Pivoting Ops In 2022, Creating A Process Culture, & The Metaverse

Chris Ronzio (01:37):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Organize Chaos. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio. And as you heard in the intro today, we're talking with Allyson, the Wolf Caffrey. Allyson, you have to explain, explain the Wolf, like please.

Alyson Caffrey (01:51):

I'm hoping I don't look too much like Harvey Keitel, but the wolf from Pulp Fiction is the person that they call in when things just go completely off the reservation, right? They've unfortunately just murdered this person who did not deserve to be murdered, and they have to hide his body before the wife comes home. And so like serious mess needs to be cleaned up. So I was actually referred to by two of my very first clients as the Wolf. And I was just telling Chris, right before we pressed play on this, that it was actually, the first domain I ever bought was the Wolf egg, because I was like, you know what? I just gotta lean into this.

Chris Ronzio (02:26):

I love that story. All right. So if anyone listening needs a body hidden or something, that's not what she means, but if you need to get stuff done in your business, Allyson is the person to call. So this is gonna be a fun conversation. We've known each other for a few years now. I can't wait to talk about this. So the things for today, we're gonna go into working from home and what that looks like with all the conversations around the Metaverse and 2022 and forward. We're gonna talk about just building process into your culture, which I know you've got some good tips on, and then you've got a new book coming out. So where do you wanna start?

Alyson Caffrey (03:02):

I love to start deep and then we can kind of go from there. So let's just like, get our shovels out and go for it and just address all of the craziness of working from home.

Chris Ronzio (03:10):

Okay. So, from your perspective, what's, what's changing and what's not gonna change. What's, you know, think back, the ongoing forever pandemic that we seem to be in, you know, a lot changed in 2020, what do you think is just never gonna be the same again?

Alyson Caffrey (03:27):

Work from home. I mean, the hybrid schedules, right? Folks are in positions now where they're able to spend more time with their families. They don't have a commute. It's going to be a huge bargaining chip. Now that we know that the infrastructure of a lot of companies can handle this. I think it's going to be something that employees are just gonna say, no, this is now a non-negotiable for me. I have young children. I know you do too, Chris, like just being able to be around them and be with them a lot more, has been helpful for my work life balance. And I know that a lot of the teams I speak have the same, so I absolutely think that that's not going to change. But what I do think is going to change is absolutely going to be the way that these teams meet up in the future more meaningfully.

So, because you natively spend less time together, right? You're in a position where you can't really just kind of throw meetings on the calendar haphazardly. You really need to be in a position where you're being really intentional with this time, whether it's an in-person meeting or it's a retreat, or it's a planning session or any of those things. You wanna make sure that obviously that is gonna be a lot more intentional not to say that folks haven't been intentional about it in the past, but I think more so now.

Chris Ronzio (04:39):

I think my, my opinion on this has definitely of, you know, if I go back to the beginning of starting Trainual, we always had this flexibility baked into our culture. Like we didn't wanna be people clocking in and clocking out. And I always thought it was crazy that someone would have to like request PTO for a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day, or feel like, you know, they have to miss their kids' game after school one day or something like that. And so that flexibility was always there, but by default, it was always that we came into the office most of the time, you know? And so whether it was three or four days a week or something like that, we could expect to see most of the company in the office and immediately that goes away. And so, 2020 comes and everyone's just at home. Funny enough, we had an office and we got a notice from our landlord that our lease was up and they were putting someone else into our space.

So we had to vacate our office in like the first couple months of the pandemic. A couple of us are going in with, you know, masks and Lysol and, you know, and of everything it just to try to move out of our space. And then we were fully remote for a handful of months before we had anywhere to go. So my opinions definitely evolved. I know people can be productive and get everything that they need to done remotely. But like you said, there's now a different purpose. It's like when we get together it's to build relationships and community and really invest in our culture. So like, how do you think you can strike that balance with not seeing people all the time, but still making those investments?

