How are you storing and managing your internal documents? Do you have a process or a system? Our guest today is Therman Trotman, who shares with us how SharePoint might be the best kept secret for your business.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
People over technology.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
- You can visit our guest’s website at: www.talksharepoint.com
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Therman Trotman is the Founder of The SharePoint Helpdesk, where he teaches people how to use SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 Suite technologies to improve their organization and job performance. With more than 20 years of IT expertise in both the public and private sector, he excels at demystifying technology and calming spreadsheet chaos while avoiding the typical “IT guy” vibe. Therman is a veteran, entrepreneur, and family man who also hosts the SharePoint Helpdesk Podcast.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
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TRANSCRIPT
[music]
[00:00:01] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering how you’re storing and managing internal documents. Do you have a process or a system for that?
Well, our guest today is Therman Trotman, who shares with us how SharePoint might be the best-kept secret for your business. Now, Therman is the founder of the SharePoint Help Desk, where he teaches people how to use SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 technologies to improve their organization and job performance. With more than 20 years of IT experience in both the public and private sector, he excels at demystifying technology and calming spreadsheet chaos while avoiding the typical “IT guy” vibe. Therman is a veteran, entrepreneur, and family man who also hosts The SharePoint Help Desk podcast. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:01:05] Therman Trotman: Well, my name is Therman Trotman. My company is the SharePoint Help Desk, and I would call myself the lead trainer here at the SharePoint Help Desk. Thank you for having me on. I’m very excited to be here.
[00:01:16] Tom: Well, thank you for being here. I’m looking forward to it, and my primary driver for having you on is really what your name says in your business, the SharePoint Help Desk, and one of the things that really caught my attention is about this idea of how most leaders are underutilizing Microsoft 365, and so many folks are on Microsoft Office and that kind of thing, and so I’d love just to kind of start there. Why are they underutilizing it?
[00:01:49] Therman: Well, that’s human nature. It’s like your cell phone. I’m pretty sure you get some good juice out of your cell phone. You use a lot of things, but there’s probably a million other things that you don’t use on your cell phone that would blow your mind if you knew about them. It’s just human nature. We do, what’s that, the 80-20 thing. 20% of the activity will get you 80% of the results, so what do you do?
You make phone calls. You do some texting. You get on the internet, check out social media, whatever. You know what I mean? That’s the crux of your phone, but you know there’s people out there who get all in and through their phones, and they could do all kinds of fancy, really cool stuff on their phones, so I’m that guy with SharePoint. Microsoft 365 by itself is a big deal. It has a lot going on, and then one tool, just one, one specific tool inside of that is called SharePoint, and SharePoint itself is a big deal just by itself.
I totally understand where people are like, “We got Microsoft 365, what do we have? We have Outlook for email. We got Teams and a few other popular things. We got Word and all the office tools, and I see that SharePoint lets us hang our documents there, and that’s all I know. We just put our documents there. We got some folders, we can link them out, whatever, and that’s it.” It is shocking the things that you could do on SharePoint that people don’t know about. I don’t want to be sensational, but I got to say, shocking.
[00:03:16] Tom: When I think of SharePoint, it reminds me of back having a corporate job working at a larger company where they’d have all kinds of shared documents and inner company type of things, and then the idea of implementing SharePoint in a small business when I started my own company seemed overkill, and really, I just didn’t know how to do it or even how to use it, and now with Office 365, it’s just I don’t even have to pay extra for it; it’s just part of what I’m already doing.
What can a leader, a business owner, especially a small-to-mid-sized business owner, do about kind of starting to enhance some of this SharePoint, or even before we get there, what are some things that you can do with it outside of some document storage?
[00:04:02] Therman: I actually just finished up on TikTok, 30 days of “Digital SharePoint Could Do That.” It’s very successful. You know what I’m saying? A lot of people were very interested in this stuff, and tons of questions started coming in because, again, people didn’t know that you could do all these kinds of things. I would say, as a leader, because it’s just too much, you could do a lot, but as a leader, let’s say that we’re not even talking about SharePoint.
Let’s just throw that out the window for a second. If I said to someone in leadership, “Hey, where do you put everything? Where do you put all of your stuff for your folks to be able to go access it?” I might hear things like Google Drive or maybe Dropbox, or “Hey, we got our things all over the place.” Without thinking about any technology, at minimum, at minimum, I would tell you everything needs to be in one location. You need to be able to see your stuff in one location.
