408. Operational Excellence: How to Document, Delegate, and Dominate w/ Chris Ronzio

If you just come into a business and you have to learn Thrasmosis, you don't know if that's going to be a month, two months, six months before you've seen all the different variances. When it comes to scaling your personal injury law firm, you can't rely on tribal knowledge. You need a system, you need accountability, you need a way to guarantee excellence across the board. The training is an actual intentional experience, right? Like when you want to train someone how to do something, you have to think, what is the sequence I want to take them through so that they understand this, that they can prove they do it, and that I as a manager have some accountability that they've signed off on this. If you've read the E-Mith, which if you haven't, you've got to get after it, you've got to go read this book. Once you've read the E-Mith, then you realize you need to document everything. But how do you actually get your team to follow the processes without consistently looking over their shoulders? When you come into something and it says, "Here's 100% of what you need to know to do your job well, and you've got 10 days to do it, that's profit and straight to the bottom line." Getting your team to speed up as quickly and completely as possible is one of the best ways to increase your efficiency and grow your business. And today we're going to get a glimpse at one way to help ensure that your team is all executing the exact same game plan without you having to call every single play. Our mission statement is to get people out to speed, keep them up to date so that they're productive and aligned and empowered. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the Elite Performance Marketing Agency for Personal Adry Law Firms. Today I'm joined by Chris Renziio, founder and CEO of Traenial, a platform designed to systemize your operations, onboard your team faster, and hold everyone accountable. We dig into why dumping files into a Google Drive isn't enough, the power of video SOPs, and how to actually get your team to adopt your processes. Let's get into it. Give me the big picture overview of Traenial. I've got a lot of super granular questions because I'm a nerd like that on the upside before we dig in and the applications for PI firms. But give me the overview. What's Traenial? Who's it for? Talk to me about it. Yeah, the biggest macro overview is Traenial is to optimize your business or your firm so that it runs exactly like you wanted to. And if I go a click deeper, it's what is the way that I want to design this firm to run? What are our policies, our rules, our best practices, our processes, our SOPs, whatever you call them? What is everything that you wish everybody just innately knew so that they could be more autonomous and do their job? What are your expectations so that they know if they're doing a great job and it's just a place to manage all that? When you're doing your outbound, you like outbound with the EBITH and you just put like PS, Traenial. Gosh. That was our first ad, believe it or not. No way. Yeah. And so it was me holding up the emith and saying, if you've read the emith and you realize you need a franchise prototype for your business and the emith doesn't describe how to do that. It just says you need one. Go to Traenial. And funny enough, we became friends with Michael E. Gerber. He wrote the forward to my book. And so they go together for sure. Peanut butter and jelly. That's awesome. That's awesome. A lot of the PI firms listening, right? They got, they have their CRM, right? They dock it, you know, Salesforce. They have their case management platform. Could be file vine. There's a number of them. Where does this fit in in terms of the tech stack? This is in addition to, you know, why wouldn't they just use a case management platform to hold their SOPs in their knowledge base? Sure. So those systems are where you do the work. Traenials where you learn how to do the work and where you manage how the work is done. And so I think that's the distinction we've always had is that there's the how-tos and there's the two-dos. And your two-dos happen in Salesforce or Filevine or whatever systems that you use. But the how-tos happen in Traenuel. It's where you as a business get to decide how do we want things to run. And it's where you train all your new people as they get started. It's where you manage change as you roll out new software systems. And it's the place where people can go and ask their questions instead of their manager. So I've got notion for my knowledge base. But like one of the things that I like about Traenuel, the name Traenuel is like, you've got the LMS component in there, the learning management system is like, I guess one thing is to have your SOPs, right? But it's also getting people to use them, getting people to go through this process. Like what are some of the things specifically that Traenuel does to address this? Like, I'll give you an example for myself. We went, we researched, we used HubSpot CRM and we found an LMS that integrated with HubSpot and we went and signed up and we created all these beautiful courses and at least couldn't get adoption, right? And so we went and we went and signed up for the LMS and we started to work with HubSpot CRM. And so I think that's what we're going to do, we're going to do a lot of research and we're going to do a lot of research and we're going to do a lot of research and we're going to do a lot of research. And then I think that's what we're going to do. And then we're going to do a lot of research and we're going to do a lot of research and we're going to do a lot of research. be accountability. So the name, train, you all came from training and a manual. The manuals place you dump the