Andrew:	This course is about creating business systems. It's led by Nick Greene, who is the founder of Ivy Insiders which hired hundreds of Ivy League undergrads to run summer SAR and ACT prep-businesses. In 2010 he sold the business to Revolution Prep, the market leader in SAR prep. You can see the website right there that he created, and you can see the man right there. 

Nick, do you have an example of what our audience can achieve if they systemize the way that you and I are going to be showing them here in this session?

Nick:	Sure. So, I'll actually show you right off the bat the culmination of all of our work, systemizing the Ivy Insider's business, and that is the Ivy-based dashboard, our one-stop shop for businesses. By the time the business was sold it was called Ivy-based and the front page of this was a dashboard that allowed our general manager as well as regional managers to see actionable, comparative data and metrics on performance of our branch managers around the country. And allowed them to basically deep dive into categories to learn more.

So, what we'll hopefully get to by the end of this presentation is understanding how to think through and build a large, multi-variable system and the benefits that they can draw upon to create a full fledged system that really organizes the main function of your business. 

Andrew:	OK. And basically what we're looking at here is how...we don't need to understand every single cell in this sheet, but basically what we're doing, what we're seeing here is you're able to manage hundreds of students, essentially, who are running their own business and see where they're doing well and where they need help. And that's the idea.

If you can keep track of such a big business with so many people in it, then we should be able to do the same thing for our business where we're probably not going to have as many people that we're in charge of.

Nick:	Exactly. This dashboard here gives visibility. It gives accountability. It creates a closed loop work flow with the major processes that we have, and most of all, as I said before it not only allows us to see it, but it's also actual. And so, a manager can actually use this dashboard to enhance their management.

Andrew:	OK. I know my audience, and I know one of the things that they're going to be wondering is:	was it always like this? Why don't you give us a sense of what life was like before you got this organized, because this is really intimidating. I want them to see that if you can go from where you were to this, that they could do the same thing for their business and really take control of it through good systems.

Nick:	Sure. So, I certainly wish I could say it was always like this. I definitely also wish that I could say it got to this much faster than it really did. This was, again, the culmination of years of iteration and much less successful business systems.

Where we started at was really at the beginning of the scaling of the Ivy Insider business in 2007, and that was systemless, essentially. It was just me running my own business, and I was the sole employee and the sole branch manager and the sold regional manager and the sole general manager. Everything was in my head. There wasn't a need for a business.

The first year we really started to expand by hiring other Ivy League undergrads to run their own summer SAT prep businesses, the very first business that we needed was one for a business system, one for tracking the application process.

I'll show you here actually my first stab at a business system for that which I can tell you was woefully inadequate, and here is where students, undergrads, were actually able to sign up [audio break]. You can see here there are probably 50 or 60 interview slots that have been selected, and our brilliant system for management of this entire thing was a Google spreadsheet. 

So, you can imagine, right off the bat, a number of problems that might arise from this. People [audio break] each other interview slots, people scheduling their own interview slot over someone else's, people simultaneously try to schedule the same interview slot at the same time. All kinds of issues that happened because we were basically flying by the seat of our pants.

The good news is that was a huge learning experience. From there, we were able to ultimately get it to where our allocation process from beginning to actual applying and submitting of a resume to interview, to the actual extension of an offer, to the management of the offer process was one system. And, again, we used the quick-based platform and developed an entire interface around that, they could manage the entire application process, soup to nuts. 

So, rather than a person signing up for an interview on a spreadsheet, they were going to a straight forward page where they would actually see instruction for how to sign up for the interview. In this case, you can't see the interview slots because there are none, we're not actually holding interviews right now. They'd be able to come down here and do a table, you know, click on an interview time and a location. They'd sign up for it and at that point, no one else would be able to sign up for, no one would be able to see that they'd signed up for. We have better privacy protection and we don't have any overlap sessions. The whole process was just much cleaner and much smoother. As you can see back here, it wasn't always that way and paying initially was really what drive the creation to a better system. 

Andrew:	You know what, I could understand that if I were applying for a job and I saw somebody else whose applying for a job too, on the spreadsheet, I could see myself maybe deleting them or maybe being a little careless with them. But, isn't it funny how that. That happened a lot?

Nick:	I mean it happened more than you'd like it to happen. Even if their not doing that, you have all kinds of issues with just privacy. Like, anyone can see this, it had to be a public document since it was being shared with all the possible applicants. I mean, the list of things that were wrong with this initial iteration, was really endless. That's the way it always is with the business system, when you first start there's going to be problems. That's why you have to really, you know, tighten that feedback loop and iterate over and over and over again. It's agile development and practice.

Andrew:	And you guys got, as a result of the system that you created, you guys got huge. How many people did you end up having under you who are creating these businesses and then teaching dozens of students, and thousands in general?

Nick:	Yeah, we were ultimately able to hire about five hundred branch managers per year. Back in 2007, we only had hired about fifty or sixty and already, you know, some of these basic business systems, these first Gen ones, were bursting at the seams. So, yeah, once you get a scalable business system, it's incredible the difference it can make to the growth potential of the business.

Andrew:	Alright, so, what's the first step that the person whose watching us right now who says, I want to organize so that I can grow as quick as Nick did, what's the first step they need to take?

Nick:	The first step is looking at the current process that you have, where you think you might need a system in the first place, or a better system than you currently have. So, I'll use an example actually from our business, which is our mailing list processing. So one of the main ways that our branch managers would acquire customers is by doing mailings. They would acquire mailing lists from various sources in the community. 

Early on, again you rewind to 2007, we were starting to scale the business, we really didn't have a system at all. The branch manager would obtain a mailing list and they would type up that list, they would e-mail it in to us, the central team would download the list and then we'd add it to the master Excel sheet. Now, that whole sort of Step 1 through 4 here that you see on the slide, was basically a black box, right? There was no real accountability on the branch manager side on the central side, and the communication was completely left up to e-mail. 

The first step in really figuring out how we could create a better system for this was understanding, alright what's in that black box, what are the implicit steps that are supposed to be happening, that, you know, often on us break down on us and we don't have any visibility into. So, first you start there and then the second step.

Andrew:	Actually, before you go to the second step, let me make sure that I understand this, this mailing is what your branch manager, the person who had already taken the SAT, who rocked it, whose now about to teach students how they can rock it, this is the mailing list that they would use to keep track of leads and convert them into sales? Right?

Nick:	Yeah, it may be a mailing list that they are, you know, they held a free event and people submitted a form that had all of their mailing addresses and they have a pile of these forms where people had asked to get more information by mail or e-mail. Or it could be that they have a mailing list from their local community. Say they had a partnership with the local Booster Club, or the PTA, and that organization provides them with a list. Well that list isn't necessarily going to be in an easily processed and database importable form. It's usually a hard copy. 

So we had to get all of those lists which come in all these various forms into one master Excel spreadsheet. I can tell you, even with fifty or sixty branch managers, this initial process, you know there are so many different potential failure points. You know, the BM would make typos when they typed up the list, they would type up the list into a Word document instead of an Excel spreadsheet, they'd e-mail the list to the wrong person in the organization instead of the e-mail they were supposed to send it to, the Central team and it wouldn't be compatible with the type of machine they were running, the operating system.

