The Truth About Honeybook for Entrepreneurs

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. Welcome, welcome to this episode today. I'm excited. I want to introduce you to a new system, a new piece of software, a SaaS program Something that we've been using in our business for quite a while. Really enjoy what I have inside this program. Is it perfect? No. But there are some things that I wanna share with you that make our jobs easier and make it easy for us to do what we have to do to service our clients. So I wanna share them with you. So the software that I wanna talk to you today about is HoneyBook. Don't know if you've heard of it before, but it is a great way to manage your client stuff. And we use it before they become clients. So we use it more of a lead system rather than a, a full CRM. We picked a CRM stuff and we put it in ClickUp. But you could totally use this all the way through if you're not using ClickUp. But for us, we use it as that lead gen piece. We use it to manage our contact stuff before they become clients. And for us, we actually use the tasks in ClickUp to manage our tasks about lead gen rather than doing that in HoneyBook. But they do have a task system in there. Like I said, not perfect, but for us, we love what we can get out of it. So let me just dive into it and tell you a little bit about You know what we use it for, what maybe you might like to use it for. And remember, if you have a system that is working for you right now and you're happy with it, don't jump ship. Okay? It costs time and money to move to a system, but if you're looking for something and maybe you have a system and you're like, nah, this isn't great, or that isn't great, or I use 3 systems to make what this one thing happen that we can do in HoneyBook, then it's a time for you to think maybe I should move. Okay? If you want to go over there, you want to talk about it, you can always get ahold of us at clientcare@kikicurl.ca. And tell us what is happening with you and maybe we can help you with it. But all in all, I wanna give you the information so that you can make an intelligent decision for yourself inside your business. Okay? This isn't to go buy this now. It's simply, here's a solution. Does it work for you? If not, that's fine, but keep it in your back pocket in case somebody else you hear is looking for something and you can help them with it. Okay? I always feel like the more information that we have, the better. A SaaS might not be good for what you're doing, but maybe one of your friends or other coworkers or You know, other entrepreneurs in your circle might be looking for something. So I like to listen and learn about things so I can share. All right, so let's talk about HoneyBook. Number one, managing our leads, managing our clients and all the communications and all that kind of stuff can get kind of crazy. Not knowing which stage people are in or how to move through those stages to be able to help them to make a decision whether or not you're the right person to work with. Keeping track of those things and the deadlines and the deliverables and all that kind of stuff, invoicing payments, Contract signing, all that kind of stuff. We can do a lot of that inside HoneyBook. Now you could do it all inside HoneyBook if you like. We choose to do part of it in HoneyBook, and I'll give you my whys as I move through. Okay? Number one, as a neurodivergent human being, it is important for us to find the things that work well for us. Some of us need a creative look around things. We need to see, it needs to be flashy and it needs to be colored and there needs to be a visual piece to it. And others need more of a black and white version to it. You know, for those of us who struggle with other things, maybe you need less numbers and more letters. Some people need more letters and less numbers. Whatever it is that works for your brain, you're looking for a solution that's going to help you to make sure that these pieces of your business are easy. They should not be difficult for you to manage. Okay, true story. If they are difficult for you to manage, try to figure out why. Dig in. What is it you like about what you're doing and you don't— which you're not doing? And find a solution that works for you. Okay, so true story. When it comes to communication, it's great because each person, each project has its own communication board. Basically, it's like an inbox for each person or each project where, let's say for example, there are 3 people on the project. There's yourself and maybe 2 people from the company that you're working with. All those emails going back and forth will stay right there in that project so you can see them come and go. All right. You can actually set HoneyBook up to use your email address instead of their Honeyman HoneyBook. I don't know what it's called, but they, they have a HoneyBook email sort of like mailer that it goes out as, but you can change that to your own domain and it doesn't mess with everything else, which is also beautiful. So like I said, we handle our leads here. So we have a HoneyBook lead form on our website. So when people fill that out, we get, it starts up their Project in HoneyBook. We communicate through HoneyBook with them. So all the emails we're doing before they become a client is all right there in that interface in HoneyBook. So that's really nice to be able to see it all in one place. We also get to move them through the stages. You know, is it time to send their proposal or is it time to meet with them? Or, you know, am I waiting for them to sign things, whatever. Some of the moves inside that timeline bar are done automagically because HoneyBook moves them. Like if you send a contract to somebody, it automagically puts them into contract sent. If they sign the