122: Chris Ronzio from Trainual on Transforming Training, New Employee Onboarding and Processes for Scalable Success

So in a growing firm, you know, people are going to be promoted and they're going to inherit new responsibilities, and that means that they have to then delegate old responsibilities and let things go to someone that's coming in and back, filling their role. And so people think of training a lot of times with just new employees, but it's really this cyclical thing that follows someone through their entire journey with you, and as they get promoted, as they take on new things, we need to teach all of our people to delegate. And everybody within our business has some best practice or some thing that they've uniquely designed, or maybe that they do uniquely well. And so our system, in a big way, is designed for crowdsourcing that knowledge for anyone to really be able to create to, you know, submit something for approval and then it to, you know, become part of the you know, businesses library. So change management is a huge piece of this.

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz, you Well,

good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time. This podcast finds you. Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. This is Jay Berkowitz, the founder of 10 golden rules. We've got an awesome guest today, Chris Ronzio. I'm going to get to Chris in just a minute, but it's not very often that we get someone who's on fire on the 10 golden rules podcast. Chris is it seems like everywhere I go, everybody's using his his company and his product that he invented called train you, and everybody's talking about standard operating procedures or playbooks. And so yesterday, I was at a meeting with our our EOS company that they hosted. And of course, the the company was, all they were talking about was Trainual and how they've integrated all their SOPs or standard operating procedures, and how they're onboarding new clients. And so if you want to really nail having proper systems in your company and really becoming a modern company that onboards new employees, and they learn everything and they don't make mistakes. This is the guy you got to hear from. So Chris, I've hyped you up. Welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast. Thanks,

Jay. I mean, this is a really high bar. I hope I can live up to that. Thank you.

So you know, the first thing I always ask, tell us a little bit about your journey and what led to Trainual, and then tell us theTrainual story.

Yeah, sure. So Trainual is my third business. So my first company I started when I was 14. It was a video production company. We did youth sporting events and started in my high school in Massachusetts, but I ended up running that business for 12 years. It scaled all across the country. We were doing events in all 50 states, hiring camera operators in every metro area, and we had over 300 camera operators and editors and sales reps. And the way that we scaled that business was through really good training, really good onboarding, so that we could hire someone in a city we had never been to before, and they could operate and follow our policies and procedures and appear in our brand and give that customer the same experience. And so after 12 years, I sold that business, I started consulting for initially just friends of mine, and then grew a pretty big consulting practice, helping people with their systems and processes, their operations, their roles, responsibilities, and I was patching together operations manuals that were just PDFs, and then we would sprinkle in YouTube videos. We would hold live training days to teach their employees like the best practice on how we do what we do. And at some point in that consulting journey, I thought, why isn't there a system for this? You know, why is everybody using Google Docs and Dropbox folders and three ring binders? There needs to be a tool that's developed for your business's operating manual or your playbook. And so that was where the idea for Trainual came from. So it started as just a little tool for my consulting clients, and then after a couple years, they were referring it out to people that didn't need the consulting, but just wanted the tool. So we spun off a software business in 2018 and today we've got about 10,000 companies and firms around the world using the tool.

10,000 companies. How many firms

that's included in firms? Yeah, yeah.

So. So needless to say, this thing's on fire. And you also wrote a book called The Business playbook. Is that correct?

Yeah, I wrote that a few years into the business, when we had, you know, two or 3000 companies using the product, and we started to see all these patterns of what are people training on? Because a lot of times you get in business and you just don't. What you don't know, and you need some sort of framework and somebody to say, like, Here's what a complete operating manual looks like. And so our book was kind of the playbook for making a playbook for your business. So

this is something I know a lot of companies have struggled with, and we certainly struggled with. I remember years ago, we I asked the team like put every process down on paper, because we read, I read the book E Myth, yeah, 22 years ago, when I started the business, I was lucky. I got that book. And the basic principle is that everything you do in the company should be documented. And then when you bring on a new employee, you can show them all the steps to do whatever it is you do. Like for us, it's like to do SEO, like to do keyword research or to promote a Google Maps location. For a lawyer, you know, we have documented steps for all the things we do in our business. And then for a new employee, we can train them on all these steps. So we originally put them all in binders. And everyone's like, why are you doing binders? Jay, like, you know, you can do it all digitally. And I was like, No, I just want to show you on it tangible. You want it like, yeah, and sales meetings, and I used it for new employees to say, hey, we've got a system. And then everything was, was it back then was on PowerPoints. And then we could just re, you know, reprint it and update the binders, but we had these sort of training manuals, which is the name Trainual, which makes so much sense, yeah. And then one of the things that's been frustrating over the years is that, you know, like people don't, would never go to the binder, and, you know, to go through all the steps. So I think train deals really solved this gap that a lot of us had, because now it's in a software it's easy to update, it's easy for people to access and use. So talk about, you know, maybe the importance of, you know, having a, having your processes B, how you onboard new employees, and then how you continue to roll it out and improve it.

