Streamline Your Business with Kris Ward: The Power of Super Toolkits

Oh, I’m pumped to be here. I can’t wait to dive in.

Right. So, Kris, Win the Hour, Win the Day. Look, it sets it up. It’s one of those titles. It’s your book. I almost feel stupid asking you to give us a headline of what the book is all about, but I’m jumping straight in, and I’m sure you’ll give us a bit about your background as to how we, how we arrived at Win the hour, Win the day.

Yeah. Well, to answer your first question, what I find is so many of us business, you know, when you have your own business, you’ve got these great ambitions and plans, and they just sort of land in your lap as a clump.

I had a client of mine just say to me the other day they were struggling with their week, and they said, oh, we need to make better goals for this quarter. And to me, that’s just putting off your reward, your strategy, saying, all right, so this isn’t working this week. Let’s make a quarter goal. Well, there’s no blueprint for that. So it’s just another ambiguous thing. But we have delayed when we’ll feel bad about it. So what I do is really break everything down, is if you can win the hour, you can win the day, you can win everything. So it’s really chunking it down so it’s achievable, and we can dive into a whole bunch of different ways you can do that.

So we are about talking about business. We’re talking to business owners on this podcast around what they have to do so that they can prepare for exit, so they can maximise the value and then exit on their terms.

We know statistically, from that SME to mid market owner managed business end of the marketplace, that 80% of businesses that go to market fail to get a deal. And we want to do everything we can to bring tips and tricks to business owners to make sure that they are one of the 20%. So if they win the hour, what do they need to do to, I guess, manage their time, manage their strategies, manage their business in a way that it is more sellable, more attractive to be acquired, and ideally more valuable so they can ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.

Yeah. Darryl, I think your message in your podcast is incredibly important because I know it’s so easy to think of when you’re doing your business some, I bet you of those, you know, 100% of entrepreneurs, so many of us, whether you got small business, big business, what you’re looking at, you think, ah, you know, I love this.

I’m never going to sell it. And I often tease, that’s kind of like looking at your youth and saying, oh, I’m sorry that you got old, but that’s never going to happen to me, me. Right? So we do want to have an exit strategy. And if nothing else, if you think, no, no, I’m never going to retire. I’m never going to sell this.

You know, to have a business that’s ready to be sold makes it a very healthy and lucrative business. So what we do is we work with businesses on their team, their time and their toolkits. And so let’s dive into our super toolkits right away. So often you need sops and the corporate model traditionally standard up.

I just thought I would ask you straight off the bat, I was hoping to get a little gap in your sentence. I just wanted to pick into the jargon, just in case anyone doesn’t know what SOP stands for. Sorry to take off your thought there.

No, no, that’s okay. Standard operating procedures. SOP. Standard operating procedures. And you know what? I think it’s my enthusiasm, because usually I do break that down. So standard operating procedures, which in the corporate world, traditionally they’re not written by the end user, they’re static in nature and they’re mostly there to cover liability.

And in amongst that, then you also have training muddled in that, right? So I don’t know, back in the day, if I was the only one to ever have a job where they dropped a manual in my lap the first day, and I thought, my lord, I’m going to lose this job because I couldn’t stay awake. And so many businesses are governed that way. So what we want to look at is we want to have things in play, like our signature super toolkits that allow you not only as the business grows, to scale it, not only to do it effectively and consistency and give you time back, all these beautiful features, but what you want to have is when or if or no matter what happens and what’s going on, and you want to sell that business, you’re good to go. You’re good to go because I hear it all the time. I’ve heard it on your show, where all of a sudden it’s like, okay, I’m ready to sell the business. And then it takes some numerous tries to sell it. It’s a painful learning process. And then it’s also like at the end of a marathon when you look and say, okay, I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve grown and I’ve got 50 employees and I think I’m ready to sell and retiree, that’s not the time you want to start overhauling your business and putting systems in play.

It’s just you’re looking to sell. You’re looking at the door. So this is a horrible time than to try to get your ducks in a row. And so that’s why I think your message and what we’re talking about here today is so incredibly important. Because not only when you have these things in play all along will they give you time back and they allow you to be more lucrative and scale as you go. But then you can sell when you have the whim.