Andrew:	And would every one of these leaders have his own system for keeping track of the mailing list?

Nick:	Yeah, essentially. 

Andrew:	So, if I happen to love A. Webber I might be on A. Webber. If you or someone else happened to love Google Gmail, they would use Gmail to keep track of it. Everyone has their own system, and the bottom line is, they're supposed to use that system to get sales, but they were all different.

Nick:	Exactly. They were all different, and at the end of the day if we're going to do a company-wide mailing it has to get to one central place. So the real problem here wasn't so much that everyone was using their own system, it's that everyone's using their own system and then we have to compile all the information from there, independent, you know, gerry-rigged systems into one central location.

Andrew:	Got it. So when you're faced with this kind of environment, and you want to systemize it the first thing to do is say, what do we have already systemized? Do we have a start point, which you did? Do we have an end point, which you did? Do we know what happens in the middle, which you did not know? You just laid it down here to understand where you were and then you took it to the next step. Do I understand that right?

Nick:	That's exactly right. And what you [inaudible] that there's not an explicit workflow, as there wasn't in this case. There's an implied workflow. And the problem with that workflow is contained in this black box. Right? And so, you first had to make that explicit [inaudible] in that black box. 

Andrew:	Okay, so let's take a look then at what's in the black box, and how you brought order to this chaos. 

Nick:	Right. So, as I said, the black box really consisted of the branch manager typing up the list, and emailing it into the Central Lead Team, and downloading it, and then trying to compile all these lists from variable formats into one Excel file. Inevitably, there was data lost. There were mistakes, and the end result was increasing costs of our mailings, increasing labor costs to get them processed, and ultimately a much lower ROI. It was a huge problem for us, especially because that was a major way that we were getting customers at the time. 

What we did, and what you generally want to do once you've defined what the problem is, you understand what implicit workflow is happening now, is you want to create a hypothesized workflow, essentially. This is what you believe is going to be the correct workflow going forward, and a key is you want to have that workflow be close looped, so there's no point in the workflow where it's not clear who acts next, or where there's not visibility in who holds the baton. So, this was our attempt at [??] the mailing list processing. 

You can see it's kind of complex. Any system for a complex process has to be. But it ultimately captured what we wanted to have happen, and made sure that the communication between the Branch Manager and then the organization that was doing the data entry, who in this case ended up being outsourced data entry processor in India, was continually viewable to the Central Team, and clear who was in charge of each cell. 

Andrew:	Now, you actually do it this way, using the Google Dock Charting System? 

Nick:	Yeah, I tend to do it in PowerPoint. I mean, for me it's just an easy interface, where I can create these kinds of workflow diagrams. Different people use different types of mediums, and the modality is less important than the kind of rigor of the process. I can actually show you, I've got a different process map, where I actually did it in Word. This is again, going back to the process [inaudible]. 

This is a workflow that we created for managing the applicants as they came through from application stage, interview and offer. I mean, you can see it's about a page-and-a-half document that summarizes what happens at each stage of that workflow. So, you can use whatever medium you are most comfortable in. It doesn't have to be PowerPoint. It doesn't have to be Word. But the key is you want to capture in a closed-loop fashion what each stage of the workflow is, and how it should process ideally.

Andrew:	All right. Let me see if I understand this. I know it's not about the specifics of your workflow, but I'm curious about how you think. And since I see the chart here on your screen, we can use that to understand how you think. What does BM mean?

Nick:	BM does not mean the popular acronym, which was both a source of comedic relief and at times frustration in our organization. BM stands for Branch Manager.

Andrew:	Okay, so the Branch Manager obtains a mailing list, either through the partner he's working with or maybe by having a sheet that he's handing out the day that he's giving a sample SAT course. People come in:		 they write their names, one way or the other, he has this list. The next thing the BM does is he scans the list. Do you mean actually scan it using a scanner?

Nick:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	You give them the scanner, or they have the scanner themselves?

Nick:	They are responsible for finding how to scan it. A lot of them have scanners at home. Now days a lot of them will just take photos of each page with their IPhone. And in fact, in the olden days, sometimes they'd go to Kinkos. 

Andrew:	Okay, so then they upload the list via UsendIt and record the link for the file retrieval, got it. Then they add the list record in IV base. What does it mean that they add the list record in IV base?

Nick:	So, they get a record link from, you send it, that is where that image file, or set of image files, for the scan list is stored and so they go to IV base, they actually pull up a form in IV base and their able to record that link. So, that's the way they submit the information for use by the database.

Andrew:	Got it, so they're just taking the link of the image file that they just created using the scanner, whatever scanner they happen to have, they send it into the system and now you've walk them through every step of the way to getting it into your database. Let me ask you this, Nick, I see now how you think it through, I'm also visualizing the person who is listening to us whose saying, I'm an entrepreneur, I didn't get into business to do paperwork, to create flow charts, to organize everything to this degree, we'll figure it out, we'll just have whatever system work. What do you say to that person who sees this and gets intimidated and says, it's not me?

Nick:	So, that's fine when it is just you, when it doesn't involve an organization that's starting to grow. You do, you want to figure it out and there's no reason to overly codify things when you're still trying to figure out the process. Eric Reese, the Lean Start-Up, you hear him talk about iterating really, really fast and your initial idea for the process is just type in offices. So, yeah, you don't need to get to this stage when you're figuring it out on your own, but once you know how the process should run, and you want to make that an extensible process to other individuals in the organization, you absolutely need to codify it. Otherwise, it just won't happen. I mean that's the problem that we ran into with our Gen 1, where it's black box.

Andrew:	Alright, I'll let you continue, but let me say this:		 I've got to disagree with you little bit here. When I was an individual running a business here at Mixergy, I thought I don't, the thinking that I just expressed a moment ago, that was my thinking, I thought it's just me, I shouldn't organize it this way. Maybe when I need to pass it on I will. Big mistake. If I would've created a flow chart like this, I would have recognized that things don't have systems and I was just kind of doing it whenever I feel like it or doing it whenever I think it's time. Or, if I would've organized it this way I would've recognized that there are moments, or steps, that don't need to be there that I can cut and save myself a ton of time. 

I would have been able to think about how I can grow and get more people in the organization. And, of course, once I did bring in more people, I would've had a system that's been tested, that I tested on myself that I knew worked and I could say to them with complete conviction, this will work and if it doesn't, give me feedback and we'll take care of this.

Nick:	Yeah, I think we're actually in agreement, like I got, I don't mean to say that when it's just you, you can run fast and loose. You still need to try to figure out what the right system is, you know what the process is, try to discover what the process system is and I guess, at that point, it really is about experimentation. So, what you want to, all I'm saying is you want to avoid overly codifying early on, because you want to be able to iterate quickly. 

Andrew:	I see.

Nick:	But at some point, and the sooner the better, you want to get to a process that's close to the work flow that you know both works at the individual level, you know at each time it's executed, but then also is scalable.

