability for consultants, allowing them to expand and grow exponentially. He shares the impact of having a strong, stable process and how to get started with establishing one. Chris also drops information bombs on network building, social media marketing, and more! Tune in now and learn how to get that key to success!
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Welcome back to another episode of the show. I’m very excited to be joined by Chris Ronzio. Chris, welcome.
Thanks for having me, Michael.
I’m excited about this. When you and I connected, I was at an event in Arizona and you were giving a talk there. It was a talk that resonated because you are the Founder and CEO of a company called Trainual. Before starting that, you’ve built and sold and been involved in other companies. Your company, in terms of Trainual, is a software that helps business owners to create systems and then train their employees on them.
Your latest book, which we’ll talk about as well, is called The Business Playbook. That discusses your framework for building playbooks, systemizing businesses and all that good stuff. When I saw your talk at this event, I thought I got to get you on the show to share your story and also your experience. For many consultants and firm owners, especially as they’re thinking about scaling and growing teams, SOPs, processes and systems, having a better handle on all those things can be valuable. I am excited to have you on.
It can also feel like a necessary evil. A lot of people don’t love processes and systems. We’ll get into it. We’ll talk a lot about when to do this as well.
It’s interesting you say that because when we started down this process a few years back, we’ve done a lot more of this. For some people, the idea of a process or a system feels like you’re taking away creativity. You’re bringing more rigidity and structure. A lot of people don’t like that. You leave the corporate world or employment because you want to do your thing. You want flexibility and freedom. To bring all this stuff back, for some people can feel like it’s suppressing the desire or the whole goal of having freedom and flexibility. What are your thoughts or experiences with that?
You nailed it. When a lot of people start their businesses, they don’t want any structure. They want chaos. They’re trying to figure everything out. You don’t know what’s going to work at the beginning, what service people are going to buy and what you could productize. You’re testing, experimenting and throwing stuff at the wall.
What the process does is unlocks scalability. If you want to maximize your bandwidth and your output and be able to do as much with as little time as possible, you need a system. You need some kind of process to efficiently do what you’re doing. That lets us take on more client work. It lets us do more before we have to hire that next person.
When I work with a lot of small business owners that are flexing up from that 1 person to 2 people to 3 people, every little ounce of productivity is massive. That’s because that can mean the difference between not having to hire for another month or two months. It can be the difference between being able to put another $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 in your bank account and having that cushion before you make that next hire. It can mean the difference between you having some semblance of work-life balance or working all the time.
Anybody that’s selling services wants to maximize their productivity. The way that you do that is by getting serious about the process once you have the demand or people coming in the door. In the beginning, I don’t advocate any process. Figure it out. Do things differently every time. You have to create demand and attention first. The process is what creates more bandwidth.
Process unlocks scalability for a business. Click To TweetWith the stage being set, hopefully, we’ve convinced some people or reconfirmed for others the importance of all this. Let’s go back to where this all started. Your interest in playbooks, frameworks, systems and processes, where did this come from? What were you doing before you even started your company?
How far back do you want to go? As a kid, I always had businesses. I had the landscaping businesses. I sold wrapping paper. I sold candy. I did car detailing and waxing. I cleaned people’s lawn furniture. I was always doing business so I’m very familiar with selling services, pricing services, hiring my friends as labor and trying to figure out, “If I’m going to do a car wash, how do I not wash one car? How do I do a car wash when my neighbors give me their keys and I drive ten people through my driveway in the afternoon?” I was always thinking about how to maximize productivity or time.
When I started my first actual company, I was in high school. I was fourteen. It was a video production company. What we did wasn’t necessarily the creative side of the video. It was live event coverage. We did talent shows, sporting events, graduation commencements and anything that you could set cameras up and film live. We record and sell the footage to coaches, scouts and parents. We live stream the footage and show it for instant replay for judges. That was our sweet spot.
In building that business through high school and college, we expanded to where we were doing events all across the United States. To staff those events, I would have to find camera crews in every metropolitan area so that they could drive within a few hour-drive to wherever the event I would book was. We had to get good at training people on our process so that they could show up, look, feel and act like they had worked with us for ten years.
