993 Adi Klevit:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP 993 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Adi Klevit

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Adi Klevit:

It’s not just work instructions. When we go into companies and ask them, they say, yes, we do have processes. Then what I see is maybe a PowerPoint that they present to the sales reps when they sign them, when they onboard them, or as sort of instructions on how to log into HubSpot. But that’s not SOPs, that’s not standard operating procedures, that’s not documenting your workflows, that’s documenting some work instructions. So, there’s a big difference between those two.

Melinda Wittstock:

If you want to run a business rather than having a business run you, the secret is all about the operating systems you need to scale or at least know what’s working or not working in your business so you can grow it without burning out. Adi Klevit is all about helping businesses create the systems that bring them both sanity and surety. She’s the founder of Business Success Consulting Group, and for 30 years she’s been on a mission to create living and breathing operational systems and processes across all aspects of business: personnel management, finance, sales, marketing, all of it. Today she shares why it’s vital teams have a documented “single source of truth” for learning and innovating.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who knows firsthand the critical importance of systems and processes for fast-growing businesses, and why systematizing isn’t a resource drain, it’s an investment in scaling, resilience, and innovation. Adi Klevit is a former trained Industrial Engineer, management consultant, and business executive turned entrepreneur founding Business Success Consulting Group. Adi’s company offers consultancy and “done for you” services to set up companies large and small for success by ensuring they have the right systems and processes in place to maximize their growth and success.

Melinda Wittstock:

Adi says too many entrepreneurs and executives mistakenly delay or neglect proper documentation — often to their own detriment. She says scattered documentation can undermine growth and consistency, as can failure to update SOPs as team members learn, innovate and master new skills to adapt to changing circumstance. She says too many companies fail to build systems early and embed live documentation workflows into company culture, before a crisis hits. She says it’s an investment that enables innovation, smoother scaling, and even successful exits. We also talk about how AI is transforming operations and process automation, strategies to get team buy-in, and how to design non-siloed living documents that evolve as companies do for a “single source of truth.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings for some practical systems tips with the inspiring Adi Klevit.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Adi, welcome to Wings.

Adi Klevit:

Thank you, Melinda. Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you know, I can see as an industrial engineer, how you would be obsessed with systems where a lot of businesses sort of think that’s boring or they kind of optional and they don’t really do it, and it really messes them up. So, let’s start with systems. What is the really number one thing that a lot of them are getting wrong? Like when you first come in and look at what they’ve got, where are they letting themselves down by not having those systems, just not having them at all? 

Adi Klevit:

Well, I can tell you and I can give you the list, but the first thing is thinking that they can do it, that they are going to do it and then just not doing it. I was just talking to an entrepreneur. He’s now going to be our client. We spoke about, I don’t know, like eight months ago. And he said, okay, well we’re gonna do it internally, we’re gonna figure it out, then talk to him.

Adi Klevit:

Three months after that nothing happened. And now six months after that or five months after that and still nothing is not in. Nothing is in place because they just don’t have the time to take that time and do it. So that’s the number one mistake. The other one that I see is not having a single source of truth. So, writing SOPs or writing standard operating procedures or policies and just putting them all over meaning some of them are under SharePoint, some of them on Google Drive, some of them are printed, some of them are here. We always create. I always recommend our clients to have one single source of truth.

Adi Klevit:

That is the single source of truth and, and your knowledge base. So that is if you want to talk about mistakes, that’s number two. Number three is not doing it soon enough and waiting until a disaster or, or something that is really threatening to the business is happening, such as your key employee gave you a two week notice but you don’t have anything documented.

Melinda Wittstock:

So yeah, that happens to so many companies, especially when they hit success, like where success becomes a problem. There’s a lot of demand, rapid scaling, they’re hiring and they literally don’t have time to document everything and sometimes you have to go slower to go faster. But that’s so alien as a concept to most entrepreneurs and the way most entrepreneurs minds work.

