Escape the Grind: Building Scalable Businesses with Digital Playbooks

📈 Feeling overwhelmed in your business? Tune in to #TheWaterTrough where Justin Banner shares his journey from burnout to balance. Learn how to turn chaos into order with simple systems. Don't miss it! 🛠️ #Leadership #BusinessTips

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough folks this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. Today I'm joined by Justin Banner. Justin is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Noggn. Yes, noggin as in that head on top of your shoulders, though it is spelled a little bit differently. That is, without the I. Noggn is a software platform that helps small business owners turn what's in their head into simple step-by-step playbooks that their teams can actually follow. Over the last 15 plus years he has started, scaled, and exited multiple businesses across e-commerce services and software, generating over$200 million in revenue, and learning a lot of hard lessons along the way. Justin, welcome.

Justin Banner 1:37

Hey, thanks for having me on Ed. Good to be here. Sorry that intro took so long, but you live as long as I do there's a little bit of water under the bridge.

Ed Drozda 1:45

I want to tell you something. This is a very succinct and very meaningful introduction. Trust me, there's no apologies needed here, and I'm glad you chose to be here with me. Thank you for that. So let's jump right in. You've got a storied past as we could say. What gave rise to the idea of Noggn? I know you said turn what's in your head into simple step by step. But way back at the very beginning, what brought you to come up with the name Noggn?

Justin Banner 2:15

Yeah exactly, and really it started not with a product, or a service, or a solution. It started with a problem. It started with someone that had pain in their life and that one of our partners who owned a restaurant. On paper that restaurant was a success story. He had bought it in 2017 and it was kind of a dumpster fire when he bought it. He did a great turnaround, improved product, improved service quality, got the reviews on track, and his restaurant is now doing several million dollars and very profitable. But in that turnaround process he felt like he lost his personal life. He felt like he was married to that business and didn't have time for his family. He also felt like when he stepped out or away, that he had no idea what was happening, and nobody knew what to do. So he was definitely the process and felt like there has to be a better way. So my partner and I, Jason, who had done a previous software venture together put our heads together on that for about a year and thought, what can we create? How can we do this, and Noggn was born. Why Noggn? The idea is that most business owners have great playbooks in their head. They never make it into other people's heads very repeatably, and most of those processes are undocumented. So Noggn is taking processes that exist in the owner's mind, and putting them into a scalable solution that allows them to get their freedom back. As long as it's you and you are the playbook, and the only one that knows the playbook, you experience what our partner Jason did. You're married to the business and you can't get out. So, this is a way that you create freedom for yourself by getting what's outta your noggin onto a digital checklist.

Ed Drozda 3:55

That's a great origin story because let's face it, when one starts a business there is a tendency to take a malignant ownership over that. I say malignant because it does kind of filter into all aspects of your life, and as with malignancy it's consumptive and eventually it left unchecked it can strangle the organism. In this case, both the business and the individual who's starting the business.

Justin Banner 4:23

Good point. I like that.

Ed Drozda 4:24

These business owners are so engaged in the business thing that I think they've lost sight of other things, important things. One of the things that I think is at play here is that sense of propriety. I call it business macho. The business is mine. I'm creating this. Nothing can be wrong here, right? I know what I'm doing, so I up the barriers so as to not let anything else in. That barrier goes so far as for me to block out essential parts of my wellbeing as well, I believe. So when you're meeting with a business owner for the first time, what sorts of things are you hearing aside from the overt symptoms?

Justin Banner 5:04

As it relates to the solution or their current phase?

Ed Drozda 5:08

The current phase, that which brought them to you in the first place.

