Why Knowing Your Employees better than You know Your Customers Will Help to Create a Company That runs Successfully without you! – with Jay Goldman

OWEN: My guest today is Jay Goldman, and he is the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Klick Health. Jay, welcome to the show.JAY: Thanks Owen, thanks for having me.OWEN: Okay, so let’s get started. This whole interview is about trying to learn how your business has been able to get to the point where this was systematized, and for the most part it can run without you, one of the execs, and also the CEO, and all that. But I want to go back and learn about how we got to this point. So talk about first of all, what exactly does your company do and what big pain do you solve for your customers?

JAY: Sure. We are a digital marketing agency. We’re actually the largest independent digital agency that focuses on health. We work primarily with biotech companies to help them bring their products to market. And we start the early of stages of clinical trials before drug is approved by the FDA. We help them recruit patients for those clinical trials and we work with them all the way through the life of that drug to the loss of exclusivity at the end of its path.

OWEN: Awesome. And so, my audience always want to know the scale of the business. And so how many full-time employees you guys currently have?

JAY: We’re just about to cross the 400 employee mark so we’re actually a fairly large business these days. We’re larger end of the medium-size business I guess you can say.

OWEN: Yeah. And also I think during the pre-interview you guys said that you expect to fill-up a hundred new roles in 2014 too as well. So you guys are growing and expanding, that’s great. And then we got to last year’s revenue and also expected revenue this year.

JAY: About 100 million.

OWEN: Wow, you guys are doing a big– Okay, so, we only take the journey and to get to where you guys are right now. So what will you say back then was  the lowest point in the business and describe how bad it got. And I think before we even talk about it, maybe give the listener kind of some background as to your role in the company so that they can understand the perspective that you are using to ask your questions.

JAY: Sure. So Senior Vice President of Innovation is actually the last title that I had. I’m now the Managing Director. And we have a very experimental culture here at Klick and that’s a very intentional thing. So we try to look at everything that our business does. As an experiment we learn from the ones that are successful, we also learn from the ones that fail. And the ones that succeed turn into new parts of our business, or different ways of organizing ourselves or different cultures. And the ones that fail die often, we don’t continue down that path. So, as a result of that we’re a business that changes considerably. I’ve been with Klick for about 3 and a half years now in a variety of different roles. But Klick as a company has actually just celebrated its 17th birthday. So we’re actually fairly old by start-up standards definitely. But we still view ourselves very much culturally as a start-up and we still have plenty of growth ahead of us. We’re nowhere near sort of tapping up that growth cycle. So Klick as a company, when it started much like all small businesses was a handful of people in one room. And it started to grow a little bit and started to pick up steam. And we’ve been fairly consistent over the 17 year history at growing anywhere between about 30% and 60% a year. So the growth curve has been fairly consistent and fairly steep for the whole history of the company. But there was a point probably about 11 years ago when the company got a little bit bigger than the ability to orchestrate all the people who were working there by just pointing at them as they were all sitting in one room. And I suspect that listeners of the podcast series and certainly readers of the blog, and users of SweetProcess are probably either at that point themselves or maybe a little bit past their point. They’re starting to realize that the old ways of orchestrating their teams and getting them to do things are no longer working for then, and they’re looking for new solutions and tools to do them. So when we got to that point our now Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of the company, Aaron said, “The program is that we’re orchestrating people through email. And email might be the single worst technology ever invented for trying to orchestrate a group of people to accomplish anything.

OWEN: Why?

JAY: Well, there’s a whole bunch of reasons and anybody who’s used email knows all of these at least at an intuitive level. They may not have thought about those specifically. But if you think about the exchange of emails between a group of people trying to get something done, you have a whole bunch of problems that pop-up. The first is that people CC people into the conversation after the conversations already start. So they don’t get the first few emails in the chain, and then somebody says, “You know Jane should really be part of this conversation, I’m CC’ing her here.” Now Jane may have the context in the body of that email or she may not. And then if somebody replies to the message before that one Jane’s not included on that. So you have this sort of branching conversation, but along the different branches there’s different people involved. So, inherently, that part sucks. Then you also have the problem of content getting lost over time. So the conversation happens in the emails, somebody may attach a file to one of those emails. It only exists in that email thread now. The person who had the file may no longer work at the company after awhile, maybe they leave, they take the file with them, it was on their laptop, nobody can find it anymore. So there’s no archive of that conversation beyond what people continue to have in their email inboxes.

OWEN: Yeah. One other thing too that you guys mentioned during the pre-interview is that how email itself, because of the scale where you guys are at, it became more of a destructive technology. And now you’re letting other people prioritize your day for you. Talk about that too.

JAY: Yeah. I would say there are disruptive technologies that are good disruptive technologies and various ones that are just disruptions. And email is more on the disruption camp. When we think of it as letting other people prioritize your day, what we essentially mean by that is email for most people gets treated as a to-do list, and the most urgent to-do items are the ones that are at the top of your inbox. What your really saying is that reverse chronological sorting is the most effective way of sorting my list which is absolutely not true. Not every email is creative equal, the ones that are at the top just happen to be [Unintelligible 00:06:01] doesn’t mean that they’re the most important. But we also think of it in a way as externalized cost. So if you know anything about this sort of externalized cost measure, when you look at something like manufacturing, you could say that you externalize cost by making people higher up the supply chain, pay for things, so that by the time they get to you they’re lower cost. And that applies just as much to email. If I CC somebody into an email threat maybe I’m just sort of covering my ass and I want to make sure that I cover the right people are CC’ed on this, it cost me absolutely nothing to CC that person. But it externalizes a cost to that person because they can either now ignore the email, or take on the burden in reading the entire chain and making sure that they’re up-to-date on it. Because we get CC’ed on so many things that are relevant to us, we stop paying attention to them. So the medium has lost its effectiveness in that communication mechanism because we’re so blind to it, because we receive so much of it. So even that part where you’re sort of covering yourself may not actually be affected because the person you CC’ed may never even read it or may just delete it without actually looking at it.

OWEN: Yeah. And I get the scale and the amount of people who are working for you guys and how email can now become a problem. So let’s talk about how you guys now solve that and how do you solve that problem.