Andrew:	OK, alright, I figured we were kind of in alignment. I just wanted to emphasize to the audience that even if your a one person shop, even if you don't think anyone is going to ever going to do your job again, do it this way. I'm telling you, you are going to benefit from being able to cut steps out that don't need to be there. When you have to actually write it down and see it on paper or see it on PowerPoint, you have to look at it and really recognize, wait, I'm doing this, do I really need to do this? OK.

Nick:	Right, and you'll see things as soon as you write it out that you didn't see when it was just, you know, based on intuition.

Andrew:	OK. We understand this first step, I bought into your system. Obviously I did, that's why I have you here and obviously my audience did. They saw your interview on Mixergy, they saw how big you're able to build your company because of systems and they asked to have you here so we could presume that they bought into it that they understand how to create this. Let's take them to the next step, Nick. What do we do after we've written this out?

Nick:	So, once you've got the system written out, you've got to decide what platform. You want to build the system in, and there's kind of a spectrum that you can go to. From a completely off the shelf to custom, you know where you're building it, you're actually programming it and creating your own custom software application, to some sort of hybrid systems. Depending on the system, the off the shelf can be great and the custom can be great. You need to decide what is best for that particular business problem for that particular business process. 

To give you an example, going back to that application process, you know, our initial system was to just do a little spreadsheet, completely off the shelf software. What we found was, it was a total mess. We needed more customizability, we needed more rigor around it so we ultimately built into QuickBase. Now, we could've built an entirely custom application for our application process but that wasn't really necessary because there are other businesses that build that need to do application processes. It's a pretty common type of workflow. You're going to be able to typically find something that's largely off the shelf, but customizable to some degree that will work for you. It's really balancing act of let's make it as complex as necessary, but not more complex than needed. 

If you can get away with a typical spreadsheet for a system, absolutely use the Google spreadsheet. If you can get way with Excel, use Excel. If you need to go one step further and used a customizable platform like Big Face, go there. The approach that we took was 'Don't build it in-house custom unless you absolutely need to.'

We did make mistakes in making these decisions. One of the things we did in 2009, I was building an entirely in-house system for managing our mailing list. You saw the workflow that we created for assembling that mailing list. Ultimately we ended up using an off-the-shelf, really awesome app that would manage our mailing list as well as the actual mailing process and metrics. The first year we tried to build our own system, we actually built it completely from scratch, hooked up a custom web app to a sequel database. It was also a completed disaster. It was overkill. We were trying to engineer an app that had basically already been engineered, and we could've just bought. 

You really want to think through each individual situation and decide the right jobs for this particular system.

Andrew:	What software did you end up going with that was off the shelf and worked great?

Nick:	We used QuickBase.

Andrew:	Tell me about QuickBase, it looks like you're doing a lot with it. Let's take a look at this right here.

Nick:	We did a lot with it. For us, it ended up being a best of both worlds kind of situation. QuickBase, like Salesforce, and a few other different platforms out there, have really created an ecosystem for non-technical app developers to create business apps and other types of apps, that can be picked up by people and customized to some degree. It's a database driven piece of software, but it doesn't require you to be highly technical to work with. You don't have to have extensive experience with table normalization, database normalization, or sequel calls. You can do everything through your browser, and it's very flexible. 

For us, a lot of our problems could be solved using the QuickBase. Sometimes we probably did too much with QuickBase. I'd say in general, using that kind of flexible tool that was both easy to use and could be used for rapid development, that also has a degree of customizability, it was really a great solution.

Andrew:	Is there a screen that you can show us within QuickBase that will give us a sense of how you're using it?

Nick:	Yeah, I can go back to the actual dashboard. This is the general manager dashboard for Ivy Base, which is our one stop shop for many of our business processes. Across the top you can see all the different business processes that we manage through there. You basically go into the menus and you can create new tables, new reports, new relationships between tables. You basically become a database architect, even if you have no experience managing databases. Then you can also build the frontend forms that populate the information that goes into the database. 

Andrew:	I see.

Nick:	With most fundamental business systems, that is the fast way for a business to stop a database problem. Basic ones can be handled with Excel, but once you get beyond a little bit of complexity, you want something that's more flexible. QuickBase gets you there. It gets you there fast. One of the great things about the platform is that it also a lot of tutorials. Both made by Intuit, but then also powered by users. It has a huge forum where people are asking questions and answering questions. So it kind of becomes an open source community where some of these non-technical people can build tech-like applications.

Andrew:	I see. So, let me see if I can understand a use case and then we'll move onto the next tactic. If someone listening to us right now has a business where his employees are calling on prospects. I mean they're shooting them emails, making phone calls, maybe even meeting them in person, they can create a form for their employees where they type in the name of the prospect they've contacted, when they called and so on, that form would go into the database so you have the contact information of the prospect, but also you can keep track of the number of the prospects that the person's contacting and see them on a dashboard like this?

Nick:	Right.

Andrew:	OK.

Nick:	For example, our CRM application was exactly that. You'd have a form, salesperson enters the contact information, creates a new contact. That's put into a contacts table. You've got another table that had holes for CRM activities and that then you can create reports that draw information from individual tables or from both tables. So, as a manager, I can see reports that show the number of activities that have happened this week, the types of activities to be categorized, to collect information in a category, you can see next steps, if you have dates for those next steps you can see what steps haven't been done by their deadline. I mean you really have kind of infinite flexibility. 

One thing I will say that kind of comes off that example, that's actually a really good example of an application that we built in QuickBase that maybe we shouldn't have. There's a lot of even more like straight of the shelf software for CRM that you can pick up that will work for many business purposes. Salesforce is one of them, but there's also some that are completely free. So, I'd say, as a first step if you're thinking about platform, you know QuickBase was a catch all for us, but a lot of entrepreneurs will find that it's worth the time to just go out there and see what, you know, type in their business problem or type in the workload that they're trying to map and see if there's already a platform that doesn't exist, or that exists, that can capture the steps their trying to do.

Andrew:	OK. Alright, so I like to get into tactics and I want to see specifics, that's why we're taking a look at QuickBase and talking to much about it, but the bigger idea that the audience keeps asking me for in addition to the tactics is this, look at the different platforms that you have out there, find one and try, do your best not to have to build one from scratch. You want to see if there's one that you can even hack together that already exists just so you can get up and running.

Nick:	Yep.

Andrew:	OK, so they've gone through it, they've looked at the different platforms, what's the next step? Is it proto-typing?

Nick:	Yeah, the next step is going to be to proto-type. So, I'll show you, and we just talked about CRM, I'll show you the initial CRM app that we had built, back in I think this was 2007 or 2008. It was a simple, again, Google spreadsheet. You know, this could've been done in Excel as well. We had our branch managers basically entering the contact information for the each of the people that they were talking to, and then as they performed interactions they would re-cap them and then they would highlight a next step. This was throwing everything into one table, which ultimately if you want to create a really robust system you want to actually break that out into multiple tables and then you can pull reports that draw on information from all of them. 

But this suffices for our individual purposes, you know, we added some color coding. You could do sorting. As a basic first approximation of the process, it was fine and most importantly, as a proto-type should, it gave us information about what additional features we wanted. So by rapidly proto-typing and then iterating off of that, we were able to start with something that was a minimum viable product at best, but pretty quickly get to something that worked a lot better. Ultimately, from that proto-type, we were able to create a system in IV Base, which is our CRM activity system that really captured all the information in one place, that allowed us to do customer reporting off of that information, that allowed us to really have the institutional memory and the manager visibility and to a really important process in a way that we didn't have as much when we were just trying to do it with a spreadsheet.

