Jon LoDuca—Stop Reinventing the Wheel: Build a Better Business Playbook

Jon LoDuca  0:00  
So I tell my clients if they're running on EOS, for example, or any other business operating system, they probably have KPIs. And I tell them, let's be pragmatists about this. Go fix something broken. And if you can solve for critical path, lead gen, lead conversion, or fulfillment, they're going to carry you around like Caesar on their shoulders when you solve it. So don't pick something on the sidelines. Go right at something that's going to make a major impact.

David Bush  0:27  
Welcome to the Business Builders Playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind predictable revenue growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by BDR AI, the AI-powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting, so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right, welcome everybody. My name is David Bush, and I'm the owner of BDR AI. And today I get the distinct pleasure to be your host and moderator for this exciting conversation. It's going to be a live Q and A for those people that are here live. If you're watching a recording, we're glad that you took the time, and you're going to want to take the time. You're going to want to put down all the distractions and really focus in on today's topic, and that is stop reinventing the wheel. Build a better business playbook, and today I have a now a new friend. I would consider him to be a friend. We've been in the ecosystem together of EOS and just really in the ideas of so many different things that we've done in our past. And I get a chance to ask the questions that you took the time to register. I'm going to be asking your questions, and then we've got some really good content that we're going to be sharing with you. And if you don't know John already, he spent the last 20 years helping growth-minded entrepreneurs and high-performing leaders to identify, package, and monetize what makes them great. Think about that for just a second. Take a deep breath and think about helping growth-minded entrepreneurs and high-performing leaders identify, package, and monetize what makes them great. And through his business playbook builder, he helps businesses capture and share core processes, training, communications, videos, links, attachments, QR codes, and the best practices so teams can execute with more clarity and consistency. And today, I get a chance to talk to him about some of the changing times and some of the things that need to be let go of that used to be good, so that they can go out there and get the great stuff. So, John, thanks so much for joining me today.

Jon LoDuca  2:28  
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. And when you talk about us, it really makes me. It sounds good coming out of your mouth. You're you're hired. Actually, for everybody who's listening, what you don't know is, yeah, David and I have become friends. We've been talking. This is like the continuation of a conversation we started like a few months ago, so it's fun to see you and do this live because it's crossed my mind a few times. We're bounding into some territory that'd be fun to capture and share with others. So thanks for doing this. I'm delighted.

David Bush  2:53  
Yeah. Well, before we get started in the Q and A, I'd like to just have you give everybody a brief introduction as to what it is that you've been doing for the last couple of decades, and why you're in this position that you're in today, really capturing and documenting the unique information and data collection that you think is so powerful for the future.

Jon LoDuca  3:16  
So a long time ago, I worked for a really fantastic software company, a small Midwest group, and I was employee number 12. I was just really lucky to be there. We crushed it. We sold it for a quarter of a billion dollars in two years. Well, this was such a culture. This was such a neat community that we get together and have reunions, and I just loved that culture so much. I thought I would try to figure out what made it work, and I built a business where I didn't have to be the smart guy at the room because I really didn't have the pedigree to be the fancy consultant, and I wasn't a process guru. It just happened that process got in our way. We were trying to grow top line, and we were trying to scale best practices from entrepreneurs. That well, I think it's a normal problem. You can't see or read the label when you're inside the jar. And I got pretty lucky. I wound up with a client that turned out to be he ended up running a major institution, and I built it was Lincoln Financial, and I ended up being his buddy and partner, building a practice management process for him, and it put me on the map in a big way. So I got to work with amazing entrepreneurs, and again, in that posture of humility, where I was just there like a like a newscaster or like a like a journalist. Like, what are you doing? How do the values drive your choices? And we started the map process, and it got in the way. We realized, wow, if we could transfer what this guy knows into everybody else's head around here. We could take over the world, and that's what we set about doing. And so I did a lot of hand-hand combat, several 100 interviews, 10s of 1000s of hours spent in the trenches. And along the way, we built a software company. Got popular in EOS. And and I get you know I get to serve a lot more people through a software platform now than as a consultant. Yeah,

David Bush  5:06  
so good. And I I've heard so many people rave about your platform and what it is that you're doing. I've seen companies that have transformed their business processes because of the way that you have set it up and made it easy for them to To scale and duplicate, and you know, coming from a background of playing football, as soon as I saw the word playbook, I was immediately boom. I was like, "Dad, you're speaking my language." And our our show is called the Business Builders Playbook, and that's what we like to share with people of how to build a better playbook. But I think it was you that we were talking about having this session. Is that you you said this the phrase leaders need to just stop trying to reinvent the wheel and they need to build a better playbook. I'd like for you to talk about what does that mean to build a better playbook in your terms and how is that different than just documenting processes and procedures.

Jon LoDuca  6:00  
There's a few things I'll probably repeat myself in this session. One of them is process is a verb, not a noun. It's alive and it's ongoing. And a lot of people have a paradigm of like, yeah, we write these things down, like Moses with the tablets, and we stick them somewhere, and then we're done. And if you played football, you know, you didn't just show up on Sunday or Friday night and give it a whirl because he had a playbook. Like that's not exactly the same thing as a a team practicing, drilling, being able to call plays, being familiar with the landscape. There's a huge gap in understanding in the small business arena, and mainly it's because the people that taught this stuff are almost all dead, and they brought their great ideas to the marketplace. They wrote their books, they did their seminars, all before the advent of technology at the pace and change and AI and all the transformative things that we deal with today. So, process from the textbook standpoint is document, but process in 2026, it's running along with a team and keeping a conversation going. It's a ongoing evolution. Process isn't a noun. It's not a thing. It's a verb. It's something you do. So the playbook thing resonates with me too because teams that have playbooks win.

David Bush  7:17  
Yeah, and they're always changing. I mean, in sports, you know, there would always be additions to the playbook based upon the competition, and now the competition is constantly shifting because of AI and because of new technologies and things of that nature. So, more than any time before, the word process is a bur.

