Ever wondered about the secret sauce that propels businesses to scale efficiently?
This week on Content Untapped we speak with Alexis Kingsbury founder of AirManual—an platform that's revolutionizing business processes.
We uncover the crucial role of training checklists and talk about how to document workflows that people actually engage with regardless of their personality type.
Processes aren't just mechanical lists of instructions. Alexis shows us how embedding storytelling and relatable experiences in your checklists can foster connection, and understanding, and become a tool to echo your values across your organisation.
Some useful resources from Alexis:
https://airmanual.link/discover
https://airmanual.link/ai/ebook
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkingsbury/
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If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Ever wondered about the secret sauce that propels businesses to scale efficiently?
This week on Content Untapped we speak with Alexis Kingsbury founder of AirManual—an platform that's revolutionizing business processes.
We uncover the crucial role of training checklists and talk about how to document workflows that people actually engage with regardless of their personality type.
Processes aren't just mechanical lists of instructions. Alexis shows us how embedding storytelling and relatable experiences in your checklists can foster connection, and understanding, and become a tool to echo your values across your organisation.
Some useful resources from Alexis:
https://airmanual.link/discover
https://airmanual.link/ai/ebook
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkingsbury/
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Hey, what's up guys? This is Ivan Meakin and you are listening to Content Untap, sponsored by Riot Business Results. This is the show where I go on a mission to unpack all those tiny little details that make up fantastic content.
Speaker 1:I report my findings back to you and I try and give you some practical tips that you guys can take home into your next project. If you do like what you hear, please do all those classic podcasty things you know like share, subscribe, tell your friends about us, all that kind of stuff. It helps us spread the word and reach more people just like you, which is awesome. Also, if you wanted to have a more in-depth conversation about what you're hearing today, just hit us up on LinkedIn. You can go to the Riot Business Results LinkedIn page or you can go to my own personal LinkedIn page and FireSidium. We can spark a whole conversation there.
Speaker 1:Thanks, guys, let's just crack on with the episode. Alexis, so good to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, no, I really appreciate the invite. Content Untap does very much a show about looking at content from different angles and finding new ways to create content, but also to think about content, and one of the things that you know we're so interesting about you and what you do at Air Manual because we use it as well as a process is writing content for driving processes forward for a business. We're going to talk a little bit about that today, but before we get stuck in. Can you just give me an idea of what is Air Manual and what it's built for and why you built it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So Air Manual is really built to solve perhaps the biggest gap and problem that I've had to overcome in my career, which is that, if I go back to even back into my early teenage years, I was always like starting new little businesses and so on, but couldn't work out how to scale them. I became a management consultant after university where I learned essentially how massive businesses that like once I was working with AstraZeneca and BP and so on how they were able to operate a massive scale, and essentially it's through people, yes, but also processes is what allows you to do that cost efficiently, because you don't need everyone to be an expert and really high paid six figure salary in your organization if you provide really good training and guidance for people to do it. And so that was the big realization for me. So when I left there and started my, I started consulting practice and then my first software business. Really, I found it really hard initially to find how to scale beyond just me. It was even though I knew it's people, it's process. And yet when I do build processes the way that I used to as a consultant, which is brown piece of paper, a load of post-it notes then turn that into a Visio diagram or something in PowerPoint and a load of Word documents that are then linked and whatever. It just became a mess and people didn't follow the process and people dropped balls and made mistakes and then, if you ever wanted to improve anything, people come back to me.
