Trainual’s Chris Ronzio on creating training infrastructure

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Patrick Campbell

No one is born an expert. No one rides a bike perfectly for the first time. No one cooks an egg properly the first time, or even the 99th time. In my personal case. And sure, there are prodigies like Mozart or Picasso, but even they had to work their way towards mastering their craft. Everybody starts somewhere at some point, bad and slow, but with enough time and the right strategy, you can work towards that expert level.

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Patrick Campbell

In B2B SaaS, you are constantly training yourself or others to be more effective operators, and sometimes with certain tasks you may not be riding a bike or cooking eggs, but you are figuring out the best posting strategy and how to be effective on sales calls and sometimes a certain tasks to help if you have a guide to get there faster.

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Patrick Campbell

And because learning is a tedious process. Folks like Chris Franzia have made it their mission to make it easier. As Train your CEO, Chris serves the need to simplify processes and make things easier for people to learn. Train and monitor their process of teams and organizations. In this episode, Chris gives us tips on how to train our teams and scale up their skills to meet their highest potential.

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Patrick Campbell

All that and more coming up next from Paddle to Protect the Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Chris Ronzio dives deep on training. We talk about the importance of training, designing workflows, creating training, infrastructure, tracking progress and accountability, and of course, the future of training.

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Patrick Campbell

After you finish the episode, check out the show notes for an in-depth field guide that will make you a better operator.

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Chris Ronzio

So my name's Chris Ryan's, the CEO of Train Your, which is the modern online training manual.

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Patrick Campbell

There we go. There you go. I like that. That's awesome training just to get right into it. Training is insanely important, and I feel like you don't realize it until it's a little too late in most organizations. Like, so maybe like someone who, like, studies this every day. Like, why is training so important? Like, I feel like it's obvious, but, like, why is it so important to, like, take it seriously?

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Chris Ronzio

Yeah, training is like tightening the wheels on your bike or something so that they don't fall off when you start to go really fast. Okay. And I've talked to a lot of companies that are growing and as they scale, they have to hire people and they sort of lose touch with the work that's getting done. And if you don't have good training, then the business kind of just gets away from you.

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Chris Ronzio

And so training is the glue that keeps everything together.

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Patrick Campbell

It's like daunting to like starter training program, right? Like, I intuitively understand, like, oh, we document things in like engineering because, you know, when you go to look at that code, you want understand what's going on, right? And then sales, you might have like, you know, what feels like spreadsheet or something like that. But when it comes to like training all of a sudden, like a higher level person, like all these other things, like, is that why so daunting is because we've, we've made it this big thing in our mind.

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Patrick Campbell

Well, I.

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Chris Ronzio

Think it's a couple things. First, it's never urgent. You know, you never set out to do training because it's the thing you have to do unless you've got someone that's starting tomorrow and you're like, crap, I need to train, train them, you know? But having a training program is never urgent, so it always takes a backseat to other things.

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Chris Ronzio

And then I think people stress themselves out because they think they need to create all this process. They need to create things when training is really about just capturing what exists because your business already operates, you do things a certain way. And so if you think about it more as capturing the processes that exist instead of creating something from scratch, it's less daunting.

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Patrick Campbell

So if we were to start like a training program or I guess it sounds like don't even call it a training program like by what you're saying, but we are going to go into and this is very like present preparation for us because I think I explain this to you like a month ago, like this is like everything we're thinking about 2018, like comes the people up.

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Patrick Campbell

Like, what do we do? Like, what are the steps?

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Chris Ronzio

Like, where do you start?

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, like, where do we start? Where do we go? What's it like? Basically, I want free advice. Like with, like we need a training program. Profilo. Like, what do we do and what are the important pieces?

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Chris Ronzio

Yes. Number one thing you have to do is architected out from the beginning. The design is so important because you need to know just at a high level what are the different departments in the organization, what are the different roles that you have, and then what does everyone need to know? And then what do they need to know at a department level and what do they need to know at a role level?

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Chris Ronzio

So it should be pretty simple. But I always tell people to start, which is the orientation that the everybody comes into your company and needs to learn why you started this. Like if we were sitting down and you're telling me the founding story about, you know, back in 2010 or 12 when the Web didn't really exist, and we're like, you know, like, whatever that would fire.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Chris Ronzio

That people can, like, resonate with and connect with, you know, captured that first because that's important for everyone. The core values, the mission, the vision, the market, who are your competitors, those things that just add context to every employee. That's where to start. Then you go department by department and you say, What are the things that every role needs?

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Chris Ronzio

What's the function in the business unless trained that? Like, how do we collect money or how do we get customers, things like that? And then you go down into the role level and you say your specific responsibilities in this and this is what we expect and this is how we know if you're doing a good job because you're training is really just meant to be a reference for them to go back on.

