10 years of team structure knowledge in 26 minutes (live training)

[Music] I've spent the entire week putting 10 years worth of knowledge and and lots cups lots of things going right when it comes to structuring teams and I'm about to actually share this training with my team and all of this can be applied to pretty much every single business and I actually as a fact know that every single business needs this so if you're in business make sure you watch the entire video I will attach all of the details in the link below for those that don't know me my name is Daniel dalan I grew

up in China but I'm originally from the Netherlands I dropped out when I was 16 and I've been freelancing doing a bunch of things from design to development to helping people purchase products in China and I have founded several businesses you can take this information very serious because I truly wish someone was giving these things to me so the main business that I am currently building is a fulfillment center that is based out of China we're helping D Toc Brands the redet e-commerce brands to fulfill globally to well over 60 countries from China this comes

with loads of benefits and if you're curious um that link will be in the description as well so you can check that out too but yeah in an invols of business with hundreds of people with a big part of the team also being very scattered and that's why we we we need really good processes and systems and one thing that is extremely important when it comes to doing business in general is documentation and actually empowering your team to collaborate but also innovate and give the more ownership so you can focus on the things that really

matter so with all of that said I've got a few more minutes until the meeting starts so uh yeah we're going to get straight into it all everyone very very good to have you as I mentioned um I'm going to start this actual training with a little bit of an update because we're in Q3 we're entering Q4 uh which is a very big month for us as a company and I want to just take a second to stand still and kind of reflect and take you guys through where we're currently are after that I'm going

to take you through the main purpose of this meeting which is training or giving a training around Sops which stands for standard operating procedures which you'll learn all about in this meeting now that said let's actually take a second to stand still it's within 2 weeks our new Warehouse is going to be finished this is going to be 10,000 square m as you can see on the right just a few months ago we walked into this new empty space uh and currently there's stock that is slowly being transferred and within two times our new Warehouse

is going to be completely operational within the entire lifetime of us as a company we have really really set the foundation for each and every single Department which now is the time to really upgrade and grow each and every single Department we're talking finance department tech department design Department marketing and sales legal department research Department customer facing support an actual operation team that is dealing in between China um as you can see the the the the the the on theground China operations team and the actual Warehouse team now statistically based on the current volume we're

actually doing um we're going to be processing orders at the current Pace considering that we're not growing now on average we have grown this last few four these last four months or three months we've on average grown per. and us as a company are currently employing well over people which is a really big thing and especially when you know actually walking into what to the warehouse itself for me it was a really big realization how big it actually is what we're doing now cherry on the pie we've brought on advisors now we haven't just brought

on any advisor we have brought on the person who has built Apple 200 warehouses in 16 weeks and is very well known within the US in the supply chain industry and has been of incredible support with really taking us to the next level and that's exactly what this meeting is about because we need need to reach these new levels and we cannot repeat you know the same things that are getting us to where we are right now in order to go to a new level so here's just like a a quick um you know breakdown

of our Revenue growth which is you know the last three months I won't go into too much detail here now with Peak se's around uh with peak season around the corner which we're going to do we're really going to have like another meeting for that in itself um the big question is how do we you know like how do we maintain our current momentum and most importantly how do we improve it now it's really important to understand where we are as a company and I've gone through quite a few of these stages but you know

being very honest with you we're also entering a new stage because we're really growing as a company and when starting a business which you know uh especially in between me and and and you know Vince we've we've we've done quite a lot of stuff now it always starts with just figuring out which is micro by just doing you don't think you're through you just do then once you start to see that you're onto something you're going to need a little more structure now we've applied a lot of structure already but now it is time for

the team to get ahead of us and what does that mean it means that the team is really going to take ownership of each and every single department and is going to build that out themselves and continuously optimize that department in itself so how do we maintain this actual growth I'll tell you what we shouldn't do so majority of these companies actually break down because of like companies that experience growth like we are it's because of lack of scalable infrastructure there's overexpansion the operational overload is getting too big and those things are not controlled now

the only problem that I really see for our business is really number three since we're growing so quickly we want to make sure that we maintain a really good team culture and don't leave like leadership gaps as in like miscommunication within the kind of like management level within the company which this meeting is really for is really for the management level because everyone in in this call is going to have their own depart they already have their own department but it's going to be you know a matter of optimizing and growing the actual department now

how do we create you know control how do we as a company feel in control it comes down to two things you have ownership and communication and I'm going to break both of these down for you so ownership really starts with understanding um sorry owning your position and one thing that I have spoke spoken about even in previous meetings and this is something that is extremely important to understand is we are a professional sports team and you know with all respect to every every other founder that is managing their company and calling you know everyone

