How to Audit Your Company to Find What's Keeping You from Growth with Ryan Drake-Lee, Founder & President at RDL Consulting
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray talks with Ryan Drake-Lee, Founder and President of RDL Consulting, about driving operational growth in small businesses. He shares how business owners can identify barriers to growth through process mapping and improve communication and accountability. The episode offers practical insights for leaders aiming to streamline operations and scale sustainably.
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Ryan Drake-Lee
00:00:00
People. Often I find in small businesses they have ambiguity. Just as you said, it's not clear. It's oh well. And the mentality is like we're a family, like hunky dory. We all help each other out. Everybody helps and everybody does everything. So like, it's all good, everything's going to get solved. Yeah. Guess what folks? You're not a family. No, that's a that's that's the wrong way to think about it. People come to work for a paycheck if they enjoy their their coworkers and they have a good time, you know, then they'll be happier and they'll be better. But it's not a family. If you stop paying them, they will stop showing up.
Lee Murray
00:00:36
They will stop being part of the family.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:00:38
Just that.
Lee Murray
00:00:38
Simple.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:00:39
And so therefore you've got to put the roles, you've got to specify the roles.
Lee Murray
00:00:47
You know, growth can sometimes be a hard thing to get your hands around. so today what I want to do is I want to talk about a structure for identifying what's keeping you from growing And for this discussion, I have Ryan Drake Lee, Founder and President at RDL consulting, to walk us through how we should be thinking about operational growth.
Lee Murray
00:01:09
Welcome to the show, Ryan.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:01:11
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Good to be with you.
Lee Murray
00:01:14
Yeah, I think this will be fun. before we get into that discussion, tell everybody a little bit about your background. I know you have a pretty cool background of consulting. You've had your hands in hundreds of businesses of all sizes, so really want to hear about that.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:01:31
Sure. Yeah, thanks for that. So, you know, my name is Ryan. I am a strategy and operations and business economics expert. I have honed my skills and my craft over a 20 year career in corporate strategy roles. I started my career actually at McKinsey and company, a global strategy management firm, and there I served a variety of clients, everything spanning from telecommunications operators when they were launching the first triple play bundles where you bundled TV, phone and internet, right, for a single price. That seems ubiquitous in the market now, all the way up to helping, you know, fortune 50.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:02:10
Oil and gas companies on their safety and operational risk culture through organizational design and development. You know, concepts and theories, you know. Along my career, I've also spent time as a volunteer consultant working for a nonprofit organization where I spent a year in South Africa supporting smallholder farmers and trying to help their businesses grow. So my business problem solving experience, right, and prowess comes from looking at, you know, micro businesses in developing economies in the countryside, which are mostly agricultural or agribusiness based. You know, all the way up to, working for, you know, fortune 50 industrial conglomerates. And I also spent about three years at Google in a strategy and operations role in the mid-market ads function. So that's the £800 gorilla core revenue producing function at Google. my team was developing go to market strategies for the 2000 plus odd sellers that managed about $1 billion in revenue per week. when I was there, it's probably easily up to, you know, $2 billion per week now. That's kind of insane.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:03:20
Just to think about how much revenue those, you know, few people are touching. But that was a very cross-functional role that dealt with technology development with software engineers in a, you know, global landscape, meaning that all of the work and, and campaigns and programs that my team led had to be localized, you know, into 30 plus languages, you know, receive legal reviews from the seniors, you know, senior higher up folks. So my experience, right, once again, just kind of giving you my background, right. Why should you care about what Ryan Drake Lee has to say? I think is because once again, I've got that very broad business problem solving experience, right? Once again, from small, small mom and pop shops, right? All the way up to large, complex multinational organizations with intangible technology and tangible intellectual property. So, you know, quite frankly, I'm a business nerd. I love this stuff. Right? I love thinking about how, you know, businesses click, how they make money, how they work, how they grow.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:04:21
And then, you know, I kind of refine that down into a very, kind of precise operational focus. I am, you know, very, very much an observer of how things actually work. Right. Like, what does it take to actually produce the widget or produce the service and do that in a repeatable way that's sustainable? and so whether that's sustainable from a human energy standpoint, right, or, you know, a materials consumption and, you know, energy climate change standpoint. So that's, that's who I am. And, happy to be talking with you today.
