Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers Podcast, we have a very special episode because I got to talk with my cousin, my second cousin, Lennette Palermo, from Canada.
Lennette's a Six Sigma, business process specialist. She's starting a new consulting business to help entrepreneurs and business owners map and process their businesses.
I love this kind of thinking because everything fits with what we do with the 8 Profit Activators. So much of creating a great business is creating a great experience, and so much of creating a great experience is in having a process map.
We had a great conversation about her experience, how she helps business owners, and what you can do to think about mapping the processes in your business, and we're actually working together right now on a business mapping process for my business, so I can't wait to share how that turns out.
This is a great episode to really help you capture what's great about your business.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 201
Dean: Lennette.
Lennette: Hello.
Dean: How exciting is this?
Lennette: I know. I'm very excited.
Dean: I'm very excited too. We're already recording. We do the whole hour. Everything is just... Of course it's a conversation between you and me all about what you've got going on and how we can map some - for you.
Lennette: Yeah. I'm excited.
Dean: I should tell people that Lennette is my... Are you my second cousin? Is that how we say what we are?
Lennette: Yeah, second cousin.
Dean: Is that what a second cousin is? You are my cousin's daughter so, so we're second cousins.
Lennette: That's right.
Dean: Okay. It's funny, because I was in Georgetown, we both grew up in the area, and I was there a couple of years ago now, right? Was it three or four years ago? I was at a dinner... Yeah, and I hadn't seen you in years, and you came up to me at dinner and reconnected, and that was exciting to see you. So now I love to hear that you've got the entrepreneurial bug and-
Lennette: I do.
Dean: ... you've fallen in love with marketing, which I also love. I see you on the I Love Marketing Zooms, which is great. So I'm excited to spend some time with you and hear what you are up to and see how we can give it some shape for you. Tell me the whole story, because I want to hear what you've been up to and what you're thinking.
Lennette: Okay. So I've been following your podcast as well as the I Love Marketing podcasts, and I guess for me, I'm just starting out so I don't have that client base yet. Basically I started a business to help small business owners or business leaders kind of fix the elements in their business that the feel are holding them back, and funny enough I think COVID has probably highlighted that for a number of people in business.
Dean: Oh, boy. Especially now that a lot of times people are expected to kind of work remotely. That'll shine a light on some weak links if you've got those, right?
Lennette: Yeah. Or do more with less. Really all of my background being... So I'm a Six Sigma certified black belt and-
Dean: Wow.
Lennette: Yeah. So in the past seven years I've undergone some educational pursuits. In seven years I've gotten three certificates. Two of them are from the University of Toronto. One is for business analysis, the other is for business management. Sandwiched in the middle of that I got my black belt certificate in Lean Six Sigma. Really I think where my passion comes from-
Dean: That's really impressive.
Lennette: Thank you. I love processes and seeing what processes can do for a business and something that's so simple can have such huge impact. But oftentimes smaller businesses or medium size businesses really don't have the money to hire that kind of resource, so that's kind of where I'm hoping my business can fill that void, helping them build better processes, start mapping goals and developing strategy plans.
So really that's where I'm coming from in this business. I'm just starting out. It's a brand new... I have a target market. I've done some research on my avatar. The problem is is I don't think my avatar hangs out on Facebook, so-
Dean: Ah, right.
Lennette: ... now I kind of-
Dean: You'd be surprised actually.
Lennette: Yeah? Okay.
Dean: You'd be surprised who hangs out on Facebook.
Lennette: True.
Dean: There's a lot of different people on Facebook, so it's always a good place to start. What have you been doing in these seven years with these skills? How have you been developing them or applying them? Have you worked in other... In the corporate world, or what? What kind of background-
Lennette: I've worked in two different industries. I guess in both industries I've been there for over 10 years. My first industry that I worked in was in the automotive after market industry, and then currently I work in a CPG industry on the food side.
Over those 20 plus years I've really... May career has come from trying to be in the white spaces of businesses where other people don't really feel the need. Through that is kind of when I really discovered Six Sigma and what that really can do in terms of business.
Dean: Can you describe what... I mean it's one of those things where I'm not even sure I know what the real Six Sigma... It's become popular and it's one of those buzz words that we hear a lot about, but can you explain what Six Sigma is?