Andrew:	OK. So, Nick, you still recommend that the person watching us right now, if they can start off with Excel, or in this case Google spreadsheet, start off with that, build what you can in there and then go and implement the same thing with improvements and a smoother process in something like QuickBase, but look for the simplest way to keep track of your system and then improve it.

Nick:	Yeah. As complex as necessary and no more complex and if you're going to err in one direction or the other, err towards simple because chances are that whatever you design right out of the gate isn't going to be right. You're going to have to iterate it multiple times, and the less investment you've made up front, and the easier it is to do those iterations, the faster you're going to get to a system that really works. 

Andrew:	OK, and when I interviewed you on Mixergy, one of the things that really excited people in the audience is, you were keeping track of all these different, essentially, entrepreneurs who were working for you, and you were rewarding them along the way. So, for example, if an entrepreneur called on a school, they didn't close a sale but you wanted to reward them and say you're making progress. If that school had the entrepreneur come in and teach a free session to their students, they were making some progress even though they didn't close a sale, make any money. If they taught the session and they did well, they were making progress still. 

Anyway, it's a long process until there's a sale and you kept rewarding them along the way by giving them points, by letting them compete against each other. The system where you were giving out those rewards, and keeping track of the progress that each entrepreneur teacher was going through, was it here, in QuickBase?

Nick:	It was in QuickBase. That is one of the great things about building any business system. Once you are capturing each step in the workflow, if you want to incentivize activity or best practices at any one of those steps, you can start to track metrics there. At the most basic level, it is just reporting those metrics, so you show how--whether it is salespeople or whoever--stack up against one another, against those metrics. What we ended up doing is we built a game layer on top of our business systems infrastructure, so we took those metrics--we called them Ivy points—we color-coded the dashboard, we added prizes for performance levels, and really started to turn it into something that was fun and took advantage of basic game mechanics to get these first-time entrepreneurs excited about actually using a business system. 

I mean, it is your point earlier:	a lot of entrepreneurs right out of the gate think, "I don't need this," right? "I want to run fast and loose because that's what being an entrepreneur is all about," so we were able to kind of capitalize on their competitive nature to get them to act as if they needed it even if they did not think they needed it.

Andrew:	I see. Alright, that is a great point, that once you systemized it, you can look for points where you can reward people who are taking the steps that the system is asking them to. OK. I did not realize that you can just do that using QuickBase off-the-shelf solution. What does it cost you per month to use QuickBase?

Nick:	It depends on your number of users and the bandwidth that you are going to end up using, so for us, I think at the scale that we are at, it is still under $1000 a month, which if you think about it, is just incredible.

Andrew:	Yes.

Nick:	The SAAS world just completely changes what you can do with a business system at what cost. If you had built Oracle on-site business systems and infrastructure ten years ago, you would be paying tens of thousands of dollars, minimum. There would have been, in our case, no way to scale. Now these can be accessed straight from a browser, they can be built right in the browser, and you are paying a monthly fee that is really pretty reasonable.

Andrew:	OK. Alright. I can even see using Excel spreadsheet if you had a small team, laying out a different column for each step in a process, and rewarding people or giving them points every time they take a different step and fill in the column, so there are ways to...

Nick:	Yes.

Andrew:	We are not pushing QuickBase, we are just pushing an idea, which is organize, systemize, and then once you have created this and you have prototyped, what is the next step?

Nick:	Well, the next step is you iterate.

Andrew:	Yes.

Nick:	You want to get to that step where you have a working prototype as quickly as possible. OK. Before, you want to minimize the amount of investment to get to that point, and then you want to release it to your users. In this case, with business systems, those users are going to be your employees or independent contractors or whatever. You want to see how they use it, you want to see where their pain points are, you want to get feedback from them, and you want to make changes in real time. Like I said, building a business system should really be an agile development process in action.

Andrew:	Nick, let me see if I understand this. You are training your people on these processes that you have created, and you are iterating them. How do you train them in a way that lets them understand the system but also communicate, "Tomorrow it might change." What is the way that you trained so many people on Excel and then Excel version 2, version 5, and then QuickBase version 1, and so on? How do you do that?

Nick:	That is a major challenge. It is a particularly a challenge because if you are iterating and changing the systems rapidly, you need a training infrastructure that can also adapt and be changed quickly. Early on what we did is we had what we called our "Branch Manager Handbook," so just a giant--on my computer it was a Word document that I was updating all the time-- and to the branch managers, a PDF. Now, of course, there we ran into all the version control issues that you would expect. It was a real mess. You also were limited in modality. It was all text, so where we ultimately landed was on creating a company intranet. 

One of my greatest pieces of advice to any new entrepreneur is, "Create a company intranet or the equivalent as soon as possible." The sooner you can start institutionalizing the memory of your organization, the faster you can start to be creating a forum for communication within the organization, and for housing documents, whether they be training or process-related or whatever, the better off you are going to be. I can show you kind of what our system looked like there...

Andrew:	Yes, please.

Nick:	...And how it evolved. We started with the very basic Google Sites version, that we called Audience [??] Intranet.

Andrew:	And this is Google sites, it's sites.google.com, it's available to free for anyone whose watching us here. And what is, before you show us what you did with it, what is Google sites?

Nick:	So Google sites is software service platform, similar I guess in theory to QuickBase, but instead of building a data base driven web application, Google sites allows you to build a basic front end web site. You can create pages. You can change the hierarchy and the organization of those pages. You can click what they call gadgets to change those pages that can show iframes, information from other web pages, that can be set up to house images, to have blog roles, whatever. It's actually a really flexible and incredible tool that has a lot of the same advantages that I was describing to you before with QuickBase. The great thing about Google sites is that it's completely free and I can tell you we've been using it since 2008 and every year we're discovering new things about Google sites. Not only features that existed and we didn't figure them out but also new features that have been added as Google.

Andrew:	And before you show, again, before you show me, I'm sorry to keep asking questions, but I want to make sure that we fully cover everything here. I've heard that it's also likened to Wikipedia, for a company, you get the encyclopedia guidebook for the company. I'm wondering though, why do so many entrepreneurs use Google sites for their intranet, for their internal process documentation instead of say, Google docs where you can create a folder and share it? Or instead of creating, I guess a full-blown website is a lot of work to create. You've got this infrastructure, you might as well use this content management system. Why this over something similar, like Google docs?

Nick:	I think getting back to the QuickBase discussion, sort of the in-between solution, right? If you're just creating a bunch of spreadsheets and folders, I mean you can do it and you can toss the information there. Or if you wanted to go a full custom app you can get complete customizability but at the expense of a lot of development time. Or you can use one of these in-between solutions where some of the infrastructure is pre-built but then you have the ability to customize to your purposes. Google sites is just incredible that way. It is like a Wiki, in a lot of ways, you can adjust the permission levels so that individuals can be contributors of certain pages but not others. You can have different sharing levels. You can make different groups into administrators or not. 

