Resources for Buying and Selling Online Businesses

How To Upload Your Knowledge Into Your Employees’ Brains (So They Can Grow Your Business)

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Owen McGab EnaohwoOwen McGab Enaohwo is the Co-founder and CEO of SweetProcess, a tool that makes documenting standard operating procedures and tasks easy and efficient. Owen is responsible for making sure that you enjoy using SweetProcess to systematize the operations of your rapidly growing company. He is experienced in the internet industry and previously was the CEO of H.Y.V.A.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [03:52] Owen McGab Enaohwo explains the origin of creating a system to organize procedures and processes
  • [06:27] Is there a simpler way to solve the challenge of documenting procedures?
  • [11:17] Why you need to start with an outline of a minimum viable procedure
  • [17:24] Owen talks about getting employees into the habit of referring to SweetProcess
  • [22:77] How searchability features can aid in teamwork collaboration
  • [26:18] Owen shares how a standard operating procedure (SOP) can cultivate innovative thinking

In this episode…

Endless tabs and unorganized documents on how to run your brand can be stressful. How can you easily share standard operating procedures across your brand and make them accessible from one place?

Owen McGab Enaohwo helped create a tool to organize your best standard operating procedures (SOPs) that runs the gamut. His tool helps businesses easily access documents with just a few clicks of a mouse, making onboarding and everyday practices smooth. When you have an SOP in place, you’re opening the door for innovative thinking and improvement. Are you ready to revamp your systems?

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Owen McGab Enaohwo, Co-founder and CEO of SweetProcess, to discuss how launching a standard operating procedure can aid in the growth of your company. Owen talks about organizing and documenting processes, why you need a minimum viable procedure for your business, and enhancing searchability features.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

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What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hi folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley  0:32

Hey folks, Joe Valley here. Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. The guest today is Owen McGab Enaohwo. And now he’s from Maryland, and he’s got a partner down in Australia, and they’ve created a company to help people with their processes, whether it’s a knowledge base, like we’ve tried to create here, a Quiet Light, which is really just a collection of SOPs, for hiring processes for VAs and things of that nature. So as you look out in 2023, and are thinking about scaling up your people and your processes, using this guy’s company, or at least the advice he gives on this podcast, we’ll help you with that. I know that we’ve developed knowledge bases before here at Quiet Light, and because we don’t have a systematic process for it, they become dated fairly quickly. Some of the things that Owen talks about in this podcast will help alleviate that and help you get organized so that as you grow and scale both in revenue and in people, you can do it in an organized fashion, which will eventually help you with an exit, whether you’re exiting to your partner, friends and relatives, family, things of that nature, or doing a full exit to an outside party. So let’s take a listen. This is Owen McGab Enaohwo from SweetProcess. Here we go. Hello, and welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  1:54

Joe? Thanks for having me. I’m good.

Joe Valley  1:57

It’s good to have you here. Man. Why don’t you give the audience a little bit of background on yourself and your company?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  2:02