you know with us a family the truth is that it may feel like a family because we get along really well but the truth is that we are a professional sports team every single position in this company is earned and that includes even me as a Founder as well as Vince my co-founder nothing should ever in whatever form or shape be taken for granted and everyone has to perform because we have to win the match now the second thing in terms of ownership comes down to documentation and delegations where it's very simple within a company

you have two types of people you have people that learn and you have people that Implement ownership is really the the way you can show that you can delegate and that you can implement the things that you've learned and this is what this meeting is all about I'm going to go in much more detail now the last point is measure to manage and own so once you own your actual responsibility it's really important that you put numbers to the things that you own and I'll explain to you why because one it drives accountability and two

it allows you to manage because one of the things that is one of the worst things that you know anyone who has a management level within a company can do is tell you oh yeah we had such good sales course this week you think like us as a as as as a Founder that has to manage the company or like us as a team collectively care about things going good or bad it all begins with what is good and what is bad which comes down to 10 new clients in one week you know that's all

right 20 clients in one week you know that's better it comes down to documenting these numbers and that applies to each and every single Department moving on to communication now ownership is essentially like the first part that you that you um that you take in order to to get to control communication is what comes next so once you understand and once you do all of that it is extremely important that you document which is also a form of communication but also actually communicate and this is going to result in you aligning as a team all

together which is going to really Drive collaboration because once everyone else is up to date and and and understands what it is that you are responsible for or better said while you take ownership off the team can actually jump in now I've sh showed this chart before but since we've grown a lot as a company um I want to just like show this to you guys again because this is a chart that I um that I really love because it really shows how powerful communication is this is U YX acces and as you can see

on the left side here we have action and value now if you put in low action and you don't communicate you get you're in a very bad spot when you put in a lot of action and you don't communicate you are still in a pretty bad spot because people are not aware of the things that you do when you are putting in no effort no action and you communicate a lot you actually buy yourself a lot of time until people find out hey they're actually doing nothing now us as a company should always strive to

be really on top of our actions and the value that we provide and make sure that that is clearly communicated so when achieving control what does that mean control really means that it's clear for you but also for all of your other team members and the big problems is that when it's clear in your head but it's not clear on paper which makes us a you know which is going to take us from a medium-sized company to an actual big company because I'll tell you what is like the difference between those two things because you

have again like that that actual you know you being in control as a person but everything that's in your head is not clear to other people that comes down to two ways it comes down to personal control and systemic control now I'm going to explain to you what personal control is which is the killer of a lot of companies that see a lot of growth is they're very dependent on just like an individual itself that holds a lot of information which is not allowing you to grow as a company or to delegate or to grow

you know that department itself or collaborate with people and I'll break down very you know quickly what these points are so first of all leis to botton when only one person has knowledge tasks get delayed if they're unavailable limits delegation people hesitate to delegate because the only ones who know how to do a certain task hindering actual team collaboration people cannot contribute fully because they lack the necessary information or context because if you don't understand what's going on you can't get feedback you can't help you know improve that specific thing it creates a lot of

stress and burnout and this is something that I you know see happen in our company a lot when being the soul keeper of information and knowledge um it puts a lot of pressure on an individual leading to a lot of stress as well as exhaustion and that's obviously something that you want to avoid because all the other problems will occur when someone is you know unavailable because of too much stress or exhaustion now it also stops us from really you know having good Innovation because when control is centralized it really discourages anyone to share new

ideas or you know Solutions which is really just slowing down us coming up with improving this and and and you know Innovation innovating like our current processes and systems so then also when you know someone were to leave us um is also going to cause disruption because no one else know how to continue the work or the things they have done systemic control versus personal control we're talking about systemic control right now this is the exact opposite of personal control and what this does is when clear processes are in place tasks can be very easily

handed off to other team members without losing efficiency because it's properly documented and you know it's just an old machine and people know what to do how to do so when everyone has access to that information it actually allows us to collaborate way more as a team and like look at it from a problem solving perspective involving multiple people now the workflows are going to be much smoother because tasks are not dependent on just one person these documented processes allow us to easily grow as a team when we onboard new team members they can be

trained and they can be brought up to speed very quickly now it also going to increase the actual consistency of us delivering service as a company which is going to you know lead into standardized procedures that will you know allow us to manage the actual outcome and have way more reliable outcomes because we know all the things that we have documented are um are consistent when all of this again is in place it also really going to empower us as a team to just involve everyone and find new ways to innovate now especially with a

