95: Define Workflow Your Grandma Can Use with Amit Kothari

Amit Kothari is the CEO of Tallyfy, a technology platform that helps business owners document and automate processes without being technical or process savvy. We talk about process improvement in small businesses, what it means to have a scalable business, and the drawbacks of using flowcharts when documenting business processes.

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Define Workflow Your Grandma Can Use with Amit Kothari

Our guest is Amit Kothari, the CEO of Tallyfy, a technology platform that enables everyone to document and automate processes without being technical or process savvy. I’m particularly excited to have you here, Amit, today because I, you know, I and Greg wrote about you in our new book, Pinnacle, and we are, you know, one of my clients, one of our joint-client, is using your system as well. So, without further ado, welcome to the show.

It’s an absolute pleasure to be here, Steve.

Thank you for having me. So, let’s talk about your journey a little bit. So how do you become a tech startup entrepreneur? What’s been your journey that led you to this point?

Well, I think, like most entrepreneurs, I think you just sort of feel the itch of a pain and you feel it so much. And perhaps the present moment frustrates you so much that you just decide to do something about it. In my case, 20 years ago, I graduated from with a computer science degree from the University of Bath in England, spent a decade doing consulting work, improving projects, helping companies to map processes and so forth.

And I felt like I was wasting my life because one day I looked into a mirror and said, well, do I want to do what I’m about to do today? And the answer was no, practically every day for the next few weeks. And I knew I had to change something essentially. And what we did didn’t really deliver any value for customers either. So, the root of this idea was just simply that you can document any kind of process you want as many times as you want, as wonderfully as you want. Who cares if no one looks at it?

And with consultants at that time, you know, you got paid to come into a company, document their processes, make them look pretty, so basically just write down what they said to you and then leave and you get paid for it. And I was thinking, well, we’re not here to see any kind of outcome, we’re not here to even implement the change, so what’s the point of us doing this? They could have just done this themselves. And so, it just felt like a sham. So, creating a simpler way to just for anyone to map a process.

And then secondly, for them to run it rather than simply read it. That was the genesis of this entire company, which is now six years old. And so, I didn’t know much about being an entrepreneur to that subject. It was just, I guess I’d read things like everyone else does, but it was just on the bigger company side of things, like how companies change, how they evolve. And so…

Okay, so that’s interesting. So that make you strike out on your own and create your own solutions. So how is your own solution, how is Stellify changing the business of defining processes? What are you guys doing differently?

The first thing I didn’t want to do is have flowcharts in our system because there’s many problems with flowcharts, we can go into later, but it just felt like you needed a process expert to be able to create a process map for you. And actually, I was paid to come in and just make process maps for people. So, it needed to be used by, to use a better phrase, the average grandmother. Can my grandmother use this? If she cannot use this, then we’re in trouble, right? Clearly, it’s too complex. So that was one thing that had to be different, no flowcharts.

And instead of that, we created a checklist type of UI, because everyone in our research understands what a checklist is. It’s just a set of steps. That’s all. Along with that, we love this idea of if this, then something. So, we realized that if we could codify statements like that as rules instead of flowchart steps, then we basically have all the power of a flowchart, but in a checklist, which makes it accessible for the average person. So those things are different, along with an integration-first approach.

If we could codify statements like 'if this, then something' as rules instead of flowchart steps, then we basically have all the power of a flowchart but in a checklist, which makes it accessible for the average person. Click To Tweet

You don’t need to write code to hook up systems together anymore. So really, a system built five years ago was mobile native, had to be mobile native, had to be cloud first, had to be integration first, and had to be easy to use because that was the change necessary at that time. So, I think GoTend perhaps didn’t have to be that way. So many of those things are different for new products versus legacy or old products. So, I suppose those things are different.

That’s great. I mean, I’m all about making things simple, simplifying so that the entrepreneur can access it and can do it. So, you do it without any process expert, any flowcharts. You think flowcharts are superfluous. Is this because people don’t know how to create flowcharts or they wouldn’t even want to use flowcharts?

