How To Successfully Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Your Company

Last Updated on April 14, 2021 by Owen McGab Enaohwo

Goals are called goals because they’re aspirations one works toward. People have personal goals, and so should businesses. To effectively achieve a business goal, it’s best to have set paths that will lead you there.

That’s why on today’s episode of the Process Breakdown Podcast, host John Corcoran helps you go over some of those paths to achieve your business goals. He has on guest speaker Shane Pounder, vice president of operations marketing at Flipp.

They talk about how the Flipp app is run, how the team handles different circulars and supply chain realities, and how it’s building a culture of continuous improvement.

He tells stories of companies he’s worked with, and he also explains ways to train members of the company to work autonomously, make decisions on their own, help the business as a whole, and achieve its set goals.

Listen to this interview

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Show Notes

0:06 – Introduction

0:26 – Host John Corcoran introduces himself.

0:41 – Mr. Corcoran names some of the past guests that have been on the podcast, like David Allen and Michael Gerber.

0:45 – Mr. Corcoran introduces the guest on today’s show and their topic for the day.

1:01- Mr. Corcoran shares the best solution that makes documenting standard operating procedures drop-dead easy, highlighting a 14-day free trial. No credit card required.

2:00 – Mr. Pounder talks about what Flipp does, the company’s goals, and Shane Pounder’s background.

3:45 – Mr. Corcoran emphasizes how Flipp is not just a simple app, and the mode of operations at the company.

4:06 – Mr. Pounder gives an overview of how operations look in the company. He quickly explains the elements involved in making the app run the way it does.

5:34 – Mr. Corcoran asks the guest how he builds the culture of continuous improvement in his “relatively younger” team in his company.

5:56 – The guest explains the tools and opportunities he gives the team so they can have agency over the accounts they work on, and how they can engage to make processes better.

7:15 – The guest speaker talks about quality control checks he had to implement during the starting of his company, the steps they took to improve, and how they removed steps that no longer had value.

9:42 – Mr. Pounder explains how he gives his team the ability to understand risks and make decisions on their own.

11:17 – The guest talks about his previous roles in the company, and his role now.

12:57 – Mr. Pounder gives advice to companies that want to build a culture of continuous improvement.

14:09 – The guest tells how the pandemic has affected him and his business, and how they’ve improved.

15:16 – The guest speaker gives information on where Flipp can be downloaded from and accessed on the internet.

15:56 – Outro

Guest Profile

Shane Pounder is the vice president of operations and marketing at Flipp, a free shopping app and website that brings circular ads, coupons, and deals right to your phone. He has more than seven years of experience as an operations specialist and has gained experience by working in different positions in different businesses.

Transcript of the interview

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: Hey everyone, John Corcoran here. I am the co-host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything that they need to be successful at their job. Some of our past guests include David Allen of Getting Things Done and Michael Gerber of the E-Myth and many more. And today’s guest, we have Shane Pounder, he’s the Vice President of Operations and Marketing at Flipp. And he’s going to be talking in a moment about how to build a culture of continuous improvement. So stick around, and I know that you’re going to enjoy that topic.

John Corcoran: But first, before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. Have you ever had team members ask you the same question over and over again? It’s the 10th time you’ve spent explaining it. And there is a better way, there’s a better solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responder government agencies use them in life and death situations to run their operations. You can use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time so you can focus on growing your team and empowering them to do their best work. Sign up for a free 14 day trial, no credit card required. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy, S-W-E-E-T, process dot com.

John Corcoran: All right, Shane. So excited to talk to you. Thanks for taking a little bit of time out of your day to talk to us here today. First of all, tell us a little bit about your background, what the company does, what Flipp does. And then I want to know a little bit about your background and how you got into doing operations.

Shane Pounder: Certainly. So first off, Flipp, and that’s Flipp with two Ps, Flipp is where I work. And it’s a free shopping app and website that brings circular ads, coupons, and deals right to your phone so you can plan your weekly shopping trip and save time and money each week. Our goal is to help shoppers provide for their families by making life more affordable. And so we’re looking to reinvent the way people shop and basically change the world of retail. And so that’s where I get to work, and having a lot of fun there at Flipp.

Shane Pounder: So in terms of my background, I am an engineer by education. So I graduated from a university here in Canada called Waterloo in systems and engineering. During that program, I got to do some co-op work, and had some good process jobs working in healthcare. After a little bit of working in healthcare, I then moved and went and did my MBA at the University of Toronto. And basically, the goal of that was to take some of my other learnings from engineering, add a business vocabulary, and move there.

Shane Pounder: I was lucky. Got into a good strategy consulting job afterwards, learned a ton in a very short amount of time before moving on to a food manufacturer called Maple Leaf Foods here in Canada. And in that role, I got a lot more access to really good, deep operations knowledge. I went in in a Six Sigma capacity as a black belt, so got six weeks of training, all the different tools, all the different analytics, in order to really help me understand how to work in an operations space, which was invaluable. And it’s still very much part of the vocabulary that I use today in my operations world.

