I Use Notion to Run 17 Businesses - Here’s How

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - The speaker outlines the 6 elements of an operating system used by their company portfolio: value engines, playbooks, team canvas scorecards, meeting rhythm, clarity compass, and quarterly/annual planning. - Value engines visualize the core value creation processes of a business - how growth and fulfillment happen. Playbooks document the key steps for critical processes. - Scorecards track metrics to optimize processes. Meeting rhythm sets regular meetings to discuss operations. The clarity compass provides the purpose, values, and long-term vision. - The quarterly and annual planning sets concrete goals and key initiatives. Notion is used to document all of these elements in an integrated system. - The speaker emphasizes that the tools don't matter as much as having a systematic framework and quality inputs. The operating system enables execution, optimization, and scaled growth through systematizing these elements. - The speaker declines to share their Notion template publicly, but offers it to consulting clients as it requires support/customization. The goal is to provide inspiration for viewers to create their own systems.

In this video, I'm going to open the kimono and let you take a peek inside the notion setup that powers the companies inside our portfolio group. Now, if you don't know who I am, my name is Ryan Deiss. My partners and I manage 17 companies across our $200 million holding group. So we know a thing or two about systemizing businesses for scale and exit. And what I'm about to show you now is the operating system setup that we use to power just one of those business units. So let's get into it. I'm going to be breaking down and showing you our exact notion setup. Every single operating system that we build out across all of our portfolio companies, they all start right here inside of good old Google sheets. Again, it doesn't have to be fancy. What does it mean to have an operating system? Well, an operating system is made up of these six things. You can have your value engines, your playbooks, what we refer to as your high output team canvas scorecards, meeting rhythm and clarity compass. Let's talk about each one of these. Whether it's a portfolio company or working with a client, our first goal is to systemize execution. We want to automate the doing of the job of the founder and of the key executives. And this is the first thing we have to do. We need to create and map value engine. So we've got a value engine that visualizes how growth happens. So that's what, you know, that's an example of this one and then one that visualizes how fulfillment happens. At the end of the day, all businesses do two things. We get customers and clients. We serve those customers and clients. If we can visualize these, then what we can really do is visualize the core value creation process of a business. That's why we call them value engines. Now, once these are mapped, and this is the foundation of everything that we do here, we can ask a really important question, which is, which of these steps can we not afford to mess up? And that's where we have this tool called the Playbook planner. Now, if we go over to our operating system, you'll see here we've got our who we are, company goals. I'll get to those a little bit. But there is actually a section here for value engines. Now, I'm not going to zoom into all of these because this is a live operating system. This is the operating system that actually powers the scalable company, the company that's producing this video. And so you can see here, these are a number of our operating systems. You can see here we've got a number of growth engines. We have a number of fulfillment engines in our setup in notion. It does allow us to go through and sort based on those, but it's pretty easy to find. Now, if I were to zoom into this particular case study here, right. If I were to zoom into this one, there's a screenshot. This actually links off to the, you know, the actual one in whimsical. So that's there. I can click off to this. And these different links that you see here. These can link off to the pages, or they can link off to the specific playbooks. And so the playbooks are the other piece of our operating system framework, and they're here. This is our playbook vault. So once a playbook has been created, we can then create it here. And everybody knows how to access it. You can see here whoever owns that playbook. I'll show you our playbook template for how we do it. It's really not that complicated. All of our playbooks, we want to have who created it. That's really important. What team owns this Playbook? What is the Playbook type? And so we got another. Does it align with growth and fulfillment? This is a biggie. Who is the owner? Who owns the Playbook? I want to make this very, very clear. Every single playbook needs an owner. There needs to be one person who is uniquely charged for making sure that this playbook, this checklist, this standard operating procedure, is kept up to date, and it is still useful. And if it hasn't been up to date, if it isn't useful, then everybody knows who they need to go to to get it updated. And that's why this other piece, when was it last edited? You know, massively out of date. That's a problem in terms of how we build our playbooks. There's a quick summary at the top. We do like to have a loom walkthrough video. And then it's just basic step by step. Any relevant links? Not overly complicated there. So now we want to ask the question, who is uniquely accountable to each and every one of these steps in the greater value creation process? Now, we asked that question a little bit when we ask who's going to own the playbook? But now what we want to do is we want to go step by step by step and ask that same question about each member of the team. And this is where we get