How To Scale Your Agency's Operations With The Right System And People With Yvonne Heimann

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Welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray McKenzie and this week I've got the pleasure of bringing on. You guys will know her by a couple different names. Ask Evie. We're gonna go with the short version first onto the show. Evie. Yvonne. Welcome. Welcome to the podcast.

So much fun of having me. Thank you.

When did you get that handle? When did. When did you get the Ask Evie username?

So there is a funny story behind how that business name actually came about and therefore the username. I'm one to always wanting to know the answer. Right. I always Google stuff and all the things. And I had a friend visit, an old schoolmate of mine visit from Australia and on the trip to Vegas, she's like, so how does this work? Why is that happening? And constant question. And I'm like, what do you do? You grab your phone and you Google it. And. And she was joking around of I should start a website rather than Ask Google. Ask Eevee. And when it came around to name my business, I was going for askevon.com initially and that was a realtor website. So Ask Eevee was available and it became my business name.

That's awesome. It's funny when some people, like, if your name comes up, someone's like, hey, I saw ask Evie on YouTube or whatever. That's like all that they often. All that they know is ask you. So it's working. The branding's working.

It's. You always have to help a little bit with the spelling often enough. So if they haven't seen it before, if I do outreach or whatever, and it's like, no, it's not iv. It's Evie.

Yep. Oh, yeah, you've got every. Anytime I email anybody, I get back Gary. Pretty much every single time. Nobody, nobody thinks it's gray. They all assume that I misspelled my name, which is totally fine. But yeah, you've got. You're in the same boat because get a good friend. She says Yvonne. And so is it Yvonne? Is it Yvonne? Is it like what. What variation of it is it? Do you know what the original is? I'm assuming nobody knows what the original is. Right?

It's Yvonne. So Yvonne is French based.

Okay. Yeah.

And it is not spoken with the American Y. There is pretty much just only one person out there that's allowed to call me Yvonne. Everybody else I will fix. And it's like Wally. Yeah, it's like the E on the end, it's Yvonne.

Yep.

Well, there we go. It is the French based version. So try to order a Starbucks with Yvonne. It ends up being Evan. And yeah, so, yeah, we are both in the same boat.

I just asked Evie and we got it. We got a definitive answer. Well, that bodes well for the rest of this conversation. What? Tell me about the business right now. For folks who don't know what is your day to day look like, what are the offers? Kind of how's. How's your business structured?

So, interestingly enough, we have the perfect timing. Things are changing right now. So my focus is on helping digital entrepreneurs scale their operations, teams and office. That is the overlaying goal. And I have done so in the past through one on one consulting as well as courses and templates. Specifically when it comes to ClickUp. Now, I have gone through a whole bunch of certifications. I added NLP to add that personal aspect, that human aspect to all of it. And also in that process discovered I'm like, I don't want to just work in a silo of creating courses. I'm like, we all know one on one has that maximum capacity. There's just so much you can do. And so building digital products was an easy extension. We are already building templates with clients. We are laying out those processes. I'm like, I see systems where other people see chaos. So I turn everything into a template. So building those courses and templates was a natural extension. And I'm like, but I don't want to do that. That means I have to promote an advertise course number one, and then I have to promote an advertise course number two. And you do not want to confuse your audience because one is focused for agency, the other one is focused for content creators in general. Then you got podcast, and I'm like, I want to do that, but I also didn't want to do just a $25 membership kind of thing. And over the last month, it has really clarified for me. And what's happening right now is I'm taking all of those courses, all of those templates, all of those videos I have created and turning them into a resource library. So rather than people coming to me for just my podcast template or my agency template, or my live stream template, they now come and can learn the actual process behind it, how to build it out, how to use it, and grab the template if they want to. But between all of that, they don't have to choose with just one course. They can binge watch it all if they want to.

Yeah.

And that's what's happening behind the scenes.

Right now, is it? So you're Going the digital product direction. Will there still be a one on one element? Not necessarily of that offer, but like a separate. Will you take on, you know, X number of one on one clients?