They’d be wearing the shirts. They’d have the lanyards and hats on. They’d be using the same app on the iPad to take orders. They’d be using the same order forms and postcards. They’d have the same tablecloths, cables and cameras. The video would be viewed the same through the website. All of that consistency came down to an obsession with process. That was where I honed the skill. It was running my video production company and trying to fine-tune a process that looked and felt the same across every state in the US.
There are two questions that I’m burning to ask you. The first is, where do you think your hunger for sales and doing business at such a young age came from? Is that from a family member? Where did that inspiration, motivation and hunger originate from?
As a kid, it came from wanting to buy my stuff.
What did you want to buy?
SEGA.
You’re dating yourself a little bit. I remember seeing that back in the day.
I remember one walker around the neighborhood with my dad. I wanted Air Jordans. I’m sure a lot of kids did. I was like, “Everybody has Air Jordans.” He’s like, “Does everybody have these? If more than half of your class has these, I don’t want you to be behind the curve. I’ll get them for you.” I was like, “Two of my friends have them.” He’s like, “I’m not buying these for you. It’s ridiculous. If you can figure out a way to pay for them yourself, then go for it.” As a kid, that was my motivation. I was like, “I want those sneakers or CDs. My birthday or Christmas is seven months away. I got to figure this out.” That was it.
You started your first real business at a pretty young age. You said you were about fourteen years old.
Yes.
From hearing your story in a little bit more detail, this business grew to be fairly sizable. You’re covering a lot of events and getting to some pretty well-known events that people would know about if you mentioned them. You’re a young guy. What were you doing to land those deals? I’m sure there’s a lesson inside of that for the person that is thinking to themselves, “I’m not a salesperson. I’m not a marketing person.” They’re in their 30s, 40s or 50. They have a lot more experience and probably a lot more expertise than maybe even you had at 14 or 15 but you were able to land those deals and win those clients. What were you bringing to the table? How did you set up and land those deals at such a young age?
I didn’t have insecurities about being able to sell if I knew that quality was there. When I go back to the first deals I got, I remember my mom picking me up. I was probably fifteen. I couldn’t drive. She picked me up from school. I got out of gym class and changed into one of those big, baggy suits. It was probably my dad’s suit. She drove me to Boston where we grew up to take a meeting.
I’m going up the escalators and then up the tower to this big boardroom. I walk into this organization. The receptionist didn’t believe that I was there for the meeting. She was like, “Is this a joke?” I finally got in there and I had with me the little demo video. It was a DVD at the time that I was able to pop in and share with the client or the prospect there. Since the quality was good, my young age is impressive.
If you focus on getting good testimonials on producing good quality and measuring yourself up against competitors, you can stand behind the quality. You don’t have to be so afraid to go out there and sell yourself. I saw youth as a benefit. It was a way to get my foot in the door and say, “I’m doing this kind of work. It doesn’t matter that I’m 15, 16, 17 or whatever it is. Here’s the quality that you can expect.”
At the same time, I also priced pretty low. When I was getting started, I had the confidence to go sell but I didn’t have the confidence to price high enough. That comes down to the experience of doing one job for this price and taking the next client at this price. What I would encourage everyone reading to do is if you’ve been selling at the same price for a long time and you have demand where people are calling you or referring you, mark up your next job at 10%. Try it. I bet no one says no. Once you do that a couple of times, you mark that one up 10%. People can wait too long to adjust their prices but that’s where we lack confidence. It’s the confidence to charge enough, not the confidence to show up and do the work.
To maximize your productivity in selling, get serious about the process. You have to create demand and attention first. Process is what creates more bandwidth. Click To TweetThat’s great advice. I can attest to that firsthand, working with so many consultants over the years and seeing that it’s the confidence. As long as you can deliver value, then you can almost always increase your fees. Buyers will be happy to pay the higher fees as long as the ROI is still going to be there for them.
The other point around being younger or being older, for many humans, we have this thing where the grass is always greener. We can be young and think, in some cases, “I can’t do this because I’m too young.” You can also be old and go, “I’m older. I have all these younger people that I have to compete with. I can be living in a small town and I’m competing with people in a big city. I’m in a big city. There’s so much competition.” There’s always a reason, excuse or something you can find that could hold you back. As you’ve proved and so many others have, over the years, if you have the mindset and the desire to make things happen, then you go out there and figure out how to get it done.
