Perfecting your Processes with Ari Meisel

Ari Meisel has been called the world's most productive man. He has consulted across the globe, written books and built large companies from his home through his ability to create awesome processes.

Here’s a glance at what you’ll learn from our discussion in this episode:

• It’s more about always improving the process than actually having the perfect process!
• Ari’s Optimize, Automate, Outsource guiding principles for getting things done
• We can’t simply train people, we have to help them learn it
• When and what to automate (and what not to)

You’ll love Ari’s wisdom and be able to put some of his ideas into practice right away!

You can find the resources and access to Ari Meisel on his website at https://lessdoing.com/ or reach out to him at VoxWithAri.com

If you’re ready to transform your entrepreneurial frustrations into freedoms by cutting through the chaos and using frameworks that help you run an even better business and enjoy an even better life, simply go to:   www.Mohr.Coach

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Transcript

Ari Meisel  00:00

Most training, like the vast majority of training, is actually in place to make up for bad process. If you ask me, yeah, because what you have is like, oh, let's, you know, let's say it's a bank teller, and you have a process for how they sort of taking checks or sort checks or deposits, or whatever it might be, yeah. And then the trainer is teaching the person and they're like, okay, but you know, sometimes it's going to be a social security check, right. And in that case, you know, then you take the stamp from over here, and you do this, you do, this definitely doesn't come off that often. But this is how you handle it. And those kinds of things are the things that trainers train, you know, they're training the idiosyncrasies, which has value, but not when it's making up for bad process, because a lot of those things simply should be part of the process.

Pete Mohr  00:45

Hey, it's Pete, and welcome to another edition of the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast, designed to provide the tips and tools that help you cut through the chaos of running a business, transforming your frustrations into freedoms for your business, and life as a leader. And today, I had the opportunity to speak with Ari Meisel. And Ari is one of my coaches, our he came up with this whole framework called OA, which is optimize, automate, and outsource. And from that perspective, we're going to dig into that conversation. But he has such a interesting mind. And he's known as one of the most efficient people in the world and really helps people through their issues and automate things and make sure that things are rolling, and just really outstanding kind of ways of simplifying your business and making it run better. And that's what this whole podcast is about. And that's why I always love talking to Ari. So we'll dig right into the conversation. Mr. Ari Meisel, it is a pleasure to have you here today on the Simplifying Entrepreneurship podcast.

Ari Meisel  01:51

Well, thank you for having me, it's

Pete Mohr  01:52

always good to see up. Yeah, and it's been a while since we chatted and so happy you could come on here. And some of the stuff we've actually talked about in past podcasts have been around some of your concepts, too. And I know you and, you know, Kayvon really well. And in fact, I was introduced to Kayvon hrough you at one of your conferences and Kayvon and I do a bunch of stuff together. And he's been a guest on the podcast a few times. But we talk about a lot of the stuff that you know, some of your foundational stuff, and really excited today to go over the idea and to talk a little bit about your newest book on productivity, and one of the chapters in that book as well. And that's called perfect processes. And for me, this is what really got me interested in Rmi, zelle, when we, you know, the whole OAO and all of the other stuff that we can dig into a little bit here in the podcast today, but from your prospective RA, and it's something that I know you've done so much work on and really a thought leader on this. How do you develop perfect processes?

Ari Meisel  02:50

Well, so the first thing is, understanding that there really isn't a perfect process, necessarily, yeah, you're pretty close, you can get pretty close, but by the very nature of the way that we create, or that I believe that we should create a process, you really can't ever get to a finish, which is a little frustrating, I think sometimes for people but the truth is, is a productivity is a journey that has no end to it. Right, we can always do better. And that doesn't mean that we need to be obsessive about it. And like you know, not do anything other than perfect our process. But it is an important sort of thing to understand that we're never going to have a process where it's like, Alright, that one's done, you know, and like, now we can move on human mind. It's this constant arc of optimize, automate, outsource, as far as I'm concerned, that's how I've always taught it. That's the framework that I've really based everything on. And that order, is what's really important. So we look at optimizing for me, optimization is really about looking at what we have now. And the way it works, or doesn't work now. And fixing it sort of usually sort of taking things away, not necessarily bringing in extra resources, but paring down to the bare essentials. And really what makes the process as clear cut as possible, which is not that obvious. Because it's not wait, no. And so the way that most people will create a process, or actually the way most people will share a process because creating it is, you know, fine, but it's actually using it the matters. Yeah, oftentimes, they'll show somebody how to do something, whether it's in person or a screencast, or something like that. And they'll ferret You know, that's the process, you know, like, go ahead and do it, or even worse, which is they'll just sit down, they'll write a checklist out like a Google Doc, and they're good to go. The problem is that most people are really bad teachers. And more than that, when you've done a process multiple times, you very quickly lose sight of the shortcuts that you naturally bring to the process that are mnemonic that are heuristic, that have nothing to do with anything that you wrote down on a piece of paper or showed to that person. So inevitably, when somebody does a process in that manner and they give it to somebody else. There's going to be mistakes, there's going to be frustrations, and oftentimes people just abandon the process. Now they are just going to do it the old way or my way. Yeah. Which defeats the whole purpose

Pete Mohr  05:09

is that where you're sort of lying in there was around, we can't simply train people, it's better to have them learn it.

