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Welcome to the WTS podcast where we help entrepreneurs make more and work less by managing their systems. And I’m your host, Josh Fonger. Today we have a special guest. We have Ryan Ryan. Yes, you heard that right. Ryan T Ryan is the one we have on the show today, but there were two decades of experience in both entrepreneurship and consulting. Ryan has not only helped others achieve success, but he’s also incorporated the strategies we’ll be exploring today into his own businesses.

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Ryan is the founder of both a back office and bookkeeping firm and a real estate management company, providing him with practical experience in implementing every component of the Work With System framework. Much like author Sam Carpenter, Ryan has successfully transitioned from working 60 plus hours a week to enjoying a life of greater freedom and flexibility. The mission of his consulting firm is clear, assist entrepreneurs in the implementation of an effective operating system.

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which not only creates order and peace of mind, but also promotes the critical element of transferability, which we’ll be talking about during this episode. This approach inevitably results in enhanced business value, decreased owner dependency, and an increase in passive income for the owner. By applying these methodologies from the book, like working system, and infusing his own frontline insights, Ryan has systematically increased both the profitability and transferability of his clients.

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and their businesses. Ryan, welcome to the show. Very good. So Ryan, why don’t you, great intro, by the way, Ryan and I were crafting that a little bit before this this episode. I’m excited to get into it and learn about transferability and about what you did in your own company. But before we do, what’s the backstory? What brought you here? Yeah, so the backstory for me with Work the System, I read the book, I think it was the second edition, maybe, you know, 10 years ago or more.

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And it just really, you know, it resonated. I love books when you’re just like, honestly, when you feel like, what, I could have wrote that book or should have, or, or, you know, would love to write that book someday myself. And so Sam’s book, then I picked up the fourth edition about a year ago. And I was literally on the beach in Florida. My phone wasn’t ringing. I was listening to the story Sam talks about in that book about not having all these voicemail messages when he got back from a bike trip he was on. And I’m like, I’m experiencing the same thing.

02:50
Um, how can I help other people? And that was great because in that fire, that book, it talks about connecting with you, Josh, and that’s, that’s how I, how I got, you know, you and I met a year and a half ago or so, maybe now. Um, so that’s, that’s the backstory with me and Sam and worked the system. So, well, then tell us, tell us the story. So, um, you relaxed on the beach, not getting voicemails, emails, calls, fires, how did you set up your own company to make that a reality?

03:20
Yeah, so interesting back story for me. So I started my career in finance, and then I moved into large scale project management, program management in the both financial industry and then later in the healthcare industry and became a project management consultant essentially. And

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While doing that, I needed to have a system for managing my small consulting business. I needed a bookkeeper. I needed somebody to do the invoicing, somebody to keep the service level agreements, all that. And so I had to create a systematic way to get that done so I could do what I call the button chair work of going and being this consultant. And in that case, I was doing a lot of traveling. And so…

04:09
It was a side hustle for me, this bookkeeping and back office service while I did project management. But the interesting about project management is that just like activities management or any kind of ongoing, you need a certain operating system to run a good project. You need clear activities management, communication management, records management, access management, all that information. And you need.

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you need all that, but you just need it for a season, a period of time until the project is over. Well, in the bookkeeping back office business, I needed that to be sustainable ongoing. And so I continued to build out this back office business and other consultants would come to me and say, can I use this service? Can I hire your bookkeeper? You know, it just started to scale up as a side deal. And then over time it took over. But the nice thing is that

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because I wasn’t doing it full time, it never could be dependent on me. And I was always trying to work my way out of, this is where the transferability comes in, work my way out of all the other stuff, do only what I could do. And so we’ve now created that, we now have that business, that vertical up and running. I don’t do any of the day-to-day work. I then also took that same

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those same principles and applied it to a real estate management firm, or we make real estate investments. And again, I don’t have any day-to-day responsibility to either of those anymore. Okay. So what, maybe there’s more we can tease out of this. So how did you, cause a lot of people want to know how to do this. How did you develop two companies, both the bookkeeping business and the real estate business where you didn’t have to be there from the beginning? Like how did you, um, develop the system to make that happen?

06:00
Yeah, so I did exactly what Sam talks about. I’m a mechanical view of life, systems improvement, work breakdown structure. So I just broke it down into its components. I stepped back and saw for what it is. And that’s a system with a lot of subsystems. And what I’ve come to the conclusion and what I now do with other owners in that consulting world is just look at what are

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And that system is made up of four components, people, technology, data, and process. But the process is really where you get the transferability. If you can document the process, put it onto a technology that is shareable, you can then teach people how to follow that process.

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And then you can monitor the data that comes out of that process being completed. How many things got completed at which, in what sequence, what’s due when. And so now you become, you, over time, if you develop that core system, which, which I consider that there’s four core systems in that there’s the activities management, which is very broad, but as a project manager first.

