Adam Outland: Today's guest is Greg DeVore, the CEO and co founder of Screensteps, a software platform for transferring knowledge faster. He's also the co author of the book Find and Follow and he joins us today. And Greg, I was looking over your bio, and one of the things that stood out to me was you were musically inclined as a young person. Is that, right?
Greg DeVore: Yeah, you know, I got a degree in and everything worked in the music industry for a while. So that was the directory I was going on. You know, I took piano lessons as a kid. I finally convinced my parents let me quit, because I hated them. And then after that, I started playing more and got into, you know, guitar and bass and drums. I was played in bands in high school, and then was a music major. I was at Brigham, young university as composition major, took a trip back to Boston, and happened by accident to end up in the Berkeley College of Music. And looked at their program like, this is exactly what I want to do, music for film. And so I transferred there and and graduated from that program and worked for a couple of years in both Boston and LA in the field music industry, doing a variety of things, orchestration, arranging.
Adam Outland: Wow. So for our listeners, this is, this is not easy. I took musical theory and just totally bombed it. It felt more like a math equation to me, which was not my strong suit.
Greg DeVore: I was the exact opposite. I can compose. But those ear training courses and like the dictation courses, those just killed me. Those were so hard for me.
Adam Outland: Do you have anything out there, orchestration, that you compose that lives on the inner webs?
Greg DeVore: You know, I have some music that was part of this old music library, if you know what that is, that they'll use on shows. And there is some editor for animal planet that loves, like, the 10 Songs I have on that library, but I still get, you know, little royalties about that. I don't know who he is, but you know, he's paid for lots of dinners.
Adam Outland: If you see Animal Planet, that would be...
Greg DeVore: Yeah, I did like 0.01% of the music on Animal Planet.
Adam Outland: Awesome. Maybe fast forward for us and help us understand a little bit of this transition, because what you do today on paper would look a lot different than compositions with an orchestra. Talk to me about that period of time in your life where you decided to move into something completely different.
Greg DeVore: Well I didn't really decide. I was kind of forced to. So my my first son, was born very premature. While we were on vacation, he was under two pounds and out of that, he has cerebral palsy and autism. They said to me at the time, they said, Hey, as long as you're self employed and as a musician, you're really self employed, nobody's gonna insure it. So I was like, I've gotta change careers here. And at the time, I'd been training a lot of studio musicians or composers on how to use a product called logic audio. It was old days. Apple now owns it. I developed some ways of teaching and training that just helped them get up to speed a lot quicker, because people would want to teach them these long courses about how all this software worked, all they wanted was a recipe about how to do what they wanted to do. So my brother and I started an opportunity came up. We started a company together, and we were building training for ultrasound systems, of all things. We
eventually built the technology, took the technology we use there, built our own product, and over the years, we've just really dug into that problem of, how can I teach somebody how to work independently, as quickly as possible with as less stress, you know, as little stress as possible. So that's what we've been doing for the last 20 years.
Adam Outland: Just out of curiosity, what was your brother's background that merged with what you do?
Greg DeVore: So he was a programmer, so he would do all the tech stuff. It was totally random. He was at this event out in Paris, and GE came up to him and said, Hey, nobody understands how to use our systems. Could you build some training? We've done some side projects together. He came back. He's like, do you want to do this? And that's how we started our company. Wow, the dream early on was to build a simple product. People would just sign up online, they'd pay you a monthly fee, and we get enough of those people. We you know, we'd all be rich and retire, and it'd be great. And it was the type of thing that you it's like the sign you kept peeling back a layer layer, and you and we kept digging into the problem, and we found there was just so much more. It wasn't a technology problem. That was the biggest thing is we thought it's just about giving people a way to write better documentation. That was all we aspired to it at first, but then we kept peeling it back. It's
like, oh, they don't have all this background knowledge, and people don't know how to build. Onboarding programs, and we didn't know how to build an onboarding program, but we've spent this 20 years really digging into we've gone to clients who were like doing something really well, and investigated how they're doing it, or others that are really struggling, and tried to pull the both the good and the bad out of all of this, and out of that, we built a system that's definitely supported by technology, but it's more conceptual about how you onboard employees, how you transfer information to them in a way that they don't get burned out, that they can be confident and they can work independently.