I was able to leverage my age to get my foot in the door for certain opportunities too. I remember one of the biggest contracts that we had was we did all of the videos for US figure skating up until the Olympics. This is around the country. They were international events. It was anywhere it would happen in big stadiums with film crews. We did some events with NBC where we would shoot the beginning and they would shoot the end. I would get to direct in the truck. It’s cool stuff to do as a kid growing up.
Getting that first event with them was me reaching out through their website and saying, “I do a lot of these events locally in my backyard. I haven’t done figure skating but I’ve done a couple of other sports. There’s an application here. What would it take for me to volunteer my services to start to learn about the figure skating stuff?” I wanted to do it for free. They wrote me back and said, “We don’t have a way for you to volunteer but we have this RFP going out. You’re welcome to throw your hat in the race.”
I filled out the RFP. I put together this whole presentation. We ended up getting one of the events on their schedule. That was a way to test the waters and ourselves. We did that event. It went well. The next year, they invited us to do four events. The next year, it was eleven events. Three years later, we had the whole United States. It was because I was putting my foot in the door with my youth. That’s something that anyone can do. You can be like, “I’m getting started. I want to do this whether for free or cheap. Let me prove myself.”
Let’s come back to processes, playbooks and frameworks. In your book, you lay out the approach and thought process that people can take to start building these out. Walk us through maybe what is the best practice for people to start thinking about how they can develop a playbook and create more systems in their business. Are there some areas that you see a lot of people making mistakes in that they need to make sure to avoid?
I’ll tackle this in a couple of parts. The first framework is what you should document and when you should document. At the beginning of a business, a lot of what you’re doing is experimental. I’ve got this phrase I use a lot. Do it, document it and delegate it. What that is is a reminder that at the beginning, you’re doing the work. You’re figuring it out. You do it once, twice or three times. Until you do it consistently or take on that client from start to finish, you’re operating in the same way with the same output. You’re still figuring it out and doing it. The mistake a lot of people make is if they hear a seminar or go to a conference and they think, “I need standard operating procedures,” they start to document prematurely.
If you’re documenting things that are not consistent, then they’re going to be collecting dust in a few months. You’re going to think you wasted all your time. You want to do that thing over and over again until it starts to feel like a job almost. You say, “This is second nature. I’m doing this the same all the time.” That’s when you want to document it. Documenting it is writing or recording the steps and saying, “Here is why we do it. Here’s how we do it. Here’s how long it takes. I’ve got a whole process for the perfect standard operating procedure if you want to get into that.” It’s recording it or documenting it so that you can give it to someone else.
The last step is to delegate it. I tell people, “Until you’re ready to take something off your plate and delegate it, don’t put yourself through this process of having to document, clarify and record it. You only do that because you have a reason to.” When you’re doing something over and over and you want to get it to someone else, take it off your plate, hire that next person or bring on a virtual assistant, that’s when you document. That’s important for everyone to remember. We can sometimes hear the message that systems, processes and SOPs are important and we’re like, “I feel guilty because I’m not working on them.”
If you’re honest with yourself and you’re still at the beginning of your business journey where you’re still figuring it out and doing it differently every time, don’t document yet. If you’re in that place where you’re like, “I’m ready to grow. I’ve got something that’s proven. This is working. I’ve got demand,” it’s time to document and write things down because you can hand them to someone else.
That’s such great advice that a lot of people will benefit from. They are wondering, “Am I at the right place to go down this path? Should I hold off?” You’re going to save a lot of people a whole bunch of time regardless of which path they take. Walk me through a little bit more. For someone, they know they want to grow the business. They might be a solo consultant. They might have a small team.
There are so many aspects of running a business from how you interact with clients to marketing, sales, fulfillment, finance, HR and technology. There are all these different buckets that we could think about. Should people be focused on documenting everything and developing systems for all these things? Do you typically recommend that there’s maybe an order that they should be thinking through like where to start and how to progress through all the different aspects of the business?
