All Systems Go! Podcast – Episode 109

Establishing Operational Excellence feat. Keith Gillette

All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
All Systems Go! Marketing Automation and Systems Building with Chris L. Davis
Establishing Operational Excellence feat. Keith Gillette
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Episode Description

Ep. 109 – This week, Chris brings on special guest Keith Gillette to discuss operational and organizational excellence. Keith is a “systems savant” with more than 25 years of IT operations management and the Founder and CEO of TaskTrain. They discuss the importance and differences of SOPs and checklists to ensure you can grow your operations to the highest level of efficiency and excellence possible.

  • [3:20] Who Keith is and a bit about his background
  • [6:18] What Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are and why you need them in your business
  • [11:24] How to create SOPs and documented processes that you will actually use day to day
  • [14:41] How documenting your SOPs increases your everyday efficiency and reduces unnecessary risks
  • [19:02] Keith explains why without having SOPs in place you run the risk of no improvement
  • [24:11] What led Keith to become a creator and founder of TaskTrain
  • [29:35] The biggest challenge Keith has faced in regards to marketing a SaaS app
  • [32:49] When you should use SOPs vs. checklists in your business
  • [34:07] Keith shares the biggest benefits of checklists for day to day use

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:30
Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast where I invite startup founders and digital marketers alike to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems at scale. I’m your host Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge, and on this episode, I have the pleasure to interview Keith Gillette, who is a process pragmatists, the system savant if you will, he’s the founder and CEO of Taz train, which is a process management SaaS application streamline for small and midsize businesses SMBs. And he’s got over 25 years of IT operations management. He’s got experience in both embedded and virtual CIO rose holds a Master of Science in Information and telecommunications systems management, MBA from the University of Chicago and is Six Sigma certified. Keith is no stranger to process. I love being able to dive deep into process, how to approach it appropriately. And we’ll discuss in this podcast the difference and importance of SOPs and checklists to ensure that you can operate, you can get your operations to the highest level of excellence. That’s the point of this podcast. That’s the key. And the main takeaway that I’m hoping you all walk away from is a higher level of operational efficiency. So enjoy the podcast with Keith and myself. Keith, welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you on how you doing.

Keith Gillette 2:03
I’m doing great foods to be talking to you today. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Davis 2:08
Yes, yes, and, and listeners. Um, before the podcast, Keith, and I got to just catch up a little bit and talk about weather. Family, talk about living where, you know, my desire is to get out of the cold. And so hopefully, Keith, you know, we’ve already come to some agreement that, you know, it’s not going to happen happen anytime soon. But I think I think the thing to kind of prep this podcast for is that oftentimes we’re focused on one thing, and sometimes that one thing maybe just takes a backseat while we get everything else in order. So I’ve got to put moving on the backseat to just get some other things operating in excellence, right. So I think that, you know, businesses the same way, everybody can just be so focused on revenue, money, money, money. And there’s other factors that go into making sure your business not just makes money, but operates at a very high level. So I’m excited to talk about that with you today. Before we jump into it, give our audience a little bit of an intro about yourself and your business.

Keith Gillette 3:19
Great, I appreciate the opportunity to do so. So I characterize myself as an emerging and introverted entrepreneur now, but My professional background is in IT operations management. I started way back in college, undergraduate as a support technician, then I worked as a network and systems administrator. But I quickly moved up into IT management and leadership primarily in K 20. Education. So I’ve headed several IT departments in both organizationally embedded leadership positions, as well as in virtual fractional interim chief information officer roles. And I continue to do that kind of CIO at your service. And he’s elated process consulting right now. But I spend the bulk of my time on my software as a service startup task trend.

Chris Davis 4:13
Love it, love it. And process consulting is a term that you don’t hear often, but I feel like it’s just the nature of where small businesses is on the rise, right is getting those processes in order, getting them in place, and making sure things are operating at a very high efficiency and you’re you’re also a Six Sigma certified, right?

Keith Gillette 4:38
That’s right. So I’ve found I’ve been a, what I call process pragmatist. And that’s sort of a professional nickname that I adopted for myself. So I, you Well, first you have to understand that one of my personal peculiarities is that I have an alarming and almost annoying affection for alliteration, so I was trying to find a way to work that alliterative turn of phrase into my work task train process pragmatists, you get the idea. And six, six sigma was training and certification was part of that because I’ve been very interested in systems and processes for all of my career as a member of the American Society for Quality, which is all about quality and process management.

Chris Davis 5:30
Yeah, I love it. So now listeners you see why said You know, you could be so focused on revenue, there’s other things that you may need to get in order, and how how much more appropriate than then to talk about processes, right processes and systems. This is all of the the good stuff, right, as an automation expert, these are words that just get my my fingers in my toes tingling. So So I wanted to set the table with this Keith SOPs. Okay. Standard people

Keith Gillette 6:06
are cringing. cringing, yes, standard operating procedures,

Chris Davis 6:11
we’re gonna I’m gonna walk people through this because I don’t want to assume any intelligence and I don’t want somebody to feel left out due to their negligence. So it’s like, what is a standard operating procedure? And why are they important?

Keith Gillette 6:27
Oh, that’s a question for me. Yeah. What is the standard operating procedure? Well, that is, I believe the core of your your business, right. So you talk about their thing being things more important than, than revenue or things you have to pay attention to other than than revenue. And that revenue is really an end result at the at the end of a long, long chain, right? That that’s a signal that you have delivered something of value to your customer. And then revenue comes in as a result. But that process of delivering value to your customer that, you know, what that process is, varies from organization to organization, you know, in if you’re manufacturing widgets, it’s it’s all of the steps and their supply chain to get the raw materials and for your widgets to bring those in the assembly line, the packaging, the distribution, the sales, if you’re a marketing agency, you know, your delivery of value is very different. You’re providing a service, you’ve got a set of clients who want you to create content for them on a regular production cycle posts, social media, but there are still recurring steps in that value chain, right, that delivery of value to your customer that is ultimately going to result in the signal of revenue for your organization. And you can decompose that value, that set of processes, some of which are on the value chain, right that in really going from your inputs to what your customer gets, some of which are off of that value chain, they’re just like overhead things that you need to do for compliance. Or just you know that human resources, onboarding procedures that you have to go through. But those are still things that recur over and over again, in your organization. And you want I believe, as much as possible to have those procedures standardized, you want to have them written and, and standardized so that you can do them consistently, and achieve a level of quality in doing so. Otherwise, you’re just doing it ad hoc every time and you’re not necessarily going to get the quality result that you’re going to want. You’re setting yourself up. I think for a lot of inefficiency, creating bottlenecks to scale are just a couple of the examples of things that don’t happen. So standard operating procedures, really the core of the series of steps that you’re going to do on a recurring basis to deliver value to your stakeholders, or do something else that enables your business.