Yeah. So I'll start back when, when you said that the E Myth, so that was one of the first business books I ever read to and it was such a full circle moment that Michael E Gerber, the author of that book, wrote the forward to my book. And it was like this perfect companion where, you know the E Myth teaches you you need to have this franchise prototype, like if you want to scale a business, whether you want a franchise or not, whether you want multiple locations or not, if you want to scale you've got to put down the recipe for this is how we do it. This is how we operate. This is our proven pattern for success. Because if you don't have that written down, then you're just relying on the information in your brain. You're the only one that can do it. And so the idea of like codifying who does what and how in a business originally came to me through the E Myth, and so through my video production company, that's what I was doing. I was packaging up every position, every role I had, position contracts, I had descriptions of every responsibility that each person had, and then we had documented SOPs and training videos for each of those responsibilities. And like you, it was originally paper and PDFs and documents and binders, because as an entrepreneur, you say, I like take pride in that I've got this tangible representation of my business. And so, of course, that is not practical and scalable to just have tons of binders everywhere. It's hard to update, and so that's where the software fills that gap, where you can still feel like you're making that tangible progress, because it has areas in the software for everything that you need. There's a place to build out your org chart. There's a place to build out every role, to list all the responsibilities, to create an SOP for each of those responsibilities and connect them, and then you've got this mobile app that everybody can use on the go to just look things up, or to just ask it a question. And so any of your people can ask a question about the business, about how to do something, and it just gives them, through AI, that natural language answer. And so that's really what we were trying to do, is like, fully recognize the vision of what I started when I read the E Myth, and how I did it in my company. So that's what the product is. To your question about just keeping things updated. I think a piece of this is just having the right tools, like our software, and a piece of this is building a process culture into the DNA of your business. And so some businesses are just, you know, they hold it onto everything tightly. They don't want to transfer ownership of responsibilities. They're competitive. They don't want to share their best practices. And a business that operates like that is not going to scale. It can't. So you have to build it into your DNA that we want to create best practices. We want to celebrate innovation. We want to a repeated pattern of updating our systems so that we know that people are all getting the newest and up to date version and and our system enables that, but it's partially part of your culture

that's awesome. Let's talk about it in terms of a law firm, like, what are some of the I know you guys worked with a ton of law firms, and that's part of why we're. Introducing why we're here today. Yeah, what are some of the processes that you know, law firms should have and and maybe some of the things every other business should have? Yeah.

So it starts, you know, the whole playbook methodology has really four pieces to it. It's first of all, the profile of your business or your firm. And the profile is like your culture, your key milestones along the way, your founding story, the products or services that your firm offers, the pricing. Do you price flat rate? Do you price by the hour? What is the structure of your firm? What is the market or the territory you operate in? Who's an ideal customer? All of that is just the basic profile of your business, and that's something that every single person that joins your firm needs to understand. That's part of their orientation. The next part of your playbook is the people. And so across your business, whether you have you know five people or 50 people or 500 people, there's a lot of personalities and bios and backgrounds and shared interests. There's the different roles and responsibilities. There's teams and departments, because any new person joining your firm has to know, who do I go to for what what is kind of the structure here? Who do I report to? Who else are my peers? Who's on my team? And so knowing your peers, knowing the people, is a big part of getting up to speed. Then you've got your policies. So obviously, every firm has some kind of handbook and policies. Some are legally mandated. Some are just cultural norms, like, what are your hours? Or how do we pay people? What are the benefits that we offer? So those are questions you're answering for your employees. And then finally, it's your processes, and that's where everyone wants to start. But I always encourage people to go through them in that order, because you want to handle and address the things that get you the most ROI in documenting. And so you start with your culture. You start with the mix of who's who. You move into your handbook. And then you can get really granular about the processes, but all of that is what you should document in the business. And so now, to get more specific, for a law firm, you know, your processes can span the gamut from the administrative processes, the sales and marketing processes to, you know, how you actually serve your your clients, how you bill your clients. But it starts at the beginning with, you know, probably intake. You know, how do you answer the phone? What's the script for somebody that's answering the phone? Is there a qualification meeting or something that you're inviting people to a discovery session? What happens during that meeting? What are the key questions that you ask? Is there paperwork that they need to fill out when someone signs on a retainer? You know, what are they how are they paying you? What are the steps to them paying you? How do they get entered into your you know, a client file in whatever system that you use. And so you just think about all the things that are done in the firm or the business. Every single thing that's done has a process associated with it. It's just probably not captured somewhere. And so what our job is is to start little by little, first capturing the responsibilities, the things that are done, and then second, capturing the how. How is this thing done? And that gets more and more important as you grow

what are like, three quick things every firm should do to set up some processes.