Adam Outland: You know, it's interesting is there's a little overlap with us too. So in my prior career, for the last 10 years, I did, I've done executive coaching, where a small component of coaching is you see the need for onboarding is a pretty common challenge that a lot of clients deal with, right because they're trying to duplicate themselves in some way. And you find a lot of small and even medium sized business owners, the ceiling they hit is their time, and the control that they need to have is another symptom of this, where they know that if they do it, it's going to get done, right, but if they give it to someone else, they've had past experiences where that person screwed it up and it costs them, and so oftentimes in a coaching relationship, we're trying to help people unclench their fists and be willing to delegate, empower others, but That's not necessarily possible unless there's a good onboarding system to equip that person.
Greg DeVore: Exactly right, and when we say delegate, and that's not as easy as it sounds, because what happens is you have that business owner or that person who has a lot of experience, they know all the skeletons in the closet. They all know all the variables, like in this situation, you need to be aware of this and that situation any better that they have all the foundational knowledge and it's all in their head. And so what our system helps people do is first identify what's the actual knowledge and what's the foundational knowledge. So actual is what I need to do. Foundational is the background information I need to understand and in order to be able to do it. So we'll help them build out. Okay, here's the actual knowledge. And here's all the variables that might impact that. Let's account for all those variables and give clear guidance of what to do when those variables come up. But then let's separate that out and give foundational knowledge. And let me just kind of
back up a second. We teach you never memorize actual knowledge, because memorizing it becomes a liability. You follow digital guides for that actual knowledge. You learn foundational knowledge so you learn the background information so you can understand what you're doing, but you rely on, like a GPS for your mind or your task to help guide you through those procedures, and when you have that in place. Now, it's very easy. I can delegate something out to someone and have confidence that they're going to handle that situation.
Adam Outland: It's a huge problem that you get to address, because it is, it's the scaling problem, right? And there's a really good point that comes to mind when you share this, that companies that need just world class talent in order to scale, it's going to be hard road, because there's not a ton of world class people out there, and so I'm hearing you say that, if done correctly, some of the jobs that might at first glance look like they require world class might mean they require good people that can follow a good GPS system and a good onboarding tool.
Greg DeVore: Exactly right. It's not just onboarding. We a key part of this is we are onboarded through this tool, but you use it every day for performance, and that's what makes onboarding easier, is it's not like I'm onboarded and I'm supposed to then memorize all this information. So I'll give you an example. We worked with a municipality in Southern California. It used to take them over 12 months for a new hire to really know what they were doing, to be able to work independently by adopting this framework and using this process of onboarding and just daily performance, they reduced that down to 30 days, so from 12 months to 30 days, and they said it was just life changing for the organization, because before it was so hard, supervisors are always getting asked questions. Employees have no confidence that they're going to be doing things correctly, and now people can work independently. They're confident. There's lots of stress. It really is transformational when
you can scale that way without rushing your most knowledgeable people.
Adam Outland: Yeah, for sure, that makes sense too. Plus you have more inherent knowledge in the business itself, I think of like, if you want to sell a business and then you're on the purchasing side of that business, what you're concerned with is the ability that there are robust systems in place that allow new team members to come in, plug into a system and be successful. So I could see how an onboarding system that that you could create could add that type of value.
Greg DeVore: And when you have those situations, either a merger or an acquisition, what they're really looking for is clarity into how things are done. All of that is stuck in somebody's head. We use this model. We call it the knowledge operations maturity model. And at the low end of it is tribal knowledge. Everything's stuck in people's heads. On the high end of it, we're more using guides. Guided knowledge an organization that's relying on guided knowledge. Now a merger and acquisition becomes much easier because there's such clarity about the procedures and how things work.
