Powerful Processes -Superior Systems- How to scale without chaos!

On this episode, we sit down with the founder and CEO of Business Success Consulting Group, located in Portland, OR. Adi and her company help businesses to scale by bringing order to chaos through documenting systems and processes. She's also the host of the Systems Simplified podcast.

Her approach helps business owners grow, while mitigating risks and maintaining peace of mind. We even have a mutual client that runs a $5milllion+ plumbing company in PDX, while living with her family in San Diego. This is just one story she shared on how truly powerful it is to dial in your SOPs.

Adi also recently had me on her podcast. We had a great discussion about creating a safety culture. Check it out here: https://www.bizsuccesscg.com/creating...


To contact Adi, or learn more about her company: https://www.bizsuccesscg.com/contact/ Ph: (503) 662-2911

Be sure to like, comment and subscribe!

Transcript

Transcript: Provided by Youtube- Improved version coming soon!

00:01
[Music] majority of the sales of a business will occur because of some kind of a life change or an emergency so it’s either there is a health situation maybe a divorce maybe somebody needs the you know a family member they have to take care of and they have to move away whatever it is you know that’s um that that’s a trigger to wanting to sell the business if you don’t have things documented you’re going to less get less for the business that it will be less sellable right and then there is
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the risk of a buyer if they buy a business without actually documenting what if the employees just leave that’s a risk right there I just recently got hired by a business owner that just bought a business and they had two employees that have been there for years and years and years but he knew that if they live I mean I know it goes back to the risk of the institutional knowledge but he knew that if they leave he would not know how to run the business so it’s a little bit different because if let’s say you are the owner
01:01
and you have the business so you kind of can jump in if one of your key employees live here you can’t because you don’t know anything about the business hello and welcome to today’s episode of the red bearded wrist guy podcast with Joshua King also known as the red bearded wrist guy and I had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend adique Levitt the founder and CEO of business success Consulting Group and we had a great conversation about how she helps businesses document processes and procedures in order to mostly grow their
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businesses and scale their businesses but we also got into a ton of other reasons for why businesses need good processes and procedures and why they need to be documented this is a topic that’s I’m super passionate about just because I’ve seen the difference between a business that has good processes and doesn’t and I’ve seen the difference between an owner of a business that has good processes and doesn’t usually it’s one is pulling out their hair and hating life and the other is relaxed and able
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to enjoy life in addition to running their business and so we get down into the weeds with that on today’s episode and I know that you’re going to learn a ton please be sure to like and comment on this episode if you do learn anything and it would really help us out if you share or leave a review in addition to that on whatever platform you’re using but that said I will go ahead and get into this conversation with ADI Club again she is the CEO and founder of business success Consulting Group in Portland Oregon
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hello and welcome everybody my name is Joshua King also known as the red bearded risk guy and I am so glad that you’re here this podcast is for business owners CFOs human resource leaders or anybody managing running or serving businesses who are looking to improve their business Acumen that’s my goal here as a commercial insurance agent who works with businesses in the Portland metro area out of Laporte Insurance Agency focusing on businesses with 50 to 250 business or employees or so I am looking to just stay ahead of the curve
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in terms of Trends challenges and opportunities in the business world and so if you run a business or serve business owners I know that those things are important to you too and so I hope you’ll follow along as I sit down with experts on all topics related to running a successful business I know it’s called the red bearded risk guy podcast the red beard will always be here but we might not always talk about risk um that’s not the sole Focus the focus is just growing our business Acumen but it will naturally come up and our
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conversations just because it overlaps with almost every area of your business and so that said again I’m so glad you’re here thank you for your support please give the show a like follow or subscribe depending on what platform you’re listening through or watching through and uh I look forward to learning together hello everybody and welcome back to the red bearded risk guy podcast with Joshua Keane I am an account executive at Laporte Insurance in Portland Oregon and today I am having a conversation with
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adiq Levitt of business success Consulting Group she is a process and sop Rockstar or extraordinaire that at least that’s how I think of her and I will go ahead and let her take it away with a brief intro just tell us a little bit about yourself and give us some your maybe some background in how you got into doing what you’re doing sure well thank you Joshua first of all thank you for having me as a guest on the podcast I’m really you would just say a guest on mine and I’m excited to flip the script
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and um then you asking me questions which is incredible and yeah so I am a process consultant I’m all about processes and procedures and my team and myself are all about creating documenting and implementing processes and procedures for companies awesome awesome and um when you’re so just to give a little bit of a background when when you’re not uh and maybe I’ll learn something here too um when you’re not helping business owners with their processes and procedures and things like that and
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everything that that all the benefits that that brings um what are what are you doing with your free time what are some of your interests and you know maybe how did you get into uh helping people with processes sure so those are two things so how I got into helping people with processes my background is industrial engineering that’s how I got started on the um journey to bring order and organization and create processes and systems and I basically stayed on the same career path but opened my own I founded my own company
