Automate Your Agency

AI-Enhanced Training: Why Training is Everything (And How to Do It Right)

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 65

Share episode

Send us a text

Ever hire someone with great experience, only to watch them struggle with basic tasks in your company? You assume they "should know this stuff," but they're sitting there paralyzed, afraid to make the wrong move.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: your training process is broken, and it's costing you more than just productivity.

In this episode, Micah and Alane reveal why even the most experienced hires can't succeed without proper company-specific training. Using Walmart's intensive cash register training as a surprising business lesson, they break down what separates companies that scale from those stuck in firefighting mode.

You'll discover:

  • Why "they should figure it out" is killing your team's confidence and efficiency
  • The marketing analogy that will completely change how you approach training
  • How AI and RAG systems are revolutionizing employee knowledge access
  • Why one training session sets everyone up to fail

Stop assuming your team knows your company's way of doing things. Every minute you delay proper training is another hour you'll spend answering questions, fixing mistakes, and wondering why your "good people" aren't performing.

This episode gives you the framework to build training that actually sticks—so you can finally step out of constant firefighting mode.

Resources mentioned:

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

Want more valuable content and helpful tips?

Explore our Courses/Programs:

Enjoy our Free Tools:

Connect with Us:

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. Micah, you mentioned a couple of episodes ago, at the very end you mentioned how you had a very small stint at working at Walmart years ago, probably when you were like high school or right out of high school.

0:00:31 - (Micah): It was last year.

0:00:32 - (Alane): Okay, well, didn't know that. No wonder you were so tired at the office. But you mentioned how they spent two weeks training you just on how to use the cash register.

0:00:45 - (Micah): Yes.

0:00:46 - (Alane): And to me that is the just perfect way to encompass what a company that has scaled and invested in training compared what we see with a lot of very small businesses.

0:01:03 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was a while ago that I worked there, I didn't work there for very long, but they, they had definitely scaled by that point. Walmart was a known brand. I'm not that old. And yeah, their, their training regimen was absolutely to the T. Even though I wasn't going to be working on the cash register right away, I had to go through two weeks of training. I had to pass assessments. They had every little bit of that curriculum lined out and everybody had to go through it.

0:01:40 - (Alane): And instead of Walmart saying, well, this is just something that they should know, they spent excruciating detail in putting in the training so that people would know how to use it. And back then it wasn't a sophisticated system, I would imagine.

0:01:55 - (Micah): Well, no, I sat in a room and watched videos with a bunch of other people that were starting around the same time that I did.

0:02:02 - (Alane): But no, I'm in the cash register probably wasn't that sophisticated. We're talking not to age you, Micah. Not to say that you're.

0:02:10 - (Micah): Here we go.

0:02:11 - (Alane): But 20ish years ago, probably, yeah, I would venture to say that you did.

0:02:17 - (Micah): That it was digital. It was beyond like the typewriter style.

0:02:22 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah.

0:02:24 - (Micah): That you see in the ghost towns. No, it was beyond that. It was digital. But to your point, right. They taught us how to count money, how to give change, how to pull the coins out of the like, slide out cash drawer.

0:02:42 - (Alane): In addition to everything that an employee would run into because of probably experience told them, hey, an employee that we hired didn't know how to do this. We now need to train for that. And you train for the lowest common denominator. Great. If somebody already knows how to do that, perfect. They'll fly through that part of the training, but you're going to catch everyone to make sure they know how to do that one piece.

0:03:03 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember thinking this is mind numbing because who doesn't know how to count money? But a hundred percent now, all these years later, training and working with scaling teams, there are plenty of situations where you can make the assumption, hey, everybody that we hire should know this. And the reality is much different. I mean, we can cite tons of examples from touch typing to Excel to even basic project management, like create a task kind of things.

0:03:34 - (Alane): We forget that because our background is different and maybe we learned how to do that. Not everybody has the same background, has the same life experiences. Might be a much younger generation that just doesn't have a lot of work experience behind them. And I even think about you and I where we'd get so frustrated, you know, in the, in our previous company early on we'd be like, oh my God, how do they not know how to do that? Do they really not know how to do that?

0:04:01 - (Alane): And eventually we just said, oh, they don't know how to do that. That's going to be part of the training. Everybody's now going to get trained on that one thing.

0:04:08 - (Micah): Yep, yep. And to your point, the people that already knew it can sail right through it, pass the assessment, no harm, no foul kind of thing. If anything, it's a quick reminder and it's acknowledgement of what you're going to reach in your role, what you're going to hit, what you're going to be exposed to, what you're going to need to know even better than just reading a job description and going, I don't know what I'm going to get into now.

0:04:33 - (Alane): And we bring up all the doing things.

0:04:37 - (Micah): Yes, yes. Well, and I think that like, man, I didn't even see you head in this direction, but 100%, because in company A, you might be doing the same task as company B, but in a different way.

0:04:53 - (Alane): You might be, you want the company standard way of doing that.

0:04:57 - (Micah): Yes. And when it comes into things that you take for granted and use every day, like email and project management tools and Excel or spreadsheets or Google sheets or even Slack real time messaging, I like this. This one I love. Because company A will go, everything needs to be in a thread. Company B goes, I often hate threads. We're not using threads now. Everybody knows how to hopefully type in a message and hit enter to send it in Slack.