I feel like modern work doesn’t really map itself well to, ironically, map itself well to flowcharts because if you’re in a production line in the 18th century and you were told just be quiet and do this job the way the flowchart says, well that’s fine, right? But we’re not in production lines, we work in creative office environments. You are not paid a six-digit salary just to look at a flow chart and follow it, right? Because if it was that easy, you could have automated that by now, right? And I also feel like you don’t do things in a linear order anyway.

You don’t follow step by step things in a line. You might do something, come back to some other thing, come back to this other thing. And really, humans are like that, right? And this is also why, if you look at the evidence around us, the fastest growing products in computer software history have been chat products. Slack was the first. Microsoft Teams, Microsoft actually said it’s the fastest growing product in their history. People like to chat. It’s that simple. And chat isn’t a linear thing. It is just random, creative conversation.

And so, it doesn’t lend itself to today’s work environment. And sometimes paths are not straightforwardly two squares connected by a line, because you can take other paths. There’s a path that you didn’t even anticipate. And we call this decision that are yet, variations that are yet to be known, which flowcharts cannot even capture. So, collaboration is a first class object. And that’s why I feel like it’s missing details along with the how to do the task.

Collaboration is a first-class object. It's missing details along with the 'how to do the task. Click To Tweet

You might have a flowchart set that says do this, but the real meat of it is well I’m new to the company, how do I actually do this? And really capturing the how is the essence of converting tribal knowledge to digitized information so that people can do things without asking other people how to do them, which again flowcharts don’t really capture. So, it’s various reasons. We actually have a whole page about this on our site, but those are some.

I love that. That’s great. So, you basically are reinventing, uh, systemizing, creating playbooks processes, whatever you want to call it, even though your background is being a Six Sigma black belt. So how did that background influence your work?

You know, you start with classical learning, like with most things in life, you start classically. You figure out the status quo, you try to implement the status quo. At some point you get confident enough to say the status quo actually sucks. And I really have to reinvent myself because this is not me. What I’m doing here isn’t me. And I think I’ve just always been a bit thoughtful about change in general.

So, I didn’t want to follow a well-trodden path. Do a career. Here’s your career, it’s laid out for you, it’s nice and easy, just do what everyone else does, you’ll be fine. And that kind of stuff just makes me a little bit angry, so that led to all this itch that needs to be scratched. So, it just came at the right time. I think sometimes, you know, when I was pitching Tallyfy for VC funding in Silicon Valley, what was interesting is, I talked to some of the top VCs, and they ask you what you do and why is it different.

What’s the pain you solve and why is that great? But the biggest question they ask you is, why now? You create this company, this venture, right? Great, it’s good for you. But why now? Why are you doing this now? Why couldn’t you do this in five years from now? Why didn’t you do this five years ago? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. And almost all innovations that have made it have answered the question, why now, along with why.

So, what’s your answer? 

Well, the first thing is the buying power and the decision power has shifted from IT to the average business user in terms of picking software. In fact, they’re just Googling what they want and just signing up by themselves. Whereas 10 years ago, you had to ask IT for software. Well, kind of don’t want anymore. You just turn up at IT and say, look, here’s what I found. You do what you have to do, right? And that’s a huge why, because that power has shifted, integration has become easier for a lot of people who are not technical, and finally, the consumerization of all enterprise software is a trend that we’ve all seen. Things that are complex are just unacceptable these days.

Integration has become easier for a lot of people who are not technical, and finally, the consumerization of all enterprise software is a trend that we've all seen. Click To Tweet

So, anyone who’s doing consumerizing anything is going to succeed either way. So, these are some of the trends. A parallel to give you an example, Uber couldn’t exist unless the phone existed. That was there, why now? Because the whole point of it was there was GPS. Yeah, because that came equipped with GPS, right? Whereas before you had to tell the taxi guy, oh, I’m two meters away from here and like manually figure out how to tell them this, right?

But now we have a dot that tells us where you are, which makes make all of the stuff around that easier to do. So, without the invention of the phone, there’d be no Uber. So hence there, why now? So I think it’s different. And for enterprise software, it’s a whole different thing. Like with business users choosing apps and them needing to be easy, usable, that kind of thing. So anyway.

Okay, so that’s fascinating. So, one of the things that you mentioned to me, Emit, is that it’s important to be process focused versus project focused. So, what do you mean by that?