Lennette: Yeah. It's really a process of project management that involves statistics and process improvement. Really in its form you really want to look at the defects in your business. Most people look at defects in terms of operational defects, but defects can be everywhere in your business. They can be in processes that create rework or errors on the shop floor. It can be an actual defect, so a product that doesn't meet specs.
Really what Six Sigma does is try to evaluate where you are currently in your process to see what your defects are. There's measurements to them and statistical analysis behind all of it, but at its purest form it's basically where are you today in terms of how you're processes are performing and what-
Dean: A kind of snapshot.
Lennette: ... you would need to get you to be in a better place, so how far do you want to move that to reduce your defects. It follows a very structured set of principles to get there.
Dean: Yeah. So you must have used... That involved the mapping process?
Lennette: Yep.
Dean: Okay. Very cool. I used that a lot. I like to talk about the people expecting things to change without changing the system and realize that the defects are built into the system. I always talk about he used to do... Did you ever hear about the games that he would play with management teams, where he would come into a management team and... This was in the '80s. They would test the management theories of the day, which were... One was goals and exhortations.
If everybody is aligned and everybody knows what the goal is and everybody can recite what the goal is, no defects kind of thing, that that will build awareness and everybody will make change to do it. But he would demonstrate it by making a big tub of red and white beads and having everybody with a paddle, like a Chinese checkers kind of paddle where you dip it in, and then whatever you got on the paddle was the day's production, and they would count the red beads, which were the defects.
Everybody would gather around and as one person was dipping in everybody would be in unison reciting the goal and the exhortation of, "No defects, no defects. Come on Lennette, no defects." Then you would dip in and then they would record the day's production, and after a couple of rounds they'd realize this is silly, because nothing is changed in the system here.
Then they would do the same thing and demonstrate how reward and punishment were zero effect. The only thing that affects it is changing the ratio in the system of... Illuminating the defects upstream before they get into the... Find out what causes them, so very funny.
Lennette: Yeah.
Dean: When you look at businesses now, like that seems like a pretty high tech skillset for small businesses, so what do you see... How do you see making that practical, or what would be kind of some uses cases that somebody might be... That might be good for them?
Lennette: My approach to this is more of two different ways, because each business leader or owner has a different... First of all it has to start with the leader, because it's only the leader that can make change in their business, so starting with them.
I have two different approaches that I wanted to take in this business. One would be in the future looking at doing something that's online, because one, it starts with the leader, but it's only sustained through the teams within that business.
So how do I bring some very simple concepts and processes into... Introduce them into somebody's business through their teams, and I can do that through an online format, but then to start off and kind of build that reputation and also build testimonial.
Right now I'm looking to do that in both free and paid environments, so free workshops for those who are maybe... They're ready and they know they need to make the change, they just don't fully understand what that means, so it's introducing them to some of the concepts and then hoping through the free workshops we can get them into a more structured approach to how many months do we need to look at working with you on something? What is it that you're looking to... So it's a very much today one-on-one approach to it, one-on-one or a team collaborative approach to what the business sees.
This will allow me to really understand what's the common theme amongst businesses so that then in the future I can take this into a more online platform and a membership platform, where when people want to solve a problem the resources are built in online and they can just go access it.
Dean: Is the main thing that you're looking to do be on consulting about this, like showing people what to do, or are you looking at being a potential resource for people, like to create business processes for people or to-
Lennette: I think it has to be twofold. I think I have to... One, I have to share my knowledge, but again in a business the leader and the team need to sustain the change. It's not a one hit wonder. So how do I bring my skillsets within... Expose it to the organization in the beginning and maybe I help them build the first process and then be a coach or a mentor through that until which time they don't... They can run with it on their own and we can move on to the next... Things are things, so there are very small simple things, like the low hanging fruit that any business can grab today.
Then as you get skilled at that you develop more... Like, okay, now we've got our operations going. Now we look at goal setting and strategy development, so it's a layered approach to a customer.
Dean: What would be some of those things that you call the low hanging fruit? What would be some examples of that?
Lennette: Well, I have... One of my lead magnets is actually a document that I call beyond the financials, like hearing what your business trying to tell you. In that I walk people through elements that they can look at in their business. So for example, some small businesses, how much are you paying on credit card fees? Can you reduce credit card fees?
