Episode 2 Transcript

Heather:
Hello, I have a question for you. What should I work on next? Seems to be the question that most of us who are overwhelmed and busyed out in our businesses ask. What should I do next? Welcome to episode two. That's what we're gonna cover. As, for normal in these episodes, these solo episodes with me, I have stories to tell and things to share about what I'm working on in my life and business as well that I hope can help you guys answer that question. maybe in a way that makes you feel happy and not overwhelmed. So let's start with busy, being busy for busy's sake, right? Being busy for busy's sake. You've probably heard that term a lot. And as a business owner, I wanna put a different slant on it. As a business owner, you're gonna be busy. We are busy, right? We have a lot of things happening. So I think that this question takes a different slant when actually speaking a growing successful business. So business that's been around for a couple of years that has team that's growing. Being busy for busy sake is different. And the idea is this is if you're growing a business, this to me means that you might be working on the wrong things and not knowing where to put your time, right? So it can be like literally, Hey, where do I find that file? Because maybe you didn't have a good enough system to store your time. it somewhere or maybe it's that you don't have a good scheduling tool or scheduling process. So you're busy trying to track down somebody's details to try and reach out to them or your Zoom link to send off to somebody because you don't have a grasp on systems. So you're busy being busy with stuff that shouldn't be worked on in your business anymore at this level of growth that you are in your business. And again, I'm speaking for businesses that are already past. sort of startup that are starting to bring on team or have team and that just keep spinning their wheels doing stuff that they keep going like, yeah, I'm spending a great deal of time on this thing that is really not driving the needle in my business. So let me tell you a little story. Actually, this was something that I was working on this morning. So in addition to running my business website love, I do consulting and speaking and coaching. for a company. And what that means is basically I stand in from time to time to assist with the marketing, not full-time marketing officer, right? So I work with the marketing team and I'm looking at the numbers and I'm developing better dashboards and I'm looking at how we bring down cost per acquisition, all those sorts of things. So this morning one of the things we're looking at is knowing the fact that with your clients it's cheaper to upsell more services to clients that you already have. rather than to acquire a new customer. So we were looking at this new pipeline of what we could do to, you know, I guess on-sell to the current clients more. And nothing like that had happened for quite a while in this business, if ever. So we launched this really cool new series of masterclasses, live webinars, and we call them the Scale Up series. And what's really cool about that is that basically we're allowed to, or we're going into and we're giving them other opportunities to work with this business. And I'm only bringing this up because the topic was really timely based on this episode that I already had planned out. And it was, um, the idea of not having sort of a central place in your business where you control your projects and your data. That problem, like I was just saying before, busy being busy trying to find files, busy being busy trying to find old emails. trying to search through Slack. You know what I mean, right? So it's like busy, busy, busy doing, spending all your time trying to find messages without actually doing work that you should be doing. So in this initial masterclass that we're doing for the clients, we basically mapped out like the architecture of your company for your processes. And looking at what your central hub of all things truthful in your communications is. And this could be, project management tool. So we're talking a bit about, you know, project management tools. And in this case, we're talking about Asana, I use Asana actually too. And there's Trello, there's Monday.com, there's a lot out there. But really talking about the importance of not only having something like this, a project management tool, but using it properly as well. So we're going into examples of, you know, why you would want a tool like this and how you would use it, your business to help you focus on the things that matter to you most. And it was great because it was a good reminder to me as well about revisiting the systems that you have and also making sure that your team's on board with that because that will help you actually work on things that are more important for your business but also remove overwhelm. I don't know about you guys but there was a time when my storage like my actual folders like storage would be in my emails like I still have folders in my emails my inbox but I'd Everything in there. Embarrassingly enough, I had everything on the hard drive of my computer. I'll talk about what I've done in my business coming up shortly and what we are using now to save time. But man, those were the days and like literally I would go and open my zoom and every single time I'd book a call with somebody, be happy to go into my zoom because it didn't take the time to save my zoom link, meeting room link somewhere I could just easily copy and paste it. So there's all these like busy being busy things like you just For some reason we get blocks and we're like, oh, it's just what I've always done or it's all too hard to set up a system. So I'm just going to keep wasting an extra minute or two doing this thing that makes no sense. Right. So it was a really great sort of moment today to help me solidify this episode and the importance of talking through the concept of not really knowing what to look at in your business, like what to study, what to review, where to find your files, sort of stuff, having a central architecture, a central place in your business where everything exists, where you can actually get on with it, so to speak. So I want to talk to you about my business and what we use in my business. And then I actually want to also share with you about a simple system that I set