Lee Murray
00:04:56
Yeah. That's awesome. excited about this conversation. I'm curious, your work with the nonprofit. since that came later, how difficult was it to translate your knowledge to the farmer from the corporate setting?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:05:12
Yeah, well, you know, it's a great question, because in business, right, there are key functions that exist, no matter how big or small an organization is. Right? And those things can be, you know, supply chain related if it's a physical product.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:05:26
So the farmers that I worked with were chicken farmers, banana farmers as well as coffee farmers. And so, you know, one applications chicken farmers, this these guys were selling chicken live chickens for, for consumption. Right. For eating. And so, you know, I learned about how you buy day old baby chicks and they literally are a day old. They come in, you know, cardboard boxes that look like the vegetable trays that you get from Costco when you, you know, get all your stuff piled into there and you carry it to your car and that's just got maybe 50 baby chicks in them. And you know, but that has a process to it, right? At some point, those chickens are going to show up on the back of a truck in a set of ten boxes with 50 each, and now you have 500 chicks. What are you going to do with them? You're in the heat. You're in the sun. Someone's got to be there at the ready. Pick them up.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:06:16
Carry them to the chicken houses, you know, open up the boxes, spread them out and do something thereafter. Right. And you got to have those things kind of organized and timed or chicks die, right? Yeah. You lose product. So there's a process involved. So that's just, you know, kind of an idea about supply chain and product management and ops, but same thing in the same environment. Then once you are raising your chickens, you've got to inoculate them against diseases. So you've got a process to make sure they're getting fed, they're getting watered. They're getting inoculated. And then eventually, when they're mature and they're ready for sale, that's actually only five weeks for live chickens. So you go from having a day old chicken five weeks later, 35 days, you should have chickens for sale. And I mentioned the 35 days in the five weeks, because that should be built into your operational cycle and how you're utilizing the chicken houses in the space that you have. So, you know, and then when you get to that point I was going to touch on, now you've got marketing and sales.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:07:17
How do you sell these chickens? Do people come to your farm to the your farm gate and buy them on the spot in cash? Do they buy them with a mobile phone or do you drive them to a marketplace? If you're going to drive them to a marketplace, how are you getting them? You know, which truck are you using? Which are you using? How many bikes are you using? Are you walking?
Lee Murray
00:07:35
That's right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:07:36
Yeah, right. So you know it's supply chain again. But it's details that matter. And so people process details Tails right there. There are those elements that are included in marketing activities. Once you get into, you know, bigger, more complex operations and financing activities, what you're working capital is. What's your cash cycle? How long is it from when you buy products, you know, inputs until you can, you know, produce an output and get paid. Right. And that's something called working capital. And so, you know, my my thinking is that the same kind of activities have to happen in all businesses, small or large, but they happen at different scale.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:08:19
Right. And so you've got to develop process that's repeatable, that's manageable, that you can quality control at all stages. and so, you know, quite frankly, I think you can you can just break down processes that happen in large organizations, simplify them and apply them. And that's where, quite frankly, the big differences come into, you know, resource availability support, right? I think people who spend a lot of their careers or their working time in large organizations, you know, may not realize is that all the support people, all the back end stuff, the fact that you call a help desk when you have computer problem, the fact that you email the quote unquote marketing person when you've got a marketing question, right, there's all these people that you can talk to to get information from and to help solve your issue in a small organization. Those resources just don't exist. That's right. You got to go figure that out yourself. You know, if you have a question and it's like, oh, well, normally you would call marketing.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:09:16
Well, this time it might mean you call your friends who work in marketing to see if they've got a perspective, or you do some research online and you read some things or you talk to, you know, folks in the supply chain who have faced this problem in the past and you get information from them. Yeah, that's what it means to be entrepreneurial. It means to.
Lee Murray
00:09:36
Be.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:09:36
Right to seek out information from different channels, from different Sources, you know, to be able to assess and evaluate that information to, to to validate whether or not it's good, it's accurate, it's useful, it's applicable to your scenario, your situation. So, quite frankly, it's a lot of the same functions that are just kind of, you know, you have a different approach to how you solve them. But it's the same kind of core issues that you're solving.
Lee Murray
00:10:03
Yeah. That's awesome. And all of this is just triggering lots of, memories in my mind. Because I don't know if you know this, but I don't know if I mentioned this before, but this is kind of where we have some overlap in our background, because I did some work with a nonprofit for a few years, traveling to Haiti and Honduras, working with, you know, exactly the everything you just laid out exactly the same way.