Jon LoDuca  7:36  
I think that's absolutely the case. I um, I think we often neglect when as a factor in considering these things, like what we're talking about or how to do things. But you have to think about when. Like we're living through an amazing kind of transformational age. ChatGPT crossed this crazy threshold in February of this year. It's really the first one that they've they've they've noted it wrote itself now. So we're at that inflection point. We're at the elbow of the exponential curve. They're anticipating, you know, AI becomes superhuman in just a few years. They're out kicking the expectations of its capability. We're all experiencing that. Maybe most of us in technology are seeing it sooner, but it's it's already encroaching, and then collapsing into that is the largest wealth transfer in the course of human history. We've got the silver tsunami, so we've got all these amazing veteran, you know, members of the community, the working public exiting, leaving behind, you know, all the wisdom they take. They they walk out the door with it. So the old ways of doing SOPs and hoping we've got it aren't enough, and there's not been enough of a conversation about capturing that before it disappears, so that we can continue to stay relevant in an age where AI might move faster, but it does not understand the human dynamic. People do, you know, people do.

David Bush  9:00  
Yeah. Well, I know that there's going to be people coming in from different phases in the process of building a playbook. There's obviously people out there that don't have any playbook, and they've got everything in their heads of a few people. And then there's the people out there that actually have written down some, you know, steps, and they've got a training manual, an operations manual, or or something. They've you know watched or read the book E Myth and listen to the videos, and they've that that process has kind of become important to them. And then there's the people that have actually adopted this idea of process as an as a verb, and they're actually leveling up and they're turning their playbook into an actual asset that has you know long term residual value as well as becoming a multiplier to their exit value, because now there's this dynamic platform that they're using to train their team and attract talent. So let's talk a little bit about what are some of the common problems, maybe for each one of those categories. The person that doesn't have a plan or doesn't have a playbook, there's obviously. Common things there. What are some of the pains that you see there?

Jon LoDuca  10:03  
Yeah, well, I think there's an old. There's this. I think it's an African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, bring others. I think most small business owners, you know, they're technicians, guys like me, maybe like you. You know, you get into it because you can do the job, but then you realize you've you've gotten a little busy. You hire somebody to help you with the stuff you stink at, like your taxes or answering the phones, and then you come to a place where you've got to transfer stuff that you do, and it gets like, oh, how am I going to do that? You know, and you go to another level. If you don't do that, you become the permanent bottleneck. So the person who hasn't done any of this, they may be a vending machine for best practices in their business, and there's no escaping that. There's no selling that business. There's no scaling that business. If you want to take a vacation, you know you're bringing your laptop. Like there's no freedom in that. That's not being a business owner. That's that's you know having a really crappy boss. It just happens to be you, you know. For the folks that have done this stuff, I think the frustration that I see most commonly is they read the books like you. They've been exposed to this. They take it seriously enough, but they've not been lied to. They've just been given half the truth, and so they've got documentation in five or six places. It's sitting in some software they're paying for they don't use. It's sitting in a binder nobody's cracked into and forever, and they're wondering if that was a heist. Like if this whole thing's a boondoggle, like why would we bother? By the time the paint dries on this crap, everything's changed. And I think again, that's the paradigm. It's not a noun. You're never done. You don't summit this mountain. You're just always doing it. I think you know, looking at business historically, there's a secret that kind of gets missed. A lot of, I think, a lot of companies believe training and communications internally for driving adoption and engagement, having a basically a coach. That's what big companies do. It's how small companies become big companies. It's actually a considerable advantage for a small company to invest in this proactively if they're really taking it seriously, to have somebody be the glue between best practices and driving adoption. And a lot of companies figure, oh well, you know, we'll get around to that when we're really big, and then they find they can't get there. So if you've got stuff and you're wondering why it's not working. If you're listening to this, thinking, you know, I got things in somebody's software. I don't know what to do with it. We can't seem to get anybody using it. You need a who, not just a how. You need a person to drive this and own this responsibility and use data as a accountability tool. I love the Great Game of Business. You you probably read that. Did you ever read that book? Haven't yet. Oh my gosh, Jack Stack, fantastic book. His whole argument was, if you brought everybody behind the curtain and you showed them the financial mechanics of a business and brought some profit sharing into the mix, you could turn everybody into an owner mindset. It's a great book. You'd really love it. Just the way you wired, you you should read it, but yeah, Mark Dender, give me some yeah yeah you'd love that yep Jack Stag and he's like got a following. It's kind of like Gerber. There's a whole worldview out there, but but the idea of bringing people behind the curtain and arming them with the tools to be excellent is is not a it's not a new idea. It's actually a very old idea. We just kind of lost it, you know. We've just let that one slide while we're all running around with our hair on fire. But for the business owner, a little bigger, a little more mature. They've done some documentation. This is how you level up. You you you you go from I have it to we're using it. Someone's driving adoption and engagement.

David Bush  13:38  
Yeah. So why do you think that business owners and key executives continue to avoid leveling up and building a better playbook. Is there a reason that stands in their way that's common? Is it because they don't have the who, or they just don't feel like that it's valuable because they have done it and then it needed updating and it just didn't become as valuable as they thought it was going to be? Tell me the truth about what? Really, I think it's.

Jon LoDuca  14:01  
I think they've been told something that's wrong. Those those books from the 80s. I love Michael Gerber. I've met him, spent time with him. Look, Sarah making pies. Are you serious? Like that stuff doesn't change. Like today's world's really different. You know, we've got technology that's different, consumption habits that are different. People don't want to read SOPs. Nobody wants to write them. People are consuming content on their phones. They're running around. Things are changing, and so if you if you adhere to that, like gurus of process, you're you're standing there holding an empty sack. You've got to acknowledge the fact that learning is a cultural thing, not an event. That's a it's a verb. It's not a noun. Again, and also this idea of there being a who, I honestly believe for most of them they figure we'll just get through the process thing and then angels and fairies will come and make everybody smarter. You know they'll find it in the cloud or whatever and that'll be great. No, they don't. I thought bad. I mean, God, I've done so many of this stuff wrong. I mean, when you're my age and you've been around. Doing one thing for a long time, like trust me, every stove I have touched, every stove. I was the $20,000 a day guy you'd bring into some Fortune 100 company, and we got it wrong. We thought you get the CEO telling a story, and you get this amazing process of how he does yada yada. We'd put it in the cloud, and people would find it. Not at all. You got to bring the water to the horse. You know, I don't know. You just daughter got married. I've got like you know kids at home who are young. My daughter's 12. I have like 30,000 photos of her. I don't go through them all the time. I just keep taking more pictures. That's pretty rampant nowadays. If there's no mechanism for me to continue to interact with those pictures, I'm not going to see them. They're just going to accumulate in the cloud, invisible to me. The same thing with process. Somebody's got to drive it home. That's that's a key.