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in 2011 and that’s what I realized that a lot of entrepreneurs needed they need help with systems and processes and actually creating those because they don’t do it themselves right the reason why they need processes will probably go into it but why do they hire us is because they do not have the time or the expertise to do it themselves and we basically it’s a done it for your service so if you have a business right now think about like the list when you have on your to-do list for I don’t know how many years
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yeah we need to document we need to have good training manuals we need to have processes and procedures so we basically identify and create and handle that need so that’s how you know I still stayed on the same career path it’s just a different aspects of that career so that’s the answer about how how did I even get started on it and I implemented my own business and I implemented in other businesses so I’m really all about creating that order on organization when I am not doing that so I have a great family
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I have a wonderful husband Ben and his son Daniel so I like spending time with them and with my standard family with my in-laws with my um my own my my parents Etc and I also um I like to hike we live in the Pacific Northwest and I like the outdoors I like exercising I like anything that has to do with um health food and exercising and living well so you know I’m definitely I like to do a lot of research about that and find new methods and new systems and you know systems again but I love that I love spending
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time with my friends I love volunteering in the community so a lot of activities and definitely I like it when it’s balanced you know I have my work but I also have my um the things that I do outside of work yeah well you know on that note um you know you mentioned being from the Pacific Northwest and like in the outdoor stuff um or in liking to pursue Health um that’s what what triggered me that to put you on the spot here is um a d here is uh has the added benefit of getting vitamin D year-round because
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she can just hop over to Florida when the weather’s not so good here and so that’s where where she is today but uh um yeah that is a very that’s a goal I guess to be able to go somewhere nice when the weather turns here because I love it here but it gets a little cloudy um well that’s great to learn a little bit more just about you personally I’ve been working with you for a few years now and learned a little bit there so that’s awesome and um so let’s get right into just kind of
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discussing why building Sops and documenting critical business operations is so important uh to the success of a business right so you know there are that’s a question that we always ask our clients is why we have to start with a why why documentation of processes and procedures is so important and the answers that we get and it varies in terms of the um order right of importance according to where the business is at and what is going on but it’s usually it’s consistency to make sure that everything
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is being done the same and that will lead obviously to efficiency and effectiveness um institutional knowledge capturing the institutional knowledge capturing the um tribal knowledge however you want to call it but basically the hard-won knowledge that people have that it’s basically in their heads or the heads of the key employees and either it’s for risk mitigation if the key employee leaves and then they live with the knowledge or if they want to scale and they want to basically train others on the same things that it’s just
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a very specialized people can do it so that way they can scale so it’s basically that knowledge transfer and also for training and onboarding so a correct onboarding right onboarding you bring somebody on like for instance I’m hiring right now but I don’t have I know that I’m going to I’m onboarding somebody there is going to be no problem because all the Sops are written all the standard operating procedures are written with examples with videos with screenshots so I will basically give him
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a login have them read it have them try it and of course there will be some Hands-On training by the majority of it basically I have the textbook so I have a manual how my business runs yeah so that is very helpful so those are the key key aspects of why it’s also like you know there is also more like a personal life like you know a business owners can say I want to 3x my Revenue right so in order to do that I have to hire another five sales people here is the process Etc yeah and of course when selling the
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business also you know selling the business is a key compo I mean a key component of it is actually have things documented because then it’s more tangible and you’re getting a better value for your business definitely definitely all of those are really huge things I think on on business owners Minds um on a day-to-day basis so um what um what can you think of maybe maybe some real life stories I’m putting you on the spot here or examples of you know what uh a horror story or what a business with no documentation and no
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processes versus one that um does have them like what’s the difference or maybe you can even use an example of one that was in that state of chaos when you met them and now they have things in place and um what does that look like now sure so a horror story is um I was actually traveling I was at the airport and I get a call from a dear friend of mine who is a referred me many many clients and he asked me to talk to one of his clients because the operations person basically gave their two-week notice and we already one
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week into that notice and nobody knows what that person is doing so and he and it didn’t end very well so the person would didn’t want to stay I said I’m sorry you know I’m about to get on an airplane and although we do do with the majority of our work virtually and remotely um that was not possible because in a week you can capture all that knowledge so that’s a Horror Story uh or almost Horror Story it turned out fine was another client where their main accounting person had to had um an emergency operation she was out of