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It wasn’t enough to just say you need to have your standard operating procedures or what I call standard work. You also need to manage projects still. So I see them as all the activities of a business. So there’s this activities management system. Then there’s communication management system, how you are going to talk about those activities and communicate about things that you’re doing. And then where are you storing the records and information? And then finally, how are you accessing everything? How are you getting through the.

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gauntlet of access management. I call it the keys to the door. In the old days, we used to have keys and in the old days, we used to have a filing cabinet in our office. Now that’s all on the web, but it’s still the fundamental foundational components of any business. So once I realized that and appreciated that for what it is and built out standard work for those systems, I could then

08:17
and real estate as the verticals. And I stood that on top of this, what I like to think of as almost an enterprise level operating system. And I can stand any service on top of that, any vertical. So any client that comes to me and wants to, a drywall company or a plumbing company or a lawyer or a nonprofit, we always start with that fundamental operating system. And so once I got that in place,

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then it was tweaking the standard work for that service line. And so in the bookkeeping and back office business, for example, we have over 500 pieces of standard work across a number of clients, each client having their own bucket of standard work, and they’re all managed by team members who are following that standard work and getting the work done. That system allows me to step away and become now more of a role of just a recruiter.

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and managing the numbers, if that makes sense. Yeah. I’ve got to ask you a question about the way you’ve built this, because it’s a question that a lot of my clients have is, how do you get your people and the companies you have to actually follow these systems? How do you actually do that? Great question. I think that technology does play a part in that these days. You have to make it accessible.

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And it has to not be hard to follow. I think of the analogy, we always, you know, the idea that you put your tools away when you’re done, instead of letting it all build up, and then taking a whole day off to re, you know, I don’t know, to clean your garage, I guess, or put your tools back. You never do that. You never get to that problem.

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So you’ve got to make it in such a way that it’s easy for people to check things off, easy for them to see what they need to do. We have embraced technology in that and two ways in which we’ve really done that is focused on technology that allows us to do what we call cross-listing and cardboarding. So cross-listing is simple, or cardboarding first, is the idea, it’s a visual idea that comes from the project management world that I was in.

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where you used cards to represent different tasks in your project, and you put them on a physical board. It was called a VizBoard. It comes out of the lean management world. Then you would create this visual board of cards, index cards, swim lanes, and boards, and you would put these up, and you’d have these stand-up meetings, which are such a big deal in the 90s and the 2000s. We’re going to have our sprint, our 15-minute meeting.

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But now we’re all dispersed, and that’s not as easy. And so we needed a technology that could function that same way where we could create a bunch of cards and put them on boards. We do that electronically now. Think of the cards, each is a different piece of snare work or each of them is a different project charter, either way. And we can post them on boards in our software. But the cross-listing

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is that ability to put one card on multiple boards. So Josh, if you write a piece of standard work, but you want it on my to-do list, and you also want it on a schedule somewhere, we don’t want duplication, because you might rewrite that piece of standard work, and then I’ll never see it. So it gets all these iterations. But if we have one card that is tagged to multiple boards, cross-listing, then we’ve mitigated that issue.

12:03
Which goes back to your question, how do you help people get stuff done? How do they do that consistently? Well, they need to know that what the checklist they’re using is the most relevant, most recent, most current, most up to date. Um, that’s, that’s one key factor of how we help people make sure they get what they need to done and how I can then monitor it from afar, right? I can see it and monitor it further and further away from being part of that.

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operation and day-to-day operation. Wow. I was talking to you really perfected internally. How about consulting? So now that you’re out there in the field consulting with our clients, helping them do the same thing, is it harder to make that happen? And maybe you can share a story about how you’re working with clients right now. Yeah. I think is it hard to make that happen? I think it is definitely you’ve got to, you got to break it down. You got to do work breakdown structure and give a, you know,

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what do they say, take small bites of the elephant. So we have a client right now who came to us after he had sold his business, his first business, and now had branched out and he now has a family foundation. They’ve got a hospitality, a ranch in Montana that they do large events at.

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He’s owned some real estate. So he’s got a lot of things going on. And he was used to being in this corporate world where everything was kind of done and there were standard operating procedures and all this structure. So he knows it, but he didn’t know how to apply it to his next phase of life. But he appreciated and understands that, hey, I can’t do everything on this ranch and I can’t run the family foundation at the level I want to if I don’t have people that can help me do that. And…

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And really what we challenge him with is, well, you don’t just need people, you need a system. You need an operating system that works across all those entities. And, you know, so that’s, that’s who we’re working, you know, that’s who we’re working with now and helping him see, okay, let’s document. And we just started with a simple document, all the projects you’re working on. And

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if it’s in all the standard work. So he really literally this week, he went through a list and he’s like, project, project, project, standard works, standard works, standard work. And we’re like, okay, now we need to flush that out. What’s the project charter? What’s the standard work development of that standard work? And then we’ve been really working on how do we, like you said, or asked earlier, how do we get that to the people that need it, so that they can build off of it.