David Bush  15:54  
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Jon LoDuca  17:29  
Yeah, I've seen small stories. I've got a friend of mine owns a roofing company, and they only had about 60 people on the team, but they were doing really well. But he was; it was time for him to sell, and a key determinant of the value of that business was they did not need him physically there holding that place together with duct tape and bubble gum to make it run. So he sold it for a lot of money and is enjoying a really nice second career, young guy. So it is a not a fallacy that the way a buyer looks at a business is through the lens of risk, and they can de-risk that investment. It's worth more to them. And if you've got to be on site, you know that's dangerous. That's a black box, and so having a playbook is a huge determinant with that. But on the other side, story where you know this is a large organization, 2500 people, a lot of things going on. They're ESOP, right? So employee owned, 75% turnover. The gals in HR were ready to like pull their hair out. Janie Gandy, this is at Russ Davis. Janie Gandy sat herself down. She made playbooks for every single type of job in that organization. 150 playbooks in 90 days and dropped the turnover 75%. Those are like numbers you can eat. You know, there is a dollarized implication for stuff like that. And if you can truncate onboarding, you know, we call it speed to utility. How fast can I get a newbie locked and loaded? Man, that those are real numbers. You are paying somebody 100% of their salary, you might be getting 60% yield for a year because they're picking up stuff through osmosis. Not efficient, but if I can get somebody locked in, crushing it quickly, man, that that's fantastic for an organization. They did this in 90 days because somebody owned it, understood the implications, and drove drove it home. Really great story, and one I like to tell. She earned, she earns the praise. Not us, Amish. That lady made it happen, and that's what it takes. Somebody has to own it.

David Bush  19:30  
Yeah, yeah. Dean just commented for all the live participants about your TED talk in the world of AI. EQ is the competitive advantage. What can people find on that TED talk? What are they? Why is Dean raving about it? I haven't seen it yet.

Jon LoDuca  19:45  
I don't know, but I'm grateful, Dean. Thanks, man. I had kind of, you know, I sat in a board of an AI company in 2016. So while this stuff was totally theoretical, I'm watching DARPA videos and reading white papers. I mean, none of us got our hands. I knew this. It was just all kind of speculative, but these guys were working on something. It was a DAO, a decentralized organization for gig economy workers. I can't even tell exactly what they were doing. It was way over my head. But I was in there, and I got to contribute. And while I got exposed to this stuff, I saw what was going to happen, and I knew that we were going to end up cutting out a lot of the routine activities, and it was really kind of concerning to me. It's, it's, you know, I hate to say it. This was 2017. I gave the the TED talk. The the stuff is proving to be kind of accurate. It came after soft skills faster than I thought, but the truth is, I still argue we are going to have a craving, and there will be a huge economy for the authentic human dynamic. I I can tell you right now, I can create a lot of slop in AI that looks pretty damn good. But there's some other aspect of the human dynamic that's sacred, and I believe that's how we'll be able to be competitive. Is we'll be good at selling stories, we'll be good at communicating with people, we'll be good at connecting with others. All the things that make us frail, our emotionality, you know, all the things that we would try to do away with with softwares, you know, like let's do a perfect version of John. He never forgets anything. He never loses his temper or he gets emotional. You know, he's just this this perfect. They've done it, and guess what? It's actually the things that make us human, that make us valuable to one another, and I argued that that stuff in a business setting would be a competitive advantage if you could capitalize on it. So today, I really talk about the same idea being company wisdom, this invisible asset all over the organization. That if you get your hands on it, it's a marked advantage over the competition. I'm a 16 year old kid in my mom's basement. I can make a playbook for a company like yours, David, overnight. I can just type in prompts and make up all the SOPs, couldn't I? But you've been at this a long time. How long you been doing this? Years, right? And you know what you're doing. I'll never catch up with you. I'm 16 years old. I have no practical experience. I just stole a ladder. I borrowed these SOPs, but I wouldn't know if something was off base. I don't have the actual practical wisdom like you do. So if you could take your wisdom and turbocharge it with some capability, some technology, you'd be dangerous. So that's the opportunity for a lot of entrepreneurs. They can't outpace this technology stuff, but there's something human on the table that we can capitalize on, and it's in our each other. It's in the people on the team. Yeah, yeah. Well,

David Bush  22:30  
that the gal that that you gave the the story about is that she did 100 plus playbooks.

Jon LoDuca  22:37  
Yeah,

David Bush  22:37  
and so there was either a lot of pain, or there was a lot of pleasure, or maybe a little bit of both that led her to do that 90-day sprint, because that did not come without sacrifice. She must have took some time to really dedicate to it. So, talk a little bit about some of the, you know, hidden and and unhidden cost of not having a good playbook, and then talk about some of the things that you're seeing that are very like concrete, tangible benefits that we could just share with the group, and then let's get into what it's going to take to build a better playbook.