Alyson Caffrey (06:18):

Yeah, good question. A lot of the a lot of the clients we work with, we do quarterly and annual planning with them, just like helping facilitate how to have those conversations and those types of things. And we saw that a lot of them pivoted to virtual annual planning events. And I remember talking with the very first client that wanted to do this annual planning virtually, and he's like two days, we're gonna do all these fun things and we're gonna ship stuff to their houses, you know, like really just like so intentional, so well meaning, but I was like, do you think someone's gonna sit in front of their computer for eight to 10 hours a day for two days straight. I was like, I really do think that we're gonna see kind of a little bit of a decline in how everyone's paying attention and all of those things.

So we decided to do and what I've decided to do with a lot of our clients and a lot of the folks I've recommended do this in annual planning capacity is to just stretch it out over, let's just say a week's time, right. If you need to meet about each department, let's just say an hour invite, only the key players and really build the camaraderie and solidify the goals in that specific vein of the business. And then kind of move on where someone could be really present for an hour or two hours of really, really core planning from a virtual perspective. And then if you do get together, it can just be for the fun stuff, right. You can save a little bit of money in that respect too. You don't have to do like two planning days.

And then like the extra day where you guys all go ski or anything. We used to do annual planning sessions. My last one was in Breckenridge and we did two days of planning. And then we skied on day three and it was so much fun and we all super miss it. But I was saying to them, I was like, you know, I wonder what we could do about just meeting up for like a day somewhere or two days somewhere. Especially if your team's mostly local. So I think that's gonna be just embracing the hybrid, right. Getting the work done, virtually being able to meet intentionally and then be in a position where you guys can get together and just be friends and coworkers for a little while, you know?

Chris Ronzio (08:20):

I think it adds so much to the culture, the relationships you have with people to just be able to have those non-work moments and experiences. You know, it's funny you mentioned Breckenridge. Our first retreat ever as a company was at North Star in Lake Tahoe and we did the same thing, two days of planning, one day of skiing. And it's such a great memory that we all have. And we planned the second year, we were gonna go to a ski town again and it got canceled. And so the last two years, we've kind of fumbled through this like virtual kind of retreat thing. This June, we're actually doing a company retreat just fun activities, get togethers in Park City. So it's gonna be really fun to get everyone back together. T's the few and far between those moments where you get people together. And so are there things that you think people should do in between the big gatherings to sustain great relationships?

Alyson Caffrey (09:18):

Oh yeah. And I think it depends on who your team is. Right? So like, if you're in a team, I help a lot of agencies who are just kind of natively a little bit, I would say, and I say this with endearment, a little nerdy. And so they'll like meet up and play video games with their teams and like do like these round robin deals and do tournaments and stuff. We've done that in the past where we've done like Mario Cart tournaments with like teams. And it was just super fun, like a virtual thing. And truthfully, our team has a book club, which we really love, and we all really love to read. And it's really nice to be able to have a conversation about something else, other than work, even if it's just for like, you know, shooting the breeze and the first five minutes of the meeting to really just have a conversation about like, Hey, this is what we were reading this week. Or did you get to that part yet with this side or the other? And we try to do two self-improvement books. One, fun read. So we'll go like 2, 1, 2, 1. Because obviously if I could just read self-improvement books and business improvement books all day every day, I totally would. But my team has actually encouraged me. They're like, why don't you just read something horrible?

Chris Ronzio (10:22):

I'm exactly the same. I have a goal this year to do five fiction books because all I ever read is just business books. And so I thought this year over the break, I read like that autobiography of Will Smith. And that was so interesting to me. And I just couldn't put it down and I thought, I need to read more than business books. So I'm gonna try to make that improvement this year. I know I teased this a little in the intro, but there's this thing called the Metaverse that we keep hearing about.

Alyson Caffrey (10:53):

It's creeping.

Chris Ronzio (10:55):

How is this gonna collide with work as we know it and, and where you work and how you work?