Adam Outland: What are some of the assumptions about training employees that you feel like most people get wrong?
Greg DeVore: Couple of things, one that people need to learn information. If we move from I'm not, you know, I'm not going to memorize a map of New York. I'm going to use a GPS to get around. Then we can really onboard people a lot more quickly and have them perform better with less stress. But most people, when they get into training, they're like, I've got to cram all this information into their head. They need to know all of this, and that's just a misconception. It decreases. It really lengthens onboarding time. It increases the stress, and we've got tons of evidence that it actually reduces. It makes performance worse. They perform better when they're using digital guides instead of relying on their memory.
Adam Outland: Has this giving you any insight into what makes a good team member, providing this type of consultative strategy over and over again, seeing who adopts it well and who doesn't. Do you feel like you've gotten a better sense of what makes someone a good hire when the onboarding system is in place?
Greg DeVore: Yeah, a couple of things, both a new hire and a good team member on your team. So something we'll see sometimes is you'll go into teams and there are people that want to protect all the knowledge they have, because they feel like it gives them job security, and they really become a liability for the organization, because they have so much knowledge in their head that if they ever leave or anything happens to them, the organization is just crippled. The ones that are really valuable are what we call knowledge investors. So you have knowledge spenders, knowledge investors, a knowledge spender. You ask me a question, I'm just going to tell you the answer, and you're gonna ask me the same question two days later, and I'm going to give you the answer again. But a knowledge investor is going to make sure that we have knowledge based digital guides, whatever it is, so that you can find that answer on your own when you need it. So I'm going to answer that question once. If
you have people on your team that are knowledge investors, that becomes really valuable. Now, when you're hiring, you want people, and this is actually true of most of millennials, younger generation. They're used to searching for answers on their own. They're not used to sitting in a in a classroom and being lectured at and being coached over and over again. They're used to, hey, how do I do this? Boom, boom, boom, right here. And and they follow it. So if you've got people like that, they're going to adapt really quickly to something like the find and follow framework. You want to look at people who can are comfortable learning on their own.
Adam Outland: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I think if you could redefine that find and follow framework, you keep quoting, how would you define it in a short way for our listeners or business owners that listen to our podcast.
Greg DeVore: Well, really, and we lay this all out in our book called find and follow. It has four systems, one for planning, understanding what people need to do, one for training them, one for helping them perform, and then a fourth, one for helping them adapt to change. The key concept here is that we're going to identify what's foundational knowledge they need to know that what's actual knowledge they just need to be able to find and follow that and we'll train them to find and follow that information, and that's going to free up so many resources in their mind and in the organization to be more productive, more consistent and more confident.
Adam Outland: That's awesome. On a personal level, because our listeners really enjoy hearing the kind of the war story of what it takes to build a business. But I'm kind of curious, in terms of a personal anecdote of you and your brother building this thing. I mean, what, what's been one of the most difficult moments, I guess, in the last 10 years that you've encountered, if you, if you don't mind sharing.
Greg DeVore: Yeah, I think it was, oh, it's probably about 10 years ago. You know, our business was in that state of it was growing, but so slow that it was, they call it like a zombie business, right? It won't die. It's not going to die, but it's not going where you want it to be. And so really having to make that decision, do we, do we keep going down this path, or is it time to close everything down and do something different. And we, I like I said, we planned on. We want to make the self service product. We want to keep it really small. We didn't want to work with big enterprise clients. At that moment, we decided, okay, we've got to lean into the real problem here. And that was our decision. We took all the things that we said we wanted, and we put those aside, and now we work with enterprise clients. And now we were, we're very hands on, but really digging into the root causes that our customers were having. That was the key of what got us through there,
because they were willing to put up, you know, when our technology wasn't great, you know, for a while there, they knew we really understood the problem when we were helping them, and that then helped us mature the product and mature the process. So my advice is, you know, if you're struggling your business really leaning into your customers problems and understanding them even better than your customer does, that's going to be your way out.
