Minimizing Human Error With Custom Software for Higher Efficiency

Last Updated on February 28, 2022 by Owen McGab Enaohwo

Have you empowered your team with the right tools to excel in their jobs?

Adopting effective workflow tools is necessary to thrive in a competitive market. As the chief operating officer at How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm, Alejandra Leibovich was adamant about not leaving room for human errors. She leveraged her expert design skills to create custom software that streamlined their business operations and boosted customer satisfaction.

The host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz, has an engaging conversation with his guest Alejandra Leibovich in this episode of the show. Alejandra talks about her unique method of resolving operational challenges with custom software.

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Show Notes   

[0:26] Intro   

  • Dr. Jeremy Weisz mentions some of the past guests who have been on the show, including David Allen of Getting Things Done, Cameron Herald of C-Alt Alliance, and Michael Gerber of the E-Myth. 
  • Dr. Jeremy Weisz introduces SweetProcess, a workflow tool that helps businesses to streamline their operations even in life-or-death situations.   
  • SweetProcess offers a 14-day free trial without a credit card. 

[1:49]  Dr. Jeremy Weisz introduces the guest, Alejandra Leibovich.

[3:27]  Alejandra talks about what they do at How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm.

  • The organization helps entrepreneurs, especially law firm owners, run their operations.
  • They function as the external or outsource CEO, COO, CFO, CSO, and CMO of small businesses, especially those that can’t afford full-time CEOs.

[4:40]  How can businesses use custom software to eliminate operational mistakes?

  • Alejandra’s goal while running How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm was to avoid mistakes, so she gradually started creating technology for repetitive tasks.
  • She started with creating bots and then created software for enrolling team members.
  • The organization used to spend about 20 hours enrolling a team of 50 people, but the software reduced the enrollment time to a minute and a half. 

[8:56]  Alejandra explains the process of streamlining the organization’s processes with software.

  • The process starts with identifying the minimal viable product (MVP) and then testing it with real people.
  • Mistakes may occur in the testing process, so you must be prepared for such occurrences.

[13:19] How did the technology impact the hiring process at the organization?

  • Operations are most efficient when they are technically managed. The organization hired more developers to help in operations.
  • Alejandra made the team understand that all activities were interconnected. A single change in an activity affects the entire system.

[15:11] Alejandra talks about the role of calendaring in scheduling operational activities.

  • Alejandra realized that the various team leads who were managing clients weren’t following standard procedures, so she created calendaring software to streamline that process. 
  • All activities regarding interactions with clients were stored in the calendar and followed by the team leads.
  • She scheduled group calls and one-on-one calls between the team leads and the clients.

[18:20] What’s the goal for a group call?

  • Clients undergo a 12-week crash course as part of the onboarding process to learn the basics of the management process.
  • The course is done virtually in groups and automated to enhance the learning process.

[22:50] Alejandra talks about her motivation to create custom solutions to meet the organization’s needs.

  • Alejandra couldn’t find a software that met the specific needs she wanted to meet in the organization, so she took it upon herself to create it. 
  • She worked closely with developers to resolve every problem that she wanted to solve in the organization at every point.

[25:46] Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks about his unpleasant experience with a software company.

[27:16] What’s the one-on-one call with clients like?

  • Alejandra identified the agenda of the team leads in their capacity as CEO, COO, CIO, etc., and created processes to meet each agenda.
  • She created thresholds for each team lead as a benchmark for measuring their performances. 
  • She assigned numbers to performance thresholds for easy tracking.  Teams below these thresholds triggered red flags.

[30:40] Alejandra talks about the importance of functionality in software design.

  • She prioritized functionality over the software design appearance so users could get the most of it.
  • A software’s design might be appealing, but people won’t use it if it doesn’t have good functionality. 

[34:47] How do you program software to report inactivity? 

  • You create a system to check all the activities done. If there’s no recent activity, it reports the last activity. 

[36:53] What calendar system does the organization use?

  • The team uses Acuity for its calendaring needs.
  • They have recommended various features to the Acuity team to meet their needs at the organization. 
  • The team also uses Zapier and Infusionsoft.

[39:04] What other systems does the team use for internal and external communications?

  • The company grew from 36 employees to 125 in the past 24 months. 
  • They have adopted more systems, such as Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accommodate their growing teams.