Jon LoDuca  23:12  
Yeah, sure. So the the the downside of these, or the risks of not having one, are are the day to day chaos that just erodes quality of life that lashes a business owner to to the business. You know, if you find yourself, you see that guy out in the sun with his laptop. You know, that's not real freedom. You know, he's back in the hotel room while those kids are at the pool or whatever. That's what that stuff looks like. Handoffs that are crummy, client experiences that are compromised, inconsistency at scales of frustration. You know, you run the business so well when it's five people. The market loves you. You try to grow, and it collapses in the weight of a paradigm that's not accurate anymore. You used to be the interface with clients. You do the handoff to people who don't really know what they're doing, or don't do it with the care and conscientiousness of you, and then you eat the business alive by by ruining your reputation by losing those opportunities for growth. It's it's such a frustration. They hit a ceiling because they just can't seem to play telephone game and keep the line tight. There's loss of key people risk, and with the aging population, this is a scary one. You know, you you know the deal. You're running 100 miles an hour. You got three or four people that know what they're doing. You're like, awesome, go do that. I'm going to work on the dumpster fires over here. If one of those people leaves, it could take you years to recover. You don't have any documentation. They walk out the door with 20 years in their head. You'd rather they stole, you know, office furniture and a laptop, then leave with all that stuff in their head. I think that one of the characteristics that's happening too is the valuation concerns. You know, people aren't just buying businesses on financial documents anymore. They're they're really doing the due diligence about how transferable is this business with this owner out of here, and one of those dynamics and. So you know, everyone should be thinking about an exit. There's no exit on a business where you are the reason for the business. Pretty common sense. All this stuff, I think, is common sense. That's not the problem. I don't think anybody listening is like, I never thought about the importance of process. Everybody gets it. It's the tyranny of the urgent and a failed premise that has led them to be frustrated, and it breaks my heart because it's very easily remedied. But everybody has the wrong idea, and that is the subject matter expert, the person who does the job, is asked to document what they do, and it's never ever going to happen. I'm a grown-up. You're not going to get salespeople who are in the top of your company to sit down and write down their processes. Come on, they're busy and they can justify not doing that busy work because they're making sales happen. The 30-year veteran, he's got a lot of responsibilities. That's why he's been there that long. He's really good. You can't get him off the line or out of the field to do that kind of work on his own. And so the big fallacy is we know process is important, but the way we've been taught is broken, and nobody suggested an idea that's kind of common sense. I did the job, and I'm just transforming that into an operating system, a process. It's not just the software, David. It's you need a who, you need somebody whose job it is in the organization, like Janie, to go out and get that IP, that wisdom out of the heads of people, and make playbooks. And it's kind of cool. Jamie's quite a gun. She's like a real trainer in that company. But I've seen it work with a junior marketing person. It doesn't have to be a high-level person. I used to do it. I was dumb as a box of rocks. I was sitting with these seven-figure, eight-figure dudes, 30 years doing something I'd never ever done. My job wasn't to coach them or teach them or try to convince them to do it a different way. Right? All I was there to do was understand it. And by being ignorant, they had to teach me.

Jon LoDuca  26:52  
It was a perfect marriage. I got them to slow down. They had to teach me, and we filmed them. Simple as that. I'd walk out with the video. Go, hey man! Thanks for the two hours. The guys just poured over into what he does and why he does it, and then it was for us, like the builder side of it, the person who collected it, to sort it out and operationalize it. We turn it into a corporate asset. So, number one, if you're frustrated, it's not your fault. Process like abandoned you. You didn't do anything wrong. It's just you've been taught wrong. You haven't been told the whole story. And number two, if you do want to get this right, if you're the person on the phone who's trying to drive this, you need three things. You need a person who's running a playbook. They know what they're doing. They have a they have an approach or methodology, and they got a platform that drives you know an organizational alignment. If you don't have those things, you're going to be frustrated. If you got documents in the cloud, nobody's using them. That's why. Yeah. If you can't get a thing started, it's probably why as well. The you can tell that fires me up. The truth of the matter is, I don't think anybody did anything malicious. It was just most of the messaging out there was by people who hadn't done it, hadn't done the work, looked at it theoretically, and thought, well, of course that makes sense. It just isn't real for a small business. It's not tenable. Yeah,

David Bush  28:12  
yeah, yeah. We talk about the importance inside of doing business development is that you got to have a playbook. You got to have a place that you put the spaces, the pieces of the puzzle, the list, the you know profile, the online presence, the messaging, the offer, the follow up. All that stuff has to be documented, or it just becomes a bunch of random, you know, acts of business development. And that's what happens, I think, with playbooks is that it's random acts of playbook building, and it's not consistent. That there's not anybody that's being accountable to it. So, like Stephen Covey said, accountability breeds responsibility. So, having that who that actually sits in the seat and is responsible for the what, the when, the why, the where, and the how, that's where this oftentimes begins to gain momentum. So, let's just talk about. Can I comment on something though that's really

Jon LoDuca  29:00  
relevant here. I worked with you, and you raced me up the learning curve. Absent that, I would have been adrift. It was such an advantage to have your wisdom poured into my team to use your software and to be able to exploit all the capabilities to get the mindset right. And that's exactly that knowledge transfer dynamic, you know that's exactly what I'm talking about. Somebody's been up the mountain can kind of shave off weeks or months of your learning curve and really protect you from a bunch of knucklehead mistakes. That's invaluable. If I'd never met you, I might have never gotten access to that. I know your model is now like this is a huge advantage. This kind of wisdom and methodology. I think it's tremendous, but it's exactly the kind of dynamic. It's turning that into a playbook and making that scale. That's the the opportunity. Yeah, I wanted to underscore how important that was for us.

David Bush  29:54  
Well, I think that all of us know, and you know, put a one in the chat if you've ever heard the term. You know, the experience of others compresses time. And so, you know, when you're working with the playbook builder, you get a chance to do onboarding sessions. Amber, right? Is it Amber?

Jon LoDuca  30:08  
Amber does that. Yeah.

David Bush  30:09  
Yeah. So I attended those sessions, and she gives you the structures of what you need along the way to give you those next steps. And then now you also have certified playbook builders, where you actually have people to actually come in and guide people through that. So, let's say that I'm working with a playbook builder support team member, whoever that might be. What's the first thing that they're doing with me to help get this thing turned into a active verb process versus being this overwhelming project that's still a noun.

