Enhancing Productivity and Collaboration in CPG Operations

(Listen on Apple or Spotify. Full transcript below.)

What advice would you get from a CPG Operations Expert that believes in building a business on your own terms, and enhancing productivity to do more of what you love, rather than simply doing more?                             

To get the answer, I invited CPG Operations Expert Jessi Freitag to the show. 

“Hacks” are all the rage right now, from food to fashion to health, and of course running your business.  As a Finance Expert and CEO I’ve learned that automation can be great, but it can also cause a ton of headaches; AI can help with ideation and repetitive tasks, but it definitely can’t replace me yet - especially in the parts of my business that I want to remain “high touch”.

It got me thinking… what advice would a CPG Operations Expert - one that believes in building a business on your own terms, and enhancing productivity to do more of what you love, rather than simply doing more, give to CPG Founders?  

To get the answer, I invited Jessi Freitag to the show. 
Jessi is an operations and project management consultant helping CPG businesses get organized and scale. She formerly hosted over 100 episodes of the Startup CPG podcast and also provides 1:1 tutoring in the popular project management tool, Notion.

GOOD SYSTEMS CREATE A THRIVING CULTURE

Jessi says that Founders and Leadership teams often underestimate how smooth systems and operations affect a business’ culture. Even if a business has two people working in it, if they are solving the same issue over and over, manually creating reports to do essential tasks, struggling to find files and information, or to connect with people and complete the work that needs to get done, it wears on you and directly impacts employee satisfaction, productivity and profits.

On the flip side, when people have what they need, aren’t constantly solving the same problem and can do their jobs smoothly, a thriving culture can be created. 

START WITH THE BASICS - IT MAKES A HUGE DIFFERENCE

File Management seems so basic, so seemingly simple that it shouldn’t require a special conversation, right?  Wrong. Jessi says that it is the biggest pain point she sees in her consulting. 

Random docs shared on slack or via email, awesome files and tools created and saved on someone’s desktop never to be shared, your own filing system that leaves you searching and wondering where that darn file is… it’s the number one source of frustration and duplicate work within organizations and Jessi shares free and low cost solutions for getting your team organized once and for all. 

She also shares her method for naming files that got her through a gluten-free certification process so fast the certifier complimented her on it! 

PATIENCE IS KEY WHEN IMPLEMENTING NEW SYSTEMS

Raise your hand if you’ve ever decided to implement a new project management tool that you’re super excited about, only to stop using it days or weeks later because it’s not working how you hoped, not integrating well into your routines and current systems, or just downright frustrating. 🙋‍♀️
Jessi says we’re not alone, and has some advice.

Implementing a new tool or system takes time because you’re building a new habit.  Big companies call this “change management” and put a lot of resources toward successfully implementing company-wide changes like this.  Small businesses with less resources have to practice patience, be committed to talking through issues and frustrations that the new system brings up, and have a willingness to iterate until you get it right. 

Hiring a consultant to help you implement operational and system improvements?  Jessi’s got advice for that too! 

SOMETIMES ITS OKAY TO DO THINGS THE HARD WAY

Much of the pressure that we feel, especially in businesses, is to automate, optimize, and systematize every single second of our business. The message we’re receiving loud and clear is that if you're doing something in a manual way you're failing. But Jessi believes that sometimes doing things the hard, slow, complicated way is fine, especially if it's something you enjoy or an approach that other people aren't taking.

In the episode Jessi shares a great story of how handwritten letters helped secure shelf space at Erewhon for an emerging CPG brand, and how a CEO takes time out of his day to review Customer Service emails to stay connected with his consumers. 

JESSI’S FAVORITE APPS & TOOLS

As an Operations Expert with years of experience in CPG, Jessi has plenty of favorites and shares recommendations for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software, Project Management tools and more.

FINAL THOUGHTS 

Everyone on the team here at The Good Food CFO was amped and ready to start organizing after listing to this episode, and we think you will be too. Jessi’s down to earth recommendations for improving business systems and operations will benefit any kind of business.

Tune in to hear our full conversation and get all of Jessi’s recommendations.

And remember…

• Not everything in your business needs to be automated

• YOU can choose what to automate, what to do manually and where you want to devote time

• Optimization should be about making your business an enjoyable place to work, ensuring that everyone feels empowered in their role, and that you can spend time on what you like to do most.

• Technology isn't going to do the work for you, it's going to help you much like using a hammer instead of your hand.

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Episode Timeline

00:00 Introduction to CPG Operations and Productivity

03:12 The Importance of Culture in CPG Operations

05:52 Dynamic Pricing and Its Implications

08:56 Jessi Freitag's Background in CPG Operations

11:48 Connecting CPG Operations to Company Culture

14:48 The Role of Systems in Business Efficiency

17:53 Navigating Change Management in Teams

21:05 The Balance of Automation and Human Connection

23:48 Teaching Critical Thinking in CPG Operations

27:04 The Value of Personal Touch in Business

29:53 Final Thoughts on CPG Operations and Culture

38:46 Documenting Processes for Team Efficiency

44:50 The Importance of Information Sharing

51:54 File Management: The Key to Productivity

57:58 Leveraging CRMs for Relationship Management

01:04:57 Tools and Automation for Streamlining CPG Operations

01:11:51 Building a Culture of Open Communication

Full Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Good Food CFO podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Delevan, and with me as always is our producer, Chelsea Stier. Hey, Sarah. Today you are talking all about CPG operations. I am. I am so excited about this episode. I have been wanting to bring our guest, Jessi Freitag, onto the podcast for I think years. Many of you listening may know her as the former host of the Startup CBG podcast. In fact, she has hosted over 100 episodes of that show.

she's also a CPG operations and project management consultant and expert who helps CPG businesses get organized and scale. And Jessi and I met a couple of years ago now, actually right after I read 4,000 Weeks for the first time. And we had connected over that book, interestingly, and so it was sort of

like wonderful timing that we were coming back together to record the episode right around the time of our book club event. I had just finished the second read through of the book and I wanted to talk to Jessi about like productivity and organization through the lens of not necessarily getting more done, but being able to spend time on the things that matter the most to you.

Right. And to create efficiencies so that you can focus more time on the parts of life that you like, not even just your business. And so I really loved this entire conversation. Yeah, Sarah, listening to this conversation really inspired me personally. It took me right back to my time as a store manager. I loved listening to Jessi talk about

creating change in an organization and really focusing in on the culture piece. Because we can have all the plans in the world of this, what we're going to do, this, how we're going to change this or make this more efficient. But at the end of the day, the cogs in the machine, so to speak, are human beings. Right? And everyone bumps up against change differently. And so, really listening to her take on how you can create change and bring people along in an organization, even if that organization is only two or three, sometimes one person. just loved it. I loved the conversation. I thought it was really impactful. And I will share that both you and our VP of operations, Keisha, told me how much you loved the episode and how much you got from the episode, which is...

I mean, you guys always say like lovely things about the show, but for you both to be like, my gosh, I love that episode and now I want to go implement new things made me very happy. was like, this is a good sign. But I agree with you. think one thing that, I mean, I talk about it, I think in the episodes, like we use ClickUp as our tool and implementing that was no easy feat. Even Keisha and I who were spearheading that before you joined the team.

Like it was hard for us to be like, okay, we're going to stick with this. We're going to keep practicing. We're going to keep iterating and making it work. And then, when you joined the team, you know, there were moments of like, I don't understand how this works or this doesn't work for me. And I love what Jessi had to say about like,

allowing people to have that frustration, allowing people to say, this isn't working for me, hearing them and adjusting it. It's another way of building a business on your own terms, right? Like choosing those tools, choosing the things you automate, taking your time and working together as a team to really implement things fully. This is a conversation about CPG operations, but I think it goes a lot deeper than that. And I'm super excited for people to hear it. Yeah. But before we get to it,

have a new Apple review to share with you, Sarah. Exciting. Yes. So this one actually comes from Steph Wiley and it reads, Sarah does such a good job at breaking down the fundamentals so that they're understandable. As a founder, I have learned so much from listening to this podcast. I haven't joined her for office hours yet, but I see that as a possibility in future days.