Adi Klevit:

That’s exactly right. That’s true.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so easy because you kind of think, oh yeah, like we can do that later. That’s not the most urgent thing. The most urgent thing is closing this revenue. The most urgent thing is hiring this person. The most urgent thing right now is, you know, fulfilling on this order or like whatever it is, whatever business you have, right. So when you come in and start working with people, how much of a hurdle is it to persuade them that this is necessary or are they already coming to you with the recognition that oh wow, we’re really messed up, we’ve got to get this done and we need expertise to do it?

Adi Klevit:

Well, obviously if they sign up with us, they already know it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right?

Adi Klevit:

If they don’t, then they’re not aware of it. We can, they become aware of it and then they reach out. So, your question is very good, but I’m going to show the different scenarios. Which means a person in the organization signed up, right? It’s either the COO, the CEO, hopefully the CEO and the founder is all also on board. So, the leadership team is on board. That’s how they will sign up. I mean obviously, because otherwise if it’s not made convincing, they understand, they need it. But now we can have the problem of getting the buying from the rest of the team.

Adi Klevit:

And that’s where the first step that we do is to get that buy in by serving the team. Because we’re going to work with every single employee, whether in the implementation phase of actually training them or creating the processes by using or interviewing, working with those that we want to, that they business want, they want a clone and they want, and they tell us, okay, those people have the knowledge, we need to transfer that knowledge. So, the first thing that we do is we start by getting buy in from the team.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s the most important thing. And in terms of getting buy in from the team, I imagine it provides some relief… people like certainty. And so, if there is a single source of truth and everybody knows how it works, that makes everyone’s lives easier in the end, right? What sort of hurdles do you have in persuading people that this is a good thing to go do?

Adi Klevit:

Well, the hurdles would be the time, the attention, the misconception that they don’t have the time to do it. Because I’m saying it’s a misconception because you really can’t afford not doing it. Because that will take away your time. But that can be also other reasons, like feeling of insecurity. Now if everybody will know what you’re doing, you’re not going to be relevant anymore, or why you’re trying to see how I do things. I mean, that, that’s the extreme. It doesn’t happen very often, but it can happen.

Adi Klevit:

So that can be a hurdle as well. But the main one is finding the time or allocating the time for it. Because as you said, you know, it’s easier to just chase the next deal or handle some fire or do this or do that, but not really spending the time organizing. That’s really why I started my business, because I saw that in 2011 when I started my business, I was a general business consultant. I’m very good at it, at creating strategies and helping business grow and scale. I’ve done it all my career life. But then I would tell him, part of it is that you need systems, you need processes.

Adi Klevit:

The same conversation we are having right now, I would have with them and they would say, yes, yes, but week after week where they haven’t done it, they haven’t done it, they haven’t done it. So, then I go, okay, well, how about if I do it for you? And they go, really? You will do it for us? I mean, there was one client and I said, yeah. And I started documenting and documented it, created beautiful playbooks. And they go, wow. And we got it done. And that created a huge, huge difference in their business. So, then they recommend they refer me to another and another. And the business grew that way.

Adi Klevit:

And of course, I had to scale my own business because I cannot do. I mean, it takes a long time to do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Adi Klevit:

That’s where we grew to having consultants and technical writers. And we have a whole process on how to do it. But that’s how it started. Because the time and the expertise and the know-how are the biggest hurdles.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. And because a lot of companies, especially at that early stage, we just don’t have the resources to really do this. Like, when you think of all the different systems that you need across hiring, onboarding, your sales systems or your revenue recognition systems or other financial systems, your marketing. There’s so many different things, like how your engineers operate. It cuts across so many different things. So, the idea of done for you sounds incredibly nice.

Adi Klevit:

That is very true. That’s why we did that. Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I think that ultimately is the answer because people are being asked to do something and documenting this that they don’t really know how to do well, necessarily. So, someone listening to this show could say, okay, this is great, so I know now that I need to document all my processes, so I’m going to go do that. But then they, they could make errors in doing that internally. When clients come to you have some of them attempted this already and just done it badly?