Jon LoDuca  30:42  
I always recommend that a lot of this stuff is political. It's highly visible, and driving adoption is an art as well as a science. And if you pick a playbook nobody cares about, you can expect to be on some desert island working on a kind of a worthless project, and you won't get the time, you won't get the resources, and you won't get the visibility necessary to keep going, so you got to pick something big. You got to shoot for the jugular. So I tell my clients if they're running on EOS, for example, or any other business operating system, they probably have KPIs. They probably have metrics or a scorecard numbers that govern how the business is, you know, moving along, how healthy it is. And I tell them, let's be pragmatists about this. Go fix something broken, and if you can solve for critical path, lead gen, lead conversion, or fulfillment, they're going to carry you around like Caesar on their shoulders when you solve it. So don't pick something on the sidelines. Go right at something that's going to make a major impact, and in doing so, you will lift a lot of enthusiasm for the project. It seems safer, you know. You pick off something kind of private, something over here on the side, but it exhausts everybody because no one is that excited about it when it's done. Go fix sales. Go squeeze the top salesperson to get him to teach how he closes these enormous accounts. That becomes a corporate asset, and that team goes nuts. They are excited about Playbook Builder. It's like a galvanizing event for the team. And what's so much fun is they see their own people in there. Like trainers are typically top-down mouthpieces for corporate-sanctioned content. We look at it as you are harvesting out of the field. You're getting your best people teaching how they do what they do. Man, that's so cool culturally. It's like, look at that lady in accounting. She's a she's a genius. Or that guy in sales. I had no idea that they were doing that stuff. That's amazing. Like to be able to surface genius that's in your team and let other people see how we how we respect that around here. It it creates a we feeling for a culture. It's really powerful, but that's a few of the ideas. You need a person to go do it, and that's that's the key, though, David.

David Bush  32:55  
Yeah, that whole that whole power about you know is it Peter Drucker that says you know culture eat strategy for lunch.

Jon LoDuca  33:01  
You bet.

David Bush  33:02  
If you can take that playbook and that can it can actually transfer your culture with your people, right? And there was a question in the chat about: Are you saying that everyone in the accountability chart, kind of using some EOS terms, is actually responsible to have a playbook? No,

Jon LoDuca  33:20  
not necessarily. I'm not. I'm saying you could do that. You could have every seat on the AC be a playbook, and we we could toggle like a playbook for a seat or a playbook for a process. That's a distinction that clients have drawn, and we like to see that. I think that's smart. This came from Dean. But value proposition number one is you target the areas that are going to move the needle on the scorecard. You start working your way around the business because every time you're in some kind of a L10 or quarterly, some kind of team huddle, the problems in the business are usually a who or a how. It's usually a person that's screwing up and malfunctioning, or a process that's broken. And Deming would say 80% of the time it's a process. So to give the person the benefit of the doubt, let's go find out what that is and go fix it and get that flywheel effect. You know, you'd see happening.

David Bush  34:14  
Yeah, maybe we could evolve the term better planning and processes and playbooks prevent Poor performance in the 7p's.

Jon LoDuca  34:24  
Yeah, I was going to go on a T-shirt. Yeah.

David Bush  34:27  
Well, I know that there's you know a lot of individuals right now that are thinking about okay, so now the the art is in the start. I'm going to tackle an individual pain point or a problem. That's it. And I'd love to see it in the chat for those of you that are Participating live, what is the pain point or problem that you think a really good playbook would solve? I'd love to see just a collaboration from and make sure that when you do submit your answer, that you put in everyone rather than just host and panelists, so that everybody gets a chance to see your feedback. And so if you've navigated. Way come back and throw in your comment. If you're watching a recording of this, put it in the comments. Let us know what it is, the pain or the problem that you feel would be the best one to tackle as you kick off this particular process. And then let's while those responses are coming in, we can come back and reference those. But what do you think are some of the most important areas that every growing business should document if they want to reduce chaos and scale what works.

Jon LoDuca  35:25  
Yeah, I like critical path. I like lead gen, lead conversion, fulfillment. That's an elegant place to start. Marketing, sales, and fulfillment are going to cover the waterfront. If a business has got a backbone to it, that's the main areas. Everything else that's a problem grows out of that. If you solve that, there's cash flow and there's there's capability to solve it. There's no reason to have an HR department if you don't have employees, and the only reason you do is because sales got it right. If sales gets it wrong, everyone's in danger. So those are the things I focus on: business survival first, and then we go pick off things like how do we set the thermostat on the weekend?

David Bush  36:06  
Yeah, the ARE, right? The acquisition, the retention, and the expansion opportunities that come from it. You nail those things, and you have a process for doing them, and you do them consistently. You've got something to measure, you've got something to improve upon, and now you can set new quarterly rocks towards what are the metrics that we need to improve. Yeah, Stephanie made the comments. Playbooks allow business owners to hire confidently. That's a good. That's a jotter downer. Nice job on that. Yeah,

Jon LoDuca  36:33  
that is a good one, Stephanie. To add to that too, because I love what you said. It's 100% right. It's also talent attraction. Like I want to work for a company was a clear path for my success. I'm not winging it, and I'm not chasing some guy around for feedback or breadcrumbs of how to do my job. Like, what a marvelous environment to say like we can get you to six figures in six months, or you know you could be mentored by a best person. Seriously, I get to hang out with your best person. No, no, no, no, no. He retired last year, but we've got playbooks, so you're not having to figure this out. That is a really cool way to say to some young person who wants to be great: we have a path for you here. So I love that. And yes, when you have playbooks, you've de-risked the investment of a new hire tremendously, shortened the amount of time for them to kick it, and you've worked the kinks out, so you don't find out that they're off target after six months of neglect. You know that's how we do it. We fire hose them in the break room, and we learn later that they're on Facebook all afternoon. You know, or they don't know how to do their job, or they missed the mark on a number of things. Playbooks make it really easy to drive success with those folks. It's really good for getting a good night's rest as an owner. Yeah, good, good, good.