JAY: Sure. So when we looked at this about a decade ago, or a little longer than a decade ago, there weren’t really a lot of tools in the market that solve that. There weren’t things like SweetProcess, you were sort of left to your own devices to figure out what to do. And so when Aaron looked at this he said, “There are actually better ways already out there or doing this sort of thing.” And the one that we took inspiration from and in fact the very earliest version of what we now call Genome was essentially just a ticket tracking system. If you think about what happens when you call a customer service rep, or your email support line, and you get back an automated ticket response. And that ticket persists through your issue until somebody closes it. We took that as a model and said, okay, if I need to get somebody to do something let’s say I need to get Owen to do a particular task, instead of sending him an email and asking him to do it, I’m going to open a ticket to Owen and it’s going to have the description of what I need him to do in it and then he’s going to do whatever it is. He may send that back to me or he may close the ticket once it’s finished. But we can track the progress of that task as it gets done through this ticket. And there’s a couple of things about that that are really critical. The first is a ticket can only be owned by one person at a time. So although Owen may need additional people to help him get this task done, he either has the choice of re-assigning a ticket to them or just asking them to help him out with it. But there is always at any point in time a clear owner of that task which is not true at all in an email thread. The most effective way to get nothing done is to send an email to a whole bunch of people and ask them to do something because everybody will assume that somebody else is going to do it and then nothing will actually get accomplished. So because tickets are owned by a single person at a time, there’s a clear ownership of the task at any point along its completion.

OWEN: Yes. So I get how what you guys end up doing was making use of what you now call the Genome, I guess that’s your own custom built software. But I’m also trying to put myself in the perspective of the listener who now see the problem was how email was a problem dive back to the very first thing you guys did ensures how you ended up coming up with the solution. You understand, like backtrack it all.

JAY: Sure.

OWEN: Yeah, retrace your steps.

JAY: So the original insight was by moving to tickets instead of email, we solve all the problems that we didn’t like about email. So there’s now a clear owner, the conversations that used to happen through those CC threads happen in the body of the ticket instead so they’re archived. We can always go back to that ticket and look at it 6 months from now and remember what everybody said and why they said it. Any files that need to get attached to that ticket to complete the task, get attached to the ticket in our archive there instead of being attached to some email along the way. So it really checked off all the boxes in terms of what we were trying to solve as an initial pass. And what we started to see once the tickets existed was really interesting patterns in the data about the tickets. So it’s turned out over time that the more valuable piece of this is not necessarily the tickets themselves although they’re extremely valuable. It’s actually what we know about what’s happening in the company because of the tickets. So as an example if we have that ticket that I assigned to you and let’s say you assigned it back to me and you ask me a question, and then I sent it back to you because I answered the question. And then you send it back to me and I send it back to you. We call that pattern ticket [Unintelligible 00:10:29]. And it happens when there’s an issue getting a task resolved. Now Genome isn’t smart enough to know what the issue is but it is smart enough to know that when you see that pattern of a ticket bouncing back and forth, there’s a good chance that it’s not going to get accomplished on its own. And so, it now flags that to the project manager and says, “You should take a look at this ticket,” You can’t tell them why and they may look at the ticket and say, “Oh, Owen and Jay are just collaborating back and forth, there’s no big deal here.” Or they may look at it and say, “Wow, the requirements for this task were not well-specified. And so they’re not able to progress because they don’t understand what’s being asked for them.” Or they may look at it and say, “Jay’s being really passive aggressive here and he obviously doesn’t want to do the task, so he’s just passing it back to Owen and not actually completing anything.” So, there’s all kinds of interesting information that comes out of that.

OWEN: Yeah.

JAY: So over time Genome has evolved considerably since that initial pass at doing the tickets. It started off just that piece, it’s not what we call our enterprise operating system.

OWEN: A quick question though, just so that I could clarify this up for the listener. This is actually you guys building your own custom platform that you guys use for your own company, right?

JAY: Yeah. So we started off about a decade ago, we’ve building on it ever since, we now have, thanks to our scale and our size, a full-time team of about 10 people who work on Genome.

OWEN: And so, let’s dive in and talk about the specific systems in the business that now enable you to run without your constant involvement and also the other execs having to always be involved as they were. I’m sure it primarily runs on Genome, right? But let’s dive in and talk about more specifics about it.

JAY: Yeah. So there’s a number of different things. Genome really covers everything we need to do as an agency. So there’s the tickets that we already talked about. All of our budgeting and forecasting happens in the tool. All of our accounting systems are integrated to it. It gets right down to the level of even mundane tasks like our expense reporting and our travel bookings, and everything goes through one place. It’s the thing that our people keep opening in their browser all day long, it’s really their primary point of contact and where they spend the most amount if their time. So it has become over time kind of our everything system and everything it clicked goes through. So, what it does for the executive team, and really managers throughout the organization and anybody at any role is a bunch of different things. One is because all of our data is in one place about everything that happens, we can use that to our advantage.

OWEN: How?

JAY: I’ll give you a couple of examples there, even some very basic things. When I go to put my expenses into Genome because our travel bookings go through the same system. And because their travel bookings are associated with the client. When I put in an expensive pick a date, Genome automatically assigns the expense to the right client for me without having to do anything else because all the systems are integrated ticket. So at that level we’re actually automating a fairly mundane task and we’re trying to give our people back as much time as possible from having to do administrative tasks so that they can focus on delighting our clients and on being in a flow state where they’re as productive as they can possibly be. That’s a very small example.

OWEN: And one of the things that you guys mentioned during the pre-interview is that now you guys also building this social feature into it that allows because of the size of the company that you guys are, it allows the employees to communicate socially and stuff like– talk about that too.

JAY: Sure, yeah. It’s called Chatter. It’s not the salesforce.com product, it just happens to share the same name. And Chatter is an internal tool that we built. It functions I guess, the closest equivalent would be like a Twitter feed. So anybody within the company can post to it. You can post to it directly through Genome or you can forward pictures from your phone so if you’re out of the field or you’re visiting a client, whatever it is, you can easily take a picture and send it to Chatter. When we established Chatter we introduced in very carefully by saying there are absolutely no rules about how you use this. You can post anything you’d like. We didn’t want to constrain what people were going to do, we wanted to see what they would use it for. And it has very quickly come to represent the internet within our company. And I say that because a vast majority of the post on Chatter are actually cat pictures and I think that’s probably pretty parallel to the internet itself. But people use it for everything. They post pictures of their kids, they post pictures of what they did on the weekend, they post funny video clips and internet memes. It has spawned a number of internet memes that happened within our company. They are very restricted to our 4 walls but they have developed organically because there were no rules around what to use Chatter for. So as an example, it supports hashtags much like the rest of the internet. And so there’s a twinsies hashtag. And the twinsies hashtag is whenever two people wear the same thing to work on any given day. Somebody will take a picture of them, they’ll post it on Chatter with Twinsies, and Chatter automatically makes the hashtags clickable so you can click on twinsies. And you can see a whole history of people that clicked that happen to be wearing the same thing.