How much of your product is being returned by a customer or why are they asking for credit? What percentage of your sales ends up being some sort of request for credit? Because that's a defect. It may not be a defect in terms of the product. It could be the service that you're giving.
A lot of businesses focus in the quality of the product they deliver, but outside of that there's also the experience your customer has when buying that product or that service. So when somebody calls and looks for a credit for something or an adjustment on a price why is that? So it's looking beyond that to see what you can do to maintain your revenue and not kind of chip away at it through things.
The other thing is restocking fees. People overlook how important the relationship is with their supplier. Their supplier can make or break them the same as a customer can. If your business is notoriously difficult to deal with you're going to pay a price for that. So it's understanding whether there's opportunity on the supplier level to reduce costs or create efficiencies.
It's really those... When you look at a financial statement, all of that is pooled up into very simple lines on your financial statement. You don't really see some of what's really driving costs in a business until you peel back the layer and look beyond those financials.
Dean: That's an interesting thing, look beyond the financials. A lot of time... I mean you look at entrepreneurs, a lot of them are not very in tune with the financials, even the big pieces of... In fact from the top and the bottom line. That's an interesting thing.
I guess until you get to a certain level... I mean what sort of... What's the makeup of the business that you're talking about as your ideal? What would be the size of the business and the-
Lennette: I don't know that I have a special on that because I have been working... I've been giving some of my time for free to some other friends that are just starting in on their business, and what I'm finding is, like you said, the entrepreneurs are... They're in business because they're really passionate about something.
The one client that I'm working with now and helping her develop a business plan and goal setting and strategy development, she's new as well. She's in business because she's passionate about something and she just said to me, "You know, Lenn, I'm in business because I really love this subject, but running a business is exhausting."
Dean: Yeah.
Lennette: So it's those details that even a small business owner can miss, or not even miss them, but just not even see them either.
Dean: Yeah, because they're not looking at it I guess, right?
Lennette: Yeah.
Dean: A lot of times in a growing business... I mean I can tell you from experience that the... You know, when you're getting things going until you get people to support you in things that the real focus is on driving top line revenue. That's the real like focus of most kind of growth entrepreneurs, and the details of stuff get kind of lost, because they're the ones that have to do it, you know, that have to focus on them?
Lennette: Yeah. Funny enough, when you think of improvement, the unfortunate part of that is that most times people don't invest in improving their business until it's a necessity, whereas if you took the time to invest in it before it becomes a necessity you're actually creating so much more stability within it.
Dean: What about things like process maps and... I know you talked a little bit about that as a focus. You've talked about user experience I heard you mention, and then I think before you had mentioned process maps. Talk about that a little bit, about what you're-
Lennette: Process maps is one thing I'm very passionate about because first hand I've seen how it can transform not only a business unit, a business entirely, but also a team. I use them religiously through the business portion that I manage today in my corporate world. They are good for explaining to people the expectation of how the job needs to be done, it insures the job is repeated, so you're creating quality around the job, so it's repeatable.
But it also helps other people upstream or downstream of your position understand what it is you do with the inputs they give you and how the other people are going to get the inputs that you're putting out for them.
So it creates this line of awareness within an organization and it actually allows an employee who's doing the process to fully understand what is expected of them. And when they know what's expected of them you can then turn to true performance coaching, because you can actually use the process... I like to use it as a checklist. If I sit down with an employee and we go through the process and I say, "Okay, this is the process. What part of it are you struggling with," or I've already identified what area they're struggling with and we can show them that they can check the boxes of each other step but this may be one step and we can narrow in on why they're struggling with that step and how to overcome it.
Then it's like I said to you... I mentioned the best quote... I wrote it down. I think I've wrote it down a million times now, that Joe said on one of his podcasts is, "Get people to plan the fight since they're not fighting the plan." That is totally how I approach process maps. If you have them involved in how the work is being done they're way more engaged for doing it.
Dean: And, you know, most entrepreneurs when they start... You know, when they're wearing all the hats most of them don't really realize that the process map is going to be the thing that frees them...
Lennette: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Dean: ... because they get to the point where they're constantly doing it, but they look at the time invested in documenting what they're doing and creating the process map as I should just... I'll do it myself. It would take me longer to explain it to somebody. But they don't realize that you only have to do that extra time you take twice as long one time to do it, but it's going to free you forever from it, and that's the biggest thing.