Justin Banner 5:11

It's typically that they can't step away, that they have no ability to onboard people in a repetitive fashion. That they don't have a systematic training, and that as each new employee joins, it's degraded. It's a worse form because they just tired of it. A lot of times they don't even know what their key or core processes are, even though they exist and they run in the business. They haven't documented those so they don't know what they are. They don't know what the critical ones are. So these are a lot of the kind of symptoms that we're seeing amongst these business owners. The other one is owner burnout. You get to a point where the adrenaline and the newness and the sexiness of the venture wears off and you're in the grind, and now you're just burnt out. Why are they burning out? Well, most of them are burning out because the process requires them to be involved. Imagine the freedom that comes when you remove yourself. If a process is something A, B, C has to get done to get result D, if you're B and you don't show up or you sleep in, or heaven forbid, you take a vacation, the business stops, that process stops. People don't do this subconsciously for all the reasons that you talk about. They don't even realize it's happening, but this idea that I am in the process is a wrong way to manage a business. You typically become in the process because you're an expert, but managing processes and creating processes are a whole different skillset than being in the process. But anyway that's a lot of what we're seeing. Owner overwhelm, owner burnout, poor onboarding and training, which results in more owner intervention over time, right? It's like this spiral that they have a hard time getting out of.

Ed Drozda 6:54

They hop on the hamster wheel and as you say in the very beginning, they're overzealous. That adrenaline rush is enough to make us ignore pain, discomfort, and fear, and just forge ahead. Are people coming to you in a state of frustration, perhaps desperation, that they've suddenly realized after all this time they put a name on it, I am overwhelmed. Or is it because they are looking for a better outlet but don't yet recognize the part they play?

Justin Banner 7:26

I think that it is more the first one, and that is that they come to us with overwhelm and burnout, but they don't really know how to fix it, honestly. They don't know that the solution exists and they can't even identify the solution. They just know that they have to go in every day. They have to grind. The grind is the same. Employees come and go. The owner is the constant, right? And there's this constant need to train and retrain and observe and manage and follow up and it seems like no escape for them. Most of the time they haven't identified this other than when we bring it up, light bulbs go on. They can then readily relate to what we're describing, right? I think it was the E-Myth that coined the phrase work on the process, not in the process. He does a phenomenal job of how you need to transition in your business. But most owners don't think about it like that. They just think, I'm in my business. Well get out, step back. That's something that needs a little bit of coaching to help them wrap their brains around. Some people are a little more process driven, I'm not making a blanket statement, but I would say 80% are caught in the mix and don't know how to pull out.

Ed Drozda 8:28

It's fair to say some may be process driven. Maybe they're better off if they're not process driven for that matter, because if they're process driven they might not be able to stay away from said process. But there is definitely a need for process to operate a business or to be maintained. You've said it very succinctly. You're onboarding, assuming it's good you're bringing in great people. They still need to be trained and they still need to be maintained. Whether or not they can be is a function of available guides, SOPs, and so on. A manager should be involved, but they can't constantly be educating, and having the knowledge base in a resource type presentation, digital as you're saying, definitely gives a big step up for the flow in the business.

Justin Banner 9:25

Yeah. The beauty is we're not the first to invent checklists. We all live by checklist. We're just the first to create a simple solution that forces you to say what is my onboarding checklist? What does it look like when they're complete? What is my job complete checklist on job A? What does it look like? What does success look like? Do we have a standard that we're measuring to? It systemizes all those things that you take for granted as an owner and believe that everyone instantly understands as soon as they joined your company. And then you get frustrated because step B got missed on job A. Well, this is a way to translate all those things into digital checklists that create standards and repeatable processes.

Ed Drozda 10:07

A mantra of mine is to first be aware. In this case be aware of the fact that your circumstances, your playbook, locked in your head is not benefiting the ones that will do the work. Owners lead, they oversee, but they don't do the on the ground work, and ideally they don't want to, but if you lock this in your head then the only one that's aware is you. First being aware that your own head is not a good enough place for it to be is a really important thing. You know, when somebody is in this state of founder overload as you've said, they're not thinking well, they're so consumed in so many different things, they may not be aware of all the things that are going on. What are some of the typical symptoms that would give an inkling to the owner that maybe I am in that state? What are some of the things that you've observed?

Justin Banner 11:09

Good, good question. I believe the quick litmus test is if I take two weeks off, what happens? If I would step outta my business for two weeks and I'm in Europe and I'm on a cruise and I'm not reachable, what happens? Are the instructions clear? Can somebody get hired? Can somebody complete a job to my standard, right? What happens if I step out in a way and if it collapses, that's a great symptom that you are the process, you're not managing the process. I think that's a really easy way to do it. Another one is, can I remotely check in on my business and see a little bit of what's being done? Can I manage the critical things remotely? If I am fishing and I want to check in on my business, do I have any idea what's happening behind the curtain while I'm gone? Those are a couple things that it is like if you say no and no. And the other is, how do you feel? Do you feel like you're tired of repeating yourself? Do you feel like if I have to train one more person or follow up on a job one more time, I'm gonna vomit? I think those are good, smoke signals that might be coming from a fire burning within an organization.

