[JOE SANOK]: This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 452.
I don’t need to tell you about the power of podcasting. If you have followed me for any bit of time, you know that I fully believe in podcasting and that’s why I want you to launch a podcast. I have put together a nine-part email series just for you. This is a course all about how to start a podcast. I would love for you to go sign up for it over at podcastlaunchschool.com. This is going to give you some step by step instructions of what to think about before you launch your first podcast. Again, that’s podcastlaunchschool.com.
Well, I hope that you are doing awesome today. You know, it is an interesting time in our world, politically in regards to, where we’re at physically, this thing of social isolation and all of that. You know, at the time of this recording, we’re still on lockdown, but because we batch record these so far into the future, you know, I never know if it’s going to change and I’m not going to go back and unrecord or rerecord it, but even if in future people are out of it, I’m thinking this is something that will forever change the lens that we see things through. If you’re still in it, that as well. You know, to have had this time with my family where we have no social obligations, we have no kid things to run around to, definitely a place of privilege compared to what a lot of people go through. And, you know, not knowing what a month from now is going to sound totally tone deaf.
I don’t necessarily want to say all sorts of big things, but you know, to at least say during this time, how do I have fun with my kids? Like this morning we learned a new board game. I knew how to play it, but the girls had never played it before. And it’s called Medieval Academy. And it’s this kind of fun game where you kind of have different tokens and things. It’s like a strategy game and to just try things that are new. I signed up for masterclass.com and I’m taking a course with Malcolm Gladwell right now and then I’m going to take Steve Martin’s stand-up comedy one, to figure out like what is it that I want to do? I mean I’m in an improv troupe and we’ve been meeting online on Zoom in mid-April, which now is for you, the listener in the past.
We did a, I think we did, I don’t know, it’s going to be next week an online, improv performance. It’s a time of really figuring out new ways of doing things and I think that’s exciting. I think oftentimes we can have a sky is falling approach, but I want to be optimistic and think through what are creative ways of connecting and still moving forward in businesses and life and our own personal development that I find interesting. and I think that’s important. I think that’s really important to do, to be that person that’s grounded, that is trying to stay connected to your families and your friends and to be a voice of reason. You know, this is really our time as therapists to be able to say, “Here are some skills to get you through the actual lockdown and then the post lockdown,” which I mean, I think we’ll be seeing all sorts of interesting things come out of that.
Well today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Josh Fonger who wrote the book called Work The System and I’m really excited about this interview and for you to get to know Josh. So, without any further ado, here’s Josh.
[JOE]: Today on the Practice of the Practice podcast. We have Josh Fonger. Josh is a business performance architect and the co-founder of Work The System. He is an international business consultant, coach and speaker. He’s had the unique experience of personally helping hundreds of businesses grow simply using the Work The System method. His specialty is taking stressed out entrepreneurs from working in their business to working on their business. Josh, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[JOSH FONGER]: Glad to be here, Joe.
[JOE]: Yeah, you know, I love that work kind of on the business instead of in the business thing. That’s something I know a lot of our listeners are going to be excited to hear about. But why don’t we go back, you know, a number of years and just start with how did you get into the Work The System? How did you discover it? What’s the kind of origin story that are for you?
[JOSH]: Well, the origin story for me is a bit unusual. You’ve probably heard that before. I thought I was going to be an architect, so my undergraduate degree is in architecture and I went to work for some real estate developers in Arizona and realized that I enjoyed the business aspect of it more than the design. And so, I got my MBA and I had planned to be a developer. But when the crash happened in 2007/8/9 in real estate basically crushed my dreams of that and I had to find something else to do because I had to feed a family, had a few kids. And that’s when I got into business consulting, which is somewhat ironic because I wrote my thesis paper about why you should never hire a consultant. So, I basically got a career in what I thought —
[JOE]: What was the thesis of your thesis? Like you shouldn’t hire a consultant? What were the main kind of points?
