we're going to talk about how to create powerful playbooks. So it's really good that your whole
team is using the QBook because Q is best for operating practices. And remember that Q stands
for capture, use, and enhance. And before we get going on that, today's pro tip is remember that
20% of the action produces 80% of the results, the Pareto principle, and that a few vital tasks
are hugely more impactful than the many trivial tasks that follow. And this is something that I
just remind myself of weekly. Is this 20% or 80%? So remember to take what are the few vital tasks
that take 20% of your time and produce 80% of the result because this is the place that you put your
energy and focus. So we're starting off strong with some weekly wins and some strong muscle
cars. With that, Dan, I'm going to hand it over to you. Yeah. You know, if you said cars, you had
me smiling. So there you go. Good way to get me going. So yeah, Ben, we'll get to the enhanced
part of the E and Q. So today is like Q, but for processors. So this is like next level stuff.
And so, you know, we always like to give sources and so forth. So this is from Dan Mattel,
anyone who's read any of his works, any of his books, been through any of his processes.
And then we've blended it with a couple of other best practices. So here's the basic idea.
How many of you have found that when you're trying to build a business, you often end up explaining
the same thing over and over and over again, right? This is how you do this. This is how I want the
office to be locked, unlocked. This is how you, you know, reconcile the books. This is how you,
you know, provide a quote for an employee. This is how you find yourself doing that again and again.
And the reason you keep doing it is because you don't have a simple playbook. So, you know, this
is sort of a much friendlier version than standard operating procedures, you know. So if you heard
of standard operating procedures, which most of us have, SOPs as they're often known. SOPs can be,
you know, a really, really tough thing because sometimes they're so detailed and so overwhelming
nobody has a chance to look at them. And it takes too long to process and figure stuff out.
So this is like the simpler, simplified version of SOPs, but it's also designed to capture
know-how. So what is a playbook? A playbook is anything that captures know-how. There is know-how
in your organization. There are people on your team that know how to do certain functions
and they're pretty good at it. And the way you find out how much you know, because you might
be part of the team and say, well, I don't know really that I know that much. And now imagine you're
training somebody to take your job, assuming that you've got promotion, you're going to go and do
something completely different. And now you have to pass all that know-how onto someone new.
That's when you find out, you know, a whole lot more than you realized. And if anybody's gone
through that recently, you know what I'm talking about. So why does this matter? Why do we need
playbooks? Because you don't have to explain it again and again. Secondly, it's because if we have
a playbook, we can capture the key ideas and constantly tweak and enhance it. But there is a
way to do this that doesn't make the person who's receiving the playbook feel like they're a prisoner
to some system. I'm sure by now here in week 20, you've captured the core idea
that we hate it when people have to serve processes. We think that's a complete waste of human life.
It's demoralizing, it's dehumanizing, and should be outlawed, right? For sure. But when processes
serve you and make you feel alive, make you feel more efficient, make you feel like you're growing,
that's what they're there for. And as people in more of a Western mindset, Western culture mindset,
this is not exclusively an East or West thing. It's harder for us to think of putting
people before process. We say cool stuff like that, but then we design the kind of processes
that are just lame. And now you have to come stand in this meeting, and you have to go and fill in
that thing. And then usually, if I take over as the CEO of a company or the president of a company,
the first thing I do is fire all those systems. I get rid of all that stuff, and I won't mention
the specific products. But I hate them because it just sucks the humanity out of everybody there.
It sucks the life out of them. And I hate them. I assume people who have to do them hate them.
But there is a need though to have some form of structure.
There is a need to capture process
and there is a need to capture the know-how.
So if you're thinking like an owner for a minute, right?
You hire someone who develops over a period of say two years
some really good know-how.
That person leaves, you lose that investment.
You have to hire someone new starts again.
Now that seems like a terrible allocation
of resources and capital.
So what if you could capture the core idea
that somebody has and that core idea
then is passed on and built by the next person
and then it goes from person to person.
So what this enables though,
if we have these basic playbooks,
I almost said playbooks.
If we have a basic playbook,
what happens is it allows people
to move around in the organization and find their A-seat.
Not everybody knows their A-seat in your company.
And it's amazing to me.
And so I'll just tell it,
like for instance, I have four kids, all married
and one of my new daughters or daughter-in-law,
one of my new daughters,
we call them our sons and daughters because they are now.
One of my new daughters,
she has an incredible way of working
with autistic children, special needs children.
And she's a music therapist and you have to study music
and you have to study psychology
and you have to study business.
It's quite a tough degree.
And as she got to do all that,
over time, one day she found this app called YNAB.
Anybody know YNAB?
You need a budget.
It's a little app for budgeting.
It's a bit of a different idea to budgeting,
certainly recommended.
She got into this and she started having fun.
And then on the side, she started helping friends.
And then she found out she really liked this.
And she found out like this gives her energy
when she sees people getting control of their finances,
gave her such a kick.
She started a little business doing this on the side.
Now, if I'd gone to her before college and said,
so let me tell you upfront,
I'm gonna give you a snapshot into your future.
One day you're gonna run a business helping people budget
and you're gonna get such a kick out of it.