While I no longer live in LA, I feel like if our paths crossed while I was living there, we'd easily be friends. I love that. Yeah. Through the podcast, you get a sense not only of her intelligence, but also of her kindness. So glad to have found this as a resource. Keep up the great work. Well, Steph, first and foremost, thank you for sharing your name so we can shout you out personally here on the podcast. And second of all, I feel really humbled by this review.

I'm touched. It's a pretty glowing review. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's never a bad day when someone writes really, really lovely things about you on the internet and then you have them read to you by one of your closest friends and coworkers, right? So I'm having a lot of feelings right now, but I think, thank you. I hope to meet you someday virtually or in person. Would love to have you in our office hours for sure. And I just appreciate that you took the time to share this

absolutely amazing review and that the way that we're breaking down the fundamentals of financials and talking about business here has been valuable to you because that's our mission here, right? Is to create value for people. So Steph, I can't thank you enough and I can't wait to meet you. Yeah. And you're absolutely right, Sarah. That is our mission. And in order for us to achieve that mission at like the maximum level, we need to be in front of people. And so I just will do my little shout out that

Your reviews, especially on Apple, they do help us get in front of more founders and allow them to find the show. So if you have been listening and you feel like you've gotten value out of this podcast as well, we would be so honored and love it if you would leave us a review on Apple.

or anywhere that you can leave us a review on the internet, will say. I'm going to throw that out there. Yeah. And I want to say one more thing, Steph, if you follow us on Instagram, will you let us know what your business is? You can send us a DM privately or just kind of get in touch with us. We'd love to support you in return. So just wanted to add that in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, Sarah, so today you actually are bringing the news story to me, aren't you? am. I am. Okay, so this is...

I was going to say is really fun. The fun part of this news item is that it's been shared with us via social media by multiple people who listen to the podcast. And it has to do with dynamic pricing. Kroger is doing this. Walmart is saying that they're going to be onboarding dynamic pricing. Target is reportedly doing this. we...

hear you guys, we heard you guys, we know that you're interested in this story. And so we wanted to highlight it here, talk about it a little bit. We're going to do a deeper dive into all of the facts over in our news segments on YouTube, but there's a couple of things that we do want to share here. So first and foremost, what is dynamic pricing? And I'm literally reading you guys a definition right now. Dynamic pricing is the practice of varying the price for a product or service.

to reflect changing market conditions, in particular, the charging of a higher price at a time of greater demand. And if we go a little bit deeper and talk about like how does this work in practice, dynamic pricing relies on real time trends and supply chain factors. So for example, if a stock

for a particular product drops on like an e-commerce site or now in a physical store, you'll likely see a surge in that price within minutes. So Amazon is utilizing this. I said, Walmart is implementing this and Kroger is very much in the news right now as someone who's utilizing dynamic pricing and doing some potentially diabolical things in this regard. I'm very curious how a company like Kroger specifically, how are they implementing that?

Several months ago, in fact, think potentially years ago, they started testing digital price tags. And so this is something that we've seen even in the good food space in smaller retailers. There are some systems and tools where you can actually connect your POS system to these digital tags. And there's a lot of efficiency in that from a retailer's perspective. It takes a lot of work to maintain price tags for your product. If your supplier changes their

you know, the cost to you and you need to update that, it's labor intensive. So having the technology to do it with the click of a couple of buttons is really great. But as some of the folks in the videos that were shared with us online said, like, technology can always be used for evil. And sort of the direction that we see it going and what's being reported is that Kroger in particular is working with Microsoft and some AI companies.

to utilize both artificial intelligence and cameras to utilize things such as facial recognition in the dynamic pricing models in their store. So the translation of that is essentially the camera can recognize you coming after seeing you buy a product a certain number of times and can essentially raise and lower the price, right, to test pricing on you and then essentially

can, it keep increasing the price until you perhaps walk away and don't buy the product. So then now they know what your price max is and they know as you're approaching how much they can charge you for an item. this is all, I will say speculation right now, but it's based on what the technology can do. This is what like lawmakers and senators, we know that Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts and Bob Casey from Pennsylvania are concerned about what

this type of technology means for the consumer. Yikes. On our end here at the Good Food CFO, I want to take it a step further. And as I said, we're going to cover all of this in more detail on YouTube. But I want to talk about what this means for brands, for businesses that are selling into larger retailers or who are thinking about selling into larger retailers. The fact of the matter is you have never really had control of what

the retailer sells your product for. And we really saw this back in 2020. Maybe we can share a link to an article I was quoted in, in regard to Whole Foods doing price elasticity testing, which is essentially the same thing. Different markets with different products, basically rising the price on the shelf just to see what people are willing to pay. And it made a lot of brands, particularly small, good food brands, very angry because their customers who are shopping in store believe that they're the ones raising the price of the product on shelf when they have nothing to do with it and weren't getting any more money for the product that they were selling into Whole Foods, for example, right? So the retailer is increasing their margin and the brand itself gets nothing as a result of that. Yeah. Right. So this is a wild reminder that you need to protect yourself.

in this industry and you need to make sure that the price that you are selling to your distributor at is a price that works for you. It gets you the margins that you need to be able to build your business financially in line with what you are comfortable with and what you can be successful doing because at the end of the day, once that product leaves your hand, leaves your facility, reaches the distributor, it is out of your control. Yeah, that's really the only piece that you do have control of.

Exactly. it's like, it's kind of wild. We so appreciate those of you who have shared this story with us on social. We love, you know, this sharing of news and information online and email. It's super exciting and fun for us. And this is one that while we were paying a lot of attention to the Kroger Albertson's case kind of went under the radar. Yeah. So thank you for those are to those of you who shared this with us.

We'll be back with more. We'll have more on YouTube, but just couldn't resist bringing this to light for anybody who may have also missed it over the last couple of months. Yeah. And like you said, Sarah, this is going to have implications far and wide, right? For consumers and all around the market. I think especially here on the podcast today, talking about that impact to founders and just that reminder to make sure that you are taking care of yourself.

I think that's awesome. Yeah. Another way you can take care of yourself is by having your CPG operations in order. And Jessi is going to help us do that in today's episode. So Chelsea, I'm ready to get to it. How about you? Yeah, let's do it.

As a Good Food founder, do you ever feel like your work is done in a silo? Is it difficult to feel confident in your business and financial decisions because you don't have a sounding board? Well, in our weekly CFO office hours, you'll not only get the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with the Good Food CFO herself, Sarah Delevan, but also with a small group of your peers.

Together, you can support each other through the work of building a business on your own terms. Passes are available now on our website. Just visit the goodfoodcfo.com and click on coaching. And now back to the show. Jessi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I I feel like this episode is a long time in the making because we met a couple of years ago, I think now. Yeah, I think you

you included the Good Food CFO in like a list of CPG podcasts or something like that. And that's how I think I like found out about you and then wanted to connect with you. so, yeah. Yeah, I've been following you for a long time. The number of times I refer people to your newsletter and your resources and so actually getting to talk to you and then we've had so many fun conversations. So now it feels really fun to get to be on your show and talk more because I love the

build a business on your own terms. And I love everything from the Good Food CFO and your team. So this is really fun. thank you. That's very sweet of you to say. I appreciate that. We connected, think, you know, over obviously CPG operations, which is your area of expertise. also sort of connected over a book that I had just finished at the time, which was also recently our book club selection. It's called 4000 Weeks.