Alyson Caffrey (11:02):

Yeah. I think if businesses are doing live events, I think that's where we might see it first, because if we think about it, right, they, and I've been in the live event space for years now, helping owners pull these types of things off. I feel that that's where the biggest, like bang for their buck might be right. If you used to get people together in a really intimate setting. And that was a sales generator for you, you might be in a position where you may invest in a beta version of the Metaverse so that you can get your community together, especially if you have a big community that meets frequently all of those things. So I think it's gonna be customer based first. And then I do think that it's gonna start to roll out internally where teams are able to do some of these meetings virtually, but, you know, it's just, the only information I've seen on it so far is very unfathomable almost right.

You're almost like how can there literally be this other universe? And so I feel almost like, I'm not sure what the untapped potential there might be for businesses, especially. And I mean, on the personal side, let's just completely forget about that for a second. I do think that events are gonna be the first thing. Right. If you think about some people who have like, you know, 150 person masterminds, right. And they haven't been able to get together for two years or something like that. They, I think will be the first people to be kind of demoing this out and really trying to get together.

Chris Ronzio (12:29):

Yeah. It's, you know, there's gotta be an evolution and beyond just zoom webinars and that sort of thing, right. Like, you know, the more interactive way to do this. When everything first started going remote in 2020, my initial thought was I'm having these screen, face to face meetings with people, but it's this little tiny head on my screen that I'm looking at. And I can march down to, you know, best buy or something and buy a 60 inch TV for a few hundred dollars. And so I started thinking like, well, why not fashion some TV's across your desk. So you could really have like a face to face meeting with someone. And so, no one's invented this yet, but I think a TV that shows someone's face, and then you could almost have it be like that person's zoom background is whatever's across from you in the room. So it just looks like they're sitting across from you. That that was my...

Alyson Caffrey (13:27):

That would be super neat.

Chris Ronzio (13:28):

Right. If I wasn't doing anything, maybe that's an idea I would work on right now. It just feels like there needs to be a better experience of getting together with people virtually. And so some of the like newer iterations I've seen on that I think meta or Facebook or whatever came out with this like workspaces, or I forget what it's called. And you can be in kind of like a virtual meeting room with other avatars of your coworkers, so that it's kind of like, you're all sitting together, but you're all like the virtual version of yourself. Do you see that kind of thing picking up or is, are we still like way too far away?

Alyson Caffrey (14:10):

I don't know. I just don't know how comfortable everyone's gonna be at first doing that. I think what we'll probably see, I mean, when the pandemic first started, right. When everyone was here, I've noticed that there was a lot of, Hey, you're on mute or whatever else. Right. Like everyone was like, just getting used to this whole thing. And now I feel like we really leaned into, I mean, like I'm wearing leggings under here. Like we don't, it's just how it is, but that's just how it goes. All of us were like, Ooh, wait, how do we tiptoe around this? And now we've just like fully leaned into it. So I'm almost hesitant to, and this is my personal opinion. I'm hesitant to lean all the way into the Metaverse, where I don't even need to do my hair or brush my teeth or shower to like, be with a client or be with a coworker.

And so I want to almost like encourage to keep the balance, but like, I just don't know how folks are going to respond to some of this stuff. Right. And I do think that, I mean, avatars are gonna happen. Right. It would be amazing if, you know, I'm with my son five minutes before, and then I can just run downstairs and be a completely made up version of myself and whatever else. But it's, I think going to walk the line of inauthenticity almost, you know. I don't wanna speak anything horrible into existence, but I almost feel like this might be even more authentic seeing somebody than looking at an avatar of that person's best self. Right. It might get a little hairy there.

Chris Ronzio (15:44):

And I mean, you could just fast forward into a totally dystopian future. And yeah, we don't have to, we don't have to go down that hole, but I also kind of think in terms of business and commerce, there are destinations that you go to in order to shop or spend money or something like the huge Superstore in New York city of some, it's like a destination that you're going there for the experience of that place. And I think that businesses that have some experience component, you mentioned events, but also if the experience of shopping at your business is something noteworthy, I can see that going into the Metaverse so that people without traveling can tap into that experience and can start to transact and buy things. I'm interested to see what those kind of brands do. Like when is there gonna be a Disneyland Metaverse? I bet that's coming.

