Chris Ronzio:
If you just come into a business and you have to learn through osmosis, you don't know if that's going to be a month, two months, six months before you've seen all the different variances.
Chris Dreyer:
When it comes to scaling your personal injury law firm, you can't rely on tribal knowledge. You need a system, you need accountability, you need a way to guarantee excellence across the board.
Chris Ronzio:
Training is an actual intentional experience. When you want to train someone how to do something, you have to think, "What is the sequence I want to take them through so that they understand this, that they can prove they do it, and that I as a manager have some accountability that they've signed off on this?"
Chris Dreyer:
If you've read The E-Myth, which if you haven't, you've got to get after it. You got to go read this book. Once you've read The E-Myth, then you realize you need to document everything. But how do you actually get your team to follow the processes without consistently looking over their shoulders?
Chris Ronzio:
When you come into something and it says, "Here's 100% of what you need to know to do your job well, and you've got 10 days to do it," that's profit and straight to the bottom line.
Chris Dreyer:
Getting your team to speed up as quickly and completely as possible is one of the best ways to increase your efficiency and grow your business. And today, we're going to get a glimpse at one way to help ensure that your team is all executing the exact same game plan without you having to call every single play.
Chris Ronzio:
Our mission statement is to get people up to speed, to keep them up to date so that they're productive and aligned and empowered.
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today, I'm joined by Chris Ronzio, founder and CEO of Trainual, a platform designed to systemize your operations, onboard your team faster, and hold everyone accountable. We dig into why dumping files into a Google Drive isn't enough, the power of video SOPs, and how to actually get your team to adopt your processes. Let's get into it.
Give me the big picture overview of Trainual. I've got a lot of super granular questions because I'm a nerd like that on the ops side before we dig in and the applications for PI firms. But give me the overview, what's Trainual? Who's it for? Talk to me about it.
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah. The biggest macro overview is Trainual is to optimize your business or your firm so that it runs exactly like you want it to. And if I go a click deeper, it's what is the way that I want to design this firm to run? What are our policies, our rules, our best practices, our processes, our SOPs, whatever you call them. What is everything that you wish everybody just innately knew so that they could be more autonomous and do their job? What are your expectations so that they know if they're doing a great job? And it's just a place to manage all of that.
Chris Dreyer:
When you're doing your outbound, you like outbound with The E-Myth and you just put PS training?
Chris Ronzio:
Oh my gosh. So that was our first ad, believe it or not. And Michael-
Chris Dreyer:
No way.
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah. And so it was me holding up The E-Myth and saying, "If you've read The E-Myth and you realize you need a franchise prototype for your business and The E-Myth doesn't describe how to do that, it just says you need one. Go to Trainual." And funny enough, we became friends with Michael E. Gerber. He wrote the forward to my book. And so they go together for sure, peanut butter and jelly.
Chris Dreyer:
That's awesome. That's awesome. A lot of the PI firms listening, they have their CRM, right? LeadDocket, Salesforce. They have their case management platform, could be Filevine. There's a number of them. Where does this fit in terms of the tech stack? This is in addition to, why wouldn't they just use a case management platform to hold their SOPs and their knowledge base?
Chris Ronzio:
Sure. So those systems are where you do the work. Trainual is where you learn how to do the work and where you manage how the work is done. And so I think that's the distinction we've always had is that there's the how-tos and there's the to-dos. And your to-dos happen in Salesforce or Filevine or whatever systems that you use, but the how-tos happen in Trainual. It's where you as a business get to decide, "How do we want things to run?" And it's where you train all your new people as they get started. It's where you manage change as you roll out new software systems, and it's the place where people can go and ask their questions instead of their manager.
Chris Dreyer:
So I've got Notion from my knowledge base. But one of the things that I like about Trainual, the name Trainual, is you've got the LMS component in there, the learning management systems. I guess one thing is to have your SOPs, right? But it's also getting people to use them, getting people to go through this process. What are some of the things specifically that Trainual does to address this? I'll give you an example for myself. We went, we researched, we used HubSpot CRM and we found an LMS that integrated with HubSpot and we went and signed up and we created all these beautiful courses and we just couldn't get adoption as opposed to like the hands-on application based training. So what's some things that Trainual does? And maybe it's not Trainual, maybe it's like, "Hey, it's better leadership." How do you get them to adopt and to use the systems that you've built in there?