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Chris Ronzio

And for you as a manager and the employee to reconcile, if they're doing a good job, it's for you to capture the best practices of what you know about the business or the department leader, and then for the employee to receive that and give the feedback loop of, yes, I get it. I've checked off on.

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Patrick Campbell

You browsing the interesting there. So I take a, you know, a spreadsheet or like you know, some sort of document and I figure out, okay, orientation, this is what I want everyone to know about the company department role. Like just like you said, like I at least have like one line in a little paragraph. I'm like, everything right now.

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Patrick Campbell

I have to actually, like, create that values training, right? And I think this is where I get cut off the most because I think I can intuitively sit back and go, okay, cool. Like, I want everyone know the values, the mission, competitors, all that kind of stuff. But then it's like, okay, do we create a deck? Do we have an interactive program?

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Patrick Campbell

Is it a podcast? And sort of like there's all these different things we can do and because everyone learns a little bit differently, do we do a test? Is a test too intense? Like, like, how do I design a module? So let's say we're designing a module, if you will, or whatever you guys call it, a training, like how do we, how do we then do that part?

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Chris Ronzio

Okay, so if you're sitting down and you want to design like the culture deck, that's the thing that's just teaching everyone your values. Yeah, maybe a great place to start would just be a simple video of you saying, Here's an introduction to our values. Listen text underneath that so that people can watch the video, or if they're just scanning through, they can still search and find the text that goes with that video.

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Chris Ronzio

But I say start simple. So shoot a video if it's something that you need to connect to before you.

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Patrick Campbell

Like outlining all the stuff, just like just shoot it. You and I like you asking me what I values. I'm just going to go through it like put it up there. I guess the best.

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Chris Ronzio

Way to create training is to record it as you're doing it once. So we we use a hashtag, explain it once or train it once, you know, because if if you hired someone today and you're going to hire 100 more people just like that, why not just capture what you're training that person on so that you don't have to do it 99 more times?

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Patrick Campbell

Because some things get a little technical, right? So it's, you know, values it. I mean, you can go through it and you can be like, this is this and this is what it means. But let's say we're training people on how to write an email or how we collect payments or stuff like that where there's like steps, right?

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. Do you do the video and do screencast and all that kind of fun screencast the process and then go back and maybe make it a little bit more rigorous, like.

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Chris Ronzio

How you can think about detail and there's kind of a framework you can use for any process or policy that you're trying to train. You know, at the very top it's what's the reason for this? What's the purpose? Why am I training you on this? Because then it sets up an expectation the person understands why they're being assigned something like, I used to hate homework in school.

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Chris Ronzio

I don't know. But if the teachers said, Here's why we're learning this or here's here's a purpose behind it, it all goes into this bigger vision. Then I felt better about the homework because I feel like I'm working on something for the semester, you know? So you give the context of why am I training you on this? And then there's some other things like what software tools do you need?

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Chris Ronzio

Are there certain templates or files you need to reference to do this? What's the frequency that you're going through? This thing? How often is it done? Is it a weekly thing? Is it a daily thing? How long does the thing take? Is it a five minute task? Is it a 20 minute task? Just that framework of explaining what the process is is a really great way to introduce it.

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Chris Ronzio

So you get in a habit of describing that at the beginning and then you say, Now here we go. You know, that was the overview, that's the intro paragraph, and now here's how to do it.

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Patrick Campbell

If you continue to take this down this path, it's kind of an ironic problem where you start a wiki basically, right? Because then you're like, Oh, here's training on all of these different things. So is there a point? Is there like a sweet spot where you're like, Well, like we don't want to make it just any basic thing, like log into a browser right here.

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Patrick Campbell

But we also, you know, we don't want it to be a six week course necessarily unless like, that's really important. If we're hiring, you know, 70 people a week, that kind of a thing. So how do you how do you figure out like what should be a training versus maybe that's a wiki article or you know what, like how do you reconcile that?

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Chris Ronzio

So we handle it where you decide whether you want to track completions of a certain thing because some of the things that you're training you do want to sign off that says, yes, they were trained on this, this is the time and date stamp and maybe I even want to train them again every 60 days or every 365 days.

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Chris Ronzio

So you and you're creating it. Say, is this something I want to track? If it's not, then it's just reference and it's there. It is awake yet searchable, just like any of those other things. But what's missing from a lot of wiki products is the accountability of did they read this? You know, you can you can have it in the wiki for someone to reference, but you can't track if they've gone through it when it was last updated, when the last time they saw it was.

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Chris Ronzio

And that's more training.