Ari Meisel  05:15

So yeah, that's a really big one for me is there's a big difference between training and learning. And we waste a lot of time on training. And most, most training, like the vast majority of training is actually in place to make up for bad process. If you ask me, yeah, because what you have is like, oh, let's, you know, let's say it's a bank teller, and you have a process for how they sort of take in checks or store checks or deposits, or whatever it might be. And then the trainer is teaching the person and they're like, okay, but you know, sometimes it's going to be a social security check, right? And in that case, you know, then you take the stamp from over here, and you do this, you do, this definitely doesn't come off that often. But this is how you handle it. And those kinds of things are the things that trainers train, you know, they're training the idiosyncrasies, which has value, but not when it's making up for a bad process, because a lot of those things simply should be part of the process. And that's the big difference, right? They need to be part of it. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about it as learning or you set it up for learning, rather than training, what you're doing is you're basically giving someone the framework or the foundation to deal with the process as a sort of a baseline, something that should be happening without an issue, because realistically, a process should be able to run without any problems to it. And then that human beings should be able to add their value by learning maybe a better way to do it, or, you know, whatever other element they need to bring into it, whether it's a human touch, or whatever you want to call it. But a lot of times they're just become these sort of human button pushers, which is doesn't serve anybody.

Pete Mohr  06:44

And that's interesting piece there, too, when you talk about the humanality of it. And that's where we come back, and maybe it isn't perfect, and things need to be changed. So you know, and that's the beauty of that human interaction where they are seeing things that might need to be altered to make it even better.

Ari Meisel  06:59

Yeah, exactly. And they can't do that if they're bogged down by a crappy process.

Pete Mohr  07:04

And so that's the first one, right? You want to optimize all of your stuff and get it all set. What's Up next,

Ari Meisel  07:09

right, so then once we optimize, now, we're looking at automation. And automation is my playground. And I love looking at automation. Because one of the coolest things about automation in general is that the rate at which technology improves and, like expands, it's just so fast and everyday that you do and, you know, there's the things that we had to have a human being do a week ago, you know, today, some free app that was posted on product time, like can completely do it for them. And I want to point out to people, the whole idea of replaceable founders, we're not trying to fire people and replace people with machines, we want to replace them, but not out, we want to replace them up free those people to do the higher level work that we know that they can do. I love that framework. Yep. With automation, we're really looking at triggers and actions for the most part, what happens here then needs to happen over here. And so much of so many people's processes, like right now that you've got going on like today, you could probably automate a large, large portion of those Eve and I know that people are going to listen and be like, oh, but there's this specialized super, you know, unique thing that I do, and that my team does that nobody else could possibly do. And it's just you've never looked, you're not aware. And you're wrong, you know, and the thing is, is that I actually take a really extreme view on this, that once you identify, especially as a leader, right, if you own a company, if you run a team, once you identify an inefficiency, meaning like, Oh, I figured out a way that this can be automated, but a person is doing it, I believe that you have an absolute fiduciary duty to remove that inefficiency, because it's cruel at that point, to allow a human being to do work that a robot or a piece of software could be doing. Because in essence, at that point, you're dehumanizing them,

Pete Mohr  08:52

they want to feel like they're contributing and all that sort of stuff, too. So if we can take that off, then essentially, we look like the hero in that situation. And they're feeling so much better about it. And they can contribute in so many other ways that are going to bring to the business.

Ari Meisel  09:05

Exactly. And ways that you're not even aware of, yeah, next step, right. So now once we've optimized, and we've automated, that is the first time really that you should be looking at outsourcing. And as you point out that most people reverse that, and a lot of times, they'll just take this sort of knee jerk reaction. And they say, oh, there's a problem, an issue, they don't want to deal with some automation, some tasks, that is minutia, whatever. And the immediate question is, I'm just going to, I'm going to give this some of them and find some way to do this. But it's the same problem is that you're basically taking inefficiency, and you're just sweeping the dirt under the rug, right? It doesn't get rid of the problem. If anything, a lot of times, it'll make a lot worse. So if we've optimized and then we automate whatever is left at that point, if there is anything left at all, because we can automate so many things, that's when you're really in a good position to start outsourcing. Or delegating, same, same difference, because now it's sort of teed up right? The ball has That and that person can now spike it and be the hero