Chris Davis 9:21
Yeah, and I’ll say this as an engineer. I was an electrical engineer. And I was not familiar with SOP standard operating procedure. Okay, I heard I I’ve heard of Six Sigma, like in the talkies. But our I would say our cousin, our professional cousins were systems engineers, right? And they were the ones that did all of that. They were the ones that were heavy on the SOPs, heavy on the Six Sigma certification. There was some electrical engineers that did, but I was not by by default, I’m process oriented. But I had not made that connection until I started getting into small business entrepreneurship in marketing. And then I started to realize, oh, wait a minute, we, if we’re going to do this, again, we should really standardize this. So it’s not changing. So and even if somebody leaves the organization, it doesn’t leave such a gap in void. It just leaves an empty seat that needs to be filled, instead of just like a breaking down of everything. So I started to learn an appreciation for SOPs, as I grew as an entrepreneur, so my relationship is a little different. But with that being said, Keith, it’s common. Let me let me not say common, because it may differ depending on the circles in the industry that people are in, but specific to my industry, right, digital marketers, and agencies and SAS founders. There’s this ongoing back and forth seesaw with the value of SOPs, because truth be told, there’s a lot of companies, there’s a lot of small businesses that take the effort to document them. And then that’s the beginning and end there. They’re pretty there somewhere. And whenever they need to be pulled out, maybe somebody pulled them out, but the day to day execution, they tend to be overlooked. So for you, in your experience, what is it how, what is what approach should we be having in order to create SOPs in documented processes that we actually use day to day? Because they’re there for a reason? Right?

Keith Gillette 11:43
Yeah. And I think you want to think about the reasons that you want them there. So first, let me make the case for why you’d want to go through the hassle of documenting your standard operating procedures in the first place, much less, you know, micromanage their implementation every day, right? I mean, the question that naturally arises, why not just get the right people on the bus, right, hire the right people, point them in the right direction, and then get out of their way? I say, Absolutely, if you can do that great. But I think there are reasons that even that is not enough. First, what you firstly might not be able to hire the right people, especially now, the job market in many places is tight. And I think finding the people with the knowledge and the experience you need to do that may be a real challenge. As an employer, you may be forced to invest in providing training and support to lower skilled and less experienced people just to get the resources you need. So one one reason is, is that, that training and support the scaffold that having documented standard operating procedures can provide their second even even if you get the right people, if you have them on board, it’s not efficient or effective to have them work ad hoc on everything. Now, I think certainly, if you’re solving a new problem, working in a very volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment, then you have to operate at least somewhat in an ad hoc fashion, and trust the experience and intuition of the people you have working for you. But once your team has solved the problem, you want to put it to sleep, right, just implement the best solution that the team has come up with, and follow it consistently to eliminate avoidable errors and increase efficiency, right. So that efficiency that you get by standardizing your procedure, once you’ve solved the problem is going to allow you to scale your business by eliminating bottlenecks. Otherwise it will be you’re going to be generating customer service problems due to mistakes and creating friction between your employees due to miss handoffs, because everybody’s doing something slightly different.

Chris Davis 14:00
Yeah, yeah. And I think the term efficiency is what brings it home for me now. Now, granted, I’m a high Ivalue efficiency, I am extremely high on that end of operation is I want mines to be efficient, where some people just want it to be effective. Hey, look, don’t care how long it works, how long it takes, how many people it takes, get it done, right? Yeah, I’m not that way. So efficiency becomes like my guiding light in principle. How do I get more and more efficient? And that to me is what brings the this process of documenting process down and really being intentional, you know?

Keith Gillette 14:41
Now I agree. And one of my other annoying alliterations is everyday efficiency, right? And that’s what standard operating procedures gets you because these are the things you’re doing every day in your business over and over again, whatever that may be maybe onboarding a new employee. It may be onboarding a new customer. It may be you Doing your sales outreach, there are a series of steps that your employees go through to operate your business and standardizing that, I think can lead to a lot of efficiency. And I want to come back to something that you talked about earlier, which is the another reason for documenting your standard operating procedures is his risk mitigation. Right? You talked about the the employee leaving, right. So even if you don’t encounter problems on a routine basis, your operation is fine with the employees you have. I think you’re still putting the business at risk unnecessarily. If you don’t document your procedures, this is the proverbial hit by a bus situation, right? What happens to all that tacit knowledge? If a key employee gets hit by a bus, we’re more likely in the age of the great resignation that we’re going through right now. Those those key employees are going to leave for greener pastures, and all of that implicit knowledge is going to leave with them. And you I mean, you brought that point out, I think that’s, that’s absolutely true.

Chris Davis 16:06
Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to be thinking about the big picture, I’ve got a best friend who’s in the construction industries got a start up that that is helping the helping with the labor shortage. And they’re seeing that a lot of their their intelligence and IP is leaving, as those workers retire. So you’re you need these new young, you know, tap this new young talent to come in, and you need them to get up to speed quickly. You don’t have time, because that that senior employee may be gone in a week or two, maybe going in a month or two, how do you get them acclimated, get them up to speed. And I think when we start to think about that, in our business, I, I go through extensive leadership training, it’s probably one of my favorite types of trainings to partake in. And one of the things that I’ve always operated by cuz I’ve been taught is, run your business, run your job, your position, whatever it is, as if it doesn’t need you, like, make it so that you’re not required. And Keith, I know, when I was a corporate worker, that was the opposite job security was this but me, right? You kept all the tricks of the trade right to your chest, though, in some locked up at home, just in case. But now it is, is I feel like the strongest approach to growing a business stabilizing a business and scaling it is make sure you’re operating it where there is no one single point of failure as a person, you know?