Adi Klevit:

Well, of course that happens all the time. I see it. I don’t know if we can say badly, but I mean, yeah, we can say that, that there are instances. But also, I also don’t want to just invalidate and say, well, you know, nobody knows how to write those procedures. But what I see is again, it’s not a single source of truth. It goes directly into work instructions as opposed to extracting knowledge, which is best practices, why things are being done in a certain way, why they are not being done in a certain way. What should we continue doing? Optimizing the process. You know, it’s a whole package.

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Adi Klevit, founder of the Business Success Consulting Group and host of the podcast Systems Simplified.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Adi Klevit:

It’s not just work instructions. So many times, when we go into companies and ask them, okay, they say, yes, we do have processes. We have, yeah, we do have the processes, we have the procedures, let’s say, for our sales department. Okay, let me see it. So, then what I see is maybe a PowerPoint that they present to the sales reps when they sign them, when they onboard them, or as sort of instructions on how to log into HubSpot. But that’s not, that’s not SOPs, that’s not standard operating procedures, that’s not documenting your workflows, that’s documenting some work instructions. So, if you’re not there, somebody can log into your software. So there, that is a, there’s a big difference between those two.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, you mentioned something really important and especially for any company that is innovating. You mentioned extracting knowledge. So just because we did it this way before doesn’t mean that this way is going to work now. Because everything is rapidly changing around us. I mean, not only, you know, with the advance of AI, with so many different things, or even there’s a new competitor People learn things on, on the job. So how do these documents remain living, breathing documents that people’s learned experiences say they innovate, they try something, they fail. But like, what did they learn from the failure? What’s the best practice on making sure that that knowledge is actually captured?

Adi Klevit:

Yes, it’s a very good question. That comes up a lot. So first of all, things do change. And I can give you also examples of how we handle it internally in our own company. Things do change, but also a lot of it stays. I mean, there are a lot of stable things that do stay. For instance, let’s take business development. So yes, there might be a different approach that you’re going to try, but you’re still going to do business development.

Adi Klevit:

And you still should have. If you’re a successful company, you should have best practices. And those best practices are not going to change. They’re going to evolve over time. But if you don’t have a base from where to start, how do you know what’s going to change? And I think that is one thing that businesses can get wrong. It’s, It’s Change Management 101. You got to know where you are starting and then change incrementally. Just really monitor.

Adi Klevit:

It’s kind of like doing a scientific experiment. You’re not going to do everything at once. You’re gonna, not gonna change all the parameters at once because you won’t be able to monitor it. So, my best advice is document your processes as they exist right now. Because you have a business that is functioning: you’re doing it and you’re doing something right. So, document it as it is right now. The level of documentation depends on what change you are predicting.

Adi Klevit:

So maybe you don’t have to document it all the way down to the weeds if you’re going to change it. But also ask yourself, what is the purpose that I’m documenting it right now? If you are documenting it in order to train another person, you do need to go into the details so they will know what to do. Now you document it as it is right now. And then every time that there is a change, you will know which part of the process you are changing. It will be very visual, very evident for you to do that. And when it’s change after, let’s say you try it. Okay, this is the process right now. This is my business development process right now.

Adi Klevit:

This is how my pipeline works. Great. You know what? I want to change something on the pipeline. Okay, good. So, step two, we’re going to change the pipeline. You make a note of it. That’s why if you work on it, you use a process documentation software. Make a note on it and go visit it and make put a reminder to look at it in three weeks and evaluate how it worked.

Adi Klevit:

Okay, we changed the pipeline. It worked. Double the number of leads. Great. Now let’s change the process. But it’s not rewriting the entire thing. It’s just rewriting that step two of how the pipeline changed. We did the same thing.

Adi Klevit:

We had a certain. We have documentation of our, how we monitor our pipeline in the CRM. And we realized that the way we are doing it, the last few steps were not very efficient. We found a more efficient way. We immediately, our marketing manager immediately logged into the system, redocumented it. We all approved it in our next leadership meeting. And done. We have it up to date.