[JOSH]: Well that’s a long time ago, the main point was you should do it yourself. Basically, they’re a waste of money. Your team, in-house knows what to do better than someone from the outside would and they’re going to come in there and give you some boilerplate answers and leave when you really won’t have the change that could have happened if you just grew up from the inside out. So that was my whole thesis. And so, I know —
[JOE]: What would you say to young Josh, if you could jump back, Bill and Ted style?
[JOSH]: You know, I would tell myself that, it’s difficult to have a proper diagnosis when you’re in, when you’re kind of in the bottle, right? So, an outside viewpoint really is extremely useful, extremely useful. And I think that’s probably the one thing I would tell my previous younger self of my twenties; would be that, it’s helpful to break the mold. I think consultants, coaches are catalyst for change that, and people have already tried on the inside. I mean, they don’t reach out to a coach or consultant or in your case, a counselor until they’ve already tried everything they can on their own with their inside circle. And so, I think they are hugely valuable in the right circumstances. And so, they’re both true. Just different circumstances when you would want to apply internal change versus external changes.
[JOE]: Yeah, and I think also just knowing what you’re asking your consultant to do or to teach or to help you speed up. You know, there’s a lot of people that say, “Oh, I can do that,” that are calling themselves coaches or consultants and you know, there are a lot of charlatans out there. So, knowing those questions to ask ahead of time I think is important. This kind of came to light just actually yesterday. So, I had back surgery when I was 19, in 1999. So I’ve always kind of dealt with like back issues and I’ve been having a flare up for a couple months and finally I went to see a PT and she had me stand and she noticed that I was flexing kind of the muscles in my hips a lot more than I should be. And she said, “Just relax those.” And, when I went walking yesterday and really focused on having those muscles be relaxed instead of kind of hypervigilant, my pain level went from an eight to a one in like a day. It came back but at least it was like in the right direction. It’s just that simple little thing like those muscles are being flexed. That expert eye, it can be that one sentence that just changes things in a business or in my case in my back.
[JOSH]: Yes, it’s amazing. And it is difficult to know who to go to because like you said, there’s a lot of bad advice out there and there is a lot of just advice out there. I’ll tell you that. So, you really have to weed through and maybe there’s a thousand things that are coming at you, but really there’s only one thing that you can absorb, deal with and applies to you right now. And so, I think it’s, for anyone who’s running their practice right now, maybe I’ll say a hundred different things to say to you today in this interview, but maybe only one or two of them are going to apply to your practice. And so, don’t, don’t blanketly think that you have to apply everything. That’s where overwhelm happens.
[JOE]: Yeah. Now, what happened that switched you from writing a thesis about like the vagueness of consultants to then saying, “You know, I’m going to be a consultant.” Like how did that journey happen?
[JOSH]: God’s Providence. You know, it’s definitely wasn’t my plan. I applied for a lot of jobs, hundreds of jobs all over the world and really the only person that would hire me, and this is basically going, maybe people can relate to this. I was making really good money in my early twenties, six figures, had a great career path and then my MBA and then, lost everything. You know, lost house, car, job, all savings, all investments, everything gone because I had to, couldn’t find any work. You know, I was literally shoveling rock and selling life insurance and just doing cash jobs because I couldn’t find anything. Because I was in real estate and no one was paying for anything in real estate in Arizona. And so, I had to be totally humbled to have basically nothing. And then the only person who said, “Hey, do you want to work?” was someone who had a small business consulting firm. And I said, “Sure.”
[JOE]: Then that thesis is out the window.
[JOSH]: Yeah. At that point I’m living in my in-law’s condo and I’m like, “Yeah, whatever.” You know, because I wanted to make some money obviously. And so, got out there and really, had some really good success early on, which was not because of experience or skills. You know, it really just worked out well for me in the beginning because most people don’t start off doing strategy consulting in their twenties. And so, I was flying around from company to company, helping them with really whatever the guy who was overseeing my work told me to do. So, whether it was financial modeling or business development or inside sales, outside sales, branding, signage, merchandising, pricing, online marketing. It was kind of just whatever, because I was in a specific industry, flooring stores or they didn’t have a lot of educated staff.