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commission for about two months I mean she was of course she could do some things from home after recovery but it was a tough time for her and that was a wake-up call so they somehow managed to get by and figure it out but then when she came back to work then they engaged with us in order to document everything so now that fear or that risk does not exist so that’s almost Horror Story it turned out okay another example is a client that just recently told me that they cut their training time of new employees on onboarding and training new
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employees by 75 percent so those are different different stories all across the Spectrum yeah yeah well you know the onboarding one is huge um that’s a major headache I think for business owners that are they know they need people but they don’t have time to dedicate 40 hours a week holding that person’s hand and from the other side of that I’ve been an employee at a company where I didn’t even really understand what my job was you know or how my job contributed to the goals of the business
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or any of that um and then I’ve been at other businesses where you show up and from day one they’ve got you onboarded within a couple weeks and you can uh just start thriving and performing in that environment because it’s all documented it’s um you know in the two examples I’m thinking of they were very similar jobs it wasn’t like one was way more complex than the other it was just that one had those in place and one didn’t so that’s huge um so uh I don’t want to make this
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entire I know the title of the episode is or the show is the red bearded risk guy and I don’t want to make it all about risk but this really does tie into risk management for owners one big one you mentioned is key people um you know that’s uh you know when an insurance guy like me sits down with the owner and tries to talk about insurance we’re usually looking at your general liability and business Auto and those are all real risks but um that’s actually a bigger risk I think to have someone that has all the
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relationships or you know all of the business knowledge essentially and then they’re gone and you you essentially don’t have a viable business at that point absolutely absolutely no Joshua there’s also the point I’m glad you brought it up because there is definitely like good documentation definitely addresses risk it’s a risk mitigation for the business you can talk Also let’s say customer service if you don’t have your procedures documented for customer service and your customers
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are not getting the same service by each representative then you can run into the risk of losing customers because they’re not getting your signature service right especially let’s say for instance you’re a dentist and you know you treat your patients you have your bedside manners you have the way you talk the way you present your treatment you know the way the practice is being known and that’s why you’re very successful and get a lot of referrals you bring in an associate there are no procedures in
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place there are no policies so there is no agreement really how you actually interact with the patients and maybe there are great clinicians but they don’t have all those procedures of how to actually present a treatment how do you talk to the patients you know and that’s something that the patients are very used to so then there is a risk of the patients not wanting to come back or not referring it’s not always very open like oh well they’re walking away no it can be like they stop talking about how
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wonderful it is of an experience is to go to see the doctor so that is risk as well that you can definitely uh resolve it by creating those processes and procedures another risk is the the key knowledge but also like in the sale of a business you know if you want to make your business sellable because you know I just interviewed somebody a business broker on my podcast and she said that for her experience and she is very very successful is that the majority of the sales of a business will occur because of some kind of a life change or an
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emergency so it’s either there is a health situation maybe a divorce maybe somebody needs a you know a family member they have to take care of and they have to move away whatever it is you know that’s um that that’s a trigger to wanting to sell the business if you don’t have things documented you’re gonna less get less for the business that it will be less sellable right and then there is the risk of a buyer if they buy a business without actually documenting what if the employees just leave that’s a risk right there I just
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recently got hired by a business owner that just bought a business and they had two employees that have been there for years and years and years but he knew that if they live I mean I know it goes back to the risk of the institutional knowledge but he knew that if they leave he would not know how to run the business so it’s a little bit different because if let’s say you are the owner and you have the business so you kind of can jump in if one of your key employees live here you can’t because you don’t
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know anything about the business but also when you know when you’re growing your business and let’s say now you start with two employees now you have 20 30 40. you don’t know what they’re doing you know they might you might have a general concept but you don’t know how they which software they use what do they run how do they do it you know you don’t and you have to have it documented so it’s very clear what each person is doing and also in terms of the risk also if you don’t
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have that then you can cross-train you can have a risk like we saw during the pandemic I mean somebody can get sick we don’t have to be here like people get hit by a bus or people don’t show up or people disappear I mean just like as simple as somebody gets a very bad um you know maybe they get a cold or flu and they’re just like in bad and can you know they can’t even function they have they have brain fog they can’t they don’t remember where they put the papers or whatnot or what to do with this or
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what to do with that you have to have somebody on the ground actually opening the book and go okay this is how you do that no problem I can service the customer and I can make it happen yeah definitely well that’s you know from my perspective um people some of our clients will think you know about the the big bad event that can happen like a partner dies or something like that but um it’s almost guaranteed that at some point in your life you or one of your staff members is going to have a short-term disability of some kind