knowledge. The training is an actual intentional experience. Right? And so the biggest difference is that accountability. It's that you as a manager can see from zero to 100% where are they in the training, which version have they seen? Is there an e-signature in place? Is there a time and date stamp? And then we've got all these proactive tools built into our system so that it's prompting you when things look inconsistent or when things are out of date or when things haven't been looked at in a while and it's asking you to update it. So with a couple clicks, you can use the AI tools and get it back to where it's supposed to be. And so the difference again with just a place to dump things is it gets chaotic, it gets stale, you don't know if people are looking at it, whereas a system like ours is actually pushing out to them and saying, hey, you haven't accepted and approved and seen the latest version and I as your manager need to know that you're up to speed on the business. I love that. It reminded me of the the Domino's Pizza Tracker, like the percentage of like where it's out. Yeah, and then I guess you could see like, oh, hey, Bob hasn't done anything. Like, I'm looking to send him some notifications. We have things like, you know, the streaks and the leader boards and, you know, our mission statement is to get people up to speed, keep them up to date so that they're productive and aligned and empowered. And so in the system, it's all about our, my people at 100% on everything they're supposed to know. And the things that they're supposed to know are attached to their role and responsibilities in the business. And so everyone's got a position, everyone's got a set of responsibilities, and then you're attached to knowledge to each of those responsibilities. It's a pretty simple setup. I love that. You know, you've looked at thousands of growing companies. You have very deeply entrenched in the PI space. Yeah. A lot of adopters there, like what are you seeing of the successful PI firms? What are they doing in terms of the SOPs and their processes and how they're utilizing the tool effectively? I think the difference is their businesses are more turnkey. You know, they can bring someone in from the outside or someone that's remote or someone from a, you know, particular role. And they just get up to speed so quickly because you know exactly what's expected of you. Whereas if you just come into a business and you have to learn through osmosis, you don't know if that's going to be a month, two months, six months before you've seen all the different variances. And when you come into something and it says, here's 100% of what you need to know to do your job well. And you've got 10 days to do it. That's profit and straight to the bottom line because those people can just start doing the job instead of, you know, just they're still shadowing. I don't know. They're not, they're not great yet. They're not there yet. It's very intentional. Talk to me about the specific processes that you want to document and we joke, you know, the emith. You read a book like that and it's like, okay, I'm going to document everything. I'm checklist manifesto in this like and yeah. And then you end up with a thousand SOPs as opposed to maybe the pretto principal 8020. What are some of the big heavy hitters that every business should have documented? All right. So first I talk about your company's playbook and I tried to simplify it with the four P is really simple. So you've got the profile of your firm, you've got the people that work there, you've got your policies and then your processes. And so we try to hit those four buckets in that order. And so first, a profile is, okay, who are we and what are we all about? This is your differentiation, your brand, the services that you offer that maybe another firm doesn't offer. This is, you know, what is your style? Who's your ideal customer? It's your story of why you exist, why you started. And so those are the orientation basics that you mentioned because a hundred percent of people that start at the firm need to know that material. So that's their foundation. Then you go to the next P, which is people, it's what is the org structure here? Who are all of my coworkers? Who reports to who like in an org chart? How are the teams or departments or locations organized? And then who does what? What are their roles and responsibilities? What are their backgrounds? Their bios, their contact? This is again, very basic. Every business needs to do this. And then you get into the more granular things, their policies, there can be something like a handbook that applies to every single person. There can be policies that are state specific, role specific, part time versus full time, remote contract versus in house. Those are policies and rules for how you have to run the business. Some of them are legal and compliance related and some of them are just the ways you want to run the firm. And then you get into benefits and things like that. Again, that touches a lot of people. So that's like your 80/20 already. And then when you get into processes, you look, you zoom out and say, what are the things that everyone here has to do? Does everyone answer the phone? Do we have a way that we need to do that? Do we have SLAs in terms of how we communicate? Do we reply to emails within this amount of time? Do we get back to each other on Slack or teams within this amount of time? Those are things that everyone needs to know. Then you look at the biggest groups within your business. Do you have a bunch of attorneys or do you have a bunch of, you know, paralegals or do you have a lot of people in a certain position? What are the things that they're all doing that overlaps with each other that you want to make sure are done consistently? So absolutely 80/20 