Okay, so I’m the CEO and co founder of a company called SweetProcess basically is a software that we make it easy for, you know, the listeners and printers to be able to have a, you know, a single place online where they can find, you know, how is it that we do any recurring tasks in our company, you want to get one single place where your employees can go find these procedures and processes on how to do work. That’s what we make it easy for your listeners to be able to do and for our customers by providing our software. But if you want to give a quick, brief introduction as to how we even found a company and how this came about, yeah, please do. Okay, so before strippers is started in the fourth quarter of 2013, right. And so before that, I used to run an agency that used to provide printers here in the US small to medium sized business owners with back office staff. So typically, like virtual assistant and stuff like that to do work for them. And this came about during the period where, you know, we had read the books, like The Four Hour Workweek, the world is flat, and then they realize this moment, small to medium sized business owner realize that they too, can take advantage of the whole was a call outsourcing and it wasn’t a thing where, you know, just limited to the larger companies like the big telecoms and all of that, right? Because before then that’s what we’re accustomed to that, you know, the telecoms were and all that would go to this company to these countries, get like hundreds of employees in this, you know, like 100, seats, whatever to handle their customer support, and all that. So that’s what they thought, but these books made him understand that, you know, from small to medium sized business owners could do this. But then we started getting this kind of customers and the issues we had with them was when they will come to us, they came with this preconceived notion that some of them in different countries speak in a different language and in a different timezone can just magically take over their work. And do it the way they want it to be done. Just the way they’ve always done it without some kind of proper onboarding on education on how to you know, how the work is done, or training on how the work is done. So part of you know, when we got the customers, part of what we had to do was, you know, said this petitioners curricula, hey, in order for us to do the work the way you want it done, there needs to be some form of training. And so what we’ll do is back then to a Skype, not zoom, and all these other, you know, old school or school stuff, so we’ll meet on Zoom, and then we’ll say okay, what is that specific tasks that you want to give us to give out to us to do that happens on a recurrent basis that you want to start with, they will have a session with us and walk host shows showing on the screen and having a conversation on how to do the work. Then, after that interview is done. Someone else on my team would take that interview and then create like step by step procedures and checklists on how the work is done. But here’s where we had issues. The issues we had was the tools we were using for the document and all of these procedures either they were enterprise level tools, bills like process consultant, and we had to use all we’re just Basically hotkey to get a bunch of different document publishing to just get this.

Joe Valley  5:05

Yeah, that’s what we do. We just pack stuff together, we’ve I think I’ve got like 45 to 50 bookmarks, at least right, and hoping the rest of the team does as well. And then we’ve got everything very well unorganized in Google Drive. And when you want to find something, it’s a task amongst

Owen McGab Enaohwo  5:24

so you’re taking away my spirit, because that’s exactly the problem we’re facing. So my mind I was like to be better wait for this, because you know, this doesn’t make sense. And so fast forward, I went on a podcast like I am right now. It was called, it’s actually called Mixergy, hosted by Andrew Warner. And he knew I was there to teach his listeners how to systematize the operations, document procedures and stuff like that just similar thing I’m going to do on this call, and my co founder all the way from Australia, listen to the call. And he literally isn’t Miss Jervis. By the way, he reached out to me and said, Hey, he’s trying to, you know, build this, he has an idea for building this app, similar to the things I was talking about in terms of making it easy for people to document procedures, and he wants to like, share some feedback with me and get my tours. And so you know, I was open to it. And this was literally a cold email emailed me, right. So we had a conversation on the phone and all that stuff. And I was like, Okay, here’s the thing, what you’re trying to do is something that I have issues with, and I actually do try to do for my, my clients, you know, so just giving you ideas on how to do this, why don’t we just go ahead and build this together? Right. But we just what I want to do, I mean, I agreed. And so I was like, we have to work with this what we should do, because I’m running into issues where the tools that I actually want to use are kind of price level and hard to use. I don’t want to end up in a situation where we’ll build the same kind of hard to use tools. So why don’t we go ahead and interview a bunch of potential customers. So you can see what the problem you’re having with this whole thing of documented procedures and having a single place, right online, the employees can go find things. And so we can take our findings to go, Okay, what’s the root issues that people are really having, and then try to build a software that, you know, attempts to address the issues in a simpler way. So we did that we had over like 40 or so interviews were recorded all that stuff, you’d use what the root issues that we were having. And then we then went ahead to build the software. So fast forward. Now, as SweetProcess, you know, we have over 2000 companies using our software, the typical company is between that 20 employees, two all the way to 150 plus employees, we have branches in the company, using software, we have churches and their volunteers using the software, we have government agencies and software, lawyers, I mean, it runs the gamut. Because at the end of the day, this issue of you know, having your employees be able to do work predictably. And having the information right in front of the hand to go to work. It’s this is industry agnostic is not specific to specific industry. So that’s why we have different industries, using the software. So that’s just a quick introduction of how SweetProcess got started. Yeah, that’s,

