62: The Power of Business Processes- with Moustafa Moursy

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[00:00:43] Erin Courtenay: You have. Have I, have I heard of it?

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[00:00:46] Erin Courtenay: I am a little addict, yes. Yes, in fact, it's brought my whole family together. I mean, sometimes it tears us apart a little bit when people are not, you know, able to do as well as they want to do, but yeah, yeah, it's the total. And you'll love this. Apparently Gen Z and Millennials also like this game. It's bringing us all together. It is, Yes.

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[00:01:31] Erin Courtenay: Totally. Apparently there's a lot of Tik Toks that are just like spoofs on the whole ridiculousness of some of the categories. I have not watched those yet. But yeah, no, I'm, I'm here for it. Connections, Strands and wordle is how I start my day every day.

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[00:01:53] Erin Courtenay: I hate it. I hate it. But I'm obliged because you know, the family.

So many spinoffs on that one, but let's dive into what we got going on today. Our guest. is Moustafa Moursy. He is a deeply experienced entrepreneur who empowers business owners to scale rapidly by rationalizing and mastering processes specific to their circumstances.

Moustafa leads Push Analytics, a top consulting firm, consultancy firm, my apologies, helping businesses grow and optimize their business processes. His strong technical foundation and expertise in B2B sales and sales leadership allow him to combine complex processes and technology stacks to deliver custom hyper focused systems that maximize efficiency, profits, and market share. By observing functions, conversing with principals and creating elegant structures, Moustafa and Push generate rapid growth and help businesses more powerfully serve and expand their core markets.

Welcome to the show.

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[00:02:55] Lori Highby: This is going to be a great conversation. I mean, everyone, especially in the manufacturing space, it's all about processes and efficiencies and technology is the hot topic these days. So.

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Yeah. I mean, I think that might be why I ended up here. Right. So.

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[00:03:32] Erin Courtenay: That's where you, that's where you learn where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. We're so glad to have you here today.

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[00:03:41] Lori Highby: Yeah, let's dive in right away. So what is the most common, most productive or biggest ROI business process improvement you help business owners accomplish?

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Your business is almost like, it's like a body almost. When you come in and you have, somebody's on a diet and they go tell somebody else, Hey, I'm on a diet. The other person's like, I'm not, I just eat whatever, and he's like, well, but you still are on a diet. Your diet is just that you eat whatever. And you know, that's not going to have good results for you. Right. So no matter what. Your business has processes, you know, and when we're doing like a webinar, we usually ask where you think it is. And it's a trick question when people say, I don't have because it does have, because process is just how you're getting from point A to point B, just like, you know, your diet is just whatever you eat and you have to eat something.

Now, whether you're paying attention to it or not, it's a different story. And that's why it's very important to understand this because, just like your diet, when it's something that. It's going to be there whether you like it or not. And if you decide to ignore it, the effects are going to be there, whether you like it or not.

So it's something that's really important to pay attention to. That's the first thing. The second thing is in anything in business, you know, right, marketing and all this stuff or whatever, there's always like, a certain level of which like things are in your court, but then sometimes.

All right. So for example, manufacturing happens a lot. You go to a trade show, You could prep the best material for the trade show, have a really good table, it's a really good trade show, but for whatever reason that day. The weather's bad and people aren't there. Or like, you know, it's, it's, it's a common thing. Like manufacturer reps, like any trade show you go to, everybody knows it's hit or miss. A lot of times you go and just talk to the other manufacturers or sometimes you go, it's pretty good. Even if you do everything right, it doesn't really matter.

Right. The ball isn't fully in your court right. Now with processes though it is. It's, it's actually the only thing that I know of that the ball is fully in your court. Like you have the full ability to, you know, it's as guaranteed of an ROI as you're going to get.

You could get ROI. You couldn't like ads. You could spend a lot of money. Some people can come, maybe it's a bad ad, maybe they don't. But with processes, it's pretty much guaranteed. Like you already have this stuff flowing through your system and you got to just clean it up and make more out of it.