David Bush  37:46  
Well, there's definitely people that in the EOS world would GWC this particular role and own this particular process of evolving and improving the the playbook. So they get it, they want it. They have the capacity to do it. My question is, and this might be a little bit, I don't know, my own bias, but yeah, there's some people that just geek out on this stuff and overdo it. Oh yeah, like they're process minded, and so the the playbook becomes this, you know, montage of opportunity, and it's just this huge. Even even if it has video and all this great stuff, it's like it's not consumable. So how did how does the software how does your staff make sure that somebody that geeks out over processes and documentation doesn't drown the the other team members? Well, the first thing is, a

Jon LoDuca  38:42  
lot of times what we see is the wrong people are asked to play this part. Quality assurance people are outstanding at process in that regard. They're not really very good at building content that gets consumed for training. They have kind of a bias towards volume, and so the first thing is the person in that seat. We call them a builder, and we provide coaching for them so that they actually learn to get a credential. So they learn how to do this job, and they're confident in what it takes. The second thing that's critical is we coach them that there needs to be a real clear metric, so you're you're not just building to build; you're building for outcomes, outcomes that show up in a scorecard. So if there's a state A on metrics for area of the business, and the gamble of changing behavior and training folks should deliver a state B, we ought to be able to track and measure that. And once you get focused on that sort of pragmatic approach. We want to move these numbers. It it sort of orients and focuses what kind of content you're building and the emphasis, which is you know not on building, not on geeking out, on driving adoption and engagement. This is a change management effort. So there's only three reasons to do process. Number one is for decision making. That's the classic stock photos of people standing at a whiteboard. You've seen them. How do we do this? G shucks, and they're standing around. They're pointing. They got stick up. All that crap. That's for senior leaders to figure out how to do it. Make a decision and make a call. It needs to leave that room though, so the chassis of the process becomes the the foundation for training. So everybody else, the followed by all equation, everybody else can get in line and execute. And the last bit, and this is a sidecar, but innovation. Like, where do you think that's coming from? It's not always coming from upstairs. Sometimes it's down the shop floor, and you can't capture process and innovation unless you have the chassis and the foundation. And so the third reason is really to be an innovative organization and build that flywheel where you're pulling it from the field where people are having breakthroughs, packaging it into new training and pushing it back out again. So it's this sort of you know the cycle, this innovation cycle, but yeah, it's it's a it's a common misunderstanding. More isn't better. You're trying to drive an outcome. That's why marketers weirdly make such good builders. They just understand the pragmatism. It's like engineers make crappy websites, David. They can't discern what's important. They put everything they know on the website. You've been to a website written by an engineer. You give it to a really good marketer, and they they do hierarchies. They use metaphors. They use images. They've picked the right things, and they're very judicious to get you to get the big idea and move forward. Call to actions are a critical piece that marketers understand. Process people typically don't think that way. They think documenting is the job. It's a change management initiative. You need a marketer's mindset.

David Bush  41:54  
Yeah, absolutely. I like that. And if I was thinking about right now, like I want to put building a better playbook, and I want to get really specific about goals and rocks for the next quarter. What's John's course of action? If you were to nail that down into you know the shortest amount of steps, I don't know who said it, but it somebody said that every extra step you add adds a degree of complexity. So a 12-step process is much more complex than an eight-step and a four-step. That's right. That's

Jon LoDuca  42:25  
right. Exponentially. Yeah.

David Bush  42:27  
So talk about what does that look like if I was to go out there and say yes, I want to build a better playbook. Show me thy way, John. What does that process looks like? Look like so I can go out there and capture the genius of my best people before it walks out the door, it gets things documented. There's accountability attached to it. What's your coaching on that?

Jon LoDuca  42:49  
Yeah, well, let's assume they have somebody picked. If they have a builder, this is the workflow. Scorecards off track, the bells go off. We don't know if it's a who or a how, so the builder goes and just inspects the situation. They look at the playbooks. Are they being used? Has anybody been in there? Are they current? Is there even a playbook? I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to rip somebody's head off. Why are you doing that? And I realize it's my fault. I never told them what was expected or gave them current training. That's often the dynamic. So that person, the builder, then creates new content. So they update the playbook, they create something from scratch, they remediate what was broken, and then they reengage the community of users. They drive adoption and engagement with the content. They measure to affirm that they've been through the updated training, and then they track those lag indicators in the scorecard. So really, it's a cycle. They're not going to do this once. They're going to do it forever, and it's an ongoing thing. But you pick the thing that's on fire in the scorecard, and you go, "Let's go get to the bottom of that. Let's go figure out who the subject matter expert is, who can talk about it intelligently, and then let's fix it, and then let's teach it. Let's ensure everyone's been through it, and we'll track the metrics, and we'll know it's working. It isn't actually a difficult workflow. We we have analogs to it in business, but we've taken those people off the payroll. You know, we used to have managers. We used to have a middle layer. This is that necessary piece. That person who takes a strategic problem and brings it to a tactical level resolution. That's

David Bush  44:29  
it. Wow, I

Jon LoDuca  44:29  
like it. Sounds like

David Bush  44:30  
a good plan. So I know that in your technology, you've incorporated a lot of different mediums in there. You've got videos, you've got attachments, links, QR codes. I'm curious to know: is is there a a balance that you like to see in terms of how much video, how much you know download, how much is there? Is there any process or equation that you could use to give somebody a better structure for their playbook?