Pete Mohr  10:03

from your aspect. I mean, I know you were one of the founders of a VA firm and all that stuff, and I know how much you outsource things. But there's sometimes where we're in sourcing or what I call it in sourcing anyway, we're actually delegating it to our internal team. And then there's other times where we're outsourcing things. And can you tell us sort of the difference around that and why you would use one and not the other. And when you would use one and not the other

Ari Meisel  10:26

day, by day, like, you can outsource so much more that you would originally have thought that you might have had to, you know, in source or keep in house, yeah, there's just so many people with really great skill sets that are willing to work on a contract basis. And if you have really good processes, you can do that, you know, you don't need the person that knows how you like your coffee, right? If you have it written down how you like your coffee, like, it sounds like an oversimplification, but it really is that way. So there's a really fun, an easy exercise that I like to put people through that illustrates which should be which for them. So you just take a piece of paper, and you put three circles on it. And the first circle, you write down three to five things that you're really excellent at, like you're the best there is brainstorming, negotiating whatever it might be. Yeah, leading, right, whatever you wanna call. The second one is the thing is that you're competent, but not excellent at maybe that's writing, or content creation, maybe it's financial productions, whatever it might be. But the thing is that like, you can get it done, you can get it done good enough. It's not efficient, you don't really love it. But it's, it's something that you have to do. And then the third circle is the things that you're really bad at, but you're still doing them. bookkeeping is one of the ones that comes up quite often for us. And then you look at those three circles. And what we invariably find is that first circles, clearly, that's what you should be focused on. Obviously, the middle circle is typically the people that you want to have in house. And the third circle is typically the stuff that you just want to straight up outsource. I have some ideas about why that is the case. But it just seems to work really well that way because that middle column the things that you're competent at, typically those are things that they're important enough to the business, that you're spending time on them, you're doing them well enough, but it's not efficient, taken away from other things, it's just very likely that those are going to be things that you want to have someone in house working on, it doesn't mean that it's an employee necessarily, right. But just somebody who you have sort of a long term relationship with, yeah, a long standing

Pete Mohr  12:21

when we use in house that in house person could be across the world, but it's just that regular relationship that we're talking about, right?

Ari Meisel  12:27

Correct. Yeah, somebody who you would consider a part of the team. Hmm.

Pete Mohr  12:31

Love this whole idea. It's one of the main things that brought me to you several years ago, love the whole concept. And we're always working on perfecting our processes and such an important piece of every business, I think, why don't you tell people how to get ahold of you, if you'd like them to, you know, reach out to you and learn a little bit more about Ari Meisel?

Ari Meisel  12:53

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So everything is on my website at less doing calm, the books, the former podcasts, the programs, coaching, all that kind of stuff. But also I like to make myself accessible for the right kind of conversations. So people can actually head over to www.VoxwithAri.com and asynchronously communicate with me directly about whatever your biggest productivity challenge might be.

Pete Mohr  13:18

Yeah, I love that. And I mean, that's how we talked this morning. I love Voxer. It's one of the ones you introduced me to and we use it within our team. When we were talking earlier today, that was how we connected and I just wonderful tool. So so much to learn here. And our he's got a great site over at less doing.com lots of great content and stuff there too. So thanks again, Ari, really appreciate your time and look forward to having another chat with you down the road. Cool. Thanks

Ari Meisel  13:42

a lot.

Pete Mohr  13:43

All right, make it a great day.

Ari Meisel  13:44

You too.

Pete Mohr  13:49

Well, I always enjoy my chats with Ari. So think about today, you know, what can you do to put these sorts of things into action? What can you optimize? What can you automate? What can you outsource, and outsource or insource or delegate? You know, as we looked at that thing, we talked about that in the conversation, you know, where do you start? Well, you always start with optimizing what you need to do first, if you try to automate something that's not optimized, it doesn't flow in the right manner, and tends not to work. So when using these formats, just think about it. And you can write those down on a sheet of paper, roll through it, and really just lay things out so that they become a system. And when we have systems, things really work well, not only for us, but for our teams and for our businesses. So love the conversation today. hope you did too. And looking forward to having Ari back in the future as well for some other great conversations. It got so much to talk about. So we'll have them back maybe in the new year as well. Think about what you could do to put those things into action so that you can have an even better business and entrepreneurial life after All you lead your business, it shouldn't be leading you Always remember, clarity creates confidence and confidence ignites momentum. And I think the conversation today will really create that confidence and create that clarity and be able to help you drive momentum in your business. So if you liked today's episode, please review it and rate it and share it with your friends. And most of all, subscribe to the podcast so you can hear future episodes. For more information on my coaching and leader programs, visit www.Mohr.Coach can email me directly at Pete@Mohr.Coach. Just connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook as well by searching Pete Mohr. Thanks so much for spending some time with me here and with art here today. And until next time, make it a great day.

15:55

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