succession plan when you know with systemic control if anyone leaves a business can continue Without Really disruption because of someone you know having like a certain set of knowledge that is only accessible through that person now it also going to reduce stress as us as a company because when there there's a lot of pressure on a certain set of service we can actually grow the team more and we can very quickly get new team members up to speed to help the actual management levels within our company so how do we go from personal control to

systemic control everything starts with personal control there's no denying of that because you know everyone in our comp company has to take ownership and you have to start with understanding what it is that you do and then taking ownership of that the thing is that everything we do is not personal we as a company are extremely reliant on collaborating together with a lot of cross communication between different uh departments so how do we create a space that allows collaboration and Innovation driven by ownership so how do you take ownership owning your position that's really what

it starts and what I mean by owning your position is that you have to understand your position what is it that you do what you know what is your department and how do you you know help us win the race once you really understand that and once you clear and all of that you start to document and delegate you define your position with daily weekly and it's s needed actions that are repeti and that you literally can just like document now the second the third thing that you do is you actually measure them as I

mentioned earlier you explain the good you explain the bad but immeasurable values because saying that oh yeah we've had a really good week why is it a good week it's this week up to our standards and we as a team can collectively decide if these standards are firm enough or if we you know have to you know like tighten the screws and and and increase the bar now the second the the next step is to actually execute and once you execute you will understand even better and that is obviously like a cycle that you will

keep repeating then once that is done you start to involve you bring in other team members which is going to stimulate the next point which is improve through collate collaboration which is going to take us all the way back to delegation because once we are aware of how we can improve it is redent it's going to be reasured it's going to be re-executed the team's going to be reinol and we will improve and that is a cycle that we will keep repeating now every company needs a source of Truth and a source of Truth refers

to a single authorative source or a system where accurate and consistent upto-date information is stored and maintained now you can find like all sorts of relevant data from records to you know our customers to really anything that is important to us and that you know allows us to make really good decisions you know actually operate as a company and also report now we currently have two sources of Truth one is within notion where we have our standard operating procedures and policies we have air table which is our CRM um and how do we continuously build

our source of truth because we actually have a lot of these foundations in place already um but what we now what as I mentioned earlier in the beginning of this meeting what works now doesn't necessarily work for tomorrow because getting from 0 to one requires certain systems certain people what's getting us from 1 to 10 is going to require new systems new processes new people and what's going to get us from 1 to 20 is exactly the same now this is something that we as a company have to continuously work on continuously improve we know

as a company that you know a lot of people just know they just know their so it's really important and that's also like one of the goals with this training is like why would I tell you what or how to do when there's really a lot of people within our company that know a lot of things way better than you know than me you know so it's really important to understand that there is a lot of freedom and responsibility within this whole ownership thing that I've been talking about and also a lot of trust from

our side because the fact that you're on the school here means that you've been you know picked out of a a a very very long list of people that want to be part of us so um you know your but now it's time to really show it so building our source of Truth um we're going to redo our Sops there was a little typo here supposed to be sop um so I've already given it a first swing of just like redefining each and every single step um but this is of course still free to um

to be amended but I'll get to that during the end of the meeting now ownership of your responsibility so once again once more I'm going to run these by you you have to own your responsibility understand it you have to document this you're going to make sure that this is measured you're going to execute you're going to involve your other team members and you're going to improve and you're going to cycle back to documentation after that is the cycle that we're all going to repeat for each and every single Department within our business now this

is just a refresher you know what we can achieve with this I'm not going to run you guys through it so I came up with a system that is essentially like this whole repetitive thing that I spoken about and that's Ado system which comes down to analyze document optimize analyze document optimize as I mentioned we have a lot of place uh foundation in place already um and this is something that we just have to consistently repeat as a company and once we have that documentation in place document sorry documentation in place this is actually going

to allow us to do that now we're storing all of this in nocean and if you know me you know I love notion the reason for that is because we can really integrate everything into one source and I'll get to like breaking down these different pages in just a second um because we can actually like really integrate everything because we work with air table we work with Google Drive and all of that and it's going to be very easy for us that within this documentation link the relevant files to all of these different platforms as

well but again storing it all in one source of Truth now this is going to allow us to seamlessly collaborate where we as a company get to very easily give feedback on each and every single step within this source of Truth on top of that we'll have a page history which is really going to allow us to guard if you know uh let's hope that doesn't happen anyone were to you know know delete a page by accident or make mistakes or you know make uh adjustments that weren't supposed to be there it's going to be

really easy for us to to just revert the changes from you know anyone who who hopefully not would make a mistake now this is actually a really cool feature because um we've been seeing a lot of um questions back and forth to us in general as a team now with notion Ai and when we start building our knowledge base we can ultimately replace a lot of that back and forth internally for us as a team with notion AI because we can literally ask it questions and we will get answers based on the knowledge that we