Lee Murray
00:10:26
we work with farmers, we work with, you know, people who are making their own peanut butter and selling it on the street, making what they call pom kits, like little biscuits. Yeah. And, and and so for me, it was taking what I knew that worked in the developed world, and distilling it down to principles that could be translated literally, you know, in a into a different language, into a different, you know, environment. But talking about the chicken farmer, we had a we had a chicken farmer in Haiti, which was was it was so surreal because they had they had all the chicks in this one big pen. And it was the first time I had ever really been around that many chicks at one time where they were just chirping really, really lightly. It was like like a pillow. You know, it was really cool. And then there was a chicken farmer in Honduras that, they had land up on a mountain. So we went up there. They had other animals too, but chickens were their main product.
Lee Murray
00:11:24
And so, we were able to be there when they were harvesting some of them. That process was really interesting. And they were doing it out. Overlooking a mountain range was just beautiful. Like people would pay tens of thousands of dollars to. To have this view. And here this is where they live. but to to the whole process thing like they, their customers were some of the restaurant owners they knew in town and they would have a cycle of chickens that came through and they would have those available, and those restaurant owners would buy them fresh and use them. So that's triggering a lot of things in my mind. You know, that from from years past. That was so much fun to take what you know and use in your day to day with, you know, American style, mid-market companies to from for me to these sort of rudimentary, upstart, you know, like talking about resources, you know, is not you don't call marketing. You don't even really call a friend. You, you you hopefully when you show up that day, the electricity's on, right?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:12:25
Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:12:26
You've got a different set of challenges.
Lee Murray
00:12:27
You got a whole different set of problems and everything.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:12:30
Right? Where you have things like, you know, barrels of water around. If the water doesn't turn on and you've got to know, you know, two guys who have water trucks, because if the water is out for a series of days, you can get in a truckload of water. So it's just it's a.
Lee Murray
00:12:45
It's.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:12:45
A whole solution.
Lee Murray
00:12:46
It's a whole other set of ingenuity that's required just to show up to work every day. I mean, you can look at all countries around the world like this, and this is how they survive every day. But that was kind of kind of a nice to hear you say all that, because I, I totally resonate with that whole train of thought. And it was difficult for me at first to translate. But as I, as I, the more I did it, it became more principle based where it's like, okay, well, what are they doing here? What they're doing here does, you know, it requires this principle.
Lee Murray
00:13:13
And so I just break it down from what I would have, you know, told a company in the US. Right. So that's great. I mean, that's that's an amazing background. You've got such a breadth of experience and knowledge. And I think that whole first part of the conversation is super important because it shows your thinking that it is very much based on principles. you know, you can go into any company and and break it down, break problems down and find solutions. So you know to the nature of our our conversation today, we're talking about, operational growth. And, you know, as I mentioned in the intro, a lot of companies and founders, CEOs are they're dealing with issues that are keeping them from growth, and sometimes they may not even know what those issues are. So what you're going to do now is take us through sort of a framework of auditing. So it's like an auditing mentality to help us figure out what are those issues that that we can identify that are keeping us from growth.
Lee Murray
00:14:11
And we can start working through solving those. So I'm going to kind of turn it over to you and let you take us through this, and I'll just pipe in wherever necessary.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:14:19
Excellent. That sounds great, Lee. So, you know, when I work with lower mid-market clients, you know, oftentimes folks come to me with a challenge around, you know, either they're wanting to grow or they want to make more money, right? It's profitability. Now that is let's say the the external facing, presentation of the challenge, right? That's like, you know, when you've got a cold sore on your mouth, right?