[40:51] You can find more information about Alejandra and her work on aleloop.com. Visit SweetProcess.com to learn how to streamline your operations and check out more episodes of the Process Breakdown Podcast

[41:16] Outro

About Alejandra Leibovich

Alejandra Leibovich of How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm

Alejandra Leibovich is the co-founder of How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm—an organization that made the Inc 5,000-fastest growing companies six times in a row. She worked as the chief operating officer and chief information officer during her time in the company. 

Having vast experience in design, animation, and software, Alejandra has over 40 international design awards. An author and artist, she channels her creativity through her brainchild Aleloop, which operates on the concept of enterTRAINment.

Transcript of the Interview

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

Announcer: (Singing)

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weiss here, 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 they need to be successful at their job. Before I can formally introduce Alejandra Leibovich of How to Manage, I always like to mention past guests of the podcast, be able to check out other episodes. We have David Allen of Getting Things Done, Michael Gerber of the E-myth, mutual friend, Cameron Herald of C-Alt Alliance that both of us know and many, many more. So check out the podcast episodes. And this episodes is brought to you by SweetProcess. So if you’ve had team members ask you the same questions over and over again, and maybe the 10th time you spent explaining it, there is a better way. There is a solution. SweetProcess is actually a software that makes it drop dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So when I was talking one of the owners, Owen, not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responder government agencies use them in life or death situations to run their operations. So you could use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time and your team’s time. So you can focus on growing, which is actually the topic of today we’re going to go through in a second. So you could sign up for a free 14 day trial, no credit cards required. Go to SweetProcess.com and "sweet like candy," S-W-E-E-T-process.com. I’m excited to introduce Alejandra Leibovich and she’s co-founder, COO CIO. We’re going to go into that a little bit, of how to manage enterprises. She grew up in Argentina, in a town where milk was delivered by wagon and pulled by a horse.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And talk about that, Alejandra, to automating systems with technology. It’s a big gap there and she decided to move to the states in her early twenties. She co-founded a six times in a row, Inc 5000-fastest growing companies, how to manage enterprises, where she was a COO and CIO. She created all the systems so well that she replaced yourself and they can be found at howtomanage.com. She’s got an amazing background as an animator. She worked for MTV, Nickelodeon, and many more, so Alejandra, thanks for joining me.

Alejandra Leibovich: Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah. People usually, they don’t understand how the variety can happen. But to me, it’s all about design and designing logo, designing an animation, designing a cartoon character. To me, it’s the same as designing a system, a software, or your life, right?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And we’re going to dig into, how do you replace yourself so you can grow. It’s not so you can move on to a different job, but how you can do bigger and better things within a company and how custom software can buy you freedom from mistakes, time, and allow you have explosive growth. So we’re going to really explore that. Before we do, talk a little bit about what you do and what the company does and how to manage.

Alejandra Leibovich: So behind it all, we had a personal development company, dressed us. We help entrepreneurs, mainly law firm owners, to we function as their external or outsource CEO, COO CFO, CSO, and CMO. Most small businesses don’t have the capacity to pay or to have enough work for the full-time CEO or COO, CMO, CFO. So we provide a service where multiple businesses share one of those and we help. The power goal is that the businesses grow. That’s basically what we do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I love it. And so I want to dig into what we were talking about, which is custom software development. How can that buy freedom from mistakes? Because when you were COO, you’re like, "How can we make things more efficient? How can we eliminate mistakes?: And I wanted to start with, we were talking before we hit record about the enrollment system. You want to talk about what you did there and maybe some of the problems you saw and then what you created?

Alejandra Leibovich: Sure. So my philosophy, while growing the company and running the company, was always to avoid mistakes. Why? Because client gets really, really mad when you make mistakes on them, especially with their files or not knowing information about them. And so I’ve done every job in the company. So I had experience of having mad customers because there was a mistake. So I started slowly creating technology to avoid those mistakes, to take the everyday, tiring thing that somebody has to do into, like over and over again, into small pieces of software. So all of my technology starts usually with a bot that is a small software that does one specific thing. And for example, it checks if some people have multiple extra calls, for example, with a one-on-one CEO, or if they don’t have enough of those calls, if they don’t have one in an entire month or they check everything that a client will get upset because we didn’t deliver a service they are paying for.