She would have thought I lost my mind, right?
So what?
Budgeting.
So what happens is we get into a role in business
and we wanna be able to move around the business.
And to do that,
playbooks allow you the flexibility to do that.
Okay, so hopefully I've sold the idea
that playbooks are important.
Secondly, it's like hitting, think of a photocopier
and it's like hitting the copy button on know-how.
It's like putting your know-how in the copy machine
and hitting the copy button.
That's what that is.
So that's, if you think, wanna leave with an analogy,
you may want to leave with that.
So what do playbooks cover?
So they cover things like how to lock and unlock the office,
how to send an invoice correctly,
how to reconcile the books,
how to create an order or a quote.
It may be things like how to handle
negative customer complaints.
Does anybody know the playbook for Starbucks?
Anybody know that?
Anyone who's been through our training
knows this already, right?
So 100x people can't answer this,
billion people can't answer this.
Does anybody know?
It actually is very cleverly uses the acronym LATTE,
L-A-T-T-E, which is clever being that it's Starbucks.
And so LATTE stands for listen, acknowledge, thank them,
tell them what you're gonna do, then execute.
Clever, isn't it?
It's a simple playbook, I just remembered it.
It's not even in my notes, I just wrote LATTE
because it's so easy to remember.
So that means somebody comes to the counter,
complains about the thing.
Now, somebody else captured a very effective playbook
that really helps customers feel heard.
So you start, you listen, oh, you got the wrong order,
this milk is cold or whatever.
Listen, acknowledge it.
Oh, I acknowledge your problem, thank you for telling me,
we appreciate that, okay.
So now it's not a fight, calm down,
the emotional tension comes way down, right?
Tell them what you're gonna do about it.
You know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna give you a free coffee
and I'm gonna give you a coupon for another free coffee
and then execute, done.
Get the free coffee, get the little coupon
or whatever it is and give it to them.
So LATTE, L-A-T-T-E, was a clever little playbook
that we can literally memorize.
So they can be as simple as that
and they can be a little more detailed.
So we can talk a little bit about how to do these.
So it could be a little bit like how to travel
in our company and get reimbursement, how to hire.
This is how you hire people.
Often the lead person or the person who's done most.
the hiring. So at Brilliant, we trained two managers to hire
Jenny being on the calls, one of them, and done various hires.
And so it was worth it for me to develop a playbook on how to
hire people. We did this at 100x as well, since I see some 100x
people here, we did the same. And then how to contract with
vendors, how to negotiate, etc, you get the point, how to run
payroll, whatever. So how do you create a playbook? To do that,
we're going to use Dan's idea of four C's, Dan Mattel's idea of
four C's, the four C's to create a playbook, and they're really
easy. So remember, a playbook should just capture one task,
the playbook isn't there to capture everything you know,
it's to capture one thing that you know, about something
specific, it's one, so it's task specific. And you want to keep
it high level enough, but also detailed enough. Do you remember
when we were doing shaping up projects, remember what I said,
keep them high level enough, don't go, when you're planning
and doing your thin slice, don't go and design the whole thing,
just keep it high level enough. So you you solve the main
problem, but you haven't solved it in detail. This is the same
thing. You want to keep it at a high enough level. Assume that
the person on the other side is actually intelligent. Assume the
person reading this is actually an intelligent person reading
this. Don't have to spell it out to like breathe in and breathe
out between pages, you don't have to like go over the top
detail. Because that's when they feel the life, the humanity
being sucked out of them. Leave enough openness there. So an
average intelligent person can figure it out from that point.
Okay, so you have the four C's on how to do it. And they will
start with C's obviously. So the first one is camera. The second
one is course. Third one is cadence. Fourth one is
checklist. I'll go through them again. Camera, course, cadence,
checklist. Here's the first camera, grab a camera, any
camera, this can be a loom, if you're doing it on your
computer, this can be a camera with you on your phone, it can
be Voxer, Zoom, whatever, just but it's got to be a camera, not
voice, video. And the reason is, is that when you grab this
camera, you're going to walk through that process quickly. So
you're going to say, pick up the camera, this is you creating
your playbook, hitting the record button and recording. If
you find that, you know that you're not remembering
everything, instead of trying to record it and get it perfect,
doesn't matter if M's and R's, doesn't matter if you look a bit
weird on the thing, it doesn't matter. You know, people have
seen you from all angles, so don't worry about it. So it's
weird to you, but it's not weird to them. They're used to seeing
your face look like that. So you're good. So grab the camera,
just do the recording, you're good. But here's a trick, do it
three times, but use all three. And the three times, try to keep
three short videos easier to listen to than one long one
where you got it perfect. So that you don't go and write
scripts, you don't go and create production out of it. This is
literally like going live. Like if you've been using the app on
the edge, which looks like all the live stuff is finally
working, thanks for putting up all the bugs, by the way, we're
getting through it, we're getting through it. But the idea
there is going live, it's the same thing like going live on
any social media platform. So you kind of going live on a
camera with the person you're teaching. So let's, you know,
let's say, for instance, I'm teaching somebody, let's take a
substantive topic, like I'm teaching somebody how to hire
someone. So that that's me, I'm putting up a video. And I'm
saying, hey, here's my hiring playbook. And this is what we're
going to go through. And I walk him through the steps. And you
know, because there's a lot of soft stuff that goes on in that
capture that moment, right? These little things you say,
sometimes it's as subtle as your tone. It says, hey, when you
speak to the customer, remember that, you know, an unhappy
customer, whatever it is, you're hearing my tone, you're
hearing how I'm doing it, you hear how I'm saying it, you're
not just reading words on a page. So this is why the camera
portion of this is really important. So capture it, do it
three times if you feel you didn't get it the first time.