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like it’s gonna be a fun, fun client to work with. So I’ve got a question I asked everyone who gets certified as a consultant with WTS. What makes them unique because a lot of folks out there who are consultants, so what would you say is your unique ability or maybe your unique verticals you work in? What makes you unique? Yeah, so our uniqueness, I guess we were definitely a boutique firm. You know, we, we are not

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trying to be a really large, either in the bookkeeping business we provide, bookkeeping services back office that we provide, which is our kind of off the shelf example of work the system, a vertical that you can just kind of grab and go with. So that’s one unique piece. I would say that really, you know, the owner working with owners, you know, that really want to

15:45
You know, I have this phrase, I’m sure other people have heard of founder syndrome. Founder syndrome is when the founder won’t, you can’t get them out of the weeds. And I have challenged my group and challenged my team to think of me as the opposite of dead founder syndrome. Like you can’t do it with me. I am out of the picture. And I challenge owners a lot of times to say, how can you get to, because founder is the only title an owner can never delegate. You could, should be able to delegate.

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everything up and down, all the way up to the C-suite, all the way down to the mail clerk, if you have good standard operating procedures. But founder, you can always say, hey, I founded a bookkeeping business, I founded a real estate business. But it also clarifies that you’re no longer doing that and that it’s creating that passive income that we talked about in the beginning. And I think our unique ability is to, is because I’m a practitioner of it.

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that there’s this unique offering that says, look, I’ve done it. I’ve done it twice. And it can be done for you as well. So our unique offering is really to that owner. And then I would say that what’s fun, and this happened in this example I was giving you earlier, is there’s almost like this cheat. We can say to you, hey, look, you don’t have to trust me as a consultant. Like if you need the back office support, why don’t you just buy that?

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vertical right off the bat. And we’ll just demonstrate for you. You’ll get access to that technology. You’ll see the standard work. You’ll see people getting done. Bookkeeping is a very easy vertical to develop standard work on. It’s very reputable, repetitive. So in this case, in this example, like in the earlier, they bought our bookkeeping module. They bought our team. They bought our process. They bought our technology. They just bought it off the shelf.

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And within two months, they’re like, can you apply this same operating, these principles, the same operating system to our operations, to our marketing, to our sales? You know, how can we use these same ideas in these other verticals? That is kind of a unique offering that we have because we can be implementers in the case of in bookkeeping or in the case of real estate management.

18:08
If people need those services, then they can see that, you know, flushed out and then adopt from there. So then, what about, what would be the common problem that someone typically has before they start working with you? Is it a problem of being overwhelmed or a problem of, Hey, what I have right now is not transferable or the problem is, yeah, I’m the founder, but I’m also the CEO, CIO, CFO, CTO, and the salesperson too.

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What’s the problem they have? Yeah, I’d say the problem is that they, a little bit of all of that, but mostly, yeah, that they don’t see how many hats they’re wearing. They don’t quite realize it.

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And they are convinced, somewhat convinced for different reasons that they can’t delegate it. They think of everything too create honestly, and this is a little bit harsh, but they think of everything a little too creatively instead of systematically like they, they don’t break it down, just realize, okay, I can delegate this, I can’t. And so you got to start out with some of that low hanging fruit and then move up from there. But it’s the transferability and the

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in the multiple hats. So we really try to, I mean, I use work breakdown structure earlier, we’ll try to break it down, like, you know, with this client we were working with earlier, it’s like, what different entities are you involved with? And how do we define that? And I think, you know, just systematically getting down to, you know, some people just come to us, I know you experienced this, Josh, like, Hey, I heard you write standard work. Like, that’s not it. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s

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the fruit of understanding systems methodology. It’s a component, but it’s not the only end result. So, yeah. Okay, that’s great. Well, just to close out the podcast, I mean, those of you who are listening interested in what Ryan, Ryan T. Ryan is up to here, what, where should they go to find out more information about you and then to connect with you later?

20:17
Yeah. So the easiest way to get ahold of me is I did for my LinkedIn, which is Ryan T Ryan, or to email me. My email address is Ryan at Easton, like the bat E A S T O N back office Easton back office.com. That’s the two ways to get all of me to exist. Very good. All right. Well, I hope that you all enjoyed the podcast with Brian Ryan and make sure to stay tuned.

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for our next podcast coming soon, where I’ll be sharing from either one of my past clients. So you can hear there’s steps to success or a business expert like Ryan, sharing a tool, technique or resource. They’ll help you make more and work less by getting control of your systems. And as always, you can find out more resources from me at WTSenterprises.com, or you can find out from Sam Carpenter, the author of Work the System, that’s the book right here, at WorkTheSystem.com. He puts out a weekly video as well.

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All right. Thanks everybody. And thanks a lot, Ryan. Well, thank you, Josh. Take care.