Lennette: When you scale up and grow you document it, so you can literally just... You can just hand it off and let someone else own it.
Dean: Yeah. I think that's the thing, is that they don't get that freedom. I find, especially entrepreneurs that are kind of solo entrepreneurs that are just starting to get traction on their business, they've figured out how to make the phone ring, how to get engagements, how to get busy, but then they're too busy to hire someone to kind of process what they do, so that's a big opportunity for people.
I mean that certainly could make a big difference in somebody's business if they knew how to do it, because the big frustration that they have is that they end up... Even when they hire one person, that's the big mistake that ends up happening, is they hire an assistant and they don't understand the difference between a project manager and a process manager.
The frustration that they end up with is they've got all this stuff that they're doing and they give it to a project manager who likes to take a mess and organize it and turn it into a process, but then they get sick and tired of doing it. They don't want to do it all the time.
that mess to a process oriented person and because the process isn't mapped out they don't know what to do, so they have to come to you to make sure that everything... What do I do here? What do I do here? How about this? That's what's frustrating to somebody.
Having that self-awareness I think really helps. We do a lot of... Did you hear about the Colby Index?
Lennette: No.
Dean: Okay. So the Colby Index is one of the things we use in the entrepreneur kind of world, but it tells people... It gives you an awareness of what your - preference is, whether you are... There's four different polarities here. You're a fact finder, meaning that your first instinct is to just research and find all the facts before make any decisions.
Or you're a follow through who likes to organize everything into a process. Or you're a quick start, which most entrepreneurs are quick starts. You get the idea and you just want to go into action. Don't worry about the details of it, just get started. Or a follow through, which is someone who just likes to build something.
You get a number of a 10 on each of those. I'm a four/four/ten/one, four fact finder, four follow through, ten quick start, and one implementer. So I know that my mode is to get ideas, which I have all the time, and then get just enough facts and structure around it to get into action, but I'm not going to be the person that... If I was a longer, higher on implementer than a one, then I would get in there and build a prototype, you know. That's how I take action kind of thing.
I suspect that you would end up... You would probably be a higher follow through than most because you've got a natural kind of... It feels like a natural fit for you, right?
Lennette: That's funny that you say that, because every... In the course of my career I've always supported the executive side of the businesses, and usually they are that shoot from the hip, let's get going on this and let's just leave the details to Lennette.
Dean: Right. Exactly.
Lennette: That is literally how I have existed in my career for 20 plus years. I just figure there are so many other people out there could benefit from that, that why not put it out there for other people? It really comes from talking to friends and acquaintances that are running businesses that kind of started to say the same things. Yeah, and I can help, and that's really the why I'm doing this, is I just feel like there are a lot of businesses out there that don't have the resource power to hire somebody with the human capital that I can contribute, so why not contribute it?
Dean: How do you approach... You had mentioned like the customer experience. Do you look at that as part of this process? Is that something that-
Lennette: Yeah. The very first thing that I would tell business leaders or owners to do is sit down with the customers that make up 80% of your revenue and then further sift down to those customers that are going to give you the honest truth, because some customers are buying from you because you're you and they may ignore the experience that they have with your business because of you.
What you really want them to do is to give you an honest description of what it feels like to do business with you, not with you as the person, but through... Even if you have a business and you only have five employees or three employees, what is it like for that customer to deal with those three employees?
Then do the same thing with your suppliers and start to paint a picture of what experience do they have with your business. Through those interviews you try to obviously create open-ended questions where they actually have to describe how they feel, or their pain points, what are the pinch points, obviously taking in all the good stuff. Those are testimonials. That's great to talk about what you're doing well, but you really want to note those pinch points, because those are what make up your low hanging fruit.
Those are what you can change to make yourself more competitive, creating more engaging customer experience, and really maintain those customers beyond any... You know, you want to insulate yourself beyond price wars or anybody new coming on the block, because not only do they do business with you, but the total end to end experience is great.
Dean: Thinking about this for like the new client onboarding and stuff too, like if you're looking at that, if you a SAS business or however you're bringing people into something, what that experience could be for them, this could be an interesting thing. Do you actually have a process for mapping out experiences like that?
Lennette: What I would do is I would ask the business to collect that information and then we'd go through what was the feedback and what did they tell you about the things that they really don't enjoy about dealing with your business? Then the next step is to really go into the analytical side of your business to find out where can you see that in your business.