Chris Ronzio:
Well, it does have to be part of your culture. We can come back to that. But I would say for the system itself, whether it's Notion or some other place that you're dumping knowledge versus something like Trainual, the biggest difference is going to be accountability. So the name Trainual came from training and a manual. The manual is the place you dump the knowledge. The training is an actual intentional experience, right? When you want to train someone how to do something, you have to think, "What is the sequence I want to take them through so that they understand this, that they can prove they do it and that I as a manager have some accountability that they've signed off on this?"
And so the biggest difference is that accountability. It's that you as a manager can see from zero to 100% where are they in the training? Which version have they seen? Is there an e-signature in place? Is there a time and date stamp? And then we've got all these proactive tools built into our systems so that it's prompting you when things look inconsistent or when things are out of date or when things haven't been looked at in a while and it's asking you to update it. So with a couple clicks, you can use the AI tools and get it back to where it's supposed to be. And so the difference again with just a place to dump things is it gets chaotic, it gets stale. You don't know if people are looking at it, whereas a system like ours is actually pushing out to them and saying, "Hey, you haven't accepted and approved and seen the latest version and I as your manager need to know that you're up to speed on the business."
Chris Dreyer:
I love that. It reminded me of the Domino's Pizza Tracker, like the percentage of like where it's out. And then I guess you could see like, "Oh, hey, Bob hasn't done anything. We need to send him some notifications to get in there."
Chris Ronzio:
We have things like the streaks and the leaderboards. And our mission statement is to get people up to speed, keep them up to date so that they're productive and aligned and empowered. And so in the system, it's all about, "Are my people at 100% on everything they're supposed to know?" And the things that they're supposed to know are attached to their role and responsibilities in the business. And so everyone's got a position, everyone's got a set of responsibilities, and then you attach the knowledge to each of those responsibilities. It's a pretty simple setup.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that. You've looked at thousands of growing companies, you have very deeply entrenched in the PI space, a lot of adopters there. What are you seeing of the successful PI firms? What are they doing in terms of the SOPs and their processes and how they're utilizing the tool effectively?
Chris Ronzio:
I think the difference is their businesses are more turnkey. They can bring someone in from the outside or someone that's remote or someone from a particular role and they just get up to speed so quickly because you know exactly what's expected of you. Whereas if you just come into a business and you have to learn through osmosis, you don't know if that's going to be a month, two months, six months before you've seen all the different variances. And when you come into something and it says, "Here's 100% of what you need to know to do your job well, and you've got 10 days to do it," that's profit and straight to the bottom line because those people can just start doing the job instead of just, "They're still shadowing. I don't know. They're not great yet. They're not there yet." It's very intentional.
Chris Dreyer:
Talk to me about the specific processes that you want to document. And we joke that The E-Myth, you read a book like that and it's like, "Okay, I'm going to document everything. I'm checklist manifestoing this." And then you end up with a thousand SOPs as opposed to maybe the Pareto Principle 80/20. What are some of the big heavy hitters that every business should have documented?
Chris Ronzio:
All right. So first I talk about your company's playbook and I tried to simplify it with the four Ps, really simple. So you've got the profile of your firm, you've got the people that work there, you've got your policies, and then your processes. And so we try to hit those four buckets in that order. And so first your profile is, "Okay, who are we and what are we all about?" This is your differentiation, your brand, the services that you offer that maybe another firm doesn't offer. This is what is your style? Who is your ideal customer? It's your story of why you exist, why you started. And so those are the orientation basics that you mentioned, because 100% of people that start at the firm need to know that material. So that's their foundation.
Then you go to the next P, which is people. It's, "What is the org structure here? Who are all of my coworkers?" Who reports to who like in an org chart? How are the teams or departments or locations organized? And then who does what? What are their roles and responsibilities? What are their backgrounds, their bios, their contact? This is again, very basic. Every business needs to do this.
And then you get into the more granular things. The policies, there can be something like a handbook that applies to every single person. There can be policies that are state specific, role specific, part-time versus full-time, remote contract versus in house. Those are policies and rules for how you have to run the business. Some of them are legal and compliance related and some of them are just the ways you want to run the firm. And then you get into benefits and things like that. Again, that touches a lot of people. So that's like your 80/20 already.
And then when you get into processes, you look, you zoom out and say, "What are the things that everyone here has to do? Does everyone answer the phone? Do we have a way that we need to do that? Do we have SLAs in terms of how we communicate? Do we reply to emails within this amount of time? Do we get back to each other on Slack or Teams within this amount of time?" Those are things that everyone needs to know. And then you look at the biggest groups within your business, like do you have a bunch of attorneys or do you have a bunch of paralegals or do you have a lot of people in a certain position? What are the things that they're all doing that overlaps with each other that you want to make sure are done consistently?