Alyson Caffrey (16:42):

Oh yeah. Those experiences are totally coming. I mean, you can ride almost every ride in Disney on YouTube right now, right. From like a POV perspective. So I totally agree with you that that's gonna happen. And shopping is definitely going to be something that happens. I think, especially, we just bought a house and we have to furnish this house. And so I'm struggling with A, the turnaround times and B the just the I need to sit on this couch or I need to see this table in person kind of thing. It was funny when I said to my husband, I was like, but the closest one is in New York or the closest one is somewhere else. Right. And I have to drive two hours. To your point, I could just hop into the Metaverse and be like, let me just try to see my dinning room table.

Chris Ronzio (17:23):

Have you ever done the like AR thing when you hold your phone up and you can place something in your room, have you done that?

Alyson Caffrey (17:29):

Yes. Yes, I have.

Chris Ronzio (17:30):

That's Cool.

Alyson Caffrey (17:31):

Some apps do it better than others, but it is super cool. It really is.

Chris Ronzio (17:34):

Yeah. I boughtI think it was a I don't know if it was Amazon or somewhere else, but our outdoor furniture, wherever we got our outdoor furniture from. I was able to place it like on our front patio and walk all around it. And I ordered it and a few days later there, it was, and it looked exactly the same. I did the same with, like, I got a, a Peloton tread thing, you know, treadmill. And I was able to just clear out the room and use the phone and there it was. And so I think that's one step in the more Metaverse direction. We're probably getting off topic now, but this is just fun.

Alyson Caffrey (18:08):

If you're in physical goods, right. It's good to them.

Chris Ronzio (18:11):

I guess another part of this, you mentioned the risk of the inauthenticity of showing up as your best self instead of your sweatpants self. But I think there's also the authenticity of knowing that you are getting a legitimate experience through, you know, these NFTs and blockchains and this. In one way or another, all of this is going to affect every single business out there. And so I think it's smart for people to just start to learn about it.

Alyson Caffrey (18:45):

I totally agree. I think, regardless of whether we feel like it's going to be a big component of our business or of how we meet up with our team, I definitely agree that getting to know how this is gonna work, how it's gonna function, especially because we don't wanna be behind the curve. Right. If someone says, Hey, I have an event coming up or I'm doing one of these things and you have to be part of the Metaverse and you've never known anything about it. It's gonna definitely blindside you a little bit and probably be a little scary, I think at first, the first couple Metaverse events are probably gonna be a little wonky.

Chris Ronzio (19:16):

Totally. Yeah. All right. Well, I can't wait to attend and and bump into in the Metaverse.

Alyson Caffrey (19:23):

Likewise.

Chris Ronzio (19:24):

Anything else to touch there? I mean, training in the Metaverse or anything else, or do you think we've exhausted that topic?

Alyson Caffrey (19:34):

Yeah, I don't know. I think it's, you bring up a good point with training. I'm Working with a company right now, actually, who has Trainual which is just wonderful. And they do a lot of their safety training and we're standardizing a lot of that. And I'm just thinking to myself, like, what if someone convert drive a forklift before they drove a forklift, right. To like, see how that worked out? My husband would honestly kill me if he knew that was saying this on the podcast, but he had got his CDL license a few years ago and it took him like four or five tries to get the past the CDL test. And it was like one of the things. And he's a very...how do I put it? He's a very naturally gifted person, especially physically. So like to have something like this happen, he was just very like taken back.

Why was I failing the CDL course? And I was telling him, I was like, were you ever able to like, drive something in a training capacity? Or like, you know cuz it's a double clutch and not a single clutch show from what I understand. It's just a different way of driving. And so I was wondering if they had a simulator and he said they had, and I was like, well, that's really cool. And so I think stuff like that related to training could be something that we see pop up in the Metaverse right. Where we're like, okay, we got a master with a double clutch in Metaverse before we take it out on the open road.