Yeah, I think what you’re touching on there, Kris, is we need to help business owners understand a really good reason why they want to be exit ready at any time. There’s no point in going, hey, look, I don’t want to sell my business for five or ten years, so I’ll do it then. What you’re suggesting and what I think I heard you say is that if you document your business, and I’ll insert my piece there, the right level of documentation for the stage of the business, because we don’t want that massive corporate and procedure manual that, as you said, is just there for butt covering. So if you have your business documented well, why do you want to document it? Well, having it documented, all that really means, I think, is that everyone knows how it works. It’s, you know, it’s just that every time you do a task in your business, it happens the same way. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?

Yeah, yeah. So with our signature. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was just going to dig into that a little deeper. So, documenting the business is just having a standard way of doing things. And if you document it, it shows someone else that everyone has the same understanding because they’ve read the documents. That’s what I understood from what you said.

Yeah. Now, the way we do it with our signature super toolkit, why this matters so much is the difference between that and traditional SOPs is they are dynamic, breathing documents that are constantly giving you time back. And what really makes them different is their ease of use and their clarity. So many super toolkits are so clunky. Sorry, sorry. Forgive me. So many SOPs. Standard operating procedures, documents, they tend to be very clunky. They tend to take a lot of time to create. They tend to get outdated quickly.

And that’s why you say things, Darryl, like, well, I’ll deal with that later. If I’m going to sell the business, I’ll do that in five years time. But also, too, here’s something incredibly important. Two things I would bring to your attention is one, you know, if you have a playbook, if you have a sports team, you know, whatever, if you’re into football, whatever you’re doing, football, soccer, wherever in the world we are, let’s call it that. If you get this playbook and you say, here’s, you know, this is how we’re going to win the game, do you want to get that playbook in play and win some games and then go through the season and really perfect it, or do you want to write that playbook and then go right into the championship, the most important game of the year at the end?

So I would also argue you want to have these things. Not only will they give back time and they will allow you to make more money, but then when it comes time, like, oh, my gosh, I’m exit ready. I’m ready to sell. You’re not experimenting with this playbook on the most important game. So that’s huge as well.

Yeah. So it’s all about practice and okay. So you mentioned dynamic breathing documents that really caught my attention. Tell me more about that.

Okay, so we have a whole glossary and a language that most sops use.

And if you really read them carefully, they’re very ambiguous and broad and they’re clunky and they’re long sentences. So some of the governing behaviors in our super toolkits is they’re very short, tight sentences with very directive and clear words. Like, you know, there’s no guessing to it. There’s no choose your own adventure. Because the other thing, what people don’t realise is you get decision fatigue.

By the time you read something, you’re like, okay, all right. It’s almost like building something that you bought and you have to assemble yourself, and that’s where most SOPs are set up. They just really zap your decision fatigue, and it’s just easier to skip it and do it by memory. So to your point also, Darryl, is when you have a team and you’re saying, like, okay, I’m selling the business. You know, whatever.

I’ve got 50 or 500 employees. You have to have that they have bought into your systems to make it sellable. It doesn’t matter how great the playbook is if no one’s using it. So then also at the end of, you know, okay, I’m ready to sell now and I’m going to get my ducks in a row and I’m going to make SOPs. Well, now no one’s bought into it.

They’re looking at you like, oh, this is another one of these things Darryl did. It will pass in another month or, oh, suddenly Darryl cares. We’ve been telling him all this time, we need to have more clarity on what expectations are or what the outcome should be. And now you care because you’re selling the business. So, you know, when you try to sell that business, the fact of how much the team, your employees buy into it is what makes it sellable.

So you then want practice and perfection, and you want it to be just something that really runs like a well oiled machine, not something that you’ve slapped together and you’re experimenting on and now you’re going to try to sell.

Yeah. So it’s like a user manual by the sounds of it.

Well, it’s, it’s more profound than that. It is, definitely. We call it, when you’re using super toolkits, we, we always say that you create, use and edit them. So it’s really like if you think about walking to a kitchen and a chef is cooking, you know, they might just stop for a second and sharpen their knife. And that’s what the super toolkits are. They’re really easy documents to use and very few words, very chosen, carefully selected words. And they really trim all the fat and the nonsense and the noise out of SOPs, because SOPs, again, they turn out to be academic documents, not user friendly and not clear direction.