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um like the death everyone dies eventually but that’s down the the line hopefully for most of us um and uh so yeah no it’s like it might not be a huge theme it might just be like your accountant that had a surgery and that’s a huge hit to the business so that’s big um and I know I’m kind of circling back here but again just trying to um look at it from the risk management side is when you were talking about customer service processes um a huge one is uh you know everybody getting the same treatment is important
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for customer experience but it also can create discrimination issues if if one customer is getting a different treatment just because you have one rock star person that kind of thinks that way and gets that and then another person handles another person completely different um you could find in to find yourself in trouble from a liability perspective there for discrimination you know when I interviewed you to my podcast where we talked about safety you know you have to have a process for safety so it’s not
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enough just to talk about safety and you are the expert at that and you laid out fantastic process on how to actually Implement safety procedures in a company and I know that you can provide the slides and you can provide the infrastructure but you have to the person has to take it and document it and I know you can help put together that process but that’s a big one yeah yeah definitely yeah um one big one is just you might be training all your employees but there’s no record of the trainings that they’ve
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gotten or you want to be able to demonstrate that you’re being proactive on that both to us the insurance people but also to um you know I work with a lot of contractors so if they’re getting hired whoever’s hiring them wants to know that they’re safe too so um all right well that’s that’s awesome and um so can we move into kind of um maybe the the anatomy of a process and like what goes into building an sop is it the same thing over and over again or what does that look like when it comes
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to actually putting the rubber to the work Road and um you sit down with your client and they know they need to get things documented what does that look like yes so the first thing that we do is we map the entire process from beginning to end and usually create a flow chart right so from beginning from point A to point Z and other points in between how do we get there how do we get there and who communicates what to whom who gives what to whom you know if you have like different departments working together
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just make sure that we understand the entire flow from beginning to end then we compartment it into sections and assign people to each one of the sections so they can start documenting we work with them to document or if you want to do it yourself when you start documenting each and every one of those segments and the way that we do it you know you my Approach is that you start big you start you start wide and you start general so you basically start first of all with the main steps that you need in order to actually to document in order
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to actually accomplish that particular task then you take each step and you start breaking it down and you create the explanation now the explanation can be with screenshots with videos we are very big on using videos you know so you use a video for instance if the first step is to enter the client into the system then just shoot a video here and and just show how you actually enter the client into the system and upload that video under that step you know it just makes it easier than to start and writing all the examples all the all the
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instructions so you basically put it together then you um have your teammates or the leadership team review all the processes and procedures to see if anything was missed if it makes sense if it actually written in the voice that reflects the culture and what the organization is all about so you do that then you take the processes and that’s very important is that you basically have the entirety of the staff read those procedures of course the procedures that pertain to them right I mean you’re not necessarily
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going to have your sales paper read the detailed operations although it will be good for them to see the flowchart so they can understand the organization what they’re selling so you have everybody review it give their feedback and then you basically implement it on a regular basis that there will be a review whether every six months every year whatever but you want to make sure that those are actually being reviewed awesome all right well um can you share um some of the biggest obstacles I mean you kind of mentioned one which sounded
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like a time constraint the person who contacted you and you were about to hop on a plane and it was obviously way too late at that point but what are some of the biggest challenges um that businesses face when they actually try to make this happen and and make these changes so they know how like how how detailed should they be or how not detailed should they be right um allocating time and making it important you know sometimes you mean you know especially when you are the main producer you want to continue to
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produce you don’t want to sit there and document processes that’s that’s also a time constraint not in time constraint that you are running out of time but it’s just not allocating time and not making it important enough um also what we run into is sometimes resistance you have resistance from Key employees that feel that if they are going to um give shared their knowledge they’re not valuable anymore and they can be replaced um I think those are the main obstacles okay and so that one I could see the
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employee buy-in on being a a big one because you’re dealing with human beings and feelings and emotions and everything that goes with that and so do you have any tips from your experience on that you can give to business owners on how to encourage that or how to really sell that to the staff absolutely so the first thing that is important is to actually get by and the way you get buying like you said Joshua we’re dealing with humans we’re not dealing with robots we’re dealing with people that have different ideas