Everything needs a spot. Now, if I brought in SharePoint in the conversation, I would say, imagine if you can go to a website that looks like a modern website. It looks like a real website, a cool-looking website where you could find everything. You click on a button, and it says HR, and then you go to an HR page, and on the HR page, you see who’s the HR person in charge, what’s the mission of HR, what policies can you read there?
What’s the teleworking policy? Where do I go to sign up for benefits? What is the timesheet process? Where do I click and go to use that? All that information is sitting on the HR site. Think about that across all of your departments, finance and operations, and all that other stuff. That is just scratching the surface, but at minimum, if I’m leadership or if I’m talking to leadership, that’s what I’m telling them about is how do you provide everything that your folks need in one location for them to easily consume?
[00:05:51] Tom: Oh, Therman, that’s really, really good, and a lot of the folks that’ll listen in to this, they’re the leader of a small business, right? It’s them and maybe a small team of folks, or maybe they have a few locations, or even in our world, we help and work with entrepreneurs and help them franchise their business, so maybe they now have a few franchisees in their system and network that they’re working with that’s growing.
Everything in one place. I know the first thought that probably comes across most owners, “Oh, that seems so daunting to think about aggregating everything, organizing it, determining where it should go.” How do you help getting over that mental hurdle?
[00:06:30] Therman: Yes, that is a big hurdle. I totally understand that because stuff like that will happen to me in other areas of my life. I get that thought process, but there’s an approach that I do recommend, which is “Do something specific. What can we, what challenge can we solve?” I’m really glad that you brought up franchisees because this is actually an example I never even thought about, but I’m going to do it right here on the spot.
A franchisee, maybe you have bought a Smonic, a Smonic cheeseburger, right? That’s what you own, and then you hire some other, or you have multiple other franchisees buying in. Now you have five different franchisees who own this burger spot. You want things done a certain way. You want them to have certain policies. They’re located in different states, so there’s other regulations they have to deal with.
I’m putting all of that on a SharePoint site, and I’m going to have like a– As much as I talk about technology, I’m not taking away the human aspect. What I would do is have maybe a monthly, I don’t know, a monthly with my franchisee owners, and I’d say, “Hey, let’s get on a call, you know what I mean? We got a lot of things to go over.” We talk about these things, and as I talk about them, I point out to them where they can find it. It’s always going to be at this one location on this site.
When I say, “Hey, listen, we got a new burger coming out next quarter, and when we do the promotion, it’s going to be crazy. We got a big rollout going on, all this other stuff. Any and everything that you need, you’re going to find right here. You’ll find all the marketing materials, how the burger needs to be made, what you got to look out for, because this is what we heard during testing, all this other stuff, it’s right here on this site.
“You have access to it. You and your employees, if you need, the employees to have access to it, too. Y’all have access to it. Go there. Any training that I have to do, any videos that I, as the head person in charge, if I want to do some onboarding training for all of my franchisees every time somebody gets a new one, it’s going to be on that site. There’s going to be videos that you watch, click through, maybe even download, financial information, maybe coming from some other partners that I deal with.
“All of that will be sitting on one location. I’m not going to have it out on Dropbox and a bunch of different folders, or in Google Drive, which there’s nothing wrong with that, because at least you have some location. I just think for a tool that you already pay for, that is extremely flexible, you should use SharePoint because it looks like and acts like the rest of the world that we interact with, which is websites.” We use websites. We watch videos on websites. We click buttons on websites. You can do that on SharePoint for your franchisees in that example.
[00:09:08] Tom: Well, you just shared something that I think is really powerful from a franchise standpoint, something that can be used, and I’m thinking many new franchisors struggle with “What I can talk to my franchisees about that I haven’t already talked to them abou?” and just going through the SharePoint site with “Here’s what we’re going to talk about. Here’s the new something, new training, new whatever coming out, and by the way, remember, here’s how you use this tool for your own employees that are maybe new onboarding, getting promoted, or moving around.” That’s really, really good.
[00:09:44] Therman: You got to think like a content creator. That’s what I tell organizations. I do this. I talk about SharePoint on the internet. Matter of fact, like I said, I did the 30 days of “Did You Know SharePoint Could Do That?” What is stopping you from being a business owner and doing that same thing, but only internally? Let’s say that you said, “30 cool things that our company does that you probably don’t know about.”