When I talk about a business playbook, I think of it in four pieces. The first piece is the profile of your company. That is your culture, your mission, your vision and your core values. It’s your history. It’s why you exist. It’s your menu of products, services and pricing. It’s the market you’re in. It’s the ideal customer you’re going after. That profile of your company is what makes you different from other companies in your space. For every single person that you bring into your business, you have to teach those things to orient them to your business.
When we build an orientation, that’s one of the simplest building blocks. Those are the simplest things to document about our business because every single person in the business needs to understand these shared things. They need to know the background, history, story, why we’re showing up here and what we’re working on. That profile of your company is the first piece. I say start there.
Your next piece is your people. Your people section of your playbook is your roles, responsibilities and directory of team members with their contact info. It’s the basics of who’s who around here, who does what, who reports to whom and what are the teams and departments if you’re a bigger business. All of that people knowledge is what helps us not to step on each other’s toes. It’s, “Who do I go to for what?” That’s important early on in a business. Even if you’re reading and you’re a team of 1, 2, 3 or 4, you’re starting to develop that division of responsibilities. Long before you document any processes or SOPs, you want to know who does what around here. That’s a form of documentation in your business.
You’ve got your profile and people. Next would be your policies. Legally, a lot of us have to share certain things in some form of a handbook based on the jurisdiction we’re in. We have to have some form of policies when we’re getting started to make sure that we’re playing by the rules. Every business also has its unwritten rules of what’s okay to do here and what’s not okay. You may have policies for whether your employees can date, policies about how they represent you on social media or policies about a dress code. There are a lot of those unwritten rules. If you can document those early, you can save yourself a lot of performance management, heartbreak and communication and fixing those things later.
The profile, people and policies are the easy things. That’s where I suggest that everyone start. You’re going to change this over time but if you can lock in on those three, that is the foundation for your playbook. In the absence of specific processes of how we do things, you can solve a lot by knowing directionally why we act the way we act, who’s in charge of what and how we behave in the company. I say start there. The process is a whole other thing. We can get into what processes to document first.
It’s interesting that you recommend people to start with that. In my experience, I’ve probably seen more people default right away to processes and documenting how they do things and neglect documenting the people stuff, profile or how roles and responsibilities are set up. Why would you say that’s so key to do before you even get to processes? What have you seen in terms of companies that neglect that and go right into processes first, to drive that point home?
If you focus on getting good testimonials about producing good quality and measuring yourself up against competitors, you can stand behind the quality. Click To TweetA lot of times, when you go straight into the process, it’s more akin to outsourcing. You’ve got a specific thing that you need to get done. You’re handing it over to someone and saying, “Check all these boxes. Do this work.” You need someone with a heartbeat or any semblance of knowledge about your space. When you’re hiring an employee or bringing someone full-time into your business, those other three things are crucial. If you can’t get those right, then you’re going to have a lot of turnovers. You’re going to have a lot of replacing people because they didn’t work out. You’ll have performance management issues. You’ll have misaligned expectations and career paths.
All of that stuff creates such a burden for business owners and entrepreneurs as they’re trying to scale a business. Starting with those simple foundations is how you be a successful employer. That’s the difference. If you’re trying to outsource a task, then skip the process. If you are building a company, those first three things are crucial.
You mentioned on the process side, you do have some thoughts about how people should approach that. I don’t want to leave people hanging. What best practices do you have or what would you say in terms of thinking about documenting the processes or bringing those processes to life? Do you have any thoughts there?
Look across your business. First, is there something that is done the most? Is there a task, a type of project or something that you do over and over again? In my business, in the video production business, this was shipping out VHS and DVDs across the world. We would do these thousands of times per month where we’d take orders from our eCommerce store and ship them out. There was a specific process to assembling and fulfilling that order that if it was done incorrectly would have caused so much chaos of refunds, customer tickets and complaints. In my business, that was a crucial thing to document early. Think across your business. What is done the most number of times?
The next one is, is there something that’s done by the most number of people? It’s a shared process that a bunch of different people does. An example of this might be in a retail store, processing orders on a cash register, gift cards, returns or one of those things. That’s something that a lot of people do. You all want to do it consistently. This is one of those things that opens you up to bad reviews and bad referrals if you’ve got inconsistencies between different people doing the same thing. That’s another area I would look at.