Keith Gillette 17:51
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it not only is important to eliminate that single point of failure, that it to minimize the risk of your organization. In today’s operating environment, so much work is team based and collaborative, that you, you have to be able to coordinate among people and standard standard operating procedures, also helps with that, because everybody’s on the same page with how you are going to do things. So I think that there are like at least six major drivers for why it’s, you know, critical for every organization to document their standard operating procedures. And we’ve talked about a bunch of them in the examples that I’ve given so far. But you know, there’s that, that efficiency gain. And you can see that in a lot of places. That you you have recurring processes, because you’re doing them so frequently, if you can, standardize and come up with an efficient way of doing it once and then repeat that, that pays huge dividends for your organization’s Yeah. And, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a quote by by Taiichi Ohno one of the founders of the Toyota Production System, who’s a major figure in the Quality Management movement, and he said, you know, without standards, there can be no improvement. So you’ve got to set that standard of how you do business for the things that recur in your organization. And then work with your employees to document your standard operating procedures. So that they can collaborate effectively with one another and they’re not going to hide hide their their knowledge in their head under their desk in a safe at home, whatever the case may be. And check them for for efficiency.

Chris Davis 19:43
Wow, that’s a great quote. And it makes me think of the word standard twofold. Right? We’ve been talking about it, you know, standardizing make sure there’s this quality, consistent quality, but it makes me think, you know, and I’m gonna do some name dropping here because Keith I can it’s my But I think one of the biggest examples of what not to do is Chipotle. And I don’t know about you. But out here, every single Chipotle is different. You could tell them the exact same thing, exact same thing, you get take a picture of your order, and what you get is off. It’s so frustrating. I don’t even go to Chipotle anymore. I don’t even go to it anymore. And what triggered that thought is as a customer on the receiving end, poor quality, whatever the standard is for Chipotle? I don’t know, because it’s the shake of the dice what I get back. So when I’m thinking about business, Keith, how many times has somebody had a good experience with support? And then bad experience with that same company’s

Keith Gillette 20:50
variability? Absolutely. Right. Now, granted,

Chris Davis 20:54
these are humans were all, you know, on a on an uncontrollable spectrum. In a sense, yes. But what is I guess what I’m saying to my listeners is, what is that standard in your business that you want to be a parent? There’s got to be a level that okay, by n a worst case scenario, we never dropped below this, the flip side Chick fil A Chick fil A, I don’t care. I’ve seen people yell at these workers at Chick fil A. And they’re always smiling. Oh, sorry about that. Would you like a brownie? Like, like, Hold on? Is there a battery in their back, he can’t be a human response. But you see the standard, Keith, the standard has been set. And it’s held like that in your business. So you just just talking through this key is given me a different, like another level of appreciation for standard operating procedures, because there is a standard that I want to be apparent in the marketplace that I want people to know, my company by, and operating procedures allow me to achieve that standard for longevity, you know, consistency?

Keith Gillette 22:04
Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s, that’s really well said, if you look at the most admired companies, they have set a very high quality standard, and they hit it consistently, how do they do that? One of the reasons is that their core processes are very standardized. And so I’ve I’ve admired, you know, companies like Apple who have, you know, this enormous creative side, but the quality of the, the device, and the service that they deliver is very high, because they have operations management really dialed in. And it’s been my mission to try to bring process to the people right to bring that big company, quality, standard, and make it accessible to people and in small and medium businesses, which is really, you know, where I grew up when my background has primarily been in small enterprise, where you, you frequently don’t even have standard operating procedures written down, which, which, which kind of blows my mind, because it’s, it’s really so easy to do. And there’s so many benefits of doing it. That, that I think it’s an low hanging fruit that will pay dividends in your organization, on multiple levels, you know, it’s, it’s, like I said, you’re going to, to decrease the customer dissatisfaction by having high standards and standard procedures for achieving them, you’re going to decrease your employee dissatisfaction with, you know, somebody dropped the ball, because they did it a different way, or I’m still waiting on X from my coworker, because we just don’t have our act together internally. And it’s going to, in the end, pay dividends in your ability to generate revenue and and get that signal that you’re doing something right and delivering value.

Chris Davis 24:11
Absolutely. And what I want to do is I want to make a quick shift here for the for our last few few minutes together, Keith and I want to talk about, you know, that path, that decision, that driver the motivation that went from consultant to founder, there was at some point, I’m imagining, you know, I talk to founders all the time on the podcast, and a lot of times they software is birthed out of them scratching their own itch. Right? So I imagine it after a while of just seeing the mistakes the the in these don’t have to be big mistakes, small mistakes of not doing the right thing over time that become big. What was that driver that say, You know what? I think I’m gonna solve this problem at scale with software.

Keith Gillette 25:00
That’s That’s exactly the situation I was in, scratch my own itch. So, you know, the specific crystallizing event for the idea behind task train occurred a number of years ago when I listened to the audiobook of The Checklist Manifesto by Harvard medical professor and surgeon Atul Gawande. But the impetus that led to that moment came from long experience in in it before that. So I mentioned I was a systems administrator. In that role, I was really too often burned by by lack of documentation, neither system configuration or procedural documentation, just you know, something would break and I have no idea how to fix it. Even if I had set the system up a few months ago, that knowledge, because it’s so specialized, it really was no longer even in my head. So I became diligent in documenting everything I did. I carried that lesson with me when I advanced to leadership. And my motto became, if it’s not documented, it’s not done in my leadership roles. I would ensure my teams would develop and verified documentation as part of project implementation. And then we had all of our critical and routine standard operating procedures written down as, as we’ve been talking about the importance of so far. But even with a, you know, really caring team and competent employees and all that documentation in place, I found that, you know, we screwed up way more than we should have, and on dump stuff, like you said, it doesn’t have to be big things, but things that were entirely avoidable if we had consistently followed those procedures. And, you know, that’s, that’s because, in my case, I, it is complicated, not everything can be automated. So there’s still that human factor you talked about before. We’re all you know, human beings in the end, and we make mistakes. And in a rush of trying to serve a user finished device set up one of my texts, they would forget a step, and that would inevitably come back to bite us. So forgot to deploy the anti malware after reinstalling the operating system Keylogger got installed. Not good. So there are real consequences, real cost consequences, and real customer relationship consequences for errors like that, that are entirely avoidable. So in those IT management rules, even though we had those standard operating procedures, and we tracked our service requests and our ticketing system, there was still this gap between that that ticketing workflow and those SOPs. So when I heard Atul Gawande talking about the remarkable results that he got from the humble checklist. So in the in The Checklist Manifesto, he describes the use of checklists and construction, and in aviation and his own work with the World Health Organization, bringing checklists into healthcare with the safe surgery checklist. And that generated a 40% reduction in surgery deaths, 36% reduction in surgical complications. Very simple, right, just following a checklist, when I heard that I thought that maybe this idea presented a way to bridge the gap between just having documented your procedures, and then actually integrating them into everyday workflow. So I started to, to flesh out a prototype for test train the the software as a service application that I’m privileged to have launched. And

Chris Davis 28:33
today, let me pause you there, keith that going into like fleshing out the software. Did you have experience in the past? Doing software? Were you exposed to it in any way? What? What gave you that confidence to go in there and document it as you did?