Adam Outland: I think that's a great example. And, you know, I think on the other side, I'm kind of curious what you'd say to this. You, Greg, I mentioned in the beginning, do coaching and consulting. You know, there's a feeling sometimes that a consultant is like the know it all. Right? I think what I've learned is that what makes consultants valuable is that they're not in the weeds, so they have perspective. It doesn't mean they know it all. In fact, I think the point and the question I'm getting to is that I've realized that even coaches need coaches, or even consultants, hire consultants, because I'm in the weeds with my own business, right? I can't. There's things that I have, blind spots that I can't see, and so I need to bring someone else in to to help me see what I can't and that's usually my role for other organizations.
Greg DeVore: Oh, definitely, you need someone to kind of sit time, and sometimes it's not very comfortable, like they're going to tell you things that you don't really want to hear about your business or how you're pursuing it, especially if you're self employed, or you're a bootstrap business, and you're just trying to kind of, you know, make small progress. You're so focused on the path you're on, you sometimes need someone that's going to ask the right questions to help you take a step back and say, Hey, is this little trail I'm on, is this even the right trail, or is it time to start doing, you know, moving over here in a different direction, you know, do I need to change the nature of what I'm doing? And if you don't have somebody else with outside perspective or other experiences, you can be really limited. You know, there's been multiple times across our business where we've reinvented the business, and a lot of that has been triggered by, sometimes, some
uncomfortable conversations with someone who told us something we didn't want to hear.
Adam Outland: Which sounds like, as a principal, even though you haven't said it out loud, I feel like you're very interested and curious in asking questions to figure out how to get better. And that's it's hard to do, because you like to think that you know what you're doing and that things are going well, but to be able to reflect with an open mind and ask yourself, you know, how could we maybe do this better? What are our clients biggest needs and pain points? I mean, that's, that's a great quality to have.
Greg DeVore: I find that books are so crucial, like, I try to read a lot on, you know, the you know, if you read a good book, and really, that gets you to think in a different way and kind of reflect on it with your team, it can really be beneficial as well.
Adam Outland: I'd love to hear you comment on this. I guess what helps people in a part of their business that they're maybe not the best at, and let's take onboarding as an example for that, is that they've managed to over complicate it. And I think sometimes people over complicate systems as well. How have you found over the course of time, how have you found the ability to simplify the lessons around or onboarding that you've created in the framework. How have you managed to, I guess, keep it simple so that a business owner can wrap their mind around it?
Greg DeVore: The most important thing that we do is what we call a find and follow workshop. And that really gives it's, you know, when you're trying to simplify something, you have to get clarity, and you have to be identify root cause. So the find and follow workshop. What it helps them do is really understand if they want to delegate a role, or they're trying to onboard somebody into a role, what exactly does that person need to be able to do? What questions do they need to be to answer? What problems do they need to solve? Metas they need to perform. We just did this with a credit union, and for one of the roles, there was over 500 different things that person needed to be able to do on their own, and that's just overwhelming. And when we're trying to onboard something, we don't realize all that there is, and so we train them on the wrong stuff that workshop. When we go through that, it's so it's such an eye opening moment for someone, because now they have clarity.
And once they have clarity, now it's simple to say, Oh, the root, you know, the root thing we need here is they need this foundational knowledge. They'll need this guide. And we could, we could solve the problem, but without that clarity, it is very hard to simplify anything.
Adam Outland: So like in that maybe that same example where there's 500 I mean, are you advising in that scenario, versus just creating an onboarding guide that you split that role to make it like into multiple I mean, do you ever find yourself in a position where you might be suggesting a role becomes multiple roles?
Greg DeVore: That is, no actually, we would say that person will be able to do those 500 things. They just can't memorize 500 things all they need to know when they go through our system, all they need to know is to search for how do I, you know, handle this situation? And they're going to have a, you know, a decision tree or a checklist or a digital guide that's going to guide them in that it's not about having to split up the role because there's too many responsibilities. There's some jobs where there's just a lot of information, especially if I'm customer facing, there's a lot of information that I'm going to need. Let's get it out of our heads. Let's put it in that digital GPS so they can find it and follow it right when they need it.