And that really sort of is influencing the conversation that I want to have with you today. But before we dive into that conversation, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your, your work in the food industry and sort of what you do around ops as well for folks. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that we connected on 4,000 weeks because that's a great book. I'm excited that we're going to talk more about that because it's a fun frame of reference to both have. So that's very exciting. And I, and for some of your listeners that have participated in book club, that'll be really fun.

Yeah. From my background. So I've been in operations in a variety of industries for my entire career. I have been in CPG operations specifically more the last five years. And I started out in CPG ops. was asked to lead a startup that was kind of going through a transformation phase of about two half-time employees to within two years we had about 30 employees. And so

My role was leading the operations primarily and some of the marketing, but primarily operations and we had our own plant. So it was plant CPG operations. was getting SQF certifications, gluten free, non-GMO, all of those pieces. was the supply chain of setting up all of our vendors, having different vendors as we grew. was managing the production team. And so it was a lot of.

growth really quickly. We were national with UNFI and KeHe. So all of the kind of CPG operations and logistics pieces, we eventually set up our own warehouse, didn't use a third party logistics warehouse, brought that all internal and that setup process was super interesting. So a lot of really compact kind of growth ops challenges and learnings that we had over, over like three years. And then I decided to start helping companies freelance because I love kind of

overcoming some of these scaling hurdles with brands and being able to work with a few brands at a time and kind of really targeted ways, helping them either commercialize a brand new product where we're finding a co-manufacturer, you know, we're setting up their sourcing and supply chain, or we're working with a larger brand who needs help with their innovation, finding innovation partners and commercializing a new line.

from helping people get set up in their systems and software. love the tool notion. So I often help people kind of get organized and set up and project management and just so they can feel more organized and more in control of all the ops around, around their business. So that's what I've been doing. And a lot of ops and systems is the same across the industry. It's about information access. It's about organizing and it's about your people connections. so CPG ops is just.

I think a lot more fun because it's food and we all love food and there's so many amazing new brands and founders. And I was the host of the startup CPG podcasts as well for about a hundred episodes over two years. And that was a really fun way to connect with a lot of emerging brands as well. And, you know, then get to have follow-up conversations around CPG operations and it's just, it's a really awesome industry.

Yeah. mean, CPG operations is, and this is sounds silly to say, but it's central to a CPG business really to any business, right? It's like operating smoothly, efficiently. in a recent conversation that you and I had, you really connected CPG operations to building a business on your own terms and also to sort of the culture and being able to create an ideal culture.

within a business and that really resonated with me. mean, it's really interesting as consultants and I'm sort of speaking for you here. So let me know if you agree with me or not. But from my point of view, it's like as a consultant, we get to dip into so many different companies, which means we get a look at like so many different cultures and sort of like, I'm going to say like the good and the bad of them. Right. Like, and there seems to be for me a connection between good CPG operations and the good systems and

thriving cultures. Would you agree with that? yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think something that I see a lot of people underestimate is their systems and ops affecting their culture negatively of like, I can't, you know, none of my employees want to use this tool. And then that's kind of related to this like culture problem going on of like, all these employees feel really frustrated, or my tone over his head. I'm like, maybe there's a connection going on here between

how smooth your ops are or how people feel information is being shared. And so the tools you use, the systems and processes you have ultimately all become part of your culture and all become part of, know, even if you're just a brand of, you know, two to three people, there's still a culture as far as like the frustration you experience with any technology, how hard it is to find information and how hard it is to, you know, connect with people or to get done what you need to do.

solve the same tech problem over and over every day, we'll wear on you as a person and then we'll affect your overall company culture. And then from the CFO seat, I can extend on that a little bit. When we have poor communication, when we can't find the information we need, when we can't get reports that we need monthly, right? Or it takes a long time to create what we need over and over and over again. It's frustrating. It costs us money. I think we oftentimes spend more money.

like on payroll, for example, because we need or we feel like we need to pay more people, you know, to do the work, you know, that needs to be done. I've even seen within some businesses where they are continually hiring consultants for things that just really need to be dialed in within their business and like solved, you know I mean? And that's another way that folks are just sort of like spending and spending and spending. And then as you touched on frustration and turnover, which is obviously a really big expense for

businesses. And then, you know, something else I've experienced firsthand is like a lack of good CPG operations and systems can create a lack of good financial information, which we need to create strategy for our business. So it's really your ops and your systems have like a very widespread effect on business, think. Yeah. And I wanted to note on what you just mentioned about seeing brands kind of, you know, continue to spend on

consultants kind of either doing the same tasks on on the as far as like systems and technology, too. I think that's an area where a lot of times I see, and I try to be really selective working with brands on if they're like, Hey, we want you to come in and build our notion setup. And I'm like, great, we're gonna be it's gonna be super hands on, I'm gonna train you how to use it as we go. And if the brands like, we want you to just set it up, leave us some documentation, and then we'll figure it out. And I'm like,

I know that I'm not setting you up for success. Like I could take that contract, but I also know that I'm not sending you up for success. Like if you're not in a place where like, can really get in and work with every person on your team, understand how they work. We can really set up everything. I just know that there's not going to be the buy-in. And so I, it bums me out when I see people pay for that outside help when they're not ready in a place to really adopt it and really build all those new habits is ultimately what they are if you're setting up a new system. So I just wanted to emphasize on that point of like, especially if you're a brand and you're thinking about paying something along in that area, like you want to work with someone who's going to be really hands on in your in your business working on your business working with you, so that you create lasting change paying someone to set up a system and then leave.

it's really unlikely that you're going to have the sheer willpower to just implement that on your own. Like you want to set yourself up for success. Yeah. I think this is something to dig into here because no matter, I think if you're hiring a consultant to do this, or if you as the founder or someone on your team is embarking on a new system implementation or like a new tool, you talked about needing to have like patience and like a stick to it-ness.

when it comes to new technology and new ways of doing things. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of the difficulty in adapting to new things? Yeah, it sounds so easy in principle, right? You're like, this new project management software looks awesome. I'm going to use Notion as example just because it's a tool I'm familiar with. if you're using it for project management, this could be ClickUp or Trello or Asana, Monday, any of these kind of tools. You're like, it'd be so great if my

You know, my to-do list is individual or my team's to-do list. Like what if we all had everything in there? You download it. It's really exciting. Everybody's kind of like bright eye, bushy tail. This is awesome. And then a couple of weeks in, no one is using the tool anymore. Suddenly everyone's back to handwriting their notes and nobody knows what's going on again. And that, I don't say that to make anyone feel bad. If you've been there, I say that to like, to normalize that that's really common. Like, and we're all prone to that.

It's exciting. And then it's really hard to keep using a tool because we're building new habits. We're going through what big companies called change management and put a lot of resources toward, but we're, you know, one to, you know, a couple of people going through change management. So it's, it takes a lot of like, usually what I'm thinking through and talking through with, you know, with folks on is how do we build this into your everyday? Like, how do we build on what you already do? Like, do you have a weekly team meeting?