And that’s just the way it’s been. I mean, that’s just the way corporations are. And then you often, as the business owner, whether no matter how big your team is, you get this false sense that you’re the one that has to create the documents and you need time to do that. Well, I always say the person who sweeps the floor should buy the broom. So that’s the first reason why these documents are outdated, is you’re trying to supervise them for jobs you don’t do.

Yep. Okay. And the breathing part of the doc, does that mean that they’re updated regularly and arguably always up to date.

Yeah. Every time you go in to use one, they just like, you know, if somebody said to me once, you know, she was new to a team and she said, oh my gosh, like they were using our super toolkits.

And she said, this is amazing. The only thing I have to remember because I always say business is not run on memory. And she said, the only thing we have to remember is just to use the super toolkit. So the beauty of the super toolkits is everyone goes there for everything. So then also if there’s an issue, if there’s a mistake or anything, we look at the super toolkit first and there’s no, then people are confident. There’s no blaming and passing the buck or anything like that. And then every time you go in there, like you might be processing this show, Darryl. And all of a sudden there’s some great new, I mean, AI is exploding, right? If you go the, if you take a long lunch, you come back, there’s new AI tools, right? So you might decide, oh my gosh, there’s this amazing AI tool I just discovered to process the podcast. Excellent. You put it in the super toolkit because everybody’s using that you can change on a dime. You will add this new AI tool and into your process take out the other thing just because you’re in there using it. Anyhow, it takes about 3 seconds to update the way we have them set up and then off you go so you can pivot change things on a dime, constantly improve things. It’s just a, it’s just, it’s like the, it’s like a huge engine in a sports car.

Right. So they’re always up to date. They’re always being used by everyone. Unlike the bureaucratic policy and procedure manual, it takes about nine months to and 140 people involved to make a change. Just intense as opposed to anything else. And they’re always out of date as it seems. So there’s so much resistance and friction in using them. They just end up on the shelf like a trophy.

Yeah. And it also lends itself to a more empowered, inspired, engaged team. So traditionally in the corporate world, what happens is it’s a very parentified system. Like whoever your boss is, is like your parent. They check your work like they’re, you know, you’re showing them your homework from school and that kind of stuff. I mean, you know, in the corporate world, if, let’s say Darryl, you’re really great at sales and you work for organisation.

They’ve got 500 employees. You’re so good at sales, Darryl? Well, what will happen is they’ll say you’re going to be the sales manager, and the first thing they’re going to do is have you manage a team and you’re not going to be doing sales anymore. Right. So it’s a very parentified thing.

Now you’re supervising people and, oh, this one’s dropping the ball and you’re encouraging them. It’s this whole thing. So what happens with the super toolkits is because everything is constantly updated, these people do not need that to be parented. They don’t need to be supervised and micromanaged because things just happen. And if there’s a change, you change the super toolkit, it gets done.

So it really, you know that saying, the whole, I always fumble it, but it’s a ship, whatever, the tide rises, all ships kind of deal. I always fumble that one. So what happens is you really give your team independence and autonomy, and they’re inspired and they’re all following the same blueprint because it’s updated. And so whether you have, you know, 50 or 550 employees, there’s a different investment because they also feel heard and they see their work mattering as opposed that, you know, that hierarchical, when they make a change and they, yeah, sure, that’s a great idea. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Nobody’s. The person who made the change in the manual isn’t doing this job. They couldn’t be more wrong. So just having that, too, when it marries itself with the super toolkits into a philosophy that is not parentified, it really just gets more and more traction.

Okay, so what I’m hearing is that the people who are involved in the process of documenting it, they’re updating it daily so it’s live, it’s being used regularly. And I can imagine a business owner sitting there going, okay, but what do I document? Like, how do I know when I’ve got enough documentation? Do I document how to make, you know, welcome a guest into the, to the lobby? Like, how far do I take this?

Well, I always say, anything you’re going to do more than once, you have to be able to do 50 times. And anything that you think is, oh, yeah, we do it this way, but there is an exception to the rule. Then that exception becomes a new super toolkit. So when I started my podcast, Win the Hour, Win the Day  we just do general, it could be anything from sales, social media for small businesses, whatever. So I remember we have a process when you’re going to be on our show, here’s the super toolkit, blah, blah, blah. You fill out a form, you do all this stuff.