And so absolutely, 80/20 is the way to attack this. It's not document everything. It's document everything that's being done by multiple people so that we're consistent in how we do things.
Chris Dreyer:
Love that answer. The other issue I've had, and I guess this is like a therapy session too, and I'd love to hear all your opinions on this, is you get all these SOPs and then somebody makes a modification or you need them updated after a period of time. Is there change logs, version control? How do you go about the ownership of the different size of the companies? A big company probably has somebody dedicated to this, but let's say a PI attorney listening that's, maybe they got 15, 20 employees, they want to take it to the next level. They're trying to get to that eight figure or mid seven figures. Who's owning this?
Chris Ronzio:
So when it comes to the whole account, usually you've got someone in the business that's championing operations or consistency or systems and processes. And so whoever that person is might oversee the account. But then when it comes to individual SOPs or processes, and we can talk about those in detail, there's a bunch of different kinds of SOPs. But when it comes to a single SOP, you've got an owner, someone that's tagged to it that says, "This is the person that not necessarily does this thing, but is responsible and accountable for this thing happening consistently in the firm." And whoever that owner is, that's the one that's going to get alerted when anything changes, when someone has a suggestion, when someone makes a change so that they own that thing.
And then you can set up time-based ownership like, "If something gets stale, I want to be notified. If somebody flags something, I want to be notified." If your person that's going through the training says, "Wait, this feels off," I get notified. And so the whole system is based on that continuous improvement, but it goes to the owner of the process, not the owner of the firm. And so it's really about crowdsourcing this because one person cannot know how everything is done.
Chris Dreyer:
With Trainual, does it integrate? It'd be nice to have your SOPs and processes in Salesforce and in Filevine. Does it integrate directly into that or is it copy paste? How do you go about that?
Chris Ronzio:
So it integrates with all of your HR and payroll systems to sync your people data, with all of your file management systems to pull in files or be able to access knowledge that's somewhere else. With tools like Salesforce for search, if you're trying to connect it as a source that you can use our AI search to connect to. And then with specific case management tools, we are in early talks trying to figure out how to put widgets on those dashboards that show you if you've got new training. But what people are doing today is just linking to important things there that then fire someone back into Trainual.
Chris Dreyer:
When it comes to processes, you can't just set it and forget it. If your SOPs are buried in a random folder from three years ago, they are actively hurting your business. Processes change, software updates, and your team adapts. If there's no clear ownership to keep these documents alive, you're not building an asset, you're just creating a digital clutter. Let's get back to Chris and dig into how to actually build these SOPs so your team will use them.
Let's circle back. You caught my attention with the different types of SOPs. So what do you mean by that? Expand on that for me.
Chris Ronzio:
Okay. So first, the people hear SOP and they think, "Okay, long, boring document, and how do I even start and what is it supposed to include?" And so that is maybe how SOPs were done a decade ago, two decades ago. Not anymore. Today, an SOP can be a checklist. It can be a flow chart. It can be a video. It can be a blurb of text. It can be fun, animated kind of stuff. It can really be any of those styles. And so we built a way for you to create or embed or soak in any documents, any content that exists, whether it's a video you've already shot on YouTube or Loom or somewhere else or a checklist you want to build in Trainual or a file that you've got in a PDF. It's really just about centralizing it all in one place and saying, "This goes to this particular role in the business."
Because then, again, the AI agent can access all of that. People can ask questions about it. They can be assigned it. We track that they've seen it, but you're centralizing it all to their role and responsibilities in the business. And then when it comes to actually building an SOP, I have a really simple kind of framework that I use where first it's the responsibility name, it's, "What is this thing?" Then it's, "Who owns this?" Like we just talked about. It's, "How frequently is this thing done in my business, in my firm? Is this every day? Is this Fridays at 9:00 AM? Is this every time the phone rings?" That's your frequency. Next is, "How long should this take if it's done well?" So is this a 10-minute task or is it a all day project? A lot of people delegate and do not set an expectation and then you get upset when something took four hours that you thought was a 10-minute task, right? And so you have to define that in the SOP.
The next thing is, "Why is this important? What is the context of why we do this? Who relies on this being done right?" And then you get into the steps, step one, step two, step three. And I think people mess up in that metadata. They leave those questions out and that's where all the management problems come from.