is the way to attack this. It's not document everything. It's document everything that's being done by multiple people so that we're consistent how we do things. Love that answer. The other issue I've had, and I guess this is like a therapy session too, and I'd love to hear all your opinions on this. It's like, you know, you get all these SOPs and then they like, somebody makes a modification or you need them updated after a period of time. Like, you know, is there change logs, like version control? Like, how do you go about the ownership of, I guess, the different size of the company? It's like a big company probably has somebody dedicated this, but like, let's say a PI attorney listening that's maybe they got 15/20 employees, they want to take it to the next level, they're trying to get to that eight figure or mid-seven figures like, yeah, like who's owning this? So when it comes to the whole account, usually you've got someone in the business that's championing operations or consistency or systems and processes. And so whoever that person is might oversee the account, but then when it comes to individual SOPs or processes, and we can talk about those in detail, there's a bunch of different kinds of SOPs. But when it comes to a single SOP, you've got an owner, someone that's tagged to it, that says, this is the person that not necessarily does this thing, but is responsible and accountable for this thing happening consistently in the firm. And whoever that owner is, that's the one that's going to get alerted when anything changes, when someone has a suggestion, when someone makes a change, so that they own that thing. And then you can set up time-based ownership, like if something gets stale, I want to be notified. If somebody flags something, I want to be notified. Your person that's going through the training says, "Wait, this feels off, I get notified." And so the whole system is based on that continuous improvement, but it goes to the owner of the process, not the owner of the firm. And so it's really about crowdsourcing this, because one person cannot know how everything is done. Which train, does it integrate? It'd be nice to have your SOPs and processes in Salesforce, in Filevine. Is it integrate directly into that, or is it copy-paste? Like how do you go about that? So it integrates with all of your HR and payroll systems to sink your people data, with all of your file management systems, to pull in files, or be able to access knowledge that's somewhere else, with tools like Salesforce for Search, if you're trying to connect it as a source that you can use our AI search to connect to. And then with specific case management tools, we are in early talks trying to figure out how to put widgets on those dashboards that show you if you've got new training. But what people are doing today is just linking to important things there that then fire someone back in the training. Even up is a specialized proactive AI built for personal injury law firms. Personal injury is in their DNA. Visit evenupload.com to learn more. When it comes to processes, you can't just set it and forget it. If your SOPs are buried in a random folder from three years ago, they are actively hurting your business. Processes change, software updates, and your team adapts. If there's no clear ownership to keep these documents alive, you're not building an asset, you're just creating a digital clutter. Let's get back to Chris and dig into how to actually build these SOPs so your team will use them. Let's circle back. You caught my attention with the different types of SOPs. So what do you mean by that? Expand on that for me. Okay, so first, the people here SOP and they think, okay, long boring document. Right. And how do I even start? And what is it supposed to include? And so that is maybe how SOPs were done a decade ago, two decades ago? Not anymore. Today, an SOP can be a checklist. It can be a flow chart. It can be a video. It can be a blurb of text. It can be fun animated kind of stuff. It can really be any of those styles. And so we built away for you to create or embed or soak in any documents, any content that exists. Whether it's a video you've already shot on YouTube or loom or somewhere else or a checklist you want to build in training or a file that you've gotten a PDF, it's really just about centralizing it all in one place and saying this goes to this particular role in the business. Because then again, the AI agent can access all of that. People can ask questions about it. They can be assigned it. We track that they've seen it. But you're centralizing it all to their role and responsibilities in the business. And then when it comes to actually building an SOP, I have a really simple kind of framework that I use where first, it's the responsibility name. It's what is this thing? Then it's who owns this? Like we just talked about. It's how frequently is this thing done in my business in my firm? Is this every day? Is this Friday at 9 AM? Is this every time the phone rings? Like that's your frequency. Next is how long should this take if it's done well? So is this a 10 minute task or is it a all day project? A lot of people delegate and do not set an expectation and then you get upset when something took four hours that you thought was a 10 minute task, right? And so you have to define that in the SOP. The next thing is why is this important? What is the context of why we do this? Who relies on this being done right? And then you get into the steps. Step one, step two, step three. And I think people mess up in that metadata. They leave those questions out and that's where all the management problems come from. Well, the big takeaway for me is the how long this should take. We don't do that. Currently in our SOPs, super smart. I guess for me, one of the thing, the game