So that's why, that's why I think process in general is the biggest ROI thing that you could do for your business. And especially in manufacturing where, you're already building stuff. A lot of things are happening and process could really make or break it.

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Which camp are you in? Being efficient is going to lose jobs or being efficient is going to help us do more cool things.

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Like, I definitely am for making it better for people. I mean, you could think of it though, as like, if you're a cause, cause you see this a lot, like if you're a business and you don't really have good processes and you don't have efficiency, what's going to happen is if they're really bad, actually, people are going to be very frustrated.

It's impossible to do their job. Let's just say, you know, you have a sales quota of whatever, 2 million a year, but it's impossible to actually sell that much because there isn't really a good support system in place. There isn't a good process in place. There isn't a good way to like, send the order to the factory.

Everything's a mess. You know, customers keep yelling at you because your order is all wrong. You know, every time something ships, and I worked in construction, so if something ships and it's wrong, it's, it's a disaster. Like nobody can build the building. A whole, like a 30 story hotel in Manhattan just went down because like, you're equipment and everybody's yelling at you.

It's like being in a movie theater. And you're standing there and you're the reason people can't watch the movie. Like you're kind of blocking the screen for whatever reason. Everybody's just looking at you. Like, imagine that's the level of like, anxiety or whatever. Right. You have to have thick skin, but that's the level of like, pressure that's on you because it's not even your fault.

It's like something in the process or the factory or some, like the company's corporate's processes that don't work out too well. You didn't do anything wrong, but that's just the reality. Right. So no ask anybody in that position, would you rather that the company had a little bit better processes and this order wasn't mistaken. Or like, you know, you had a little bit easier time selling and they would say yes. So, I think it depends on kind of the angle we're taking. But yeah, that's, that's kind of my approach. My approach is to really empower your people and make sure that they can actually do the job that they're supposed to do.

Because a lot of times you see it happen. They can't even really do the job they're supposed to do. Unless they over strain themselves. And even then what ends up happening is they just leave, right? They just rotate. So it's actually worse for everybody because you're good people.

Maybe, I mean, maybe some people who aren't so good end up staying because it doesn't really matter anyways, but the people who actually want to get it done, who are actually good workers, they end up leaving because they just get frustrated.

Like, I can't get anything done. This sucks. And you know, and this is too stressful. The competitors offer me X and I'm just going to take that and leave. That's all the times it ends up happening.

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You, one, free up people to do their job better or to do maybe another role better. And two, you know, people that aren't contributing know that this isn't the place for them. So it really ends up benefiting all people on the team.

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One of the first things we say is optimize your lead process, like how you deal with leads. Right. you know, whether you're bidding jobs or whatever, optimizing that, cause a lot of times as a company, you're quoting out all these things You're just don't have a good way of following up. So things fall between the cracks. Any person who's in sales would love to get more orders, you know, if the process was better, like anybody who's good in sales would love to do that. And you know, if you had a way that you can show like, okay, you can get more orders this way.

I mean, they wouldn't want that. Right. And people will, sometimes some people will say like, Oh, I'm, you know, I'm really good at remembering, which is fine. And some people are right. But If I had a busy week or two weeks and I put out 20 quotes, and I'm really good at remembering, and I remember to follow up with 18 of them.

I mean, that's pretty good, but that also means I missed two, which is 10%, right? But those two, that could be like, you know, a hundred thousand, 200, 000, 300, 000 in lost revenue or more if one of them were going to be an order, right?

Which is very possible. And it's very possible that you're not following up, lost it, lost it for you. So, again, like, some of it even kind of goes beyond that. And again, it would actually be helping a lot of the people. And if you ask any salesperson, especially if they're paying on commission, would you like to be, selling 10 percent more?

I think they will all say yes.