OWEN: How does this now even affect the culture because I think that’s one of the things you guys mentioned during the pre-interview.

JAY: Right. So it has a really positive impact on the culture for a variety of reasons. One is that on the whole, it has a very high positive to negative ratio. So the number of post on Chatter that are overall positive in tone versus negative in tone, and we don’t do any kind of automated analysis on this. It’s really just more of a heuristic one. It skews heavily, heavily positive. And you think about it, it runs down the right side of every screen that you’re on, on Genome. So all day long while you’re working within the rest of the tool. You have this social– You can even close it if you want to focus on whatever you’re doing. But for the rest of the time you have this feed and it’s always giving you this positive vibe about what’s happening in the company. The second thing is we built a feature into Chatter which we call Kudos. And Kudos is a very simple, lightweight way for me to give thanks to anybody who works at Klick. So let’s say you and I are collaborating on a project and it goes particularly well and you did something that was really amazing, or the client gave us a big complement about the work that you had done. I get this post to Kudo right through the Chatter so they can view it from anywhere in Genome. I can pick the type of Kudo that I want to give you, they’re aligned to our core values as a company. I put in a little description, and it pops into everybody on the company’s Chatter feed. So everybody sees this Kudo appear by Owen, and they now know whether they’re really paying attention or whether they just sort of notice it as it’s [Unintelligible 00:16:50] that you’ve done something really great, or that a client gave us a compliment and we use it for new client launches, when we launch a website for them, something like that. And it creates this very positive vibe because everybody is seeing Kudos between their colleagues all day. It gives you something to talk about the next time you see that person. It gives you an awareness of the other people who work in the company. At our size you have lots of people in the company that you don’t work with directly but you’ll pass them in the hallway. You have nothing to talk to them about because you’ve never actually met each other except you just saw a Kudo go by about something great that they did. And so when you walk by them in the hallway you say, “Hey Jane, I saw that Kudo about you that was rally awesome. Congrats.” And now you have a thing that you can talk about and have some connection. So, on the whole it has a very, very positive impact on our culture.

OWEN: Yeah. The next question I want to ask now is the question that most of my listeners like. Imagine your business now like a conveyor belt. On one part, maybe someone in the health space that needs probably the services that you guys offer. And now on the other end they’ve been transformed into this raving customer of you guys telling the whole health industry about how great you guys are. But there’s a lot of different parts in the background on that conveyor belt that’s making that happen. Now let’s give the listeners some insight on what’s happening behind the scenes.

JAY: Sure. So we think about that a lot as orchestration. If you think about everything that needs to get done from when we first need a new client all the way to them being a raving advocate and telling everybody else about how awesome we are. There’s a lot of things that we have to get right in order for that to happen. And we actually spend a fair amount of time thinking about the customer experience of working with Klick. And one of the ways that we think about it is as a series of touch points where we work with our clients. And then we try to evaluate each one of those touch points on its own. Understand whether we’re exceeding expectation at that touch point or not. And so a touch point can be virtually anything. If you’re thinking about the very beginning of that conveyor belt as you said, that first contact that we have with a new client, it could be that we meet them– let’s say for example at an industry conference or a trade show and they happen to come by our booth and have a chat with us.

OWEN: Yeah.

JAY: So, the first touch point that they have actually happens before they come into the booth because typically at that sort of even we’re one of the lead sponsors. And so, they’ll encounter our branding and our messaging even before they come into the booth. So we treat that as the first touch point. And we have an internal expression that we use at Klick. It’s not really a marketing slogan that we use in the market, although we don’t necessarily hide from the market. But it’s really the way that we orient our people and it’s one of the most important statements that we have about our company. And it’s our entire purpose and our objective. And the statement is the relentless pursuit of awesome. So everything at Klick is oriented around the relentless pursuit of awesome. And it’s great because you can ask yourself a question after every single experience, was that awesome? And if it wasn’t awesome, then you can go back and figure out what you could’ve done to make it more awesome. And I say every experience because it’s something that we do when we’re talking about external experiences like you just asked about. But it’s also something that we do about internal experiences. If I just led a meeting with a number of my colleagues at the end of that meeting I can ask myself, was that meeting awesome? And if it wasn’t I can think about ways that I could make that meeting more awesome the next time that I have to lead it. So, when we look at those touch points for the customer, what we’re asking ourselves in every point along the way is was that as awesome as it possible could’ve been. And if it wasn’t what could we have done? Was the way that our branding was presented at the conference awesome? When they came into the booth did they have an awesome experience? When they talk to one of our people do they get the answers that they were looking for and get what they needed in order to drive that conversation forward? So, let’s assume that they dated, we get to the point where we’ve actually closed the deal with them and we’re going to start working with them.

OWEN: Yeah.

JAY: At that point we have a lot of process that we use to make sure that this is going to be a great experience or an awesome experience. One of the things that comes up quite often in our space, and maybe the same for some of your listeners and some of your plans and customers. We have to partner with another agency in order to deliver the solution that the client is looking for. So in our case, because we’re a digital agency, or predominantly digital agency that often comes up because we’re partnering with an agency of record who might be a traditional off-flight agency. And because we do that so often, and I’m sure that whether you’re partnering with another agency or you’re just partnering with somebody else, your listeners will be quite used to the idea of we have to work with another group to get this done. We’ve developed what we call an agency interaction model. And it’s something that we do at the very beginning in our relationship. And I think it’s a way of aligning yourselves so that future interactions and process goes more smoothly. So we actually adapted what’s called RACI model. If any of your listeners aren’t familiar, it’s sort of a classic management approach to how you organize a group of people. RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed. And so really what you do is you sort of list out all of the tasks, or areas, or responsibility when we’re working with another agency. And then we see who’s responsible for this, who’s accountable for it, who gets consulted and who just gets informed? And so, when you look at that as an agency interaction model you say, “Okay, here’s areas or responsibility and it’s relationship, and we’re going to be responsible for all of the digital parts.” And the other agencies are responsible maybe for the branding parts. Now responsible and accountable aren’t necessarily the same thing. We could responsible for it but somebody else is actually accountable for getting that task complete. So in some cases the agency of record might responsible for something but we’re actually accountable for getting the work done. But we’re going to consult with a third party and then we’re going to inform the client. And so that’s what that line might look like in that agency interaction model. And this just helps to get everybody going in the same direction. But it also really does is, and the reason that we actually do it is it negates future politics. Because at a later point when somebody says, well that’s not it. My role– or somebody is trying to take a piece of work from somebody else, whatever it is, it can point back to this model and say, well actually, if you go back to model on line 37 you’ll see that you were actually responsible for completing that–

OWEN: And it’s a framework that you guys use so that everybody knows who’s– okay, responsibility, accountability, let me try if I got it right. RACI, and C is, what is C?