There’s an interesting book around this too. It’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s basically about process improvement. So, a process focus really just means that you’ve given enough thought to how something should be done, to put it in plain English, how it should be done. You have a recipe, right? A project tends to be sort of like evolving. So, if I’m remodeling my kitchen, I don’t remodel my kitchen 20 times a week. I just do it once and it’s fine for the next 10 years. That might be called a project.

But things will emerge as I do that, and hence it’s called a project, right? So obviously the core difference is that it’s a system. It scales, it’s predictable, it’s repeatable, and most of all it’s comparable. I can compare one process to another process, apples to apples, but two projects could be apples to oranges, they’re probably not related to each other in any way whatsoever. So, I think the core of business scalability and growth depends on systemization and process really.

The core of business scalability and growth depends on systemization and process. Click To Tweet

And beyond the obvious, which is document processes, which to me isn’t, it’s only part of the story, is to actually run those processes. And finally, to improve them. And here’s where we get to the final point of what the real difference is between process and project. You cannot improve a process that nobody even uses. It’s like having a recipe. It’s no point in telling you. Yeah, the simplest way to put this is, there’s a fantastic recipe made by a chef and in a restaurant chain of 20 restaurants, they deploy this recipe, right, in a restaurant.

So, if someone orders that dish, one person thinks it tastes horrible, the other person says it’s fantastic. Why is that? Because the chef just didn’t follow the recipe, they just did it the way they wanted to. So, if someone says, let’s improve the recipe, well, what’s the point? The chef’s not even following the recipe anyway. So, who cares about improvement at this point, right? There isn’t even a process anyone follows. So really, a process it, make it, run it, improve it.

You cannot improve a process that nobody even uses. There's no point in improving a recipe if the chef is not following it. Click To Tweet

So really what it’s about is that if you have projects, maybe you’re a contractor, maybe you’re a home remodeling company, whatever company you are, if every deal that you do, every engagement you do is a different project, then you don’t have a scalable business. In order to have a scalable business, you have to create the process, you have to uniformalize your recipe, you have to do the kind of projects which are all the same way.

Then you can go from the process, then you follow the process, and then you can improve it because there is consistency and then the variances can be kind of cut off and eliminated and over time, you have a consistent product that you can then increase completely customized service to kind of a product approach where what you do is consistently uniform so that you can make it much, much better. Maybe you have, you provide fewer services, but whatever you provide is a much more refined and efficient service. I mean, I’m just rambling here.

I know you’re absolutely right and actually that concept is really productized services. So, you can actually productize a service too. But there’s a human element to process versus project which is the stress and chaos of a project means that someone is reactive. Like oh my god, this just happened, we have to address this, this is priority one, right? Reactive, reactive. Proactive is the process approach which is, you know what, I’m completely calm, I know how it’s going to be done, I know the outcome will be perfect, if you just follow the steps, the outcome will be perfect, and I know how long it takes on average, so I can predict when it’s going to be done.

There is no, let’s wait and see, and oh my God, we’re late, right? That’s all reactive. And so, I think the process philosophy is a human, it’s a very desirable human trait of just calm, because you’ve done it before, you’re not reinventing the wheel, you know how long it takes, you know the outcome, you can predict the outcome. That’s the magic of that kind of thinking. That’s a huge time. So that’s a separate issue I guess to the particulars of business growth versus… People don’t want to work in a place where every two seconds there’s just a chaotic, like, everyone drop everything, we have to do this right now, like just a reactive approach. And we have unique project approaches resulting in chaos half the time.

But it’s not scalable. And it’s not scalable.

Yes. And so that, again, pertains to project versus process. So, it’s difficult to think in these terms, but when you see these practical examples, like the chef in the restaurant, that’s when you’re beginning to realize that a chain of 20 restaurants really needs their chefs to follow the recipe. Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to roll out any dishes whatsoever.

Then you don’t have a product. Yeah, you don’t have a consistent experience and people are creatures of habit. So, if we have a good meal, we want to go back and have the same meal. You know, stupid example, but we make a pot of coffee every morning and I kind of have a process. I always do the same amount of coffee, the same amount of water, and it always stays the same and I love it. I love the consistency. I expect my coffee to be in a certain way.