Speaker 2:I felt like, in theory, I was growing the business in this organic, exciting way, whereas the whole point was that it wouldn't require me and yet I just felt completely locked in the business at every step and so I realized we need to do a different approach and so iteratively, really over the course of about three years of learning from all the books and for all the smartest people I knew about how to delegate and how to make that easy and effective was how we developed a completely different approach. And when I did that, it then meant that my first software business spider gap. Then the growth was incredible and accelerated and got to a position where seven figures of revenue, a team that run the business and the day-to-day I'm not required day-to-day in that business. In fact I've got to a point now where they set their own objectives, key results, strategy and essentially strategy, and my role is a coaching capacity, probably about one hour a week, maybe two hours per week. So that's been an amazing journey, but it all came about from this change in the way in which we're working in processes and how we essentially how we were delegating, which now people seem to think, oh yeah, lexus is naturally a great delegator, a great people manager. That's not the case at all. I was terrified.
Speaker 2:I've had to develop this approach, and so we developed, we built Air Manual as my second software business to solve this for other businesses, because a lot of the solutions we were using at spider gap were sellotape and string holding it together, and so I wouldn't wish that upon my friends and my worst enemies and so on, because it was a bit messy.
Speaker 2:Whereas with Air Manual, we set out to basically create a solution where every process training, checklist, onboarding, guidance policy, etc. Has got a home, and it means that as an organization, you can set a realistic expectation that everyone knows where to find how to do something in your organization and, as you say, working with yourself and Georgia and the rest of the team, we've worked with your team to essentially go okay, how do we get new sales team members and other members of the organization on boarded into the organization, understanding our values and our vision and how we use tools and how we work together. Get them on boarded into their role, get them adding value really quickly, helping feel empowered and engaged, even without requiring the business owner to be involved. That was why we built Air Manual to do that. But essentially, as you say, it's creating internal content. It's the knowledge, the information, the process. It's the guidance that your team need to succeed.
Speaker 1:I'm not certain how many business owners or how many entrepreneurs appreciate how important this is or how much there actually is to do when it comes to documenting the process. I think if you ask a lot of people, oh, what is your process? Most people would super interesting to probably tell you about, like their sales process or their marketing process, because it's more the sexier it's got the revenue attached to it. But I'm not sure how many people would default to oh, this is the process, my onboarding process, or this is the process that we roll out our products with, which is super interesting. When you started, you mentioned that there was a shift right. So from your old software company you were doing things a certain way and you shifted into this new way that you do it at Air Manual. What, for you, was like the turning point for you to realize that this wasn't working. You needed to do something different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess I could probably bring it to life best by using a quote from Peter Drucker, who's perhaps the father of management theory and featured prominently in my business studies and management science education, which was that no institution can survive and be great if it needs to be managed by super humans. It must be able, it must be organized in such a way that it can get on under a leadership of average human beings. And from that quote the lesson I take. There is the temptation when you look at your business and you look at the fact that you're super as a leader, you're super busy, you're firefighting all the time. There's really expensive mistakes happening. When you onboard a new team member, it's enough just to try and find them a desk and a computer, never mind get them set up and running and being able to add value within a few days. That's your situation, where parts of the business rely on you or other key individual in your team and, as a result, when they go on honeymoon or off sick or whatever, the business either really struggles or suffers or you have to pull on that person. They still have to do some work, even when they're not meant to be, and I think that when you're in that kind of world of experiencing one or more of those problems, the temptation and certainly mine was to think I need to be a better manager, I need to be a better leader, I need to delegate more and do all these things. And the problem with that is that it violates that quote from Pete Strucker, because it means that you're requiring so much of you to be able to manage the organization and lead it that it means that you're then stuck in it because no one else could possibly come in and lead it as well or better than you, because you've had to become this superhuman leader and manager. And I think that was the realization.
Speaker 2:For me was when I was reading all the books and speaking on to the smart people.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I think some of the biggest lessons came from speaking to the less smart people who would then themselves say not well educated, didn't really study, didn't study business, not particularly good at much stuff, but somehow I built this business.