Then you can completely customize the organization of the site. I mean, early on you can see we just did a very basic navigation with a few different pages, by 2009/2010, that was getting really, really big. Then we ended up creating a set-up where there was actually organization within the navigation, so we had sections of the site. So, it's really, really powerful in being able to kind of grow with the organization.

Andrew:	I see, let me read that out to the people just to make sure that they can see it. So, right now, left margin just a handful of menu items. That's the first version, let's see the second version after that.

Nick:	The second version, we all of a sudden have about twice as many pages.

Andrew:	Gotcha.

Nick:	And it's getting a little cumbersome, you can see we just alphabetized the pages here for user navigation. 

Andrew:	And we have error tracker, Facebook, people need to know how to use, how to do sales, how QuickBase works. All these processes are documented and are linked to from the left margin and as you have more and more processes because your business is growing and we can see the business growing, you're saying to yourself, we need a little better structure than alphabetical order and that's when you're going to tab number three.

Nick:	Exactly. So that's when we started to build in functional organization, which is a lot better than just alphabetical organization and we've got now a branch manager basics category, a training category, a marketing category and it goes right down and you can see by 2010, the intranet is massive. Basically, you know a collection of collections of websites where we have now aggregated and stored all of the institutional memory to companies. Every announcement that's made, instead of those going out by e-mail, they are posted here on the intranet in our announcements section.

Andrew:	I see.

Nick:	…which is a blog role, automatically e-mails the branch managers. Instead of us creating a new training document, you know, we're updating the training page for whatever we want on the intranet, or if we do want to have an external document, we've got a page on the intranet. I mean, this is one of the things Google sites does really well that allows us to merge a control documents and manage the most recent, up-to-date versions for everyone in the company.

Andrew:	I see, so if the process changes from month to month, you can always go back two months ago and say, that was a better way to do things, let's go back to that version and publish that to our people. If you grow the company bigger and you suddenly hire Andrew, for example, to manage your marketing, you could say, 'Andrew, you have permission to edit all of these process documents only regarding management, you do not know anything yet about training, you do not know anything else about these other pages, leave them alone, you have complete control over the pages that fall under your territory.'

Nick:	Exactly, and then the Administrator actually has the ability to view every single edit made to the site itself, so you actually have purge control on the internet itself. So, if Andrew gets hired for marketing and he comes in and says, 'Oops, I deleted the entire marketing section of the website.' Someone who is non-technical, like me, can go in, and I do not have to go into FTP, I do not have to deal with anything on the backend, I can just do it straight from a browser-based interface and really simply revert to an earlier version.

Andrew:	I see. Oh, this is wonderful. By the way, thank you for taking us through this. I know this is backend stuff that companies often do not want to share with others, I really appreciate you doing this and taking us through this, and this is the kind of thing that I want to do Mixergy for. I know that, and we have so much more to cover but I have got to say this, with Mixergy we specifically target real business people. Non-business people have no interest in this. They just want to know where you came up with the idea and how you celebrated on whatever yacht you ended up buying. 

That in-between part is never fascinating to non-business people, but to real business people, it is like air, you want to understand how is it that Nick did it so that I can do it. Let me just not only hear it, but see it. Sometimes you look at this and you understand something that you can bring back to your company that is just unique to your specific issue and I really appreciate that you are willing to share it all with us. I look at this and I even come up with ideas for what we can do, for how we can display this stuff. I really appreciate that.

Nick:	Cool

Andrew:	What else did you want to show about this before I interrupted with my enthusiasm?

Nick:	I share the enthusiasm and that is kind of a problem, I could go on for hours about all the different parts of this page and geek out on it in ways that even entrepreneurs would not find interesting. That is one of the really great things about business systems in general, once you do start to capture them, you will get interested and you will develop a passion. A lot of people start out not being fans of systems, once you start to do it and you see the value that it adds to the organization, and the efficiencies that it adds to the organization, you become a fan. That was the case for me. When we first built the intranet it was just an experiment, now it is an essential.

Andrew:	Do you remember one time when you said to yourself, 'Ah, this makes so much sense. I see how in this one example, my business improved or my life got easier'?

Nick:	Again, I hate to go back to the intranet, but that is a prime example of a place where there was just so much pain. When you are thinking about taking 500 undergraduates who have never run a business before, getting them up to speed and trained in a month and a half, and then they are running their own businesses during a pretty tight window of time, where they have to ramp up and make it successful, you absolutely need them to have at their finger tips, any piece of information they need and there is a lot of information there. 

It is not just that you can send them a bunch of emails with all of the documents they need, they need to be able to search and find that information, and with Google Sites, every single one of our training documents is now in the Google site and is directly searchable. A Branch Manager that has any question can go in here, type into the search bar powered by Google, and be into whatever training documents are relevant for them.

Andrew:	Wow.

Nick:	It is just amazing how much this has decreased the amount of support that is needed or required for the branch managers, it allows our regional managers to, the second management layer to be really focused on management as opposed to trouble shooting and support. It allows us at the General Manager level to be focused on being strategic and leveraging the institutional [??] that we have, rather than recreating processes because we did not ever really [??].

Andrew:	Alright, I see that there is a fourth tab here. Is there something on the fourth tab that you wanted to show us or was that it?

Nick:	Yeah, the fourth tab is just the 2011 version, so this is this year and you can see from 2010 to 2011, one of the major differences is that we decreased the number of pages here on the navigation bar, and that was because it was getting a little bit unwieldy, but the same principles. On the front page, we have got major announcements, celebration of people who have performed really well, a chart that shows the top performers for the week, you really have a snapshot of what is going on in the business that keeps the employees focused on the parts that are important.

Andrew:	So, you create your system. You want to keep iterating. You train people. You get feedback. How do you iterate with the feedback that you get from people?

Nick:	The iteration I think is the most important part of the process. As I said before, the first skill that you're going to have out of the gate is going to tend to be uninformed. It's a hypothesis, so you want to make sure that you're equipped to gather the information to find out what's working and what's not and then make changes quickly. I think that another one of the nice things about a platform like QuickBase or Google Sites is that a non-tech person can implement those iterations.

What I'll show you now is the way that the progress was made in iterations of Ivybase, and I believe I've got here Ivybase 2009 which was my first stab at creating a dashboard. You can see it's got the color coding. We tracked revenue, regions, and we've got some of the different tabs up on the top for the tables we were collecting. By the time that we got to 2010-2011 the business was more robust. Not only had the business grown a lot but you can see that the whole page is organized in a more fluid and easy to read manner. We've added the PNL's down at the bottom which can be seen for the whole business and we've added more and more tabs along the top. 

Going from this to this may not seem like a lot but it's a lot of functionality. Maybe the best way to throw it into perspective is to show you this 2009 version. I believe I have on here a workbook that shows our gen.5. So, here it is. We basically had an Excel workbook that each branch manager had. Each branch manager had a manager version. We used Macros to basically aggregate all the data and have information by all the branches, a region summary, and a business summary. But, you can see that this is basically pushing Excel to its limits. Then we got over to this. Then we got over to this. 