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Patrick Campbell

Is the accountability aspect because testing is something you can do it right. Is it good to test? Is it like you do just like, hey, you know, do you track how much they read? Like how do you how do you get that accountability? Because because the idea of like, oh, they got to the end and click the button and like, we're trained, it doesn't feel great, right?

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Patrick Campbell

Like, how do you what's the best way to do accountability, right?

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Chris Ronzio

I mean, it's kind of like a paper document that you just scan past the first 20 pages and sign the end of it. You know, you don't want that. So we lay out where every step you have to complete to progress through this step. So it's a little more like a driver training test or something where you've got to go through it and it gives you that extra accountability where if you put something like your handbook or your policies in there, instead of just signing off, in the end you're signing off on every individual policy.

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Chris Ronzio

So that helps because someone can put it down and come back to it. Testing is super important though, so particularly for anything that, you know, if if you've got a certain sales strategy or an approach you take with your customers or you've got certain people that are culture fits or value fits and you want to weed that out, then a test is perfect for that.

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Chris Ronzio

So you can do multiple choice or survey based tests in our system. And I don't recommend doing a lot of it, but it's it's good as just a a check.

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Patrick Campbell

Point really important yeah.

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Chris Ronzio

At least at the end of your orientation and maybe to certify you in a particular position in the company or before you get a promotion, there's a test, something like that.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. No, it's like it is super interesting right, Because there's just so many layers and this is I mean, it's a weird balance, right? Because you're like, you're identifying this part of the problem. Like, we put this way too up on a pedestal, like, Oh, I got to create a syllabus and a curriculum. Like, it's a course, you know, in high school or college, right?

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Patrick Campbell

And then on the other end, we're sitting there and we're like, No, no, no. Just to do a quick thing first, you know, just do a quick we all.

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Chris Ronzio

Do it like we're training anyway. You know, somebody comes up behind your shoulder and you explain something to them with the computer. So why not just hit the little record button while you're doing that, you know, or you write an email to somebody? Why not just copy and paste that text of.

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Patrick Campbell

What you had to.

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Chris Ronzio

Show us on anyway, you know?

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah. How do you get a company on board? And I presume this is I mean, there's this kind of a double in question here, right? Because this is this is your biggest probably your barrier is not I mean, there's probably a bunch of feature barriers and things like that. But like the bigger thing is like, are they a training organization or are they not?

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Patrick Campbell

Like, how do you inspire that? Or is it more just like, let's just wait until they're ready?

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Chris Ronzio

You know, there's so many varying degrees of training readiness. You know, some organizations have a particular role that they have to hire 300 field reps for, and they don't use the product for anything else in the organization. Other than that, you know, are some people have a seasonal business and they're just trying to ramp up a call center every fall or something, and they've got a small utility for the product and so they just get it right away.

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Chris Ronzio

Other people want to sell their business and they want the whole playbook for the entire company. And then it becomes more of a team crowdsourced effort. So it really depends on the motivation behind the material they're creating and how they tackle it and how quickly they find success.

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Patrick Campbell

That's interesting. That's really cool. Why this? Like, why was this like the thing? I know you're a runner, so like, you're probably training when you're running only initially.

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Chris Ronzio

Okay, this is a new thing. And it's funny, the parallel between training, like I did a triathlon last year and, and yeah, and so the parallel between this training and the business training has been really cool. The history for me came from my first company, so I had a video production company that did youth sporting events all over the country.

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Chris Ronzio

So we would find crews in different cities, partner with sports organizations and then film those championships all around the country. So we had to get really good at onboarding and ramping up tech crews, you know, camera operators and producers. And so there's just tons of documentation and step by step processes and supplies and laminated sheets, and that became ingrained in what I was doing.

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Chris Ronzio

So I sold that business in 2013 and started consulting operations, consulting for other companies. And it's funny, the training stuff started to percolate again, but in different language people would say, I want the playbook for my company or I want, you know, my systems and process. Everybody goes to a conference and they say, Work on your systems and processes are like, work on the business and not in the business.

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Chris Ronzio

And then you sit down in front of your laptop and you're like, okay, how do I start? Like, how do I work on the business? And so you fire up a Google doc or something. And I saw that there was this gap between just writing this stuff down and actually delivering it scalable to your people and taking them through a sequence of Here's what I want you to know and the order that I want to show it to you.

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Chris Ronzio

So that's when the product is born.

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Patrick Campbell

Because most of us are like, okay, I'm going to create this system of spreadsheets and like get a wiki and like combine it all and like, use Google surveys to like do testing and stuff. You're like, No, I'm going to actually create something for this, which is cool. Who do you look up to? Like, what are some of the companies that you're just like, Holy cow, That training program is out of control.