What if in the weekly team meeting, rather than, you know, like having a separate agenda document or something, what if your, you know, your Monday board is the agenda? Like, what if that, that tool becomes part of your meeting or you have one-on-ones with your employees or, know, your one employee, what if that tool is part of the part of that meeting where you actively use it together? like building in kind of these touch points and

Also, it really takes someone on the team being the champion. And even if you're a company of one, you're going to have to be the champion for yourself. But even if you're a team of a few people, I've seen some brands that have been really successful, you know, implementing a tool. Someone on the team is really excited about it. They're like, they've put some time into the knowledge and they're comfortable enough kind of continually reminding everyone on the team, like, Hey, thanks for sending that to me in Slack would love if you could put that in.

you know, notion next time, that kind of thing. And I've had to be that person in an organization and it just takes a lot of patience. I think it's also too important to recognize that it can be frustrating and it's going to be hard. And I've told employees before that I've worked with, like, take, bring all your frustrations about this new tool to me. Like we can't not implement this inventory tool. We need it. But if you're upset about it, you're frustrated with it. Like come yell at me about it. Like let's like, just like don't.

hold it in, like, don't, you know, don't just keep it all to yourself. Let's figure it out. And then let's problem solve it together. And it's that takes a lot of time and patience to just kind of, you know, hear those frustrations and then be like, all right, how do we make it work for you? But that's the kind of staying power persistence that it takes to really get a tool or a system embedded in a team. And so I don't want folks to think that they're, you know, necessarily doing something super wrong if they haven't been able to get something to

work on their team, I just want to emphasize this is hard stuff. These are big changes. This is why there are so many books about habits and everything in our personal lives. It's exactly the same in our business lives. Yeah. And to tie back to the topic of 4,000 weeks, I want to approach this conversation today. And I know we both do not from the space of how do we optimize our systems so that we can get more done, but how do we optimize our systems so that we can build the culture in our company that we strive to? And so that we, as founders and those on our team, can spend more time on the things that matter the most to them. And as you pointed out in our last conversation, sort of offline, that might be a work-related thing, and that might not be a work-related thing, right? It's for each of us to decide, here are the core things I need to get done. I want to get them done as efficiently as possible and ensure that I have time to focus on these things that matter.

the most me or that are important to me as a founder, you shared a really fun story with me about writing handwritten notes to Erewhon to get in. And I would love for you to share that because it's like, there's a very much a Baba Yacht energy in what we're talking about here today that I want to make sure like bleeds through the rest of our conversation. And I think that that Erewhon handwritten note story does that. Yeah. yeah. Happy to share that.

some kind of additional context from the, the 4,000 weeks piece is one of my big takeaways from that book was just his emphasis on like, sometimes it's okay to do things the hard way or like the long way or the complicated way. And I think so much of the pressure that we feel, especially in businesses is to automate, optimize, systematize literally every single second of our business, every single second of our lives. And then if you're doing something a manual way that you're

you're kind of failing somehow. And that book is very anti that mentality, which I love because I think sometimes doing things, the hard, slow, complicated way is fine, especially if it's something you enjoy, or especially if it's an approach that other people aren't taking. for this Arawan story in particular, we were, we were trying when I was with this smaller brand and we're early on, we're trying to get into Arawan, not hearing any responses to emails.

And so our sales guy and I got together and I was like, what if you wrote them handwritten notes? I was like, I can literally just print a logo on some stationary. Like I, you know, I ordered something super cheap and I was like, I'll just get like 20 note cards and then you can write some notes and then we'll just keep sending them handwritten letters. And so that's what we did. He would write these, you know, painstaking, like cute little notes and then we'd fold them up and we'd mail them off. And eventually one of the buyers was like, Hey, like.

Okay. Like I love your little handwritten notes. Let's talk. And then we got on the shelves in Erewhon and that was our first, you know, kind of big store to them that led us to getting into sprouts and you know, all these other retailers. So that was kind of the in, in the door was, you know, from a, from a pure systemization optimization perspective, writing all your sales, you know, inquiries, handwritten. That's not the fastest way to do that. The most optimist way to do that. But

It was effective in this case. And it was also something that like the, you know, the, the salesperson, he enjoyed writing the notes and sending them off. so sometimes it's okay to do things differently when everybody else is like, that's silly, you know, use, you know, use automated templates and send as many emails as you can. Well, that wasn't working in this case. Yeah. Or use AI to like, yeah, scan LinkedIn and write the email draft for you. then you just review it and send it off. mean, I love AI for certain things, but

not human connection related things. mean, I have a similar share in that way. like I manually review all the transactions for the clients that I do cash flow management for. For me, that is like the gateway to really understanding how they're spending their money and where we're spending money. And sometimes I can even get a gauge of like what is on a founder's mind based on how money is being spent, which is fascinating.

And I can't get that same kind of connection just by looking at a P &O because it's a summary. And yes, I can look at it, but there's something about clicking the buttons, reading who did we spend money with and how much money was spent. And yeah, it takes me a couple of hours on a Monday, but it's integral to being able to do the rest of my job and feeling really grounded in the finances of my clients. And I'm sure that there are CFOs out there who are like, that's crazy. You shouldn't be manually doing that or you should have someone on your team.

doing that. It's like, tried that and I felt too disconnected. And so I made the decision to reconnect and I can have my assistant do other things that don't cause a disconnection for me in the numbers. So everyone listening is like, everyone probably has a different thing in their business or a couple of things that they're like, I don't want to change this. This is important to me or helps me feel like I can do my job better or whatever. so stick with that. You don't need to change it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if there's something that you, think a lot of times to if you are a solo founder, you started with, you know, a friend or you started with a couple people, when you started your business, you you had a vision of changing the food system or something like you didn't start your business because you love you were like, someday I hope we get to use monday.com to organize everything or like someday I hope I get to like spend a lot of time fighting chargebacks. Like these aren't the reasons you started your business. So

if there are things that help you feel connected to your business to yourself that just, you know, aren't the most productive, quote unquote, like I think of like, Paul from Ouroboros that I've, I've talked to a few times, and I've also, you know, listened to interviews with him, he talks about how every day at Ouroboros, even though they have a big team now, he reviews some of their customer service inquiries and responds to a couple. Like, is that

you know, from a pure productivity standpoint, does that make the most sense in his day as the CEO? Probably not. Like he has a whole customer service team. But he's mentioned that like, for me, that keeps me connected to the reason I started my business. So seeing people write in and say, I loved this or seeing people write in and say, Hey, I had a shipping issue or whatever. He's like, it helps me stay connected to the reason I started my business. So that may not be the exact thing for you, but finding something like that, that

It probably doesn't make sense to anyone else, but it helps you stay connected. That's fine. Like that, that's great. Like you don't, you don't have to, you know, ignore that because everybody's saying that it's more productive to do it a different way. I think sort of on the flip side of that, when we start to look from, you know, a single or like solopreneur and founder and sort of the way they like to do things and the way they've always been done. And then we start to think about growing our team and being able to create a culture that we really want to.

There's a bit of a fine line perhaps between doing it the way it's always been done and really creating systems and providing our team with what they need to feel good in their job. Right. And so can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the common things that you see in your work that can affect culture negatively or can affect like workflow and sort of like positivity in the workplace.

Yeah, probably the biggest one. And like you said, this is a really good example of the flip side of what we were we were just talking about of where you have as a founder that you need to give up some control or some information. The biggest thing I see is that so much wonderful information lives only in the founders brain. And then when you hire an employee who is great, and like they're ready to go.

they have to ask you about every single thing. What do you what do you want? What should I do about this? What should I do about this? And then a lot of times I also then see the founder go, I'll just handle it because I know how to handle it. And that that is a sustainable long term, you have to kind of let go of the reins a little bit. And like you have to allow that person to do their job and, and trusting them. And of course, like, you know, hiring is an imperfect process. So that's not it's not to say that every employee is going to implement everything

you would like just the way you want, but you do have to kind of let go a little bit so that they have enough information to not rely on you. And that's where things like, you know, an SOP, which I don't even love the term like SOP, because it sounds so big company, like corporate, you know, standard operating procedure. And SOP can be a five point list about when I answer the phone, I say this, this and this, and I take a note, like it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be a checklist.

But essentially trying to get those things out of your brain, even just writing down or tracking, like how you think about something like this is how I respond to a customer. Like one example, when I was training a new customer service rep, I had been handling a lot of customer service. And so what I did is I actually, recorded a video of myself answering some customer service and I, and I just talked out loud, you know, I'm a podcast host, so not everyone is as comfortable with that. could write this down.