Adi Klevit:

So yes, processes are living, breathing documents. They have to be looked at. I mean, the procedures, the written procedures. However, it’s not an excuse not to have them documented because it’s not an excuse to go blind or fly blind, drive blind. How can you run a successful company without a playbook, without a manual on how to do it? You can’t.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Adi Klevit:

So, you document and then you change. It’s part of the process. That’s the thing. And I tell people all the time. Yesterday I delivered a lecture to a hundred, 100 entrepreneurs here in Portland, Oregon. And I said, look, this is not a one and done. If you think it is, then you gotta look at it because it’s not, it’s not a one and done, but the heavy lifting of creating the infrastructure, creating everything, documenting that is the part that’s the heavy part of the project. And after that you have a maintenance phase. So, you review, you revise, and you utilize. And I suggest that you have revisions. And revisions are based, they’re time based and event based, meaning event based. You bought a new software. Okay, good. You should document your, you should document it in your processes and change what needs to be changed.

Adi Klevit:

But it can be also time based, meaning you revise, you make, you put it on your calendar, or the leadership team puts it on the calendar for every quarterly meeting or every quarter or every six months, depending on the stability and maturity of the processes. You review your processes and then if something changed, you change them. It doesn’t have to be very complex, but it is part of having an organization. It’s part of running a company. Just like you can’t run your company without having numbers and looking at numbers. Although I know that several, many companies do run like that. Kind of like, oh, well, we, we, we keep some numbers, but not all but you know that once you start keeping numbers, looking at your numbers, you run much better. The same thing applies to processes 100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, say even in a very early-stage company. Like I’ll use my son’s company as an example, okay. He’s 19, he’s a college student. He’s creating this incredible app to connect dog owners in real life, in neighborhoods for real life community belonging. 

Melinda Wittstock:

But at the beginning stages, he has systems like for engineers, systems for the local market managers that are going to work in these neighborhoods, social media, a really good admin dashboard where everybody in the company as it grows can see those, how are we doing against our overall goals and our KPIs. 

Melinda Wittstock:

The beauty of this is AI is you know, you feed in what you need, but the AI is essentially creating this for us in a way that is really, really good. Like it’s a living, breathing document. And this is a pre seed company.

Adi Klevit:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

And it has systems already. So, like what can credibly an early stage when there’s a lot you don’t know yet. There’s, there, you have a lot of assumptions, right. And you’re living into your assumptions and changing them as you go.

Adi Klevit:

That’s true. But what I would do in that case, you know, we, I mean granted we, we work like when we engage on a, on a project, it’s a fast-growing company that is lacking consistency and we usually they, usually they’re not in the startup phase because in the startup phase I tell entrepreneurs go find clients and go proof your, prove your concept. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, like everything in this case is all about okay, what do we have to do to get to product market, fit in the first markets, right? 

Adi Klevit:

So, I understand the question. What I would recommend in this case is to map the process as high level. So, figure out, okay, how are you going to get your, how are you going to onboard your clients? What does the onboarding process look like? What is the customer journey or what is the client journey from beginning to end? I would actually map it so at least you have the picture of it. But if you have, but if you are changing it and you don’t know, you didn’t try it, then there is nothing to document. You have to have some kind of processes in place in order to document.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right, right, right. Do you recommend like, making sure that everybody has access to the same information and that’s hence this, you know, an admin dashboard that everybody can see. And maybe there are different permissionings for different people or whatever, but it is accessible by everyone. It’s in one place, right?

Adi Klevit:

That’s right. It’s a single source of truth. Absolutely right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because you get like, I know previous companies of mine where you have different people working on different systems. The SOPs for the hiring are over here. And then like you’ve got different people working on different aspects and then you’re trying to keep track of all these documents in a Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever. It’s like, oh my God, make it stop.

Adi Klevit:

You got it, you got it. So, the single source of truth, get everyone to get there and be able to be aware of it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right. I think about a lot is where to be in alignment with the company values and mission. So, say for instance, one of your highest values is innovation. Well, what does that actually mean? To operationalize? Because if you want to spur innovation, then you’ve got to allow people to fail, but you’ve also got to allow the room for people to document what they learned from that failure. So, you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel that people can learn from each other.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, you allow people that space to be able to speak without fear, like not be embarrassed about making a mistake, but actually learning from it and that that learning becomes operationalized.