Jon LoDuca  45:00  
I'm I'm I'm reluctant to say you have to have this and you have to have that. Suitability wins the day. So if you got a bunch of engineers, you might need more you know fact finder type content. If you've got guys out in the field doing stuff with their hands, you're going to want videos of people demonstrating how to do stuff with your hands. Suitability of medium is a way of thinking about this. So matching it used to be this big idea of different learning styles, and it's been debunked. That idea I bought into it. I thought that was appropriate. Certain people learn certain ways. It's not true. Certain situations merit certain mediums. Need to teach how to think through a problem. You need a you need a decision tree. You're going to teach somebody how to do something on a piece of equipment. You probably ought to put a QR code on it. It's going to be emotional and nuanced. It's probably going to merit having a video. If it's a software that you're walking through, you're going to do a screen capture video of a software. So all those widgets, you know, we ended up adding them to the software, and of course we would because every time we ended up with more and more clients, they kept asking, like, "Hey, we've got to be able to solve this problem." We realized there's a spectrum of types of learning, and in addition to the situations, you also have to think about. Now, I'm not trying to make it complicated. When when is the learner learning? Is it the first time they've ever made a pie, or is it the 50th pie and they just can't remember one ingredient? So you've got to think about that too. Your community might be a bunch of veterans and you're trying to tweak things, or you might have a whole bunch of newbies who've never seen one of these before. You might have to think about tiers, you know, and different content layers, so that folks can find what they need fast. I'm out in the field. If it takes me an hour to go through a two-hour training just to remember what kind of apples go in the apple pie, man, I'm out of there. I'm asking a buddy, or I'm going to do what I did my other job. So it's got to be instant gratification in situ, out in the field wherever I am, and it's got to be bite-sized so I can just snap in and get out of there. The old days, you know, learning management softwares, they came out of academics. They came out of academia, and they had the same academic premise, which was your folks were going to sit in the cloud, they were going to learn crap, they'd be in there for two hours, they get like a little certificate thing, and they know it, and they would do it forever, over and over again. And it's totally wrong. It's why those things fail. The premise is not tenable in a real life environment, and so bite size matters. Thinking about your learner matters, and thinking about the problem they're trying to solve. You know, is it a physical thing? Is it a lot of reading. It's compliance oriented and matching the right medium. So the answer is it depends, which is a weasel answer, but it really does depend. Somebody's got to have a heads up, David, and be able to look at it and go, well, what are we doing here? Who's the learner, and what are we trying to teach them, and make a decision. That's why a marketer that mindset is so valuable. Somebody who says, "Well, I got a bunch of crap over here. I'm going to throw it into a software." They're never successful. The person who goes, "What are we doing though?" They'll make good decisions. That that's a trust I have in them, and I'll see creativity. I'll see you know people enlisting teams for role play videos, really creative stuff to solve the problem. It's really neat.

David Bush  48:24  
Yeah. Well, I want to land the plane here with a kind of an assessment. Maybe you could kind of walk us through if you were to give us all guidance on how to grade our current playbook. What are the critical success factors that you're looking at, and and if you were to you know break it down into five critical success factors, here's the five things that I would be looking at inside of a playbook, and you could grade it you know A, B, C, D, or F on the academic side of things, and you know knowing what knowing what your report card is today is just a starting point. It's not that you're a bad person. It's just today is who you are with the current circumstances that you have. And now let's cast a vision for. I want this playbook to be better. And how would I define it to be better if I don't have a metric or a vision system?

Jon LoDuca  49:18  
I think the first things I look for, I look for videos of people, senior leaders, talking about the importance of this initiative. And when I don't see that, I know that some poor team member got thrown this project with no oversight, no endorsement, and probably not a lot of executive support. Just one of the first red flags we look at is like front row looks like somebody got this dumped on their plate. They don't know what they're doing, and no one's helping, or no one's invested in their success. That's number one. Number two, I like to see that why behind the how. I like to see the wisdom that led to the procedures, so that when someone is learning the ropes, they're also getting layers. Of wisdom, values, culture those things that bring them closer into the company's heartbeat. When you get apprenticed by somebody, you get that stuff. When you get a bunch of SOPs thrown at you, you don't. I look for completeness of playbooks. You know, are these 80 playbooks that are all 10% done, or did somebody meticulously and thoughtfully say, "I'm putting these things into a hierarchy. These ones are getting crushed. We're going to just crush these ones." And I can see that decision was made because one or two playbooks have like real stuff in every step. I look for a spectrum of asset types. I do think that there's often a visual appeal to that, like, hey, this is cool. This thing's got life in it. There's a picture of David in there. There's a video of David explaining something. I also see that someone's made some decisions, so there's some variety. When I see like one video, one step, one video, one step, I know they just dialed it in. They're like, all right, fine, one video, I'll put video. But instead, if I could tell somebody's like, "There's a whole conversation about what email to use," maybe I should attach the email as an example. Like when someone's thinking like these are little kits and you're handing them off with everything the person needs, I can tell they're they're being meticulous. It's it's a seat. It's it's not a it's not a thing you do for five minutes. I mean, it's why it's like a job for somebody because if you deliver on it, everyone's rowing in the same direction. The business is scalable, it's sellable, and it's defensible in the loss of a key person. It's worth doing, but it is like saying, you know, if I bought a marketing software, what would I see in there that's working? It's like, well, a lot. It's a big deal. It delivers upside potential that far outweighs the cost of the software. Right? You'd say the same thing. So same problem. You'd want somebody to take it and run with it. Same idea.

David Bush  51:55  
Yeah. So I got leadership. Leadership in the videos, top-down demonstrations or explanations, putting a little power into it from the top. The the why behind the how. Yep, getting a little bit closer towards the purpose behind the project. Completeness, how how complete and how thorough. Variety, making sure that there's balance and different options available for people, and then actually having that person that is the seat owner that owns that responsibility is that a good report card? If you would,

Jon LoDuca  52:28  
that was pretty good, Dave. You could be a builder. That was that was good. You synthesized a process on.

David Bush  52:32  
So now I'd like to know if if I'm in a if I'm in a position and I want to get I've heard the quote many times that says that in which they create, they take more ownership. I can't. I don't remember the quote exactly. So how do you get this to be owned by an individual who, where you've got the accountability, but it's all back to us, and it's not to hey, I'm just going to make this playbook because I'm going to make John, you know, more rich when he sells PlaybookBuilder.com. How do you get them to take ownership so that they can actually? And in the in the what I'm thinking of it here is is that a person that actually wants to grow in their organization or grow in a position, they immediately would be fearful of if I document everything that I do, they can replace me, or they're thinking of it as if I can document everything that I do, I can actually train somebody and I can go to the next level so that somebody can replace me rather than replace me for a good option for me, not a bad option. So, talk a little bit more about how do you get that involvement and make it to not to be something that it's like if we document it, you're basically more disposable or expendable.