Ed Drozda 12:18

That's assuming that I can go away or that I do go away. How many people do you think simply won't go away for fear of those things?

Justin Banner 12:30

That's another great point. If you don't trust your system, you don't have a system, right? You don't have a system. I think that's another great one. If you can't trust that you have a stable process in place that won't fail when you're not pushing the buttons, you don't have a real system. And you know, we all have ownership and nobody cares as much as owners. You feel like it's your baby and no one's gonna care as much as you, and there's truth to all of that. But there's no freedom in that, and most entrepreneurs want freedom. That's why we do this. We don't wanna be told what to do and what we're worth and how long we have to work, and who our customers are, and what opportunities we pursue, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We do this for freedom, and then all of a sudden we become chained to a job and we're like, is this the dream? Is this the dream I pursued? And the answer is hell no. No. That's not the dream. You just don't have it set up as a system that can become the dream. The dream is a system that operates without you or with minimal oversight or with minimal ownership. Again, we get excited, we get zealous. We just do what has to be done for the business to survive and it's not thriving or scalable. Systems create both. A business that can survive without you and that can thrive and that can scale with out your one hour to one hour produced involvement, right?

Ed Drozda 13:48

So it seems then that this is ultimately about feeling safe to let go.

Justin Banner 13:56

Yep. Absolutely. Why would you not feel safe? You don't have a parachute, right? The guys that jump out of airplanes for a living, they don't fear it. They feel very confident. They have plans and backup plans, and you think they're nuts and insane. But that's the same with this business. You just have to have a plan and a backup plan, and then you feel safe and like nothing's gonna go to hell in a hand basket. If I'm not there, it explodes. We do some process work, and again when I say process I want everyone to think it's as simple as step 1, 2, 3, A, B, C. Just document it. Not an overwhelming thing. It really is just something that you can hand to somebody and they have some inkling of what to do in a repeatable manner.

Ed Drozda 14:38

In a conversation we had prior to today, you made a statement, you said thinking in systems, not heroics. Can you elaborate on what that means?

Justin Banner 14:51

Yeah, I think you kind of identified it when you say we get founder syndrome or owner syndrome, where we believe that we are the hero, where we believe that we're the only one that's gonna do it good enough and the right way. But again, that's very limiting, not scalable. You've limited your business potential, you've limited your freedom, you've limited your life on all those things when you operate in the superhero fashion. You put your cape on and fly in, and you might get the but at the same time, at what cost? The cost typically isn't worth it, and by the way every new venture that I've been in requires heroics. It just does. It requires a ton of fuel, a ton of force. But the idea is that you're transitioning to something a little more sustainable. I will say in my first venture in 2008, I had the cape on, and I believed that we were gonna get a three year exit. So I ran like it was gonna be a three year race and it was a sprint and I was killing myself. I was up really late at night, twenty four seven. Phone on. No family time. And then year four came, and then year five came, and then I kept at it, and six came, and seven came, and eight came. And I was like, I just ran a 50 meter sprint for eight years like this. I didn't do it right, and when we eventually sold the company I laid on my couch for about six months and I couldn't live. I couldn't answer my phone, I couldn't answer my emails. My body was just done. And so the next time I jumped back in, in 2018, I had a different mindset. I was like okay, heroics versus systems, I am a hundred percent about systems now. A hundred percent to a fault because I don't wanna say damage done, but really at the cost of my life, that wasn't worth it. I wouldn't trade what I learned, but I would trade the way that I approached it.

Ed Drozda 16:40

I think that's a really important life condition that you just mentioned. I would venture, not only could you not do much for those six months, but I surmise you realized you needed to not do so much. Yeah?