that’s great, man, you’re solving a problem. First, it was your clients problem. And you said it was a problem for everybody else, you know, we’re in the same boat. Right at Quiet Light. We’ve got, you know, 35 36 employees now, and growing and doing, you know, hiring them on and bringing VAs on, in particular, I find always to be challenging, because we don’t have the process, we don’t have the SOPs in place to bring them first of all, on how to bring them on. Secondly, once they’re they’re brought on, you know, is the role that they’re going to work in, fully documented in the interest? No. Oh, and so how do you encourage your clients through SweetProcess to, you know, properly document things in terms of a onboarding be, you know, the work that’s going to be done by let’s say, let’s say a VA, because I think most of the audience would probably be working with virtual assistants. And onboarding them properly, is a barrier to getting that work done to begin with.

Okay, so let me give you a framework on how to get this done. Regardless of your reason of why you’re doing it, it might be because you’re trying to grow and scale the company, or you’re trying to do succession planning and get you know, someone else to take over from you or because you’re trying to sell the company because the company gets more valuable, because if you have these documents in place, all for training and onboarding purposes, to get quick use out of your customer. So based on the reason,

Joe Valley  9:21

pause right there, and don’t forget what you’re about to say, folks, he just talked about, you know, if you’re going to sell your company, and how this will increase the value of your company, and I’ve got to touch on that because it’s not a numerical thing, right? It’s not sellers, discretionary earnings times a multiple because of you, you know, what your processes and your onboarding, but what it does is it instills confidence in buyers. They believe in you as a professional, they believe you’ve built a business that is going to transfer more successfully and not have lots of road bumps and blocks that you have to get around as a new owner shortly after cool closing, because you’ve got everything well processed and documented. And if you, unfortunately get hit by a bus or just disappear off the face of the earth intentionally or not, after closing doesn’t matter, everything is processed to the tee. And it’s going to, it’s going to get you more value for your business either in higher offers, or a better deal structure. So, how to say it? Oh, and how to say it?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  10:21

Well, I’m glad you, I’m glad you. I’m glad you went on that. So the reason why you’re doing this, so we have agreed that you need to do this. So now the next thing is, where do you start? So before you get started, I would say no, evaluate the work you do on a recurring basis, because we only documenting the work you do on a recurring basis, right? Not the stuff that you do, you know, once and then you never do it. Now that doesn’t like projects you never do over and absolutely only focus on the things to do over and over again, that’s evaluate like maybe a week or so a month or whatever of like a timeframe of this work you do on a recurring basis. And then that will give you a kind of a list of what is happening in the company, right. And then before you start documenting, I’ll say the first thing you need to ask is, which of these recurring tasks are required. The reason why I say required is because some of these days, we just sort of tribal knowledge, we’ve always done things this way. And it’s not necessarily required, because, you know, you might just start by eliminating the things that are not required, so that you can only focus on the recurring things that are required, because we want to start this documenting thing. And it’s an effort, we don’t want to document things that are unnecessary. So now we are left with two recurring tasks that are required. Now let’s look at that and say, Okay, let’s break that into two parts, the tasks that are, you know, revenue generating, which are the sales and marketing tasks that bringing your customers like, you know, into the company. And then the other part of that, which is the production tasks, the things that you do to deliver what you’ve promised to your customers, right? Now, people are listening to this and say, Oh, maybe I should go ahead and start with the recurrent note with the with the sales and marketing stuff, because it’s exciting. You know, if you document how you do that, because you have a system, you don’t now you do now you can get more more employees to bring them bring in more customers. But as it was on that, because you’re going to end up having a system that works documented how it’s worked in bringing people to do the work. So they bring in more customers. So they this customers get pissed at the fact that you’re on your production site. There’s a lot of bottlenecks, right, you don’t want to miss more customers off. So that’s why I say start with the production side of things first, now let’s determine which task on the production side of things is the biggest bottleneck. And to identify that it’s like the tasks that anytime it comes up is like, oh, gosh, information nightmare information is missing here. And they’re all you really don’t like doing it because you feel like, oh, it’s taking so much of your time, or, you know, whatever reason it is