Chris Dreyer:
Well, the big takeaway for me is the how long this should take. We don't do that currently in our SOPs. Super smart. I guess for me, one of the game changers, and I'm sure it's for many, is the Loom video. Just shooting a quick video was really helpful. And I find, I don't know if it's the ADHD, the what, but the super long documented processes, I can't practically do them versus the image or even the audio are just a different medium.
Chris Ronzio:
You know what's coming that I'm so excited about? So the reason that text has been easier to maintain in the past is if you shoot a bunch of videos, it's really hard to go back and make those minor tweaks to your videos. And then you end up with a ton of outdated Loom videos and you kind of give up on the whole process. Whereas if you had text, you can just search the system and say, "Find and replace every instance of this," boom, it's all done. And so we're finally getting to a place with AI where we can insert variable changes into videos. That'll be coming out this year in Trainual, where you can have a recorded video in Trainual and say, "Oh, actually we don't use that software anymore. We changed it to this one." Or, "Actually, anytime I mention this person's name, change it to this one." And it'll go back through your videos and make all those changes. And so it's a pretty cool time right now.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fantastic. And you're exactly right. And then it's kind of a pain in the butt to rerecord a video, especially if it's a lengthy one.
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah, always keep them short. If you are doing videos, try to keep them like two or three minutes max, because then if you do have to replace something, it's just that one. It's not a 30-minute cinematic experience.
Chris Dreyer:
So we've got the processes and the onboarding, the systems things. Let's go to the LMS specific. How are you determining... And I like the gamification stuff that you have, but how are you determining if a person should proceed to the next level or if they have the... Specifically on the learning management system. Because I think Google Docs and Notion is like, "Here, hold your repository of information, just hold this information." But I think what's intriguing about Trainual are these other components, the notifications, the push notifications, the gamification. Talk to me about the LMS side.
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah. So what we did is we set up every role in the business has different responsibilities or competencies so that you can build out not just maybe today's positions, but all of the future positions that your people may be after. And then you can start to document, "Here's what I would expect from this position." And then if you have that knowledge internally, you can put it in there and you can start assigning it to people and track their progress toward their next role. Or if you don't have it in there, you can purchase any number of external courses and just bring them into Trainual. And so if you want to purchase some public speaking course or some management 101 or anything that's preexisting, you can buy it and just plug that course into Trainual and say it's attached to this position.
So the LMS component historically has been very big organization. Only big enterprises have like a talent development department and put time into building this stuff. And now it's really democratized it for anyone to say, "We want to have a learning track, a system here for up-leveling, for investing in our people." I can get content anywhere on the internet, or I can build it myself, or I can build it with AI, and I can say, "What do I want everyone to know?" Or, "What do I want this person to know as they're making advancements in their career?"
Chris Dreyer:
Sometimes when I get a new piece of software, everybody has these great client success teams to help, but sometimes I get it and it's like overwhelming. Where do I start? For example, a lot of the PI attorneys that we work with, a lot of the listeners are traction EOS based business. They're using that business operating system. Do you have like, "Oh, here's the template for an L10 meeting. Here's the template for a quarterly rocks meeting." Do you have existing templates that you can call in to help with that creation process?
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah, absolutely. So we've got about 500 templates just prebuilt in our library, but we're seeing more and more that people are just using the AI creation tools in our system to build those. And so you can, with a few prompts, say, "Show me what an L10 meeting looks like for a law firm with this many people attending the meeting." And it will create you something more specific than some template that someone made five years ago for an EOS L10. And so it's really easy to just say what you want documented and it creates it. But yeah, we'll be at the EOS conference and we're big in that ecosystem as well.
Chris Dreyer:
What other tools, features did we not touch on? We hit the SOPs, onboarding. I like the organizational stuff. I'll tell you this personally, and again, I could just consolidate into Trainual, but I use Pingboard for my org chart.
Chris Ronzio:
Oh, man. Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm on there every day. Literally before we jumped on this... James Helm, our buddy, makes fun of me. I look at the org chart almost every day. It's like, this is what I do.
Chris Ronzio:
That's an interesting hobby.
Chris Dreyer:
Well, for me, our people is still... Because I'm not as tech enabled? And a lot of the leverage is based upon human capacity. So it's when I see it from a visual perspective, I can see how the work flows and it helps me there. But yeah, a bit obsessive.