Mainly the staff was family and they were just used to selling flooring and installing flooring. And so, I was the outsider trying to come in and help them build a business structure. And you know, fast forward several years I realized that what I was doing, helping these companies improve is that whatever I would do, it wouldn’t stick. So, once I left, they would need to fly back out or to continue to work with them because they didn’t really have it infused into their business, into their culture, into the strategy, into their documentation. And it would just deteriorate over time quickly. And that’s expensive. You know, they’re paying someone expensive to come in there and then when it doesn’t work long-term, it’s a problem.
And so meeting Sam Carpenter, the author of Work The System changed the way I would do consulting in that he was all about building documented systems, you know, business structure that’s going to last, that’s going to actually mature and get better with time. And we met in Oregon when I moved up there and I started off working as a contractor with him then as an employee then a partner; and a majority partner. I bought them out recently. And so now I run this business called Work The System that helps business owners and some of them, you know, who would probably relate to, you know business owners who are counselors or own practices that want to go from working in their business to working on their business or I guess more clearly go from being self-employed, slave to their own business, to being a business owner who has more freedom both in terms of time and income and influence. And so that’s what I help people do; is make that transformation, make that shift. And it’s difficult to do, but I’ve had a chance to do it for the last eight years with thousands of companies and that’s what our business is about.
[JOE]: So, take us through the method for Work The System. What are kind of the main pillars that people can take away from it?
[JOSH]: Yeah, the main pillars of the method, and this is a framework that works with, we’ve tried it with a lot of companies. So yes, the psychologists and psychiatrists and the chiropractors and the dentists, but also the internet marketers and the nail salons and podcasters. It’s an overarching framework that starts with you and not your business. So, you have to get outside and slightly elevated and look down on yourself, your team, your business, your customers, and see the separate systems, the components that make it up. That’s the first thing. It’s a perspective change. So, you can be pragmatic and precisely and accurately look at the reality of your business. So that’s the first thing; the perspective change.
The second thing is having what we call as a strategic objective, which is a one-page plan, which tells you where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. And so, you’re defining your future, right? So you want, do you want to grow a practice with a bunch of people underneath you who are going to be trained in your certain method or you want to just do the work yourself because you love it, but you want to have a support staff to support you in that? Do you want to open up new locations? Do you want to take your secret way of doing things and write a book and make money that way? Or would you like to instead patent something you do? And there’s a lot of ways to take your expertise as a counselor and build a business with it. And most people, they don’t really clearly have an end game in mind and they don’t have a plan to get there either. And so that’s the strategic objective.
The third thing is operating principles. So, everybody who is going to work with you to create that future reality needs to have certain principles or ways to govern the way they make decisions. So how do they govern the way they make decisions about time, money, customer service, technology, marketing, the facilities. So as issues come your way, what is going to be the filter or the framework for making decisions? And so, we build those into a document called the operating principles. And the last thing is the procedures. And this is essentially taking every single, repeatable task of your business and document those systems, which sounds tedious, not very fun, but it’s the way to build yourself freedom, mechanically.
So, we call it mechanically building freedom. So how do you open up your practice each morning? How do you set it down each night? How do you set up the alarms? How do you do set appointments? How do you do sales calls? How do you put out your newsletter, your marketing pieces? So, each piece of your business is a separate unit. And we want to make sure that we document that repeatable system so that you can use it for increasing quality, for measuring, for delegation, for scaling, for integrating technology. All those things happen once you carefully look at each piece. And that’s the level of detail you want to get to so that you as the owner of the practice cannot have to be engaged or involved in every single element of your business because those elements have been figured out and other people can actually do them and they know what good looks like and how to achieve good on a consistent basis because they have that documented system.