Joe Valley  12:32

to do it each month, that’s that’s the problem. It’s like, okay, this is once a month, it’s not a big deal. But at the beginning of every month, I’m like, How did I do? How do

Owen McGab Enaohwo  12:40

you do it? And it’s even now heightened now that people are not working in the same location, like back in the days before, you know, COVID make remote working fashionable, right? Everybody’s doing it now. You just rely on maybe walking into your coworker and interrupting them, because that’s what you were literally doing to try to get information from them. And now they have to figure out, okay, what was I doing before this guy can do to help me so I can do my work. Now, you can’t even do that. So everybody’s working from home. And keep in mind, a lot of them are parents, with kids and all that. So everybody’s attention is literally needed to do work. So it’s it now, because people are working for them. So back to the story. So we’ve identified that, you know, the biggest bottleneck on the production side of things. So how do you get started, I’ll say is the time when you about to work on the task, that’s when you start documenting, like, because you mentioned, you know, trying to remember how to do the work, right. So when you actually try to do the work, obviously, gonna have to try to remember how to do the work. So I say, Okay, why don’t you also take the time to document a procedure. But here’s the thing, I’m asking you to document an exact video at this point. And I’m asking you to document what I finally called a minimum viable procedure, which is a fancy way of saying a skeleton outline of a checklist. All it has it had days is titled procedure, title of each of the steps. So if you are working on a 10 step task, for instance, by the time you’re actually done working on a task, you will have a minimum viable procedure has scheduled the task and title, the 10 steps. How do you go from this outline of the procedure to something with more details fleshed in where mean details? I mean, screenshots in their text in between each step may be additional, like a small video blurb, or whatever that gives more insight into what you’re doing in each step. How do you get from that outline to that very point is, first of all, you have to put in the minds of all your your managers and your employees on the ground that, hey, this is going to be a continuous improvement thing we got to install in the in your mind, we’re all starting from version zero. And we are going to as we keep working, we’re going to keep improving which version. So now remember, you’ve documented that outline, the next time your employee, manager or whatever is about to work on this task. Again, do you need to have that outline in front of them? Right? And the task is as they’re working on the on the task, all they need to do is go in and put in some blurb into each of the steps, not not just something that we want to go from version zero to something with more detail. And your job is once they have done that is to review that document and upgrade of it to make sure that there is some information in there, right so that every time that this is the dance, every time you’re working on this task, we go into back to that document and trying to add additional information. And you are making sure that you have your eyes on this to make sure that you’re improving as you go. So that’s the framework. Now you go to

Joe Valley  15:21

the document itself, what is the format of the document? And where does it live?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  15:27