Chris Ronzio (20:53):

Big companies have those kind of things. My cousin, she's a pilot for a major airline. And when she was training for like the next Airbus or whatever it was, they have these huge simulators that they go into to be able to mimic real life experience. You don't want to go up for the first time in one of those just, you know, in the real world. And so they've got those things for these real industrious, like enterprise use cases. But I think what virtualizing or the digitizing these experience will do is, is small businesses will be able to replicate that at kind of training and experience. We've already started to play with some of this with 360 degree cameras and VR kind of videos and, you know, simple things like giving someone a tour of headquarters or you know, sitting down across from the table and like having a coffee with somebody on their first day, those are experience that could be replayed virtually. And I think it's there there's so much opportunity ahead, which is fun.

Alyson Caffrey (21:54):

Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree.

Chris Ronzio (21:56):

So moving into topic two, which is about process culture. A Lot of people ask me this question, so I want to throw it to you. How do you infuse process into the culture to make it something that people want to contribute to and want to keep up to date?

Alyson Caffrey (22:13):

Yeah, it's a good question. And I actually, I was on an interview yesterday and someone asked me, asked me this like super great question. They were like, what do not enough business owners ask you? Like when they first come to work with you as like a core concern? And I said, this question. How can I build process culture in my, in my business, right. How can I not have like, you know, myself, right. The owner or the head of, you know, operations or whatever, right. Come out to my team and say, Hey, we need to make this process, Hey, we need to make this process. Right. And then they just kind of react. And I think that it kind of starts with the core responsibilities list. Right. If you do any responsibility mapping, if you're using like RACI in your business, right. To project manage or anything like that really making that a core responsibility of the team upfront.

So basically they've got their list of core responsibilities for their role itself, and then everyone in the organization. Similar to your core values. Right. Has this kind of a silent or not so silent, ideally, right. Like role of creating process right. Out of the things that they do. And I also think that it's gonna be really helpful in the in kind of the indoctrination of this to make it forward thinking. Make it frequent. Talk about it a lot, really meet about it a lot in the beginning. If you're especially rolling this out to the team, you can be in a scenario where we say, okay, let's at the very least create one new process a week, or at the very least, right. We're gonna aim to do, you know, these tiny little milestones where we can really all get behind and get excited about this, similar to like a sales leader board or something.

We can say, Hey, listen, this is the leader board. And, you know, Allyson was able to make five new processes this week, around how we serve our customers or whatever. And then we can all kind of rally and do that sort of stuff. I also think that monetarily incentivizing your team to do this is extremely wise. My team is monetarily incentivized, my leadership team, to create new processes and workflows for my business, because I know that whatever it is, I'm paying them monetarily is actually worth less than what they're contributing from the process perspective. Building a business long term, leaning on systems is the way that we business and the way that we continue to generate more and more profit year over year. So in my mind, they're adding directly to my bottom line. So we can probably just share that with them. Right. It just makes the most sense to me.

Chris Ronzio (24:35):

I'm really curious about that. I've heard people say before, ask people to go find cost savings in the business and you'll pay 10% or 50% of the cost savings to your people as kind of a bounty for doing that. And then you'll get people that are canceling softwares and doing all this kind of stuff. You hope they're not eliminating things that are efficiencies.

Alyson Caffrey (25:01):

Buying the crappy pens.

Chris Ronzio (25:02):

Yeah. But I've heard that. So how do you think about the monetary incentive, like an amazing game changing idea worth this much and a small, like minute improvement is this much... Like how do you even think about that?

Alyson Caffrey (25:20):

Yeah. That's a good question. So let's back for a second. I've got basically two fundamental ways. I see how businesses work. So we've got our standard operating procedures. That's the way we operate day in and day out. And then we've got our quarterly initiatives or our growth goals, right. The way that we plan to grow as a business, right. If its new projects, if it's new services, if it's new, whatever. Right. So we basically decide my team and I, at the beginning of the quarter, okay, here are the new projects that we're going after. And here are the standard operating procedures, the way that core, like the core way that we help people, here's how this is going to change, or we need to improve this. And so those improvement incentives, each quarter are paid out quarterly. And basically we just decide what we wanna do.