John Corcoran: And I could see how that would be helpful in the work that you do at Flipp, because I want to emphasize that this is not just a simple app, like three people in a room does a little bit of coding and you’re done kind of thing. You have got a lot of different moving pieces, you’ve got different publications, you’ve got different lead time, different teams. So start by giving us an overview and an understanding of what operations looks like for your company.

Shane Pounder: Absolutely. So if you go onto the app, what you will see is a lot of circulars, publications, the weekly circulars that a lot of the merchants put out. We work directly with a lot of those merchants. And we bring in PDF files and we make it interactive so that you can use it on the app the way that you see. And as you said, that’s not a simple process. There’s a lot of moving pieces in behind that, a lot of different elements.

Shane Pounder: It’s interesting that you raised lead time. That’s one of the variables that we deal with. Some of our merchant partners will have their stuff ready six weeks in advance, some will have it five weeks in advance. And so what the operations team does is we bring in those assets, we understand how they need to be distributed. Because the circular for a merchant, it’s going to be different in New York City versus Dallas, because there’s going to be different pricing, different supply chain realities. And so what we need to do is bring in all the different pages, we need to attach them to the correct version, and then we need to maneuver it through a whole set of steps to literally draw boxes around the pictures on the circular, type out all of the text, and then make sure all of that is done correctly on each individual page, each individual item. And then it’s distributed to the right place so that wherever you’re sitting, you’re only seeing the circulars that are important for you. And so that’s what my team does.

John Corcoran: Wow. That’s a lot of complexity. And add to it the fact that, as we were discussing beforehand, before this interview, you’ve got a relatively younger team. And you say that of equal importance to operations is building this culture of continuous improvement. So how do you do that, especially for a more green team, a younger team, how do you instill that in them?

Shane Pounder: Absolutely. We bring it back to the goal of this with this team. As you said, it’s a young team, it’s an ambitious team, and it’s a really great team. And we want to make sure that the work that they get to do is interesting and empowering and value add for them as well. And so one of the things, one of our goals, was how do we give them some different tools, how do we give them some different opportunities to learn and develop? And so that’s where this whole culture of continuous improvement came out of, which was what are the different things we can teach them so that they can have agency over their individual accounts that they work on? They can find the little process improvements, they can work on systemic process improvements, and they can raise their hand whenever they see something that could be done better. And that was ultimately the goal, is how do we give them that chance to really engage and be part of how we improve and how we make our systems and processes better?

John Corcoran: That’s really next level stuff when it comes to systems operations, is giving them that ownership, if you will, to improve the process themselves. But I also want to ask you about, because you write that the systems and processes were pretty volatile early in your tenure, and you had to implement additional quality control checks. Any stories you care to share that you can share that led to those quality control checks? Because usually people have something.

Shane Pounder: What I would say is, is when I started back five years ago here, the base system, so our proprietary system that we do all of the work, we set up the distribution so that everything goes to the right place, there were a lot of different elements to it. And so things would break. Sometimes we would overload the system. There was one retailer that we worked with that had over 200 different versions. And so when that would come in, just the power required to manage all of that would slow down the system, such that the team would have to put onto our internal messaging, hey guys, heads up, this retailer’s coming through. Things are going to slow down a little bit. But fortunately, through some improvements, we worked with our development team and we were really able to scale and improve that over 2015 and 2016 to improve it. But there was definitely some things in there.

Shane Pounder: And then even before that, there’s stories around having to build in a dictionary to make sure that words don’t accidentally get through that shouldn’t get through through the way you were tagging it. And so there’s little things like that where you learn about little mistakes. And so we would build in generally a bit of a manual quality control check so that we could manage to that. And then when we figured out that we didn’t need it anymore because we built the systems in a better way or we fixed the process, then we would analyze it. Say, okay, this isn’t adding value anymore, and we’d remove it.

Shane Pounder: We had a couple great ones where our continuous improvement team actually went in and did the analysis for us unasked. They said, do we need to do this? And so they raised it, they dug in, they were empowered to do it, and came back and said, here’s my recommendation. Let’s stop these two steps. And we were able to save money in terms of our processing, save time in terms of how long it takes to get it done, and not put the quality at risk at all.

John Corcoran: That seems like such a challenging one, because it’s so easy to add quality control steps or so easy to add complexity, but removing it, so often an organization or company doesn’t have a process in place to remove them, to lift them. And then there’s also the question of is that the right decision? Even if it’s an outlying quality control step that’s in place to prevent an outlying type of situation from happening, how do you know that it’s okay now to remove it? How do you give your team that ownership and that authority to make that decision?

Shane Pounder: So the way we did it, so we had this one quality control step, I’ll call it a preview step. It was a preview quality control step. And we did the analysis over a long period of time, up until the time we wanted to turn it off. And we determined certain types of projects, certain types of publications that were low risk. And so we took a chance. We did that and we moderated it. So it was a walk before we run type thing. But what we did is we worked with the people who managed each of the individual accounts, and we basically helped them understand what is the risk on your specific account. And we let them, to a degree, make the call.