But don't go for perfection. And don't do lots of takes. That's
not the idea. Rough and ready is perfect for this. Number two,
we want to capture the course. And by course, it's not necessarily
the best word, but it's the way to capture the main steps. So
the main steps are going to be, okay, we're going to, when we're
going to hire somebody, we're going to post, we're going to
post that we have a need on these three social media
platforms.
platforms we use, or we use Indeed, whichever one we do. And
this is how we're going to post these on. We're also going to
post this summary of the job on different job boards. And then
we're going to, you know, as resumes come in, we're going to
narrow it down to five, then we're going to send the top five
people, you know, to have an interview with with the
department manager. And then once they do that, then I'll be
the final step, I want to do the fifth interview. So if you were
hired at Brilliant, for instance, we have a very
specific process, right? So how many interviews do we have,
Jenny? Tell me. Four interviews, that's right. And what do you do
on each interview? You have rehearsed this, right?
No, no, no, no, no.
You know the playbook. So tell us the four interviews.
I do. We assess, now I'm gonna go blank. We assess drive,
problem-solving, and we assess chemistry.
Good. And that's the second. So in the second interview, we go
to?
Yes. So after the initial interview, oh, I apologize. You
want me to go through all four? Yes. So the first is assessing
that the second is to drill a little bit deeper in the in the
problem solving, the problem solving skills. So we ask them
to solve to share, we have a couple of questions to drill
down in, which is what is the biggest problem you've ever
solved? And then the third one, we do an interview with a team
member to assess team chemistry. And then the fourth one is the
final one where they meet Dion, the president and receive an
official invitation to join the team.
And, Matt, you've recently been through that grueling process,
right? It was a lot of hours, a lot of interviews.
Yes.
So what did it feel? Did it feel very structured? Like
there was a playbook involved?
Looking back, probably. Yeah, definitely.
Okay. So it was very thorough, though, right? So some of these
interviews can go two or three hours each. Yeah.
Second interview was two hours long. I think that was with
Jenny, actually.
Yeah. So so here's the thing. That's a playbook that we've
created. So what you want to do is have the main steps in there.
Again, you don't have to write on every detail. Now, here's a
very important number three cadence, the frequency that this
has to happen. It doesn't help. Now, in the case of hiring
people, that's every time we hire somebody. So the cadence
there is every time we hire somebody. But if I'm locking up
the the office, right, then that's every day. That's if I'm
doing so if I'm sending, like if you do you expect them to send
out invoices every day, once a week, or once a month, every two
weeks, what's the cadence you expect this playbook to be
executed? Hey, we found best practices is this is the cadence
for this playbook. So you need to do it this often. And then
the last one, the checklist, the checklist are when you've done
them, and you check these boxes, you nailed the main point. So
this is sort of tying back to the core steps. But what you're
making sure it's like the accountability piece at the end,
that they make sure they've captured the right thing. So
what we're going to do, we're going to go through very
briefly, we're going to break up here in a second. And again, I
just want to remember the key is not to be too detailed, assuming
there's an intelligent person on the other end, back to Jenny's
Pareto suggestion this morning, this early in the session. And
that is remember, let's go and look for the 20% of the
playbooks that can cover 80% of what you do. So don't go and
pick some small task that you hardly ever do once a month or
whatever, you know, so we want something that is no pretty
straightforward. And then what we're going to do is we're going
to have you create a playbook. And then at the end of the
playbook, we want you to hand it off to someone, even if it's
sort of as a pretend or as a practice run, pretend you're
handing it off to someone. And we're going to make sure that
they've done two things, that they've watched the videos, and
they've read your playbook, your high points. So you can see this
is very high level, very outline, very quick. And the
whole idea is this creates a culture of a vibrant environment
in which we're capturing all the know how and all our best
processes and all our best thinking, and all our best
procedures. And then down the road, we can add other things
like automation tools, and so on. So, you know, we can we can
bring all that together. But I would like to pause it there for
a second, and say that, any questions about this before we
go to the teams, and we get into the worksheets? Was that so was
it straightforward enough, right? Pretty straightforward.
And so what I'm going to ask is that everybody participate.
And if you're here and you don't have your whole team,
yeah, that's fine.
I'm also ask Team Brilliant to go with Jenny.
I'll stay behind and hang out.
And then the other groups,
the solo folks can go with, to the general.
And we will see you back here.
Again, remember the four Cs
and try to find a project that you think
captures a good portion of what you do.
And you'd love to hand off to someone else
while we're doing that.