So to set up processes, I think the first thing you want to do is start with your roles and responsibilities. What are all the positions that you have currently, today, and what are the responsibilities that you expect of those positions? And you can run this through, start with when you hired people, what you listed as responsibilities, and then get people to sign off on it and say, Is this still an accurate representation of what you do. So I recommend this exercise in the book that you know can take people through capturing those responsibilities. First, you start with just, you know, time based you know, what do I do every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year, and you can just, you know, think about the meetings that you attend and the common tasks that you have, and then you go through, if you use email, which I know most do, you go through your emails and you say, you look at your your last couple weeks of sent email, is my hack, because your sent email shows you what you're actually interacting with. It's the messages you're sending, the ones you're replying to, the ones you're forwarding to other people that maybe you're a bottleneck for. And so your sent email is actually a gold mine for responsibilities. Then you look at your calendar. I know a lot of attorneys are tied to their calendar, and so you're looking at, what are the meetings I'm taking, what are the calls that I'm on, and so all of that is just sourcing responsibilities, and that's definitely the place to start. So I'd say that's, that's one place the next place I would start would be your basic orientation to your firm. Because whether you have turnover or growth plans, you're introducing new employees to your business, probably quite often. So. And you want everyone to get that initial, foundational experience, to know you know their way around, to know what you expect of them. And so I would invest in your orientation, and then I would look at

even more important today, right? We're a remote organization, oh, absolutely around. Like, the first thing we used to do is, like, here's the kitchen, here's the restrooms, you know, here's HR, like, used to show around, like, literally, and, yeah, you know, it's remote. It's like, okay, here's your email and your password, right,

right? And think about, think about, from the new employee standpoint, if they just show up on a zoom call and you give them their access to their email, and you don't have a really structured way to explain the business, like, what are they signing off and thinking about you and your firm? You know, whereas if you bring them on and you say, here's what your full first week looks like. Here's all the meetings I've set up for you. Here's the guide I put together for you to understand our culture and our principles and our values. Here's where we're going as a firm. Here's your list of responsibilities, of what we're going to expect of you in your first 30 and 60 and 90 days, they're going to leave that call thinking, wow, like this is I'm set up for success, and that's what you want for every new person. And then you know beyond that, you're getting into actually documenting processes. And I would always start with the things that are done most frequently in the business, or the things that are done by the greatest number of people. And so, for instance, if you have, you know, 10 paralegals or something, that are doing the same type of work, there's a lot of opportunity for inconsistency there. And so you'd really want to laser focus on the task that are taking up their time and make sure that there is a consistent way to, you know, do the research or to file the notes or to do whatever it is that they're doing.

That's great. You mentioned intake, and intake seems to be a hot button. As a matter of fact, our our last monthly live webinar event was on intake. We had Ben leader as an amazing attorney who's rebuilt their entire intake. So go listen to that one, if you like, if you want to improve your intake. But let's say you didn't listen to the webinar and you wanted to improve your intake, how would a law firm go about creating the right processes and figuring out how to document it and how to train new people on the intake team.