Lee Murray
00:14:47
You just the symptom.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:14:48
You don't know that's a symptom, right? You don't know exactly what's causing that. Right. And so you may be vitamin C deficient. You may be dehydrated. You may be another mineral, you know, deficient. But you've got to go figure that out. So I kind of take a similar approach to business challenges where owners say, hey, I'm not making enough money.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:15:08
I want to be more profitable. I should be able to be making X, right? Or we haven't really been growing. My revenue has been more or less flat for the past 18, 12, you know, six months. So, you know, I want to grow. How do I, you know, how do I do that? Generally what I start with is what I call an owner's operating model audit. Right. I want to understand. And quite frankly, just one step aside, right. The problem solving approach is first data gathering. Right. So you think you put that under the hat of, I need to go gather data to figure out what's the status of things. How are things working today? And in a small business, as we already touched on, you don't have these big departments with lots of resources and a lot of process, you know, that's formalized and established. And so, you know, it's kind of easier to narrow in on things. Or you can go to a department head and say, tell me everything that's going on, right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:16:01
So we have to come at this from a very ground level practical approach. And that starts with understanding roles and responsibilities right throughout different functions of the business. So let me give you an example. I was working with a client. Right. I'm going to use a super simple one which was a coffee shop. Right. This was a coffee shop. Somebody bought a coffee shop in the pandemic. They had a, you know, a full time job, if you will, as a as an attorney at a tech company and they bought a coffee shop in the pandemic, didn't have a lot of experience operating and running a coffee shop, and felt like profitability was, you know, they were not profitable. They weren't making money on a, on a, on a month over month basis and wanted to change things. So we thought that, you know, the hypothesis going in was my pricing is wrong or, you know, my staffing level is wrong. I'm paying too much on labor. Right. So when you've got a profitability challenge, you look at your PNL and you're like, what are the big line items, right? If the big line items are taking up a large percentage of my revenue, right, or my total cost, I must attack that one.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:17:05
That must be the issue. Now, that's not automatically wrong, but you want to double click into that a lot more. So in continuing with the example, we start by understanding what are all the roles that exist in the coffee shop. You've got baristas. You've got, you know, clerks at the front who are taking payment and taking orders. You might have a food prep person in the back. Maybe there's a manager, maybe there's not a manager. And you've just got all doers and it's not clear, right? Who makes tough decisions when there's conflict or when there's friction. Right. So we first want to go and map out what are the roles. Right. And what are they supposed to be doing. Then what we also do is we want to map out what's the process from zero to end product delivered to customer and customer is happy. And the reason I say that it starts at like zero is because it's not when a customer walks in the coffee shop, right? Because when they walk in the coffee shop, you have to already have coffee, already have milk, already have staff, already have napkins and cups and holders and sugar.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:18:08
So there's a bunch of stuff that happens before a customer even comes in the door. And we need to understand how does all that stuff work? Who's responsible for ordering. Right. That's procurement is a big word for corporates, you know, scenarios. But in all cases it's just who's buying stuff, right? Right. When are they buying stuff? Right. Who has authority to use the credit card and buy and put stuff on there? So you know what I mean by this is what I'm going with. This is that if you're the owner, you might have a manager and you've delegated that all to the manager. But when was the last time you looked at the the most recent order, and you scrutinized it to the level of how much of things are we throwing away? Right. So stuff comes in the door and I pay money for it. And then if I finish goods, they go out the door and I get revenue for it, or I have unfinished goods, or I have unsold items, or I have things that be spoiled, or I have mistake orders that happen and they have to go in the garbage.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:19:04
Yeah. You want to look at what are your spoilage rate or your wastage rate. And you also just want to understand after people order things right. How does it get inventoried? How does it get stored. Because some of your problem could be that it's an accounting issue. It's a paper issue meaning that you order things. They either don't get entered right. You know, accurately into the system. And so what you're looking at is a report that comes out of your POS system, but it's got all these holes in it. And so it's not capturing activities that are happening. And so you can't see it on the back end of the PNL where your net operating margin is right.
Lee Murray
00:19:41
But it sounds like through all this, you're just asking the right, like good questions of your business, right?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:19:49
So so that's right. But, you know, the challenge is for folks who've seen a lot of different businesses in a lot of different scenarios, right, in a variety of markets and environments. Those questions of what to ask come naturally.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:20:02
They come intuitively. Right.
Lee Murray
00:20:03
They have a lot more patterns there.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:20:05
To a guy like me because, you know, I'm I'm looking for pattern recognition.
Lee Murray
00:20:08
Right? That's right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:20:09
Yeah. For, you know, yeah. I'm looking for what's going on. I kind of know to ask, I know I need to ask about this role. I need to.
Lee Murray
00:20:15
Ask.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:20:16
This function. I need to ask about procurement. I need to ask about working capital. I need to ask about who opens up and closes at at the end of the day. Who does the cash runs? If you have cash runs and walks it to the bank? Right. Because these are all places where leakages can happen. And so as an owner, you may not be aware if you're relatively new, you may not be aware or you could have established a process upfront with somebody you hired two years ago and they're just not following it anymore. And so you're assuming that things are happening according to XYZ, but they're not in reality.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:20:48
So back to as where we started, which is a process map and a process audit. And that has to start from whatever zero is and to whatever the finish line is, where product goes out the door and gets paid for, or where service gets completed and gets paid for. Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:21:04
And I like that idea of a map. Like a visual map? That makes sense. Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:21:09
Yeah. I mean, and you may even want to diagram out a visual map, right. And you can start with pencil and paper. Right. I like to complicate things and try to use AutoCAD. And there's 10,000.