Keith Gillette 28:51
Well, I think, you know, when you when you start out with the beginner’s mind as as I did, because I had taken some cool computer science courses when I was an undergrad, but and I’d done, you know, scripting as a systems administrator, but I had not done enterprise software development. Yeah. You know, if you don’t, if you’re not a subject matter expert, you always underestimate the complexity of any task. So let’s just say that as with any entrepreneurial journey, it’s been quite a long and bumpy path. But I’m very pleased that, that my partners and I have built a tool that I wanted to, and done it without outside funding, so I’m excited to be able to have it out in the world and chat with you about it.

Chris Davis 29:35
Yeah, no, that’s that’s great. And you know, the marketer side of me is wanting to probe a little deeper with the with the go to market challenges that you face. If you do if you want to share a challenge or two that you face you you went through the dev process, got the MVP probably had some beta users in there, test some things out. Now we’re ready. We’re slowly rolling it out. For with more and more users, what were some of the challenges that you faced as you started to see the in the end of the tunnel? Like, wait a minute, the software’s ready? You know, I think we can go and tell the market.

Keith Gillette 30:15
Right? Oh, yes. And that presents a whole new set of challenges and learning experiences, let’s let’s frame them from that way. I, especially with the, the problem I chose to solve, and the way I chose to solve it with task train, this is this is a this is an enormous challenge for us. Because in many ways, I’ve I’ve built a a horizontal platform, right I’m, I built a piece of software that allows you to very easily document your standard operating procedures, as outlined as a checklist with multiple levels in them, and, and embed training at each of those steps, right. And then you can assign those standard operating procedures and turn them into workflows that people can collaborate on with each step, having a different assignee comment threads at each of those steps, you can easily collaborate, right? That that platform, you know, that can be applied to any organization that has recurring processes, and, and that makes marketing it as I’m sure you’re able to tell me better, a real challenge because I was listening to one of your other podcasts and you were talking about the that if you’re your market is everybody your market is no one and you really need to focus. So I think that is the challenge we are facing right now is that especially built a soft piece of software, that that solves a problem that many people have. But we are a, you know, a founder funded startup don’t have huge marketing budgets really do need to focus on a customer profile that has the biggest pain, right? Who is really facing that, that challenge? So that’s where we are right now. I can certainly don’t I could go on about this particular challenge indefinitely. But I’ll stop.

Chris Davis 32:26
Right? No, thank you for sharing. I always am intrigued, you know, I’ve by just by the nature of what I do, you know, my digital Rolodex is split between a whole bunch of savvy marketers, and then a whole bunch of savvy CEOs. So I hear both sides. And it’s just always interesting to to let of course the listeners here but always, you know, just check in. I’m always fascinated, always fascinated with the the process of development. And marketing is just such an interesting relationship. But there’s one thing in closing, I want to say that I I found works really well for me, Keith, great in based on how you set up your software. It sounds like you were probably probably privy to this far before I was okay. And it’s the idea that my SOPs what I’m learning in my business is the SOPs are great for that person just getting started need to get familiar with the process for the first time. But I don’t necessarily need them to go through that SOP every time it seems it gets to be a bit big for the task. So what my operations manager started to do is create checklists based on those SOPs. So once you know the process, you can go through it, you don’t have to go through the SOP. But you better make sure you generate this checklist and make you know and check everything off. You mentioned that when you were talking about your software, how, you know, you can do the SOP, you can split it out to workflows and create checklists. It sounds like this is something that you have been aware of along the way as well.

Keith Gillette 34:07
Absolutely. So I think there are a lot of advantages to the checklist format force for a lot of things, but for standard operating procedures in general, because your typical standard operating procedure, right is is very long, it’s like text base, long paragraphs explaining what to do. Maybe if you’re lucky, you get some pictures in there. If there’s like, you know, some some pieces of software you’re supposed to be doing at a particular step. But that can be overwhelming. And that’s why people that’s one of the reasons people like don’t refer back to them after they’ve done the initial learning because they’re just very clumsy to work with. Yes. Whereas checklists are very succinct. When you’re you’re talking about a particular step. You’ve got to be very concise in describing it. You’re just jogging the person’s memory at that point. They’re going through the checklist the 10th time. But at the same time Oh, yeah, it’s it’s easy to forget a step. But it’s like it’s you have that curse of knowledge. And if you’re not using a checklist to complete a procedure, you think you know everything because you’ve done it at the time. But but maybe you’re distracted, maybe the phone rang and you forget a step, the checklist gives you that, that check on making sure that you’ve done it, right. But it doesn’t overwhelm you with too much detail. And the design of testing is really built on that if you want the detail, it’s there. But it’s one level down, you don’t have to look at it every time, you can just check the the point off when you’ve done it, because you know how to do it. But if you’re that new employee, you get the best of both worlds, because you have the outline of exactly what to do. And then if there’s a place where you get stuck, we provided as much content, multimedia, videos, diagrams, you can embed whatever you you need for your employees to get that just in time training.

Chris Davis 36:06
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, man, this was a very wealthy conversation, I got some notes here. I am a student of process a student of process. So anytime there’s software to make that easier. And anytime I can talk to somebody who’s just neck deep, right, I don’t want ankles. I want neck deep into just the nitty gritty of creating operational excellence. I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about, right? Making sure that your operations that whatever those systems are, that they’re that they are at their optimum, right at all times. So thank you, Keith, for coming on and sharing your your expertise, your story and your and your software. If people want to find out more about you or your software, where can they go?

Keith Gillette 36:56
Well, I really appreciated the opportunity to chat with you. And I would encourage you and your audience, if if you’re interested to check out tasktrain.app You can sign up for a totally free account there we have a free forever tier. And that’s also the best way to reach me. So you can reach out via the messenger app inside tasktrain.app , as well as see my social media and contact links on the People page of our website.

Chris Davis 37:32
All right, great. Well, we’ll have that link in the show notes for all our listeners. Thank you again, Keith, for coming on, man.