Justin Banner 16:58

Yeah, it was fatigue on all the fronts. It was probably physical and adrenal fatigue of my body, and then it was mental fatigue, it was exhaustion, it was all the things. I needed some recharge and so I didn't do anything for about 18 months'cause I needed some R and R. If I would've spread that 18 months over those eight years, I probably would've had a healthier run here. My family probably would've appreciated me more. Right? So, I just would've had some better balance. So as much as I still love 24-7 business, I am putting bookmarks in things, saying this is not gonna crash if I don't do it at nine o'clock tonight. It's gonna be here in the morning. I'm just pacing myself. I'm doing meditative things. I'm doing exercise things. I'm doing some spiritual things. I'm just trying to create a balanced approach that is sustainable, and not that I'm gonna be here and give you hard 18 months and then I'll see ya in 18, right? So I'm trying to just create that balance. What's the antidote for this heroic syndrome? It is systems. It's handing things off, passing the baton, and giving people clear instructions on what follows.

Ed Drozda 18:02

I think it's a good reminder to anyone, particularly those who are at the energy level of the serial entrepreneur, which I define in a different way than business people at large. For the serial entrepreneur, the notion of founder overload is routine. Before they even engage in this process I think people like this would be well served to consider you're still flesh and blood. A friend of mine comes to mind who right now is working crazy, crazy, crazy hours. He's developing a new arm of his financial company and recently he said I'm drinking from the fire hose, but I'm looking forward to the holiday were going on for 10 days. And my comment to him was you know you are just flesh and blood, be well. I'm not saying this individual will ultimately suffer for it, but I think any of us really have to acknowledge the fact there's two sides to this coin. My ambition, my desire, my hopes and dreams are fueled by me. You know, body, soul, mind. The body, soul, and mind do take a beating in that process. Again be aware, that your approach is to provide an adjunct solution, but more fundamentally, we have to be aware of our own personal vulnerability. Our expectations can't exceed the fuel that we've got.

Justin Banner 19:27

That's a great point.

Ed Drozda 19:28

But sometimes I think people get engaged in that, where of course I can do this. You can't call me a conservative about much of anything, but when it comes to this, the idea of conserving your wellbeing, I'm definitely on board. When I see people that do things that defy logic, defy safety, and defy everything else, I say to myself, why? I won't get into the science about why things like that happen, why people do things. I accept they do, but that all goes back to that very core thing. Are you okay?

Justin Banner 19:59

Yep. I was under the illusion for a while that businesses had a starting line and a finish line, and that I was just gonna do this at 120 miles an hour until I crossed the finish line. Well, business is much more like life, which is a treadmill, not a start and a finish. It's a treadmill, and no matter what there's more and no matter how many steps you take, it still rolls. So put it on a pace that you can sustain. If it's 6.0, you're a superhero, but for most of us it's gonna be a 3.0, a 3.5, 4.0 for jamming. Just realize that there's no finish line to this thing. I've sold four companies. There's no finish line for me. It's a false summit. As you're hiking a mountain, you sell a company at this false summit because as soon as that exit is complete, now what? Now I need to conquer another mountain. Right? And so and so get on this treadmill at a sustainable pace and don't think of it as a starting line and a finish line'cause it doesn't exist.

Ed Drozda 20:56

Thank you very much for that. I think that the inclination is you just keep going, going, going until suddenly you don't go but along the way, what did you leave in your wake?

Justin Banner 21:09

That's it. Yeah don't have the regret of, or the mindset, which I did and I regret, this is the only thing that matters until it sells. That's not a great way to live life. You get value out of what you're doing, but you at what cost, and the collateral damage isn't worth it ever. And so there's more balanced approach is a hundred percent the way to go.

Ed Drozda 21:30

So these are the things that you've learned through the process of building and selling, coming and going as it were. These are among the lessons?

Justin Banner 21:39

Yep, exactly. The rear view mirror. I wish we all got to do life over again. We gotta redo and who knows what that looks like, but the point is, as we look in the rear view mirror, pass on some of the lessons along the way to those that are earlier on in the process than I am. Hopefully they can take some of those things that I wish I would've learned earlier and known and had perspectives I would've had and applied. So, yep these are from the trenches, life in the trenches. Yeah, as a guy that's done it four or five times now, yeah a hundred percent.