Lee Murray
00:21:19
Tools.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:21:19
Yeah. Yeah. To you know blah blah blah. Download an app click through stuff. Pen and paper works fine.
Lee Murray
00:21:25
Just draw it out. Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:21:26
Just draw it out. Right. So you you want to understand what's that process. And then who are the people and what are their responsibilities within each of those. And are they doing what they're supposed to be doing. Right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:21:38
Basic questions like that. Because the next step is after you've kind of had those conversations with the owner and you've got the owner view on how things are supposed to work or how they establish them, you know, time, you know, months ago or years ago now you want to go talk to the actual people doing the work. You want to talk to the employees, talk to the front line employees and the managers and ask them, right. This always goes back to the classic, hey, I'm going to show my age here. I'm in my 40s, I don't care, you know that, right? The Office Space movie with the consultants to go in and talk to the guys and say, tell me, what is it? What is it that you actually do?
Lee Murray
00:22:16
What is it that you do here? Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:22:18
Tell me what you do here. And then, you know, whatever. There's there's comedy scenes that come after that. But that's the point is you're trying to understand how do they spend their time if they're spending it effectively.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:22:30
And remember, it's not always to to kind of, you know, hit people over the head with, oh you're wrong. It's more like you might be doing something better and faster because, hey, by the way, you were doing this for a year and you're like, this is a fast one. So I just do it like this. But maybe that didn't get communicated to the person who runs the afternoon shift.
Lee Murray
00:22:49
Yeah. So it's like fact finding.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:22:51
You come in in the morning and you figured out a way to do it and you do it, and then the person comes in at 3:00 on shift change, and they do it a completely different way, and they screw it up. And every morning you have to fix what they did. Yeah. And it's not getting, you know, and then maybe the manager doesn't feel empowered to correct, you know, employee one versus employee two and have what is a difficult conversation because you've got people who are doing things differently, and now you need to get on the same page.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:23:17
So somebody's going to have to say some feedback. Somebody's going to have to say, okay, great, I've heard from everybody and now we're going to do this. Right. If you don't have a manager who's empowered to have that conversation and who and who has the right tools and who knows the boundaries of what they can change, what they can't change, what the implications are of the changes. Are there cost implications, are there scheduling implications, are there legal implications. Are there customer service implications. Are there downstream? If you do it this way and it's not ready by 5:00, well then XYZ the person who comes after you doesn't, you know, show up after 5:00. So that means it really kicks it to the following day. Yeah. So then you've got three hours of dead time or something at the end of your day when things could be happening, but they're not happening. So once again, I've just ran through kind of random examples. Right. That's right. Mapping out the process, committing it to paper and then talking to the people and seeing if the people's actions map the process as intended.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:24:19
That applies everywhere. Give you another example. I worked for when I was at McKinsey and company. I worked for Walmart on a a retail operations study to optimize their vision centers and their pharmacies. Okay. Vision centers and pharmacies are heavily regulated businesses. Right. With health care delivery, you know, through optometrists and ophthalmologists and then through, you know, I'm sorry, pharmacists and pharmacy techs, pharmacists are the ones who have to review the prescription and do what's called adjudicating the prescription, ensuring that it's accurate. It fits with the insurance. So they're going to get paid. It's it's it's relevant to the patient's profile and all the information, all the P-2 information, the PII, the personally identifiable information name, address, phone number, social security number. member. Right. And, you know insurance membership number are accurate. Then they put that downstream and they give it to a tech who's then going to go fill the fill the bottles from the big bottle to the little bottle. Once again I'm just giving really random.
Lee Murray
00:25:23
All these steps are important. I mean, everything they're doing is important, but that's where you can find issues, right?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:25:29
Because so you know what I'm going with this is I optimize pharmacy operations for Walmart, which is A3000 plus network of pharmacies. But every state has different laws, so there's different constraints that you have to work with. So first it involved me spending probably about a month worth of a month worth of human time, right person hours, man hours, standing in pharmacies, observing, watching people do their job right. But I don't even know what to observe at first. So day one is let me just watch and figure out what's going on and let me ask some questions. Now I've got a day under my belt of watching this. Let me create a template or some kind of map where I can start counting tabulating, right? Looking for deviation between what's supposed to happen. Quite frankly, what happened yesterday and what's happening today. So you start with a blank sheet of paper. You get some information, then you go create a template.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:26:27
For now you know what you're looking for. Now you go and you count, or you observe and you observe specifically what you're looking for. Yeah. Then you go and you do analysis. You find patterns.