Keith Gillette 37:39
Fantastic. Thanks so much,

Chris Davis 37:40
Chris. Have a good one, man. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online academy responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:30
Welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast where I invite startup founders and digital marketers alike to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems at scale. I’m your host Chris L. Davis, founder of automation bridge, and on this episode, I have the pleasure to interview Keith Gillette, who is a process pragmatists, the system savant if you will, he’s the founder and CEO of Taz train, which is a process management SaaS application streamline for small and midsize businesses SMBs. And he’s got over 25 years of IT operations management. He’s got experience in both embedded and virtual CIO rose holds a Master of Science in Information and telecommunications systems management, MBA from the University of Chicago and is Six Sigma certified. Keith is no stranger to process. I love being able to dive deep into process, how to approach it appropriately. And we’ll discuss in this podcast the difference and importance of SOPs and checklists to ensure that you can operate, you can get your operations to the highest level of excellence. That’s the point of this podcast. That’s the key. And the main takeaway that I’m hoping you all walk away from is a higher level of operational efficiency. So enjoy the podcast with Keith and myself. Keith, welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you on how you doing.

Keith Gillette 2:03
I’m doing great foods to be talking to you today. Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Davis 2:08
Yes, yes, and, and listeners. Um, before the podcast, Keith, and I got to just catch up a little bit and talk about weather. Family, talk about living where, you know, my desire is to get out of the cold. And so hopefully, Keith, you know, we’ve already come to some agreement that, you know, it’s not going to happen happen anytime soon. But I think I think the thing to kind of prep this podcast for is that oftentimes we’re focused on one thing, and sometimes that one thing maybe just takes a backseat while we get everything else in order. So I’ve got to put moving on the backseat to just get some other things operating in excellence, right. So I think that, you know, businesses the same way, everybody can just be so focused on revenue, money, money, money. And there’s other factors that go into making sure your business not just makes money, but operates at a very high level. So I’m excited to talk about that with you today. Before we jump into it, give our audience a little bit of an intro about yourself and your business.

Keith Gillette 3:19
Great, I appreciate the opportunity to do so. So I characterize myself as an emerging and introverted entrepreneur now, but My professional background is in IT operations management. I started way back in college, undergraduate as a support technician, then I worked as a network and systems administrator. But I quickly moved up into IT management and leadership primarily in K 20. Education. So I’ve headed several IT departments in both organizationally embedded leadership positions, as well as in virtual fractional interim chief information officer roles. And I continue to do that kind of CIO at your service. And he’s elated process consulting right now. But I spend the bulk of my time on my software as a service startup task trend.

Chris Davis 4:13
Love it, love it. And process consulting is a term that you don’t hear often, but I feel like it’s just the nature of where small businesses is on the rise, right is getting those processes in order, getting them in place, and making sure things are operating at a very high efficiency and you’re you’re also a Six Sigma certified, right?

Keith Gillette 4:38
That’s right. So I’ve found I’ve been a, what I call process pragmatist. And that’s sort of a professional nickname that I adopted for myself. So I, you Well, first you have to understand that one of my personal peculiarities is that I have an alarming and almost annoying affection for alliteration, so I was trying to find a way to work that alliterative turn of phrase into my work task train process pragmatists, you get the idea. And six, six sigma was training and certification was part of that because I’ve been very interested in systems and processes for all of my career as a member of the American Society for Quality, which is all about quality and process management.

Chris Davis 5:30
Yeah, I love it. So now listeners you see why said You know, you could be so focused on revenue, there’s other things that you may need to get in order, and how how much more appropriate than then to talk about processes, right processes and systems. This is all of the the good stuff, right, as an automation expert, these are words that just get my my fingers in my toes tingling. So So I wanted to set the table with this Keith SOPs. Okay. Standard people

Keith Gillette 6:06
are cringing. cringing, yes, standard operating procedures,

Chris Davis 6:11
we’re gonna I’m gonna walk people through this because I don’t want to assume any intelligence and I don’t want somebody to feel left out due to their negligence. So it’s like, what is a standard operating procedure? And why are they important?

Keith Gillette 6:27
Oh, that’s a question for me. Yeah. What is the standard operating procedure? Well, that is, I believe the core of your your business, right. So you talk about their thing being things more important than, than revenue or things you have to pay attention to other than than revenue. And that revenue is really an end result at the at the end of a long, long chain, right? That that’s a signal that you have delivered something of value to your customer. And then revenue comes in as a result. But that process of delivering value to your customer that, you know, what that process is, varies from organization to organization, you know, in if you’re manufacturing widgets, it’s it’s all of the steps and their supply chain to get the raw materials and for your widgets to bring those in the assembly line, the packaging, the distribution, the sales, if you’re a marketing agency, you know, your delivery of value is very different. You’re providing a service, you’ve got a set of clients who want you to create content for them on a regular production cycle posts, social media, but there are still recurring steps in that value chain, right, that delivery of value to your customer that is ultimately going to result in the signal of revenue for your organization. And you can decompose that value, that set of processes, some of which are on the value chain, right that in really going from your inputs to what your customer gets, some of which are off of that value chain, they’re just like overhead things that you need to do for compliance. Or just you know that human resources, onboarding procedures that you have to go through. But those are still things that recur over and over again, in your organization. And you want I believe, as much as possible to have those procedures standardized, you want to have them written and, and standardized so that you can do them consistently, and achieve a level of quality in doing so. Otherwise, you’re just doing it ad hoc every time and you’re not necessarily going to get the quality result that you’re going to want. You’re setting yourself up. I think for a lot of inefficiency, creating bottlenecks to scale are just a couple of the examples of things that don’t happen. So standard operating procedures, really the core of the series of steps that you’re going to do on a recurring basis to deliver value to your stakeholders, or do something else that enables your business.

Chris Davis 9:21
Yeah, and I’ll say this as an engineer. I was an electrical engineer. And I was not familiar with SOP standard operating procedure. Okay, I heard I I’ve heard of Six Sigma, like in the talkies. But our I would say our cousin, our professional cousins were systems engineers, right? And they were the ones that did all of that. They were the ones that were heavy on the SOPs, heavy on the Six Sigma certification. There was some electrical engineers that did, but I was not by by default, I’m process oriented. But I had not made that connection until I started getting into small business entrepreneurship in marketing. And then I started to realize, oh, wait a minute, we, if we’re going to do this, again, we should really standardize this. So it’s not changing. So and even if somebody leaves the organization, it doesn’t leave such a gap in void. It just leaves an empty seat that needs to be filled, instead of just like a breaking down of everything. So I started to learn an appreciation for SOPs, as I grew as an entrepreneur, so my relationship is a little different. But with that being said, Keith, it’s common. Let me let me not say common, because it may differ depending on the circles in the industry that people are in, but specific to my industry, right, digital marketers, and agencies and SAS founders. There’s this ongoing back and forth seesaw with the value of SOPs, because truth be told, there’s a lot of companies, there’s a lot of small businesses that take the effort to document them. And then that’s the beginning and end there. They’re pretty there somewhere. And whenever they need to be pulled out, maybe somebody pulled them out, but the day to day execution, they tend to be overlooked. So for you, in your experience, what is it how, what is what approach should we be having in order to create SOPs in documented processes that we actually use day to day? Because they’re there for a reason? Right?