0:05:29 - (Micah): But those minute details make a huge difference.

0:05:33 - (Alane): And a lot of that nuance is such a Great example, Micah. Because the way that we use Slack and ClickUp is going to be most likely, unless they went through one of our programs or a client of ours is going to be very different as another organization that may put less emphasis on keeping things standardized in ClickUp and maybe Slack Chats everything. If you Slack chat me all day, whew. Going to be worn out in about five minutes.

0:06:01 - (Alane): That needs to go in the space in the task in ClickUp where it has a home. But not every client operates that way or every organization. And so having these standard operating procedures, having it as a part of training so that they know how your company operates.

0:06:18 - (Micah): Yep. And I think there's the extra level that can go a little bit deeper, which is how far does a company take the features of a platform? So even take Slack, there's a bunch of features that we don't use at all, we don't touch. Same thing with ClickUp. There's certain features that we just don't touch. And you can look at the other side of it too. There's features that we absolutely do use and we use them for very specific purposes. And we could stand back and go, people will figure it out.

0:06:48 - (Micah): Everybody should know this. But it's that kind of, well, nuance, which we keep using that word, but it's that nuance that does make a big difference to the team members because if they don't know which way to go, then they're the outlier. They're the new person who's coming in and not using it the right way. Or they're making a bunch of suggestions, trying to help, saying, hey, have you ever thought about using the lists in Slack? And we're all like, yeah, no, I'm just, whatever. And then that's shutting them down. Right. Because they're just trying to help.

0:07:21 - (Micah): We shut them down. And I'm just giving a hypothetical here, but those little interactions make or break the whole onboarding. And first months, first six months, first year of an engagement with a new team member.

0:07:36 - (Alane): Yeah. And they and employees, like, one thing I had to learn from going through our previous company is they're not the owner, they're not the manager, they don't know what is okay and what is not okay and they are afraid to make a mistake. Maybe you have 10% of your employees that aren't afraid and they're just going to go run with it.

0:07:56 - (Micah): But the other thing, the ones you promote to management anyway, so as long.

0:08:00 - (Alane): As they have good decision making. But that's still like such A small percentage of the people that are just going to go after it, and the rest of them are either going to sit and wait and do nothing or fumble through trying to figure it out. That is so much time wasted in your organization.

0:08:16 - (Micah): So much time. Oh, my God. It. I mean, we're talking hours and hours that we can in this business and our last business, when there's that insecurity, for lack of a better word, of should I go this way or should I go that way. They can spiral in circles for hours, and they may not have all different sides of the business, and they may.

0:08:41 - (Alane): Not have the right knowledge to make a skilled decision, which is when they halt.

0:08:47 - (Micah): Mm. There's not training. So then they. They have to go to somebody. They may not even know who to go to to ask a question. So it's like this complete frozen state of like, oh, what am I gonna do? I don't know who to ask. I don't know how to make this decision. I'm new here. I don't want to be wrong. I don't want to look like I don't know what I'm doing.

0:09:11 - (Alane): Yeah. You know what I think is so interesting when we work with some companies is we work with them and they put so much emphasis on setting up their workflows and getting things fine tuned. And they're beautiful and they work so well and there's automation in there. And then they do maybe just one. One day training on how to use the system.

0:09:36 - (Micah): A day is generous, Alane. I'm saying one hour.

0:09:40 - (Alane): One hour. Yes, yes. I was being generous, but it really is one hour. Typically on training to use the system, you just worked with a company to build out your entire workflow and system. That most likely took two to three months for a couple of your workflows because we were the expert. And now you're going to hand off that system to your team who are not experts, who maybe might want to make some changes, who don't understand how the company wants to operate in there fully. Because.

0:10:13 - (Alane): Because it's new, the company may not really know yet. You got to kind of massage some areas and training needs to keep on happening so that people continue to utilize the system and don't go back to bad habits or old habits. I see that so often where the shift goes back to old habits because it's scary going into a new system. Everybody then is using it a different way because not everybody's been in there long enough to really get a system in place.

0:10:41 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I think the, the core point that we're trying to make here is training is way more important and far more difficult to do right than any, any of us want it to be.

0:10:55 - (Alane): Yeah, that's a great point. None of us want it to be this hard.

0:10:59 - (Micah): I'm still struggling with that. Like, I'm all about refine, refinement and iterative improvements and all of this kind of stuff. And little ones here and there work fine. But when you start making bigger changes, and honestly, really any changes, there has to be training. And it's. So I let, like, I think there might be an analogy to marketing here, Alane. Okay, when you're marketing, you. You don't just send one email out and go, well, that's it. We can't, we're done.

0:11:32 - (Micah): Can't make it.

0:11:33 - (Alane): Want marketing to work.

0:11:34 - (Micah): We all want marketing to work like that. So here's my analogy. We all want marketing to work like that, but then we hire experts and we, when marketing does work, we hit sell seven touch points. We hit 14 touch points. We're, we're hitting the same audience from different channels. We're using slightly different messages that lead them all back to the same landing page. Well, that's exactly what we need to do with training. It's not just the one meeting.