I love, I love the energy of working with one on one clients. So yes, there will be a small amount of one on one clients. I already just work really just with a small amount because I want to be able to give my clients my all. And with that it already is a VIP offer. The extension to the all access digital content where you don't have to go scour YouTube and figure out which way works best for you will in the future have an upgrade for group consulting. So not just an office hour a weekend, you have to come to me to figure out didn't tell me what you need but rather the pro active approach of consistent training specifically based for people that are using ClickUp as a business. So that group coaching program is going to be focusing on Vas obms, people that base their business on ClickUp to help them build a business around ClickUp.

Yeah, I don't want to get too lost in this, but I'm just curious and I haven't asked you about this one before. You were involved with Minerva. If I'm saying that right, is that still a thing?

So Minerva has pivoted a little bit. So as a startup, you know how that goes. Minerva is an interactive how to tool. That's what I call it. So for everybody listening, what Minerva does is taking screenshots and having that little purple gizmo on your screen that tells you or your team how you do things and walks you through that. Now Minerva has pivoted from a, from a user base. So like you teaching your agency clients where to click on ClickUp to make something happen to more of a corporate style integrated solution. So yes, they are still around. They have simply pivoted in their startup approach to be that corporate solution rather than the end user.

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the ways that. Well, actually I'm going to. We're going to go two different places here. We're going to go to your background first. Then I've got a question about the YouTube side of things. Tell me a little bit of the EV story because you've, you've done a bunch of different stuff, which is cool before, kind of becoming, at least in my part of the world, like becoming the. Hey, here's Evie, one of the Faces of ClickUp on YouTube.

Pretty much what got me here is just following the yellow brick road. I'm like, what, what Gray is referring to is I've been doing hospitality since I was 16. I actually went to electrician school and did the whole I'm becoming an electrician thing. Moved to the States from Germany in 2007, went back into hospitality because it's the easiest. And then with my late husband, that that is where I ask Evie started to become what it is today. I filled that need for his clients of initially social media marketing and realized really fast written content is not my thing. Went into more of the systems and tools behind it, taught myself web design. Got pretty Darn Good at WordPress web design, but we all know how that goes. The cousin of a mother, of a brother of a father knows how to do that. Lost the interest on that simply because clients didn't seem to have quite the appreciation for all the work that I put in to do this right. And then simultaneously what happened is my late husband got diagnosed with cancer. I pretty much took two years off from business. And after he passed away, I looked at his business and my business and I'm like, we have all of the stuff here. What do we do with this? And I realized that people came to me for web design and left with full on business coaching. And that's when Ask EB started to become what it is today. And yeah, pretty much in the first year of ClickUp, I was annoyed with Asana because you have to have five assignees in there. You have to have five seats in there. I'm like, no, I don't Trello. You can't grow with. And I came. I don't even know how I came across ClickUp, but I came across ClickUp, did a Facebook Live video, talking through it, just being happy to have found the tool. And yeah, then became ClickUp Startup Evangelist, the first one to talk on YouTube about ClickUp and the rest is history. Here we are.

Yeah, that's wild. Why did you. Is that just like the Facebook Live hit and then you did YouTube and there was some traction. Like was it intentional going down the YouTube road or was that like this.

Just happened and now it literally just happened. I had and I. This video still exists on my YouTube channel. The quality is horrendous. It was back in the day, barely. I don't think it was even an hd, just Logitech Webcam back in that day. And I literally just went online, hit the damn button and talked about why I like it. I don't know. Yeah, let's just download it from Facebook and upload it to YouTube and okay, this is the thing And I kept digging into what ClickUp can do. I'm like, do you remember 1.0 version? Oh, that has been a while. And I just went down the road of figuring things out and sharing the process and how to do things. And it just happened. And it's happened pretty much like everything in my life. It just happened. You just follow the yellow brick road. Your audience is going to tell you what they want.