The third thing would be back to delegation. What hats are you taking off? We all wear a lot of hats. What hats are you taking off? What roles are you passing to other people? Those things have a specific reason, which is delegation and wanting to scale or grow, that you need to document. I would go there next. What is the next position you’re hiring for? What’s the next thing that’s coming off your plate?
I want to dig a little bit into your company, Trainual. You could have gone many different paths with this business. You could have been pure-play professional services, going to different organizations, helping them to develop these systems and so forth. You could have licensing models with different people that you certify to become Trainual certified consultants. You could have chosen a lot of different models but you chose to productize and build this into a SaaS or a Software as a Service type of business. Talk and walk us through your thinking or maybe the chapters of the progression of how you got to where you are with the model.
Part of my story we haven’t covered yet is after thirteen years, I sold my video company. When I was looking for what to do next, I started consulting. I started as a solo consultant. I hired my 1st, then 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th employee. I built this little consulting boutique. What we specialized in was operations consulting. We were helping people use tech to be more efficient and streamline their processes.
Part of what I was delivering pretty often was a playbook, except we were doing it by packaging together Dropbox folders, Google Docs and YouTube videos. I thought, “If there was something proprietary that I had.” That’s where the idea of Trainual came from. It was, at first, a tool for my consulting clients. When we decided to pivot into SaaS, the thinking was, “Rather than selling my time as a consultant, if I can give all my time away as marketing and share how to do this, then we can monetize it with this product.” That was the idea for the pivot.
We made that shift in 2018. The team has grown a lot since then. We’re over 100 people in the business. We’ve got thousands of companies across the world using the product. The decision has always been to focus on SaaS and not do a lot of services internally. That’s because we want to be a platform that other consultants like I used to can use to grow their businesses. Any consultants out there that are helping people build their operations can be affiliated with us. They can be a referral partner. They can get some type of certification but that’s a third-party thing. It’s on them. It’s been cool to see people build big businesses and set up our customers.
When you’re running your boutique consulting business, before the software is already in play, a lot of people have expertise. They’ve explored or at least given thought to, “What if I could build this into software or productize this further?” In the case of software specifically, it requires an investment. Do you remember how much the initial investment was to get version one of Tainual up and running?
$10,000. This is my hardline.
How did you feel about that amount of money when you were considering making that initial investment? Was it a lot for you at that time?
It was major. I didn’t know too much about software but I knew that I had heard horror stories of people spending $100,000, $200,000 or $300,000 developing software that never took off. In my mind, the initial version of the app was a proof of concept that I was going to use for free with my consulting clients. I was still monetizing the business on consulting.
The initial idea with the Trainual application was to have some IP for my consulting business. It wasn’t to build a SaaS company. I went out and said, “I’ve $10,000.” I got a couple of contractors. I designed it so I cut some corners there. I went to a free mockup tool and got a theme kit. These things are easy to do. There are pre-built SaaS application themes. You have to say, “I want a form on this page and a profile on this page.” I sketched it all out. The developers made it happen and we had a prototype.
Once you had that, it was a matter of you starting to implement it or integrate it into your day-to-day work with consulting clients. At what point did you decide, “I’m going to shift and turn the folks of the business into selling software, not into selling services.”
It was in late 2017. I had a team of five. We had a big customer that finished up their project with us and we had a gap. Rather than looking to get a new customer, I suggested to the team, “Why don’t we treat Trainual as one of our customers? Let’s work on it for 1 month or 2 and see how far we can get it based on all the feedback we’ve gotten over the last couple of years.”
From spending that $10,000, the next couple of years, I didn’t invest $1 into it. It was like, “Let’s use this in the field.” All at once, we took that batch feedback and started working on the app. I fell in love with it. I was like, “This could be something. This doesn’t exist out there.” I was getting so many ideas. I got a logo designed on 99designs. I printed t-shirts and came into the office with the T-shirts. I said, “We’re going to do a software company. Here’s a free shirt.”
In the consulting space, there are a million consultants. You need to differentiate yourself through your brand, personality, or niche. Click To TweetYou were getting a lot of feedback from the marketplace, existing clients and so forth. Were you charging anyone for the software by itself at that time?