Well, then we got a notable guest that was on American television that was on a big show, Shark Tank. Well, all of a sudden I look and say, wow, he’s not. We’re not going to fill these forms. We’re lucky he’s on the show. Like, this is. He’s the exception. And this is what happens in corporations all the time. Small, medium, large businesses. Oh, we do it this way except when. We do it that way except when.

And then you almost have to become part of this family, dysfunctional family to know, oh, when somebody’s new, oh, yeah, we do this, but not these days. And Ethel does that. We only do that on Tuesdays. So what I would say is anything you do more than once, you want to be able to do 50 times. So in that case, I was like, oh, Kevin Harrington is going to be on our show from Shark Tank. Great. You know what? He’s not going to fill all these forms. He’s not going to do that. Then I need a VIP  super toolkit for my show.

Okay. Now, because it’s something different. So you don’t need to have a super toolkit of how to get permission to go to the bathroom. But I would

argue over processing is probably the least of your worries. You start where you are. The next thing you’re going to do, or the biggest pain you have right now, or whatever is consuming your day, you build a super toolkit. And then when you learn how to do that, which is quite easy, you get excited and you see how effective it is, then the next thing you go to, it will take care of itself. It will just snowball. And that, to your point, Darryl, is another problem where people sit down over here and say, okay, I’m going to make all these SOPs. You want to be creating them as you’re doing it, you don’t want to sit down and just try to write out all these steps. That never works. And that’s what the corporate world does.

Yeah, they do. And then. And people don’t use them, as you say. What you’ve highlighted there, Kris, is something really interesting. And that, I guess I’ve seen a lot of resistance over the years myself when I’ve been involved in seeing people trying to systemize the workplace, and that is resistance from smart people going, hey, look, we’re creative people. We don’t need to be told what to do because it’s a creative process, Darryl, you can’t document the creative process. And besides, what you’re telling us about, it only happens all of this this way some of the time, and you’ve got all these exceptions, so we can’t document it because of all the exceptions. How do you handle it when you get that sort of pushback?

Yeah, I get that all the time. And so what I would say to you is, no matter what the creative process is, you still have a creative process, right. And so you want to get that creative process, have a super toolkit in play to prep you for that creative process, because you don’t want to use up your brain power and decision fatigue when you sit down. Let’s say, I don’t know, let’s say you’re a company that builds a machine. Let’s just be so dramatic and simple. You’re a company that builds widgets, machines that build widgets, fine. It’s like, oh, there’s so much engineering to this. And I have to think of something new because I got this problem. La la la. Right.

So solving that problem is going to use up a lot of brainpower. There’s still pre and post work to everything you do. You may part of that be doing research on their current problem or checking out their website or what’s problem with the machine they have right now. There is still a process. And you have that.

You’re just doing it on memory, which is no business successfully is run on memory. So what the super toolkit would have the pre and post so that those things either would be done and don’t use up your brain power or could be done by somebody else. So that when you sit down to do the creative element, your creative juices have not been worn down by attention residue and decision fatigue. So the creative element, actually, it protects this even more. And that’s the thing it leans into allowing you because to be more creative, because the creative part of the brain is not the same as the organising.

Let’s get everything together so I can be creative part of the brain. That’s where you wear down your battery to the point that when you sit down to be creative, you think, okay, I got it all organised, so I’ll know where I’m picking up tomorrow, because now I’m spent, I’m done.

Okay, so you mentioned, you’re really pushing me on this one, Kris. So, which is good. You mentioned AI and the changes AI make. So, yeah, and with tools that we’ve got today and processes, if you just think about it, is the historical, even an office environment where person a does task a, they complete their task, then it moves on to someone else and they complete a task. And the next person can’t start a task until that task is completed. It’s a bit of project management, and historically you have a project manager that managed that and sort of handed the task on with current software and systems and AI, as you say, there’s a whole lot of automation that can handle a lot of this. Does your approach handle that or how do you handle that? Because no one wants to do something that they don’t have to do.