Alejandra Leibovich: So with that, I started slowly, and quarter-by-quarter adding different things to those little bots and combining them. So then I, one, avoiding mistakes on enrolling someone into a program. So they got absolutely everything that they needed to get in the right order, from the welcome emails, to the homework, to the information on their calls, the logins to the membership site, logins to our app, everything that they need to have. So I started first with the bots and then it ended up becoming a software that we call big picture ups, where it’s basically a system to enroll everybody without mistakes.

Alejandra Leibovich: Before the software was fully finished, it would take us basically 20 hours to enroll a group of, let’s say 40 people, 50 people. Now it takes about a minute and a half and there is nobody doing it. So in combining, my philosophy in creating this software is to first know, step-by-step, what you need to do, what needs to happen and with whom and what are the valuables. And then start creating little pieces that start testing if that is right, because what you think is needed, it’s not necessarily what is actually needed. So slowly, it takes about, I will say a good year to two years to get a fully functional software that can do everything that you want to do, from the very beginning to the end.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So let me see if I have this right, Alejandra, and I’d love to hear at the end, when you started doing this, maybe you didn’t set out the higher developers. I know that you do development, but did you have to hire more? But what I see is first, it sounds you map out the process, all details. Then you look at, in the process, where are the most mistakes being made? Where’s the most repetitive stuff that maybe you can create a bot for? And also within those repetitions, what are the problems and pain points that are occurring? Then you create a bot that does something small, that automates something small. And then once you start to build out those bots for the process, all of a sudden you’re like, "We’ve created, bit-by-bit, these building blocks of a software. And then…" Is that accurate?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes. It basically is like that. You basically do what in software is called an MVP. You even start before an MVP, a minimal viable product, you start with little pieces of that minimal viable product and you test them. And most of the time, what you think is going to be needed is not, or it needs to be changed, because things don’t work like they work in your head, pretty much never. So you have to reopen to change it. And also to test it with real people and you tell them, I’m testing this thing, you might get these things wrong. So don’t get mad. This is what we’re testing. And usually business owners respect it because-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, like in the enrollment system, like you were saying, you’ve mapped out the process. You’ve identified what’s repetitive, where are their mistakes, you create a bot. In that, the bot may send out an email, it’s not the email that was wanted. So you test the actual bot within the process, is that what you’re saying?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah. And for example, depending on who enrolled that person, that client, it might be that they forgot a different piece. So now they don’t have the exact same, all of the elements that somebody else has. So then they miss something. So then it’s like, "Oh, now I need to add to about this other part before to make sure that everybody comes in with the exact same things that we need." Those kinds of mistakes happen all the time. One time when I had the whole enrollment system done, that it was the first time going from twenty hours of two people working on enrolling all these people to a minute and a half, what happened was that it was so easy that the person doing the enrollment, filling out that form, making those choices, she put them all in one product.

Alejandra Leibovich: Why in the first product? Because it was just too easy. She didn’t realize that it needed to change and that they belonged to different programs. And then what happened was that we couldn’t stop it. We hadn’t even thought about, "How do we stop it if it’s wrong?" So you discovered all of those things by doing, is how it works.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You need some kind of switch. You’re like, "Boom, we need to in and change course, if it wasn’t entered in right in the first place."

Alejandra Leibovich: Especially at that speed, imagine 20 hours, two people, 40 hours, reduced to a minute and a half. So when something was went wrong, none of us-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You don’t have time. You don’t have time because it’s two minutes.

Alejandra Leibovich: No. It’s two minutes. Well, but they had had tools that, for example, that then we came up after, that you can with one button, stop everything, post everything that’s happening, if you realize it, right? Fast enough. And then also how do you undo all of those things? Because now they have to be enrolled into something else. So that happens. It happens. And you do when you learn.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: But going 20 hours of onboarding time to less than two minutes is pretty darn good.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah. And it has gotten improved since I replaced myself, the new director of operations and the new tech person that are doing those two jobs, they even improved it even further. And those are all things that, before, while we didn’t need it, and then it’s always good, in my opinion, to build it and then give it to somebody that is better than you at it. And I apologize, I work from my house and my dog was just barking.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: No worries.