They would get it for free for six months after we worked together and then it was $49 a month. Over those couple of years, it had grown to $1,800 or so in recurring revenue, which, for me, I was ecstatic about. It was covering my car payment, rent and all that. My wife was like, “Maybe you should do something with this thing,” but it was minimal when you’re talking about a SaaS business.
You have $1,800 a month coming in through this little SaaS mockup that was working for you but certainly not a highly profitable software business. What were the next steps to start bringing in new clients and building a pipeline of business around the product and not just the services?
I started in the last 6 to 12 months in my consulting business. Before we made this shift, I had started to do a lot of content marketing. I was writing a newsletter that was going out every week. It started with my friends and then it was a few thousand people. I printed and self-published a little book that was some of my hacks for running a business more efficiently. I started prospecting on LinkedIn and sending people copies of the book.
I was getting this inflow of leads for the consulting service. I saw how powerful marketing could be to drive business beyond referrals. It was an important lesson that I learned toward the end of consulting that I was able to carry forward into Trainual. When we launched the product of Trainual, there was the initial big announcement. We did a big launch party. We invited reporters from the local paper. We launched Product Hunt, which is a website that features a lot of tech platforms.
We started blasting everyone I knew on LinkedIn, as you naturally do, to tell everyone, “This is what I’m doing. I would love your feedback or any connections.” I was not trying to sell it. I was trying to get feedback. I was trying to get connections and people to say, “Let me refer you to this other person.” That created some momentum.
It was 3.5 or 4 months into the business that we started doing digital ads. That became a huge part of our early growth strategy. It was being able to say, “Here’s my pitch.” If I’m sitting in a coffee shop with someone, I’d be like, “Let me blast that out to 100,000 people and get some cold lead.” That was the turning point.
With digital ads, to confirm for everyone here, are you talking about ads on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google? What specifically were you doing in the early days to put this in front of more people?
Facebook and Instagram were the two that we did in the early days. It was in your feed but also the story ads. What we were trying to do is not look like a billboard or an advertisement but look like people. We appear in someone’s ad and say, “I’ve built a business to this size. If you’re going through that journey, I wish I had this thing. Click here, check it out and see what you think.” It was disarming and conversational but it was those two channels early on where we scaled a lot.
You started running some ads. You’ve blasted this to everyone that you know saying that you want to get some feedback. From $1,800 a month in revenue, where did that roughly get you once you started doing some of these things?
It took us about 6 months to get to $10,000 a month in recurring revenue. That was the slow going. We hit $1 million in revenue in our 13th month. The first half was trying to figure it out. Once we struck a vein with some of our messaging and some of the ads we were working on, then it was a matter of turning those up and making sure that the customers are getting into trials and that their cards are getting charged. We started to dial in our processes, which were, “How do we do demos at scale?” I was doing those differently every time for the first six months but how do we do that repeatedly? It was all the process stuff we were talking about.
In the market and space that you’re in, other tools exist around processes, systems and documentation. How do you look at competition? How do you look at the competitive landscape? How does that drive the decisions that you make and also your overall execution in marketing?
The first thing is it’s a huge market. It’s important to know that there are always going to be a lot of tools. In the consulting space, there are a million consultants. The way that you differentiate yourself is through your brand, your personality or the niche that you’re focused on. For us, one of the focuses from the beginning has always been small business.
When you think about processes, policies and documentation, you can quickly go to compliance, learning management and training management. You start to think of these big corporate training rooms and the L&D department giving you stuff that you don’t want to do. That feels bureaucratic. It feels like a lot of red tapes. From the get-go, we did not want to be that.
We wanted to be if you’ve got operations in your company and you want to be efficient, you want to run lean and you need to write those things down or record them, we are the business for you. Branding, positioning and pricing were all to make sure that our customer, the small business customer, knows that we’re here for them. That’s one piece.
The next is we’re a hybrid tool. With most of our customers, chances are they’ve got a lot stuck up in their heads, they’re training people through osmosis or they’re sitting one-on-one with people. If they’re writing anything down, they’re most likely using tools like Google Docs, Notion or word processor-type tools to get things written down.
Where we are different from those tools is it’s more of a training experience. It’s more, “As a new person getting to know a company, I can know what I haven’t completed yet. I can track my progress. I can see when something was last updated. I can see what attaches to my responsibilities in the company that I need to be proficient to get that next promotion.” It’s this whole layer of a training experience that sits on top of simply writing things down that makes Trainual different.