And if it’s that way, I love it. And my wife, she doesn’t like processes, so sometimes she puts a little bit more coffee, sometimes she puts half decaf, sometimes she puts more water, less water, and it’s inconsistent, sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it’s weak, it drives me crazy, and maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I know I love consistency.

I think there’s wiggle room for creativity, for sure, but the framework is just a scaffolding, right? Nobody said you don’t have to be creative, but, you know, process improvement is in fact about creativity. Here’s a great idea, let’s try it out.

Being systematically creative, not in an ad hoc fashion so that you can actually, you can hold on to your improvements because you know what you improved, and if it works, then you improve your process, you change it, and then you have a better part of coffee.

And that’s how scientists run experiments, right? They hypothesize, they run that, they check the outcome, and it’s almost like A-B testing. If that one’s better, they go for that one and they keep going. So, it’s, I don’t know why in business people don’t follow the approach that chefs do in restaurants or scientists do in scientific study essentially, it’s just the way to improve and sometimes That the tiniest thing can lead to outperformance So just you know a tiny 100 tiny things going to the book atomic habits changing a hundred things by 1% Or improving them by 1% results in a 40-fold increase in performance for improvement in a year.

If you do it every day.

It’s a compound growth thing. It’s one to the power of 365.

It’s amazing if you can do that. So, let’s talk about improving processes. So, what are the steps between documenting a process and optimizing? So how do you get from documented to optimized? And what does it mean for you? How do you define optimized?

It’s really simple. In between documenting and optimizing is just running. You have to do it in the middle to see the problems sometimes. So documenting is okay I’ll just type it up, I’ll just try something right? Then you run it and you realize you know what I’m missing this I’m missing this and that and that. Go back, put those things in, run it again. And now you notice you’re missing this, this, this. So, what you’re doing is really just running it, improving it, coming back and running it, improving it. It’s just the way a child learns. They make a mistake, please don’t make that mistake again. Make another mistake. You know, it’s all sealed up memory and time. And that’s probably why Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world, versus the rest of us. He’s just made more mistakes and has remembered not to make them again. So sometimes habits are simply a baked-in product in your mind of just optimization and habit, just physically not making those issues. So that’s true.

So how do you see that? Because that sounds a little bit. Maybe oversimplified the way you say that you just run the process and optimize it but how do you know how to make it better. Maybe Okay, maybe there are obvious things that you see that the conveyor belt makes a loop which is completely redundant you just remove it, it’s an obvious thing, or something is wrong with the process something falls off the conveyor belt. You have to fix it so that it doesn’t fall.

But if something is not visibly wrong with the process, how do you improve it anyway? Do you have a system? So, one of the things that I talk about in this book, Pinnacle, is sometimes you have bottlenecks in the process, sometimes you have roadblocks, sometimes you have the different wastes, the eight wastes of lean. So, is this something that you guys use to look at a process and kind of think of, okay, are we using our resources effectively? Do we have any inventory? Do we have any wasted motion, stuff like that? Are you looking at it this way as well?

Well, let’s look at it rationally. I don’t know what I don’t know. So, if I try to improve the process myself, I’m limited by my own tiny head, right? I just don’t know how to improve it. So, what’s the answer to this? Well, a customer tells you. That’s the first thing. So, anything customer-centric will be like the customer complain and says, you know what, this suck. Then you come back and say, oh, I didn’t realize it sucks. Thank you for that. I’m going to fix it. So maybe that’s your source of your fountain of ideas of improvement.

Should really just be customers. The second part is crowd sourcing, which is your co-workers telling you that this needs to be fixed just because they do it every day. And that’s the difference between the ivory tower approach. I’m the process owner, I know everything. Well, actually, you don’t, right? Maybe the people down there doing the work, know how to improve it. And if you give them a voice, and they say to you, this is a great idea, we should do it this way. Receive the idea, moderate it and put it in as an improvement.

