425: SweetProcess with Owen McGab Enaohwo

Owen McGab Enaohwo is the CEO and Co-Founder of SweetProcess, a business process management software that helps management teams and employees easily document procedures, implement processes, and manage tasks.

Chad talks with Owen about taking specific root issues and building software around them, overcoming resistance to the core idea of documenting processes, and the importance of having the freedom and ability to be empowered to make changes to organizational documents that outline how you do your work.

• SweetProcess
• Follow SweetProcess on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
• 52 Sample Standard Operating Procedure Templates
• Follow Owen on Twitter or LinkedIn.
• Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

Transcript:

CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is Owen McGab Enaohwo, the CEO and Co-Founder of SweetProcess, a business process management software that helps management teams as well as employees easily document procedures, implement processes, and manage tasks. Owen, thank you so much for joining me.

OWEN: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you inviting me as a guest on here.

CHAD: I could only return the favor as I recently went on one of the podcasts that you run over at the SweetProcess. I'm happy to have you on the show.

OWEN: Great, great.

CHAD: Let's dive in a little bit to SweetProcess. You know, it's a tool for documenting process. And I'm curious what led you to founding SweetProcess and creating this product?

OWEN: That's a great question. So what happened was SweetProcess was actually founded in, I think, the fourth quarter of 2013. And before then, I had an agency where I would provide entrepreneurs in the U.S., so small to medium-sized business owners, with back-office support, basically, people in the Philippines doing back-office support for them here in the U.S.

And so people had read these books that were very popular at that time, The 4-Hour Workweek, or the World Is Flat. And then suddenly they realize that being able to hire people abroad and outsource work was not limited to only the larger companies like the telecoms and all that that would go and hire like 150 or more people in these countries working at their phone support 24/7 and all that. So these books exposed small business owners to the idea that even they themselves can do it on a smaller scale and outsource a lot of their work. And so that's what I was doing.

But the issues that I ran into was that first of all; they were coming to me with this idea that the moment they hire that immediately the person will hit the ground running and start doing the work magically, not realizing that for that to happen, there needs to have been documentation in place. Because first of all, the person you're hiring is in a different country, different culture and all that. There's that that you have going against you.

But then also, they're not even with you physically where you can say you can teach them by talking to them while they're next to you. So they're in a whole different location. So the more clear your instructions are in terms of having standard operating procedures in front of them, the more easier and quickly they're going to deliver the results you want, and so that was the first thing.

The second thing was they were very busy wearing so many hats. They didn't have time to document these procedures that we needed to do the work for them. So we came up with this strategy where we would meet with our clients at the time online on Zoom, not Zoom; Zoom wasn't the thing at the time. It was...what was it called? Skype.

CHAD: Skype.

OWEN: Yeah. So we would meet with them online, and we'd have recorded sessions with them where they would walk us through what they were doing then record those conversations. And then, someone else on my team would take this conversation and document standard operating procedure step by step from what they told us.

Now, on the backend, the issue we had was t...