You mentioned your 100-plus employees and team members. How has your day-to-day changed over the last couple of years? What are you doing differently compared to what you used to do before?
Don’t ever stop collaborating with people at all different levels of the business. You should always want to be approachable and involved. Click To TweetEarly on, before we had leaders in place and all the different functions, I was doing the sales demos. I was doing escalated customer success tickets. I was setting up our CRM or whatever it was. As we put functional leaders in place and we had someone to oversee customer success, the product, development and design, little by little, those responsibilities get peeled off. We have departments for all the areas of the company.
I have seven direct reports. I see those as my seven consulting clients. They each run their department, which is like running their business. My job has shifted less from doing the work and managing ICs myself to overseeing the CEOs of their department. It’s comfortable because this is what I did before Trainual. I love being an advisor, a consultant, a coach, a mentor and that sort of thing and helping them solve problems without solving them for them. I’m loving this stage of business.
Do you ever find yourself getting pulled into or wanting to jump in with people that are lower down on the ladder? What I mean by that is you have your seven direct reports. Let’s say under the marketing department, you have one CMO or someone in a similar role. They have the marketing people that work within that department. Do you ever find yourself wanting to jump down to work with the people in the department or give feedback? How involved are you with the other people inside of the department and not just the seven direct reports?
It varies. I could think of probably a dozen examples of working with someone that manages all of our partnerships. We’re collaborating. We have a good idea about an event that’s coming up. I’m working with someone on our people team that does all our events about an event that’s at the end of 2022 that I’m excited about. There are also our product teams and our squads.
I’m always working with the PMs and designers and giving them direct feedback. I don’t have to manage all these teams directly but it’s fun to continue to collaborate with all of them. I don’t think you should ever stop collaborating with people at all different levels of the business. You always want to be approachable and involved. It’s fun. That’s what I like to do.
Before we wrap up, I want a final from you. You’ve grown to 100-plus people. What does the future look like? What challenge is top of mind for you? What are you thinking about?
At the top of my mind are a couple of things. Number one, we have a big event coming up. Our annual event called Playbook is coming up from September 22nd to 23rd, 2022. You can go to Playbook2022.com. It’s a free event. We’re expecting 10,000 or so people digitally. We’ll be Zooming in for a couple of days. That will be a lot of fun. I’m working on my presentation and my keynote for that because that’s when we roll out a lot of fun product stuff. It’s an exciting date that we look forward to every year.
Next is a new presentation for a speaking event that I’m working on. I do a lot of thought leadership content. I’m speaking and writing. I have my podcast five days a week. That’s always top of mind. We’re hiring a new leader to add to our team. We’re doing dozens of interviews and understanding how to find the right person that we need. I’m talking to our investors and my mentors and refining that role. Those will be the three things.
Chris, I want to thank you for coming on here. I also want to make sure that we could maybe link up more information about Trainual. Maybe there’s something cool that we could provide for all of our audience and guide them towards you. Maybe we’ll put something up at ConsultingSuccess.com/SOP to make it simple. Maybe Chris and I could come up with something to either guide you towards or something that would be of value. Head over there and you can learn more about Trainual, everything else that they have going on there and maybe some cool resources we’ll be able to throw at you.
I want to thank you so much for coming on here and sharing some of your journey and best practices. I should also mention that we are using your product. We’re rolling it out across our team. I highly recommend anybody interested in bringing in better systems and processes, documenting things to make training easier and having things more organized to head over to ConsultingSuccess.com/SOP. You’ll see why. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Michael.
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About Chris Ronzio
I am energized by progress, and driven by process. I love producing innovative ideas and making an impact by organizing chaos and getting things done.
My experience as an entrepreneur, consultant, and speaker has afforded me the opportunity to travel the world, meet amazing people, and absorb diverse perspectives that continue to fuel my imagination.
After working directly with hundreds of entrepreneurs, my team and I created a software tool to help organize small and growing businesses. Every process, every role, every responsibility: consistent, teachable, and centralized in one place. Document and delegate what you do, and create your scalable operations manual with Trainual.com.
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