But I was like, all right, I just got this email. This customer seems a little bit upset. Their order was damaged. All right. Here's what I'm going to think there. I'm going to think about how at the end of the day, I want them to have a good experience. So I'm going to go ahead and reship their order or, know, whatever, whatever you want your company policy to be. I kind of would talk through some different scenarios. Then when I was training this new rep, I spent some time with them, but I was like, Hey, if you want to watch this video of me going through these, I think that'll be helpful. A few weeks later.

the person that I had hired for this was like, hey, we had a couple really urgent customer service things. You were in a meeting. So here's what I did. Here's how I handled them. I really hope I did it right. And I was like, that was amazing. Like you did great. And they're like, well, I rewatched your video and I understood your thinking framework. And I was able to then apply it myself. And so sometimes, especially as a founder, you might not know how to verbalize like, well, okay, sometimes you do step one, but sometimes it's step three. So.

you know, even documenting how you think about something and what your priorities are, and then communicating that to your team can be really valuable so that they know the angle you're coming from, and then they can kind of fill in those gaps. So you also, I think there's this urge to like, have all the systems and processes be perfect before you kind of hand them to other people, you can kind of just have the bones there. And a lot of times people can fill in the gaps as long as they know what your priorities are.

Yeah, I think that's such a great tip to teach people how to think, right? And then take action as opposed to this is the way that we do it because then they're not thinking on their own. They're not critically thinking as we like to say. And so they get hit with a situation like, I'm just supposed to follow this script and it's not appropriate in that moment or in that situation. Things can actually go worse. I love the idea of teaching a process of thinking.

to in order to make decisions within a framework, you know I mean? And I think that that actually speaks directly to culture too. Like this is how we want our customers to feel at the end of every call or, or in a customer service situation. So I think that's like such a great kind of general tip that you can sort of spread out across the company. also want to emphasize it can be hard and it can feel kind of silly to start doing that. Cause you're kind of, it's I've

Seeing people kind of have a hard time with the hurdle of like, don't really want to record my voice or like, this seems so silly. And then usually once they get over the hurdle, then I get an email later saying, I'm so glad I did that. That was so helpful. So if you want to try this kind of framework method, take some recordings of yourself just for yourself. Like when you're doing a complicated process, you know, maybe it's some UPS thing or, or, you know, some distributor process, take a video of yourself doing the process.

save it away somewhere, like label it really well, and then do that a few times and then go back and revisit those a little bit later and be like, okay, that was kind of useful. I think I'm going to record more. like, just kind of baby step yourself into the process of, of recording what you're doing. It feels so simple when you get started of like, everyone would know how to do this or I've been doing this for years, but they would, they don't. it, it, is just okay to document the most mundane things. Yeah.

And so that's very much in the vein of like how information is shared. like getting things out of the owner's head and into maybe like employee number one's head or even employee number one and two. And then also I think how information is shared between people is really important too. Again, even if it's only a team of like two or three, this still becomes really important. mean, our team at the Good Food CFO is three people. And so we implemented a project management system and

We had a champion, thankfully, who was a willing to like spend time and also rework the system when we were like, this isn't working for me or like, you know, we thought that this would work, but it's not. sort of taking the time to change our settings and change our automations and, then hold, hold us accountable. like, Hey, so-and-so you're not using the system the way that you should. So I think it's like, you know, no matter if it's two or three.

having a way to share information that everybody knows, as well as like getting things out of your head and into a certain place is really important for that culture and for everybody to feel good working together with each other. In that vein, something else we talked about that's helpful is for everyone to understand each other's roles and the tools that are used and the information that's needed. Can you talk about why that can be important and sort of the benefits of that for a team?

Yeah, for sure. And I think, and I think of something like this, like, you know, we've, we've talked about, like, you know, kind of understanding all the different softwares that you use in the business or understanding all the different kind of areas or understanding where all the documents are stored. And those kinds of pieces, like, it's so helpful for other people to know what's going on. Cause you might think, this, like the sales team doesn't really need to know how we organize, say our marketing assets. And then I've come in before and been like,

where did you get that picture? And they're like, I just I pulled a picture because I wanted to send it to this retailer and I couldn't find anything else. So I pulled this picture and I was like, that was not like we weren't going to share that picture externally. And then you're like, Okay, so sales needs to know where good photos are that they can share like in an accessible way or like they need to know where the new assets are going. Or if we have a deck that we're commonly sending out, everyone needs to know where the latest version of it lives so that old versions aren't being sent out or

The sales team closes a new door, the ops team needs to know to be prepared for shipping out that order and they need to understand the lead time. So the sales team doesn't over promise, like, yeah, we can get that to ASAP. And then the ops team is like, no, wait, like here's the current lead times. So it's super important for all the pieces to come together both so that you're promising the correct things to your external partners. And then also so you don't end up duplicating a bunch of

work internally, like remaking the same tools, redoing the same things and spending, you know, extra time searching for what you think someone else might have already created. And so then you ultimately just get frustrated and you redo it or you remake something you made because you can't remember you making a document. You know, it happens like it happens to all of us. And so having kind of a central place.

where you know where all the information is like I've talked about like this can be like as simple as a Google Sheet with links in it of like, here's the links all software we use. Here's the link to marketing folder. Here's links to sales folder. Here's a link to some of our like videos that we've taken of ourselves for SOPs or some maybe documents of how this process work like just this big document that kind of has everything that someone could an employee or yourself could need to access in a day. Yeah, that

like that can be really helpful because also then when someone comes, you hire a new person, they're like, Hey, I'm looking for this. I don't see that on the document. And then you're like, that'd be a great thing to add to the document. So having any sort of hub that you can go into, it could live in notion or a tool, but I'm also just like scrappy, like what's the kind of lowest cost way. So a Google doc with some hyperlinks can also just be a way to really have an understanding of what's going on and also kind of audit. Like, we have two marketing folders.

Oops, I guess maybe we should combine those before I hyperlink this or we're paying for this other tool. Maybe I should cancel that subscription and I don't need to put it in the document. It can be a good way to kind of audit everything as well. I'm thinking about a scenario. of course, from the financial realm, working with a client who has like a big ops department in that they're placing very large orders. It's in the sustainable meat industry and they work with partner like

ranches and farms. And so it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of meat that's being purchased at a time, you know, and you place the order 90 days in advance of when you're going to get it. You're paying for it 30 days in advance, like after you purchase it, which is still 60 days before you like bring it in. it's like those like lead times and payment times are kind of wild. And then when we do get it, there's sometimes there's further processing and sometimes they're not. And as the finance team, it's like, if we don't know what's coming up,

we can't be prepared financially for paying for those things, right? And making sure that we have the money. And we came into this really interesting situation where it was like, okay, I need a tool, I need like a system for understanding what we're buying when and who we're buying it from and like what the contract terms are, because they can be different depending on the type of animal and all of these sorts of details. And no one said like, so-and-so in ops like should have something already for you.

to do that. And so we started creating our own tool to try to track things. it was like, eventually we found out that there were things that already existed that we could have just utilized or like connected to or added to. You know what I mean? And what we were trying to do with like the new tool, the team was having a hard time adapting to, right? So it's like, I think also when you bring a consultant on or a new team member, just really understanding like, hey, these are the tools I have. Like not just like,

You know, Joe is in the fulfillment department and procurement departments. Like, okay, Joe, like what files do you have? What things do you do? What tools do you use? Like, that's actually a really great conversation to have because I think it enables or enhances like the connection between departments and communication. Like you mentioned Slack earlier. I despise Slack because I think that people put like important things in there, like file sharing in Slack. No.