up for a charity that I'm a part of as well. Because I think between the two, maybe we'll get you thinking about the simplicity of setting up systems as well as maybe just a nice time to revisit what you're using in your own business. business. So for my business website love, we also use Asana, just like what I was talking about in the master class, we were doing the Scalelup series, where we were teaching, you know, those business owners the importance of it using it. I use it too, I could use it better, everyone can always improve things right in their business. But I use that. So basically in there, I have for, so we build websites as one of the different things that we do in our business, and we have website templates. So every time we have a new client that comes on board, we load in the pre-built to save huge amounts of time. And we load that into our Asana for a new client and it's already built in with a task list. That the project manager, the copywriter, and the graphic artist can go in and tick things off as they go. And then I can go in and see at any given moment as the founder where we are up to with the project, which is really, really, really handy. Now, the idea of having templates is great, but also not getting stagnant on them. So every single year, team, specifically my project manager, and I'll say, what can we improve? What are we missing? And we're always crafting and fine tuning that template. So we're not running a business on a template from five years ago. So that's one thing that we do that's in Asana. So we sort of have our main systems, or I suppose our flow that we work on with clients in our Asana. And then we have different teams, whether it's the website team, whether it is the ads team, you know, things like that. We have a maintenance team to do the maintenance on our websites that we run as well or that we look after. Next we use Slack. So here's the thing and this I learned this actually this morning in the master class interestingly enough. So with Slack I love it for having those those ongoing little chats with people but you have to be careful that you don't start storing everything in Slack because this is where you get busy being busy trying to find files and coms or communications with your team, right? You're like, oh God, where was it? Was it in Slack or Sona? I do this with my developer a lot. I'll just Slack something and then we're like, where did it go? Where did it go? I'm trying to get better about it. But that's the thing, it's like you have to be really clear on what you're using and what it's for. So Slack really ultimately would be used for really quick questions, things that don't have to be stored in a project management tool, for example. So I'm getting better at using Slack. CRM system. For CRM, we use onto reports. You know, there's HubSpot, there's Salesforce, there's Active Campaign, there's so many out there, right? But that's what we use. I've used it back in the day since it was called Office Autopilot. I don't wanna say that was in 2010. I've seen many iterations over the years. Doesn't really matter, you know, what CRM system you use. I think the main things are that you wanna have a pipeline in there for your sales team or your sales process. You have a sales pipeline that's in there. You have the ability to segment your email lists into customers versus non-customers or prospects. the ability to really, if you send out communication, you can find the exact group of clients or prospects that you wanna send that communication out to. Automations are really important in a good CRM system. So for me in our business, we use this as the hub for our client profiles, our prospects sending out our emails. We have automations for funnels. So somebody signs up for a webinar. I do webinars as well with our tribe. By the way, if you want invites to those, you can go to hustlerebellion.com and you can sign up to get alerts about the podcast and there's other resources on there and you'll get invitations to the masterclasses I do. But with these masterclasses, we have automations for that too that we set up. So all of our masterclass, automated emails, all of our forms that we set up on the website and the landing pages, all that's run through our CRM system. So it's a good snapshot of where somebody is in the pipeline with us. from the time they join the email list all the way through to becoming a customer through the purchases that they have. It's all stored in that. Next, I use Google Drive for my SOPs, so my systems and procedures like my docs around processes. And yeah, there's other tools out there. There's something called Sweet Process that I've just recently heard about. There's Process Street that I used to use way back in the day. But how I work is every system that we have, we just do Word doc. So my business relies heavily on Word doc. on Google Drive for storing files. And we link to these files from inside of Asana, for example. But we have a big file structure in there, and one of them is systems. We have subfolders in there for all the things that we do. So whether it's how to do SEO content for our own business, so our internal processes versus onboarding for new clients, it's all in there. And how we work this is that whenever we need a new system, it's always I will actually give the basics to our project manager and then I'll get, or my assistant, and I'll get him or her to actually create the document and we'll do some loom videos in there, some little recording videos. So the idea is that I'm not wasting time being busy in the future. So if we have something that is consistently done in the business, it's like, cool, it's in that systems document or the systems folder in Google Drive. And go in there and do it. You know, it's always there. and improving on the systems docs. And not too long ago, by the way, I had an assistant who had to leave the company for another job. She loved working here. It's not that. But she just she wanted to try something new and different. So she did that. And she mapped out all these SOPs, and I just handed them to my new assistant. And it was so brilliant, because they were already there. And I didn't have to waste a week of my time retraining on stuff that I'd already trained the previous assistant on, right? So SOPs or systems file in Google Drive is what I do, but you know, you choose you choose you and