#334: Organize Your Chaos, Get Your Business Out of Your Brain, and Increase Equity Value with Chris Ronzio from Trainual

Ep.#6 [THEME SIX]

In order to turn your business into a machine that has sustainable, predictable, and transferable cash flow, you have to get your business out of your brain. I know–easier said than done.

Most business owners don’t want to do the same thing twice, let alone sit down for long periods of time documenting their SOPs or writing out step-by-step how-to’s. That’s the problem today’s guest set out to fix.

For the last episode of our equity growth miniseries, I speak with Chris Rozio, the founder and CEO of Trainual. Trainual is The Business Playbook–it helps you organize your chaos by systematizing onboarding, training, and knowledge transfer in a way that people will actually like and continue to use.

Chris created Trainual to allow business owners to quickly take time out of their day to create, update, or share the playbook that runs their company. The best part–Chris and his team built a training system that wants you to spend less time…training.

Chris started Trainual after successfully scaling and exiting his video production company. The idea behind Trainual started because Chris attributed a lot of the success behind his exit to the playbook he had for his business, which most people would argue couldn’t be scaled or sold–a video production company. His playbook allowed any new hire to come in and quickly carry out a successful client assignment, and he was able to show any potential buyer exactly how his company worked.

The goal of a business playbook is to help you build a company that gives you the flexibility to reduce your hours, replace your leadership role, or exit the business when and how you please.

// WATCH THE INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE: Intentional Growth™ Podcast

What You Will Learn

• What helps business owners turn the repeatable day-to-day tasks of their business into a how-to playbook.
• How Trainual can help business owners transform their business into a financial asset.
• How creating processes and procedures will help you exit your role OR ownership.
• The four sections a company is divided into when it comes to making a playbook.
• The first steps to creating your business’s playbook.
• Why you don’t need to know everything about your business when you start with processes–and how you can create the cadence of documenting everything.
• How to balance taking the time to design the systems versus executing them.
• How Chris creates his goals and puts them into action.
• Real-life stories of business owners that sold their businesses for more because they had a playbook.

// USE YOUR FINANCIALS TO CLARIFY A PATH TOWARDS A MORE VALUABLE BUSINESS: Intentional Growth Financial Assessment

Bio:

Chris Ronzio is the founder and CEO of Trainual, a leading SaaS platform that transforms the way small businesses onboard, train and scale their teams. Chris is the host of the “Organize Chaos” podcast and the author of the best-selling book “The Business Playbook: How to Document and Delegate What You Do So Your Company Can Grow Beyond You”

Interview Quotes:

13:26 - “I love creating systems and I hate following systems.” - Chris Ronzio

13:57 - “You design the system and then you bring in other people to follow the system.” - Chris Ronzio

14:21 - “Get your business out of your brain.” - Chris Ronzio

18:46 - “Even if you don’t have processes documented for any of the explicit how-to’s, if you at least know who to go to, for what, you’re halfway there.” - Chris Ronzio

21:24 - “Don’t write the way, until there is a right way.” - Chris Ronzio

26:24 - “These are things that we’re doing reactively now, that we used to do proactively when we used to start a company.” - Chris Ronzio

26:41 - “How do we predict cash flow.” - Chris Ronzio

31:07 - “Understand what the business needs from you.” - Chris Ronzio

32:27 - “I think it really comes down to roles and responsibilities.” - Chris Ronzio

33:00 - “I always do goalsetting on an annual and quarterly basis (and I’m talking about personal goals here).” - Chris Ronzio

36:16 - “Trainual isn’t for your to-do’s it’s for your how to’s.” - Chris Ronzio

41:40 - “Anyone who wants to sell a business or wants the optionality to sell a business needs to be investing this stuff, because if you’re not doing it now, you’re going to have to do it later when you stumble through it.” - Chris Ronzio

Links and Resources:

Trainual

ChrisRonzio.com

Linkedin

Instagram

Arkona Website

The 5 Intentional Growth™ Principles (5 Videos to Help Clarify Your Vision)

Intentional Growth™ Financial Assessment

Fractional CFO Services

You can also reach out to me via email at rtansom@arkona.io, or on my LinkedIn.