Ed Drozda 22:11

I think it's great that when you share stories of your experience with people who are at different phases on that journey, it's understood that your experiences are your experiences, and we can never expect to teach them how it should be. We can share our story. This is what I experienced, this is what happened with me in hopes of inspiring those people to think about those things. Yes?

Justin Banner 22:38

That's a great point, and I would consider all of this conversation to be a buffet. Walk down the buffet and pull off of it what makes sense for you. We all have, like you say, life stories, experiences,. We're at different stages, different amounts of money in the bank, different family situations, so many factors, but hopefully this banter of my experience and yours, our collective wisdom, there might be mashed potatoes that you want and you might pass on the roast beef, right? But take what you want, fill up on it and leave the rest behind. This is a buffet for you to learn from, and I think that the fact that you're listening to podcasts and absorbing knowledge and gaining new things, you can't implement everything. So pick one or two things, maybe a year to implement, maybe every six months'cause you can get information overwhelm. If you get off every podcast and write down five things that you're gonna do, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. Be very selective, let it soak in. If it resonates and it moves your soul, act on it. But most of the time you're gonna leave a lot of these things behind.

Ed Drozda 23:38

And that's perfectly fine.

Justin Banner 23:40

Yep. I used to be the guy that would have a script to follow after every podcast or book. Then I'd be in the next book and podcast, and I'd be like how does that marry with this one? Then I would be in the next one. Entrepreneurs get FOMO so bad. Oh, I have to be doing affiliate marketing and I have to be doing PPC and I have to be doing SEO and I have to be doing, and your head's spinning. So coming again from my experience take what's valuable, and leave the rest.

Ed Drozda 24:05

It's yet another source of founder overload.

Justin Banner 24:09

Yes. Yes, and the FOMO is real.

Ed Drozda 24:12

Oh gosh, yeah, the fear of missing out.

Justin Banner 24:15

Every time there's somebody doing something a certain way we think we're missing out. No, no, no, no, no. That's the formula and the recipe that worked for their situation. To your point, everything is unique and individual, and even if you were to do those things, you're not gonna replicate it. You almost have to filter, tune up, put on blinders and go hard. That's more than getting distracted and getting yanked around in 30 different ways. That's way more valuable.

Ed Drozda 24:39

I think this is a bit of a nod for AI. It can take this incredible wealth of information and consolidate and or stir it up in a pot. So the 10,000 books on how to blank, blank, blank can be summarized as such.

Justin Banner 25:02

I love it for that.

Ed Drozda 25:03

And in that capacity it becomes inspirational because it doesn't really have the space to say, do this, do that, it talks in broad strokes.

Justin Banner 25:12

Right? I agree, it's the antidote once again for the information overload, and it came at a perfect time. Like everyone's brains are ready to explode with all of the information that's out there. How do we consume it? AI is an unbelievable tool, and even if you want specifics on how would these three people teach me to do a pitch it creates this synthesis that would've taken me six months and boom. And I want it in four steps, but it just does it.

Ed Drozda 25:40

While all these other things take time in our case we are at the end of our time. So Justin, is there anything you'd like to leave us with before we go?

Justin Banner 25:51

Sure. If any of this resonated with any of you, if it's one of the items that you want to take off the buffet and you want to chat about the process such as in your business, you can always visit us@at noggn.com, NOGGN.com. We're early stage, we have alpha testers, and we're looking for people to join our beta wait list, so doesn't matter the industry, doesn't matter the vertical, we're probing it all. We're in the testing phase and early validation. So if you wanna just chat, have follow up questions, or want to get on the beta wait list, it's all the same. noggn.com, NOGGN.com.

Ed Drozda 26:22

Justin, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. My noggin is thankfully, not overwhelmed. It's in a fine space and I'm left with inspiration for which I'm grateful.

Justin Banner 26:34

Likewise, you're fun to banter with Ed, and all kinds of value coming back at me. I enjoyed it very much.

Ed Drozda 26:40

Excellent, thank you so much. Folks, this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor and once again I wanna thank my guest, Justin Banner. I hope that the conversation that Justin and I had today will remind you of the importance of listening carefully and as Justin said, taking things from the buffet that suit you. There's always more than you can eat. So choose wisely and chew what you take before you go on for the next plate. From The Water Trough, I wanna wish you a healthy business.