Adi Klevit:

That’s an interesting question. Why? Why? I mean, I’m curious, like what. How do you see that people will be embarrassed?

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, I’ve seen it so many times with, say, engineers don’t want to admit that they, they weren’t right. Like they, they did something and it didn’t work. And they don’t necessarily speak up and own that. Like, okay, I tried something and it didn’t work right. So, creating the space for people to feel comfortable, like in some company cultures, people are really afraid to speak up.

Adi Klevit:

That’s a problem. You know, I think that’s a problem in culture, and I talk about that as well. It’s, you know, you have a people problem, a process problem, or both. If you’re creating a pros, an environment where innovation and process improvement is not welcomed. I will start with working on the culture, honestly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly.

Adi Klevit:

You know what I mean? Because it shouldn’t be that way. And when you ask me the question about what do we do first in order to get the buy in, I mean, that’s part of it, is when we get the buy in, we also get set up the stage correctly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, exactly.

Adi Klevit:

Yeah. Yeah. But that’s interesting. It’s, it’s an interesting concept. You’re right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Where I was going with that more cleanly is where culture and processes fit, right? Because, because they’re, they’re, they’re two sides in a way of the same coin. Like, one can’t work without the other really effectively.

Adi Klevit:

Right, you’re right. And, and the way I look at it is, is it a process problem, a people problem, or both? And if you have processes in place, then you can hire for culture, because sometimes we make the compromise that we need to hire for experience, or we need to hire people that know the processes because we don’t have those written or we don’. Documented. We don’t have those implemented. So, then you hire. Let’s say the engineering company, you have to hire a very experienced engineer, or in a law firm, an experienced paralegal, but they’re not really fitting your culture, but you have to compromise. And I mean, I experienced that with myself. You know, if I didn’t have my training for my technical writers, I would need to compromise and hire technical writers that might have the experience but not necessarily fit the culture.

Adi Klevit:

But we are so proud of our culture and we have great relationships. How can I describe our culture? It’s very, we’re very dedicated, we’re very competent, driven, intelligent, communicators but we get along with each other great, and that’s very important to us. So, if I did not have those processes documented for the technical writers, I would need to hire people sometimes that are not necessarily a fit for our culture. But what I’m looking for is somebody that can communicate, can write, is driven, competent, and then we can train them, so then I can actually get somebody that fits our culture and not vice versa. Does that make sense?

Melinda Wittstock:

That does make a lot of sense. So, tell me, Adi, how is AI disrupting everything that you’re doing right now? As companies try and figure out how AI works and fits into their processes, that’s the big elephant in the room.

Adi Klevit:

Oh, it is. But you know what? AI is helping us tremendously. I mean, we are one of those industries that lucky. We are lucky that the. The. All the. Everything that has happened with AI actually increased our business tremendously, because you can’t really implement AI without having good workflows, because you can’t. You can have an agent.

Adi Klevit:

What is it? What is the agent going to. Let’s say you are a company. I want to automate my processes. I want to automate how I do things. Well, the first question is, how do you do things? Because otherwise, what are we going to automate? Do you know what I mean? I mean, how can you. Let’s say you hire an AI consulting company.

Adi Klevit:

That’s the first thing that they’re going to do, is they’re going to map your workflows or at least try to. So, we actually partner up with several AI implementation companies because they all go, oh, wow, what you do is amazing. If I have that, then it’s not a problem to create the AI tools. We see a lot of increase in business.

Melinda Wittstock:

There have been all kinds of articles written about companies that have failed at implementing AI because they’ve either decided to replace all their engineers with AI, and then they’ve realized that, oh, wow, the tokens for AI are, like, more expensive than the actual engineers.