Adam Outland: Yeah, makes sense. So, yeah, there probably are. Because I know when a business scales mean that the owners and everybody's kind of wearing like three, four different hats, because the business requires it, right? And at some point you you get enough revenue in the door, hopefully you can splinter off and relieve some of that. But to your point, maybe in an assessment, what you help them realize is that, hey, this role may not to be, need to be split up. There's just part of that is all this foundational knowledge we. Need to capture and make sure that's separate from the actual tasks.
Greg DeVore: Well, and I do do this, though for myself. So, you know, obviously, as the business grows, I continually fire myself from different jobs, right? And and so when I do that, I go through this workshop on my own to identify, Okay, part of my job. This is actually what I expect this new person to do, to be able to do on their own, and I make sure then that when they come on, I'm giving them the right foundational knowledge. I'm providing them with actual knowledge that they'll then take over and own, maintaining that actual knowledge. But I can make that transition to one aspect of my job, of handing that off to someone else much more quickly, because I've been doing this for a long time, so I've done it poorly, right, where you don't really give them the guidance they need, and you're still doing it, you know, even though you've got this in the person, where if you do it right, you can have somebody come in and really be productive very quickly.
Adam Outland: Yeah, I love the story where you're applying your own strategy, because I think that's sometimes what we get caught up in, is that we can apply these things to other people's lives. We kick ourselves. We go, I didn't follow my own dang advice, and that's why it bit me. Yeah, I love that. Okay, a couple quick fire questions that I'd love to ask you, too, what's something significant that you feel like you've changed your mind about recently? So something where maybe due to your experiences in business, that you've kind of changed your perspective or changed your mind about what you believe about this.
Greg DeVore: So we, for 20 years, we bootstrapped this business, and we never wanted to take on VC investment. It was just going to take us down a path that we didn't want to go down. We didn't want to have to and maybe it was part of it was not wanting to have a boss. I don't know what it was, it, but we just took on VC investment. Now, is it was the right VC for us? It was, it was a good fit. They aligned with us. But, you know, forever, we hadn't wanted to go down that path. But then we saw some opportunities and and a good partnership. And so we, we did a 180 on that. We were toying around with the idea. We got approached by a lot of people and, and so we were toying around the idea, but started actually, it's actually an old friend I've known since, since we were both little kids. Hadn't connected for a long time, but I started asking him for some advice, and, and we had just kind of ongoing conversations kind of came to a point and said, Hey, this might make sense. And
so far, it's been great. So it came together.
Adam Outland: When the right person comes along. What's the most used app on your phone today?
Greg DeVore: Mostly it's reading applications. So I'm a very religious person, so I have my scriptures on there. I have, you know, Kindle, I read a lot of articles. The thing I love, you know, if the phones are used right, there's such a wealth of information there, I try to keep my distractions to a minimum. I maybe get a little too distracted lately on Sudoku puzzles, so I'm trying to cut that down a bit. But the most used apps are those for reading. I have started using chatgpt If there's something really long and I'm like, there's too much information here. Like, tell me what this means. Give me a summary here. But I use, I mostly use an app called pocket where I can see something that's interesting to me. It'll save it for later, and it just gives me kind of a curated list, then of the things I said, I want to read later.
Adam Outland: What's one habit or practice that you feel like saves you the most time daily?
Greg DeVore: 100% it is being a knowledge investor instead of a spender. So when I do something, I write down a checklist, because I know I'm going to need to do it again, and that just has saved me hours and hours and hours of work even just a simple bulleted list of the next time I do this, this is what I need to do, and that little bit of investment has saved mountains of time for me.
Adam Outland: Wow, I love that. And this might kind of connect to this next question, which is, a lot of people have different definitions of the word success. I mean it's a really, you know, can be a really abstract thing, and people think they all define it the same way, but at the end of the end of the day, I think people have different definitions. How do you define success, and when do you know you've achieved it?