Alejandra Leibovich: You heard it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So I think of too, Andre is hiring. So when you got into starting this company, you start to create these software because that’s helping you optimize and scale and have less mistakes. Did you find that you started hiring differently because of this mentality of hiring more technologists? How did that change your hiring?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes. Operations has to be extremely technical. We started hiring developers to help in operations, to help create these boards and to understand also how everything is connected. The one number one, I would say issue that we have to make sure when we are developing and also training people is that they understand, and not just in operations, in every part of the company is that everything is connected to each other. So if they make a change in one place then that will affect every… Something is going to stop working. And what I did was, now technology’s all in one department, even though there are developers in programs, there are in different areas where there are developers, now we are actually developing a full in-house development team that works for every single part of the company so that there are no issues and that everything talks to each other.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. So the way I look at it, and we’re going to talk about out, I know a big thing is calendaring, and I know it’s for a lot of companies because there’s a lot of meetings. And I think you were saying there’s 3,200 one-on-one monthly calls with the company, right?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So that’s, if you you think of scheduling the time and coordinating the time and emailing and then getting on the call, so it’s you identified this problem, like you said, mapped out a process, found out where the repetitive, the mistakes were, created a bot and then created a software around it. So talk about calendaring.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah. That was a little bit different. So the main thing is always have the customer happy, right? So then I had started getting complaints that they are where one-on-one CEOs or CFOs that had not… Some clients were saying, I haven’t had a call with my CFO in five months. I haven’t had a call with my CEO in three months. So I haven’t had a call with my CEO in two months. So I realized, "Okay, we need to start tracking." And at the same time, people will get upset if, for example, one of the CEOs or one of the professionals working one-on-one with them, if they would leave, they would change jobs, or they would do something else. And they had to be assigned to somebody else. And I was wondering, "Why? The service should always be the same for everybody." But I realized that it wasn’t. That having different, I would call it coaches or one-on-one professionals, like business managers, professionals, people were not following the questions that they needed to be asking, the threat information that they needed to-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: They weren’t following the process.

Alejandra Leibovich: They were not following the process. So I looked for a couple of years for software that could do it and that could do what we needed to do. And I couldn’t find it, so I said, "Okay, well, let’s start developing this." So what happened was, I ended up creating two softwares to solve the calendaring and the one-on-one co-instant trackings. Everything that needs to be delivered to a client basically lives in a calendar at one point, that is the one place that is unique to everybody. Every already has to be in a workshop. They have to be in a group call. They have to be in a one-on-one call.

Alejandra Leibovich: They have to be somewhere that a calendar is involved. So I divided the group calls for any kind of group, live or online, or over the phone. And then the one-on-one calls and those became two separate softwares. And the group calls, the main thing on those, the main mistakes that they were happening were that people would not find out that they needed to invited to that call, that they needed to attend to that call. And then sometimes the person delivered in the content in those calls, they will not know exactly what they needed to teach and they will teach something else.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: A question, Alejandra, with that. So there’s one-on-one in group. One-on-one I could see. There’s a client. They’re like, "I need to be contacted with my CEO, the CFO, COO, so I can get more strategy." What is an example of a group call? What would be the use case for a group call?

Alejandra Leibovich: So when a client gets to our company, they first get into a 12-week crash course, so that we make sure that they have of the basis of everything that they are going to need to manage their business. Most of the businesses don’t even have a business plan. So in those 12 weeks, they develop a business plan. We go through every single part. All the parts of a business. And we make sure that the basis are there, and the basis for businesses at different levels. There are multiple of these 12 crash courses. So for example, there is an order in that our system that that is better to attack first, the goals of the owner, then the marketing, then the people, then the factory, then each of those milestones. And for example, somebody wouldn’t know exactly what was taught the week before.

Alejandra Leibovich: So then they would teach something else that it didn’t follow the rest of the workload. And the client will get homework for something, but then the person will be teaching something else and they wouldn’t address any of the homework. So things like that were happening. So with this software, we basically coded all of the levels, all of these 12-week crash courses that, I don’t even know how many hours it took, to prepare all of those emails for each of the levels and then send on limitations to the right group of people. It was hundreds of hours. So right now you basically create a new crash course. You choose the start date. You choose the group that you want and you click start and then everything that has to happen happens. You choose who’s going to be the host to make the host, and a back-up host. And that’s it, basically. And all the content and all the talent on invitations, all the information, all of the homework, everything that needs to happen happens in basically 15 seconds, 10 seconds, that it takes you to start one.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So people get on almost a live group training webinar, and then they get the follow up emails, the people show up and they know what they’re teaching, et cetera, internally, and externally, people get all the notifications and everything they need to get started.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah, And information, what’s going to be taught and the homework that they need to do before the call. So they can ask questions and they can bring their problems. And then we can talk about them. Usually there is teaching part of the call and a Q and A, and everybody has to do some sort of homework so then they can talk about it. And the other thing is, after the call happens, if they couldn’t attend the call, so the system automatically sends emails when the recording is posted in the membership site, which is also all of those for operations is a giant workload in a place where tons of mistakes can happen.