So, improvements could come from you, but really most of them come from customers and from co-workers. And the co-workers end, we call it crowdsourced processed improvement, where you’re crowdsourcing ideas from people but yourself, outside of you, who are perhaps doing the jobs themselves. So, I think that’s probably the way to canvas improvements to sort of generalize that specific pain point of how do I improve. So, whereas if you try to do it yourself, well, I guess you’re just going to lack a lot of insight that others do.

So basically, if you let people, if you empower people, if you engage them, then they will come with the ideas, you don’t have to canvas the ideas that hard, they’re going to be happy to contribute their ideas to improve the process?

I think so, I think they’ll be proud of that. Most people like to have a voice. And really modern workers have some creativity and they don’t like to be just treated like just do your job and never give us any ideas ever again, right? I mean, most of the best companies in the world succeeded by empowering and creating cultures of improvement and even rewarding people who have great ideas. And so really what we have done is created a commenting system where I can type in a chat in a task that I think this is a light bulb moment, like next time, basically it goes something along the lines of next time, let’s do it like this. When things start with next time.

Let’s start with suggestion

Yes, something that’s how you know that this is a process improvement idea because the word next time has been used. They’re not only thinking process, they’re saying, can we not do this next time?

So, it’s not broken, it just can be improved.

And improvement is obviously, you just chip away little things. There are 1% things in the book Atomic Habits, there really are 1%. There is no silver bullet. You’d be lucky to find a huge silver bullet somewhere. But it’s something saying enter.

I love it. It’s the Kaizen, it’s the continuous improvement, the idea of a continuous improvement.

Indeed, yes. Except, you see, Toyota did this back in the, what, 60s, 70s or whatever, for manufacturing, we’re doing it for professional services, office workers, where it’s never really been applied before. And so that’s what’s exciting and interesting about this new world order of service-based economy versus what was previously a manufacturing economy. So, I think for the US in particular, much of the GDP is driven by services. And yet we don’t have a process improvement approach for services in particular to that.

So, the idea was that services are much harder to improve. So the, you know, some of the things that I read that, for example, in the food industry, the productivity improvement is much slower than in manufacturing for example, which may not be true because now you’ve got portals where you can order your food and there are improvement steps but if you walk into a McDonald’s the way they make the hamburger is probably unchanged for the last 40 years.

Something’s reliable but at that scale you know when you’ve fully established everything, I suppose you’re just scaling to the size of Starbucks and McDonald’s. But when they were small, they had no such systems, just some guy who hoped that someone did it right. I think they had to build these systems. If you ever make a franchise, you don’t have an option but to build systems. Others are going to run it for you. So yeah, sorry, we veered off the main subject there slightly, but I hope that was a different view as to how you get improvements. I think that was the core of the idea. So, you don’t come from…

So, Amit, let’s go back to the service industries and office work. So, what is the difference between processes and workflows?

I tend to use the word workflows because they more particularly… I think they have more variance. Chat inside a task is a work-flow oriented principle, I feel. A process just has connotations of a manufacturing line. Do it this way. This is the way we do it, right? A workflow tends to be somewhat regimented, but with a lot of wiggle room for conversation as a first-class object, especially when you’re stuck somewhere. And I think the rest of the world, I think there’s too much for this horrible feeling when someone says process because you immediately picture flowcharts in your mind and Ten week, a long ten-week process where nothing’s ever going to happen. Remember I did this for ten years I I mapped processes and it fills me with dread So basically repositioning the concept

So that you can give it new meaning you can give it a new substance. What about automation? So how do you go from having workflows to actually automate workflows? What are the workflows that can be automated and is there a clear path from going workflows to automation and is it possible to aspire for a systematic way of transitioning more and more workflows from manual to automated so that you can liberate the people and you can give them more creative and more socially engaged type of activities rather than mechanical repeatable activities.

For a company, especially for the management of a company, I think it’s a journey, it’s a life cycle, it’s a maturity model basically. It’s like you start at just tribal knowledge where just Joe from accounts knows how to do this. To, you know what, oh, Joe from accounts is on vacation. Should we like type up what Joe does just in case he leaves us or he goes on vacation? Like someone can take over what Joe does. This is tribal to written.