Really the goal is to be able to somehow quantify what that's costing the business, or it might not be costing you anything today, but what is the opportunity if you could overcome that, so it would be your opportunity to do better, or could it be your sustainable competitive advantage?
Then we come back to kind of the roots of Six Sigma. Why is it happening? We've found it, we've explored it, we've analyzed it, now let's look at why it's happening.
Dean: And then map that out?
Lennette: Map it out in the current state, because there's always the process the leader thinks is happening and then there's reality, especially when they're not mapped, especially when they're not documented, because people take shortcuts. They're humans. You know, work smarter, not harder. They don't necessarily represent what the process was in the beginning intended to be.
So you map out the current state, you look at how it's flowing today, and you really start to learn about what their awareness levels are within the leadership as well as the team. Then start talking about this isn't clearly working for our customers because they've told us that. Now how do we take this process and improve it?
This is where the team has now input on how do you make the work better, how do you make the customer experience better, or the supplier experience better. Then you build it into a new process and you trial it and you see what happens. Then you see what financial impact you may have within your business.
Maybe the customer orders more or maybe through that you get another customer or you found somewhere in your business that's actually been costing you money. Maybe your credit percentage that you're... You know, you've got these orders coming in, but how much are you giving back in credits or deductions? How much are you having to discount stuff? All of those things lead into improving your business and insulating yourself for the future.
Once you've gone through all those steps and you've built a new process and you've trialed it and everybody is happy with it, you now have it documented and that it is the benchmark for how the work gets done moving forward, and it's a living document, so it can always be changed.
Dean: It's pretty amazing. It sounds like what you're describing would be a kind of bring your own team experience?
Lennette: Right. Exactly.
Dean: Like you would be kind of guiding the team on the process of what to do, so that's kind of a requirement for the people that you would be working with, or are you in a situation where you could help them to build the team or to get a team ready kind of thing?
Lennette: Both.
Dean: Okay. A lot of the stuff that we do... Like a lot of stuff in marketing, I have discovered that there's... You know, everybody kind of talks about scaling a business, and certainly processes and everything are the key to scaling. Do you know Verne Hamish or the Rockefeller Habits or Scaling Up?
Lennette: No.
Dean: All their protocols are about scaling a business and using systems and processes, just like what we're kind of talking about, but there's a kind of pre-level to that, is you have to have something that I call scale ready. A lot of the things... What we do on the marketing side especially is help somebody crack the marketing code so that they've got the scale ready marketing algorithm that they can launch and then use that to scale the business itself. But that would require a... If somebody is starting out with that, they wouldn't have a team to kind of deploy this on.
I guess what I'm looking for is to see the scope of stuff for... There would be more people listening to this podcast that would be solopreneurs or small teams, meaning they might have two or three people kind of thing. Even I look at where we've come, as having now 11 or 12 people, that makes a difference, but it's still... That's still pretty lean in terms of capabilities for scaling kind of thing. That now would require some process mapping to go to next levels kind of thing, you know.
Lennette: Yeah. Right now I really am looking... Because of the climate of business that we're in today, I'm really focusing on those solo entrepreneurs or the very small business minded, and I'm willing to do both. So in order to introduce a concept that it has to start with the leader, I want to appeal to... I want to start off with them in helping them get them process that business so that I can grow with them, so to help them achieve the stability they need today, but also be a resource for their teams tomorrow when they need to, because to be real, when business comes it comes fast and there's not always a lot of time to be sitting down and saying this is how I want things to be laid out.
So in my role today whenever I'm asked to map out something or create a new process I always say to that leader, "I need you to explain to me what the end looks like, so when I come to you at the end what are you expecting to see?" Then I map it backwards. That's really what I would do with another person's team, so starting with them and as they grow and their needs grow and they create people on their team, how can I support them through that process?
Dean: That's pretty exciting, because we're looking at a situation now where just in general in the world it's become so much easier to collaborate with other people. Now that it's okay that we're all working remotely, that even opens up the door for that even more, because it doesn't matter now that you're not in the building kind of. It's like everybody has got the opportunity to provide whatever sort of niche level contribution that they have in a modular kind of way.