You can look at this in terms of iterations by summers. There were three summers in getting from the Excel spreadsheet to the final QuickBase version, but, literally, the number of actual iterations that were made there are in the hundreds. We are basically deploying on a daily basis and in many cases on an hourly bases. The iteration, I would just say do a lot of it, do it often, and do it from the very get go.  

Andrew:	A quick statement to the audience and then a question for you. I have the ability to scroll and zoom in and out of these documents. I'm intentionally not zooming in all the way. It's not about the specific numbers, the specific rows, and the specific columns that Nick is showing us it's about the overall understanding of how there's progress being made. 

It looks like also, Nick, that some of this stuff is really private, so I'm intentionally not zooming in to bring it up. It's about the bigger picture and that's why you're not seeing every last detail here. I don't want to distract from the big message by going down to each individual number. 

Nick, you're pushing this out to your users. Actually, in this case your users are your employees and partners. How do you get feedback from them in a way that's useful and allows you to adjust. I know that when I asked Eric Ries about the Lean Startup movement he talks about getting multiple users, hundreds of users, to come in and interact with your product and then use that to iterate the product. In most companies, they're not going to have hundreds or thousands of people they're going to have maybe dozens of people. How do you get feedback from them in a meaningful way and then use it to improve it and create a product that's good for whoever is going to be there in the future? 

Nick:	That's a really good question. One thing that we are huge fans of is surveys. As a means for direct feedback they are flawed in many ways, but they get a lot of information and they get it quickly. For an organization like ours, we've got 500 plus branch managers out there, we can actually get a lot of data points even if we don't have a ton of participation from the surveys. So, we ran surveys from 2007 through even this year multiple times per summer on everything from Ivybase to other business systems to experiences they were having in the classroom. We found that's a really good way to get information. The classroom that we typically use for surveys, just to [do with surveys] because it's totally free, it's pretty flexible and ties in really well with the internet. We can just put the survey right there on the internet and they can take it there.

The other one we've used in the past is [Sumawrang]. There's one more that we've used, Survey Monkey. Both of those are pretty good, but they're paid programs. I haven't seen enough, other than the maybe the data analysis that you can do on the recording features, to justify the cost. I'd rather get the hard data right out of a skip fee download that you can get from a Google survey or Google forms I guess is what they call it and then do my own data and I'll sign it.

One thing I really stress is that doing direct feedback whether it comes from surveys or weekly management calls or conference calls or whatever, only tells you what they think they need. What they think they need is not always . . . I mean there's overlap, but there's not 100% align with what they actually need. Another really, really important opponent, I'd say probably even more important than listening to the customer or the user or in this case the employee, is to be watching how they use the application.

Where are they having problems? What's getting drops? What parts are working really well and are there best practices being used there that could be applied to elsewhere in the system? With Google Analytic you can also see what parts of the page they're using more. We use that even on some of our Quick Base applications to really look at another Google Analysis. 

We use Google Analytic on the web applications. They're custom built to find out how they're being used [??] further.

Andrew:	I see. So you want to ask them for feedback, but you also want to watch how they're using it. Someone else I interviewed, I interviewed a guy name Stephen Jagger who's also using Google sites to manage his employee documentation. He says he puts a question on the bottom of every page that says, "How can I improve this?" Are you able to put a form within each page on Google sites to let people give you feedback on it?

Nick:	Here you actually could. We have actually just one page on a site that's for feedback and questions and it's a bug recorder too. That just populates into Google form. There are also a lot of grades apps actually out there that are built for bug reporting. There are three kinds of applets that you can just also plug into any site that will run that kind of thing for you. The more you can make it easy for them to find information and being right on is the better. Being right on page is obviously a lot easier than having to go to a separate page.

Andrew:	You mentioned a web app, can we see that to? Do you happen to have it available?

Nick:	The web apps that we have are on the back end of the [??] site, that I can go to, but those are basically the system that had to be fully customized. If we weren't able to build it through Quick Base because it's something like core scheduling, for example, if we're going to create the process for our branch managers to set up their own SAT prep courses or anything that will populates the web site

One, that's a pretty specific kind of process that you're not going to find a lot of off the shelf programs to do. Two, it has to talk so much with the website anyway, you almost might as well build it. Those are the kinds of processes that we built there. Those are actually probably less relevant for the entrepreneurs who are watching this for the same reason that the details on some of these business systems aren't as relevant. They're just very particular to our business.

Andrew:	OK. Let me show my notes here to the audience. What I've got here is year one used excel just to get yourself going. Year number two is a minimum viable product as you say. Year two Quick Base with limited reporting. Year three Quick Base with advance reporting, again still off the shelf, but now you're getting more and more sophisticated with it. Year four you built your own web app.

Where most people might jump to year four, you're say, "No, no. Let's start simple. Whatever is available to us that we can adjust easily and that even the least technical person in the company can use, jumping with that then go for the next step up and get more sophisticated. Only when you're busting at the seams only then do you build your own internal web app." That' the process that you took.

Nick:	No, year four our own web app really hasn't even happened yet. I mean the only thing that we've built our own web app for has been the things that are very, very specific to our business. 

Andrew:	OK.

Nick:	 So the CRM, the market activities tracking, the Ivey points tracking, the P&Ls, all that stuff is still housing Quick Base. We've actually had the discussions at multiple points and what points we want to move over to our own custom web app. We're getting probably quite closer to that point, and I will tell you why. The reason is that we have had issues with down time on QuickBase, at the whim of their servers, and because there are certain types of functions that we now want to do for payroll that do get customized enough that it could justify a web app. What you really find is, when you actually weigh the costs and benefits, a lot of times building your own system just does not make sense. Even if there are significant benefits, the costs are so high to going in that direction, make sure you do not do it unless you really need it.

Andrew:	OK. Let us go over some of the things that you have said that we need to remember. This is something that you said before the session started, you said, 'Do not forget the user. Stay 80/20. Err on the side of usability, keep it simple.' Can you talk about that? Maybe we can start with 'Do not forget the user.' Why is that an issue? Why is that something you want to make sure to emphasize to the persons listening to us right now?

Nick:	You need to think about who is going to be using the business system because if you are building it for somebody who is exactly like you, and you are building a business system that you would want to use, you need to think, is the person who is going to use this system actually exactly like me? When I was building business systems that were going to be used by Ivy League undergrads, I used to be an Ivy League undergrad. They are a lot like me. 

When I was building a business system that was going to be used by our outsourced data entry partners on the other side of the world, all of the sudden, a text-heavy, really complex form that requires a high degree fluency in English does not work so well. So, really think about how sophisticated this person is technically. Think of what are the things that the typical user might have problems with, and try to pre-empt those so that you can build a system that is catered to them.

Andrew:	If you are dealing with someone who is overseas, who does not speak English as well as Americans might . . . these days it happens that the people overseas end up speaking it better than we do but, if you are dealing with someone who is overseas where you might have a language issue and you are certainly going to have a time and space issue, how do you communicate the process that they need to take? What do you do? Do you do video? Do you do screen shots?