Stage one, right? The first moment you realize that we should write this down somewhere, right? Because we obviously can’t scale if Joe decides to go on vacation somewhere or leaves the company. So, second is now the running aspect, which is, okay, six people are supposed to do six different steps here. And have you probably seen baton races in the Olympics, when someone runs around and hands the baton to the next person who then runs around, right?

Well, that exact same thing happens in a multi-step workflow where I do my thing, and then I hand it over to you because you can do your thing, right? So that baton passing is an email that we generate in our app. It’s called, it’s your turn. It’s literally called in English, it’s your turn. And that just tells you that without asking me, you already know that you’re up next. So, the running part is now removing all this stupid busy work, where I have to ask you, have you done it yet? Have you finished yet, Steve? Right? Well, I don’t have to ask you now, it’s going to come to me, it’s going to be push, not pull, right? So that’s the running part.

And now finally you get the automation part, which is like, okay, well, you know what? Got these seven steps, they’re done between seven different people, right? Turns out that step four to step five can be automated because it’s actually just someone going to a system, typing this in and then coming out of that system, right? So, you see an opportunity to take bits of that multi-step workflow and say, you know what? We don’t need this bit or this bit or this bit. So out of those seven steps, three can be done by machines. Maybe four have to still be done by people. That simple, right? And so, a very practical perspective of this.

It’s a very step-by-step. It’s not like a grand design where you transition all your processes. You’re pushing all your processes towards automation and you basically have a great plan on how you’re going to do that. It’s more about if there is a repeatable process which doesn’t necessarily need the human input other than some physical moving of the thing, then you can automate it.

Yeah, and also anyone who tells you otherwise, they need to say it in English just like we’ve described it. Like I’ve written something down because so and so is, if they’re not around, what do I do? I think that’s an obvious statement. You don’t have to be an MBA or some kind of business guru to really know that you’ve got to put this down somewhere. And then you’ve got to run it, which is like, okay, well, how do we know to improve it, or even who’s doing what, basically, which is where the tracking comes in.

If you’re a COO and you have an airline cockpit where you never have to ask anyone, have you done this yet, or where are we at with this? Think, you know, with FedEx, when they send you parcels from Amazon, you get a real time tracker of where that parcel is at. They do that for millions of parcels each day. So, no one ever calls in to ask, has, you know, where’s my shipment? Well, click the link, you can see where it is. It’s two kilometers away from your house right now.

Literally, that’s the real-time tracking, right? Then from there, you could move on to automation, which is now, well, we don’t need a human to move the parcel from here to here. Let’s make a conveyor belt that just shifts it without any human interference, right? So there’s your opportunity to take bits of that and say, this can be automated, so can this, while all the time still keeping control. And most of all, scalability is the result of all of this.

If you make this happen you can now ship from you can go from 100 parcels a day to 700,000 parcels a day without breaking a sweat or losing sleep at night because you’re not hiring people, and praying they it right, you’re hiring people and introducing them to your system which already works right. That’s the biggest problem people don’t see yet, right? They think hiring people is doing a process faster, but if there was no consistency in the first place, then the new people are just going to just do random things.

They have to ask questions and you have to train them and they don’t know where to go for the information. So, basically what I’m hearing is the steps is you got the tribal knowledge, whatever state it is in, just document it, just write it down, start to run it, and then you can observe, OK, can we improve the process? We eliminate some steps, maybe something’s missing, maybe there are some variations. So, work on making it much smooth. And then, OK, which part of that doesn’t need a human, a thinking human to actually give any input so we can actually give it to the computer. So, then you automate these parts and that makes your business more scalable. So, is that it?

Yeah, it just starts removing fat from little bits of fat. Again, this is incremental, remember? There’s usually no, let’s automate everything, like that’s just ridiculous. So, starting just simple, common sense, stepwise in this way, just gets you amazing results incredibly fast. You can get 80% to just your dream operation state, just by practical means like this. Put it down, start running it, keep improving it.

So, so, Amit, Are, there some like rules of thumb that if you go into a service company, then just by tallyfy, I don’t know if it’s a word, but we used it with our cagey group there. Both of us work with just tallyfy certain processes is going to improve productivity by a substantial percentage in the productivity? Is this something that you measure or you observe?