Keith Gillette 11:43
Yeah. And I think you want to think about the reasons that you want them there. So first, let me make the case for why you’d want to go through the hassle of documenting your standard operating procedures in the first place, much less, you know, micromanage their implementation every day, right? I mean, the question that naturally arises, why not just get the right people on the bus, right, hire the right people, point them in the right direction, and then get out of their way? I say, Absolutely, if you can do that great. But I think there are reasons that even that is not enough. First, what you firstly might not be able to hire the right people, especially now, the job market in many places is tight. And I think finding the people with the knowledge and the experience you need to do that may be a real challenge. As an employer, you may be forced to invest in providing training and support to lower skilled and less experienced people just to get the resources you need. So one one reason is, is that, that training and support the scaffold that having documented standard operating procedures can provide their second even even if you get the right people, if you have them on board, it’s not efficient or effective to have them work ad hoc on everything. Now, I think certainly, if you’re solving a new problem, working in a very volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment, then you have to operate at least somewhat in an ad hoc fashion, and trust the experience and intuition of the people you have working for you. But once your team has solved the problem, you want to put it to sleep, right, just implement the best solution that the team has come up with, and follow it consistently to eliminate avoidable errors and increase efficiency, right. So that efficiency that you get by standardizing your procedure, once you’ve solved the problem is going to allow you to scale your business by eliminating bottlenecks. Otherwise it will be you’re going to be generating customer service problems due to mistakes and creating friction between your employees due to miss handoffs, because everybody’s doing something slightly different.

Chris Davis 14:00
Yeah, yeah. And I think the term efficiency is what brings it home for me now. Now, granted, I’m a high Ivalue efficiency, I am extremely high on that end of operation is I want mines to be efficient, where some people just want it to be effective. Hey, look, don’t care how long it works, how long it takes, how many people it takes, get it done, right? Yeah, I’m not that way. So efficiency becomes like my guiding light in principle. How do I get more and more efficient? And that to me is what brings the this process of documenting process down and really being intentional, you know?

Keith Gillette 14:41
Now I agree. And one of my other annoying alliterations is everyday efficiency, right? And that’s what standard operating procedures gets you because these are the things you’re doing every day in your business over and over again, whatever that may be maybe onboarding a new employee. It may be onboarding a new customer. It may be you Doing your sales outreach, there are a series of steps that your employees go through to operate your business and standardizing that, I think can lead to a lot of efficiency. And I want to come back to something that you talked about earlier, which is the another reason for documenting your standard operating procedures is his risk mitigation. Right? You talked about the the employee leaving, right. So even if you don’t encounter problems on a routine basis, your operation is fine with the employees you have. I think you’re still putting the business at risk unnecessarily. If you don’t document your procedures, this is the proverbial hit by a bus situation, right? What happens to all that tacit knowledge? If a key employee gets hit by a bus, we’re more likely in the age of the great resignation that we’re going through right now. Those those key employees are going to leave for greener pastures, and all of that implicit knowledge is going to leave with them. And you I mean, you brought that point out, I think that’s, that’s absolutely true.

Chris Davis 16:06
Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to be thinking about the big picture, I’ve got a best friend who’s in the construction industries got a start up that that is helping the helping with the labor shortage. And they’re seeing that a lot of their their intelligence and IP is leaving, as those workers retire. So you’re you need these new young, you know, tap this new young talent to come in, and you need them to get up to speed quickly. You don’t have time, because that that senior employee may be gone in a week or two, maybe going in a month or two, how do you get them acclimated, get them up to speed. And I think when we start to think about that, in our business, I, I go through extensive leadership training, it’s probably one of my favorite types of trainings to partake in. And one of the things that I’ve always operated by cuz I’ve been taught is, run your business, run your job, your position, whatever it is, as if it doesn’t need you, like, make it so that you’re not required. And Keith, I know, when I was a corporate worker, that was the opposite job security was this but me, right? You kept all the tricks of the trade right to your chest, though, in some locked up at home, just in case. But now it is, is I feel like the strongest approach to growing a business stabilizing a business and scaling it is make sure you’re operating it where there is no one single point of failure as a person, you know?

Keith Gillette 17:51
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it not only is important to eliminate that single point of failure, that it to minimize the risk of your organization. In today’s operating environment, so much work is team based and collaborative, that you, you have to be able to coordinate among people and standard standard operating procedures, also helps with that, because everybody’s on the same page with how you are going to do things. So I think that there are like at least six major drivers for why it’s, you know, critical for every organization to document their standard operating procedures. And we’ve talked about a bunch of them in the examples that I’ve given so far. But you know, there’s that, that efficiency gain. And you can see that in a lot of places. That you you have recurring processes, because you’re doing them so frequently, if you can, standardize and come up with an efficient way of doing it once and then repeat that, that pays huge dividends for your organization’s Yeah. And, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a quote by by Taiichi Ohno one of the founders of the Toyota Production System, who’s a major figure in the Quality Management movement, and he said, you know, without standards, there can be no improvement. So you’ve got to set that standard of how you do business for the things that recur in your organization. And then work with your employees to document your standard operating procedures. So that they can collaborate effectively with one another and they’re not going to hide hide their their knowledge in their head under their desk in a safe at home, whatever the case may be. And check them for for efficiency.