what's going to work for you. Now, another thing that I've done recently to save me a lot of time is setting up calendly properly with the automations and the linking into my Google calendar. So what I mean by that, like I said at the start of this episode, I used to literally just go in and I'd grab the link and I have to email it out to people. God, it was so time consuming. So now it's properly set up. my Google Calendar, it automatically generates a Zoom link. So it's linked to my Zoom, I use Zoom. And it's, if by the way, if somebody chooses Zoom, so they have preference to choose phone or Zoom. So if they choose Zoom, it automatically generates a Zoom link, puts it in the calendar, sends them a calendar invite, it's all automated. I don't have to do anything, my team doesn't have to do anything, it's all in there. And I have different automations that go out based on the different calendar bookings that somebody chooses, whether it's an interview for this podcast, which there's a whole system for, is a paid coaching call, whether it is a discovery call, whatever it is, there is like an automation behind it to make our life easy and the Zoom link gets auto-generated and everything is so good. That's something. A Google Calendar, if it's not on my Google Calendar, it's not gonna happen. I have it color-coded for personal stuff, for my Pilates classes, I go about four times a week to Pilates to keep myself going. Health is important, so I have that color-coded in there. I have my coaching calls a certain color, team calls a certain color, and then I like to see when things are done. So I actually go in and then I change everything to green when I've done it. And I just easily move things around. So to me, that's a really great flow. These are the core systems in my business are tools that we use. It saved me a lot of busy work, busy for the sake of being busy work. And it's really streamlined what I'm able to do because our business is growing, my team's growing. have something where I feel secure about the growth and then I know that people are getting looked after and I know that I'm getting looked after as well, that I am taking time to look after myself. So I just wanted to leave you, I guess, with a couple of other last thoughts and one of them was the simplicity of a system that I just set up for another thing I'm working on. So I'm a volunteer for a women's shelter here in the Sydney area and what happened is that I have a small, we have a small team, right? So we have the chair that we report to, we have a board member that heads off the committee that I'm part of, and then we have our committee members. And a big part of what we do is the emails, like the EDMs and also the social media posts. And we were constantly getting bombarded with like lots of different emails coming in from people. And then everyone was CC'd in and it was like, oh my God, who's doing what, who's doing what? So you guys, I literally am like, okay, we've got to fix this problem. This is how quick you can create a little system, right? So I'm like, how are we gonna do this? Okay, set up a Google Doc and I said, okay, oh, and a calendar. So calendar of events and a Google Doc, all in Google Drive. And I went out to the team and I said, okay, whenever there's something new, a thing that needs to be posted on social media, a new event, here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna put the event into the calendar and you're just gonna email me, not the rest of the committee because I head off a subgroup of the committee. just me when there is a new event that's been added and when you have new content that needs to be put on social. I then copy and paste that stuff from the socials that need to be put out from the emails I keep getting and I put it into a document. Now my team that I support they know that that's like the Holy Grail right so they just they look at that. I look at the calendar with the rest of the team we're constantly strategizing with that but my the doers that help with the social media posts they only look at that doc that's it They don't have to be worried about all these emails flowing back and forth anymore because I removed them from getting them. They only look there, has their name, it has the date of the post and then content and then they go out and create the graphics. So that's as fast as it took. It was something that was going on and on for two weeks. Everyone was overwhelmed, nothing was getting done. I sat down for 10 minutes and I created these documents and I just told the team, this is what we're gonna do, essentially to make our lives easier. So, and it's working so well. So there's just an example, you guys, of thinking strategically about systems, right? Little tweaks over time to help you with your overwhelm, to help you with your stress, to help you just breathe deeper into running your business. So I want to leave you with a question and a tool. Really cool tool that I've come across recently is Brain FM. I use it for the focus mode. It's like scientifically proven music for helping your brainwaves. in there, one's called Focus. So I go on and click on Focus. If I want to just do 60 minutes of solid work, it turns off all your phone alerts. It's like a really cool meditative track. I'm not good listening to music and doing work, but this is different. It plugs like right brain waves into my brain, and then I can sit there and for 60 minutes be really focused on something I want to get done. So Brain FM is a really cool tool. And I want to leave you with a question as well. If you into your week ahead. If you were trying to bring more joy into your week ahead, what would you choose to say no to and what would you choose to say yes to? Think about that. What would you say no to and what would you say yes to if you wanted more joy in your week ahead? So something to percolate on and we are at the end of episode two so thank you so much for being here for tuning in. I always like chat, even though we're new in the game of this podcast. And look, if you like this episode, let other people know. And also come on over to hustle rebellion.com. That's where we have the additional resources and things that we talk about in these shows. So that's it for this time. Until next time, enjoy your week ahead and also be thinking about that question. Hopefully it's a little bit more joyful. Talk soon.