The process of documenting your procedures virtually is something we call Play, Pause, Do. This is where you take a written standard operating procedure and record a screen share that shows you actually doing the activity. Now not only are you seen doing the activity but you can talk to your employees about it and answer questions about why you are doing it.

Play, Pause, Do requires a video to be associated with the written documentation for every standard operating procedure. Play, Pause, Do allows an employee who may have gone through two weeks of training several months ago to go back to the procedures and be able to complete tasks more successfully.

The great thing is that once you have a video recording of something, it lives forever. You have crafted it, and it can be set on a Vimeo or YouTube account and played back as much as is needed. These accounts can be set to “private” so that only people with company email addresses, for example, can access them.

Why is all this documentation so important? So little of human communication is fully understood in a single iteration. Only 55 percent of face-to-face communication is fully understood. That means that 45 percent of the time, people don’t correctly understand you, even if you are standing right in front of them! What’s more, only 37 percent of nonvisual verbal communication and 17 percent of written communication is fully understood. Isn’t that astounding? Quite literally, 83 percent of the time you can expect your emails to be misunderstood. It is a natural human failing that can be overcome only by repetition and clarification.

Accept that, because going throughout the world thinking, “Well, I told them,” will not help you scale. The onus is on you, the business owner, and chief communicator, to provide clarity if you want to be successful.

One of the hardest pills I had to swallow was understanding that my adult learners need to hear something, on average, seven times before they fully can appreciate and implement a new change inside of a business. You might be thinking, “Well, I don’t hire average, Daniel,” and perhaps that’s true, but even if you get someone twice as adapt and intelligent, you’ll need to make sure there are several reminders, perhaps three to four reinforcements, of a new concept. To be perfectly frank, while this book is to help our clients learn best practices, it also serves a purpose for our internal team here at MyOutDesk.

It is a reinforcement point in our understanding of our company’s vision and mission.

When you are a business owner in the weeds, so to speak, it may not seem like a good use of your time to document all this training. You might be thinking, “This is a lot of work!” But trust me when I say you will be glad you followed the process to the letter. Once it is done, it can be replicated a thousand times. And it might not even take up as much time as you think. You can record yourself as you go about doing the tasks you want to delegate, like making sales calls, for example. Rather than spending three hours concocting a dummy training scenario, record a video of a real call. Then it doesn’t become a lot of work for you and, overall, is less burdensome.