Chris Davis 19:43
Wow, that’s a great quote. And it makes me think of the word standard twofold. Right? We’ve been talking about it, you know, standardizing make sure there’s this quality, consistent quality, but it makes me think, you know, and I’m gonna do some name dropping here because Keith I can it’s my But I think one of the biggest examples of what not to do is Chipotle. And I don’t know about you. But out here, every single Chipotle is different. You could tell them the exact same thing, exact same thing, you get take a picture of your order, and what you get is off. It’s so frustrating. I don’t even go to Chipotle anymore. I don’t even go to it anymore. And what triggered that thought is as a customer on the receiving end, poor quality, whatever the standard is for Chipotle? I don’t know, because it’s the shake of the dice what I get back. So when I’m thinking about business, Keith, how many times has somebody had a good experience with support? And then bad experience with that same company’s

Keith Gillette 20:50
variability? Absolutely. Right. Now, granted,

Chris Davis 20:54
these are humans were all, you know, on a on an uncontrollable spectrum. In a sense, yes. But what is I guess what I’m saying to my listeners is, what is that standard in your business that you want to be a parent? There’s got to be a level that okay, by n a worst case scenario, we never dropped below this, the flip side Chick fil A Chick fil A, I don’t care. I’ve seen people yell at these workers at Chick fil A. And they’re always smiling. Oh, sorry about that. Would you like a brownie? Like, like, Hold on? Is there a battery in their back, he can’t be a human response. But you see the standard, Keith, the standard has been set. And it’s held like that in your business. So you just just talking through this key is given me a different, like another level of appreciation for standard operating procedures, because there is a standard that I want to be apparent in the marketplace that I want people to know, my company by, and operating procedures allow me to achieve that standard for longevity, you know, consistency?

Keith Gillette 22:04
Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s, that’s really well said, if you look at the most admired companies, they have set a very high quality standard, and they hit it consistently, how do they do that? One of the reasons is that their core processes are very standardized. And so I’ve I’ve admired, you know, companies like Apple who have, you know, this enormous creative side, but the quality of the, the device, and the service that they deliver is very high, because they have operations management really dialed in. And it’s been my mission to try to bring process to the people right to bring that big company, quality, standard, and make it accessible to people and in small and medium businesses, which is really, you know, where I grew up when my background has primarily been in small enterprise, where you, you frequently don’t even have standard operating procedures written down, which, which, which kind of blows my mind, because it’s, it’s really so easy to do. And there’s so many benefits of doing it. That, that I think it’s an low hanging fruit that will pay dividends in your organization, on multiple levels, you know, it’s, it’s, like I said, you’re going to, to decrease the customer dissatisfaction by having high standards and standard procedures for achieving them, you’re going to decrease your employee dissatisfaction with, you know, somebody dropped the ball, because they did it a different way, or I’m still waiting on X from my coworker, because we just don’t have our act together internally. And it’s going to, in the end, pay dividends in your ability to generate revenue and and get that signal that you’re doing something right and delivering value.

Chris Davis 24:11
Absolutely. And what I want to do is I want to make a quick shift here for the for our last few few minutes together, Keith and I want to talk about, you know, that path, that decision, that driver the motivation that went from consultant to founder, there was at some point, I’m imagining, you know, I talk to founders all the time on the podcast, and a lot of times they software is birthed out of them scratching their own itch. Right? So I imagine it after a while of just seeing the mistakes the the in these don’t have to be big mistakes, small mistakes of not doing the right thing over time that become big. What was that driver that say, You know what? I think I’m gonna solve this problem at scale with software.

Keith Gillette 25:00
That’s That’s exactly the situation I was in, scratch my own itch. So, you know, the specific crystallizing event for the idea behind task train occurred a number of years ago when I listened to the audiobook of The Checklist Manifesto by Harvard medical professor and surgeon Atul Gawande. But the impetus that led to that moment came from long experience in in it before that. So I mentioned I was a systems administrator. In that role, I was really too often burned by by lack of documentation, neither system configuration or procedural documentation, just you know, something would break and I have no idea how to fix it. Even if I had set the system up a few months ago, that knowledge, because it’s so specialized, it really was no longer even in my head. So I became diligent in documenting everything I did. I carried that lesson with me when I advanced to leadership. And my motto became, if it’s not documented, it’s not done in my leadership roles. I would ensure my teams would develop and verified documentation as part of project implementation. And then we had all of our critical and routine standard operating procedures written down as, as we’ve been talking about the importance of so far. But even with a, you know, really caring team and competent employees and all that documentation in place, I found that, you know, we screwed up way more than we should have, and on dump stuff, like you said, it doesn’t have to be big things, but things that were entirely avoidable if we had consistently followed those procedures. And, you know, that’s, that’s because, in my case, I, it is complicated, not everything can be automated. So there’s still that human factor you talked about before. We’re all you know, human beings in the end, and we make mistakes. And in a rush of trying to serve a user finished device set up one of my texts, they would forget a step, and that would inevitably come back to bite us. So forgot to deploy the anti malware after reinstalling the operating system Keylogger got installed. Not good. So there are real consequences, real cost consequences, and real customer relationship consequences for errors like that, that are entirely avoidable. So in those IT management rules, even though we had those standard operating procedures, and we tracked our service requests and our ticketing system, there was still this gap between that that ticketing workflow and those SOPs. So when I heard Atul Gawande talking about the remarkable results that he got from the humble checklist. So in the in The Checklist Manifesto, he describes the use of checklists and construction, and in aviation and his own work with the World Health Organization, bringing checklists into healthcare with the safe surgery checklist. And that generated a 40% reduction in surgery deaths, 36% reduction in surgical complications. Very simple, right, just following a checklist, when I heard that I thought that maybe this idea presented a way to bridge the gap between just having documented your procedures, and then actually integrating them into everyday workflow. So I started to, to flesh out a prototype for test train the the software as a service application that I’m privileged to have launched. And

Chris Davis 28:33
today, let me pause you there, keith that going into like fleshing out the software. Did you have experience in the past? Doing software? Were you exposed to it in any way? What? What gave you that confidence to go in there and document it as you did?

Keith Gillette 28:51
Well, I think, you know, when you when you start out with the beginner’s mind as as I did, because I had taken some cool computer science courses when I was an undergrad, but and I’d done, you know, scripting as a systems administrator, but I had not done enterprise software development. Yeah. You know, if you don’t, if you’re not a subject matter expert, you always underestimate the complexity of any task. So let’s just say that as with any entrepreneurial journey, it’s been quite a long and bumpy path. But I’m very pleased that, that my partners and I have built a tool that I wanted to, and done it without outside funding, so I’m excited to be able to have it out in the world and chat with you about it.