Speaker 2:You'd be like how I studied business studies at GCSE, a level, studied management science for four years, I became a management consultant for three years and then I've been a consultant and so on. And how were they finding this easy and, of course, to some extent, one of the biggest differences is that they weren't making it rely on them to be good at doing one for each, whereas I was making it all about me. And so, in trying to be this great leader, I was actually making the problem worse in many ways, and so when I realized that, I realized actually, how would I make it easy for anyone in the organization to do this? And that's when it all started to click, and that's when I made it easy for people to find processes. Rather than needing some clever understanding, we made it easy for people to document the stuff they were doing, so it didn't mean that only I or certain people in the organization could actually capture checklists.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. A lot of people almost handcuffed to their business by their own ability to think so well or to perform so highly they're their own kind of, let's say, genius has chained them to their business in a way that they can't really break free. You mentioned a thinking that you have to be a genius or you have to be awesome in order for this to run, but sometimes I think a lot of people who are very talented assume that other people think like them as well and therefore should be as talented or as able in that specific task, or think that they know it because they told us in them twice or three times before, verbally or even in an email, and we've certainly learned this is, I'm sure a lot of people learn this. That's not really the case, not necessarily because they haven't heard it. It's because they haven't interpreted it in the way that you intended, which I think.
Speaker 2:Being able to document it and have easy access to this kind of information is so useful, because it downloads not just the kind of, not the knowledge, but also the way in which that knowledge is laid out and interpreted into an easy to understand format, which I think is interesting, yeah 100% and in many ways I'm a lovely person, but I am incredibly impatient in some ways, and particularly in the past with team members, when I felt like that, when I felt like, oh God, I had to do this yesterday, or I told you I did this six months ago and now you're making mistakes or you don't seem to know what you're doing and whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh, have I made a misire here. And fortunately that was going on in my head, not verbally, but it's like that would stress me out. Right, I'd be stressed and they can feel it Like I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve and so people could feel it, and that was a horrible feeling and this is fortunate. It's quite wild, but like the realization of going, actually, if I can provide the guidance in an easier way that they can refer back to as well, it makes it so different, isn't it? As an interaction, because it means that I can attack the process, not the person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so by now.
Speaker 2:I mean, let's say I've got someone who, as part of a sales call perhaps their conversions haven't been very good, perhaps customer satisfaction scores haven't been very good on their calls I could listen to their recordings and under normal circumstances you'd listen to that and just get very annoyed and so the temptation would then be like angry email or get them on a call or whatever, and I think I suspect that quite a few people identify with that. It's certainly something I've heard described as feeling like you're surrounded by idiots when that happens. But of course, as you say, it's just that they've got different experiences and they haven't repeated it in the number of times and all these things. And what I found is that when I had it as a checklist, it meant the worst case scenario, let's say that still happened, even though they'd gone through the onboarding checklist that chain apps do it, even though there's a checklist that they can follow to conduct the call. What it allowed me to do is run the tap. The person say why didn't you do this? Which puts them on defensive.
Speaker 2:I could say, ideally, in our discovery call as a support for sales call, we would be asking questions to have a really good understanding of the impact. I believe that's in our process and our standard process for doing it, but I don't think it happened on this call. Can we explore why that might not have happened? And normally we're looking at the process and it might be worst case scenario, they didn't follow it, in which case really easy to agree. Okay, in future make sure that you use the checklist, because it will help you avoid making these little mistakes.
Speaker 2:Or perhaps they did, but they didn't even know that was the thing they had to do. Like, let's make sure that's in the process. Maybe it's not in there which has happened, and I think the guidance that I thought I've given and then found, oh, I totally haven't, or maybe it's not clear enough, and that's really empowering. And so they go oh yeah, of course, and they'll update it, and I get another opportunity to see where they understand, because if we're still not aligned, it won't look how I'm expecting, they won't write what I'm expecting, whereas if we are, they'll update it and I go yep, that's exactly what I want, or it's not on how you thought things might have been made.
Speaker 1:It's like there are people thinking different ways and that's the beauty of it and by them giving them the chance to add their understanding of the process, you may find that's an improvement on how you intended it in the first place, which is cool, oh absolutely.