So let's just say, for example one of our quarterly initiatives way back was we wanna retain more customers. Right. And so in that case Lauren on my team that was like her main metric. And we said, okay, if we can retain customers between 80% and 90%, then we could be in a position where we could pay you X amount of dollars. And so then that becomes something that is a core incentive for her role for that quarter. And I think it can change all the time because what we don't wanna do is we don't wanna just go looking for stuff to improve when something's already great. We don't wanna like beat that dead horse. So I think shifting people's focus too helps them realize that this is a holistic effort. This is like, you know, multiple things happen.

So when we retain more customers, then what happens, right. We have to look at team management potentially to fulfill on those customers. So that's where we shifted next. We were like, how do we optimize the people who are writing our processes? How do we get that turnaround time faster? How do we get the quality up? So we looked at someone for quality control and then that was our magic next quarter metric. Quality control. If we can get revisions down to less than zero, you guys will all get paid X amount of dollars. And so it was really fun. And I really like coming up with these incentives with my team. I think it helps with buy-in. I think it really helps with, okay, I can totally take this off or, you know, bite this out and then be able to handle it because oftentimes I think as owners were like, oh, it'd be super great if my team could onboard clients in less than one day. And the team is like, wait, hold on a second. You don't even know what it takes to onboard a client. So like, we just like thrust these goals on these people with all well intention, but it sometimes I think that they come back and they're like, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. So that's how we personally do it and how I've seen it work really well.

Chris Ronzio (27:39):

Yeah. That makes sense. So it's just kind of like a strategic collaboration to say, what are the biggest issues in the business or the biggest opportunities. And then let's pick reasonable targets and let's put an incentive to those targets. That's different for every person or every quarter every year. And it just keeps changing as the business changes. So I like the iterative nature of that. As you were talking about some of these like small improvements in the business, I was thinking out this book, I read Two Second Lean by Paul Acres. Have you ever heard of that book? It's like really easy read. You could find like a digital copy online. It's all about like how in a manufacturing floor, they encourage people to find improvements every day that would shave two seconds off their day. And so it could be like the simplest little things, like I'm always reaching across the table to get this hammer.

What if I just had a hook on the side of my bench and it was closer, I'm saving myself like reaching for it. And you, you just think like how those compound every day in the business really interesting read for anybody that's like wanting to think about how to build process into culture. One thing that we have have done I think is a really simple approachable tip is just celebrating innovations and being really intentional about anytime somebody changes something in the business, that's like a new best practice or a better process. We'll like blast it all over, over slack. And the company's thing to say, here's what they did. Here's why it's awesome. And we've had like, you know, even last quarter, I'm thinking about some of our engineers that made these improvements on their own to the application, just to make pages like store things in the cash and not have to reload when you clicked on a button. It makes the experience so much better for our customer, or they made improvements to our like testing suite so that it just takes, you know, two minutes to run all the tests instead of 20 minutes where they had to like, go get a sandwich before, while it was running, you know, like these little things add up, it's like a cumulative impact.

I think the culture is really about just the visibility of these improvements and that's what I've seen.

Alyson Caffrey (29:56):

I totally agree. We lean really heavily on our company scorecard, especially when tracking and celebrating and taking a look at some of this stuff. And we review the scorecard in our weekly meeting. So anything simple like that. I mean, even if it was two second improvements, for example, right. We can be like, Hey, Chris came up with four, two second improvements this week. This is so exciting. It's like super easy. I agree with you on the visibility perspective to celebrate is like clear and in black and white you know, versus kind of being otherwise.

Chris Ronzio (30:26):

People are probably laughing at my stupid hammer example, but like, I read that book and I came home, we had this in my bathroom sink at home, the towels were like on this wall over here and I bought a hook for the towel right next to the sink. And I was like, that's gonna saved me three steps a day.

Alyson Caffrey  (30:44):

That's so good. That's so funny. When you were talking about that book, I was thinking like, moms are gonna love this. Yeah. Like every mom, whenever any baby goes down for a nap, they're like, okay, I have to do this and this and this and this and this. And if everything had two second shaved off and they would be able to actually sit and have a cup of tea or something.