How's that strategy evolved? Like today? What is the YouTube strategy? How much like this is an area that I think we should be doing more on is we do these webinars and stuff. None of it makes its way back to YouTube other than putting this podcast out on YouTube. There's not a whole lot of other YouTube content and there should be a lot more YouTube content. But. But you've got a cool playbook on the. And ours obviously be really focused around the agency side where yours historically has been largely focused around the ClickUp side. Well, what is that like, how far in advance are you planning? What are the things that you're looking for? How do you figure out, hey, I want to do a video on this or that promotion? What's the strategy?

I should have a better strategy together probably than I have. It's a combination of things. I have things that I do want to talk about. I have things where questions come up over and over and over again. So that was pretty much also my beginning strategy where it was like, I don't want to explain this to my client again, just turn it into YouTube video. So specifically for people that are starting out on YouTube, we use the 10 by 10 formula. 10 questions. Your clients always ask 10 questions they actually should be asking. And right then and there, you already have 20 videos done. My approach right now is actually shifting. I have worked closely with Daniel Battelle on shifting the approach. YouTube is overrun with ClickUp. You have everybody is popping up wanting to do ClickUp content and showing how to do this and how to click here and how to do that. There's. Don't get me wrong, there is a need for that. There is a need for specific niches. How do you use this? How do you approach this specifically in ClickUp? But when something hits that, that level of everybody is talking about it, that's when I start getting tired of doing the standard how to content. So we have started playing around and testing to reach the market that needs ClickUp yet doesn't know yet they need ClickUp. So rather than hitting the SEO terms for ClickUp, which ClickUp has, they can Run ads on it. There's other people that are hitting that. That topic definitely better since I was in YouTube jail. But that's a whole nother story where we are now focusing way more on the problem rather than the SOL solution in getting the video out. We are still providing the solution, but we are targeting the people where they're at when they don't know yet what their solution is.

Yeah, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I always used to, back when we were building marketing game plans at our agency, from a keyword research perspective, look for the pain based keywords and then the solution based. And solution doesn't necessarily mean like the right solution. It's kind of to your point. It's like what's the solution that they're searching for, whether or not that's the, the actual right solution for them. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And then we have a full process behind it. So because I am best on video and like turn on the camera, I will talk. I will don't, I will not shut up if you don't tell me to stop. So this is the perfect medium for me. But not only that, I also do work with my clients to get comfortable on camera and be able to start here because it's the easiest to repurpose, it's the easiest to connect with your clients. So having your face on camera and talking, you can take this long form content. First of all, send it into descript, get the transcription done. Do you go easy on your blog and you just do a little intro and then add the whole transcription. Are you taking that transcription and turning it into a full on written blog post that is easy to read? Cool. Awesome. Now you have the full length YouTube video. You have your repurposing on the blog. So you're not just hitting YouTube SEO, you are also hitting your regular Google SEO, which YouTube does too. But you can link easier out from it. You are actually driving traffic back to your website. We all know the SEO advantages from that. You then take that transcription and turn it into short form social media posts. So you grab all of this knowledge bites out of it, turn it into social media posts, driving traffic back. We decided to drive traffic back to the blog which has the YouTube video embedded. So we are generating views too. Yeah, there's a, there's a whole process.

Behind that other than I'm sure, I would imagine, I'm not sure YouTube's your number one client acquisition channel and I would imagine referrals are up there too. Outside of that, are there any major Channels like, is it. Is the. Is YouTube the bulk of your, you know, if you were to turn your hours into dollars or think about it that way, like, is that the bulk of your investment is on YouTube?

Bulk of the investment is going to YouTube. Interestingly, it's not the main acquisition tool, but it's the proof of concept. So, yes, most of my clients have seen the YouTube channel and have made a decision based on that, but they might actually not necessarily come straight from YouTube. They often enough they'll cool. They saw a video of mine, squirrel, they're going on with their life and ooh, I got an issue. So they're going ClickUp Consultant. They often end up on the ClickUp Consultant, the vetted consultant page. Recognize my face because of the YouTube channel come through there. And then when I ask them, it's like, oh, yeah, I saw you on YouTube. Even though they came through the vetted consultant channel.