Adi Klevit:

All the mistakes that the AI makes or, you know, the customer experience, all of that. I mean, I’ll give you an example. So, we just finished a great project that we did with a manufacturing company, and now they are going to implement, actually implement, because that’s another thing that happens, Melinda. People say AI, AI, but then nothing happens. Right? I mean, It’s a concept, yeah, I would love to automate. But then they’re not moving forward with it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, they don’t know, they don’t know how and they don’t know how to necessarily train their employees on it. So, like if you as a, as an executive team, if you’re not that familiar with AI, how are you going to onboard? Like get, get your, all your team using it. Right?

Adi Klevit:

Yeah, create, create the tools. That’s the thing. I mean training the team is one thing. And when we say AI, we’re not talking about just the LLM, we’re talking about actual agents and automation. So that company going back to that manufacturing company, we documented all of their processes, we optimized it and now they went to one of the partners is also has an AI implementation company and, and he looked at it because like, wow now. And they were able to actually identify what is the where is going to be, the return on investment. What part of the process do they need to do to automate? And then they will take the documentation and automate it, and it would be great because then they can have, it can actually happen. And when you have agents, you have to train.

Adi Klevit:

I know because we are creating agents internally for our company. The way that we did it is we took our standard operating procedures, fed it into. We’re using Claude, so we fed it into Claude, and we build the agent and training the agent to use those SOPs. And it, it takes time to train the agent as well, just like you are training a human. But because we already had the systems of onboarding and training, then we can tweak it, we can teach it how to do it, et cetera. So, we are living through that. I mean we are automating things in our company as well. If we did not have it in place, all the workflows and the standard operating procedures, we can’t really train, we can’t really build automation because we don’t know what to automate.

Adi Klevit:

We wouldn’t have known what to automate.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, Exactly. Well, I think with AI, so much of it is sort of iterative experimentation as well. So, say if you decide, okay, so we’re going to use agents to do like our social media, right? That’s a big task because you know, are you using it to research and figure out what are the active conversations that you want to insert yourself into? Are you creating it to come up with a content schedule? Are you doing this, are you doing that, what are you doing? And then how do you track success? Because you’re learning from this process as you’re implementing it, right?

Adi Klevit:

That is correct. You’re absolutely learning from it and, and make yourself better and improve. And it’s very important also, by the way, for humans to understand the processes because not all of it is going to be done by robots. It’s not going to happen. The humans have to elevate themselves to actually control the robots and do the quality control and so on. So, they really need to understand the processes and what’s going on so they can evaluate the output.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, and the only way you can really do that is jumping into it. Like there’s no replacement for just doing it. Right. Having your own little local experiments or, or, or whatever. But then as you do it, making sure that you’re documenting what you’re learning.

Adi Klevit:

Yes, absolutely. And that is key. So, you can document as you’re learning so you have the different iterations and you don’t forget. And then when this is done and you figure out you, you decided this is good enough for the next few months. Okay, good. So, this is the final version.

Melinda Wittstock:

AI can actually help with that. Like so say you’re deep in CoWork or Claude Code or whatever and just like you can run prompts to document, you know, decisions made and what you learned and how you change the process and just keep a running tally of that. I mean, like there’s so many ways that, that, that can work as well.

Adi Klevit:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, tell me, when you’re looking for your ideal clients, Adi, who, who are you looking for? And, and what’s their investment and what’s the kind of before and after, like how long do they work with you? Tell me about just all of that, that whole process.

Adi Klevit:

Of course. Our ideal client are fast growing companies that are lacking consistency or founders that want to exit the business, and they know that they can’t do that without having well documented processes and procedures.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Adi Klevit:

And now also fast-growing companies lacking consistency and they also want to automate. I mean that’s an addition lately because that’s what we’ve been getting a lot as I just mentioned. The way that we work is the first thing is we design the entire process, meaning we map the workflows from beginning to end for the company and then we mark map the workflows for each department. Now we can engage on projects where we document just a few departments. One department or all the departments. So, it really depends. That’s why my answers, you know, there is no one answer that fits all. It depends on what is needed and what we.