Alejandra Leibovich: If you, and the wrong recording to the wrong group of people, they get pissed. And we have anywhere from five to 10, I would say five to 15 calls a week, that are happening in groups. Some months there are also workshops, live workshops that are happening or digital workshops that are happening. So all of that gets put into the software and everything that they need gets sent automatically. So things that before takes just hours and hours and hours and tons of mistakes now in seconds, they get done.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And did the one-on-one calls work the same or was it differently? And I just want to point on one thing that you said, which I thought was important, which is with all these things, it sounds you search for a solution out there, because if you could save your team development time, if there was a solution that you could use, you’d use it, but it sounded you looked out there and there wasn’t anything that met your needs.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes. What happened was, I looked in all industries first. In all industries first, there wasn’t anything. Then one software appeared for coaching companies, but it would only do one professional assigned to one client. And we have multiple professionals attached to that client. And also that client usually has multiple employees. They have partners, they have other people that need access to the information because we’re helping run their business, right? To manage and grow their business. So it’s a group of people and we are a group of people too. So for a long time, that software didn’t do that. Then finally the developer decided to put that, but then he was just one person developing everything. And where were we? I think we were maybe at five or 6 million, I think, at that point. It was a while ago. And I thought, "Okay, this is a time where I’m going to keep developing all my bots and my basic software or that I’m going to move to this other software." And the developer didn’t want to put the code escrow in case that-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s a big decision. Yeah. That’s a big decision for a company.

Alejandra Leibovich: Well, and he didn’t want to put the code in escrow. And he sends that to, "Well, what happens if something happens to you? I can’t put my whole company, our services in jeopardy because of if something happens to you," and he said, "Well, my best friend that is a developer then would help my wife." And I’m like, "No, I’m not putting my company in that position. If that’s how you work, then we’re done, basically."

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So you wanted access to the code, if something houses to him, you could build on top of it.

Alejandra Leibovich: Exactly. And I could use it, modify it, and I could actually keep it running because, if you develop anything, even you have a website that Chrome is going to do the update. Then the other thing is going to do the update, and the other thing is going to… Then the browsers, then the computers, and it’s endless.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: It’s endless. Yeah.

Alejandra Leibovich: So nothing works at one point of the month, I will say, sometimes we can go maybe three or four months and nothing actually breaks. But then the moment the day is an update on the database, on the whatever it is going to be, something breaks. So you have to have developers constantly making sure that it’s up, that’s the nature of the beast.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So from the one-on-one worked a little bit different from the group, then?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You had to create a whole different thing for that?

Alejandra Leibovich: Like completely different thing. And that one has-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And by the way, this is a serious pain point because, I’m not going to name the company, but it’s a large software company that I’ve used. And that was a huge issue. Someone would leave. I would get auto responders for a while. They didn’t reassign me. They think they need your software, you could sell it to this publicly traded company that I was using. But because it was a huge problem from a client perspect… From me being the client. They didn’t have a process or system or software. And this is a huge software company, too, in general, in the payroll space. I won’t name names, but it was crazy. I’d be reassigned or not reassigned. And I would just be in this endless loop of not being in contact with people. So I get the what you’re about to talk about, the true pain point from a client perspective, if it’s not in place, from the one-on-one.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah. Imagine in a small company when that happens and then the client is not even contacted. You get really, really mad as a client. And what we care is that they pay us. Right? So that if not, we’re not in business. So that is the most important thing. And the retention rate, right? And the software is essential. Our retention rate went so much, like right now it’s 98%, to give you an idea. But we were at 65, 64%. It was crazy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: How’s all… Yeah. Tell me about the one-on-one. How does that work?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah, so the one-on-one, I knew what we needed. I knew that if the professional, the one-on-one professional, was a CEO, they needed to have this particular agenda. If they was a COO, they needed to have this whole particular agenda. Like each of them had their own agenda that they had to go through, like a number of questions. And they were meeting monthly and also weekly and asking different amount of questions, for 90 minutes, 60 minutes, and 30 minute calls. And also these calls were happening with different members of their team. So it was pretty complex, right? The level of calls that we needed to make sure that happened, and what was happening in those calls.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. A lot of human error, if it’s left to their own devices can happen there.