So there's a couple ways you could go about this. You know, first, everyone's gonna have a slightly different process or workflow for how they do this. And I'm not saying that there's one best way to do this across all firms, but the first thing is, is outlining how your firm does it. So we have a flow chart tool, for instance, and I think that's a really easy way to start, which is boxes and lines to say, Okay, step one, we do this, and then we do this. You know, there's this call. We ask them these questions, we send them these forms. They send it back. We file it here in our system. We schedule this meeting, whatever all those big steps are, you map out with a flow chart, and get all the stakeholders around the table that are involved with it, and have people collaborate and say, Yes, this is an accurate representation of how we do it today. You know, a lot of people think creating process is really burdensome, but the processes already exist. You're already doing this. It's just about capturing it. It's just about sitting down, taking those few minutes and saying, Okay, let's, let's go through. And one easy way to do this is just write down what you're doing while you're doing it. You know, if you've got someone that you're going through intake with, have someone else sit in the meeting and just write down every step that they're going through, just be an observer in the meeting. It's a really easy way to just capture those steps. And so once you've got the steps, then you think about what's the appropriate medium to actually record this. And so things that happen on a computer, for instance, might be best suited for a screen recording. So if you're filing some notes inside your CRM or something like that, maybe you're firing up the screen recorder and you're recording a one minute clip that just shows how you do that particular step in the process for a you know, form that you're sending out to people. Maybe there's just a document template, and your instructions are simply, here's the template, send this template with this little script in the email and and you put that in the system. And so the way we've designed our system is first to let you create those outlines, and then to pick the mediums, the videos, the screen recordings, the files, the documents, the slides of however you want to train each particular step. And then the final thing is, once you've got it all collected in the system, now you would be assigning it to a new person. And so a huge part of our system is not just that it's documented, it's that you can actually assign it and track that someone's gone through the training. And so when you've got this whole intake process you know outlined and recorded, you assign it to whichever role in your firm does intake, or whichever roles do intake. And then when you hire a new person that is fitting those roles, they'll automatically get assigned the intake process, and it'll track that they've gone through it and watched everything and learned from zero to 100% so that you know they're up to speed on the latest version. And I think that was the accountability piece I was always missing in my video company, was we had everything documented, but had people seen the latest version? If I made a change, did it go out to everybody? Did I know that they had seen it? And that's what our system does.

That's awesome. And I love the fact that it's all in one place. We did our own version of a trainual, very rudimentary, tgru, okay, in golden rules, university for new employment. And we created about, I don't know, there's 50 or 60 videos, and there's a short quiz, they're broken into 15 minute segments, and there's a certificate of completion. And we scratched the surface, but we're definitely part of our 2025 plan is we're going to do training. We're going to do really, do it right. And thank you for laying out the four parts of the process that I now know we did a lot of this just by, you know, happenstance and and knowing that one of the big things we needed to get better at was onboarding new employees. And part of it was, since we weren't remote, you know, it used to be easy when we were seven or 10 employees and we were just, you'd walk around the office, they'd sit over your shoulder, you'd sit over their shoulder, right how to do things. But we, A, we're not, you know, we're not in the same building anymore, where everybody's remote. And B, we're up to like, 20 employees. So it's, it's a lot of new people coming in, and more people in the same role. So the opportunity for this is tremendous, absolutely.

And, well, it's fantastic that you've invested in that and already done that. It'll make it really easy to take it to the next level. But you mentioned quizzes. Those are important too. You know, those little knowledge checks to make sure people understand what you're teaching along the way, or have those feedback loops to you as the person creating the content, is really important. So, yeah, that's a great tip also, and it's also in our system.

Yeah, another think about it. We probably seven or eight employees have been through the entire process, and our turnover has been very low and in the past year. And I think part of it in previous years was, you know, there was some frustrations for new employees. They didn't necessarily learn the systems, and they didn't necessarily, you know, maybe it was, I'm sure it was frustrating for them. We stumbled on getting some of these things right. One of

the things I started doing is, you know, we do the most of somebody's new training, or new employee training, in their first two weeks. And so they go through all of their training in the first couple weeks, and then at the end of that two week process, we offer them cash to leave the business. We started with 2500 then it went to 5000 then it went to 10,000 just to say, like, hey, if this is not the right fit for you, you can actually take this easy button, take this ramp out of the business. Now that you've seen the training, you've seen the materials, you know what we expect from you, and in the last four years that we've been offering that we haven't had a single person take it, which I think is a testament to the training and setting people up for success.

That's fantastic. So, mutual admiration society, I mentioned that I was just reading the book buy back your time by Dan Martell, yeah, you said Dan's an investor in your company. Yeah, a little bit about how that came about, and the reason why I was sharing that with you is that Dan has a whole chapter on playbooks, and so I actually I owe Dan a couple bucks because I actually scanned it and sent it to my leadership team, but I'll send them all a copy of them here. I'm promoting it here. But yeah, talk about Dan and how y'all met up and worked together, and a little bit about buy back your time.