One of the things that you may have heard me talk about is our idea of breaking a business into three individual units, the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. I've been having a lot more conversations lately with this realization that the before unit of a business, meaning the business unit that delivers new customers to the during unit, has really an opportunity to be completely modular because there's no constraints in cloudlandia, that we've been calling it. You can literally be anywhere and serve anywhere as long as it doesn't require physically touching somebody or being in the same... On the ground delivering some kind of physical good to them.
So much of the stuff can be managed there. Is there an opportunity in providing sort of stealth teams that maybe you could put together that deliver one piece of an outcome for someone, like being able to create this experience or create the map?
Lennette: Absolutely. Yep.
Dean: I just think about it as being more... There's a lot more, you know, telling people what they need as opposed to being the who they need to deliver the what, because all of that... When you're telling people what, you're kind of in that whole telling somebody how to do something, and I wonder... It's an interesting thing, especially if it's a project... Like creating a process map is a project interestingly, now that I think about it, right?
Lennette: It is. Yep.
Dean: Yeah. But it's an ongoing... I mean it's a living, breathing thing. If the process of creating it is a project on its own, I'm just thinking... I'm wondering how many businesses would love to be able to have someone kind of be able to come in for a short period of time to create the process map for the?
Lennette: Yes. Absolutely.
Dean: It would even be faster, right?
Lennette: Yep. I think coming in and creating them for them would be the first step, and then later on as their business grows is where you come back and you said okay, here's where we started. Now let's improve upon that, and this is where you've got the employee engagement.
You can do process improvement in two ways. It can be someone that comes in and creates the improvement for you or it can be through your own teams. I just find... I can do both. I don't have a preference. I just find the change is more sustainable when it comes from within.
Dean: I'll give you an example of how... Like my experience of that is I used to have a lady, Mickie, that worked with me. And this is how it came about, was I created a program for our real estate... We do a lot of work with real estate agents and I created a program for our Money Making websites business that was a 90 day experience for new clients, who we would bring them on board, get their websites set up, get everything in place, then go through a 90 day process to help them do the 12 steps between starting from scratch to getting their first client.
I created the program on the fly once, so I invited people in, and then I created the program as I went for the first 12 weeks. Then about 30 days into it I launched a second group, because I had already created the first four weeks for it kind of thing, and then they would go through that process there.
But then Mickie came in halfway through the second group and she helped me organize what I had done into a process, because I wasn't creating... I was creating it with that in mind, that it would be a duplicable process, but I was creating original work kind of thing as I went, and version two was slightly different than version one based on what I had learned doing that.
But we did it three times and then Mickie created this binder of the actual process that we had. Then she ran the program for four years, but she was that kind of follow through... Organized the process. There were 93 touch points in the whole process from beginning to end, like day one send this email and this blog post, so it was mapped out very detailed.
We would always start the process on a Thursday so that... And it was always the first Thursday of the month, or the second Thursday of the month, sorry, so we could always go into that day four was always a Monday kind of thing, you know, so that we knew that on day four and day 11, there were emails that went out.
What we'd do is push the launch button kind of thing and then all the reminders and everything would unfold at exactly the right time, and everybody felt like they were going through a completely built for them one time experience, but for me it was exhausting to sit through as Mickie was like getting the things... Extracting what I wanted to have happen on certain things. But after I did that, then I was free of it for four years and it was the rocket fuel of our gross on that.
Lennette: You had to put your brain on paper and that required your effort, and you were building a customer experience that you had in your mind, and when you have someone that can... I always kind of think of it this way when I'm sitting across from a leader and I'm listening to them describe the end results that they want, but over their head I can kind of see this kind of... You know, this cloud of everything that I'm envisioning the steps backwards to that goal and I'm picking out all those elements.
Not everybody has that ability and you blessed to find someone who had that capability, so... But they're few and far between sometimes, but they're such a vital portion to especially startups.
Dean: Yes. I get it. I find that even in... I guess that same thinking would go for creating user manuals I guess, like that's another sort of step.
Lennette: In our business today we're creating a tool in Excel that we eventually want to find somebody to build us as a program. We're using Excel in process maps to actually kind of map the coding of it, because nothing really exists today. So together with process maps and Excel we're trialing, and you were doing the same thing. You were building the blueprint to today what I'm sure you probably have automated.