0:12:02 - (Micah): And you hope your entire team and all the users of this new workflow suddenly magically know every single bit of it and we'll start using it tomorrow because you have all that insecurity of being wrong and not knowing and not having the resources. They're not set up for success. Just like your marketing campaigns aren't set up for success when you only send one email and call it done. Your change management, your workflows, your improvement, your scalability is not set up for success. When you just do one meeting and we're done.

0:12:34 - (Micah): You need to have multiple touch points. You need to hit that audience from multiple channels. You need to be there to set them up for success.

0:12:43 - (Alane): Yeah, and I, and I think you and Beau did an episode on the rag system and how you can have company knowledge easily accessible by your team members because they're not going to retain. Maybe they go through a training. They cannot keep track of all of those things in their head. And you don't want them to. You want them to have the capacity to do other things as well. But they want, they need to know there is training on this. It's available.

0:13:09 - (Alane): Let me just go and do a quick chat with our knowledge base and pull out.

0:13:14 - (Micah): At risk of completely derailing the topic of this episode. There's also this whole concept that training is changing because of AI and because you can connect your company data. So take customer success or customer service. If you have a team and you have a ton of products, well, how do you train on all those details of all those products? Now you can have AI create a chat interface to the product specifications that are specific to your products, to your company, and how they should be handled and communicated to the customers.

0:13:52 - (Micah): That's a whole different type of training. But it's still. It's one of those channels. It's one of those touch points that I was talking about earlier with the analogy to marketing, is that it's setting your team up for success. It's just a different way to look at it. We don't have to make our team sit there for two hours or two weeks watching videos. There's multiple different ways that you can do this now.

0:14:17 - (Alane): So it can be hooked up to multiple systems having accessible knowledge from different places than just what's in that one place.

0:14:24 - (Micah): Yeah, and it's something like if. If you're trying to find this single document, you're spending the time finding the document. Maybe you have a search, but you're searching fold, you're going through the file. Then you got to find the right section. You then have to read that section, and you got to do all that. Most people don't do that. They go, hey, Lane, how do I do X, Y and Z? Because it is way easier to ask somebody or something a question than do all the work to find all that out.

0:14:51 - (Micah): So then switch over to, you know, this rag chat interface. You can communicate with a custom agent that has access to the information that it needs. And you can ask it a question instead of asking somebody else on the team who's already busy a question. And it's going to do all that searching for you. Only it's not going to take 15 minutes, it's going to take 15 seconds, if that. And then it's going back and analyzing the data that it found and synthesize a response back to you.

0:15:23 - (Micah): So you're getting not just a search, you're also getting an AI response and analysis that you can continue to chat with and continue to ask information on. And it's a completely different experience than, oh, I need to look up an answer in an employee handbook or I need to figure out how to find the right SOP for whatever it is.

0:15:44 - (Alane): Yeah, and I think there's two sides to this. One is you absolutely need to be training and having Them go through training courses or SOPs or something within your organization because they don't know what to ask sometimes. They don't know not to hit reply all on every email. You know, there's going to be things that need to be trained that you need to go through with your employees, and then there's going to be things where they need to be able to search and find those trainings when they have a question, oh, I don't know how to do that, I'm going to go search and find that.

0:16:16 - (Alane): So that's the two pieces. You need training happening and you need that knowledge accessible.

0:16:21 - (Micah): Yeah. You could think of it as like, I don't know, the way that I shape it in my brain, Alane, is like, there's this baseline training that everybody. The stuff that everybody needs to know, but you can't retain a hundred percent of that. Like, you could. You could do baseline training on every SOP for each role that you have in your company. Great. But the retention's gonna be 5 or 10%, maybe less, which leaves a huge gap. So then you have. You need quick reference material. And we've talked a little bit about this in different episodes, but I think the, the point that we're trying to make here is the technology is advancing the capabilities of training and just going back to as. As important as marketing is to generate sales leads, training is as important as it is for productive team members and employees and scalability.

0:17:16 - (Micah): Because without that, you're just lighting fires and it's your job to put them out all day. And I know there's listeners that are hearing that going, yeah, that's. That's me. Yep. That's exactly what's happening right now. Because you and I have both been there as well.

0:17:31 - (Alane): Oh, absolutely. I, We. We're not perfect. We still stumble along the way, too, and realize, oh, we need to train for that and we need to build some training for that.

0:17:42 - (Micah): Yep. I like to think now, though, that we're seeing the smoke and we're able to stomp on, like, the, the little, the little fires still start for sure, but it's like more of a controlled burn than it is, you know, a forest fire of headache.

0:17:59 - (Alane): Agreed. Agreed. So if anybody wants any of the free resources and courses that we have, we'll link to those in the show.

0:18:06 - (Micah): Notes and check out the BRAIN program. We'll include a link to that as well. We're even giving away a free month so you can see the value without any obligation.

0:18:16 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:18:41 - (Alane): Bye for now.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Alane Boyd

Co-host
Head Shot

Micah Johnson

Co-host