Speaker 2:You mentioned what an experience that is for someone on their first or second day that they are fundamentally updating our guidance, what it says about us as an organization when we're able to continuously improve and value that kind of input. And it means that more often than not I'm not updating the processes and when stuff goes wrong we're able to say, okay, how could the way in which we work be changed so that that never happens again? And then the process gets updated and we don't get the repeated mistakes that I certainly used to, but also I see all the time in other businesses. It's one of these weird things that I'm almost getting increasingly in Neco Chamber, both of my own business and now increasingly our clients, where I forget that most businesses don't have a situation where, oh yeah, we have a problem and you fix your process and you never have that problem again. It's like for most it's ground whole day and for most businesses they have, they're working some crazy hours, whereas myself and all of our team we're all working like normal working hours. Yeah, we're not working evenings and weekends. All of those things become alien, but the amazing thing is like that all becomes possible when you get this stuff sorted and it is incredibly transformational.
Speaker 2:But also what's interesting is that I think there's an assumption that it takes a lot of time and effort to start getting the results, and so I see a lot of people holding back from doing this stuff because they think that's going to take me weeks or months to document this stuff and then I've got to hand it over and that's going to take weeks or months of training. Best case scenario it's not going to be three. It'll be three to 24 months before we get any value. Therefore, I'll tell you what I'll do it myself. It'll be quicker. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 1:Then let's talk about the presentation of this content, right? Because, as we said at the very beginning of the show, when people think a lot about content, and think about marketing content or like organic outwards content, about the, then internal content for your team. And for one thing for content, whatever it is it does, it needs to be two things. So it needs to be logical and easy to understand and needs to be emotionally engaging and have a hook or have some kind of way to get people invested in the message, for them to want to actually absorb that message. Do you find that true for internal content, when you're outlining processes, as much as for outward content, like where do you see the balance there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, essentially. Yeah, there's some nuance that we essentially teach as part of best practice. How do you document and we provide to all our users. So, basically, actually, how you document a checklist does make a difference. So, for example, let's say you create a process checklist, some guidance, and just call it quotes. Now, the problem with that is it's not clear on what the scope of that will be. So the headline, as it were, doesn't give you the. This is what you're going to get from this. So, as a result, it becomes a dumping ground for anything related to quotes, whereas if you create a checklist called send a quote to a customer, now you make it really clear what you're going to get out of this checklist. Right, this checklist is going to help you send a quote to a customer, and that might be the headline. But then the little summary at the top of the checklist would explain the context. So say, for example, like when does this get used? Who's this appropriate for? And I think in marketing it's the ideal customer and situation and essentially for the quote example would be when a customer sends a request for a quote via our website or via support, we need to provide them a quote. Typically, we aim to provide that within three hours or within one working day or whatever. But it's really important that we provide an accurate quote because that can severely hurt our bottom line if we under the under price. So use this process to make sure you don't miss anything that's significant. So you can see that essentially, if you think about that and it has a marketing copy, it makes really clear like who's going to be. Who's going to be here.
Speaker 2:If you're on the sales team and you're getting this, when you'd use it, what you'd use it to do and why it matters all in two sentences and then you have the high-level structure of your checklist. Just at the high level would have the main steps and then you can put detail in where needed. Now the equipment for marketing would essentially be it's like your headings, it's the what are the three pain points, what are the three benefits, what the case studies and so on, essentially tackling it. But it's like the important thing there is with a checklist about when we used to use Word documents that are 30 to 50 pages long. It's very hard for someone to very quickly get a sense of what's going on. It's lots of scrolling and you can't follow it as a step by step. So instead in our manual we made it so that it, like concertina, is all the steps so that very quickly you could see here's the eight steps for doing a quote and then, when you're following it, it's then expanding and showing more detail where needed.