Because it’s highly likely, if you got a bigger organization, there’s some people just working for you every day, going through the motions that don’t know some of the things that they’re actually supporting. Imagine you as the owner or the leader inside of the organization, and you drop an email weekly for the next quarter about cool things that the company does. Somebody gets the email, and it’s like, “Hey, did you know that we did this?”
Then they click a link, and they go to a page on SharePoint that has a video. Maybe somebody in leadership is explaining what this thing is that we do. It has information about it, downloads you can capture and read, all kinds of stuff. You got to take away from the technology piece, and more so, think about what is helpful, what can you do as a person? Because it’s just the example I always use is you go to the gym, and when you go to the gym, it’s not your sneakers, you know what I’m saying?
It’s not the treadmill, it’s none of that; it’s you. You are going to the gym, and then you’re using tools, which are all of this stuff that you see in the gym, to get to your goal. Your goal is to get fit, but all you’re doing is using these tools to get fit, and now when you want to level up, maybe you hire somebody like a personal trainer who knows a little bit more than you, who they’ll track your stuff for you and make you really focus in on pieces that you weren’t paying attention to before, but now you nothing is changing.
It’s just the way you interact with these tools, the exercises that you’re doing, and stuff like that. That’s what’s really helping you level up, not the fact that these tools exist. That’s why I want to drive that point home. The reason why I talk about SharePoint is because one, I love the tool. I think it’s crazy, crazy good, but you already pay for it if you pay for the Microsoft 365 suite, and it’s powerful and flexible, so why not use it? Especially since you don’t probably, I’m going to bet, you don’t have all of your stuff in one location, and that is just the first step, is having it in one location.
[00:12:07] Tom: Just thinking of getting it to one location, do you have a few steps or things you suggest as a starting point to help someone get started with getting it in a location?
[00:12:17] Therman: Yes, absolutely. Normally, when I have a consultation with somebody, I’m learning a little bit more about their business. Before we hang up that call, the first step I ask is say, “Hey, the stuff that you would like to manage on your site, if I was to create a site for you, what is it in your business that you would like to see on there? Whatever that is, send me an email.”
That would normally be like, “We track our SOPs. We have policies. We have all these other documents. We have an intake form that we use. We got all these forms. We have an employee tracker,” or whatever it is. “Here’s all the stuff that we would track on a site if we had one,” and then I say, “Okay, email that to me.” Then I’ll take that email, I’ll look through the stuff that they sent me, combine that with my knowledge of what I know works, I’ll mock up a site, and then we’ll have another meeting, and I’ll demo that site to them. If they like the site, which usually happens, [laughs] then we move forward from there.
I would usher you in to getting started by saying, “Look, all I want from you is just tell me what you’d like to see on the site,” and then we’d start there. It is all I’ve been talking about, is just a site. SharePoint has three big pieces to it, which is SharePoint Sites, SharePoint Lists, and SharePoint Libraries. All I’ve been talking about is the sites. We’re not even scratching the surface. The site is just so you can have a place to keep everything, but there’s tons of more things that you could do. I always suggest the site first, because once we get that stood up, now we know everything we do going forward will be hosted on that site.
[00:13:52] Tom: What are the other two pieces then? You’ve got sites where it’s kind of this website-
[00:13:57] Therman: Yes, there’s a website.
[00:13:58] Tom: -that you’re talking about for storing the important things, and then what are these other two items?
[00:14:03] Therman: SharePoint Lists is like spreadsheets, but in the web and on steroids. If you think of, I don’t know, maybe Airtable, I don’t even want to say Smartsheet, but it’s a web-based list that allows you to collect information way more efficiently than people collect with spreadsheets. Somebody would take a spreadsheet, send it out, and say, “Hey, I need y’all to fill these things in.”
From the time you hit Send on that email, let’s say you sent it out to five people, you’ve made five copies of your document, so now we’re already dispersing the data, which is crazy, but it’s normal, it’s normal behavior. They fill the information out, and then they send you back their spreadsheets. Now, what do you do? Copy and paste out of those spreadsheets and put it in your “master spreadsheet,” and then you go from there.
A SharePoint List allows us to, again, behave like the internet. We interact with what we interact with on the internet; it’s what we’re used to. If you were going to sign up for a Netflix account and Netflix said, “All right, here, download this spreadsheet, put your information in here, and send it back to us,” you’re going to be like, “What is going on? What happened to Netflix?” What does happen is that you go to a site, you press a button, you enter information into that form, and then you hit Submit. You can do that with SharePoint Lists.