No, no. Purchase requests in Slack? No. You know what mean? To me, there should be certain avenues that are like, quote unquote, formal avenues that things travel through when they're critical to the business CPG operations. yeah. And just the file management in general is one of the biggest pain points I see. So yeah, random documents ending up in Slack, random documents being on an employee's desktop who works remote. They built this great file. They work remote. It's on their desktop.

it will never see the light of day and someone will recreate it like that is a bummer. like having it sounds so boring to say like file management, but file management is ultimately so important. Like how often have all of us gone to send an email with, where did I see that file? What did I name that file? Like, do wait figuring out a way or especially early on if you're just at a stage where it's just you or it's just you and a couple employees.

Creating a system, like it can be a note that everybody has on their desktop of like here, you know, every time we save a document, put the, you know, the date that it was saved as the beginning of the file and then add some keywords for what it is and then add your initials at the end. If you last edited the document, some sort of rule like that, or if you're doing your own production management, there can be.

some really great ways of labeling like, you know, your gluten free certifications or all your different like spec sheets, those kinds of things being consistent in how you save those. Having a little document somewhere that says this is how we save XYZ files will save you so much headache down the road of being like, you know, some file like it was downloaded and it just has gibberish letters and then you're never able to find it again like that.

that so much time is wasted on that in on something so simple and just even having a folder hierarchy that makes sense so that so that someone doesn't feel like they need to send it in slack because also a lot of times those things happen where people will send documents one off in email or they'll save them to their desktop or they'll send them in a you know a tool like slack because they don't know where to save them so having a way to be like this is where these types of files go and then if you don't know where to save something

having a way for employees to flag, hey, we need a folder for this and probably not just creating a new random one, because then you've got four marketing folders. so kind of centralizing as a team, like aligning, these are our key folders. This is the key structure. This is where we save stuff. And everyone feeling like that makes sense for their workflow can save a lot of headache later. Yeah. So Jessi, this sounds incredibly boring. I'm speaking for all of the people listening, right? And I said that to you the other day when we spoke about like, how do we want to approach this episode?

But even though it sounds boring, everyone listening, I guarantee, can think of a number of occasions where they've saved a file that they cannot find. like so and so on their team said that there's a file and it's saved and like you can't find it. And what is more frustrating than like wanting to complete a task, wanting to like get something done. You might be in a creative mindset and now suddenly you're just searching for a file because you can't find the darn thing.

you know, I had asked you, where do you see the biggest impact on a business and its people and culture when it comes to organization? And your number one answer was file management. Yeah, it's a big pain point. And I love this. And so like, want to spend just a second of time here because I think, A, that like my team can do better here. I can do better here. There is sort of a system, but the system kind of changes for all of my client work, for example.

And I think sometimes as founders, we can have expectations for our team that we like sometimes don't hold ourselves to that same standard, which like a little, I'm guilty of that. cause it's like, I'm in a hurry. I'm just going to do this right now. And then like, I can fix it later. Well, then you can't find it. And it's like, you know, you've you're failing yourself and your team. So I love the recommendation of like how we save files, like the file naming convention, if you will. think that that's an amazing tip. I also love the hub or like that one pager.

that outlines like the file structure for your company. And I think that that's something like I could picture having like a quarterly meeting or a monthly meeting and be like, hey, let's outline how we save files. And then one step further, it's like, let's outline how we use Notion or how we use ClickUp because I think or Monday or whatever, you know, tool you're using. Cause I think that those systems can do so much that it's very easy to go, I'm going to create a new list.

and store this information here. And it's like, you've got this area that is like one task in it and one file that like no one goes to, or it's like not intuitive for where the information is stored. So literally having a map, I just think is a great idea that sounds so simple, but I bet the majority of us are not doing it. Yeah. And especially you and I talked a little bit too about how a lot of us use Google Drive because it's what comes with the Google suite that many of us are running our businesses on.

And Google drive is not super intuitive for the way that the files are stored. The interface is not as intuitive as something like Dropbox, Dropbox is a fair, is a more expensive tool. And so that's where having like, like you said, like in that hub, having links to different Google drive folders and kind of creating your own hierarchy versus trying to navigate it within Google drive itself all the time. Like, you know, you could spend time being like,

I'm so frustrated Google Drive, just it's you know, it's so irritating, like, you know, and I've been there too, like you could spend time being frustrated about or just, you know, come up, come up with a different way to work on it that works for you. And if it's a Google Doc, like, sure, that doesn't make sense that Google Drive should be better. But if that helps you like then that I would opt toward that every time of just I'm going to make a structure that makes it work for me so that every time I share with someone, they know a new employee like, here's the marketing folder, here's the sales folder.

They're show, you know, they're in the same order every time. know like that they have all the links because there wasn't some extra sharing thing that, know, that we didn't know about. So yeah, again, like it's, it seems so boring and a lot of ops pieces are of like, nobody wants to talk about file management at your monthly team meeting. But the first thing you'll hear complaints about is I spent so much time last month looking for all these files. And so like the first things that will come up.

in complaints are the like not being able to find things the frustration and so and that can be solved with ops. just a little bit of kind of planning ahead and setting up a system is you know, system like light duty can save you so much hassle. I remember going through an audit once I have a very specific naming convention like I mentioned for for supplier documentation of like all the gluten free certifications have the same type of name all the non GMO shirts, all the specification sheets.

Coa is like they all have dates or whatever and the auditor came in and like hey, can you pull up this? Yep. Yep. And the auditor was like, wow, like this file organization system is like really working like this is really organized and like you're a small operation and I remember just being like, that is the greatest compliment you can give an ops person. But that saves so much time in that audit, like we finished early. And so things like that where you're thinking of like, like

You know, I'm going to last minute prep for an audit or whatever. If you can prep for those things along the way, it saves you so much time and headache to do the things that ultimately you want to spend more time on, know, in the, in the spirit of 4,000 weeks, like, you know, if you have limited finite time, so like, you don't want to spend it searching for documents. Like you want to spend it working on your business, talking to new retailers, talking to new partners. And so some of these small things enable you to do more of the things you want to do. Yeah.

Something else that you have told me is pretty important, especially when you start to expand your team. But even if you are a solo founder right now is a CRM. Tell us about that. Yeah, I am always on the preaching about CRMs train and I just, I won't get off because I think there's so important. So CRM stands for customer relationship management.

This can be something simple, like, you know, this could be in a Google sheet. They're really great free tools. I've been using the free plan of HubSpot for a number of years. I've implemented it lot of companies there, you know, there's like streak, CRM that, that works with Gmail. There's some CPG specific ones, whatever it is, having a way to manage your relationships and keep track of them will save you so much time. And an example that I like to share is when

I was starting at this smaller brand. were really little as me and the sales guy, one other person. I was like, I need you to start using the CRM. We're all going to use it. And he, we were friends, but he was so frustrated with me. He was like, you have got to be kidding me. I don't want to do this. And so we, we worked together on it a lot, but you know, in HubSpot, had every person he'd emailed. It has them by company and out. And every time he had a call, he eventually put his notes in there. eventually

built that habit. And then two and a half years later, it was time to hire another salesperson. And the person came in, and we gave them access to HubSpot. And the guy was like, when's the last time you talked to this fire? actually, let me see. That's that's right here. when did you last meet that person? here's a note that you met them in the straight show. and he was like, I have everything I need. This is great. Like I can just go off to the races. And this employee was like, thank you for making me use HubSpot. This is probably saving me months. And I was like,

That's why it's so important. And I think in the supplier world too, from ops of, know, saving when you meet, you know, you need quinoa in low volumes right now, you go to expo West and you meet someone who has, you know, ships, pallets of quinoa. You don't need that right now. So, but you put their info in HubSpot, you make a little note so that you can search for the word quinoa. Then when you're like, I need a pallet of quinoa quick. I met someone at a trade show.