Speaker 2:So I think I guess those principles of how you'd do good content marketing and good content externally still essentially apply, like making sure that it's clear what it's for, who it's for, when it should be used, what matters as your hook and then, before you then go into the meat of, okay, this is exactly what you're going to do, yeah, I suppose the equivalent of the call to action that you might have in normal marketing speak would be make sure that handoff is clear in your process.
Speaker 2:Like at the firstly, all the way through, everything should be action orientated. So, for example, fill in price calculator spreadsheet, not just price calculator or whatever. Make it really clear what you're expecting to do. But also at the end there should be the clear handoff. So if it's now send the quote to the customer and update our CRM, that should be absolutely clear so that you know what the end of the process is. So I guess there's a lot of similarities there, but having that content documented similarly to external marketing content, if you haven't got it you might feel that there's a gap. But when you've got it and it's doing the right thing, it's game changing for the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think fundamentally, if you chunk this all up whether that's with marketing content, but also with this internal content is make it simple and very clear as to what happens next.
Speaker 1:That's harder than it sounds. I think people can convolute messages marketing messages just as much as they can convolute the way that they document processes as well, and there are going to be people who are probably a lot better at that than others, which I suppose leads on leading on to an interesting point is there are going to be people in any organization, based on personality profiles, who enjoy the process of filling out documents or going through checklists a lot more than others. If you think of, if you know the Colby K index, for instance, as a personality profile, you have these quick starts. You just want to get the stuff done and do the thing rather than document the process. And then you have other people who are like really enjoy going through and picking this apart. So I suppose you can, as a leader managing a team, you can very much lead the horse to water, but how do you make them drink that water so they're actually doing it, because some people will be more opposed to this than others.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I suppose there's three parts to this. The first is that in our experience, with a bit of guidance, anyone can create a simple check list attached that they already know how to do. Right, because that's the key. You're not trying to document something that no one in your organization has ever completed before. That's silly. What you're trying to do is document stuff that works so that it can be systemized and happen consistently, even when you're busy or you hand it over to someone else and you're not in or whatever. We have found that anyone can, as junior or as senior, as scattergun or as data driven. It is possible.
Speaker 2:That said, secondly, second point would be you're right, different personality types have different attitudes towards process documentation. There are definitely some people who love it. The risk for them is that they put too much detail, so they end up every step has got a screenshot, every there's a video there's, or everything has got or end level of detail on it, and the problem is that then it becomes a bit more a bit slow and difficult to follow. Plus, it takes the majors, but we've seen people who will spend three days documenting a process that is going to save them three hours a week. It's a long time to get your return on investment. Contrast that with we've worked with business leaders and I've got consultants in my team who have done this to team members including her with Georgia to write business results, where we literally sit and say, okay, just talk me through it At a high level. What's the process? How do you start? Oh, I'll spread this out, okay, and then what? And very quickly, in less than 30 minutes, we can get even a complex process like sending quotes completely documented and then in another call you get handed over to a team member and suddenly you've saved 15 hours a week or more sometimes as a result of handing over that one activity. And that's how it should work.
Speaker 2:So you might assume that someone who is very detailed would just find this perfect and easy, but actually that's the risk. They fall in the other end of the scale, which is probably more where I sit, where I actually would prefer not to have to document it. I'd prefer that other people just take the information, can watch through Osmosis and do an amazing job, and I'm preferred to do that. Or ideally, you could go oh, just video yourself doing it and someone else will now do a really good job. The problem with. That is a fan doesn't work. What happens is that in the video it's okay, but in the video of me doing it I'm not really properly thinking about the order of steps and why I do certain things and the criteria. I don't make it as easy to follow and cope with different use cases, and certainly for someone then to follow it scrubbing back and forth on a video takes a lot of time and is messing, isn't very efficient. So that's the problem at the other end of the spectrum is just, I don't want to do this at all.