Dean: Yeah. It was semi-automated after that, but it required some... She was hosting the thing and we had a few different outsourcers that we used for specific - and things at the time we'd start somebody. It was a flurry of activity to get 30 people at a time ramped up, so it was like a sort of a one or two week kind of build up to launching on that Thursday, so that would always give us 10 days in the building up to it.
Then it was launched on that Thursday and went all the way through. But it got to a point where we were graduating... I call it graduating, that people were successful in going on, with 72% of all the people that went through it. We could have even done better if we had a little more filtering in the beginning, but in anything you're going to have 10% of the people that just never made it or never get out of the gate, so overall I think we were moving. We did a good job.
Lennette: 72% is a pretty good job.
Dean: Yeah. It was great. That's kind of a fun way of looking at it. I may be one of your customers here. I might be able to use some help with a couple of our processes.
Lennette: Absolutely. This is-
Dean: I could map out the experience for you.
Lennette: Yeah. This is my... I get teased at the office for how process minded I really am, but for me it's fun and I really sit back and enjoy when people can move through their roles in a way that is better and creates improvement for everybody, so I get really excited at stuff like that.
Dean: Yeah. I like it. That's kind of the thing. Are you able to create like the... My dream... Let's just be selfish here. Let's think about my dream coming true here, is I could see if I look at our GoGoAgents platform for instance for the real estate agents, I would love to map out our onboarding experience and the ramp up kind of... Everything is in there. I know it's all in there and it's all great, but I know that the process of figuring out what to do once you're in there could be better guided and that would be my dream, is to have a really great field guide for our GoGoAgents to say, "Do this and then this," and then, "Here's how to do this," create the great recipes for them, the instruction, almost like the instruction manual kind of thing.
Is that the kind of thing... So here's where my... I'm either going to be totally attracted and in love with the idea or I'm going to be like repelled by the idea. Is that something that you could draw stuff out of me and use the resources that we have to create that manual, or would it be-
Lennette: Yes.
Dean: ... here's what you need to do to create that manual, where I would have to do it?
Lennette: No. I usually... In a situation like this I work best when you're talking and I'm taking notes, because your dream is ultimately what should be my goal and your team's goal to put to paper. Process maps or field guides in some industries are called SOP, you know, standard operating procedures. They go with process maps. They are a part of the package and you can't really have one without the other.
Process map is such a high level snapshot, you need the greater detail. The more detail you give, the better the process executes, so for sure. I personally live at my best when I am with somebody who can... You don't even fully need to articulate it. You just need to tell me how the experience feels, and usually-
Dean: Well yeah. The thing is right now... This is the thing, is that right now there are lots of people who are successful. With what's in there now they're able to figure things out, but they have to seek and find it as opposed to... And we've got Diane, who is our... She's got the procedures for a lot of the things... We offer an easy button program, where people... Rather than figuring out how to do it, they can push the easy button and we'll do it for them.
So I know that Diane has a lot of these processes mapped out for her to be able to do these for people, but somebody wanting to do it on their own, it's not as easy for them to figure out, and I know that the people who do figure it out are people who are patient and able to seek for it, but we're definitely... It's not as easy as it could be or as intuitive as it should be for people to do it.
I think that would be a big win for us. That would be... Because we offer on a free trial basis, where people can come in and experience it for 30 days and then decide whether they want to continue it. I think we could double our conversions if we had a really mapped out process, a welcome process, that 30 day experience. So that might be a nice project that you and I could work on.
Lennette: Absolutely. I'm addicted to learning. The other part of why I'm doing this is I spent the last 20 plus years of my career only with really two... Three companies, and I am addicted to knowledge, so the more I can do for different businesses the more I learn and it's a win-win.
Dean: This is all very exciting. I'm going to have to... We'll have to keep people apprised of how it all works out, but I think that would be a great two part podcast, to do it and then come back and talk about what happened and the experience, and maybe that can be an encouragement to other people that it would be a good thing to do.
Lennette: Absolutely. I'm game.
Dean: And there we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, want to go deeper in how the Eight Profit Activators can apply to your business, two things you can do.
Right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book, and you can listen to the back episodes of course if you're just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the Eighth Profit Activators are part of the Breakthrough DNA process. You can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the Eight Profit Activators at breakthroughdna.com. That's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about Breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there.
So that's it for this week. Have a great week and we'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.