Oh, 100%. Hello, I live in the modern world. I’m awake. Yeah, definitely there’s automation. But no matter how spectacular automation is, somebody has to be supervising that automation. Right. You have to make sure that that automation did happen and you have to make sure, do we have the most updated automation and does this automation connect to the other new automation? That’s the whole nightmare of tech. Is this thing plugging into the next. So yeah, in the super toolkits, you know, then you’re going to have this. The last thing of this department will be to flag and pop in their project management. Okay. You pick up here and so it just goes through the super toolkit to the next thing. So that again, also it’s not going ping ponging back and forth to the manager. Oh, great, you did that. Let me check on it. Okay, now I’ll give it to Steve. Okay, Steve, you did your part. Then the manager, the supervisor, the owner is the bottleneck. So yes, this leans into automation because not only when you as the business owner have more and more ambitions, you know, maybe you are a leader in your community, you’re know your niche market, and now you’re starting to do speaking gigs. Well, that takes time on your calendar. Now you’re having to have your assistant book those speaking gigs. Well, that takes time on her calendar. Okay, great. Well, she needs to have those super
Not just for efficiency, but as you move on to bigger and bigger ambitions, even when you go to sell the company, that’s going to take a whole lot of time out of your weekly calendar. So then these super toolkits we have to look at and say, okay, great, how can we make this effective so we get time back? Because you always have a bigger ambition that needs more time in your calendar. One exciting adventure just leads you to the next one.

Yeah. So I’m thinking about the business owners that are sitting back and they’re going, this is the way things are done around here, and yet they want to be able to state that or make that statement really confidently and be assured that when they say, this is the way things are done around here, that they are actually done that way. How does a system account for that? What’s the mechanism to make that work for the owners?

Well, that’s the beauty of it. In the project management, whichever you’re using, you’re using the super toolkits. You don’t even have to ask someone, you just look at the super toolkit for that activity and it’s like, oh, it’s done. It was done on this date and this person was flagged. It takes no investigation or asking Steve if Sarah did it. Running around, all that chaos, no bottlenecking, it’s as plain as day, it’s beautiful, it’s up to date, it’s efficient. Because the other problem with Sops, as I said to you before, so many times you think, I’ll sit down and whip them up, I don’t know about you, Darryl, but if you’ve ever had the horror of teaching somebody how to drive recently I was teaching my niece how to drive.

And you, sometimes when you haven’t done it in a while, you’re like, oh, right, I forgot to tell her this because you’re just doing all these things on automation, right? Oh, turn that on, check this. Whatever. And so, until you have these super toolkits you’re making, as you’re creating them, as you’re doing the real work, live time, you’re definitely missing steps, you’re giving misinformation. It’s not something you do all the time.

So you’re having to relearn the job. So these super toolkits, they just allow everyone to be using them efficiently, effectively, making sure you’re not wasting time being the ball neck, fixing mistakes, which are incredibly expensive, and that at any point, if anyone has interest in your business, then you can sell it. And now you’re not running around like a crazy person trying to convert a team and a culture in your business and get everybody on board, because you’re now ready to sell. That’s not the time to ask for a buy in from the team. You want to have all these things humming and working, and so then you don’t have to sort of. It’s almost like when your kids are acting really bad and company comes over and you’re just hoping they last behave really good for an hour. If somebody’s looking to buy your company, you’re not. You don’t want to be sweating it out and trying to hide all the flaws and the, you know, the infighting in the business by your team, your team will make you look good or bad. You know, your employees are going to really tell any potential buyer a lot about your business and how those employees run their work. If those employees are invested in you and they’ve just all got this culture of, oh, it’s like a family, or, we’ve been together 20 years. Well, guess what? When Darryl leaves, they leave. But if these employees say yes, we follow the super toolkits. We do this, we do this, we do that, then it doesn’t matter. Again, it just looks so healthy and vibrant. It’s not vulnerable to the captain of the ship.

Totally. So we’ve got these super toolkits. We’ve got some sort of reporting system, by the sounds of it, that has a dashboard that shows the state of progress as things moving through the systems as the business grows. It sounds like we’re making a whole lot of good use of digital technology to make our lives streamlined and more and easier. The only question I’ve got now, Kris, is how do you know when you’ve got enough? Are there layers to this documentation? Do we start with, I don’t know, an organizational chart and then job descriptions and then processes on how to do each of the tasks, or super toolkits on how to do each of the tasks in my job description, how does it all fit together? Or is it just a amorphous, natural, growing, living, breathing thing?

So, again, you’re coming at it where most people would from an academic perspective. So what I would say when I’m working. So what I would say is, when I’m working with companies, I just start where they are. Right? So it’s like, well, what does your work like work week look like this week, Darryl?