Speaker 2:But what we've found is that, if you can embrace the concept of what we call prioritized document test, pdt is you just identify what's the biggest bottleneck for you right now and what guidance would make that easier. So, for example, if you're a leader of a business who's having to do loaded price quotes, if we use quotes again and this is a real example where I was the owner of a printing company who's doing 15 hours a week on price quoting and, as a result, was working all evenings and weekends so we said that's taking up a load of your time, let's get that handed over. And so we say okay, so that's the priority Right now document it. And again, we started just super high level but then added in just where we prioritized. Where do you need the screenshots? Where do you need the logic? Where have you made mistakes in the past that you don't want others to repeat?
Speaker 2:Okay, and now test it. Get one of the salespeople to go through it with you watching, so that you can say, oh, you're about to make a mistake there. Why have you done that? Oh, okay, yeah, we need to add a step here. Okay, let's add that in now. And going through that means that you get to point that now they can do it and now it's off and on that. It means that in less than often less than an hour and a half you can hand over even the most complex of tasks to people and save 15 hours a week as a result of doing it. And I think when you embrace that concept, both people are opposite and deserve the spectrum, can come together and get that done, I suppose, as well.
Speaker 1:that makes quite a compelling narrative and gives you the ability to kind of market the benefits of documenting your processes to your internal team with more kind of emotive content, right? So what is the benefit of going through this process? You save yourself 10 hours a week. What does that mean for your day? What more can you get done? Or maybe you could leave work or you could enjoy your life probably a lot better with that extra time. And by adding that salesmanship side of what you would normally do in an outbound marketing campaign to something internal, to give people an understanding of the benefits of doing this so they're bonded to the concept before they start doing the process, I'd imagine you probably get better results. Do you find yourself giving that kind of encouragement and narrative to people in the beginning?
Speaker 2:Oh, 100% and it's why, like one of our number one core value across all my businesses is focus on impact. And so, as a result, when talking to clients and having those conversations, we're always starting with what's the goal that we're going for, what's the bottleneck that we want to go, what's the pain point that we currently have that we want to remove and then work backwards from that, because otherwise the temptation is to go, and we have this with customers. We say, okay, so what's the goal? What's the pain point, what's the bottleneck? I go oh yeah, we just need to get everything documented. No, that's not. It isn't Because it's oh great. Are you going to document how people are going to go to the toilet and then open their email? No, of course not. So you'll never document 100% of every activity that your team will do. So you need to prioritize, you need to pick where's going to have the biggest impact and you start that way round. And, yes, you do get to a point that you end up documenting processes that don't happen that often, or rarely, have mistakes or whatever, but only because of diminishing returns, because you've solved everything else.
Speaker 2:And I remember documenting a process in my business that was providing refunds, which happened very rarely and typically only when a customer accidentally did a double payment, and for my other software business, typically they're multiple thousands of pounds for a spider gap.
Speaker 2:So as a result, that could be quite painful to them, depending on their situation. So you need that turned around quickly, but it didn't happen very often. So I was the only person in the business who knew how to do a process, a refund. Now you might say it's not going to save very much of my time to hand that over because it only took me about five, 10 minutes. But it happened when I was on holiday and so when I was called away from the swimming pool with my wife and son when we were in I think it was in Dubai and I had to go up and work on the balcony and get the laptop out and do all of that, I was thinking I never want to do this again, and so at the same time that I did it, I documented the checklist and handed it to my sales team and never needed to do another refurb Brilliant.
Speaker 1:It's just basically avoiding pain, isn't it Like, really, if you chunk all of this up to an emotional level, it's do the work now so you don't feel the pain later. Or maybe a lot of the processes are born out of experiencing pain at some point and not wanting to do it again.
Speaker 2:Exactly right, and I think back to that kind of different personality side. I think and this really applies like in the world of content and marketing and so on you could loosely group people into two categories. Either you're the sort of person that loves experimenting, you want to create a new marketing campaign, a new ad, new piece of content, a new product or whatever new sales page and see what happens, see if it works, and you know that more than 50% of it won't work.