Okay, this is where we start talking about the actual tool that makes everything all come together. And this way, you know, I will talk about SweetProcess, but I’m trying to give you a framework on how to do it, regardless of whether it was eight, I don’t want it to just be an ad for three plus, I wanted to give them how to do regardless of sweepstakes or not. So the to answer your question the format could be I would say let it be, you know, a document, write a readable text document that has title of the document and title of each of the steps. And you know, you want to have images in there, right, I will say don’t put a video a long video, because the problem with videos is that when you have a video that is too long, now you’re telling someone that oh, I’m going to spend the time to watch this entire video to get an understanding of what you want me to do. So if you want if you do not have to use a video, make a video in less than a minute. We honest, right? Because we want that video to be representative of that very step. So personally, I rather not use videos, I rather use screenshots. And if you need to make the screenshot, a visual where people can see things or use a GIF, or GIF, we will show you some kind of animation, right? So screenshots and text, because when you make changes, it’s just a payout. It’s the new stuff, versus trying to use a video video, you have to render a whole new video. So back to the thing now. So you’ve you’ve identified that first document, you’ve gone through that dance, you’ve created that procedure for that first document. So every time employees are working on tasks, their job is to improve a document, you go there and approve it. Now you identify the next biggest bottleneck on production side of things, you do the same thing we mentioned, identify the next biggest bottleneck. And so you know, eventually you will have documented quite a lot of the tasks on the production site where you can start freeing up some time, it’s okay, let me start looking at the sales and marketing stuff started bringing customers into the company, you start documenting how you do those things as well. And here’s the thing, you now get to a point where you can start assigning, bringing on new employees to do those tasks. Knowing that on the operation side of things, you won’t run into an a bottleneck because you taught me how to adjust as the production side of things are done. And if you need to bring in new employees to take over some of those things, they have a starting point that they can go from. So now the next thing is you understand how to make this done? How do we also have this culture in the company that people have a system thinking mindset. So I’ll give you some some tips on how to do that. The first thing is, if your employees come asking how to do a certain thing, you have to make sure that you always tell them, Hey, have you checked SweetProcess? For instance, if you’re using SweetProcess, they know the first thing your manager or anybody who they keep coming to ask questions. Have you checked SweetProcess and what that does to them? So consciousness like hey, I can go ask my boss, I can go ask my manager how to do something onto my chest SweetProcess, right, for instance. And now. So now they now know that every time you have a question, the first place thing you have to do is go and check that software that you’re using, and see that document is in there. Now you’re trying to train and habit. Now what also happens is that eventually there’s gonna come a time where they check three brothers, for instance, they didn’t and they don’t see that document. Now that should trigger something where you’re the manager or you the mind, or you’re the owner, the company knows now that this is some information that is critical for your employees to have trained in every time they need to find something, then go and check that to process my answer. But now this document is not there, that should now trigger the opportunity for you to go ahead and document a new minimum viable procedure for that task, especially because it’s something that you want to do on a recurring basis. Another way to also encourage the whole thing of habits into your employees, right for this whole system thinking is, as your employee starts checking the SweetProcess, seeing how the documents are all document all the different types, you’re gonna start seeing, you know, you know, every document and employee’s name is next to a document that maybe they created it, or they were the ones that added a step to the document, or did it was to add comments to it. So what does that put in their mind? Well, all my colleagues are here, helping to improve a three documents, or how we work, maybe actually started joining in this dance too, because I don’t want to do like I’m not contributing to this company, right? Please start doing that. But now from the mindset of the employees, you are supposed to let them know that from a culture standpoint, where will you say that the company has your best interest other than the fact that okay, you are doing the work and we are encouraging you to come here and make updates to how you do the work. This is a company that actually listens to you and we care so much about you that we want you to be part of improving how we do work. So that’s this is ways to sell it to them. Now, people might say, Okay, well your employees have things to do, maybe, you know, they might not have the time. So let me give you some tips on how to add additional ways for them to do the work or incentivize them. You’re, they’re getting paid to do work. And now you’re, excuse me, now you’re asking them to, you know, invest some time to actually help you document and improve this, your procedures and processes, why not also pay them for doing this, right. So you can actually pay them to do this on Earth, and you can also do is that maybe you can create a kind of shortcut, some of these days, you can maybe create a procedure on how to create procedures so that all they have to do is copy that document, right? That template document. And that kind of gives them instructions on how whenever you created a procedure, this is how you want the procedure to be this how I want the title to be this, how I want you to have steps in how I want you to have details in there. So I’m just giving the listeners tips on how to do it. If you say for some reason that okay, all these tips is not enough for you to do something to get this started. Well, they are process consultants, people who are hire third parties who are hired to plumb into a company to help you document procedures, if prominent, follow this whole dance that I’ve mentioned and introduce a software like free process to actually help you get it done in your company. Now the thing is, obviously, if you hire a new process consultant is going to be more expensive than if you’re trying to do it yourself and with your employees, but at least you have all the options available to get this

Joe Valley  21:26

done. One of the challenges I have is creating, you know, a place where it’s properly labeled, so somebody is searching for, you know, an email launch, you know, sequence How do I do that? Or, you know, to change the list price of a business? How do I do that? Where like, how do you organize, you know, SOPs by employees or by departments and things of that nature. But how deep do you go?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  21:56

