Ian Richardson WINs by developing processes and documentation

Welcome to W.I.N. (what's important now?) - the entrepreneurial podcast where we dive into business challenges, achievements, and opportunities!

Join your host, Ian Richardson, from Richardson & Richardson Consulting as he explores what entrepreneurs care about and focus on. This week, Ian reflects on the importance of developing processes and building documentation.

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with Carrie here!

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

Ian: 0:59

Hello and welcome to WIN. I'm your host Ian Richardson from Richardson and Richardson Consulting, and today your guest is me. This is the second of a three part of short episodes around seven to 10 minutes in length. We're just giving a little bit of update to kick off the 2023 season of WIN. 2023 is season two. We had a great batch of guests and I'm really excited for our lineup this year. I'm not gonna give you any previews, but I actually want to talk about another offering, another media series that's happening at Richardson Richardson, and that is our webinar series, the Thursday Process. You can learn about Thursday process by going to the website thursdayprocess.com, all one word, no space, dash, anything like that. Thursday process is a webinar series that I started last year around sharing knowledge throughout my career. First at Doberman, my IT company, and now at Richardson and Richardson. I've had a mixed relationship with process. At the start, I didn't see huge amount of value. I fell into the entrepreneurial trap of people should be able to read my. They should be able to do things the way that I want them to be done. They should be able to find the same resources I can find. They should be able to put one and one together in the same way that I do. And that fallacy really hurt me. It didn't only hurt me, it hurt my team. It hurt my clients. It hurt my previous business. And at Richardson and Richardson, I made the decision upfront to do things differently. All of 2022 was spent documenting every single system, every single process from start to finish on how it should rub when things were complicated. We made step-by-step procedures, even if the documentation already existed in a vendor system. We took that documentation and integrated it into our platform that we use for tracking documentation to make sure that everything was in one. now, documentation is never perfect. It should be a living, breathing document. So one of the processes I'm most happy about is our review process. How we take out information and say, Hey, is, are these systems still right? Is the procedure still right? Does this reflect what we currently do? And we do that on a cadence with every single system that we have developed at r and r. Over the course of a year, every process gets pulled out, examined, and then put back away with any sort of edits, modifications, or or deletions that might be needed internally, I like to learn. Carrie loves to learn. Steve's loves to learn. I love to learn, and one of the best ways I've found for myself to learn is chatting with other entre. I can't spend time with someone and not take away valuable lessons, and that was really the impetus of Thursday process. We said, Hey, what if we invited CEOs of managed service companies, of software companies across the IT channel and said, what's a process you've used in your business in your. In your organization, either at your current company or previous company, what's something that you could have used or have used successfully to fix a problem? And that's what started the webinar series last year. We had great guests. Our inaugural guest was Gavin Garbat from Naval fame. And he came in and talked about how he used business process to create raving fans. We talked with Emily Glass of synchro about remote workforce culture. Zach Ien Berry of Hooked Security about raising series funding. Paula Za from Service Tree about building culture through a process. And we have really a great list of past guests, but today I don't wanna look backwards, I wanna look forwards on on what's coming up and who we have coming and joining. So again, if you go to Thursday process.com, you can see everyone coming up. And we have a really powerful guest roster that I wanna run through our kickoff guest. The the first guest of the season is Ta Hammed from MSP camp. MSP Camp does marketing support for managed service companies, and I would consider them a. A, a strategic partner in alignment with Richardson and Richardson. We both do marketing, but we do different things. And to is going to share the process that he uses at MSP camp and at Alltech. The MSP that that he's a member of right now for vertical marketing campaigns, developing a campaign that will attract the specific vertical. That you want to service or or gain. That new logos in Taher is joining me on the 19th. That's next Thursday, a week from this Thursday where we're gonna dive into things. Then I'm joined by Nate Tutus Over at Membrane. Membrane is Richardson and Richardson crm. They're a strategic partner of Richardson and Richardson. We're diving wide and deep with them. Nate and I are gonna be doing a series. around sales process. One of the findings I found from my over 50 conversations with managed service companies across North, north America last year is that universally everyone had ill-defined or straight up, didn't have a sales process. I aim to fix that. So I am sharing every part of the Richardson and Richardson sales process. Every procedure, all documentation over a series with Nate, where we dive into this is what we have, and this is what we're, this is what we're working on. So we're doing an overview in, on January 26th of the r and r sales process, and then the last Thursday of the. For the first half of the year, we're gonna dive deep onto each stage, each step in that process, and explore them together. February 2nd, I've got Damien Stevens from sirva, a good friend of mine. He's sharing his process for disaster recovery testing. This is, this was born, his company was born off of an experienced, Damian had a, his old M S P, where they were trusting Backup reports. They were trusting those green check marks, and then they had a data loss. Damien's walking through the process, you can use as an MSP or an IT department to make sure this doesn't happen to you. It'll be a really, really good session with quite a bit of value. George Bari is coming on to share his process for throwing kickass parties. George, as many people know, is the CEO of BE Voy, he's also the CEO of MSP In. An MSP initiative is throwing the best parties in the channel. George is sharing how you can plan your own event. Whether you're going after a thousand attendees or 10 attendees. This process scales to meet the needs. George is joining us on February 16th, Damien's joining us on February 2nd, February 23rd. Nate's back to do a deep dive discovery a deep dive into the discovery stage of the r and r sales process. This is where sales are made, so I can't recommend enough for you to come and join us. My friend and mentor and previous HTG facilitator and the person who introduced me to Strat Op Israel Lang is joining me on March 2nd, which happens to be my son's 12th birthday. He's sharing a process he's developed around managing service team. So if you've ever struggled about, Hey, how much capacity do I have on my desk? When do I need to hire, when do I need to to staff up to support new load? Israel's diving in with me on that process he's developed. This is a heavy hitting process that I can't recommend enough attending the. My good friend Bob Coppi from Simplex. It is sharing a process around categorizing and approaching internal stakeholders. Those of you that know Bob, knows that he is Mr. Co-managed it. We've taken the process that Bob's uses for managing this complex relationships, and he's sharing it with you all. March 23rd, I'm joined by the one, the only, Matt Lee from PAX eight, the senior Director of security and Compliance, and Matt is sharing the process you can use to adopt security frameworks into your business. When Matt talks, he's got a massive megaphone. He teaches classes on this process, and he's sharing it and giving away the process you can use to adopt these frameworks for free. On March 23rd, rounding out the series. Nate's joining me again on March 30th to do a deep dive into value proposition. If you've ever struggled with closing, Hey, how do I close the deal? How do I close in the room? This is a session for you. It's March 30th. We will probably have one or two more guests that pop in, but this is a lineup of who's built out and ready today. If you go to Thursday process.com, you can see all of these people, you can see you can see all of these sessions there and register for one or register for the whole series. So I'd really I'd encourage you to take some time and go out. We're giving away these processes. There's no cost to register, there's no catch there. It's just an hour diving into them and sharing that knowledge. If you've got a really awesome process at your business, love to hear from you about it. If you go to r and r.consulting/connect, you can click on the Thursday process icon there. It'll take you to a form where you can share a little bit about yourself, what the process is, and get. Process started to show up on our show for quarter two or later this year. Until next time, take it easy.