Lee Murray
00:26:38
Okay.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:26:39
You set hypotheses. You say, look, I think it should be happening like this. Now let me go and test and see if it's supposed to happen. Like if it is happening like that. And let me see if it's happening like that in Mississippi and Tennessee and Minnesota and Oregon and Connecticut. Oh, it's happening in different places. It's different.
Lee Murray
00:27:00
You're going to find a lot of interesting stuff about that. Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:27:02
What's going on? Is the training the same? Is the communication. The same is the role and responsibility. The same is the job description. The same is the, you know, all of it. So that's just an example on vision on pharmacies. Right on vision centers. It was a similar thing. So I say all that once again to give an example of whether it's a 3000 plus location network chain.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:27:25
You're going to start by doing observations on the ground in a single store, and then you're going to develop a hypothesis of what's going on and start to compare that to what should be going on or what the plan was supposed to be. Then you're going to go and look for deviations by geography and by location, and try to find all the drivers that could be driving these variations. Is this tenure of the employees? Hey, if you get folks anybody less than five years, they just don't have the chops yet. There's high turnover. It's just it just happens the way it happens. But you notice that after someone's been there for five years they get in the groove. They understand the constraints. They work within the limits and things start to level out. I don't know, it's just a hypothesis, right? So once again, I'm bringing this I'm describing all this right as an example of how you do it for lower middle market companies. But at the same approach and problem solving methodology applies whether you're big or small.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:28:24
Yeah. When you get big the complexities now start to be consistency. Right. And and manageability. Meaning if I'm the owner and I'm really adamant about things being a certain way, I can control one store. I got to show up every day and do it, but I can probably even control 3 or 5 stores because I can split my time going to different stores and checking in with people and being present and giving them support and reiterating and repeating and ensuring that it goes the way it's supposed to. Once I've got 25 stores, 50 stores, 100 stores, and I can't be in 100 stores even in a year, I can't touch 100 stores. Well, then, now you need process. And that process has to have incentives and and kind of penalties on it because, hey, if you're not there to observe, then people are going to do what they do and people are people. They're going to find the way to get the least amount done right and get the most amount of credit. So you're going to have leakage.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:29:24
So you've got to have systems, you know, systems.
Lee Murray
00:29:26
It sounds it sounds like to me the key here is if it's not the owner operator that is doing this inquiry, because sometimes it won't be, but I think for a lot of people listening, it will be the founder CEO. it's about being curious and being objectively curious, almost. It's like looking for patterns. And so am I right in saying that. Because if they don't hire someone like you, that just gets it. Like, I mean, you have all the patterns built in, like you just come up with the right questions. If they're searching to find the right questions. Is that really the how they should be? The thinking should be when they go about trying to find issues. because I think that they can't they probably can't launch off into this big study of their company. They probably have to take one, you know, piece at a time. And, and you mentioned, role descriptions. It triggered in my mind.
Lee Murray
00:30:20
I, I've seen a lot of, companies that have a lot of issues with people because of role ambiguity, where it's not clear what I do when I do it, who, who I'm connected to, and all this stuff. So just that one specific thing could take up a lot of time to go in.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:30:37
And hugely important finance hit the nail on the head, right? Roles and responsibilities are the most basic thing. I like to use this.
Lee Murray
00:30:45
Okay, that'd be a great place to start. Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:30:47
Yes, I like to use the sports analogies with folks because it's relevant in a lot of at least Americans get it right. It's like, you know, if you're playing football, right, there's a quarterback, right?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:30:58
Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:30:59
The quarterback can throw the ball right. Somebody else tries to throw the ball. Guess what? There's a flag. It's a penalty. Yeah. Right. And you know, and furthermore, you know, that's an extreme. But you know, and you run plays.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:10
Right. And when you run a play, people have to run their play. They have to play their role.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:14
That's your run the route and your role.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:15
You have the responsibility. You got to block this person. This person has to get open. You got to throw the ball to them. That's right. Use any sports analogy that is a team sport.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:24
Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:25
Okay. Because people have to play their roles. In soccer, if the striker is running back to to play defense, when you finally do win the ball in defense of position and then you kick it forward, the striker is not there. You go nowhere.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:39
That's right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:40
Right. You got to stay in your position and play your role. So people often I find in small businesses they have ambiguity. Just as you said. It's not clear. It's oh well. And the mentality is like we're a family, like hunky dory. We all help each other out. Everybody helps and everybody does everything. So like, it's all good.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:31:59
Everything's going to get solved. Yeah. Guess what, folks? You're not a family. No, that's a that's that's the wrong way to think about it. People come to work for a paycheck if they enjoy their their coworkers and they have a good time. You know, then they'll be happier and they'll be better. But it's not a family. If you stop paying them, they will stop showing up.