Yeah. So funny story. I was a customer of Dan's in his last business called clarity.fm it was a business where you could hire people, kind of, you know, pay, by the minute, and you could hire experts to in different fields. And so this was like, you know, 15 years ago, I was learning how to blog and how to guest blog and network, and through Dan's platform, I hired someone that taught me how to pitch my writing, and I ended up getting a bunch of guest blog posts and all these big publications. And so it was funny that Dan and I had this, this connection. So when I was starting Trainual, a friend tagged me in one of Dan's LinkedIn posts where they were saying, Dan had said, I want to assemble the biggest list of SOP templates. And, you know, comment here with all the things you wish there were SOPs for. And so everybody's commenting. A couple friends tag me. Customers tag me. They're like, Hey, Chris, you should chime in on this. And so I said, Who is this guy? Like, he's, what is? What does he do? And I'm the SOP guy. Like, this is, this is my thing now. So I reached out to Dan, and I said, you know, we should probably work together, or maybe whatever resource you're creating, I could send out to all my customers. Or I could have you on my podcast. And Dan turned it back to me and said, Actually, I'm building this SAS leadership group, this small mastermind, and you should be a part of it. And I says, I said, Okay, well, let's do both of those things you work with train. You'll, I'll be a part of your group. So I joined his SAS Academy. It's called when there were about 15 or 20 people in it, and and now they have hundreds and hundreds of people, and he coaches people around the world. And so got to, got to work with Dan one on one, really early on. And he's such a great guy. And so the buyback your time concept is something that's always resonated with me. You know, the idea that you only have so many hours in the day, and when you choose to do a certain task in your business, you're making a choice that has an opportunity cost for the other things you could be doing in the business. And so you have to make this really analytical decision, to say, What am I going to focus on? That's going to have the highest ROI or the highest yield, and that gives me the most leverage? And then how do I take other things off my plate. How do I delegate the things that other people can do? And so the chapter in the book on playbook Dan mentions us, because, yes, he's an investor. They've used the product a lot, but it's simple. It's if you want to delegate something to someone else and you want them to do it right, you should give them some instructions and some expectation. You know, you should say, Here's how I did it that worked for me. If you can do it better and improve it and make your own best practice fantastic, but at least let me maintain the quality that I've been performing at. You know, Dan calls it the camcorder method, where you just watch someone and write down what they're doing, or you literally record a video. It's as simple as that. You know, process doesn't have to be complicated, and so it's been really fun to watch his business grow and his book just catch on fire over the last couple years. Yeah,

one of the lines that's resonated with me in his book is, 80% done, is 100% awesome. And what he explains is that, you know, if you can, I've now have a full time VA. And if she can get an 80% right, that's pretty darn good, and normally good enough. And if she can catch an email from someone who's wants to book time with me and send a note, we use his format. Hey, this is Elizabeth J's VA. I jumped in. I saw this email, and I wanted to send you a scheduling link so we could get this on the calendar right away. You know, from she, I might have worded it differently. I might not have asked a prospect to book their own meeting, things like that, but nine times out of 10 it works and it's 80% awesome, and or it's 80% done in 100% Awesome.

Well, yeah, well, you know, done today is better than well done someday. You know, like it's better to just do it, but 80% done is maybe a starting point. I find that when you hire the right people and you empower them to improve the way that they're doing it, you get to 110% or 120% pretty quickly. You know, people can start to specialize in that thing. And when they realize that this is the task I own that's on my plate, scheduling whatever else it is, they're gonna find tools and hacks and efficiencies and things that you didn't even have because you are doing so many different things in the business. And so maybe you start at 80% but the goal should be to get everyone to be more proficient than you were at those things.

Yeah, because I guess most businesses, there's got to be 20 to 50 different jobs, and the founder, you're probably really darn good at eight or nine of them, but there's probably 40 people who are better at their specific task than you ever could be. And obviously you can't be in 40 places at the same time. So yeah, yes. And Dan's principle is you figure out what your time's worth to the company, and he has a calculated formula. And my buyback rate is like 25 bucks or something. And so if I can get someone to do something for $25 an hour. It's much better for the company, for them to do it than for me to do it. Yeah,

absolutely. Inside our tool, we built a few few little tricks, or a few little tools, I guess, to analyze this for yourself. And so this thing has been a passion project of mine. It's called the delegation planner. It's a board where you list out all the different roles, or all the different positions or people in the company, and then you see in each column all the different responsibilities. And for each responsibility, you can click on it and say, How much time does this take? Is it five hours a week? Is it 10 hours a month? How much time and bandwidth does it take? And then you can rate across a few different measurements. Zero to five. Is this impactful for the business? Zero to five? Is this something I'm passionate about? Zero to five, is this something that I'm actually skilled at, that I'm really good at? Zero to five? Is this something that's part of my long term career trajectory? Zero. Five. And then when you zoom out and you see all the things that are on your plate, it's a really great lens to say, okay, obviously I should move these few things off of my plate to someone else's plate. And that's when you decide, let me hire a VA. And they can take this from me and this from my partner, and you know this from this person, you start to bucket those tasks into new roles in your company, and that's how you really start to find leverage.