[JOE]: Now, how important is it for, actually, let me rephrase that. So, I’ve done something a certain way. I want you to tell me if I’m wrong. So, when I’m trying to do systems, I’ll often have the virtual assistant or assistant kind of write the system and then I’ll review it. So, for example, we just started doing this Done for You Podcast launches. So, we have eight podcasts we’re launching in 2020 with different customers and we have four audio engineers that we just brought on. So, I have those four audio engineers kind of creating the system so that if one of them is sick or something happens, it’s easy for them to kind of pass it off to someone else with the idea that if they create it then they’ll have more buy into it. But then I still need to have eyes on it and kind of say, “Oh let’s tweak these things,” because maybe I have the knowledge they don’t have. Is that a good way to do it? To have the people that are doing the actual implementation to write the system or should I be more involved in it?
[JOSH]: That’s a great way to do it. Yeah, and there are a couple ways and that’s the most common. That’s the way we hope companies will do it.
[JOE]: I passed the test?
[JOSH]: Yeah that was good job. So, the idea is that whoever is going to be actually touching the work, doing the work, does the work on a regular basis, they would know what, you know how it goes because they’re doing it right. So, you want them to document what’s in their head, how they do it, then outsiders within their department or you as their manager to see and therefore optimize, improve, give some suggestions and tweak it with time. And that’s great. They’re going to buy it because they’ve actually written it. Sometimes the people you bring on don’t know how to do it and then you or someone else will have to write it and pass it down to them and that’s also very common. The new person who does the task will then, you know, they’ll review it and they’ll optimize it with time. And sometimes like, I actually was working with a mental health clinic and one of the clinical directors was so busy and there were so many things that only she knew how to do that basically when she was driving from location to location, because at several locations she would audio record the systems that she did. You know, how she would handle certain situations like, I guess group therapy or about an industry.
But whatever therapy she would do, or handle situations, she would record audio files and hand that to her subordinate and that person would then write it and then she would review it. So, this, I mean there’s a lot of ways to be creative with getting out of your head, but the main thing is, that’s the end goal. Get it out of the person’s head who knows the most about it and then make sure at least one other person does a thorough review of it and then you put it, you make it live and then you make sure it does not gather dust over time, but that it gets, you know, you go back to it and you come up with new ideas. Because podcasting, it’s a new industry. So, you know, 10 years from now there’s going to be new technology, new techniques, new automation. So, whatever your team has documented, Joe, this is super smart.
What you’re doing is you have a framework and then you’re going to build a build and refine and make an improved and improvements on it. So maybe a competitor of yours who might have more talent at this point is not going to be able to keep up with you long-term because you’re going to have the framework that they don’t have and the ability to gather the best ways on a consistent basis.
[JOE]: Oh, I love that. So, what else should we know about the system?
[JOSH]: Well, I think the other thing you should know is that it’s a requirement if you do want to get past a certain threshold. And there are, this will probably relate to your audience because I’m an attorney I work with who is a patent attorney, I’ve been doing a long time, super smart, successful, and he was making, I want to say somewhere around $600,000 a year, personal income. So, he was making good money, but he was working seven days a week, nights, weekends is burning out and he wanted to continue to grow his business. And I said, you know, you’ve maxed yourself out and everyone gets to that point where they’ve basically like you can’t work anymore. You can’t charge anymore and you’re going to be stuck until you get sick or hurt or whatever, and then your company will just crumble until you regain your health.
And you’re basically stuck at that point. You’ve hit the proverbial glass ceiling and everyone will get there. Everyone listening to this will get there and so the idea is if you want to break past that and you want to have a that’s different and not everyone does, then you actually do have to build out your team. You have to build out your systems. You have to build out your documentation. You do have to become more of a leader and you have to change your mindset. These things necessarily have to change. Now that’s not for everybody. Some folks, they just want to do their thing. They want to keep a small practice. My dad was an eye doctor, an optometrist. He kept a small practice. He had some people underneath him. That was his goal. It worked out great. He’s retired, super happy, awesome.