Chris Ronzio (31:01):

My gosh, I love when my kids were babies and I could figure out how to like prop the bottle up with my knee -- It was like a personal challenge to see how much I could, how efficient I could make that. So you said, you mentioned your dashboard really quickly and I just wanna touch on that because again, the visibility of goals I think, is important to see how things are moving up and down and to make sure everybody is aligned. So is there some system you use or anything for tracking KPIs for tracking goals that you wanna throw out?

Alyson Caffrey (31:38):

I use a Google sheet because it is the simplest and easiest thing, and I love it. And nowadays Google sheets can be pseudo software and it's all fun in games. So we use a Google sheet and what we do is we have a new one each quarter, right. That goes with our initiatives and the standard operating procedures that we want to improve. So we basically have three buckets of data. The first is like the data that's important for the business all the time, right? Like the profitability and the client retention and all of those numbers that we absolutely need to know. And then the second bucket is the things that we want to improve about our standard operating procedures. Those incentives I was talking about with my team. Then the third bucket is our quarterly goals. The new things that we're doing to really track how they're going.

For example, this book is launching and it's gonna happen and we're putting it on the scorecard and everything. We need to just make sure that this makes sense, right. That like, you know, like everything, right. I'm just kind of throwing things up against the wall and seeing what sticks. And I'm really excited about this project, but I am the type of person that likes to be really objective in my business. And I encourage all of my clients and others to be the same. And so even if you have a passion project, I've wanted to write this for so long. I'm so excited. And I know that if it totally flops, then that's okay and I'll just do something else. Like I just have, I'll keep, probably be a little upset, but I'll be honest, right? Like, you just have to let your business tell you what it needs. It's like another, like being relationship in your life that you need to nurture and take care of. So that's really where we go. So we've got, like I said, the metrics that we always track, the things that we want to improve and then our quarterly initiatives and new projects, just to see how they land and how they affect the other numbers.

Chris Ronzio (33:22):

I'm glad I asked that because I think it's a critical thing for people, even if it's just a Google sheet to have visibility into the goals and the initiatives that they're tracking. We started using this like EI tool that's stupid expensive, but you know, we've got so much data at this point. We need needed to see it all, but we pulled it all into one place and the whole leadership, team's looking at it every, every weekly meeting. And we shared it at our all hands meeting. And I think it's critical for people to see the numbers moving. I also love that with your book project, you don't have this attachment to a certain outcome. You have the attachment to like, this was a passion project. I wanted to do this. I did this for me. And it's it. I think that's the right way to go about it.

You can tell someone's an entrepreneur when that's how they think. When someone's like, so tied to the outcome that you're just trying to get there. Then you kind, you lose the fun of like, let's test this, let's test this, let's try this. And I think that it's the, it's the wanting to try different things and being okay if they fail, that gives you the resilience to be able to keep trying things. And that's what creates the long term success. So it's just like a little nugget I've pulled out of what you said that I love.

Alyson Caffrey (34:36):

I appreciate that very much.

Chris Ronzio (34:38):

You mentioned the book, let's talk about the book. It's called Operations simplified: The Five Step Guide to Creating a business That Lasts. I love that. So tell us about the book, give us the pitch.

Alyson Caffrey (34:50):

Yeah. So this book has been something I've been wanting to write for a really long time, and it just talks a lot about my five phase process and how closely our business intersects with our life. And I of alluded just a second ago, like your business is something that you need to pour into like a relationship, right? Like you really need to take care of it. You can't be really one sided. You can't expect your business to just like produce all of these things for your life without being able to give it back some things, right, like processes and standards and people that feel really nurtured and taking care care of and trained really well. And I think that when we do that the business becomes this like prosperity engine right. For, for our life. And we can really be in a position where we can change our lives.