SharePoint Lists, instead of collecting information with spreadsheets, you send somebody a link. They go to the link. They press a button. A form comes up. They put the information into a form. They hit Submit. Your information goes into a SharePoint List. That is modern interaction with the internet. That’s what we’re used to. Again, just scratching the surface because behind that, you could do automation and all that kind of stuff.
Now, the other piece, document libraries, SharePoint Libraries, those are comparable to Dropbox and Google Drive, but it’s only one piece of SharePoint, and it has a ton more features than Google Drive and Dropbox, and it comes with the security that you’re used to with Microsoft. Those three pieces, sites, lists, and libraries, make up SharePoint and allows you to run your entire business on it. I promise you. That’s not overselling it, and I put my money where my mouth is. I run my business on SharePoint, and I love it. Those are the other two pieces.
[00:16:19] Tom: Oh, fantastic. Well, listening to you describe these lists and some of these other things that you’re talking about, I’m thinking of, okay, maybe a project, okay? Even just in our business and lots of others like it, where you have client projects you’re working on, so a lot of what we’ve been talking about has been internal; how does this work for external gathering of information? Can you use lists as an example or some of these training for people outside of your organization? If I were to gather information and need to collect things from customers and centralize that, how does that work?
[00:16:55] Therman: Yes, you can do that, too. You’re familiar with Google Forms, right? Microsoft has Microsoft Forms, which they took the idea from Google, and they created Microsoft Forms, which allows me today, right now, I can send you a link to a form, have you fill it out, and it comes into my environment. That’s one, I can do that. Number two is if I needed you to come interact with my SharePoint, like sites, my libraries, and all that other stuff, I have the ability to invite guests to my SharePoint site.
I can have a site spun up and say, “We’re building your new podcast studio. This is a whole thing. We’re working with external partners. There’s things that need to be tracked. We don’t want them inside our entire environment; we just want them in one secluded, secure location. We can create that, invite them in, and let’s work in that one central location.” When that whole thing is done, and they leave, and you disconnect them from that, you have one location that tracks all of your information from that project.
You just go there, not comb through emails and do a lot of other stuff. You just go to that one spot, and you see all your stuff from the project. Those are the two ways that you can interact with external folks, and for the Microsoft Forms thing that Google can’t do, when you take a Google form, and the information comes, it goes into a spreadsheet. When you do it with a Microsoft form, it also goes into a spreadsheet, but there are tools inside of the Microsoft 365 suite that you don’t have to pay extra for that can take that information from the form and transfer it into your SharePoint List.
Let’s say that we we we do a we do a system where we do intake for new podcast clients. They want to be a guest on the show. They fill out a form, and it comes in there, and now you move it to SharePoint. Now you can start to manage this and say, “All right, have they filled out this? Have they done this? Okay, cool. Press this button and schedule it on the calendar so that we know when to set up and be prepared for it.” It’s a whole thing. You can do that right now, and everything I just said, you don’t pay extra for. It’s already there, it exists.
[00:19:02] Tom: Wow.
[00:19:02] Therman: You just don’t know.
[00:19:03] Tom: That’s phenomenal. One thing you mentioned was security, which owners and leaders of companies, certainly that’s something that comes up that they’re going to think about at some point in this process. How am I making sure that my documents, the information, whatever is coming into there is secure? Talk about how that works with Microsoft, and it sounded like you were comparing it to maybe some other type of options out there.
[00:19:30] Therman: Microsoft gives you tons of options for security and tons of levels. With SharePoint, it comes with your existing Microsoft security that you’re used to. Right now, if I needed to share a document with you, I can share it from OneDrive and share it to you anonymously in the rest of the world, but if I wanted to share with you something from SharePoint, I would share that thing with you, and then first, I have to share it with your email address.
You get something to your email address, and if you try to open that document, it’ll say, “Okay, wait, we’re going to send a code to your email address. Take that code, put that in the thing, and then you can get access to this file.” There’s that. Then, inside of SharePoint, let’s say that you, as leadership, inside of SharePoint, you say, “This area right here is only for leadership. We don’t need the rest of the team members looking at it because it has secure information,” like maybe salaries and whatever.
You have that ability to manage at that level. You could say, “Everything in this section, only leadership is allowed to see, but members and team members for the rest of the company, they can see all this other stuff.” Then there is more levels, higher levels of security that is out of my purview. You know what I’m saying? Then we got to talk to a cybersecurity professional, but all of those things that I talked about are at your fingertips today, and then Microsoft’s regular built-in security, and then going beyond that with leveling up with more security. There’s a lot, what you’re used to with Microsoft, basically.