JAY: Consulted.

OWEN: Consulted, and then I is informed. Okay, is it always the customer that’s always being the informed person?

JAY: Not necessarily. So, if we’re working on something and when we complete it we need to inform another group that it’s completed so that they can now do the next task in the sequence, they might be informed. Sometimes the customer might be the one that gets consulted because they need to give input into this. So unlimited task on here will be the responsibility of the customers. So they are the responsible party in there.

OWEN: Awesome. So we’ve talked about how they saw you guys maybe some advertisement or some event or whatever so that’s the touch point that first happens. You guys have a model which you make sure that the first engagement with them but you feel awesome. And you ask it’s up on your employees to ask themselves, did that person who had that first touch point the other day feel this was awesome. That gives them the ability to continue to find ways to make that happen. Now you get that person in, and because of the nature of the work you might have to work with other agencies. You now use this framework which is RACI, repeat what do they mean?

JAY: Sure. Responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.

OWEN: Okay. And now you use that framework to work with the other agencies that you work in to deliver the results to the customer. But I’m also wondering, besides this now, what else is part of the conveyor belt that we have not talked about?

JAY: So, in a sort of similar way to the way that SweetProcess works, we have a tool that’s part of Genome called Gene Sequencer. And what we do with Gene Sequencer is go back to all of the types of tasks that we do on a repeated basis for our clients. So I’ll use a simple example. We do a lot of banner ad creation for our clients and trafficking of those ads and purchasing the [Unintelligible 00:24:46]. So we have a project type in Gene Sequencer which is the creation of a banner campaign. We have a project type in Gene Sequencer which is the creation of a mobile app for smart phones. So any of the types of things that we do on a regular basis exists in it. And what we did when we created those particular Gene Sequences is really look at all of the steps on how to get done for that task to get completed. We did it for a RACI perspective internally so, which team at Klick is actually responsible, or accountable, or consulted, or informed. We put that together into what is essentially a very fancy checklist that allows our project managers to progress through the various stages of getting that task done. And it provides them with a whole bunch of guidance at each of those stages about the things that they need to look out for. So there’s a whole bunch of lookouts in there that are past experiences captured so that we’re not making the same mistakes over and over. And there’s an intelligence to these checklist. It’s something that we call it tech as a coach. So we actually recently wrote a book that at the end of February it sort of covers all of these things. So if your listeners are looking for more information the book is called The Decoded Company. It’s available really anywhere that books are sold. And we were very happy, honored to make the New York Times Bestseller list for March. So if any of your listeners want to sort of dig in to these ideas they can find it there, including Gene Sequencer. So what we actually do in there, this concept of tech as a coach is that most technology exist within companies as a referee. It’s there to enforce the business rules. But it’s not necessarily there to help you people actually get things done. Now, enforcing business arbitrarily doesn’t actually benefit the company. I suppose it does for maybe a risk management or responsibility perspective but it doesn’t help you people achieve a higher level of performance. Rather than a referee what you really want is a coach. He’s going to be in your people’s corner, whispering in their ear, helping them to achieve a higher level of performance. So we don’t look at this checklist as a way to manage risk or put constraints on the way that a project gets done. Rather we look at it as a coach that helps our teams to get things done better. And because Genome understands the work history of all of our people– If we have a project manager that goes to start a type of project for the first time. Let’s say that they’re going to do a banner campaign. And Genome looks at their work history and says, “Okay this is the first time that Sue has done a banner campaign.” We treat them as a teachable moment, what we call a teachable . And Genome will flag that and say, “Okay Sue, before you start this project, you’re at what we call a teachable moment. And so, here’s a little bit of just in time training which is going to teach you a little bit about what you need to know. It might come in the form of a video, or a presentation or something like that.” It’s going to pair Sue with somebody else at Klick. This is a buddy that has done this type of project before. So if she has any questions she knows exactly going to go to. And it’ll actually create that connection automatically so it’ll create that pairing. And then it’s going to give her, as she goes through Gene Sequencer, the fullest of watch-outs and everything. So she gets the most sort of guardrails around us to make sure that as she goes through this she does the job as effectively as she can the first time. But as she gets used to doing this and she runs more of those, we want to start taking those things away so that she’s getting more and more efficient at doing these with less constraints on her doing. Because most processes in most companies, especially larger companies. Although even at the small to medium size it starts to get in there. You have one size fits all processes. Every process is the same no matter who’s doing it or how much experience they have, it doesn’t adapt itself to the person, it just follows along kind of blindly what the company’s process is. That’s probably not an issue if you’re a 5 person company and you’re just sort of documenting these processes for the first time. But as you add more people to it, and as the people you already have get more experience with doing them, making them go through the same set of steps every time may not make sense. It just depends on the processes. So we’ve got these idea that the process involves along with the person and it does that automatically based on their work history and how many times they’ve gone through this.

OWEN: Awesome. And so this is the delivery part of the engine where the person is actually doing the work, and this is the first time they’re doing the task, your system lets them body up with other people who have done it before. And gives them procedures on how to do it. And that way they’re being coached, like how you said, technology has a coach. And now they get the work done, so they’re delivering the work. At this point now, where in this conveyor belt are we in because I want to close the loop for the listener because we want to get them all the way to the happy, raving customer part.

JAY: So, if this is our first engagement with a client, this whole Gene sequence takes us through the delivery phase. So we will have done some specifications and strategy work upfront that usually not included in the Gene sequence, it’ll be interaction with our strategy team, and maybe through client service team and that kind of stuff. Then we get into delivery, that’s kind of covered by the Gene sequence. And the end of that should really be delivery of the project. So the project should now be live. But everything that we do is highly data focused. So we always want to make sure that whenever we’re rolling up to the field has analytics on it that we’re measuring as much as we can, that we’re reporting back on that so that the client is always in the loop about what’s happening. And that we’re analyzing and optimizing for the campaigns. So for running a search engine marketing campaign. It’s never about putting it out there in the world and forgetting about it. It’s not that constant enter of optimization so that we’re always delivering on a promise that we made to the client and making the best possible use of their budget. So once the project has gone live we’re into that period where we’re doing the analytics, that we’re reporting and we’re doing optimizations. And so, that will happen as we’re going through the rest of that. And that’s part of what turns our clients into big believers in us, because they can see the exact results of what we’re delivering for them, they can see that it’s getting better over time, and they’re in constant contact with us as we’re continuing to do that. And we try to do that in a way where the reports that they’re receiving from us are highly shareable by them within  their organization. So we might give it to them in a PowerPoint format so that they can actually present that internally and help to show that. We’re making their lives as easy as we can.