Alejandra Leibovich: Totally. And a lot of tracking. So the first thing that I realized was that a lot of those questions, and if we modify those questions, the answer could be a number. And if it’s a number, then I can create reports, right? So I basically modified change so that most of the answers will be numbers. And then if they were copy, then we will have also an expert of that copy that complete. So we could understand what was happening there in that business. But the main thing that we kept track of was all of those numbers and from revenue, account receivables, number of clients, all the important numbers that a business owner should be tracking, and a business should be tracking. So then we put our red flags, if the numbers went down more than two months in a row, if the number of clients reduced and what they are charging also didn’t change. A bunch of red flags that we can do, that we can know about, because they answer some numbers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So how often were you… So if the team member was meeting with this company, how often would they be filling out those numbers? How would the numbers be filled out? Would-

Alejandra Leibovich: They are weekly and they are out monthly.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Got it.

Alejandra Leibovich: And depending which member of the team is meeting, they have different ones. But we mainly care about revenue, number of clients, and account receivables. That is basic. They are also information that is important yearly. Did they fill out, did they fill out and send in their taxes? Things like that, that are major for a business, right? So with that, I actually hired people that just came out of school. Originally. I had a project manager that was seasoned, but I did not how he was working. He was too slow and I needed to go fast with this. So I hired basically students and we created, in three months, we created the first version of the software we called the dashboard, because it’s a dashboard that shows you everything that is happening.

Alejandra Leibovich: And I did not care about… And this is important. I did not care about what it looked like because I needed functionality. I needed to know, for example, if they are going through 20 questions in the hour and a half, do they want them in a list or together? Or do they want one-by-one? And how do they want to see it, the reports from the past months or the three last months and things that? I wanted to understand how they like to work the best, because if the person using your software, they don’t it, you’re not going to use it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You were worried about the look. Yet, if you compare, I guess, surveying softwares, type form, only one question shows up at a time. And there’s other ones that you can see is intimidating. You see all 20 of them or something like that.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes. For example, that. Like that was one of the things that I wanted to test. So before basically skimming the software, putting colors, and making it look pretty, I wanted to understand functionality. And if we were right, right? If this was the order, all of that. So in three months we have something that I ask the team to test. So then they test it. They say, "Yes, this is fantastic!" And then they tell me, "You know what? If we went for two months to San Francisco, we could hire one of these companies to actually make the software." And I’m like, "But I just made the software. It’s working, you’re telling me it works," but they didn’t consider it as software because it didn’t look nice. So then I spent the-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Well, the funny, ironic part, Alejandra, is you’re a world class animator. And so I think this says something about the process, because you can make things look pretty and nice, but you chose not to do that at that point. So I just want to stress that, because you had the capability to do it, even.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah. I’m also a world-class designer. I have, I don’t know, 40 international design awards. I could make this thing look pretty, but the purpose, any purpose of any design is it needs to work. People needs to use it. That’s the purpose of software. Right? So if they don’t use it, I didn’t want to spend, because it was going to spend a lot of time designing it and creating the colors, the interface, and all of that. And I knew I was going to have to change it, from experience. So when that happened, they were telling me, "Why, but it doesn’t look good. It’s basic." And so then I said, "Okay, give me a week. So then in a week we designed it, we made it look pretty."

Alejandra Leibovich: So then I reintroduced it and then they looked at it. They used it. And, "This is wonderful. This is fantastic. Let’s use it. Can we add this thing?" And everything worked. So if you are the CEO watching this, you’re developing software, know that that will happen. And I will still do it again, the same way. I will not spend any time with the design because it’s going to change. And then it takes a lot more time when certain things have to put into the software so it looks a certain way and it’s a pain in the neck to change it. I would still go functionality first.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I could see, Alejandra, that part of this one-on-one, so part of it is, you develop this dashboard so that the meetings, you have to fill out these numbers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Right? And you know if someone’s not having the meeting, because it is not being updated. So how does that work to be? Because sometimes I have found it to be hard, if there’s no input, how do you trigger a system rather than… I could see if there’s an input in the system, someone enters something in, it triggers the system. But if there’s no input, does it trigger the system saying, "Hey, this hasn’t been updated in three weeks? What’s going on? Has there not been a meeting?" How does that work?