[00:21:04] Tom: For someone that’s tuning in and says, “This sounds like a great tool, but I’m a little overwhelmed. I might need a little help with that,” how can people get in touch with you, talk about this, learn a little bit more about what you’re doing?
[00:21:15] Therman: Well, to your point, if they want to talk to me about it, they can go to talksharepoint.com. That is, they can book me there, we can have a chat, and then find out what we can do for you. The question that you’ll see there is “Do you need a SharePoint site?” My bet is yes. Come on in, let’s talk. You know what I’m saying? I don’t bite. I’m not the typical IT person; I’m people first, IT second. Would love to chat with you and see what we could do.
[00:21:42] Tom: Perfect. Well, we’ll make sure we include that link right in the show notes for someone to access quickly here. Well, Therman, this is a great time in the show, and we ask every guest the same four questions before we go, and the first question we ask is “Have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?”
[00:22:00] Therman: Speaking of SharePoint, when I first learned about SharePoint back in 2009, when I first started using it, I was on the “If you build it, they will come” train. I thought, “Man, if I just built this cool thing for the organization, they’re going to change the entire way that they do business, because how could they not?” I was on that for a while until I learned it’s not even about the technology; it’s relationships, it’s people, it’s process.
All of those things matter before the IT matters. Leadership, everything. I learned about culture and process and people maybe three or four years after learning about SharePoint, but before SharePoint, I was already in IT, and I was already a personable person, but someone had to come, a guy who was older, and he was on his way out the door, had to come and connect the dots for me and tell me, “Yes, it’s culture, that matters. You just knowing technically how to do a thing, cool, but how do you translate that to people? How do you talk to people and tell them about that?”
I didn’t know that. I had the ability to do that; I just didn’t know that that was a skill that I had to lean into. I was just like, “Because I have the IT brain and I have the person brain,” and I’m like, if I saw something that worked that well and it was going to help me do my thing, I’m good, but I’m like I didn’t even have the ability to get them to see it because I didn’t think that I had to communicate that in a certain way, so big, big, big change for me. I’m glad it happened when it did in my career because now I take that everywhere.
[00:23:33] Tom: Let’s talk about a make or a highlight. Let’s look on the other side.
[00:23:37] Therman: Going independent. For a long time, I was an employee, and I tell you what, it was a great time. I had a really, really good time, but one of the struggles was reaching leadership. I could get to certain people up there, but leadership, I probably wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it, but leadership was frustrating because they did think tool first.
If something was broke, they’d be like, “All right, we’re going to buy this new tool, spend a ton of money, hire all these consultants, do all this stuff so that we can fix this process.” Once I was just like, “Man, that’s crazy. That’s not going to work.” I now have the ability to go straight to leadership. I just go straight to leadership, and they either are thinking about buying in, or they’ve already bought in, and that whole struggling with constantly having to fight against leadership, and let them know this way is better, I don’t got to do that anymore, so I love that. That’s a big, big make, too. That’s another one.
[00:24:40] Tom: Great. Well, the name of the show is Multiply Your Success, and we like to talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to grow yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you’ve run.
[00:24:51] Therman: Yes, this isn’t fair because it might sound cliché, but it’s AI, specifically the chatbots, so generative AI. Wow. You know what I’m saying? Game changer, because I learned a couple of years ago from somebody about a terminology that I didn’t know was a thing. It’s called being a verbal processor. I’m wanting people to speak out loud as I try to figure something out, way better than keeping it in my head. I do the verbal processing with ChatGPT.
It’s like I get to go back and forth with this thing as I’m in idea mode, trying to come up with something, and it has helped me tremendously because previously, which this sucks because AI has taken all the internet information and just put it inside of ChatGPT and all these other chatbots, and now they’re reselling it. It’s kind of crazy because before ChatGPT, I would come out of my pocket if I was able to and pay someone who had the knowledge and go back and forth with them because I needed to know more.
I can ask these questions and get all this information, and they just scooped it all up and put it inside of this tool for a couple of bucks a month, and it’s crazy, but that is what I do. That has helped me. If I got an idea for a video or I got an idea for a podcast episode, I go there, and I start thinking, I’m like, “Yo, look, this is what I got going on. What do you think?” Then, after enough back and forth, I’m like, “Yes, this is exactly what I need to do,” and I go with it, so AI.