Are you telling me it's advantageous to be in one of the top spots on the consultants page?

Honestly, not necessarily. So it has changed. I'm like, you know, we've been in the vetted consultant community. It's not like I'm constantly getting requests from there. So we had seen quite a few of spam go on and that kind of stuff. We all know how context form work. We all have it on every single website. There are people when I talk with them. So when a client comes on, I always ask some standard questions. Some of them, what have you done before? Which tool are you coming from? Why didn't you like it? I'm pretty sure you're doing similar things to know how our client thinks and works. But I also often ask, so who else are you considering? Because, you know, we work closely with each other. Where I send agency clients over to you, I want to know if they are potentially already talking to you and they people are scrolling through it. Is it of advantage to be up there? Because I already have the YouTube channel and people know my face. Yeah. Because they are not going to go past 10 other vetted consultants before they recognize my face. But it's not a make or break.

Yeah. Yep. Cool. I want to talk about the SOAR framework a little bit. Ask ev a s k y dashvi.com soar s o dash a dash r is the URL. We'll make sure that's in the show notes too. But what is the SOAR framework?

So the SOAR framework is pretty much the base of everything we do. SOAR stands for systemize, Optimize, Automate, Review and then rinse and repeat. And we do that in three different areas of your business. We do that for your programs. Meaning what programs are you using? Let's systemize this. Let's optimize this by cleaning it out. How many dollars do you have spent on appsumo for tools that are now just sitting around? So let's clean this out. Then what can we automate that? You know that just as much as I do, there is so much data happening in those tool. Are they ways where we can connect those tools, automate them, make things run smoother and just save a ton of time in admin work? Cool. Let's automate that. Then we are going back and reviewing those programs. What has saved us time, what makes sense, what doesn't work, what works? And we start the process from the beginning again. We do the same with our processes. And I see systems where other people see chaos. Some people's heads start spinning the first time they jump on a call with me because I think big picture and then small picture and big picture again and I see all of the dots connecting. So what's happening in your process is what do we need to systemize? How do we need to systemize those? Once we have those down on paper and we actually visually can see the things and move them around often enough in a flowchart, how can we optimize that? Because the moment you look at it, you're going to see where your bottleneck is. Where are the issues? Where are you bleeding money right now? Where are you using resources wrong? Then what can we automate even on that level, when we are just building out the specific hierarchy in ClickUp, I already have a little icon, a little bot icon that says we can automate something here, we can automate something there. So how can we automate admin task creation, the follow up, you know, it. No matter if it's internal ClickUp automation or if it's external stuff, and then the same thing again, review those processes, what's working, what's not working, rinse and repeat from the beginning. And then the last thing, the last area we do this is also with people. So this has come, this has become a really core point for me. It always has been coming to the states with language barriers and really seeing how people work with each other, which always happens in bigger teams, right? And even just in smaller teams, you trying to tell your VA to do something and they don't hear what you are saying. It has always been on the forefront for me and I was able to do my NLP MasterProc to really dive into this and really get a better sense of the how people process information and how I can figure out how they process the information to be able to give them the information easier. So what I mean by that is when I say think of red, chances are you're in the podcast, might not be able to see it. So head on over to YouTube. When I say think of red, Gray might be thinking about this red that's right in my background or maybe the red of my microphone because it's right in front of him. It doesn't mean I'm thinking of the same bread. So when you are working with your team, when you were implementing processes, the human aspect, the team aspect is the biggest point of trouble, of friction. More often than not, the tool is not going to save the problem. It's not going to be the solution. You need to work with your team to build the right solution. Which is one of the reasons I love ClickUp because we have all the different views, we have all the different approaches to this, but really diving into this and yes, you can systemize people. Sounds bad, I know. I love people. Hear me out. Systemizing people, meaning really drilling down to what their personal values are. What do they want to accomplish? Why are they working in your company? Why do they might not be happy? We are then optimizing based on those values that we just learned from them of, okay, how does that align with our company values? How does that align with their job? Maybe they shouldn't be the social media manager. Maybe they are better off in pay per click and paid advertising. So we are quote optimizing people then as well as you can automate things simply making their life easier, but also having the conversation with them where it's like, okay, we are automating some of your stuff. We are not taking your job away. We are not we wanting to make your life easier. And again, doing that. Rinse and repeat and never forget to revisit what we have implemented and check it again to make sure everything runs how we want it to run.

