How to Document & Offload Processes with Kevin Schmidt

Kevin has been hustling his entire life. Multiple streams of revenue have always been a focus for him and that has manifested into multiple businesses during his adult life.

[6:00] Math had always been a favorite subject for Kevin, and he worked with his father in an accounting role during high school and college, but eventually wanted to do something different. He decided on teaching as a profession and did that for a few years while growing his side businesses at the same time. Bookkeeping was a natural fit as an additional source of revenue, so Kevin started looking for clients and now it’s his full-time gig.

[10:40] Kevin discovered Bookkeeper Business Launch through a simple Google search and enrolled while still working full time. In the interim time since starting the course, Kevin has picked up 26 clients, some of which have multiple entities.

[15:30] Kevin attributes his success to his hustler mentality, but he also believes that anyone that is looking for an additional source of income or a new career could be a good fit for Bookkeeper Business Launch.

[17:05] Kevin’s goal is to find someone to work for him that can take some of the tasks off his hands so that he can focus on growing the business. The trouble is that each client seems to do things a little bit differently which can make it difficult to establish a process that someone else can take care of.

[20:15] Kevin currently does not have a niche, which is one of the reasons he’s experiencing challenges. Niching down streamlines things when trying to establish processes since the clients are somewhat the same, but Kevin doesn’t plan on niching down at this time.

[22:25] We always think people are our answer to feeling overwhelmed with work, but it really starts with processes. Start with the tasks that are pretty much always the same no matter the client and begin documenting those. They are the low hanging fruit for creating processes.

[25:20] There will always be unique aspects to every client, but ideally that should only comprise a maximum of 20% of the total work. You have to identify the processes that are common among all clients and start with the easiest. They may only take a few minutes to do but over the course of a month and multiple clients it can add up to hours.

[27:20] Once you complete the task audit, rank them in order of easiest to most difficult. Once you identify the activity that’s common to all clients ask yourself whether you can stop doing it, whether it can be improved, whether it can be automated, or if it can be outsourced.

[29:30] Virtual assistants are the next step. Take one of those tasks and send them to your VA first, then once they’ve mastered that, go down the list and keep giving them more tasks to do.

[31:20] To document your tasks, get a screen recording software and record and narrate yourself doing the task. Send the video file to Rev.com to get it transcribed. Now, you have multiple formats for someone to understand exactly what they need to do for a given task.

[34:50] Don’t record your tasks as you want them to be, record them as they are. As you become more familiar with the tasks and get in the groove of someone else doing them, you can start to look at ways of improving those processes.

[36:30] For unique clients, just refer to a client-specific process in the task. Unless those clients are large, the extra processes should be very small. The bulk of the training should be in the common processes among all clients.

[40:00] Kevin’s first goal is to go through his clients’ common tasks and start making the recordings for them after figuring out the tasks that are the easiest to outsource. He’s also going to go through Outstanding Processes and Procedures to get a head start.

Mentioned in this episode: Books by Schmidt