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

in this video I'm going to open the kimono and let you take a peak 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 dice 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 and showing you our exact you know notion setup every sing single operating system that we build out across all of our portfolio companies they all start uh right here inside of good old Google sheet so 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 need to have your value engines your playbooks will we referred to as your high output team canvas scorecards meeting Rhythm and Clarity Compass so 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 uh value engines 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 what we 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 is which is which of these steps can we not afford to mess up and that's where we have this tool called The Playbook uh 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 in 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 um and so you can see here these are a number of our operating systems um you can see here we've got a number of growth engines we have a number of fulfillment engines uh in our setup in notion it does allow us to

go through and sort based on those but it's pretty easy uh to find now if I were to zoom into this particular um case study here right if I were to zoom into this one um there's a a screenshot or this actually links off to the you know the actual one in in Whimsical uh 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 uh piece of

our operating system framework and they're here this is our Playbook Vault so once a Playbook has been created uh we can then create it here uh and it you know 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 uh owns this Playbook what is the Playbook type and so we got is 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 the standard operating procedure is kept up to date and it is still useful and if it hasn't been up to date uh if it isn't useful then everybody knows who they need to go to to get it uh updated and that's why this other piece when was it last edited did 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 uh we do like to have a loom walkthrough video and then it's just basic step-by-step any any relevant links so not overly complicated uh 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 uh 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 um 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 uh the marketing team um 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 uh easy it's very linkable and then if I go over here to company goals you can see here we've got our 12q 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 uh the next one is the meeting

Rhythm how often are we going to meet uh to discuss this we do have a company calendar where our meeting Rhythm uh sits and then also each team when it's doing meetings their meetings are stored inside their their team section so this piece over here is 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 uh we'll get to that in just a second now we get to the last phase of the operating system buildout which is to systemize the actual

scale to begin to automate the decision-making process the tool that we need to do that uh 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 defense competitive advantages if you know where you're headed that's your three-year Target that's your your medium-term goal if you know why you're headed there your company purpose that that greater you know 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 uh 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 Cor values as well as this kind of an additional one 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 12q planning canvas that does give that three-year Target goal now this is important the company's starting point is uh $2,100,000 in profit in 3 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 recorder 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 scorec card we already talked about here's a link to our 12q plan and these are our quarterly Sprint uh plans I don't want to go into the specific ones but I can show you the template uh that we built inside of notion the time period company division because we are a holding company uh we from a revenue perspective set good better and best targets uh we've got unit goals U because it is quot 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 greenl for this quarter we can do project planning here uh 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 already go

into the marketing team uh can see their team key initiatives here as well just through doing some basic uh 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 you know went through today but what I hope that you see is that without this overarching picture without these different elements the best notion setup 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 going to 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 is 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 uh into how we you know work with clients to get this done U 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