Adi Klevit:

So, after we map everything, we have our roadmap. We assign responsibilities. Who’s responsible for each process and we meet with that subject matter expert. We meet for an extract information. We have consultants that meet with the clients and with their subject matter experts and we extract information. We ask a lot of questions. Show me, tell me, how do you do this? How do you do that? We extract information. If you already have standard operating procedures in place, we will review them and use any materials that the client has.

Adi Klevit:

So not to. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. And we go department by department. So in between. So basically, we have a call. Let’s say we are documenting your processes. So, we’ll meet with you. We go, okay, let’s, let’s do your processes for intake.

Adi Klevit:

Good. So, let’s start with the intake. We’ll meet with you once a week for 90 minutes. We’ll extract the information and then our technical writers will convert that meeting converts into a whole day of work behind the scenes of writing everything and putting everything together. And we will present it to you. So, let’s say we meet on Monday. By Friday, that procedure will be presented with questions, with additional questions and suggestions. And then you will review it and let us know what you think.

Adi Klevit:

We’ll edit it and then we’ll meet again the following Monday until we’re done with the intake department and then go to the next department. That’s high level. This is how it works. At the same time that we extract the information and we create it, we also optimize it. So, we’ll give you suggestions on how to optimize and how to make the process better. And then we are going to roll it out. Because the followed by all is as important as documenting the processes and procedures. The reason we build the project that way or the process this particular process to execute a project that way is because we are working with busy entrepreneurs.

Adi Klevit:

We know that you are not going to be able to give us a whole day or several days. You’re going to shut down the business. I truly believe after all these years of experience, it’s workable 90 minutes a week. If you can do that, then we have a problem. So that’s how we time it. That’s how, that’s the cadence. And again the, the, their implementation, the rollout, making sure that the processes are being utilized. That’s a whole part of it.

Adi Klevit:

And we coach you and your team on how to do that to ensure that all the processes are being followed.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Yeah. And so, so there’s all kinds of decisions, I guess, about the software and the best platforms. What’s some of your advice for that or what are some of the things that you use yourself, in this process?

Adi Klevit:

Yeah. So, you know, there are, there are many options. We go over with the clients, we interview them very thoroughly, and then we have knowledge so they don’t have to do the research, and we will recommend the best platform for them. So those are also the tools that we use internally. We run the projects on different tools, but there, there are many tools out there. We know what works, what doesn’t work, and what to recommend according to how many employees do you have, which interface you would like, what are you using the processes for? So, there are many answers that probably will. We can do a whole podcast about the tools that you can use. 

Adi Klevit:

As you said, you know, the technology changes very fast. So, what is relevant today might not be relevant two weeks ago, two months from now.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, Adi, you have a podcast, System Simplified. Is that a good place for people to start to just kind of understand this better and, and if this is the right fit for them and they need you. I imagine most businesses do need your work. Is that the best place to start?

Adi Klevit:

Well, they can definitely listen to the System Simplified. I mean, that’s how we got introduced, because we had a common guest and she recommended that I talk to you. And thank you so much for that. Yes. System Simplified is a podcast that, where I interview founders, entrepreneurs, thought leaders about systematizing a business. So, it’s not necessarily learning about us. You can learn about a lot of other people. 

Adi Klevit:

I love my podcast. I mean, I recorded over 500 episodes and it’s fun. Yeah. And it’s like, I get to learn about other entrepreneurs and get to share with our listeners inspiring stories and always talk about how to systematize. So definitely you can look up System Simplified. If you want to get a hold of me, the best place is either our website, which is bsuccesscg.com or LinkedIn. So, Adi Klevit and I’m on LinkedIn and you can reach out, book a call, ask questions. Absolutely, I 

would love to hear from the listeners.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Well, Adi, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Adi Klevit:

Thank you so much, Melinda, for having me. It was a great conversation.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Adi Klevit is the founder of the Business Success Consulting Group and host of the podcast Systems Simplified. She helps fast-growing businesses master their operating systems and processes. Check out her new eBook, Stop Carrying Your Business in Your Head.

Melinda Wittstock:

Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating and review the podcast on Apple and Spotify—it helps more entrepreneurs like you find the secret sauce to support and grow their businesses.

Melinda Wittstock:

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