We can change the lives of our customers. We can change the lives of our team members. And it just becomes this vehicle, this engine that you can really, again, pour into and then have kind of really amazing results come out of on the other side. That's kind of like the 30,000 foot view. We get super tactical with the actual five phase framework, which I'm really excited about. We talk about process creation and planning. We talk about efficiency. Quality. We talk about training your team. We talk about metrics and data. We talk about profitability. So all of those, like really fun buzzword that operations obviously just affects all of those things. And my big kind of mission statement is that ops should be simple and able to be augmented and changed, right. As the business grows, as the business changes as we all change.

Right? Like I'm not trying to be the same me. I was a year ago. I want that to be different. I want my business to be different. So I think like, you know, really pigeon holding ourselves into an operating structure. Like for example, EOS, I, I do love a lot of elements of EOS. I just don't wanna be in the box. You know what I mean, of be able to free flow and, and do those types of things. So, and I know that my clients have responded really well to that too. So I wrote it all down.

Chris Ronzio (36:45):

So operations simplified because for a lot of people, operations sounds like this scary, intricate thing that they just want no part of. I used to when I was doing consulting, people would tell me I'm not an operations person. Like I just don't think like that.

Alyson Caffrey (37:02):

I hear that every day.

Chris Ronzio (37:03):

No, I'm just like, it's chaos. And so is this, is this something for everyone? Is this for people that are self-identified operations, people like who should read this?

Alyson Caffrey (37:13):

Yeah. So this is either for the business owner who has a small team and no operator yet. So some one who's like, okay, I really gotta figure this out. And I don't have anyone to help me yet. And it is also for an operator who is a COO, an ops manager, a person who's working with an organization to help that organization grow. It can be absolutely for both because the frameworks are applicable. I think through both lenses. They're easy enough to wear someone who says I'm not an ops person can totally take some nuggets and start to run with this and build on this and then maybe pass it to their ops manager, as soon as that becomes available to them. And then the ops manager, I personally feel like can just take it and run and implement, which is so exciting.

I agree there definitely is kind of that line of, you know, I don't really speak this language, but then I do speak this language. And so that's something that we're really working on in 2022 to fine tune is post the book, right? Like what happens after that? Right? Like who do we actually need to be like handholding through this? Is it the business owner who's gonna give us a ton of resistance through this? Probably not. Is it the number two? Probably. Yeah. I've always wanted to help number two. I think a really fun, like solid understanding holistically of how to potentially go about this. And then from a plan perspective, like I really hope that we can help, like number twos, create their plans to like really implement this and catapult some businesses.

Chris Ronzio (38:41):

Well, it sounds like an amazing framework. I'm sure it'll be super useful for everyone. We'll put the link in the show notes, but is there somewhere that people should go to look for it or pre-order anything right now?

Alyson Caffrey (38:51):

Yeah. operationsagency.com/book. That is where you can get it. The pre-orders up now, but it'll be out in a few weeks. I know whenever you're listening to this head over there and you'll be able to snag it.

Chris Ronzio (39:03):

Amazing. So we covered a lot of ground today. We talked about, between the book and process cultures, and then just the future of remote work and tech with colliding with the Metaverse any big takeaways or final lessons you wanna leave everyone with?

Alyson Caffrey (39:22):

No, I think just like I said, I think one of the biggest things that has helped me is just being able to take things objectively, right? If you can be in a position where you can be as objective as possible about the business or your life, your personal life, how things are intersecting you know, don't take everything super personally is something I think that I've learned over the past year and a half-ish. I just became a new mom a year and a half ago. So I think it's something too that I've just been really leaning into is that, you know, things don't happen to us, right. They happen for us and like leaning into the changes, and the funky stuff is just gonna make us better and stronger in the end. So I feel like we talked about that a little bit today and I'm excited about all the upcoming new things. The Metaverse no matter what it looks like. I think just being excited about the future and just, you know, what's happening is gonna be super, super fun.

Chris Ronzio (40:16):

Amazing. Well, thank you for leaning in and sharing so much with us today. Allyson the Wolf Caffrey such a pleasure talking with you. I appreciate it. And we'll see you all next time on Organize Chaos.

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