changers, and I'm sure it's for many, is the LUM video. Shooting a quick video was really helpful. And I find, I don't know if the ADHD, the what, but the super long documented processes I can't practically do them versus the image or even the audio or just a different medium. You know what's coming that I'm so excited about. So the reason that text has been easier to maintain in the past is if you shoot a bunch of videos, it's really hard to go back and make those minor tweaks to your videos. And then you end up with a ton of outdated LUM videos and you kind of get up on the whole process. Whereas if you had text, you just search the system and say find and replace every instance of this. Boom, it's all done. And so we're finally getting to a place with AI where we can insert variable changes into videos. That'll be coming out this year in TrainUl where you can have a recorded video in TrainUl and say, "Oh, actually, we don't use that software anymore. We change it to this one." Or actually, anytime I mention, this person's name changes to this one. And it'll go back through videos and make all those changes. And so where it's a pretty cool time right now. That's fantastic. And you're exactly right. And then it's kind of a pain in the butt to rerecord a video, especially if it's a lengthy one. Yeah, always keep them short. If you are doing videos, try to keep them like two or three minutes max. Because then if you do have to replace something, it's just that one. It's not a 30-minute cinematic experience. So we've got the processes and the onboarding, the systems things. Let's go to the LMS specific. How are you determining? And I like the gamification stuff that you have. But how are you determining if a person should proceed to the next level or if they have the specifically on the learning management system? Because I think Google Docs and Notions is like, "Here, hold your repository of information. Just hold this information." But I think what's intriguing about Trainiol are these other components, the notifications, the push notifications, the gamification. Talk to me about the LMS side. Yeah. So what we did is we set up every role in the business, has different responsibilities or competencies so that you can build out not just maybe today's positions, but all of the future positions that your people may be after. And then you can start to document, "Here's what I would expect from this position." And then if you have that knowledge internally, you can put it in there and you can start assigning it to people and track their progress toward their next role. Or if you don't have it in there, you can purchase any number of external courses and just bring them into Trainiol. And so if you want to purchase some public speaking course or some management 101 or anything that's pre-existing, you can buy it and just plug that course into Trainiol and say it's attached to this position. So the LMS component historically has been very big organization. Only big enterprises have like a talent development department and put time into building this stuff. And now it's really democratized it for anyone to say, "We want to have a learning track, a system here for up leveling, for investing in our people. I can get content anywhere on the internet or I can build it myself or I can build it with AI." And I can say, "What do I want everyone to know? Or what do I want this person to know as they're making advancements in their career?" Sometimes when I get a new piece of software, right? Everybody has these great client success teams right to help. But sometimes I get it and it's like, "Overwhelming, where do I start?" Like, for example, a lot of the PI attorneys that we work with, a lot of the listeners are traction EOS-based business. They're using that business operating system. Do you have like, "Oh, here's the template for an L10 meeting. Here's the template for a quarterly rocks meeting. Do you have existing templates that you can call in to help with that creation process?" Yeah, absolutely. So we've got about 500 templates. Just prebuilt in our library, but we're seeing more and more that people are just using the AI creation tools in our system to build those. And so, you know, you can, with a few prompts, say, show me what an L10 meeting looks like for a law firm with this many people attending the meeting. And it will create you something more specific than some template that someone made five years ago for an EOS L10. And so it's really easy to just say what you want documented, and it creates it. But yeah, we're, we'll be at the EOS conference and we're big in that ecosystem as well. What other tools features do we not touch on? Right? We hit the SOPs, onboarding. I like the organizational stuff. I'll tell you this personally. I, and again, I, I could just consolidate in a train, you know, but I use pingboard for my org chart. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm on there every day. Like literally before we jumped on this James helm, our buddy. Oh, yeah. It makes fun of me. Like I look at the org chart almost every day. Yeah. Um, it's like, this is what I do. That's an interesting hobby. Well, for me, it's our people is still because I'm like not as tech enabled, right? And a lot of the leverage is based upon human capacity. So it's like when I see it from a visual perspective, I can see how the workflows. Yeah. And it helps me, helps me there. But yeah, a bit obsessive. It's fun, fun story about pingboard. I know they're CEO too. And they started as an app to page people and you got to the office. That's why it's a pingboard. It was like an iPad that you ping someone up from there, whatever level to come get you. But yeah, we, I think it's a, that's a cool software. It's been a while since I've used it. But we saw a lot of people just