Yeah, we try to keep it down to earth, but we have literally measured a one day saving a week in a lot of clients, who have a return the investment calculator where we fed in these things and it’s one day a week.

So, it’s 30%?

One, yeah, it’s literally an entire day of an entire week, which is ridiculously high. Yeah, it’s crazy high. But the thing is that we should start on the ground, so if you don’t do it right as well, you can fail at this. So, for example, we tell people, when you start typing up a task as in what you do, start with a verb, like phone the client, right, or send a proposal to prospect. But don’t type in something like manage prospect, you know, what does that mean? There’s no task to this, right? So, the way you even write steps, you think about a recipe. In the kitchen, you write a recipe for some food, right? It’s so clear, it says mix this in a bowl. So clear, right? It doesn’t say, you know, something random like make sure it’s mixed or something.

Or even worse, mixing or, I don’t know, food preparations and all that.

Yeah, it has to be a word that is moving something somewhere. It’s clear, it’s verb-based, and it’s in the present tense, like do this now, right? And then the second thing write the description of how to do it as if it’s the first time you are ever describing to someone how to do this. That’s a big other problem we’ve seen, which is that the most experienced person who’s been there 30 years can’t be bothered to type up properly how they do things.

Because for them it’s second nature, but for an outside observer it’s totally unique.

These are practical steps. So don’t forget these. Yes, you’ll get the ROI, but at the beginning just have someone who gets how…

Do it the right way.

Follow the process for creating the process. There is a skill set for documenting too, right? It’s not just like anyone can type this. Just like anyone can’t be an author. There is a process to that too. There is a process. So, Emmitt, we are running out of time here, but so if someone would like to learn

More about this, maybe like to check it out, what kind of help you could give, Tallyfy could give, where they go, how can they get in touch with you?

Well, our product is a free trial, 14-day free trial, no credit card, no nothing. So, if there’s one thing you do today, just spend 20 seconds signing up and playing with it and just making your blueprints. We call them blueprints. These are these recipes and templates. Go to tallyfy.com, that’s how you can find me, us and we will… It’s about specificity to your actual state, your actual problem.

And Tallyfy starts with a T, right? It’s actually two Ys.

Yes. It’s T-A-L-L-Y-F-Y.com.

Okay. So Tallyfy with two Y’s. Okay. And what are the ideal businesses that can use this? So, do you have like, does the business have to be a certain size for it to make sense for them? Or is it completely for sole-opener?

It’s for any size company, really. But it’s for tiny companies, it won’t make much sense below five people, because at that point, they don’t really have any processes. They’re still figuring it out, right? But we also have Fortune 500 customers. But it’s really just any team in any size company that has one specific use case, where they just want to say something like, goodbye busy work, I’m just sick of this, right? It starts from the pain.

There is a relevance to certain teams, but with, like say, use cases like onboarding clients. You want to make that smooth? Great. Onboarding employees, you just hired an employee, there’s a 50-step process to get them productive or something, great example, right? So, there’s specific things, but really what we do think, the way we see things is pain first. I have a pain, here’s the pill, right? And it could be anyone, it could be big company, small, whatever role. So, we’re seeing quite broad applications.

Awesome. So, if you are interested how to create workflows, how to simplify your life, improve your productivity by 20% or so, then go on Tallyfy with two y’s.com and sign up for a free, two-week free trial and check it out, test it out. If they want to reach out to you, Amit, then you’re on LinkedIn, right? We’re connected on LinkedIn, so they can follow you as well. So reach out to Amit and definitely do try it. Also, if you’d like to read a live case study about it.

You can check out our new book, Pinnacle, and you can read about our joint client, the Ryko Client Group, who are using Tallyfy and how they use it and how did that help them. Yeah, and do processize you, do create systems, do automate, because it’s going to liberate you people and you can get more done and you’ll have a more engaged workforce who spend more time in the flow rather than the boring work. So, thank you for coming on the show, Amit. Really enjoyed the conversation. And if you liked the lesson, if you liked the show, please don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for our next episode. Thank you.

 

Important Links:

• Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain
• Stevepreda.com
• Amit’s LinkedIn
• Tallyfy.com
• Atomic Habits by James Clear