Speaker 1:And that's fine.
Speaker 2:I'll accept that. Now, when I say, great, you found something that works. Now I want you to do it every single day. Let's say you found a particular social media posting strategy that works really well and it's like great, now do it every single day, those people go oh really, I don't want to, because I love doing new things and I'm in that category firmly. So that's a real problem, because they're good at finding new things that work, but then terrible at making sure they happen consistently.
Speaker 2:And in the world of content marketing, it's all about consistency right, working up with consistent messaging on a regular basis. And so if you're the sort of person that struggles for that, you need to be able to hand it over to the second group of people, because there's a whole world of people out there that hate the idea of doing stuff that might not work. They would far prefer to find something that already we know works. The data shows that it works, we just need to do it every day, and for them, nothing could be easier. They'd say are you kidding me? We just need to do the same thing every single day and we'll get amazing results.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, let me add it Now. The other people would hate that out, but they would love it. But what you need is the handover. You need the experiment that worked to be turned into something that can be followed by the people that are very happy to repeat that process. And when you get that in your marketing and in your business not just for that, but for sales and every delivery and so on that's where the magic really happens, because now you're using the strengths of both groups of people. They can spend more time doing what they love and are really good at, and your business gets the benefit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant Love that you mentioned earlier about your values and obviously I think again this goes back to the external versus internal content thing is that's very much projected a lot of the times like outwards in content that you create. Do you find, like an internal process and documentation, the tone of voice and the way in which you explain things when you're writing them out is important, that it reflects the values that you hold within an organization, or is it very much more robotic? Regimented content is better because it's just easy to follow.
Speaker 2:No, I would argue that the most powerful way in which you can build and maintain the culture in your organization which ultimately comes from when we talk about culture and the particularly desired culture, we're talking about people demonstrating the values that you want them to demonstrate the most effective lever that you've got for that is having those values embedded in your processes. For example, I've got a client recently who said that before we'd worked together, so just over a year ago he would have described his business as people came for the paychecks and he said he didn't enjoy working in it but it provided him his income and so he felt trapped. He was working crazy hours. He was pretty much stuck in it. Now we started working with him back then because of how he described the situation. I'm glad that we did, because a few months later he had some very challenging personal circumstances with their baby and basically died for a period and fortunately was brought back and that took a huge personal toll where he needed to be out of the business and some of his partner and we'd got him by that point. We'd gone to a point where he could do that and have that freedom, which is awesome.
Speaker 2:What I love even more is that what he shared with me, and this is only a few weeks ago. He shared this. He said for him even better than that, because obviously there's a big personal one, but for him, even better than that was he noticed the culture shift in the organization. People now loved coming into work and there was a much greater sense. And he said why, what's the? He's been working on his processes. Why has that changed? And it's because the values of the organization have been embedded into his processes.
Speaker 2:Here's just one tiny little example as part of their recruitment and onboarding process, there is a step in which they send a gift to a new joiner in advance of them joining the organization, with the intent and it's written into the process, with the intent of helping them feel welcomed and valued and so on, even before they've stepped foot in the building, that we're excited for them to join. And that's something that comes fundamentally from his values of what he thinks is the right thing to do. Now he sent a WhatsApp exchange with a VA contractor that he was taking on and he said oh great, can I get this person's address because I'd like to send them a gift. And they were like oh wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:I don't think we've ever had a client who's sent a VA a gift at all, never mind just as a starting gift. That's lovely. I will send you their address, but, by the way, can I suggest that you perhaps wait a few weeks to check that you're happy with the work before you send a gift? And this client, stuart, replied thanks for the suggestion, but no, the way in which we work is that we send this gift in advance so that they can feel, and all the, the, the like and they were blown away.