into assigning what we refer to as critical accountability bullets. Who is uniquely accountable for each of those different steps and stages? What team are they on? So it just makes it easier to kind of interlink. The best way I can demonstrate this, if I go back to the playbook vault again, these are some of the different team members, and it makes it clear who owns these different steps in the process. What we've done at this point is this first phase, we have systemized the execution. We've gotten very, very clear on what do we do, how do we do it, who is doing it. Once you know what you do, how you do it, that is this basic foundation, the set of algorithms. Now we can move on to systemizing optimization. What is the process of fixing what's broken? How do we know these different steps are working? This is how we go about creating scorecards for our operating system. Our scorecards are going to exist at the team level. So if I go over here to the marketing team, they've got scorecards that are listed over here in the resources area. If I go over here to the programs team, you can see they've got their scorecard listed here as well. So it's very easy, it's very linkable. And then if I go over here to company goals, you could see here we've got our twelve Q plan. I'll get to that. But the overall company scorecard is clickable, linkable because this is active. Again, I'm not going to open this up. The next one is the meeting rhythm. How often are we going to meet to discuss this? We do have a company calendar where our meeting rhythm sits. And then also each team, when it's doing meetings, their meetings are stored inside their team section. So this piece over here is our operating system. This is the team section. And this is just general resources that we need down here. You'll see the key initiatives. We'll get to that in just a second. Now we get to the last phase of the operating system build out, which is to systemize the actual scale to begin to automate the decision making process. The tool that we need to do that is our clarity compass. What is our three year target? What's the company purpose and why? What are our core values and what are the strategic anchors? In other words, what are our defensive competitive advantages? If you know where you're headed, that's your three year target, that's your medium term goal. If you know why you're headed there, your company purpose, that greater mission that you're striving towards, your greater company, why? And it's going to be your company core values as well as your strategic anchors that are going to keep you on track. For us, this shows up in the who we are section, you know, so for us, we've got, you know, our basic statement up here and you can see we have a link to our clarity compass. Now, I'm not going to open this up. We got a three year target mission. Our strategic anchors, our company core values, as well as this kind of additional and our unique points of view. Now the last phase is really the where are we going? What are overarching company goals. And for that we have two tools. There's the quarterly sprint planning canvas that says where we want to be in the next 90 days and the twelve Q planning canvas that does give that three year target goal. Now, this is important. The company's starting point is $2,100,000 in profit. In three years. They want to be doing 2 million in profit and 110 million in sales. And it breaks down what needs to be true quarter over quarter for them to achieve those goals. And then they can keep track of that. So this is a really valuable tool and document if we go back to company goals. There's the company scorecard we already talked about. Here's a link to our twelve Q plan. And these are our quarterly sprint plans. I don't want to go into the specific ones, but I can show you the template that we built inside of notion, the time period company division. Because we are a holding company, we from a revenue perspective set good, better and best targets. We've got unit goals because it is quarterly. We break them down by month. We set a theme for the quarter. We have overarching sub themes. There are certain metrics that we're going to track. What are those metrics on our company scorecard that we're going to pull up. And then we determine what are the key initiatives that we're going to greenlight for this quarter. We can do project planning here. We can design owners and stakeholders due dates. We can also determine which team so that when I go into the particular team section. So for example, the programs team, they can see their team key initiatives down here. If I were to go into the marketing team, they can see their team key initiatives here as well, just through doing some basic filtering and sorting. Now what you want to wind up with is what I showed you here, right? This is what everybody's been asking about. This is what I went through today. But what I hope that you see is that without this overarching picture, without these different elements, the best notion set up, the best ClickUp setup. The best project management solution is not going to be good enough. It's about what goes into your operating system. So I hope in this video I was able to show you again that one, we actually do this stuff, but two, what does our notion operating system look like? There's no but. There's no magic. The magic isn't to the tool, the magic is in the input. Also, I'm sure we're gonna get questions about can I share my notion template? And the answer is, if you're a client, yes. If you're not, no. And the reason it's simple is because I can't get into basically providing support. Hope you found this helpful. If you do want our help doing this, I'll drop some links into how we work with clients to get this done, but hopefully you got enough here to at least get some inspiration for doing it yourself. With that said, thanks so much for watching. See you in the next one.