OWEN: Awesome. I love this. I always get excited when I hear about systems and what things happen behind the scenes. But the whole had to have been challenges. So what challenges did you guys experience when you initially try to put the systems together and how did you solve them?

JAY: Yeah, I’ll tell you a story around a particular tool that’s part of Genome called Project 360 because I think it represents one of the best stories of learning through failure. So, a number of years ago we had a project that went disastrously wrong. And it was the first time doing a project for this new client. It was the first time that Klick had done a project really at this kind of scale. And although we ultimately ended up delivering the project to the client on schedule, it cost us way more than we had anticipated to get the project done. And it cost us even more because it cost us people. Some of the best people that we had working here at the time got burnt out as a result of the project at [Unintelligible 00:31:48]. And so, all entrepreneurs have gone through this cycle. What we decided that we would never go through the cycle again. And so, we tried to figure out what we can do about it. And when we sat down with the team and ask them how we could’ve know that this was going to happen. They got even more frustrated because they all said, “Well, we told you this was going to happen.” And so we went back and looked and we realized that everybody on the team felt that the project was going to go this way. But they had all told somebody else, and they haven’t all told the same person. So everybody on the team had this general feeling that it was going badly but there was no centralized feeling that it was going bad. So we said, “Okay, we can fix that through technology.” And we created a tool that we call Project 360 at Klicker built into Genome but you can very easily accomplish the same thing through a whole bunch of other tools. The way they work, once a week Genome asks everybody who works at Klick to do a weekly review. The weekly review is an automated process. You get a reminder that your weekly review is now available for you to complete. It takes you only a few minutes to go through the weekly review so it’s very quick for you to do. It’s tailored and customized specifically for you. So when you click through do it in Genome then you start your review. The first thing you’re asked to do is red, green, yellow every project that you’re working on. How is the project going. If it’s green you don’t need to provide a comment, you can if you want to. If it’s yellow that basically means I’m starting to think that something’s going wrong. And red means if we don’t change our behaviour something is going to go wrong. And you can specify why. So we’ve got a set of reasons. It might be a timeline concern, or a financial  concern, or client issue, or whatever it is. And then we have an extra status past that which we call blue. Blue is Klick’s color, and so blue is for awesome. And awesome is something really awesome happened on this project this week and he can actually essentially convert that into a Kudo on the spot so it gets posted out through Chatter. So you do that for all of the projects that you’re on and really what we’re doing in this exercise is capturing the gut feel of our people, about every project that’s running at Klick in real-time, because we trust our people, we think that their instincts are going to tell us a lot about what’s happening. So they don’t have to necessarily provide a very specific reason. They might say I just have a really bad feeling about this. One of the best Project 360 comments I ever saw was my spidey sense is tingling. Somebody was basically saying, I can’t even tell you why I think this project is going to go wrong but something is telling me that this is not going to go right. And what it really does is give the team a chance to stop and say, “Okay, that is a concern, let’s regroup on that.”

OWEN: And so what I get from that now is you have this real-time feedback like tool that people are clicking and basically saying, red, yellow, different colors. Red meaning danger, danger. And then you compile all the people working together and if you see a lot of reds going on, that’s like, okay, maybe someone else jumps in. Is that the case?

JAY: Yeah. So the project 360 is form the whole team gets sort of reported into that team. They don’t go about that team so we don’t flag them up to the leadership level or anything. You asked about ways that we have been able to step back from necessarily the day-to-day running and that’s part of the way. The team gets those issues flagged. Other people from the company can go in and look at the 360’s for a given project if they want, but we let the teams deal with those issues within the sort of bubble of their own team and then they can escalate them if they think that needs more senior attention on it. So Project 360 turned out to be wildly successful for us. They have anticipated a lot of problems that are in the history since they were rolled out that we’ve been able to avoid. And we sort of look at it as having no blind spots about our business. So things that would otherwise be a blind spot that would turn into massive problems get highlighted early, dealt with and they never become that issue. And they become so successful for us that we’ve actually rolled out something that we call Client 360. So, Genome is now integrated with Google Calendar. We use the Google Suite for all of our internal productivity tools. So we’re able to look on people’s Google Calendar and say, “Oh, you just had a meeting with this client.” Now Genome knows about all of our clients. And so after you’d have that meeting it’s able to prompt you and ask you for a regular green on a relationship with the client. And we do that as part of the weekly review as well. So, you get asked questions about the projects you’re working on. And then you got to ask questions about the clients that you interface within the last week. And so we have this view of the relationships we have with clients as well as the work that we’re completing with him. And hopefully that helps us to identify early warning signals that there might be something happen again, the relationship that we need to be cautious of.

OWEN: Yeah, and I like how you guys solve that challenge, and I know when you’re building the system and trying to, it’s a continuous, ongoing process of improvement. But given that, how do you guys stay committed to this whole direction. What drives you to be committed to it?

JAY: I think the easy answer to that question is the benefits that we get from it make it impossible to now live without a system like this. It has been so useful at anticipating problems. Our people are so reliant on these systems to help them do their job. We regularly sit down when new people have joined Klick. And the rate that we’re growing there’s a lot of new people who’ve joined Klick. And we ask them how they feel about them. And almost unanimously the answer is I can no longer imagine running a business that doesn’t have a tool like this. And so that’s why we stick with it because it is a completely different world because we have these tools in place.

OWEN: So, I guess the listener listening to this now already know for the most part how the employees know exactly what they have to do because you’ve covered it already so I wont to ask that question. But one of the things I’m going to do is get you to talk a little bit about your book, The Decoded Company. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So what exactly is a decoded company?