Speaker 2:And, of course, the VA contractor was blown away, but also the VA, and you imagine what it means for that person. That's just one tiny step in one process where they have worked out that this is something that they value and they want to put that into their processes. Think about what that does like, over time, stacks throughout their organization for their culture, what it makes people feel, and there's so many examples of that in every process in your business. Yeah, how you deal with a customer complaint, right through to how you deal with an employee submitting an expense claim Does. When the expense claim isn't quite right, does the administrator just click reject and it goes back to the team member who's now out a few hundred pounds and doesn't know what to do next. Or is there clarity in the process and how do you want them to be treated? Do you want to give them guidance? All of that can be embedded into processes so that people behave the way you want them to behave, even if you're not around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant and that's really and I think that's the key thing before we wrap up because we're running a long time, but I think that's a really, probably a really nice way to end this conversation as well is I came into this process and thinking in this conversation with ideas of processes and mapping as a fairly systematic and potentially robotic way of just getting the thing done, and I think what's really interesting and what a lot of people hopefully can take away from this is that there's a real human side to this as well, in the way that you do it and the way that you explain what comes next and the little touches.
Speaker 1:I think it's probably the thing that makes it customizable to you and very special to you and your organization and echoes who you are and the values that you have as a business owner and as a company is in those little nuances and personal touches that you put into your processes, which I think is super interesting and a great way of thinking about it. For the next time anyone starts laying out the process is like, how do you want to make it more human rather than less robotic and just do the thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree. Of course you can create more connection and be more personal and use stories more. That's a great thing from content marketing right, it's the power of telling stories, of specific examples. You can put that into your processes for sales. You can make sure that your support, your customer success and support people and self. People and operated people are using stories to help people understand, to help people overcome blockers and mid-seasons and all those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:And you can also document your entire process for creating outbound marketing content as well. We have a whole process for how we edit blogs. We have a process for how we create social media posts. We have a process for different stories that you can tell in a book when we're coaching book clients, and this is all documented and put down in a process. So when we are coaching clients, we have tangible assets that we can rely on to offer them, as opposed for it just being like flying off the seat of your parents.
Speaker 2:For someone like me, like when I do my podcast DeStress your Business, which Georgia has been on, I want to show up, I want to do the recording, have a great chat and jump off and move on to something else. My team follow a step by step checklist so that they can pick up where I left off. They know exactly where the recordings are going to be, they know where all the show notes and whatever, and that they can go post it in the right place and that they can post it on the social media in the right way and that they can repurpose it into clips in the right way. And they can do all of that without having to ask me a load of questions and disrupt my flow. And they can do it in a way that we want and we expect. But also they can do it without loads of expertise and experience, because it's clear what they need to do. So they don't need to be professional video and audio. There's social media managers, they're just other team members.
Speaker 1:Anyone can become an expert with the right process. It's the moral for this story, alexis, great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. If anyone wants to learn more about Air Manual or find out about how to connect with you or the work that you do or how you can help them deliver better processes, what's the best way they can do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so people are very welcome to connect with me on social media. I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, but on one variety, alexis Kingsbury, there's not many. There's certainly not many that are male and there's only one. That's the founder of Air Manual. Connect with me on there If you want to find out more about Air Manual. We've got this really great guide that talks about the challenges that often you need to overcome and gives a step-by-step approach of how to do that and then more information about how Air Manual can help. That's available at airmanuallinkcom. Forward slash discover. So, yeah, reach out to me via social media or reach out to the team at support at airmanualco.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, we will put all the links to what you've just discussed in our show notes as well, so people can check them out. All right, alexis, thank you so much. Thank you, cheers, cheers. Hey guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of Content Untapped. If you are interested in finding out what we're up to at Right Business Results create content to grow an oil audience please do get in touch at info at rightbusinessresultscom and we will get back to you post haste. Secondly, if you wanted to continue the conversation about creating great content or anything that you're listening to on this show, give us a DM to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page or you can DM my personal page and we can spark a whole new conversation about any of this stuff. We love having conversations about content, so the more the merrier, guys. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next time.