contract, it automagically moves them into contract signed. So some of those things will be automagic. Other things, if you create a different stage on there, you'll have to move it yourself, but it is flexible enough to have different stages that are outside of their norm, which is beautiful as well, which also works for our brains. So you can invoice and pay through HoneyBook as well. And that I will say doesn't work well for us because we actually function in multiple currencies and HoneyBook is not quite yet ready to support that. So they'll only support one currency, which doesn't support my whole business. So therefore I don't use that portion of it. But if you only work one currency, it's beautiful. You can actually invoice and pay directly through it. It works really nicely. The, there are workflows as well. You can create workflows for moving people through. and do some automated stuff that way, saying, you know, if they do this, then the next thing is this, and if you do this, the next thing's that. So they've done some work on creating different workflows through that piece. They do say they have project management, but for us, it's not what we need. And of course, you know, we've been using ClickUp since 2019, so we're kind of ingrained there. We like to spend time there. And being a verified consultant with ClickUp, I spend most of my time there. So I don't use the project management piece, but you can assign tasks inside there and you can do some of that work in there as well. If it works for you, that's fantastic. Now the contracts is where they really shine. They will help you set up your first contract when you get inside there. It is nice because you can create, I mean, before HoneyBook, it was gross. I would have a document that was a Word document. And then I would have to adjust the Word document the way it needed to be. And then I would have to save that Word document as a PDF. And then I would have to take that PDF and I'd have to upload it to, I don't know, Signthority or wherever the heck I was using, because I had tried a couple of those and I'd have to upload it over there and then I'd have to email it. Okay. Like that's already way too many freaking steps. In HoneyBook, all I have to do is click on the templates. I open the template, make the adjustments I need to make and push send. It goes to them. It's a beautiful thing. And if, if they don't sign it right away, there's an email that goes out that says, hey, did you check this out? So I find that that alone is worth gold to me. That is like massively important to the way I do my business. So that is a huge, huge piece of save me a whole lot of crap of time. So we love, love, love using it for that. So for us, that was one of the main reasons why we moved to HoneyBook was because of the contracts. They are beautiful. You can have it auto-populate the pieces because you're bringing in information from the project. So like you can bring in the project name or you can bring in the first client name or the second client name and it just automagically populates into the document. Absolutely beautiful. So what those, that's the main reason why we moved over there. We do, however, like the ability for somebody to fill out a form on our website, for it to start that project in HoneyBook and for us to be able to follow through with that until they become a client. Once somebody becomes a client with us, we take all of our communication and we use ClickUp for that communication moving forward because we're not wanting to do that in 2 different places. So we're working on the project, we want to work on that project inside ClickUp and we stay there. But through the whole lead process, we're using HoneyBook for that entire process right up until they sign that document. And when we send them the welcome email and from there, Everything else happens in ClickUp. Okay. So for us, it was a huge, well, for me, it was a huge time saver to be able to use their contract system. And I had already a contract that I had created, obviously, in that Word document that I kept using over and over. And so they were able to use that to recreate it as a template for them. We've, of course, updated and changed it since because we've been with them for quite a while. But in that process, though, it was great to be able to have them start that for me. And then it was easier for me to tweak it as I went. So when I first got in there, the contract thing was a little bit clunky. It didn't feel very good. I know they've done some work on it since, but they're very good at helping you with that piece to get it going. And it has been a godsend. Certainly saved us a lot of time over the years that we've been in there. So for us, like I said, we have, we use their form on our website. We use the lead piece there. We keep it going through. We can see how many leads we have in different areas of the business. They've added different things now to allow us to be able to sort of, you know, put things in different silos, which has been great. And so they are doing a very good job listening as well to be able to make those updates. So for us, it's been very, very awesome and efficient. So if you are looking and any of those things I've mentioned, then you're like, ah, geez, yeah, that thing's a pain in the butt and this can solve it. We will drop the link below. Of course, it'll be an affiliate link for us. You can choose not to use our affiliate link if you so desire, but we will drop you a link below so as you quickly and easily get over and check and see whether or not HoneyBook is right for you. Okay. I hope you have a fantastic week. I look forward to talking to you next week. Bye for now. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. 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