Lee Murray
00:32:20
They will stop being part of the family.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:32:22
Just that.
Lee Murray
00:32:22
Simple.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:32:23
And so therefore you've got to put the roles, you've got to specify the roles. And actually people are dying for that specificity. Yes.
Lee Murray
00:32:32
Because they because it's empowering.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:32:34
It's empowered. They want to know what good looks like is one. Yeah. So if you want to be clear on this is what good looks like if you do this list of things in this ways or in these orders, you will be good by me in my eyes. And by the way, here's the things that are kind of not negotiable. And then here's the things that are maybe are negotiable.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:32:53
But you need to know that clearly. And why is that important? Because it allows work to be handed off between team members and sets expectations. Yeah, right. If the expectation is when a customer comes, you know, if there's four people on the shop floor and when a customer comes in, the expectation is everybody's going to help them. Guess what? Either no one's going to help them or everybody is at the same time, and the customer is not going to like it. Yeah, because now they're on bombarded. Hi. How are you doing? Welcome in. Hi. How are you doing? Welcome in. Oh, well, I you know, when I was, when I was halfway in the store, somebody over here said hi, help them. And now I'm in the back of the store and somebody came from the. Oh, hi. How are you doing? Welcome in. Yeah. Like, dude, you know.
Lee Murray
00:33:32
Let.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:33:33
Me let me shop.
Lee Murray
00:33:34
Right. Once you guys get on the same page.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:33:37
So, so so that's just an extreme example. But you know, that's that's that's what people want. They want clarity of roles. It sets expectations for who's doing what when. It also helps with, you know, quite frankly, when things go wrong. Because when things go wrong you can go to where did they go wrong? Oh, they went wrong in step. You know, five of 17. Okay. Who's the lead for steps one through six? Let's go talk to the person who's on lead for steps one through six. Because it went wrong in step five. Now we can figure out what happened. Oh, I was tired today. I'm sorry I made a mistake or. Oh, I didn't even know we were supposed to do it that way or. Yeah, you know what? Step five is really dumb because it really waste my time on step six. So I always skip step five. Yeah, and they don't even know the implication that the person who's responsible for step 12 is like, I keep getting this incomplete thing and I have to work with it.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:34:27
Why is it always like this?
Lee Murray
00:34:28
It's amazing how many times I've seen that play out in companies where, you know, the right hand doesn't really know what the left hand is doing, and just fixing a few things could really have a lot of impact. if I'm recapping here, here's, here's the way I would say it is, you want to look at your operations, map out the process, you want to ask, you know, intelligence, smart questions like. Curious type of questions. You're you're gathering data. Looking for insights. You're looking for patterns that will usually, if you know your business pretty well, are going to stick out pretty quick. and then you want to analyze that data, whether it's actual spreadsheet data or, you know, qualitative data.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:35:12
It could just be a set of quotes and, you know, and statements that you're taking.
Lee Murray
00:35:16
We're just talking to your team because that's going to be part of it. what how does all of this wrap up like how how does it what does it all, coalesce into.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:35:26
So great question. Right. So that's accurate. It's a good way to synthesize. Right. The, the the process here is you start with an open, curious mind asking genuinely open ended questions like, how does this work? Why do you do it this way? I'm not accusing you.
Lee Murray
00:35:40
That's a good. That's a good point. Yeah.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:35:42
Right. And then you're going to get a bunch of data. Now you're looking for patterns and you're looking for comparing it to how things should be. You as the owner, you probably have an idea of how it should be. If not now, you should think about it. Well, I heard how my employee one does it and employee number two doesn't play number three. What do I think is best? Right. What cost me money or what costs me management attention. Right. So now you've got all this body of data and now you're looking for you're probably in that. And throughout the process you will start to get ideas about. All right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:36:15
It seems like this is where the breakdown has happened. There's probably a breakdown in communication.
Lee Murray
00:36:20
Usually.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:36:20
Breakdown in execution somewhere. And those two things are the heart of all problems.