So, yeah, just awesome skills. I mean, the way I've always heard it is, like the things that you're really good at, the things you love doing, you should keep doing those. And the things that you're not great at and the things you hate doing, you're going to screw them up anyways. Yeah, get someone else doing those things exactly. So back to basics, what is an SOP? What is a playbook? They're interchangeable for the most part, right? Yeah.

So I use playbook in both a macro and a micro sense. There's a playbook for your whole business that's like your your whole operations manual, training manual, which is those 4p that I mentioned. But then you can also think about in a micro sense, like the plays that you're running are your your SOPs. They're the individual how tos. And so if you break down the DNA of an SOP, the perfect SOP, starts with just really simple, the title, what is this thing? What is the responsibility? The name, who owns it? This is like, who is responsible for this being done correctly in the business. This may not be the person that is doing it, but this is who owns it. Who do I go to for questions? Who's going to keep this updated? That's the owner of this responsibility. Then the last time it was updated, the date last updated is important. That way, you can always sort and filter and see what may maybe needs a second look, and then you go to, you know, what is the frequency that this is done in my business? Is this something that happens every time the phone rings? Is this something that happens Fridays at 9am that's the frequency the time estimate is. How long does this thing take? If it's done? Well, I find a lot of people miss this one, you know, is, is this a 30 minute task? Is this a two hour task? Is this a two week thing? You know, a lot of times you delegate something to someone, you come back later in the day, and you're like, you're still working on that. I thought this was, I meant, I meant spend 20 minutes on this, you know. So that's the time estimate, how long should this take? The tools that you need are another piece. So, like, do I need software tools? Do I need logins? Do I need templates of documents for a proposal or a slide deck in order to do this? And then what's the context of this thing? Like, why is this important to the business, after you do your part, who does it go to next? That helps people with innovation? Because if all they're thinking about is very myopically like, this is what I do, my head's down, they're not going to see those opportunities for efficiency with the handoffs. And so the context is just like, Where does this go next, or how does this fit into the broader process? And then you get into the steps. So after you've got all of that, like metadata, I call it, then you get into step one, log into this platform. Step two, fill out this form. And those are the screenshots, or the video recordings or the descriptions of what you're doing.

I want to step into the entrepreneurial Chris for a minute. Okay, you did something amazing, right? That like a problem that a lot of us have as entrepreneurs, and you figured out a solution for it. What was the entrepreneurial moment where you said, you know, all these systems and training and onboarding, like there should be a product a company that does this.

So I'll give you the one big moment, but honestly, there were probably hundreds or 1000s of tiny moments that were just like little sparks in my head as I was building my first business and saying companies should be organized like this. And you read the books, and you go to these entrepreneurial workshops, and everyone is saying you need systems and processes, and you need to know who's responsible for what, and you need clearly defined SOPs, like people were saying this, but it just wasn't all in one place. And so in my company, I had, you know, a really nicely structured and named folder system, you know. And then I had the binders like you had, that I was proud of, with the spine that set each roll, or whatever it was, because I could show people and they came to the office. And then I had the videos, and but it was still all scattered. And so the real aha moment was I had a consulting client that had a retail store right across the street from a huge university ASU, here in Arizona, and they hired almost exclusively students who would almost entirely turn over every semester. So real high turnover business and every group of students that came in every new COVID. Cohort, they had to teach them how to use their equipment to print merchandise. That's what they were doing, how to stock the shelves, how to receive the shipments. And they had a 60 page PDF that they would send each of these college kids to get them started. And I thought, this is the most horrible onboarding experience. There has to be a better way. And so when you think, Okay, what would the perfect onboarding sequence be? It's like, okay, well, maybe I send them a welcome video, which is me like, welcoming them to the brand, and it shows them a little bit of the history of the the story. Maybe I show them, you know, the the guides to the different pieces of equipment they'll be using. Maybe I split out, you know, the back office from, you know, the people that are working in the point of sale system, and then I should have training for how to use each of those things. And so as we designed, like, the perfect training, I thought this, like, this should be a software platform. And so that was where the prototype for training will came from.

That was the one light bulb moment, yeah, yeah, followed by many times in darkness, where you had to find the way out to the light. Yeah, exactly.