Jon LoDuca  53:53  
It's a great question. I've learned a lot about cultural shifts and dynamics. A players hate one thing; they hate being on B teams. I've never met an A player that was like, "I'm going to be stingy with what I know." Those are the signs of B players. Those are the guys who are stingy because they feel like you know they can be replaced if they gave up their their how-to manual. A players don't think that way. There's something else going on in their heads, they want everyone to do better because the chaos of being dragged into fixing crap or teaching subpar employees erodes their confidence and harms their productivity. I've never found A players to be stingy. It's a sign I've got the wrong person, frankly. If I get that kind of pushback, I go, "Uh oh," get somebody who's petty or afraid. I'm not trying to take anything away from them. It's just that's not the sign of an A player. And the person whose voice I want, Don Chamberlain, is a good story. So Don was a top producer in this financial services platform. 125 reps. They were like the largest independent tax firm in the U.S. U.S. Second or third, I guess they were USA Tax, and they sent Don out to Chicago for us to lobotomize him and put everything in a playbook, which we did to great success. 124 other reps got better, and then the number two guy to the number 20 guy started bitching. Why? Because nobody asked them what they do, and they do stuff that's better than Don. And I thought, oh shoot, this is going to go hit the fan, and it's going to be a calamity. I was just young and stupid. We got their stuff too. They did do things better than Don, and it became a mosaic of best practices. And now I had 20 advocates. You know why? Because pride. Because the guys who have their stuff in there love the fact that they do, and they're proud of it, and they want to bring their buddies in, and they love Playbook Builder as an initiative because they got to share their stuff. And so you wind up with this huge adoption dynamic because of galvanizers who are A players sharing their stuff and making damn sure their buddies see them. Because yeah, you know, I'm in there. I'm a celebrity around here. And so we learned a lot about what is actually going on culturally in a lot of organizations. But that thing about like people being afraid to put their stuff in there, yeah, it's true. It happens. It just happens with people that probably shouldn't be in a playbook anyway. Not to be rude about them. Not to say they don't have a justification. You know, everybody you know should be creating a ton of value, but people are really exceptional at what they do. The real subject matters in your business, it's not even on their mind.

David Bush  56:30  
You get me excited, man. So let's talk about somebody wants to work with Playbook Builder. Where's the best place to go to get started?

Jon LoDuca  56:37  
Oh God, we'd love to help, and so we like to do this sort of hand to hand. You can go grab an account, but the best path would be to work with one of our people. So you take a demo. Someone will work through like you know risk reward. Is this right for you? What does it look like? Help you. We have job description for the builder, so you can bring somebody on your team and go. This person fits that, and and give them this responsibility. Then we train that person. So we're kind of like geeks for this stuff, and I I'm passionate about helping, and so the and it's not like a sales pitch. It's just the truth is, this is such a key to unlock an opportunity for a small business, and if we don't help small businesses, we're going to see our talents collapse. People are going to be exiting and not not able to sell, and we're going to see you know people getting crushed by AI. So it's an urgent pursuit. We want to help small business, and if they don't know how to do this stuff, and I do, we're going to share it for free. So if they get on the phone with somebody, they're going to get an opportunity to really learn, know what this looks like and takes, and then we don't go good luck. We run with them. We hand hold. We make sure they're successful. We do free webinars. We do everything we can to knowledge transfer to them. There's a playbook in their account where we teach. I mean, we do everything we can do to de-risk this, so that they don't have to pioneer a new pathway. We have certified advisors all over the country, and they're smart as hell. They learned our methodology, and they can come and do the work for you. I mean, there's a million ways to take advantage, but most important thing is everyone agrees this is very, very valuable. I think I can say the old cliches about you know if nothing changes, nothing changes, or if it's that important, you'd get it done. A lot of people buy a bow flex or a Peloton and hang their dry cleaning on it. The truth of the matter is, most of the mistakes that I see are because the wrong people think that this is their job. An integrator in an EOS business is way too busy to take on process. This needs to be a junior person with clear leadership from on high, but it needs to be a junior person, and that's usually what gets people stuck. Small teams are like, "I can't do this. I'm the founder." Of course, you can't. And so, if they can just get their head around the who, it unleashes this capability.

David Bush  58:55  
That's great.

Jon LoDuca  58:55  
Yeah, it's the message I'd want to leave with. I, if I could leave anybody listening to this, you know, podcast, like, what's the most important thing he said? I'd say don't worry, someone will interview you and get it out of your head. Somebody on your team, a junior person, would probably love to do that, and they can film it on a phone. You got a really nice camera in your pocket, and you got really high quality video done, and that is the easiest path we teach it. Yeah. Well, man, I am so excited that we got this recorded, and I'm glad that people were here live to

David Bush  59:30  
participate. If you have some feedback, put them in the in the comments now. Go to playbookbuilder.com. Learn more about how this technology is transforming the world of business and helping business owners and their team members to elevate and delegate and escalate a lot of opportunities into. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to be all the 18 words, but we're we're excited about what's going to come out of this thing. And I I just like to leave everybody with a question. That is, if you were to hand me your playbook today, and I was to come into your organization, would I be able to win with your playbook? And if I lose, what's the cost to you, right? Because that's the that's the transition. Whether you are, you know, delegating it, handing off the business to family members, whether you're trying to sell it to a new owner or you're becoming an ESOP, but if you don't have a playbook that's going to help the next generation win, that's an opportunity that is designed for opportunity to scale. So, thanks everybody. David, I appreciate you, and we're looking forward to the next time we get together.

Jon LoDuca  1:00:39  
David, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. Great questions, and I appreciate your hosting. Really do. Thank you.

David Bush  1:00:46  
Thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders Playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building predictable revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with BDR AI, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's highest-paid prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us at BDR AI. Until next time, let's keep building.