Nick:	To preface that, it is a great question. To preface my answer I will say, it is so much more important when you are working with someone or a team overseas, for all of the reasons you described. The a synchronized timing makes it especially important. If they have a problem, they cannot just ask you because you are sleeping. Then the issues with language barriers, it is so easy for things to be misinterpreted. There are also cultural differences in the differences in the quality of work. If you are outsourcing, a lot of times you are doing it because you want to save some money so the quality of work bar can be dropped even further. So yes, that was extremely necessary for us.

The answer is that there is no really good answer. There is no fool proof way and you have to [??] as you do every time, but you want to just be that much more diligent in trying to set up the process to be fool proof. With our data entry partner, we really made sure that every single passing of the baton was crystal clear for them. We minimized the number of tables and reports that they would have to go in to. We did all of our training with them live so that we did not depend on them to read on their own time, a document that we sent them. We got face-to-face with them. We said, 'Here is the process, let us walk through it. Alright, now let us see you do it on your own. Do not just tell me, yes I understand it, show me that you understand it.'

Andrew:	Ahh.

Nick:	Then we ran some test cases for our mailing list process before we ever released that to the Branch Managers, we submitted some mailing lists as if we were Branch Managers, and of course, we told the outside data entry partners that we were Branch Managers, right? We did not let them know that it was a test, we saw how it went, and then we gave them feedback.

I would say the biggest things are:  do the training in person, show that they understand exactly what the process should look like, and the third thing is test it in an environment where they do not know it is a test. So, actually make sure they have done it when they actually think that they are working with a customer.

Host:	I am writing it down right here for the audience. OK, remember the user, show... by the way, when you said, 'show it to them live' essentially what you are saying is to use the same tool that you and I are using to teach my members, get on gotomeeting.com, which is what we happen to be using right now, and say, 'Show me on your computer as you do it' or 'let me show you first and then you take the mouse and you show me.'

Nick:	The irony is that if you are like me, what you are trying to do with the data entry part is avoid having to be on Skype with them for 3 hours, from to 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. every day, which is what I was doing for a while. In order to get to that point, you have to first do that in person.

Andrew:	Okay. And I've actually done that. And what people have often asked me before is, after I show them one-on-one on their computer, they say, 'Can I have a recording of it.' So I started using screen flow and you can of course if you're on a PC use Camtasia, or actually, if you're on a PC you can Go to Meeting, hit record. I started just recording it, and if they want to watch it later on, they can watch it just the way, you the person is listening to us right now, is doing it.

All right, stay 80/20. What do you mean by that?

Nick:	I mentioned a couple times, I think, earlier in the conversation, you know, make it as complex as necessary, but no more complex. All right? So stay 80/20, just means if you guys are familiar with kind of the predo efficiency, or predo optimality, 80% of the benefits come from 20% of the features. And with 20% of the work, you tend to be able to get 80% of your goal. So, don't over optimize, basically. Focus on getting that minimum buyable product out the door, right:		 that business system that can just barely do the process that you're trying to get done. Then, [inaudible]. 

You want your product to be as 80/20 as possible, and then the iteration is where you start to improve it, hone in and perfect. But I think even during the iterative cycle there can be a tendency, especially if you're like me, and you start to fall in love with the business system, to go for more complex. And eventually you start to lose people. The usability of the system goes down as you increase features. I would say, with QuickBase if there's one criticism it's probably that there's too much there, that we get from Branch Managers, is that there's just too much there, and it can be very overwhelming. 

Well, for me, it gets me all excited that we've got all of this data that's being collected:		 for some of the Branch Managers it's gotten to the point where it's already too much. So, keep it simple [??].

Andrew:	Okay. You know, and actually that happened to me, too. I said, I don't need any systems here at Mixergy. I can deal with it myself. And then when I brought in other people I said, I don't need any systems for them, because we still had it pretty simple, and they could figure things out. And I don't want to be too rigid with people by telling them exactly how to do things. Meanwhile, they wanted me to be clear with them. They want to know exactly how I do it. But later on maybe they could experiment. 

But first, they wanted to know specifically what do I do on day one, what do I do on day two, to give you what you're looking for. So I got to that, and then I started to go, I think I might even be now going towards a place where I'm over systemizing. So, how do you know when you're over systemizing? I want to know before I start to say, here is a document and a way to do, and a macro for every email you send out on behalf of Mixergy. How do I know where the stop is before I get to that?

Nick:	Right. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet there. It is case by case, right? And the factors and variables are different with each business system. But I guess I'd say two things. One is, you want at first to start with the [heuristic] that less is more. Right? I mean, you want to minimize the number of features, and you want to only have those features that are absolutely necessary. So basically, if you [??] you just raise the bar to about double of what you think it would be for introducing a new feature, or a new deal that you affirm, or a new component to a business, from a new step in a process. 

And so, really discipline yourself to not do those things unless you believe it is absolutely necessary, and to just think back to that each time you're going to do it. The second thing I would say is to implement those [??] that we talked about. Watch how users are using it when they're actually in the system, and solicit their feedback through surveys. And listen to them. If it's too complicated, they'll tell you. You'll hear it in angry, unsolicited emails, and you'll certainly hear it if you do any sort of survey. 

Andrew:	Okay, and there are a couple of mistakes that you want us to be aware of. The first mistake you say is, 

Nick:	I've lost you. I've lost the sound.

Andrew:	Can you hear me now? Good, that should do it, right?

Nick:	Great.

Andrew:	Okay, so there are a couple of mistakes that you want us to also be aware of. You can't see this, but I'm sliding documents up in front of the screen, as we're talking, so that the audience gets to see.

Nick:	You're reminding me of all the things I said I'd talk about and didn't. 

Andrew:	No. I'm just doing so much, right. I'm doing so much here, like, as you were talking I hope that this comes out for the people who are watching us, taking notes on their behalf so they can follow along. Here, like, I can slide in your home page right now. So, let's talk about some of the mistakes. You say there are a couple of mistakes that we need to be aware of. The first is systems that capture information soon get redundant. Tell me about that, and maybe show me how you did that. 

Nick:	Systems that get redundant, later capturing too much information, is that it?

Andrew:	Yeah, I think you were saying too that the room tracker, or the room rental tracker, is a good indication of where you might have made a mistake in the past. What is that?

Nick:	Yeah, I mean you want to collect as much information as is necessary, right? Going back to our simplest point but you don't want to collect much more information than is necessary. We had a room rental tracker, one of the big processes the branch managers had to go through is renting a classroom space where they're going to run their courses, and that tracker was meant to capture all the information we needed to make a decision about whether we should allow them to rent a particular space. But we wanted them to fill in that information for every single space that they considered using. Many of them considered ten or fifteen spaces for every one space that they even ended up deciding they wanted to use. So the system became a real burden as we built on more and more fields and required them to use it for every single space. 

The result ultimately was that people just stopped using it, that's really the risk, I guess to close the loop on the point we were talking about earlier, of not being 80/20. Now, if you do make a system overly complex and you capture too much information, you think you're doing a really good job because you're going to have all this data to work with but at the end of the day you end up not getting nearly as much as data, because people would've stopped using it.

Andrew:	I see. Do you happen to have that on your screen to show us?