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[00:10:55] Moustafa Moursy: Yeah. I think it's helpful to look at your processes, like periodically and see, like, assess like, Hey, where are we at? And if you've never done this, then do it now. If you've done it recently, then you're going to know. If you don't know that you've done it, then you didn't do it probably.

Right. So, you know, it's helpful to look and like, see. What we do, and this is what I was alluding to earlier, is that we assess that we've kind of break out like the business, it's like different types of processes. We, we put like a process board up of the lead process, the actual sales process, then the onboarding process, which is very important.

You know, there's a lot of friction that happens between sales and onboarding that just everybody is frustrated, including the workers. And a lot of issues actually happen at that point, especially for things that, that are more complex. And that's something that people don't really pay that much attention to.

Cause they assume like, oh, we already got the order or whatever. That's where all the headaches originally originate. Anyways. And then the operations and like fulfillment side of things and then like the support and the backend side of the manufacturing processes and stuff like that, but that kind of goes into operations. So, so kind of like look at the different types of processes and the way the order I set them in is kind of the simple way of looking at it, which is look at the most important thing in your business, which is the customer and see like, Not to say the journey exactly.

Cause you're looking at it from the company's perspective, but see the steps the customer kind of takes. And then what does that mean for the company? Right. So, people ask, how's that different than the customer journey? Because customer journey is mainly looking at it from the point of view of the customer only, whereas here it's looking at it from kind of almost like both, right. When the customer requests a quote, well, now we have to, take this document and pass it along to our quoting team and then have engineering review it. If there's something custom and then do this and then do that.

I would recommend doing like a thorough kind of review of where you're at now.

And we always start like consults, like telling people, like, look, Tell me where you are right now. And there's no like wrong answers. There's no bad answer. even if your process is that we write something on a napkin and we hand it to like the guy at the factory to build, right, that's fine, but we still need to know because you have to understand where you are now so that then we can take that and where you want to go and then, you know, put on the GPS and get there, right?

nd doing that, especially for: 2024

[00:13:04] Lori Highby: Sure, yeah, that makes sense.

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What are some things just like what would you throw out there? What would you put on that napkin if one of our listeners was to say what are the things I can do right now for immediate ROI and how will those changes lead to self funded innovation in long term growth?

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And that's what they want quoted, right? And it was kind of like half joke, half real thing. Cause I guess they would, you know, you'd meet with a contractor or something at a diner and they just be like, I have a, or have a job. And instead of giving you a set of drawings, they're like. Here's what I need. And just scribbles it and hands it to you. Quote. I mean, if you were going to absolutely like the first thing you're going to start, I would say would be kind of what I said, take it from the beginning and take it from your lead management process. I was telling this somebody the other day and And he was like well, we don't really do leads. I'm like, what do you, what do you mean? He's like, we bid jobs.

I'm like, well, yeah, that's, that's leads. He's like, well, we just bid them. I went, but you have to follow up on them. Right. Right. So it's, it's so like, it's still a lead, like, so yeah, I mean it very broadly in the sense that your first step towards interfacing with the customer, That process just take a look at that. You know, again, with quoting, it's very common, people get caught up in quoting so much. And even a big companies, by the way, This happens everywhere, right? People are caught up with quoting so much and just exhausting for the salespeople and every special, you got to quote a lot.

If you're working at the more complex level, which a lot of people who are manufacturer sales will be right. Is this complex equipment, complex orders, whatever it's usually the manufacturer reps are getting involved in the more complex stuff. And there's like agents or something like handling the reps, or distributors handling thestraightforward stuff or whatever.

They also handle complex stuff too. You want to look at that because you don't want things falling between the cracks and then you don't want to be like, Spending a lot of effort.

That's not getting you anywhere. And there's this huge customer and it's like one of the biggest, Possible customers in the area. We're trying to get them. We have one or two people quoting them a whole lot, but then it turns out we quoted them 20, 30, 40 jobs and got nothing.