JAY: The Decoded Company is– the subtitle of the book is What Happens if You Know Your People Better Than You Know Your Customers. And the premise here is we spend a lot of time trying to understand their customers. We invest heavily in that. We maybe do things like surveys with them. Let’s say you run into e-commerce website you spend a lot of time looking at the analytics, what people put in their cart, what didn’t they. How can we entice them to come back? Will a special make a difference to them if we do a discount? You spend a lot of time understanding the analytics that go along with your business, externally facing. However, sales bin in this quarter, or this geography. Do I need to invest more here, what if I spend more on marketing? You do all of that kind of stuff. And it’s very, very data rich. But when you look at the internal side most organizations spend very little time trying to understand their people at that level. And historically we’ve always relied on the crutch that people skills are really soft skills and it’s really hard to quantify them so I’m just not going to do it. Or you get very large businesses. I started my career at IBM, one of the largest businesses out there, that are so large and we’re established so long ago that all of their processes are one size fits all processes because they have to be, at the time where they were created at belief around how to run companies like that. But there’s so much data and it’s now available but what’s happening what inside of your company. And there’s so much technology that’s been created that does a better job of these kinds of things that it’s really no longer the case that we have to rely on that excuse that these are soft skills and they cannot be quantified, or that there aren’t systems to do this. Some examples of that from the consumer world that we talked about in the book are things like Netflix. So Netflix is great because it saved us the trouble of driving to Blockbuster. And nobody remembers going to Blockbuster anymore because it doesn’t even exist anymore. But it’s done more than just solve that problem. So delivery was part of why it won. But Netflix existed before there was really the deliver challenge. One of the things that is really accomplished is the recommendation engine that’s built into Netflix. It’s really good at recommending things that you are going to like to watch. And so, that technology around the recommendation engine. If you think about what’s actually doing behind the scenes is understanding you at a very, very deep level based on what you’ve liked in the past, what you’ve rated other things, maybe what your friends have liked in the past. All kinds of data points that it can pull in to do that. And that is storing that into movie recommendations, your TV recommendations. Amazon’s recommendation engine does a very similar thing for things that you might like to buy. So it does that in ways around things like customers who bought this also bought these other things. Or it looks at things you bought in the past you’ve rated or whatever. And it’s getting to the point where Amazon has actually started talking about predictably delivering things to you that you haven’t ordered but are likely to order in the future based on–

OWEN: Based on data, yeah.

JAY: So what happens when you take all of those algorithms and technology and you turn it inward in your company. And you look at what drives your people, what engages them, what they’re passionate about, what they really want to work on. What they’ve done in the past and how it affects what they’re going to do in the future. So when you think about our example of a teachable moment, the first time one of our people does a new type of project. That’s the same sort of thing. We’re looking at their work history and all the data points we have about what they’ve done before. And we’re using that to infer that they’ve reached the teachable moment where we can offer them some training. What that allows us to do is not force them to go through a massive training program when they started Klick, we get them running right off the bat because we know that we’re going to hit them with training just at the moment where they need it. And they’re going to retain so much more of the information we tell them at that teachable moment than they would if we made them sit through an entire class about this 6 months ago. And by the time they actually have to do it they’ve forgotten everything that they did back then.

OWEN: Wow, I love that. You know what, as a matter of fact I’m actually going to put that book on my audible list. I can listen to it because I love what I’m hearing. And one of the things– I looked at the table of contents of the book and I saw something that is technology as a coach and then technology as a trainer. And I’m like, what is the difference?

JAY: Sure. We’re using the sports, maybe abusing the sports fan [Unintelligible 00:41:49]. And also just incidentally if you do listen to the audible you’re going to hear my voice a whole lot more because Lee and I actually recorded the audio book together, so it’s the two of us reading it. So, the difference is really if you think about it the sporting metaphor. So, one of the things that we think about a lot is when you have a high performance athlete. So let’s say, just as an example, you have an Olympic sprinter. Now you would assume that that Olympic sprinter has one or more coaches working with them and also has one or more trainers working with them. And the trainers might be working with them on their fitness level, or teaching them how to do things. The coaches are working with them in real-time around how they’re running in the race and all that kind of stuff. You can say the same really, essentially about any high performance athlete in any sport. We would expect that they have a support team that’s helping them to accomplish that level of performance. It’s not to take anything away from the performance of the athlete but it’s how they get to that level of performance. So you would want to give all of your people coaches and trainers in order for them to reach their highest possible level of performance. But that’s not economically sustainable. We simply couldn’t hire coaches and trainers for all of our people, it would crazily expensive to do that.

OWEN: Yeah.

JAY: Now, there’s enough technology that can step into that role. It may not do it to the full level of fidelity that a person could do. But there’s enough technology that can step in to act as a coach and trainer in the right circumstances that it can really drive a dramatic difference in performance for your people, and it is infinitely scalable. You can offer the same level of coaching and training whether you’re a 5-person company rolling on a system like this, or you’re a 5,000-person company rolling out a system like this, or even a 500,000-person company, there are many of those. But if you were you could still do it at that level. So the distinction we make between the coach and the trainer is really around whether this is real-time coaching that’s happening for you as you’re completing a task, or whether this is more on the learning and training side. So, technology as a trainer. So we’ve talked a bit about technology as a coach, identifying a moment where we can provide some coaching for you and then delivering them. We also have a whole bunch of systems inside of Genome and we’ve provided in the book some ways that anybody who wants to start using these but doesn’t have Genome because we’re really the only company that does, can get started with a bunch of off the shelf tools. And SweetProcess would be one of those tools you can absolutely use to accomplish a bunch of the things we talk about. Probably closer to Gene Sequencer but there’s probably other ways you could use it as well. So I’ll give you an example of one of the things in the tech as a trainer side. We have a system at Klick called Klick Talks. And the idea of Klick Talks is that you have lots of questions as you go about doing your job. Some of those questions are going to be about how you do the task that’s been assigned to you, so there might be technical questions about the specific task. Some of them are just going to be general questions about the company, like how do I file an expense, or where do I get the printer drivers, or what’s our mailing address, whatever those questions are. It’s really inefficient for you to have to find somebody to ask those questions to, it takes up your time, and if that person is the person that gets asked this question a lot it’s really inefficient for them because although we may be happy to answer it, they keep answering the same question over and over again. And so, Klick Talks is really based on the premise that there is a certain knowledge base for the company of repeated questions. And if we can document the answers to those questions it saves everybody time. The person asking the question can just go directly to Klick Talks and get an answer. The person being asked the question only has to answer once. And the way the system works really comes down to a very simple interface within Genome. If you hit Ctrl Space on your keyboard anywhere in Genome, you get this little window pop-up on your screen, we call it Quicksilver. And Quicksilver allows you to just start typing things that you’re looking for. So if you’re looking for a person you can start typing their name, it’ll match on their name, and then you can get details about them. If you’re looking for a project you can just start typing the project name. If you want to dig in to the budget for portfolio you can type the portfolio, etc. If you start typing your question like how or what those types of words that signify the beginning of a question you’ll automatically be into a Klick Talk. So if you started typing “How do I file expenses?” You’ll immediately get a video answer to your question that plays within the browser when they’re right where you are. It’ll tell you exactly what you need to know. As those questions get answered they have an expiry date on them. And at that expiry date they go back to the person originally answered them to verify that the answer is still correct. And then they approve that it can continue to live on. So, the content in there is always guaranteed to be fresh.