didn't have a simple org chart. And beyond the org chart, they didn't have a way to attach it to all of the things someone did in the organization. And so that's the grid we built. As we again, linked to whatever payroll you have, we build out that directory, we build out the org chart. And it has if you click on any person, all of their responsibilities and you click on one of those responsibilities and it has the documentation of how you do that thing. And so it becomes really easy to fill in for people if they're not there because it's all in one place. And if you already have an org chart, you just turn that off and train them. I would say the things that we didn't get to delegation is something I care a ton about because that's a huge reason you create training is to delegate something to someone else. Either you're going to be out, you know, you're on vacation, you're on leave, or you're moving up in your role and taking on new challenges and you need someone to take over your old tasks. And so we built a system where for every responsibility, you can go through and rank, what is your level of skill, how passionate are you about that thing, how career aligned is that with your own trajectory and then you and your manager can have that discussion and say, is this something I should be doing or should we drag and drop this responsibility to someone else's plate. And if you move it, then it moves all the training associated with that thing to that next person. And then you can even build out roles that don't exist. So maybe you're dragging and dropping responsibilities from four people's plate and you're creating this new position in the business and you've got a way to, as soon as that person starts, their training is already there for them. That's something I like a lot. It certainly feels a lot more actionable than just a simple NPS or whatever they call it, EPS, the employee net promoter. Oh yeah. With those generic questions, more specific to the individual, totally. Me and the Google docs people, we got the notion people, we got the Google docs people. Right. Hey, good, good for us at least have some of these processes. Right. You know, back in the day or 10 years ago, I used base camp, right. And you had this import, right. And you could import into the platform. Like what's the migration into the platform? Like say, have all these folders, all these documents and notion, Google, like, what's it like to migrate over into training? So we have a implementation team that everybody that starts gets their first three or four weeks of a one to one. Someone to hold your hand through that process, migrate your existing materials, hook up connectors. If we have them two things like notion and Google docs and pull in content, hook up connectors to file management systems. If you've got a drop box or drive or something like that, that is a big part of getting started is saying, let us suck in all your existing knowledge so that it's there. And then let's figure out who needs to know what, you know, does every employee have access to your whole Google drive? Probably not. But in training, you can distinguish, you know, this role or this department or this level of management needs to know these things. And so yeah, it's the first piece is just taking what you have and getting it into our system. And then it's building from there. But if you've got Google docs or something to start with, you're in a better place because day one, you've got searchable useful utility inside of training, and you don't have to create from scratch. Love that. Have you seen the PI trial attorneys? Have you seen anybody make a training like how to become a better trial attorney? Like what have you seen in the space? Some cool applications that come to mind? Yeah. And actually, so we have this share feature. So I know in some of the masterminds, people will create training content. And I'm sure you've been in a group before where it's like, hey, does anybody have a way you do this? You can just click a public share link, share it to someone else. And if they have a training account, it'll duplicate that and copy it into their own account. Very cool. And so it's a really easy way to share SOPs and to just help in the community. Love that. Chris has been amazing for the PI attorney listening that wants to take it into the next level. First, go read the book, e-meth, shout out the Gerber. You read the book. You're going to want to start documenting the processes. I think everybody goes through that period of time where they pick up the book and it's like, oh, I got to, I got to make a change. Chris, what's the best way to get in touch? Learn more about training. Just train you all dot com T R A I N U A L dot com like a training manual. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, just Chris Ronzio. And yeah, we'd love to help optimize your business so it can be whatever you've imagined it to be. Amazing. Chris, thanks for coming on the show. A massive thanks to Chris Ronzio for coming on the show and laying out exactly how to build a high performance firm through accountability and rock solid training. Look, getting your operations dialed in and your team executing a high level is how you build capacity. But once that machine is built, you need to feed it. If your firm is ready to scale and you have the systems in place to handle a surge of high value cases, you need a marketing partner who plays the win. At RankingStyleO, we are the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. We don't just talk a big game. We deliver. If you're ready to dominate your market and partner with a team that is as competitive as you are, head on over to RankingStyleO and let's get to work. I'm Chris Strire. Thanks for listening to Personal Injure Mastermind. We'll catch you next time.