You guys are telling me that you didn't win any of these jobs. There's no way, right? I mean, you wouldn't be in business, right? So, so what are we doing? So then we got to have a conversation of like, Do you guys actually want to work with us or are we just wasting time? So, and again, you're never going to be able to do that if you're just kind of looking day to day and you don't have any checkpoint in your process.

And again, it doesn't even have to be that you need this fancy system. I mean, you could, it should be like a human process because processes we're going to end this in a little bit. Is, is a big part of it, is actually the human element. But even if you just have the human element, even if you're putting it on a spreadsheet and you're like, let's just list every job we quote and then every week let's just make sure we go through them. Check off that we followed up on them. And every month let's go through, you know, the last month. But every month, let's kind of go through and do a look back of three months or four months or whatever, and see where are we actually getting business from? And that's a simple thing. It doesn't even involve the tool. It's just a spreadsheet.

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[00:16:18] Moustafa Moursy: Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm particularly tidy or untidy, but also depends if you ask my wife, she's going to have opinions, but yeah, right.

But I mean, I do like to be mentally organized. I think it's a little bit different than maybe physically organized. So I do like to be mentally organized because I think that being mentally organized helps you get to the bottom of things very quickly.

And people resonate with that, you know, heavily because they're like, we've had people like even executive level who would, after a meeting or presenting it. Like, thank you for helping us understand their own business better. You know, even though that wasn't even the point of that call, but because we kind of mapped it out and showed it and now they're starting to see, Oh, this connects with this and this connects with this.

And then they're like, Oh, like now it's like a lot, very mentally clear. So I like having that mental clarity. Yeah, I've, I've seen it, right. So I've seen like kind of the results. I guess I have that unique perspective of like, I've actually worked it.

So a lot of times what people do is. They'll kind of have somebody who's working on, we hired so and so person who worked on Wall Street or something to do our sales process. And then everybody's like, who is this guy? What does he know about selling? Like, you know, whatever airplanes or whatever it is that you're selling.

And it's true. That person usually doesn't know. And then it's just like, ends up being like, two kind of entities talking like different languages and nothing really gets done. Right. So, having actually worked it and like knowing like what works and what does it I think it's, it's really cool to be able to see it from both sides.

You know, while looking at the overarching view, I know what this step looks like, I know what it means for a salesperson, I should get up and have to follow up, four or five times or whatever and I know that what you're asking this person to do is ridiculous.

And you can't ask somebody to follow up three times in one day, cause it's not practical. And then the last thing is I've always been interested in two different things at once which is the business side of things.

And the technical side of things, you know, I studied engineering but I didn't want to set a desk at the time. I didn't know what options were. And that's why I went into when one of my friends who was older I was like, what'd you do? And he was like, sales engineering.

He's like, oh, well you can, you sell, but you're also like engineering and system. I'm like, that's really cool. Like I didn't know you could use both skills at the same time. That's kind of like how I basically started. Because I wanted to use both things which, seemed kind of obvious to me, but I guess it's kind of rare, because usually people kind of gravitate one way or the other, and I'm kind of like, that center, I can do both very well.

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[00:18:34] Moustafa Moursy: Yes, exactly. That's a good way to describe it.

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[00:18:41] Erin Courtenay: Oh, this fits with my thing I just learned.

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All right, Erin finish the sentence. What did you just learn?

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You might've been familiar with like spirals and nature and Leonardo da Vinci and so forth. Well, the, golden mean in sort of philosophy and discussion and arguments and I think it's such a cool idea to think about right now because what it is, is it's that middle path that really brings two super opposing sides together.

And I mean, it is sort of a mythical, you know. Right now, we all know how hard that is, but just the idea that there is a path and that it is sort of this exalted position where both sides really feel heard and like they can move forward. So I was excited to, to learn that there's the golden ratio and like sort of the physical world and the golden mean in the interpersonal world.

And I hope we can get there. All of us.

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[00:20:01] Moustafa Moursy: Thanks.