Nick:	You know I don't. I don't have that the one specifically, but you can actually see, you know we've got that table and here's the form that we currently use for room rentals. You can see it's quite a bit, so we ultimately ended up changing. We both reduced the number of fields, if you can believe it this is less fewer fields, and we also now only require the form to be filled out for those rooms that are already selected as one's that the branch manager wants to use.

Andrew:	OK.

Nick:	So, rather than them having to do it for twenty or thirty rooms, now their doing it for three or four. 

Andrew:	And actually, you're a company when people are renting rooms, were they renting it from the company or renting it from third-parties?

Nick:	Renting them from third-parties.

Andrew:	OK.

Nick:	So, if we're running programs all over the country, you'd have, you know we'd be renting from a school, a church, a synagogue, whatever, for a classroom space. Every single one of those processes has to come through from the branch manager to central and you know, just with that mailing list, there's a bunch of different steps that take place in between. 

Andrew:	I see, and by the way, as someone who used to organize events, I know how tough it is to find a location and I completely understand why you'd want to keep track of all the locations you've considered and be very methodical about it, because boy is it hard to get someone to just rent you space. It's not, it's not something that's as organized as say finding a restaurant to go to dinner. 

Nick:	Yeah, and another place where we see this is a lot, and I think most entrepreneurs will see this, is in an CRM system, you'll have a tendency once you build a CRM system for your salespeople, to want to collect as much information as possible and sales people, you know, they'll want the information that is valuable for them and managing the process but any information that's extraneous to that, they don't care about. So, the more of that kind of information you start building into the system, the less likely they are to use it.

Andrew:	OK. You also want to show us an overly complex version of IV base versus the simple version. Or am I just jumping ahead here?

Nick:	The overly complex version of Ivy base I guess is the current version of Ivy base. What I showed you guys before. It works really, really well but like I said, the major criticism that we'd gotten from branch managers was that it can be a little bit too much. Again, you need to think about your user, and in this case we've got first time entrepreneurs and in many cases with first time employees who really run a business with four and are now having to get everybody up to speed on a business system. 

The more complex that system is, the more frustrating and overwhelming it starts to be and I think what we've found is, is that we've kind of crossed the line in some areas and what we're looking at over the course of the next several months, before we head into the summer of 2012 is really simplifying the data or simplifying the tables so the branch managers can really focus on the things that are most important without being overwhelmed by too much information, too many things to do.

Andrew:	Got it. Alright, anything else that we missed, before I ask you one last question?

Nick:	I don't think so.

Andrew:	I think we covered it all. Here's a question that I had for you, by the way, thanks for doing this session here with us, let me bring up your website so the audience can see it. Behind you, I've been looking over your shoulder, I see a bike, I see a surf board, how has life changed since you sold the business?

Nick:	Life has changed a lot. I have a life. As any entrepreneur whose watching this knows, when your in the throes of building a business, that's all you can think about, it's all you can dream about, and it consumed your life and even with the best business systems, even with the most automation that you can have, if you are anything like me, you will still be spending night and day focused on the business, and that was very much the case for me. That has changed, obviously, since selling the business. I am still working very hard and having a great time working for Revolution Rep, managing their products and technology, but I also have some time to surf. I have gotten back into cycling, something I had enjoyed for a long time before but had not done much of for the last few years. As you can see with those Venetian swords back there, I have also had the time to travel a bit.

Building the right business systems, though, was very key to even enabling a sale to happen. You know, the key thing with any acquirer, or the key question that any acquirer will typically ask, is, "Can this business be taken, and put into our business as a strategic acquire, and still run?" and if we did not have the business systems that we had, the answer to that would have been a very vociferous, "No." Because of what we built, it was pretty much plug and play.

Andrew Yes. I can see, too. A company buys your business--they do not want to worry that if you leave, the business falls apart. Here, you leave, the system is still in place, and you have a process for iterating it. Alright, let me say this to the audience:	

We keep talking about specific tactic, tactic, tactic, but let's not lose sight of the big picture. It's not about Google Sites. It's not about QuickBase. It's not about any specific tool or any specific tactic. It's about a big picture here that you want to organize your business, you want to systemize it, you want to delegate it, and then you want to iterate based on the feedback that you are getting from people.

Every time we hit "publish" on one of these courses, I get email back from people who often--let me tell you this Nick--people will sometimes pause at about fifteen minutes, and email me back and say, "I had to use this before I continued." I want those emails. If at any point here, you stop and you say to yourself, "I am going to go try this," or "I am going to go explore this," come back and let me, let Nick, know how far you have gone, what you have been able to do with this. I am so proud of what people who have taken these courses have been able to achieve, and I want to keep hearing more and more of them. We do this for a reason. Nick does not need to do it. He could be surfing right now, and I appreciate, by the way, not only the time, Nick, that you put into doing the course, but all the hours that you spend to prepping this with us.

Nick:	Of course.

Andrew:	The reason that he did that--correct me if I am wrong, Nick--is to pass it on to you guys, so you can go and influence your business and then come back and hopefully do what Nick does, which is share with everyone else what you have learned.

Nick:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	Alright, thank you for doing it.

Nick:	I will say one more thing, and it is going to be half something I feel now, half just a plug. To your point, Andrew, the ability to share what I have learned, from the pain of running without systems, to getting to the point where the business really was systematized to the point that it could be sold, was an awesome journey, and it was also a challenging journey at points, that could have been made less challenging had I had some insight from other people that had done it. I hopefully have communicated some of the things that I learned and can help other people to learn those things faster. 

I also want to say--here's the plug part--that if there is anyone out there watching this who is an undergraduate at a competitive university and wants to take their entrepreneurial skills to the next level, one of the great ways you can do it is by applying to be an Ivy Insiders Summer Branch Manager. The program continues to be run through Revolution Rep, and to my knowledge is still one of the only positions you can take that does not involve the risk of being an entrepreneur but still enables you to get out, learn how businesses are built, build your own, and use the best-in-class business systems like the ones we have been talking about today to really become an entrepreneur.

Andrew:	I have to tell you, people do not think that I have had jobs--I have had a few jobs before I started my first company. One job that I had actually was working for a guy who just systemized his business, who understood his business, and who understood how to make sales. To me, working for him, Paul Sorbera, was more valuable than the four years I spent at NYU, more valuable than the four years I spent at high school and all the eight years before that. When you get to work for someone who really understands business and can communicate it in a way that you can pick up and use it, it is like being apprenticed in business and in the real world, and I am glad, actually, that you said that. I hope that people in my audience, if they are looking to get started, will get started with you, and I hope that they will give me feedback on that, too.

Thank you all for watching, guys. Nick, actually, where do they go if they want to sign up and work with you? I am going to zoom in on a page. Can you highlight the part of the site where they should go if they want to work with you?

Nick:	Www.RevolutionRep.com/Ivy-programs. From the Revolution Rep homepage, they can just click on Ivy Insider and they will get there, too. The applications will be open in January and February in 2012. We are going to have our biggest summer yet, and a lot of exciting developments and changes to the program that will make it just that much more of a better training ground for entrepreneurs.

Andrew:	Cool. Alright, thank you for doing this. Thank you all for watching. Send us your feedback. Don't just be a passive observer of life. Be in the game. I am looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you all.