I didn't know what to call it at first. You know, I remember sitting on a couch, and my wife and I were saying all these, you know, system, process, workflow, procedure, all these different words. And finally, training and manual came together, and the domain was available. So that was it. And

we danced around this, but you know, if you could sum it up simply, what are some of the best practices for onboarding new employees? Yeah,

so it starts with before they even set foot in the door. And so we actually have training that happens for candidates during the interview process. For us, it's a way to ensure that they're serious, that they'll invest some time to go through the training. It shows that they're committed. And then it also kind of weeds people out. If they don't feel like they're a good fit for our culture and our values and the things that we train, pre offer letter, they weed themselves out. So that's where the training starts. Once someone accepts an offer, then we do an intake form that asks a ton of different questions about their preferences, about their working style. You know, even things like favorite snacks and T shirt sizes and all the things that we can be ready for them when they start, when they start their first day, is like a just an exhibition. It's like just the this full designed. It's almost like a cruise itinerary where you're coming in, you're getting to meet different teams, you're getting live presentations. You've got time on your calendar that is downtime for you to do your asynchronous training that we assign to you. And then there's little moments along the way where you get to spend time with your coworkers. We also assign people a buddy during orientation, so they have a peer that they can go to for questions. So we have a ton of content on our website about the perfect orientation and, you know, videos and templates, and so people can look those up, and it's all free. I

love it. So we're gonna get into the final section in a minute. But is there another is there another question, something else about trainual that I didn't ask? No,

I think, I think beyond just the onboarding and the documenting of SOPs, a big thing that we focus on is change management. So in a growing firm, you know, people are going to be promoted and they're going to inherit new responsibilities, and that means that they have to then delegate old responsibilities and let things go to someone that's coming in and back filling their role. And so people think of training a lot of times with just new employees, but it's really this cyclical thing that follows someone through their entire journey with you, and as they get promoted, as they take on new things, we need to teach all of our people to delegate. And everybody within our business has some best practice or some thing that they've uniquely designed, or maybe that they do uniquely well. And so our system, in a big way, is designed for crowdsourcing that knowledge for anyone to really be able to create, to, you know, submit something for approval, and then it to, you know, become part of the, you know, businesses library. So change management is a huge piece of this. Yeah,

I love it. It's so true. One of our account managers does a great job, and she actually pre writes the meeting notes prior to meeting with the client, and then she explained how she does it. She's like, well, first of all, I wrote the agenda, and second of all, like, their pay per clicks going really well, we're going to recommend increasing the budget $5,000 so I can put in there. You know, client approved increased budget of $5,000 now they might increase the 3000 or they might increase the 10,000 when they see the great results, but she's already got the meeting notes written, so now we've made that an SOP, a standard operating procedure. That's amazing. Yeah, and the new account managers, and we call it the Brianna method, we give her credit, but it's like the other thing is, you know, we're running these. Meetings on Zoom, and they she can have the meeting notes like ready to go in a draft format, because she knows the order the agenda. She can have that up on her second screen. And, you know, because we always had this thing where someone's running the meeting, and then they're also taking notes. And so she, she solved that problem for the most part, by pre editing the meeting notes. So there's so great, so many solutions that can then be part of the training manual. Now this is in our sort of PowerPoint or Google Docs format, and it's in our tgru but it's going to be so much better when we get it drenial. There

you go. And then you could take it a step further and say, you know, here's, here's the bullet points of the variables that they may agree or disagree with. And you put it in a, you know, an AI thing, and then you just correct it after the meeting, and it writes the updated, you know, document. Then you've got your new meeting notes.

Yeah, in fairness, we're actually using Fathom now and recording the calls the meeting else, but that's great, great. Well, so we've been doing this for, I don't know, this podcast is probably 13 or 14 years old, and we do these quick one liners. And if you want to go back in time, we interviewed Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, and Jason Calacanis when he was doing a startup, and now he has the top podcast in the world, and Gary Vaynerchuk. So everybody's answered these questions, Chris, you're part of a famous guy. So what apps or techniques do you use for personal productivity?

Ooh, all right, so personal productivity, the first thing I use is this, this methodology. It was from a book called living your best year ever, by Darren Hardy. I highly recommend this book for personal goal setting, for planning out your best year. So I actually started doing this solo with just a few entrepreneur friends of mine, and then started doing it with my wife, actually. And so now, for the last 13 years, my wife and I have done annual planning using this book. And so it really starts there with having a big plan for the year with personal, professional goals, everything that I would hope to accomplish during the year, and then a calendar that I fill out in advance for the year. For days I'm going to take off vacation. Weeks I'm going to take off the kids vacations, you know, half days that I want to pick the kids up in school. I fill all that out on the calendar at the beginning of the year, so that sets the like frame for my year. Then on a on a more sort of day to day basis, I've got a really structured week where certain days of the week will be for internal meetings or external meetings or podcasts like this, and my assistant manages all that for me. And then on a day to day basis, I've got, you know, everything's time blocked from, like, my morning workouts and being around for the family in the morning and and, you know, any, any meetings that I'm on, and then being home for for dinner. And so I try to stay with, like, a really strict regimen. I live and die by the calendar. You

almost answered the next one. Do you have a personal wellness and fitness routine, yes.