OWEN: I love that. That’s a smart idea. So basically when the person checks out the question and shows them– how would I assume, kind of like a procedure on how to do something. And a  system now goes back after a couple of days to verify for that person if the information they found inside the procedure, whatever, is actually correct. And if it’s not correct it’s going to trigger something so that someone else can go and improve and make the changes.

JAY: Yes, exactly. There’s 2 sides to that. The one side is the person who asked the question. Everything that exist within Genome can be liked and commented on. So somebody watches one of those videos and it turns out that the information is incorrect anymore, they might just comment directly on it. The other thing is that at the expiry date, and the expiry date’s usually fairly long. It might be 6 months or it can even be a year. The person who answered the question originally gets the question back to them. And it says, “Is this content still correct.” And that way they can look at and say, “Oh yes, I’m actually the expert on this topic and this is no longer correct. I’m going to record a new answer to the question.” So, It’s always keeping itself up-to-date. And the whole thing works on top of our ticket system. So if a question comes up that hasn’t been answered. And we’re now up to, I think the last time I checked there was almost 700 answers in the system. So there’s actually quite a lot of content there. We see that at the beginning with somewhere around 25 questions that we anticipated would come up and we went and got people to answer them. And everything else has been organic as people have just asked questions in the system. So, if you ask a question that’s not answered, then the question turns into a ticket, and the ticket gets assigned to our Mojo team. Our Mojo team is our culture team. They’re responsible for all the culture, and education, and training, and everything that happens within Klick. We actually don’t have an HR department. So they have taken over some of the roles that would be part of an HR department in other companies. Someone on that team gets the ticket. They will grab their phone, they’ll go and find the person who could answer it. They will just come up on them with the phone. You don’t need to prep your time, you don’t need to prepare an answer, they’ll just say, “Hey Owen, somebody just asked me this question, can you give me an answer?” They’ll record a video of you giving me an answer. They’ll go back and post it to Genome, we guarantee a response to those questions within the working day if not sooner. And when the question gets answered the person who asked it will get the ticket back to them with the video answer on it. And they can verify that it actually answered the question that they were asking. And if it does it just gets posted in the system. It gets timed accordingly so that anybody else that’s looking for it in the future finds the same answer. An that’s really tech acting as a trainer, because you can ask it questions and they’ll come back with the answers. And if it can’t find the answer, it’ll find the answer for you.

OWEN: I like that. So one of the questions, we talked about the system and all that. But the system is dead but there’s also this question. So how do you now track and verify the results being delivered by the employees? And let’s see if we can answer that real quick.

JAY: There’s a lot of different ways that we can track results within the system and it really depends on the type of results we’re looking for. So, if you look at the different roles within Klick for example. if you look at project managers, it turns out, we’ve learned over time, that the most important metric about a project manager’s long-term success in the company is how good they are in estimating how much resources required to complete a project at any point in time.

OWEN: Okay.

JAY: And it turns out that there’s a particular point at which they will be successful, and they will be wildly successful project managers. Or if their ability to do that follows below a certain point they are unlike to be successful as project managers. It’s a very, very predictive metric. And once we figure that out we started asking people in their weekly review sessions, how much effort they thought was left to complete the project. So if you’re a developer and you’re working on a project, we’ll now ask you as part of your weekly review, regular green on the project but also how much effort do you think is required  for you to finish. And we’ll correlate that with how much time the project manager thinks he’s related, and then we’ll use that to determine historically looking at their projects at any point in time were they correct. And how likely are they to be correct going forward. And so we can determine pretty quickly within a project manager’s tenure at Klick whether they’re going to be successful on their own, or whether they need some coaching around that particular data point. And if they need coaching it’ll get flagged to their manager in a weekly review that the manager has a 1-on-1 session. It’ll pop-up as a topic that they probably want to provide some coaching.

OWEN: Awesome, I like that. And so, rounding up the interview. The question I have now is how will you say the business has been transformed as a result of systematizing the business and building a  system you guys have?

JAY: And you think a complete transformation of our business. You asked earlier about the sort of conveyor belt and how do you get to the advocacy at the end. We’re all the way at end of that conveyor belt for systemization. We are complete advocates for it, absolutely. It is a huge competitive differentiator for us in our market. Very, very few, if any other agencies in the world follow the same level that we follow with our tools. It is the subject of the book that we written which is Getting Right: A Claim Out in the Marketplace. And it is a big driver of how we’re able to accomplish– one of our biggest goals in running the company is what we call creating a center of gravity for brilliant minds. And a big part of what attracts those brilliant minds are the tools that we have in place to enable them to do their job, and to spend as much time focusing on the craft that they love instead of the administration around that craft. And that’s a direct result of having put all these processes, and systems, and tools in place. So, I think it’s a complete transformation from the day that we rolled out tickets and realize the data around them was so valuable to where we are today.

OWEN: Awesome. And so, how will you say your personal life has been transformed as a result of the way the business has been systematized?

JAY: As a leader within the company, it gives me a lot more time with my people where I’m spending time with them on what matters rather than on administrative tasks. Most of those are taken care of automatically by Genome. So we look to automate the mundane pieces so that people can focus on the important bits. As a manager of teams and as a leader of people, that means I can really focus with them on the issues that they want to work through, or on training or coaching, rather than on paperwork and all the rest of that stuff. I would say for me personally outside of that, it means that I get to spend more time on what I love to do and less time on the work around what I love to do. Which also means that I got out of here earlier and I can go home to my family and I can spend more time with them which is always a big benefit that comes out of that. I would say that it’s also turned a lot of the people who worked at Klick into advocates of data. And so, we have become deeply invested in things like the quantified self-movement where many of us will wear fitness tracker and look at the data that comes out of them to understand our own behavior outside of the workplace because we’ve seen how valuable it can be within the workplace. And we use data around those things to help improve ourselves in much the same way that it’s helped to improve Klick.