So I can tell from our standpoint, a suite process. So what we do is we allow you to create teams, right on how your company runs. So if you have a sales, your marketing finance page for different teams, and within those teams, obviously you have roles in those teams as well. Right? So let’s imagine if let’s say you run in a restaurant and you have a kitchen, right? And in that kitchen, you have a role where chefs, right, so you can put a role for chefs and people who are in that role, and then a role for dishwashers and people who are in that role, right. So now back to the teams is that, you know, you put documents into those teams. And those people who are part of those, those teams can only see documents in that in that team, they can see documents outside of that team. And then you can even further organize the documents within each team. By putting those documents in relevant orders. One of the things that we did to make sure that is a SweetProcess from the standpoint of search search ability is a universal search. Meaning that if you wanted to search for a document, all you literally have to do is sites, think of a specific key word that should be contained in a document, let’s say if you’re looking for, you’re writing a procedure on how to reform orders, right, and you’re looking for how to do that, how you would do is just type the word the key word reform, as we process will bring out a result of every single document that has that key word refund, either in the title or in the content. And it’s now easier for you to now see okay, from this result, I can see what I’m looking for.

Joe Valley  23:24

Yeah, this is this is the problem we had here a Quiet Light were searching for keywords in the title a document inside of Google Drive, searched, I think our entire Google Drive instead of the specific folders that we were trying to create. And funnily enough, we used to have what we called it a knowledge base and we used to have it as a separate URL accessible only by our team on our WordPress site. And I swear, every time I needed to upload a new video or training sequence or whatever it might be, I had to relearn it every single time. I didn’t have an SOP on it because I thought no big deal I’m getting this I know how to do this this month. And you know you do so many things in a month as an entrepreneur that you quickly forget tasks like that. And eventually the the the knowledge base, which really is just SOP documentation, it became dated very quickly. We’re in the middle of trying to rebuild it and I know Mark my business partner is doing it because I did it last time and it didn’t you know it’s a monumental task. And honestly I don’t think we’ve looked at SweetProcess so this is going to be one of the first things I have him do once we’re done with this recording. So I appreciate it. What other what other tips can you give to help people to get started even you know, again, they’re not you know, this isn’t a This isn’t an ad for SweetProcess, but if they’re not using SweetProcess and they’re just trying to get started, and they’ve only got you know, it’s them in a partner in three afford VAs and they’re hoping to add additional VAs in the coming year? What What tips can you give them to just start to get organized?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  25:09

So yes, the thing too is that I’ve given you a lot of tips and the framework. But you know, I also said, if you can do it, or your employees can do it, you can hire process consultant, now also a process component that is looking at it from a standpoint of consultant. But maybe that’s too expensive. There are actual people who there are jobs literally call them standard, standard SOP writers, you can go on on what’s it called on the LinkedIn and do like a title search, right? And hire these people. And these people are literally hired in companies to write SOP. Now, obviously, these guys don’t come with the spirit of consulting that process consultant will will come with. So it’s more of a hand held thing where you have to, you know, kind of give them way more information. And their job is to go there and try to write this stuff. So that’s another option that you can throw in there. But if you go with the process consulting route, here, they come from a much higher level where they actually kind of consulting and going through trying to help you think through things. And then eventually, sometimes they actually end up having SOP writers that they hire internally to do the actual writing of this document. For you. There’s something you mentioned earlier ways, like you said, you have to spend time trying to remember how the work is done, right. And so now this is interrupting the fact that you don’t get to do the work you need to do when you need to do it, you have to spend time trying to remember how the work is done. Now also argue that if you have all these procedures in place, you don’t have to spend any energy, trying to remember how work is done. As a matter of fact, because you don’t have to spend how much time trying to remember how the work is done. Because you can just get quickly get started on the work that also allows that innovation to come in. Because when you start doing the work, you start thinking Hmm, how can I make this better? That’s what your mind starts going to because your mind is free from thinking how do I do the work, you might just go straight to doing the work. So you’re now allowed to start thinking, Are you only you, but you are your employees? Because you have these SOPs in place, your employees that stuff yourself to start thinking, how can we improve stuff, and that to me is is is innovation, the whole continuous improvement of how your work is done. And that only comes in when you actually have that starting point, or the starting point is the documents in place?