Lee Murray
00:36:25
Because of communication. Execution breaks down because of communication.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:36:29
There you go. And the communication might break down because someone assumes that something's supposed to be, you know, the world is, it is. And somebody else assumes the world is a different way. And you haven't talked about the fact that we're both assuming a different facts onto the same scenario, right? So the super simple coffee shop example is like, hey, at the end of the, you know, shift change. Certain things are supposed to happen between the 3:00 and the 4:00 people, but they don't always happen that way. And the 4:00 person doesn't even know because they've only ever worked the afternoon shift, and they never know what opening looks like. And so they don't realize that they've left 45 minutes worth of work for the opening person in the morning. Yeah, because they just don't know.
Lee Murray
00:37:15
Then it goes back to role description. Because in your role description, if you knew that at the end of a shift you have to fill out this checklist, then the checklist will get done. Will to make the handoff. So you know what your role is. You know what's that's part of it. It's going to get done because it's part of your role. So there's lots of things that are going to come to.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:37:36
That's exactly right. And so here's the here's the extra layer of complexity that that you know, can happen there is that you might have that checklist And. And you might have basically someone who's like, I don't like doing the last two items on the checklist because they're dirty and I and it's smelly.
Lee Murray
00:37:53
I just don't want to do it.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:37:54
You know, I have to go to the back and take the garbage out. And there's always dark and scary, so I just don't do it. Yeah, right. And so there might be a difficult conversation that needs to happen, which is now the owner or the manager has to say, look, I've noticed that you're not doing the last two steps on the checklist.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:38:12
That's not okay. Right. Maybe their reason is valid. They're the only person closing the shop at the end of the day. And the dark alley where you have to throw the trash out is scary, and they don't feel safe. And so. But if you don't have that conversation, you don't know. So now you can talk about solutions. Do I need to put a light outside. Do I need a, you know, have a protocol where you ask the the neighboring business to walk outside with you? Yeah. And throw the trash out. And it literally takes 60s and some politeness. Yeah, right. But but until you. So if the manager's avoiding that difficult conversation because they don't want to deliver the negative feedback, which is you're not doing the last two things on the step. Yeah. That's two steps on the process. And that conversation never gets had you know. It might be that like, you know, every day now the next morning the person who opens has to take the trash out and do x, y, z.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:39:07
And they're 20 minutes behind getting the coffee started and getting the stuff out of the fridge and setting up the milk bar. And the first customers that come in are always a little rushed. And you and your morning rush.
Lee Murray
00:39:18
It impacts revenue. It impacts the culture. It impacts everything.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:39:22
Yeah, exactly. And really, like you said, lastly, the culture, it might be that the morning folks are just grumpy because they always have to do this and they think that they shouldn't be. And you just don't know it. And that's why you like get complaints. And so unless you drill down to the who's taking the trash out basic level detail. You don't know and you're sitting with my labor. Cost is too high and I think I need to cut staff. Yeah. And the real solution is the real solution is you need to have a couple uncomfortable, uncomfortable conversations with two employees.
Lee Murray
00:39:56
To address.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:39:57
The issue. And you've solved it. And now everyone's happy and everyone's dancing in the shop, and customers are tipping extra.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:40:04
And everybody's happy now. And it wasn't, you know. And that was. And that was going on.
Lee Murray
00:40:08
That's awesome. That's a perfect way to wrap this up too. I mean, I think that's the whole kind of audit in in a nutshell. So thanks for that. Thank thanks for being on. This has been an awesome conversation.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:40:19
Fantastic. I'm happy to be here. Hope, folks, take something away. And you know, I can be more helpful on a lot of other topics than, you know, just coffee shop operations.
Lee Murray
00:40:28
Yeah. That's right.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:40:29
Please, please reach out.
Lee Murray
00:40:31
Well, definitely. And you're clearly passionate about what you do. You obviously have a lot of knowledge about it. So we want to send people your way. Where do we send them?
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:40:40
Absolutely. Thanks for that, Lee. You guys can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Ryan Drake Leigh. Please search for me and send me a line. Reach out. That way we can set up a consultation and explore what you're facing.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:40:53
Or you can find me at RDL consulting LLC. Com so RDL consulting, LLC. Shoot me an email. follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram. I share, you know, wise tidbits about challenges facing first time business buyers and first time business sellers. you know, and generally my perspectives about macro and micro economic issues in the US, across a variety of topics. So I'm a I'm a business and econ nerd. I share my nerdiness with the world and, you know, looking forward to helping you.
Lee Murray
00:41:29
Well, you have a home here. Excellent. Thanks again, and we'll have to have you back.
Ryan Drake-Lee
00:41:36
All right. Lee, I appreciate it. Talk soon.