Shane Pounder: And so if they believed that for merchant A, they are big, we work really well, and they’ve got a couple of out of spec processes, I don’t believe this one is a safe one for us to do that. We set it up so that we didn’t turn it off for everybody. And so that was a way that we gave the individual operators the opportunity to help guide the decision-making on that and understand the risk themselves.

Shane Pounder: We also made it so that we could bring it back if we had to, and so there was a little bit of puts and takes at the start. We would do a little bit of extra manual checks just to be clean at the start. But ultimately, it rolled out really well. The team did a great job figuring it out.

John Corcoran: It sounds like you have put systems in place. So what role do you play when you have a team that is working? So what does your day to day look like?

Shane Pounder: My day to day?

John Corcoran: Yeah. Does it get to the point where you work yourself out of a job?

Shane Pounder: I like to think I’ve done that at least once in this place already.

John Corcoran: That’s a great thing. That’s a victory, right?

Shane Pounder: I think my role, and I think it has varied in five years, at the start, I was the first person with a real operations background in the organization. And so my role was education capacity planning because that was a big issue when I first started. And starting to build out the culture of the ops team, such that we were able to give people a little bit more agency, that opportunity to make calls and whatnot. And then over time, I took on a bit more of an education role. So I would explain to the managers, here’s some different pieces of ops theory, here is how we can look at it. I brought on a continuous improvement team, and so we brought people on and that was their job, to help coach people as they’re trying to understand things, but also do other projects. And so that was my role at the start.

Shane Pounder: And then over time, the managers, they got really, really good at this, at managing the team and dealing with that. And so I stepped out of the way on a lot of the day to day. And so I’m not as involved on the day to day work right now because my now directors and the managers and the leads, they’re fantastic. And so they’ve been able to take it up, and then I’m there for escalation, additional education opportunities, that kind of thing, and to help where I can. But it’s a lot more probably people management and strategy at this point for me.

John Corcoran: That’s really interesting. Anything else? We’re running a little short on time, but anything else that we should talk about for companies that are listening to this who are thinking about, well, I want to build a culture of continuous improvement within my company? What else should they be thinking about?

Shane Pounder: I think if I went back to our start, I think it’s what is your goal here? What are you trying to get out of this? And for us, it’s around empowerment, it’s around helping talented people get better, and giving them opportunities. And then once you’ve got that, land on the different pieces under that. Make sure you’ve given them the tools so they know how to do it. Make sure you’ve given them some autonomy so that they can make decisions, celebrate wins, measure, measure, measure. And then probably most of all, listen. When they raise their hand and say, “Here’s a problem, stop the line, blah blah blah” you need to listen in order to really do that. But ultimately for me, building this culture is around empowerment and giving people that opportunity to make decisions and to drive the process themselves.

John Corcoran: And finally, we’re recording this in the beginning of December, 2020. We’re eight or nine months into this global pandemic from the coronavirus. How has this pandemic affected the way that you approach this? And have there been ways in which it has surprised you or thrown the team for a loop, or new things that you’ve had to think about in terms of how to continually improve?

Shane Pounder: So we’ve been home since March, so we are working from home pretty much completely right now. And so the biggest thing has been not to lose sight of the prize here in what our goals are, and continuously to remind that. Continue your KPI updates, continue talking about the wins and everything, because it has been pretty up and down here. We work with merchants, and the merchant world has had a lot of change that they’ve had to deal with. And so we’ve had to be flexible, take this publication down, add this new one. Something’s different, oh my gosh, I’ve run out of paper towels kind of thing. So be there, be in the moment, deal with those things, but don’t take your eye off the prize. That ultimately, we’re trying to do things better and look for those improvements. And so for us, it’s been a lot more around how are our managers and directors engaging? How are we talking to people and continuing to push the ball forward?

John Corcoran: That’s great. Shane, tell us where people can go to learn more about Flipp and learn more about what you guys do, and where they can download the app.

Shane Pounder: Absolutely. So you can download Flipp off of the Apple store, the iOS Apple store, or Android. You can find it on there. You can find us online at flipp.com. And it’s a great app. It’ll help pull all the different publications together in your area to help you with all of your planning needs. So that’s flipp.com, Flipp with two Ps, because some people go to the wrong place, and find it on the store and check it out. It’s actually super helpful. It helped me through some of my Black Friday shopping. I needed to find that Chromebook touchscreen, and it helped me find the best deal locally for me.

John Corcoran: Wow. Very cool. Okay, cool. We’ll definitely check it out. Shane, thanks so much.

Shane Pounder: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14 day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process, dot com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk-free 14 day trial.

Owen McGab Enaohwo: Hi, this is Owen, the CEO and co-founder at SweetProcess. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast interview, actually, you know what I want you to do? Go ahead and leave us a five star review on iTunes. That way, we get more people aware of the good stuff that you get here on this podcast. Again, go on to iTunes and leave us a five star review. Looking forward to reading your review. Have a good day.

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