And you’d say, oh, my gosh, I’m doing this big speaking gig. Here’s what’s happening. And I’m like, okay, so let’s start the super toolkit for that. I just start where you are, and we train you to do that. Then next week, we’ll be where you are there as well.

So once you get those going later, we can dig deeper and say, hey, where does this all begin and end? But for us, like, we’ve got this leadership program that when we, for some organisations, we find hire and on board vas, for other ones, they have existing teams, and we put them through our leadership program so that, again, we get away from the corporate choking, bottleneck stuff. We want them to be leaders, know how to communicate because it’s not about you being a leader, it’s about you being surrounded by leaders. So often we’ll work with organisations and they ask us to come in and they’ve got, you know, a team of ten or 20. So, you know, right now we’re making some adjustments to the leadership program we’re amping up.

So I’m like, hey, I have this idea for the leadership program. So I’m meeting with my team. First thing we do is we look, okay, we need a new super toolkit for this because it’s a new thing that’s going to happen. But we know the moment we have an idea that we start the super toolkit, then we’re building on our success. So next week we’ve got this idea that we’ve got four steps in the super toolkit, and now we’re like, okay, what if we do this?

And now we’ve got six steps because we’re just starting always from our last place of success. But this is where you ask such a powerful question, this is where everybody gets so overwhelmed and they think, well, we need a month to do this. No, what we’re going to do is we’re going to work with you. We’re going to come in and we’re going to get you time back this week building out a very simple super toolkit on something you’re currently working on. You’re going to get excited and see how all that works. And I didn’t have to remember it doesn’t use brain power. I didn’t make mistakes. I didn’t drop a ball. I didn’t forget where I left off when the phone rang. And then when we have that success, great.

We move to the next thing you’re working on. It’s months later where you start going, okay, what about the stuff that we don’t do very often? Or I get other people working on it, but don’t overthink it. We start where you’re at. And this is one of the differences.

Well, because otherwise corporations start. Let’s go back from the letter a and start building sops and half of them you don’t need today. So why are we working on it today? Let’s get success right now, today on your calendar.

Okay. So it’s all about really getting that low hanging fruit and getting the quick wins, isn’t it, by the sounds of it, where they are today, work with them where they are today, get some quick wins, demonstrate the value in the super toolkits so that they’re keen to go well, okay. They’ll start finding ideas once they get some experience and confidence in creating these toolkits.

And more than finding the value, because it’s not about me, it’s about them getting time back and not making mistakes. I often give this quick example, and I think it’s powerful, no matter how big your organisation is or how small. Think of it like this, Darryl, if you. I was going to a store right now, give me three things you’d ask me to get at the store, at the grocery store, three things.

Oh, okay. Milk, eggs and flour.

Okay. So I go to the grocery store, I get milk, eggs and flour. So I drive there, I go get the milk, eggs and flour. I line up, I do the cashier thing, I put the stuff in the bag. You know, I’m drive back, and all of a sudden, you know, I’m all good. And 20,30 minutes in, I realised, hey, I don’t know if I have the eggs. And then it takes me a little while to figure out I don’t have the eggs. And all of a sudden I realise I don’t have the eggs. I don’t know where the eggs went. And then I realized, you know what? This is a non negotiable. I needed those eggs. That was what I went to the store for. Okay, great. Now I got to go back to the store, get in the car, go to the store, spend time and money and gas and line up cashier and then come back. So I doubled the work and I doubled the cost because I made one little mistake. And that’s the problem with all these sops and that, the mindset of blaming your team and you don’t have any infrastructure that protects them and they don’t feel safe.

It was with these super toolkits, these little mistakes you make. You have no idea how much money that’s costing you. But I just showed you a very simple example of going to the grocery store. You forget one thing, it doubles your time, doubles your cost. And so these super toolkits are about mental freedom, about consistency, about scaling, about making an exit strategy that you don’t have a big clump of work to do at the end.

And it’s about making more money and working less hours throughout this process the entire time. Why make your business so healthy at the end for somebody else just to sell it to them? Why wouldn’t you have enjoyed that all along?