put together within this actual document so questions like what is section 321 uh which is one of like the big advantage that we have for you as customer is explained here after asking it because we've written several articles or there like knowledge within our actual database or better said our source of truth that we can just ask questions to which is a really cool function and I really recommend we're going to use this uh a lot more as a company now one thing that is also pretty good which I would like to share with all

of you as well I within our entire notion environment also have my own private space which is allowing me to just manage tasks in general um which is something that I'm happy to share with you um you know anyone that's that that wants to so um just send that through to me if you would like access to that and I can send that to you now where to store this very simple everyone in here has access to the eflow in Ocean if you don't we can send uh voytech a message and I'll take care of

that but eflow is the the main page now you have in the left sections you have three parts now C Level Sops is mainly for uh me and Vince um but here we have our Eon flow Playbook this is really where we store everything this is our source of truth how do we store it as I said you have to really understand you have to understand the purpose of your position and why do we document this in this way um M because again you know it's it's not just a task list and we're talking about

an sop which is sop is is standard operating procedure and it's not just like a a list of task it's just making sure that we can contain consistent high quality outcomes um one thing that is also really important is I need you guys to really take ownership and like have you act like take the actual mindset of taking ownership and taking pride in in in the way you documenting things because um how you work and why you work and and and and how you of this is is is really important and it really matters and

as I said earlier just now you as a person responsible for that specific Department knows what you're doing and you should show that throughout your documentation now I'm going to run you very quickly through the structure uh on how you can actually structure these documents so first of all very simple a title and who owns it the next thing is an actual introduction and again I'll I'll I'll get to those details in a second so you introduce what is happening here and what is the actual goal what are we trying to achieve here who's doing

what and what is the you know overall zoomed out perspective of what this actual department is doing or these specifics specific sets of tasks and then also you need to add the actual anas as is in Access which basically States you need access to this this this and that that is followed by very very stepbystep um simple instructions uh as you can see sequential which basically just making sure that it's in the right order that it makes sense that it's very simple you can just work with bullet points but yet still detailed so that it's

clear as as clear as possible now what is really important to understand when writing these things it's as if you're explaining it to a person you know like let's say we are doing competitor research you just explain this to another person that's exactly how you should write this down make sure that it's so clear and that anyone who doesn't even understand our business would be able to read this entire document get up to speed what we do and how they have to do what you are currently doing now then last part you have to measure

and measure is something that I mentioned before it's really important because you can't really meas you can't really manage anything if you can't measure it that's why it's so important that we as a company start defining our actual goods and bads into each and every single Department even better so that we can really measure our success of each and every single Department one so then I want to really thank you for being here um um and you know listening to me for you know close to half an hour right now all right great stuff Daniel

thanks so much right all right everyone have a good one all right let me grab you guys here we go you just had the meeting uh it was a pretty good meeting um a little tired I've been up since 4:00 a.m. today but let me just give you a few more you know lessons and learnings about doing something like this so for those watching and you actually want to implement this for your yourself or you know you you as a person with your business is what I'm doing here is I am literally pushing each and

every single person into a pool now it's going to be very clear who's going to swim and who's going to drown and what does that mean those that will swim will own their department they will continue to grow it and they will keep up with the current scale those that will drown are in the wrong position and are not qualified at this current stage to actually manage that department so we're going to have to replace them with someone who actually is because as I also mentioned dur the meeting the systems the processes the people that

get you from 0 to one are not the people that going to get you from 1 to 10 and those people are not going to get you from 10 to 20 and that is something that you really have to understand you've got to find people that are here that want to come down here and take you there there's two types of people people that learn and people that Implement and you've got to make sure that management level is always people that Implement now one of the other things that is really important is you know it's

like uh a lot of people are you know a little too kind when running a business trust me I have best interest with everyone within the business but again you know like you've got to understand that we're a professional sports team you know everyone earns their position even me I would say cherry on the pie is when you do this and when you have you know your team actually do this it's going to be very clear like the outcome as in like the document that they will present to you is a direct reflection of their

expertise and that's going to allow you to make your you know a decision which can be a good one or a bad one you know so that's it I hope you've enjoyed this training um let me know in the comments what you think of it this is of course a little different than you know my usual videos uh but the truth is that I've literally spent all week just inside to prepare this training and you know a lot of other things obviously but um yeah we've got a lot coming up next week um so make

sure to check out all my other videos and yeah I want to thank you for being here and I'll uh see you guys in another one