[00:26:23] Tom: Very, very interesting. Well, I, similar to you, am an external processor, and I figured that out after someone pointed it out to me a few years ago, and as soon as they said, I said, “Oh, wow, that’s brilliant.” I have not used AI to help process that. That falls on my wife still, as of right now. She may want me to transition to the AI situation. I don’t know.
[00:26:49] Therman: That’s pretty good.
[00:26:50] Tom: That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea.
[00:26:52] Therman: Especially if you’re driving. If you’re driving, it’s super dangerous to bust out your phone and start texting. Matter of fact, I did this. Speaking of speaking of your wife, my wife saw me do it, preparing for Thanksgiving. I’m the cook, right? We were in the car, and we were driving, and she hadn’t seen this before, and it was probably Copilot, not ChatGPT, but I had one of them up, right?
She’s like, “All right, here’s what we need,” whatever, whatever. I turned on the thing because I would have been writing it down, and I said, “All right, listen, trying to get ready for Thanksgiving, I need you to create a list for me,” and she starts saying it to me, and then I start saying it to the thing. I’m like, “All right, take these down.” Then I’m like, “All right, categorize the foods for me because I’m about to go to the grocery store. I need to be able to get in there and get out.”
Then I’m like, “Are there any dishes that I’m missing and all this other stuff?” Then I’m like, “All right, cool,” and I’m done. Her seeing that in action was like, “I didn’t know it was that good,” and we’re just using the basic stuff, which is just “Make me a grocery list for Thanksgiving.” Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
[00:27:53] Tom: That’s fantastic. Well, Therman, the final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
[00:28:00] Therman: Getting up and being able to do the thing that I enjoy every day, whatever that looks like, I do know what that looks like, but if I get to wake up every day and I’m able to do the things that I enjoy doing for the majority of the day, I found success, and I will say I found success a very long time ago because I’ve been doing what I enjoy doing for a really long time.
I’m not talking about just professionally; I mean at home with family, out with friends, professionally, personally, all these things, I’m having a good time. I’m enjoying life. Just as long as no one takes that away from me, the ability for me to get up and on this day do the things that I enjoy doing for most of the day, because there’s going to be some things you don’t want to do, but if the majority of the day is filled with things that I want to do and I get to do, I’m successful, and I’ve been successful for a really long time.
[00:28:59] Tom: Very, very well said. Well, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:29:07] Therman: Not that I haven’t had a chance to, but I want to reiterate, is that people over technology, all day, every day, you have to remember that. I don’t know if there’s any junior folks listening who is at the early point of their career, but even people who exist right now in a later part of their career or is running a business for a pretty long time, you have to think people first.
No matter what keeps coming out here, even with AI and all this other stuff, people first, process, all those other things, and then bring in the technology to support what you’re doing, not to do what you’re doing. If you were writing meeting notes before, and now you found this technology that writes them faster for you, that’s a level up for you, but the technology, once it produces the the the notes, give them a look over with your eyes because you still got to present this to somebody, and you have to use them, and you’re the human who can say these are good notes or not, so again, people, then technology. Got to drive that home.
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[00:30:13] Tom: Therman, thank you so much for a fantastic interview, and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway Number 1 is when Therman said that most of us underutilize the technology and the tools that we have, and that we underutilize it by a lot, and I like that example that he gave of comparing these office products, comparatively to using our cell phone.
Takeaway Number 2 is when he said you need to store all of your stuff in one spot, and I thought that’s just a great reminder for us. That’s right, just having a centralized place to store all of our documents, files, and internal documents. Takeaway Number 3 is when he talked about a first step, something that we can do, and he said, “Well, the first thing is just do something specific. Pick a thing, take one step, make it very specific, and do it and get it done.”
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win really stems from Therman’s focus on people over technology, and he said that’s the important thing, people over technology, and for me, the real big aha moment is when he talked about being a content creator for your internal staff with your internal tools, and I thought that was a great way to think of it. How would you do this if you were posting something on LinkedIn, or Instagram, or TikTok, or whatever your favorite social media tool or platform is?
Think of it, and he gave that example of 30 cool things your company does that you don’t know about, and I thought that was a clever little way to describe it. It’ll be a win for you, a win for your staff, a win for your franchise system, a win for all parties involved. That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review, and remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com, where you can schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
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[00:32:36] [END OF AUDIO]