Alejandra Leibovich: It’s very simple. What you do is, you do a bot first that is going to check, going to all of the different clients and see what calls they did, where the information when was inputted and then who they are also assigned to. And then, if there was no information, then it counts, "When was the last time that there was information in the ad?" So then every Monday it sends us one of the Monday emails is the no-show report. And it tells us if there wasn’t a show, if there is any information that anybody else put in there out of why this person didn’t show up, it’s going to appear. And then it shows everybody assigned to them. The dashboard not only tracks the one-on-one calls, tracks also all the notes and all the interactions. So anybody that has an interaction, they can go in there and add different types of notes.

Alejandra Leibovich: Like if I talk to one of a client and I want everybody else to know about it, I go and make a note. And I explain what happened. If finances goes and does it, anybody in the company can do that. And then they add automatic reports that also we get by email with basically Excel sheets that show us trends, how each of our one-on-one professionals is doing a, like for example, since then you have all that data, you can tell who is, from the one-on-ones, who is trending up, all of their businesses that are working with them are increasing revenue. Which ones are going down? And then you know also how to manage that person. And you can ask questions before, basically, the client fires you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I guess one of the questions is, do you use a certain calendar system that, it makes it easier for you to integrate with the software?

Alejandra Leibovich: Yes. At the moment we’ve been using Acuity. Acutity-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I’ve had Gavin, the founder on one of the podcasts, different podcast. And they actually sold to Squarespace.

Alejandra Leibovich: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: But it’s a great software. He’s a genius. Yeah.

Alejandra Leibovich: Totally. I have requested over the years, many, many features with them. It would have been useful to know him early on, because we had specific needs that the first… The reason that I had chose it originally was because was the only one that could do two-way calendaring with Office 365, which is a system that we use for email and calendar. So all of the other software at the time, which, it was years ago when I chose it, they will only do one way. So from the calendaring system to Outlook, but then they could do two way, like it could check if the time was busy already and then not show it. Right. So that, for us, was very important and everything ends up being zapped also with Zapier. And then they get specific tags in the CRM. We use Infusionsoft. So then every thing ends up over there too.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about, since we’re geeking on a software and you are basically integrating different softwares so you have the input into one place, what are some of the softwares you like? You mentioned Zapier, you mentioned Acuity scheduling, and what other softwares do you like outside of the ones you’ve created, of course?

Alejandra Leibovich: I like Infusionsoft very much. Hmm.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Are the other ones you use for internal and external communication with the team or with-

Alejandra Leibovich: No, by now we used to use, since I replaced myself, I knew that there were certain things that we were growing. We went in the past 24 months, we went from about 35, 36 employees to 125. So systems had to change and now they chose, for example, internal communications. They like to use Teams. That is part of the Office 365 suite. We went from Evernote to OneNote because it also is part of the same suite, trying to reduce the different software that we were using. And we use also for files, we still use Dropbox. We like it. It gives us everything that we need far as access and administration of it over the years, also a lot of bots lead… The other thing we use a lot is Amazon is AWS. We use that in many, many capacities.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: First of all, Alejandra, this has been fantastic. I just want to… I know we went a little bit in the weeds, but this is what the COOs and directors of operation like to go in the weeds. That’s probably why they became that way and dig into the system. So I appreciate you walking through your mindset with everything. I want to encourage people to check out more about what you’re doing, what website… I know I’ve gone to howtomanage.com.

Alejandra Leibovich: Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Are there any other places online? Is that the best place for people to learn more about your company and you?

Alejandra Leibovich: No, I would say aleoop.com. A-L-E-O-O-P.com.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s A-L… Say it again? A-L-L…

Alejandra Leibovich: A-L-E-O-O-P.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Got it.

Alejandra Leibovich: Dot com.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Got it. Awesome. So people check out that, howtomanage.com, ALEloop.com and check out more episodes of the podcast and SweetProcess. And Alejandra, want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you so much.

Alejandra Leibovich: Thank you so much. It’s been fun!

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