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Chris Ronzio

So like they have a great internal training program. You know, I think it's that's a hard question because so many of the companies that are getting all the press about their training are focused on external training, like we're this big enterprise and we want to supplement all our managers with this external knowledge. But the training we focus on is more internal.

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Chris Ronzio

It's how do you do your job? And so the best run company is one that everybody knows their job, their role. They've got low turnover, they're able to grow and maintain their culture and there's so many businesses like that, but they're not as much the household names. They're totally, you know.

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Patrick Campbell

Like the alignment, right? Because I think of when I think of that question, I think of like Enterprise ran a company like do I don't know if you know that a program out of school where like they have this really tight management program that a lot of people like to go to like right out of school, Like when I was like Google, like training was like really easy.

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Patrick Campbell

But even at Google, it was really surprising because you had some testing. But it was it was a lot of just like ad hoc decks that there was just an Allen team. Like there was no like it wasn't as formalized as you would think it should be, which is interesting.

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Chris Ronzio

You know, Zappos has a good training program in terms of just exposure to the business and getting everyone on the phones and then incentivizing people to leave the company, even they take it that far. And then they've got these milestone based promotions that they set up, which we have a similar feature where people can request access to materials to proactively take on stuff that they want to learn in the system.

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Chris Ronzio

And I think that's a great way to look at it, is just you're the contents there. You're not forcing it down people's throats, but it's available to them when they want to be ambitious.

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Patrick Campbell

Total. And when you think about like training future, right, Because this is something that's been around forever since, you know, thousands of years ago when someone was training someone at the local store or something like that, Right? Yeah. Do you think there's going to be some like major breakthroughs in like comprehension that's going to help us? Like, do you fear the whole, like universal basic income future or something?

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Patrick Campbell

Like like what do you think the future is here or is there no future Because we're only going to train people.

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Chris Ronzio

I think you'll always need to train people, but it'll get easier in on both sides, so it'll get easier to capture the information from the people that have it. So if I had a machine, I could hook up to someone's brain and just download them before they, like decide to leave the company. You know, that's the ideal. And I think we'll get closer to that based on just artificial intelligence, interviewing people and and almost watching what you're doing on your computer and putting it into natural language.

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Chris Ronzio

So I think documentation will get easier. And then I think on the other end, training will get more effective because like you said at the beginning, people have different styles of learning. And so just in the same way, you can shoot a video and have it auto transcribe into text, you'll see that material you've documented starts to be automatically transcribed into different formats that someone can kind of choose their own adventure.

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Chris Ronzio

So I think you'll have it get easier on both sides.

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Patrick Campbell

No, that's awesome. Yeah, that's really interesting. Do you think that if you're going to take this seriously, I know like training from just the masses and just putting up a, you know, camera, but do you think that is there a point where you should hire someone to be like the chief facilitator for all this?

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Chris Ronzio

Yeah, I mean, companies that have, you know, that they're growing quickly and they have they hit 25 or they hit 50 or they had 100 people depending on the industry. They'll hire a director of talent or learning and development or people operations or somebody that puts more intentional effort behind this kind of program. You know, before then you've got more collaboration.

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Chris Ronzio

It's just team leaders or people documenting stuff within their own department because it's going to immediately benefit them.

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Patrick Campbell

That's cool. That might be an interesting growth lever somewhere for you is like plugging into a lot of the wiki type products. We started looking at notion and notion is great because it allows you to do so much like, yeah.

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Chris Ronzio

It's and it's a task totally.

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Patrick Campbell

To go in there and like but it doesn't, it doesn't act as much like a wiki as we want to do. And so there's, this is something that you know, might be able to, hey I'm doing all my and this is something that, you know, was really fascinating is like I'm doing all my personal notes and like writing stuff in Evernote Apple notes, you know notion taking that as you said, I'm already documenting it and like getting it into like something like training or might be something super interesting.

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Patrick Campbell

I don't know. I don't know if there's any juice there. But it's it's.

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Chris Ronzio

Definitely yes, you'll see some stuff coming out.

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Patrick Campbell

Okay. This is on the wavelength. That's awesome, man. Well, this is great. I appreciate it. Yeah.

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Chris Ronzio

Thank you.

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Patrick Campbell

Thanks for hanging. Yeah, totally.

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Patrick Campbell

A huge shout out to Chris for doing the podcast. Now you know what it takes to implement training at your own company. Today we talked about the importance of training, designing workflows, creating training, infrastructure, tracking progress and accountability and the future of training in the company. And if you want to support Padel and the show, we'd appreciate it if you leave a five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch the podcast.

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Patrick Campbell

Gods tend to like that type of thing. And you know, we like to a piece of the podcast gods. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle. A podcast from Battle Recur, the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.