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different beliefs different opinions right different fears so what we do is we basically start with a survey what is it in for you to actually have well-documented processes and procedures or what frustrates you most about your position right now good so if you had well-documented processes and procedures how would that change would that make any difference how would it help you so we really figure out how does it help that particular individual and then we take the answers in order to document in such a way that will actually provide
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provide a solution for them great um well um do you have any other um you know good ex really good example shining examples again you don’t need to mention names but uh you’ve given a couple but uh just a success story from the last year or it doesn’t have to be from the last year just any uh big wins where processes made a big impact on a business whether it was their ability to scale or they had a big merger and acquisition or whatever it was um sure yeah I mean you know we have a mutual client um there were planning company where we
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documented the processes and procedures and as a result the owners were able to actually step out of the business and the business continued to operate also without them and they accomplished their dream of being able to be more spend more time with the family and actually move to a different to relocate to a different location so that that’s a great story yeah they did what ADI did and went somewhere Sunny so um must be nice but uh but yeah no that actually I love that story um I I share that a lot when I’m when I
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deal especially with a contractor or trades person because I deal a lot with those and um you know I I just know that if someone will meet with you and take your advice it will make a difference in their business and they’re a shining example of that they went from pulling their hair out and spending a lot of hours on their business every week to um living in a completely different state different city and running it remotely and can continuing to grow so that has been awesome and then we had another while back previous
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Mutual client who grew drastically over it was an HVAC company Over a four-year period or so and um he’s basically partially retired at 29 and I know that’s not all a d but still he gives her a lot of credit to the success in his business that he just listened to her and applied his advice and um so yeah I am uh if you haven’t noticed already a walking talking billboard for a D in her Services just because it’s exciting to see what can happen to a business when they get these things done thank you Joshua and I’m
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definitely also you know working together with you on Mutual clients making you makes a huge difference because you really care about the clients and that is something I want to give a client right here for you because it’s not just Insurance you know it’s really you care about their business you really learn about what they need and you only recommend the solutions that they need but they really will protect their biggest investment which is their business well I appreciate that yeah that’s definitely a big big Focus for me
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um so uh with all that do you have any last final thoughts on processes or anything we’ve talked about here that you think the audience just needs to know before we sign off well I my my advice is always if you’re thinking about it if you think that you need processes and you can see how it will help you just get started you don’t have to think about oh this is a huge big project that will take me so long no get started somewhere because you are then a bit a day closer to actually finish the project as opposed to a day that you
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didn’t start it great and if anybody wants to get in touch with you um whether it’s just to start a conversation or learn more where where should they go so the best I mean I’m LinkedIn it in at ADI and last name is klevit okay you can also um call at 503-662-2911cg.com a lot of ways to get a hold of me okay and you know for people listening on the road or who aren’t able to take note of that this will all be in my show notes when the episode goes live so um or you can just reach out to me don’t
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hesitate to reach out to me and I can introduce you to a D um I’m as you know always happy and enthusiastic to do so so um this has been a really good conversation ADI I’m excited to get it posted I know that the audience is going to find it valuable and um yeah just really grateful to have you as a partner in helping businesses together and um we’ll uh maybe look forward to revisiting again on another episode down the line as we uh work together more and learn more about each other absolutely well thank you so much Joshua of course
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well there you have it folks thanks for joining us today on the red bearded wrist guy and as ADI mentioned as we were wrapping up there if you haven’t started on documenting your processes and procedures please start right away it’s huge not just from my perspective as a risk management guy but just in terms of growing and scaling your business in terms of being able to relax and go on vacation or have a life outside of your business and for so many other reasons there’s so many headaches and pain
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points in your business when you don’t have the right processes and procedures and you don’t have them documented and we got into everything from improving the business of or I’m sorry the value of your business before a sale to making sure if you’re buying a business that you’re not buying something that’s going to take as soon as key people leave because all the processes are in their head and a plethora of other valuable insights about why we need to have this done and how to do it and so if you got
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value out of this please give us a review like follow comment I love it if you commented with any feedback questions or key takeaways that you got out of the episode so that we can make a conversation out of this and obviously if you want to get connected with adiq Levitt I do highly recommend her feel free to reach out to me directly or her details about her and her company which is business success Consulting Group will be in the show notes and that said I look forward to you all joining me on the next episode and I hope you have a
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blessed rest of your day [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]
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foreign