That’s the right question. So, Kris, I think we win the hour and winning the day by working on anything that we’re going to do more than once. We’ll create a super toolkit that’ll save us time. It’ll save us a bit of stress because of the mental stress and outgoing. Have I remembered everything? Have I remembered everything? Have I remembered everything? It’ll save us on rework because when we document it and have it, we haven’t mentioned checklist, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of checklists involved.

No, no, they’re more super toolkits and checklists. And also, let me just say, let me just. This is super important, Darryl. Businesses, nothing worse for your business than a to do list. If you want to do something with a to do list, set it on fire.

So these super toolkits eliminate to do lists as well.

Okay. So we’re documenting it where we’re eliminating stress because we’re not having to panic and remember everything because the toolkit takes us there. We’re doing less rework because we’re, we’re doing it the same way every time. And we’ve got a whole lot of time back. 

Every time we find something that we’re going to do again, more than once, we’ll get into the habit and we’ll learn how to document it again and again and again. And we’re doing it now so that the business is always efficient. And if it’s efficient, it means we’re making more money, we’re more profitable. The business valuation goes up, we’re removing dependence on, well, you had said something earlier. What is it businesses and I done on memory, so we don’t have to remember stuff all the time.

So it’s documented. So that means the owner can extract themselves out of the business because they don’t have to be there to remember everything. What else have I missed? Or does that kind of capture the essence here?

You did an excellent job of capturing. But I will add one more thing, which is really super important, is one that also when things change in the business. I’ve worked with corporations where whatever, this person has left the job or got promoted, and then the super toolkits, within a week, somebody can be up to 80% capacity of the new job because everything is laid out. It’s not all this stuff in the job that evolved over the period of time that that person held the position like, oh, darn, we’re gonna have to promote Charlie. He’s so great. But he said that job for five years, we’re gonna really take a hit removing him from that.

So that’s the beauty of it as well, is you are not held hostage if somebody leaves or if you promote them and they’re not relearning the job. I was sitting with my cousin. She’s got this high end, really important sort of forensic accounting job thing. It’s a really very educated position. And it was on the weekend, she had to do some extra hours and she said, oh, I have to do this once a month.

And I swear I have to relearn it every month. But it’s a really important thing. But she forgets every month. So it takes time to get back to where you were and to your point as well, Darryl, the human brain, even if you do something every day, if you say, well, you don’t understand, Steve’s had this job for 100 years. He does this every day.

It’s the only thing he does the human brain can remember. If you gave it seven things to remember, even if you did it every single day, you will not remember all seven things. And often you only remember four. And you will rotate which ones you forget. And again, you’re using up decision fatigue.

Don’t you want your team to be able to just clearly go into the real work and not waste time and not burn them out remembering stuff? So it just really empowers your team, frees you up, you make more money, get more holiday time, and you’re always ready to sell.

That’s a nice way of pulling it all together for us there, Kris. Look, I’m thinking I’ve gone through it all. I really understand what you’re doing. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you were thinking I might ask you on today’s conversation?

I just think what we don’t spend the message, we don’t share the message enough. And I’m very passionate about this, that your business should support your life, not consume it. And I know for so many business owners, you always think, well, once I get past this next thing, things will be different, right?

Ding, ding, ding. That’s an alarm bell. And then when you are in period of growth, you know, what got you here will not get you there. So when you had 50 employees, you’re like, okay, you know, I’m sure you were so like, oh, when I have a bigger team and when I have a bigger office, and because you think somehow that these extra resources are going to get you your life back, but they’re just more responsibilities and more things zapping your time. So it’s the same thieves, time and money, whether you’ve got a team of 5,50 or 500.

And so when you think you get to that next mountain. Oh, I just have to get more people, and then I can finally stop working these crazy hours, or we can be making more money. It’s the infrastructure that is killing you. It is not the lack of resources. Adding more people to chaos does not create calm.

True. Nice summary. So, Kris, pulling it all together out of all those top tips that you’ve shared with the business owners today, listening to the podcast, or everyone listening, they’re all thinking, how do I. Okay, so you’ve shared a whole lot of how to guides. We’ll put some contact links into how they can contact you in the podcast.

What’s the one key message that you want, or the highlighted message that you want people to walk away from today’s conversation?

Your business should support your life, not consume it.

Beautiful. Nice way to end it. Kris Ward, winning the hour and winning every day. Thanks for sharing your exit insights with us today.

Oh, thank you for trusting me with your audience.  appreciate it.