Greg DeVore: I think there's a couple of aspects to success. I think one is independence. Now that can be independence financially, it can be independence just emotionally, to be able to do the things that matter to you most. So the ability to have that independence is important, but also to make an impact on others and help other people be successful. That's really I think, if I were to narrow it down, success is when you you have what you need, and you're able to help others be successful on their own. That's where you find the most fulfillment. Like, yes, it's awesome to close a deal that's going to pay you a lot of money, but it's really fantastic when you hear that customer story and you see them thriving, or you see somebody on your team really growing and thriving on their own.
Adam Outland: You know, it strikes me when you say that, that there's a lot of this next generation. I mean, even even previous generations where, you know, as a young person, they said, You know, I want to pursue a career in acting or in music, or they were so tied up in their passion for this specific job that maybe there's underneath that job description, there's the passions kind of hidden in it, because one would maybe say you you had this passion that was driving you towards music, and there's a deviation, and I know that was something that you made a decision to change because of life and the need for insurance that led you down different path. But I hear passion in what you do now. So I'm kind of curious what you think about that. Do you feel if you had to kind of State your passion and how you've redefined it as you made a change in life? How would you how would you say you did that?
Greg DeVore: Well, I tell teenagers this, and it's like, what I used to do sounds so much more exciting than what I do now, but I love what I do now 10 times more than when I worked in the music industry. Wow, I know I loved working with musicians, I loved all the toys, all that sort of stuff, but the actual business I didn't love that much. I realized I love creating. I love solving problems, and that's what really drives me and so finding solutions to challenging things and and creating those and seeing them work. It's not that much different than composing like that's what's exciting about composing, is you create, especially in film composing, you have a problem, right? You have this scene, and you have to create music that's going to enhance that, because movies without music are just dead. And so you created something that, that that that made this succeed. Right here. What I'm trying to do is is, is create things that will provide lasting value, give
people frameworks they can use so that they can improve their businesses and their organizations and the lives of people in there.
Adam Outland: I think there's a real good message in that for all of us, which is that instead of getting tied up in a job description a good chunk of life, especially for a young person, is about discovering not the job they want to do, but maybe some of the aspects that they enjoy that could be applied to a lot of jobs, problem solving, something that you can do in all those different ways and places. You know, yeah, maybe this is related. If there's a piece of advice that you would give yourself when you were 21 knowing all the things that you know now, I guess, what would you what kind of feedback or advice would you give to a young version of you?
Greg DeVore: It's all gonna work out like, you know, when you're young, you can get so caught up on like, I need this one thing to happen or, you know, and the fact is, is there's going to be lots of hard things, lots of curveballs that get thrown your way that you didn't expect. But if you're just stay focused on dealing with what you need to deal with, keep your life in order surround yourself with good people, it's going to work out you don't need to fear things as much.
Adam Outland: Yeah, really good. This has been an awesome interview. Thank you for making this time to talk with us and share some of these anecdotes and stories and advice. I guess, if you want to leave our listeners with one, one actionable thing that they could take away from this, what would be the action that you would say they could take for the business owner type listeners that dial in here?
Greg DeVore: If they really want to delegate something or they want to improve onboarding, sit down and just write down on a spreadsheet, what are all the questions that you get asked, the tasks that you need to perform, the problems you have to solve, giving yourself that clarity, and then asking yourself when somebody needs to do this, if I delegate it to them, how are they going to know how to do it? Just go through that exercise. You'll get so much clarity into what somebody you know, either onboarding someone or being able to delegate some of the things you're already doing.
Adam Outland: Wonderful Greg, if, if they want to find out more information, where can they find their book? Where can they learn a little bit and and follow you?
Greg DeVore: So the book they can find at findandfollowbook.com or my company is Screensteps. Screensteps.com. I'm also on LinkedIn. Greg DeVore, you know, LinkedIn, slash.com/greg DeVore, I post a lot there as well.
Adam Outland: Perfect, Greg. Thanks for giving us your time.
Greg DeVore: No, thank you. You make it very easy.