Other folks have different ambitions and they want to, maybe they want to have five locations. Maybe they want, they have seen a hundred patients a year but they want to see a thousand patients a year. Maybe they want to take a month-long vacation or sabbatical. For those people, they have to know that they’re going to need to build this infrastructure and systems if they’re going to want, if they’re going to actually have that freedom. And certainly, for your audience, if they want a free copy of the book, Work The System, they can go to our website and get it at workthesystem.com and get the book for free. But, beyond that, I mean, that’s why I’m here; is to say if that’s you and my messages resonate with you, that’s what we do, help people actually.
[JOE]: Oh, that’s so awesome. Thanks for giving that book away for free. Yeah, it reminds me, I remember it was about a year ago, I interviewed Mike Michalowicz who wrote Clockwork and he and I, it was the last day, actually is the last day before we both were going on a four-week vacation. And his whole thing was, you know, if you can’t leave your business for four weeks, you’ve only given yourself a job. You haven’t created a business. And for me that’s really resonated that. You know, can your business make money outside of you? And for some people they don’t want to. They don’t want to necessarily kind of build out this whole clinic that has multiple clinicians and kind of runs itself outside of themselves, like how your dad had his business.
But for a lot of people they’re like, “Well, my kid’s sick. I don’t want to think about how I’m losing money and when I go on vacation, I don’t want to be thinking how I’m, you know, five grands in debt in addition to what I paid for the vacation.” So how do you think people get to make that jump? Because I think a lot of our listeners, they’re, you know, they got their practices going, they’ve joined our membership community, Next Level Practice, they are really kind of getting some good traction, but they want to make that jump to making money beyond just the work they do. Like are there mindsets or tips or techniques that you would recommend that help with that jump?
[JOSH]: I would say writing down where you want to be, you know, we call it the strategic objective is the key to doing that. Because there’s plenty of people who think about it, they have nice feelings about it, like they want it, but you have to write a plan. I mean you really do have to decide this is where we’re going to end up as an organization and this is how we’re going to get there. Beyond that, it’s just wishful thinking and most people just, they enjoy dreaming of their fantasy but not putting in the work. And no one can actually rally around and help you and be magnetized to you and execute that plan if it’s just sitting in your head. So that would be the number one piece of advice. You have to actually write it down. Without that, you’re just going to be going back and forth based on the wind, based on your emotions, based on the latest customer you worked with.
You’re not going to really stay true to that singular direction. So, I think that’s the main thing. And the other thing is most people’s ambitions are, they play it safe, right? They say, “You know what, once I hit this dollar figure, then I’ll be happier once they hit this.” And then they don’t actually think beyond that. And it’s a goal based upon their own personal interest instead of a goal based on impact. So, the impact, the goal was, “I wonder what I’d have to do for my practice to help the most people.” That starts to ask different questions and then it’s going to require you to grow as a leader. It’s going to require your business to improve, because that’s the only way you’re going be able to impact more people. So, if it’s self-seeking you, you are going to probably limit yourself more than if it’s what’s the biggest impact for the most people, then you’re probably going to actually desire to build these things.
And so, there’s a lot of things. Head games, the strategy, I mean it’s all wrapped into one and I would say the number one factor that is the essential for any of this to come true and success, and I don’t know your program is Joe and how long you’ve worked with folks, but it’s time. Time is the number one factor. So, people who think, “Oh, I’m going to do this thing and it’s going to happen in a few weeks or a few months,” they’re 99.9999% of the time wrong. You know, it takes time. And those who are long-term thinkers and long-term planners and long-term workers will get there. I mean, you can do way more than you think if you give yourself time. Like, people, they underestimate what they’re going to get done over a long period of time and they overestimate what they can get done in a short period of time.
[JOE]: I love that Gary Vaynerchuk quote that people overestimate what they can get done in a year and underestimate what they can get done in a decade.