You don't want to go through the bottom of your backpack through business cards. Like you want to be able to search in a tool. And every call that I have, I save notes directly in HubSpot. And that is so useful both for, you know, just relationships or remembering, Hey, like I remember we talked two years ago. Remember we had a call about this and the person's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just, it's, I can't emphasize how important it can be. Even if you're just a person of, of one being able to mark who you're.

you know, save who all your retail contacts are your supplier contacts, a lot of it's automatic to like, it's going to automatically log your email, it's going to group it together by email address of like, you're emailing john at Whole Foods is going to show you your whole history for that person. And then it's going to roll up like, john and Jill and everybody you've ever emailed at Whole Foods. And those kind of things can just be so valuable because as you grow,

The relationships are so important of being able to, who can you call in an emergency for especially supply chain? Who's that freight broker that was really awesome, but you stopped using them. Those kinds of things are going to come in. So clutch later. And it's pretty simple, effective to set up just now, throwing some notes in and having that all safe. So that's my CRM soap box. think it's so important. You can use it. Like I said, use a free tool, but I have.

Yeah, I've implemented it so many times and it's always just been so valuable. I literally as a freelancer, I use HubSpot for myself and I can't tell you how often I go in there and relook up old chains and look at the history and it's just so valuable. And again, I'll expand on that too, like a little bit for my own business and then a little bit as far as the CFO role that I inhabit. We have like a CRM-ish kind of a thing in the

email system that we use, but it allows like if I'm out of town, my VP of Ops can come and see like, Sarah was emailing this person. And this is where that conversation left off without having to be like cc'd on every single email. So it's like, there's this continuity of business when I'm away, right? Which is really amazing that wouldn't exist if we just had regular email that like she didn't have.

like access to the information about it or like access to my inbox or if it wasn't organizing it by founder or company even. The other thing is, you know, I sometimes have to deal in contracts and payables and things like that. It's like, I'm regularly emailing a founder and being like, hey, can you connect me with so and so? Whereas if we had a CRM in place, I could, as a non-salesperson,

just go in and I know the person's name. just have none of their contact info. I don't know anything about the conversations that this founder has had with them. If I can pop in there and see that information, then I can kind of pick up where the, hey, I know this about, you know, where the contract is and, you know, I'm working with so-and-so. And it's just like, again, saves you so much time, both as the founder, the person who has the information either in their brain or in their inbox, and also as the person trying to do the work. Because you can just pop in there and get what you need and move on with your...

day. So I like the CRM idea for sales and not for sales. then obviously something we've already talked about is that software audit from the finance perspective, like do a software audit. just discovered three of the same subscription in one of our client accounts because three departments were using the same tool for different things and had three different logins and three different annual subscriptions. So love the software audit just for continuity and also for saving some money.

And then the SOP creation, which you talked about earlier, I think is a great thing to do as well. I would love to kind of like round out the episode with some recommendations for tools. Now, here's the thing. We are very careful about making recommendations on this podcast because we fully believe that there is no one size fits all solution for what you need. But I think that there are some general things that we can recommend and sort of some areas we can point people to if they're interested in

you know, creating some efficiencies, creating some like SOPs and I know like our team really struggled with the SOP thing. It can be overwhelming to go like, how do I start this process? And then CRMs, like you mentioned HubSpot, but maybe there's some more that people can look into as well. Yeah, for sure. On the SOP side, I think I mentioned the video recording tool Loom, there's a free plan. There's a bunch of different versions of that. Just, you know, if you want to just search like, you know,

free video recording plan. I really like Loom because I've used it a long time. It also has some pretty great AI features as far as I was telling you when we last talked that I took like a 20 minute video of myself doing a process. And then it was like, Hey, do want me to make an SOP of that? And it wrote a pretty good SOP from the recording of my voice. So there's some good tools in there, but you know, any sort of video recording software that is cheap and accessible.

There's also tools like Tango and Scribe where basically it's going to record what you do with your mouse. It's not recording any audio or anything, but you you're going through maybe you're like in the the Keihi portal or something like that and you're trying to download a report. It's going to note every time you click and then it's going to pop out just a beautiful little list of like step one, click this step two, click this, and then you can edit it a little bit.

That is a really fast way to create some really basic SOPs. They have a great free plan too, where you can create the SOP and then just download it. Yeah. And you don't have to pay. It's like as long as you don't store it on their site, which like you don't really need to do. Yeah. And when you've got your file sharing system set up and managed, everyone will know where to go to find the SOP. So I just wanted to shout that out that like Tango does have. I'm not sure about Scribe, but we use a free Tango here at the Good Food CFO.

Yeah, yeah. And that that's an important note on the SOPs, whatever tool you're using, have a folder that everyone on your team has access to that says SOPs and then give them really long labels like how to like find that or how to create this report for XYZ blah, blah, blah, like put all the keywords so that anyone on your team can be like, I can't remember how to do this thing in UPS.

I see the word UPS. yeah, there's the SOP. so like save all your SOPs in one place with really long titles. love this piece of advice that you're sort of saying, but not like you're saying it, but I'm having like a moment of like, you're essentially creating like a searchable file name so that when anyone on the team is like, okay, they might not be searching the exact

file name, but it'll come up in a short list based on the keywords. And then because it's descriptive, they'll be able to know this is the one that I'm looking for, which I think is so smart. I think a lot of people, maybe I'm wrong, but short file names are better. I don't know. But I think being descriptive is such a great idea. I love long file names of adding. It's SEO for your file system. yeah, adding some keywords. I try to think of like

What is future me going to search for this? They're not going to remember today. So yeah, I think I'm going to add some extra words and yeah, no, nobody's harmed in the process of that. there's just long file names. And then what about CRM? As you mentioned that you're a big fan of the hub spot and their free plan has served you well for a couple of years. Any others that you like?

Yeah, I've heard good things about less annoying CRM and turn link. Wait, is that what called? It's called less annoying CRM. that which I, I love that. Turn link I think is a little more CPG specific streak. CRM is the one that pairs really well with Gmail, but yeah. And if you were to hop into the, like the good CFO community or something to there, there might, there might be other recommendations too, as well. If people have any, you know,

want to hear from some other specific ones. One last area of a tool is just kind of on the automation side. I know everyone's talking a lot about automation. You can only do so much as a small business would be my note on automation. But I would say that like Zapier and then there's a prep program platform called make those have some really great basic automation. So you know, if you're if you're sending out a form to

You know, some of your top Shopify customers and you need all that information to, you know, end up somewhere eventually, or sometimes your whole team is copying, pasting something into two different documents. You can use something like Zapier make search in it and say, Hey, this is what I'm trying to do. It has pretty good AI features.

And it'll walk you through setting up the like quote unquote automation. There's it's very light duty, low tech. they also like Zapier puts out really great free content. They have a conference where they go through like key use cases that users have come up with that are really awesome. And that can be really helpful to kind of be like, if I didn't have to redo that, that would save me a ton of time. And you can do a lot on the free plans for those. can run a certain number of automations per month.

and it's completely free. So that can be really helpful if you have some duplication of data entry. That's a great, Rick. I love that. And then I think before we wrap up, because earlier in our conversation, you mentioned this is going to take time. This is going to require a champion internally. Do you have any tips or best practices for ensuring like

this consistent file sharing technique or communications about like what everyone is doing and ensuring that there's no overlap. Like how might a founder or someone on their team go about like, like consistency and like helping a team to do this longterm? Yeah, I would say the biggest thing you can try to do is try to make whatever you're trying to implement.