That's awesome. Do you do any of this on top of like for us, the client filter is ClickUp. ClickUp's just the tool for how we get to the end outcome. And it's that combination of technical, procedural and behavioral. Like that's the people, the process and the tooling. That's how we get there. And ClickUp's just the tooling. It's the vehicle to get there. Do you do any of this work with Anybody on a project management platform not named ClickUp.

I do have a couple of clients that are like, I want to go ClickUp. I'm fine where I'm at and I will not fight them because the best tool is the one you actually use. 95% of my clients are on ClickUp simply because it aligns best with everything we need. Don't get me wrong, people that are coming new to ClickUp, they are often overwhelmed. There is so many capabilities. They can't put on the blindness and just focus on what they need to get done. Often enough the issue is also they do not have their processes down. They don't know what they actually need. So they are hoping for ClickUp to be that solution, which we know is not. But that, that customizability that ClickUp has and none of the other tools have is what speaks to this goal. So, yes, the short answer is most of my clients are working in ClickUp simply because they want the best solution.

Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. Well, I think the Soar framework is super helpful and I'll make sure we have that in the show notes so people can go through what you've put together in terms of training and kind of a worksheet to run through and see how that plays out. There's a lot of similarities between, like how we're approaching the problem between our business and what, what you're doing as well. So I was excited to have you on and dig into some of that story. I don't know how often in a conversation it's rare that I'm talking to someone and they say, hey, we're also talking to, to Evie. But that comes up from time to time and there's, you know what it's like when you're in this space for long enough. You kind of have a feeling from, you know, someone says, hey, we're talking to xyz. You're like, oh good, that's like, that's totally fine. Or oh man. Well, we'll probably, you know, if you don't work with us now, like, we'll probably talk to you again in three months and we'll clean this up at some point in time.

That process is interesting to see, isn't it? Because when you get the list of oh yeah, I'm talking to this person and that person and that person and you are like, okay. So my brain then goes to, what's your decision making process? Are you, is this client specifically looking for their best solution or their best price? Especially when, when you see the range with More often than not, it's the same circle of vetted consultants that are being mentioned. So when it's the same kind of circle, I'm like, ok, you are going for your best solution, not necessarily your best price. And then sometimes you have a couple where it's like, oh, you are just trying to save a big buck here. Okay, I'll remember that. That'll get noted down because I know you're not going to go with me. I'm not the cheapest on the market, but I'll see you again.

Yeah, it's interesting to have those conversations and just try to help people through the decision making process of, you know, often it's like, I don't know any of my oil change. Like isn't all, all oil changes are the same, right? I think it's how it's often thought of. It's like, ah, not, not, not exactly like. And also this isn't, you know, if it's a simple oil change, like maybe that's one thing 90% of the time it's not a, not a simple oil change. So yeah, it's just there are some funny conversations that happen there sometimes. But anyways, it's been great to be in the ecosystem together and be able to point folks back and forth. Folks who are a better fit for you, folks who are a better fit for us. So I appreciate you coming on and being willing to share here. We already mentioned your username but for people who want to follow you other than the website, askevy.com, anywhere else that we should point people.

LinkedIn is where I'm mostly active right now. Facebook has kind of become, sounds bad, my dumping ground for content. So you will see my content there. But yeah, where the real business conversation is happening, that's LinkedIn. That's where I really connect with people. And if you want to have a behind the scenes Instagram stories, always a good laugh.

There you go. That's awesome. Well, great. Well, thanks for coming on today, Evie. This is a blast.

Thanks so much for having me.