Chris Davis 29:35
Yeah, no, that’s that’s great. And you know, the marketer side of me is wanting to probe a little deeper with the with the go to market challenges that you face. If you do if you want to share a challenge or two that you face you you went through the dev process, got the MVP probably had some beta users in there, test some things out. Now we’re ready. We’re slowly rolling it out. For with more and more users, what were some of the challenges that you faced as you started to see the in the end of the tunnel? Like, wait a minute, the software’s ready? You know, I think we can go and tell the market.

Keith Gillette 30:15
Right? Oh, yes. And that presents a whole new set of challenges and learning experiences, let’s let’s frame them from that way. I, especially with the, the problem I chose to solve, and the way I chose to solve it with task train, this is this is a this is an enormous challenge for us. Because in many ways, I’ve I’ve built a a horizontal platform, right I’m, I built a piece of software that allows you to very easily document your standard operating procedures, as outlined as a checklist with multiple levels in them, and, and embed training at each of those steps, right. And then you can assign those standard operating procedures and turn them into workflows that people can collaborate on with each step, having a different assignee comment threads at each of those steps, you can easily collaborate, right? That that platform, you know, that can be applied to any organization that has recurring processes, and, and that makes marketing it as I’m sure you’re able to tell me better, a real challenge because I was listening to one of your other podcasts and you were talking about the that if you’re your market is everybody your market is no one and you really need to focus. So I think that is the challenge we are facing right now is that especially built a soft piece of software, that that solves a problem that many people have. But we are a, you know, a founder funded startup don’t have huge marketing budgets really do need to focus on a customer profile that has the biggest pain, right? Who is really facing that, that challenge? So that’s where we are right now. I can certainly don’t I could go on about this particular challenge indefinitely. But I’ll stop.

Chris Davis 32:26
Right? No, thank you for sharing. I always am intrigued, you know, I’ve by just by the nature of what I do, you know, my digital Rolodex is split between a whole bunch of savvy marketers, and then a whole bunch of savvy CEOs. So I hear both sides. And it’s just always interesting to to let of course the listeners here but always, you know, just check in. I’m always fascinated, always fascinated with the the process of development. And marketing is just such an interesting relationship. But there’s one thing in closing, I want to say that I I found works really well for me, Keith, great in based on how you set up your software. It sounds like you were probably probably privy to this far before I was okay. And it’s the idea that my SOPs what I’m learning in my business is the SOPs are great for that person just getting started need to get familiar with the process for the first time. But I don’t necessarily need them to go through that SOP every time it seems it gets to be a bit big for the task. So what my operations manager started to do is create checklists based on those SOPs. So once you know the process, you can go through it, you don’t have to go through the SOP. But you better make sure you generate this checklist and make you know and check everything off. You mentioned that when you were talking about your software, how, you know, you can do the SOP, you can split it out to workflows and create checklists. It sounds like this is something that you have been aware of along the way as well.

Keith Gillette 34:07
Absolutely. So I think there are a lot of advantages to the checklist format force for a lot of things, but for standard operating procedures in general, because your typical standard operating procedure, right is is very long, it’s like text base, long paragraphs explaining what to do. Maybe if you’re lucky, you get some pictures in there. If there’s like, you know, some some pieces of software you’re supposed to be doing at a particular step. But that can be overwhelming. And that’s why people that’s one of the reasons people like don’t refer back to them after they’ve done the initial learning because they’re just very clumsy to work with. Yes. Whereas checklists are very succinct. When you’re you’re talking about a particular step. You’ve got to be very concise in describing it. You’re just jogging the person’s memory at that point. They’re going through the checklist the 10th time. But at the same time Oh, yeah, it’s it’s easy to forget a step. But it’s like it’s you have that curse of knowledge. And if you’re not using a checklist to complete a procedure, you think you know everything because you’ve done it at the time. But but maybe you’re distracted, maybe the phone rang and you forget a step, the checklist gives you that, that check on making sure that you’ve done it, right. But it doesn’t overwhelm you with too much detail. And the design of testing is really built on that if you want the detail, it’s there. But it’s one level down, you don’t have to look at it every time, you can just check the the point off when you’ve done it, because you know how to do it. But if you’re that new employee, you get the best of both worlds, because you have the outline of exactly what to do. And then if there’s a place where you get stuck, we provided as much content, multimedia, videos, diagrams, you can embed whatever you you need for your employees to get that just in time training.

Chris Davis 36:06
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, man, this was a very wealthy conversation, I got some notes here. I am a student of process a student of process. So anytime there’s software to make that easier. And anytime I can talk to somebody who’s just neck deep, right, I don’t want ankles. I want neck deep into just the nitty gritty of creating operational excellence. I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about, right? Making sure that your operations that whatever those systems are, that they’re that they are at their optimum, right at all times. So thank you, Keith, for coming on and sharing your your expertise, your story and your and your software. If people want to find out more about you or your software, where can they go?

Keith Gillette 36:56
Well, I really appreciated the opportunity to chat with you. And I would encourage you and your audience, if if you’re interested to check out tasktrain.app You can sign up for a totally free account there we have a free forever tier. And that’s also the best way to reach me. So you can reach out via the messenger app inside tasktrain.app , as well as see my social media and contact links on the People page of our website.

Chris Davis 37:32
All right, great. Well, we’ll have that link in the show notes for all our listeners. Thank you again, Keith, for coming on, man.

Keith Gillette 37:39
Fantastic. Thanks so much,

Chris Davis 37:40
Chris. Have a good one, man. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online academy responsibly, my friends

Today’s Guest

Keith Gillette is a “process pragmatist”, “systems savant”, “introverted entrepreneur”, and Founder/CEO of TaskTrain, a process management SaaS application streamlined for SMBs. Keith has more than 25 years of IT operations management experience in both embedded and virtual CIO roles. He holds a Master of Science in Information & Telecommunications Systems Management as well as a Master of Business Administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Keith is a Six Sigma-certified senior member of the American Society for Quality.

Want to Be a Guest On the Podcast?

We’re currently accepting guests for the podcast that are SaaS owners, marketing automation consultants, and digital professionals that have produced high results with automation.
 
If that’s you, or you’d like to recommend someone, click here to apply to be a guest.

About the Show

On the show, Chris reveals all of his automated marketing strategies he has learned from working in fast growing marketing technology startups so you can put your business on autopilot quickly and without error.

Discover how to deploy automated marketing, sales, and delivery systems to scale your business without working long hours to do so.

Chris L. Davis - Chief Automation Officer

YOUR HOST

Chris L. Davis

Chris is an Electrical Engineer turned entrepreneur who is the Founder of Automation Bridge, an international speaker and facilitator, and startup consultant