OWEN: So we have 3 more questions left. But I’m wondering, what will you say is the very next step because obviously, if someone’s listening to this they’re very interested in being able to systematize their business and get it to run without them. What will you say is the very next step that such a listener should take in order to get one step closer to that goal?

JAY: Sure. So the way that we look at that from a decoded company perspective, there’s actually a section in the book, it’s the last chapter called getting started. And it really walks you through how you could get started on the road to becoming a decoded company. We don’t look at a decoded company. It’s a binary state, you’re not decoded or undecoded, it’s a journey to get to that sort of state so there’s lots of things you can do along the way. And getting started chapter will really help people to walk through that. One of the first things that it recommends doing is a decoded assessment, you’ll find it in the book. But for the ease of completing it we’ve actually recreated it on the book’s website as well. So you can go to decodedcompany.com. There’s an assessment tool that you can do on there. And it’ll help you to understand the areas that you should focus on as you start down that journey towards being decoded.

OWEN: Awesome. And so, besides Decoded Company, which I’m actually going to listen to and I guess you listen to a book and you read it. That’s what I’m going to do. Besides that book, what are the books will you say has influenced this way of thinking and why?

JAY: There’s a lot of books that are foundational to what we did, that we’re big fans of Gary Hamel and all the work that he’s done on the technology management. We’re big fans of Tom Peters and all of the work that he’s done thinking around management. We’re fans of work like Dan Pink. He’s really dug into motivation and what drives people, and what engages them and gets them to think. And we look at all that work as incredibly foundational. In fact, in the book we talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. Those are the works that got us thinking about a lot of the approaches that we take. And we sort of look at everything that we’ve done as the how to their why. So they talked about why this stuff happens but not necessarily how to implement it. And we talk a lot about the how to implement it to kind of go along with that. So, I would recommend a lot of the books. And there’s actually a reading list in the book as well. So if you’re interested in a lot of the books that are this sort of theoretical thinking about this. Those are all well-documented in there. We are big fans of The Checklist Manifesto.

OWEN: Oh yeah, Atul Gawande?

JAY: Yeah, exactly. So it is a bit of a bible for us and it led to a lot of the thinking I’m sure around SweetProcess, but also around Gene Sequencer for us. So I would highly recommend that. One of my big take-away’s from it was that he’s talking about surgeons, so it’s a very, very specialized complication of checklist. But one of their take-aways was that it didn’t matter how long you had been a surgeon or how much experience you had the checklist, we’re still valuable in doing a better job. And in their case a better job at saving people’s lives. So there’s high stakes there. And that was a big takeaway for us. It’s not that checklist aren’t useful if you’re an expert at doing this. You still forget things because you’re human. It’s not a reduced form of checklist might be more relevant. So instead of 100 item checklist that you need the first time you go through this, it might now be a 10-item checklist because only the absolutely most critical pieces that you can’t forget. And so adapting that checklist to your level of experience is really important.

OWEN: So what’s the best way for the listener who’s listening to this all the way to this point to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview?

JAY: You can reach actually all of the authors of the book at authors@thedecodedcompany.com. So if you want to send us an email we can certainly do that. We’ve been quite actively blogging on the website, so if you want to provide comments there’s a whole commenting system built-in, decodedcompany.com. Look for the blog and you can find us through that. You can also find me directly. Probably the easiest to find me is on Twitter. It’s @jaygoldman.

OWEN: And so, final question for you. Is there a question that you  are wishing that I asked you during the interview and for some reason I didn’t ask you. So if so, post that question and then the answer.

JAY: That’s a good question. It’s one of the questions that we ask in our interview process is what question should have I asked you. I think one of the questions that comes up the most often when we do talks about the book, or when we talk to people in general about the idea of systems and process has to do with the availability of data. And because we’re talking not just about creating a structure for people to follow as they go through but try to pool as much data in as we can about, and learn from that data. One of the questions that people have quite often is how do we have access to tools like this or how do we have access to data. And it turns out that most companies already have a lot of data at their fingertips, they just don’t think of it through the right perspective. So if you think about email for example, access to the server logs that track all the email that got sent through your company is a very rich source of data. Now, you have to be very careful with a lot of these data, you have to make sure that you’re being very ethical and you use of it. We talk in the book about a set of ethical data principles that we adhere to and we encourage other companies too around making sure that everything you’re using in your analysis is part of what we call the corporate public record. It’s data that everybody in the company would expect the company now have access to. Be very clear and transparent about your use of that data so that everybody knows what you’re going to be using it for. And that if in any way you want to use data that might not be part of the public record, or that you have the main transparent about in the past, you have an explicit opt-in for people that they can consent that they’re going to use it. It gets rid of a lot of the concerns about Big Brother and privacy that might otherwise come up. So we talked about something like email logs, or when we talk about the fact that most companies have some sort of key system that they use for people to swipe in and out of the office. It’s a security measure for them and they only really think of it as a security measure but actually can tell you a tremendous amount about what’s happening in the company. Especially if your organization is split between different offices like ours is. So we have 4 floors of an office tower. And what that means is that our people are constantly in motion between those 4 floors. They’re going upstairs for a meeting, they’re coming back downstairs, they’re collaborating with somebody. It makes it very hard to find people. So Geno is connected to our Swipe system so that if you’re looking for somebody, it’s very easy for you to find out what floor they’re on. We don’t track past the floor level so I can’t tell you that Owen is in this particular meeting room, or having a conversation with this person. That would be a violation of privacy. But we can tell you that Owen is now in the 3rd floor, or he was last seen exiting the 4th floor. And so now if you’re looking for him it’s easier for you to locate him. So, that’s a great example of data that somebody might not anticipate but they actually have at their fingertips and just never thought about using it for other purposes.

OWEN: That’s awesome. And so talking to the listener right now. We’ve come to the end of the interview. And if you found this interview useful what I want you to do is go on sweetprocess.com/iTunes and leave a positive review for us on iTunes, hopefully a 5 star review because here’s why. When you leave positive reviews you expose this podcast, Process Breakdown to other entrepreneurs who will find it useful. And the more people coming on, checking out our interview the more we’re excited to go out there and bring on entrepreneurs like Jay Goldman to come on here and talk about, literally breakdown the process and system behind their business. And if you found this interview useful please share with another entrepreneur. And finally, if you’re at that point of your business where you’re tired of being the bottleneck and you want to get everything out of your head, document it into procedures so your employees know exactly what you know, sign-up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. and if you want to be able to assign task and manage them all the way and track their progress all the way to completion then sign-up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. Thanks for doing the interview Jay.

JAY: Thanks Owen.

OWEN: And we’re done.