Count for multiple things. So like I use the example before of like, you know, pulling up a tool in your meeting, like versus writing separate emails with the agenda or, know, agenda sounds long and complicated. Maybe your meeting has three bullet points, but you're, you know, you're pulling up the tool, like embed whatever you want to do into what you're doing. Like if you have any regular meetings or maybe you need to add a regular meeting, I know, you know, sometimes you want your meetings to be a good use of time.

but build them into what you're doing. Or if you, send the same kind of like, you know, newsletter every so often, you know, or, know, like maybe updates to your retailers. It's like, okay, well, how, how could I save like my notes that I'm building for that, you know, little retailer newsletter throughout the month? What if I had a tab in my project management tool where I save those all the time versus, you know, them living in your drafts folder? however, whatever things you're already trying to do,

build it into that. So it's kind of multipurpose of like, yeah, this is like you have a check in a one on one check in with your employee. Maybe you're one on one always involves pulling up that person's, know, personal Trello board or whatever it is. And that just becomes your talking points for your meetings of how things are prioritized. Like here's my top three priorities. They're all always visible in Trello. And then we pull up up in the meeting of like, I got a little behind this week. Let's just live update them. I'm a big fan of also just doing the work.

together if especially if you have someone who's kind of lagging of like, I really can't get used to it. Let's just spend some time in our regular meeting doing it together. Like, you know, like, let's update this right now. Like you're you want to update your to do list while we're having our meeting. Let's just update it. And that has to work for everybody's personalities. But the more you can kind of make things dual purpose and

and build them into your meeting and culture so that they're coming up all the time. You're talking about them all the time. Hey, did we put that in, you know, in monday.com? Hey, did we put that in monday.com? Or, you know, the more you can talk about it and bring it up and then also stay, stay the course of like, of realizing that it's hard recognizing, hey, I know this is frustrating that this tool isn't up yet.

But we're getting there. Everyone's doing a great job. Like sometimes just a little cheerleading too of, well, of like, this takes a long time and being kind of kind to everyone in the process can go a long ways. know that's very not technical answer, but we're all humans at the end of the day trying to learn a new pattern. And so it just takes time and that's totally okay. it's just like, you know, anything else you're trying to learn a new habit, you want to have like rewards built in there.

Like maybe you got a week where everybody updates everything. All right, have a little like go get coffee as a team or like, you know, like make it try to make it as fun as possible, even though you're talking about, you know, systems and software. Yeah. You also had mentioned last time we spoke, like kind of normalizing asking questions like, hey, are there any files on your desktop that other pipe other people might need access to, which I think is great. Like if it becomes a regular practice or like a regular email.

that goes out, you're not calling anyone out. It's just like, hey, we all know that in the pace of business, things might just get saved locally that need to get saved. It's kind of like cleaning out the fridge in the office. It just has to be done every once in a while. And so it's like that same kind of reminder. And then the other thing I remember you mentioning is that like asking team members, like, is anyone not getting the information that they need? Do you recognize any improvements that maybe we can make as a team to better share?

info. Yeah, I think having really open conversations about that where people feel comfortable asking so also doesn't become personal or anything like you mentioned, people have different styles of work working so normalizing like, yeah, you know, a lot of us save, save our documents on our desktop, but once a month, we all move into the share folder, whatever it is just normalizing that it's okay. And then it's okay to ask when you don't know that's a hard culture piece to do. I mean, I've

been in that space, it can be a hard hurdle to get over based on other people's company experiences. But the more you show examples of like, Hey, I just so you know, I moved my files out of here or, you know, hey, I'm feeling really like even if you're the founder, hey, I'm feeling really frustrated with the tool I told you all to implement. Like that can be valuable to for other people to hear that you're experiencing frustration and normalizing. just a human, a human response. I think to something that we

tried to do here is to ask the question, is there anything that you wish was an automated system that's not? It's such a silly thing, but whenever we are setting up a season for a podcast, we have a Google folder that has all of our podcast folders in it, but then we have tasks in our management system where we're updating and tracking status and stuff like that. There's a moment where that file needs to get attached to the appropriate task.

And like for me, I was like, it drives me crazy when I go in there and there's no file, little thing, but then I have to like take the time to go and do book, right? So it was like, can this be automated? Like sometimes it's fun to just be like, can this be a thing? And sometimes the answer is no. And sometimes the answer is like, yeah, actually we can totally automate that and like auto attach the folder. So we try to make it a regular habit of being like, what?

is not working for you? What is a frustrating like pain point for you? What do you wish was automated? And, you know, then we explore like, if it's possible or not. And I think that that kind of I hope anyway, that that helps with culture to be like, to express like, you don't have to stay annoyed. Like, you can you can advocate for yourself. And also, there's especially if you're a founder, and you're hiring new team members, like the people that you

hire will have really great ideas. And you want to tap into that too, because I think a lot of times you spent so much time with all the creativity and everything, like living in your brain and landing on you. And it can be hard to kind of relinquish and let other people come up with new ideas. But especially as you grow, and they see those pain points really empowering employees to be like, Yeah, like, do you know, like, is there a better way we could do this? And it's amazing what people will come up with when you kind of give them the like,

Hey, I'm empowering you to like set this up the way you want. And I mean, I've seen the light kind of come on in employees brains of like, wait, you want me to figure out a system that works for me? And I'm like, yeah, like I trust you. Like you're good at your job. Let's do it. And like seeing the solutions that people come up with, I'm like, this is awesome. Like the pressure doesn't all have to be on, you know, the founder, the leader to come up with all the new great ideas for your systems and ops. it can, you can tap into the cool people on your, on your team. And it's you, you just end up with

cool and better ideas and processes from doing that. Yeah. This is such a fun conversation. I think I end every podcast episode this way. like I could stay and talk to you forever, but we have hit our one-hour mark of recording. Sadly, we have to wrap up. But Jessi, do you have any final thoughts that you want to share with our listeners around system optimization and what we've been talking about today? Yeah. My final thought would just be to

think about the relationship piece and all of the systems and tech, and that might seem like a weird, weird thing to think about, but I think about that's what kind of you're ultimately trying to enable at end of the day. You want to have good relationships with your employees. You want to have good relationships with your vendors, with your, with your retailers. And so how tech kind of sets you up to do that of whether it's, you know, having a log of all your calls with your suppliers so that you know them really well. Cause

you know, you want to work with partners and vendors that you like in your business. Like that's also why we're doing this is to work with other great people trying to make change in the food industry. And so, you know, having notes so you can remember that so and so told you, you know, their kid was going to camp and you're like, how was camp like, know, like having these kind of like notes like and and just like records can really help enable and take relationships to the next level.

And I think that that's important to remember the human piece. Like, yeah, we're trying to save time. We're trying to automate things, but it's for relationships, either your relationships outside of your business or inside your business. And so if that helps you kind of frame what you want to prioritize, cause you don't need to do all of this, like all of these things and tips that were mentioned today, you don't need to do all of them immediately. You know, pick one thing and write one SOP like in the next week. That's a great first step. Like there's no.

pace that you have to be on. You don't have to automate everything by tomorrow in your business. Like this can be a slow process of just like, all right, I'm going to write one SOP a week and each of them is going to be five bullets and that's fine. So however you want to break down just one thing from this episode too, I would also say like, that's a great place to start. There's no shame in starting really small on these pieces and then just slowly building and you'll get momentum as you keep going. Yeah. I love that advice.

If folks want to hear more from you on social or maybe you've got a website, where can they do that? Yeah. The best way to connect with me is usually just through LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. do have a website. That's just my name, jessifreitag.com. then I also, I've got podcast episodes out there. If you want to go back to the archives of the Startup CBG podcast, I've got all those episodes out there.

as well. But definitely feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn and say, say hi and feel free to, you know, reach out anytime if you're, if you want to talk about notion or you want to talk about tools in your business, you know, would love to hear from folks. Yeah. And we'll link to those episodes in our show notes as well. So they're easy for folks to find here. Jessi, thank you so much for your time today. This was really fun, really insightful and loved having you.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. Really, really appreciate all that you and the team do for the food community. So this has been great. Thank you.

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