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[00:20:03] Moustafa Moursy: The golden ratio is like, yeah. Some people are really fascinated by the golden ratio. Mm-Hmm. And I, I went to engineering school and one of the architectural students, he was so fascinated by it and he always wanted to like design everything, to match up the golden ratio.

And was always very interesting.

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[00:20:28] Moustafa Moursy: Yeah. It's pretty cool like that. I feel like it just manifests its way. Like nature.

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You can take it all a little too far, but it's cool to, you know. What about you, Lori? What have you just learned?

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That's easy way to think about it. Right. The hunter gathers. So in, in that mindset, historically, we've always pictured them like eating a big dinosaur bone meat, you know, right?

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[00:21:15] Lori Highby: Yeah, like they're the meat eaters. But the study found like based on bones and teeth from that period that they were actually plant eaters.

And I thought that was interesting because there's a lot of diets like the paleo diet that's like an all meat diet. So like the whole thinking of this is completely inaccurate.

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[00:21:47] Moustafa Moursy: Interesting. Well, I was going to go with something else, but what Lori said actually gave me something that I had just learned about diet, which is, and this could be like a whole podcast, but I learned recently that the way that they calculate calories, like, you know, when you see on a meal and it's like, Oh, this is 200 calories is so approximate on so many levels.

Even though we take it as like, you know, definite facts. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

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[00:22:20] Moustafa Moursy: Yeah. No, it is. I and there was like, there's like a bunch of things, like I sat down and read through like how they calculate, cause they each food group like the protein, the carbs and the fats, right? And then they, everybody just uses the same the same number of like calories per gram or whatever. It's like nine for fat and I think five for carbs and protein, regardless of however they came. It's just always the same. And then even they approximate the protein based on nitrogen. So anyways, there's like so many layers of approximation. It's very interesting. It's very interesting. You know, so, yeah, it's, it's not, it's not as hard.

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[00:22:54] Erin Courtenay: Yeah. My husband went through a little phase where he was into the calories and he got this calorie king. It's like this little book and you look up any food, like a whole food or a food from fast food or anything. And it would, and I was like, how do they know? How did the calorie king know how many calories there are in a Whopper? I'm not buying it.

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[00:23:21] Moustafa Moursy: And, and it's in the way they even came up with the concept of calories. I think one of the original things, and don't quote me, this is in my field, but one of the original things was like I think somebody kept with this device called like a bomb kilometer or something, which basically they're just burning different things.

Yes. And seeing how much they heat water, but it's like. Okay, hold up. Our bodies are not necessarily like, you know, six cylinder diesel engines or something like, you know, so it's like maybe yours isn't. Yeah, right. I don't know. So it's like, does this, I don't even think that guy would have wanted us to go as far as we did today with like, whatever he was trying to do, right?

I'm not saying it's, you know, obviously it's still useful directionally, but it's right directionally.

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[00:24:00] Moustafa Moursy: I think it's only as full directionally because, and I think one big thing and why a lot of people struggle with this is that it doesn't really take into account the type of food that you're eating.

It doesn't take any other factor into account.

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[00:24:13] Moustafa Moursy: Yeah. Yeah.

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[00:24:17] Lori Highby: This was a super fun episode, Moustafa. If anyone's interested in connecting with you, what's the best way that they can reach you?

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com put in that you came from this podcast. And my team can get a meeting booked with me directly. And for anybody listening here if you're coming from the podcast we want to offer you especially manufacturing, I love manufacturing.

We want to offer you you know, like a free process audit. So like, let's sit down and actually like look through your processes which is pretty intensive, but we want to offer that like care for free here. So again, mentioned you came from podcasts. You could say, Hey, I want to take you up on this and we'll schedule a call and get that going.

It could be, and it could be, it's going to be a little bit different for each org. I mean, depending on what tools and systems you're using and where your processes are at. So we'll discuss that on the initial call you know.

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We'll include all that information in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

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[00:25:18] Lori Highby: All right. This is three broads, two of them today, wrapping up. We encourage you to go out and make something awesome.