[JOSH]: Exactly. I know Gary says it, but there’s someone else. Was it, John Maxwell says it and I think he got, I think John Maxwell got it from someone else even older? So, I can’t believe the quote has been around for at least a hundred years, but it’s so true. And once you realize it, then your big ambitions are big enough, given enough time. And it’s, people are attracted to that. People want to work at your practice. I’m working with this dental office right now and once she caught a bigger vision for what a practice could be, the quality could be, the people that they could serve, and the impact, people just started flocking to her, both customers and employees, and they wanted to actually be a part of this as opposed to previously employees didn’t want to say they were kind of depressed and it wasn’t really, it was just how do we survive and pay everyone next month? No one wants to work at a place like that.
[JOE]: No. And I feel like one of the things that I’ve noticed is when an owner really owns their voice and also gets their staff to own their voice and you know, a lot of times in the counseling world, people are so worried about self-disclosure. Like, “I don’t want them to know that I like dogs. I don’t want them to know that I like surfing. I don’t want the world to know anything about me.” But those that seem to be the most successful are the ones that are really able to own their own voice while still walking the boundary that, you know, you’re not going to dump all of your personal stuff on your clients, but be a little bit unique, stand up in the market, systematize what you’re doing and systematize that culture kind of throughout. That seems to be some of the kind of core building blocks that help people really get to that next level.
[JOSH]: Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s a trend that’s happened over the last 50 years as people’s, their personal, I guess their personal lives have blended with business lives and the fact that there is less privacy and social media. I don’t know if that’s the reason why or if we’ve always been wired that way, but certainly you could see those with the most success are the most authentic and afraid of being them. And people appreciate that courage and that’s, those who aren’t willing to go there, people they have maybe some skepticism or fear to work with them. So, I think being relatable is essential. So as long as they keep politics out of it, just don’t say whether you like Trump or not. That’ll save you.
[JOE]: Sure. Sure. So, Josh the last question I always ask is if every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[JOSH]: I would want them to know that their work matters. Certainly, I’ve worked with a lot of these counselors and their work really does matter. But to realize that the work doesn’t have to be done by them. There are thousands, probably millions of counselors and so they could make a bigger impact if it was them showing teaching and training those underneath them to do really good counseling. They can make a bigger and bigger impact than them doing it themselves. And so, consider that is the goal to make the biggest impact. And if you’re a good counselor, that’s going to happen. By training up your disciples of counselors, that’s going to be bigger. And so, yeah, think big. Don’t be afraid to do that and you’ll help more people.
[JOE]: So, awesome. Josh, if people want to get in touch with you, remind us also the link for that free book. What’s the best way for them to connect with you?
[JOSH]: Okay, so I’m going to read this off because okay, so some agencies set this up for you all. So, if you go to workthesystem.com/practice, so again, workthesystem.com/practice, we’ve got a few freebies there for you. The free book, I mean you can buy it on Amazon. It’s an instant five languages, but if you want the free book you can go there. Also, I’ve got a podcast as well where I help people improve their business go from being self-employed to being business owners. That’s what our podcast is about. And also, a link to our flagship product, which is our group coaching. So, if you want to go deeper, work with me and some other entrepreneurs, it’s all on that page.
[JOE]: Oh, thank you so much Josh for giving that away and for all the value you brought today.
[JOSH]: It was fine. Thanks Joe.
[JOE]: So how are you going to go Work The System? What are you going to take away from this? We here at Practice of the Practice loves systems. It helps us to stay sane and to get more done. So, what are you going to do to Work The System today? In the next interview, I talked to this single guy who made a documentary about marriage and he, excuse me, his name’s Roger Nygard. And Roger, he did a documentary called The Truth About Marriage. I’m really excited for this interview. He interviewed the Gottman’s, he interviewed a bunch of couples also. You know, he wanted to figure out what is the truth about marriage. And Roger actually, he works on the show Curb Your Enthusiasm, he worked on the office, he also works on Veep, worked on Veep and so he knows his stuff and I’m really excited for you to hear from him next week. It’s going to be an awesome interview.
So, you know, as you move forward in your life, if you get stuck, let us know. We want to help you through these difficult times. So, thanks for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon.
Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.