So my best tip, my best tip here, is to have a finish line so it, you know, when people set goals that are like, oh, I want to, you know, go to the gym three times a week, that's a goal that you almost guaranteed cannot sustain. Like, there are going to be weeks that you're on vacation and you missed it, or what happens if, last week you only went two times, did you get the goal, or didn't you get the goal? And so I always look for concrete fitness goals, and it may be something measurable, like you, you want to, you know, gain a certain amount of lean muscle, or you want to lose a certain amount of weight. That's a measurable, you know, when you hit that finish line, or it may be a literal finish line, and that it's a race that you sign up for. So I do a lot of marathons, half marathons, triathlons, and having something on the calendar that I'm training for creates the discipline of every day, doing the work that I know it's going to take to successfully cross that finish line. And so I like having a finish line in the distance and working toward that goal.

I love it. Best business books.

Well, you mentioned buyback your time, and you mentioned the E Myth. So you took you mentioned my book, The Business playbook, so you've taken all the good ones. Recently, I've been reading a lot of biographies Made in America. Sam Walton has been super interesting. The the the story of Bob Iger in Disney. It was incredible. The Steve Jobs biography. So I've just been diving deep on biographies.

I love it. Yeah, it's such a great way to learn. It's really a great vehicle blogs, podcasts and youtubes. You know, one of your feeds hits your stream. Which one do you stop everything else and listen to that

one? Well, you mentioned Jason's podcast all in so I listened to that. One every time it comes out. I like moon shots, which is Peter Diamandis. And it's just like these big, far out ideas that exploring things. I really like saster, which is a SAS software podcast, and then 20 VC, which is really it's like interviewing investors, but it's such a great perspective on how they see businesses and how I can be a better operator based on how they see businesses. And then on the personal side, I'm a huge Phoenix Suns fan in the NBA, and they're a customer of ours, and I go to all the games, so I listen to a Phoenix Suns podcast also,

well, the next one is, you're great at the Segway thing. You didn't even know this. Who's your NFL team and, I guess your NBA team. And how do the suns look this year? Oh, well,

the suns, when they're healthy, look incredible. Their first like, nine games of the season. I think they were eight and one, and then Durant got hurt, and that sent him down a six game losing streak. So now he's back. I think they'll be good. NFL I watched kind of like when, when it comes up, you know, I'd have to say, when I was in college, I interned for the New England Patriots doing quality control. And so I would have to, even though I don't watch many with ball deflating. Or, yep, I was deflating all the balls Exactly. No, I it was, it was the best experience. I they gave me a handful of cash, and I would walk around the stadium buying hot dogs to check the temperature and buying merchandise in the store and tracking how long I was in line and asking where the nearest ATM was and writing down someone's badge number. It was just like, are things working well in the stadium, which, you know, maybe that had a, had a was part of that Rrainual DNA as well.

What a great what a great exercise. I love it. Yeah. So who are the best folks to use Tainual Like, if someone's listening to this podcast, and we want to make an introduction, who are the best people, and where do they go and do that? Where can they get in touch with you or the company?

Yeah, so really easy. Trainual.com Sounds like it's spelled like it sounds so train U, a, l, Trainual.com or you can look me up, Chris ronzio, on any social platform. I hang out most on Instagram and LinkedIn. The best customers are the best people for Trainual Is anyone that's serious about scaling their business, anyone that either wants to grow the company or they want to remove themselves from it so that they're less tied to day to day operations. One of our trademarks is get your business out of your brain. And I think so many companies are just stuck up in people's heads how to do what you do. And so our mission is really, you know, get your people up to speed and keep them up to date on all the knowledge in the business, so that you can do whatever it is that you love. And that could be scaling the business. It could be just being around more at home, whatever it is, it's, you know, we're running a better operation. So anybody that's interested in that, send them our

way. Awesome. Chris, this was really, really great, really inspiring, and we're going to make Trainual a big part of our 2025 so thank you so much for your time today. I

love it. Thanks, Jay.

Thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n, golden rules.com you.