Joe Valley  27:19

Yeah. My last company that I sold, it was it was me and one, you know, remote employee. And one of the recommendations I got from Mark here at Quiet Light, when I was selling my business before I was a partner with him, was creating SOPs for tasks I did every day, it was easy, because it was just me. And I knew who I was writing it for I was writing it for the new owners of the business. And it became very valuable and helped me get, you know, a full price all cash offer. I think the challenge sometimes own is when we are so busy doing all the things that we do, and an eventual exit is someday down the road. That’s not motivation enough to write the SOPs, but what you just mentioned is, it helps you continually improve your business and waste, you know, eliminates wasted time, and gives more confidence to people and they can continually improve the process that they’re working on, they can do you know more in less time. And that in itself is an improvement of the business, people will be happier, and the value of the business goes up as well. Or you just might end up making more money because you’re doing a better job at these organizational tasks. So there’s, there’s lots of reasons to do it now versus for Sunday for an exit, wouldn’t you say?

Owen McGab Enaohwo  28:39

Of course. And one final point is, you know, a lot of this documentation were documented so that human beings can do the work predictably the way we want it. But that shouldn’t be the end goal. That shouldn’t be where you stop, we should also think that, okay, as we keep improving this stuff, maybe we get to a point where we can start figuring out ways to actually start automating some of these things where some of the points in the tasks that we’ve documented procedure, maybe we don’t even need to have human beings do it, we can then you start using software and machines doing it. So that, you know, we go from, you know, 100% being done by human beings, we get to certain points where we start having automation. So that’s kind of the dance of how you’re doing this is that, you know, sometimes you can get to that point where a lot of the stuff humans don’t have to do, you can automate it. And now, you know, only out of Yeah, but you don’t get to that automation, until you’ve gotten a full understanding of how the manual things get done. You start from the documenting of the SOPs, and eventually get to the point where maybe the entire thing is automated or some parts of it or a large essence of it is automated and some of the parts are done by human beings.

Joe Valley  29:41

That’s awesome. The thing I like most is the fact that you have a document showing you this is the framework on how to create an SOP, and then the rest of your team uses that so they’re similar, right? Anytime you go to a new SOP. It looks familiar. You don’t have to learn it from scratch. It’s great and I just took a look at your your site again. And I gotta admit, I mean, I’m thinking about this for quite a while and be honest with you. It’s ridiculously affordable. It really is.

Owen McGab Enaohwo  30:11

Yeah, that’s a thing people keep saying all the time, I’m begin to wonder maybe we should increase the price and

Joe Valley  30:16

wait until wait until after we say that. How? How do people learn more about SweetProcess? Oh, and how do they reach you? How do they you know, get started if they want to take a look and see if it’s a good fit for them.

Owen McGab Enaohwo  30:31

So great. So what I want to do is because the listeners are listening to the all the way to this point, I want to give them an incentive. So if you go to allow a website, by default, the trial is 14 years because you’ve listened to this interview all the way to this point, I want to give you an extended trial. So instead of 14 days, you get 28 days with a longer time to try the software, use it for free. And to get this offer you go to SweetProcess.com/QuietLight again, as sweet, so sweet, like candy process like process.com, forward slash Quiet Light, and you’ll be able to get access to this extended trial of SweetProcess.

Joe Valley  31:05

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast today. Oh, greatly appreciate it. Hopefully people will take you up on the offer and have a great day. 2023

Owen McGab Enaohwo  31:14

Thank you very much, Joe. Thanks for having me and to the audience. Thanks for listening to me.

Outro 31:20

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 And the Quiet Light Content Team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at [email protected] Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

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