Chris Ronzio:
Fun story about Pingboard. I know their CEO too, and they started as an app to page people when you got to the office. That's why it's a ping board. It was like an iPad that you pinged someone up from their whatever level to come get you. But yeah, I think that's a cool software. It's been a while since I've used it, but we saw a lot of people just didn't have a simple org chart and beyond the org chart, they didn't have a way to attach it to all of the things someone did in the organization. And so that's the grid we built is we, again, link to whatever payroll you have. We build out that directory, we build out the org chart, and it has, if you click on any person, all of their responsibilities, and you click on one of those responsibilities and it has the documentation of how you do that thing. And so it becomes really easy to fill in for people if they're not there because it's all in one place. And if you already have an org chart, you just turn that off in Trainual.
I would say the things that we didn't get to, delegation is something I care a ton about because that's a huge reason you create training is to delegate something to someone else. Either you're going to be out, you're on vacation, you're on leave, or you're moving up in your role and taking on new challenges and you need someone to take over your old tasks. And so we built a system where for every responsibility, you can go through and rank what is your level of skill, how passionate are you about that thing? How career aligned is that with your own trajectory? And then you and your manager can have that discussion and say, "Is this something I should be doing or should we drag and drop this responsibility to someone else's plate?" And if you move it, then it moves all the training associated with that thing to that next person.
And then you can even build out roles that don't exist. So maybe you're dragging and dropping responsibilities from four people's plate and you're creating this new position in the business and you've got a way to, as soon as that person starts, their training's already there for them. That's something I like a lot.
Chris Dreyer:
It certainly feels a lot more actionable than just a simple NPS or whatever they're called, EPS, the employee net promoter with those generic questions more specific to the individual.
Chris Ronzio:
Totally.
Chris Dreyer:
Me and the Google Docs people, we got the Notion people, we got the Google Docs people, right? Hey, good for us to at least have some of these processes, right? Back in the day or 10 years ago, I used Basecamp and you had this import and you could import into the platform. What's the migration into the platform? Say all these folders, all these documents and Notion, Google, what's it like to migrate over into Trainual?
Chris Ronzio:
So we have a implementation team that everybody that starts gets their first three or four weeks of a one-to-one, someone to hold your hand through that process, migrate your existing materials, hook up connectors if we have them to things like Notion and Google Docs and pull in content, hook up connectors to file management systems if you've got a Dropbox or Drive or something like that. That is a big part of getting started is saying, "Let us suck in all your existing knowledge so that it's there and then let's figure out who needs to know what." Does every employee have access to your whole Google Drive? Probably not, but in Trainual, you can distinguish this role or this department or this level of management needs to know these things.
And so yeah, the first piece is just taking what you have and getting it into our system and then it's building from there. But if you've got Google Docs or something to start with, you're in a better place because day one you've got searchable, useful utility inside of Trainual and you don't have to create from scratch.
Chris Dreyer:
Love that. Have you seen the PI trial attorneys? Have you seen anybody make a training like how to become a better trial attorney? What have you seen in the space, some cool applications that come to mind?
Chris Ronzio:
Yeah. And actually, so we have this share feature. So I know in some of the masterminds people will create Trainual content and I'm sure you've been in a group before where it's like, "Hey, does anybody have a way you do this? " You can just click a public share link and share it to someone else and if they have a Trainual account, it'll duplicate that and copy it into their own account.
Chris Dreyer:
Very cool.
Chris Ronzio:
And so it's a really easy way to share SOPs and to just help in the community.
Chris Dreyer:
Love that. Chris, this has been amazing. For the PI attorney listening that wants it taken to the next level, first, go read the book, E-Myth, shout out to Gerber. You read the book, you're going to want to start documenting the process. I think everybody goes through that period of time where they pick up the book and it's like, "Oh, I got to make a change." Chris, what's the best way to get in touch, learn more about Trainual?
Chris Ronzio:
Just Trainual.com, T-R-A-I-N-U-A-L.com, like a training manual, or you can find me on LinkedIn, just Chris Ronzio. And yeah, we'd love to help optimize your business so it can be whatever you've imagined it to be.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Chris, thanks for coming on the show.
A massive thanks to Chris Ronzio for coming on the show and laying out exactly how to build a high performance firm through accountability and rock solid training. Look, getting your operations dialed in and your team executing at a high level is how you build capacity, but once that machine is built, you need to feed it. If your firm is ready to scale and you have the systems in place to handle a surge of high value cases, you need a marketing partner who plays the win. At Rankings.io, we are the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. We don't just talk a big game, we deliver. If you're ready to dominate your market and partner with a team that is as competitive as you are, head it over to Rankings.io and let's get to work.
I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll catch you next time.
