The Secret Power of Documenting Processes as You Go

In this episode of Happy Client Show, Ben and I are going to be talking about how you can document processes as you solve new client problems so that you can stop reinventing the wheel at your agency. Let's dig in, guys.

Welcome back to the Happy Client Show. My name is Ben and I'm here just having a nice caffeinated chat with my boy, Andrew Demski. Andrew, how are you today?

Ben? I am doing fantastic. Looking forward to this topic today because it's something that's near and dear to my heart, processes and making life easier for agencies. So I'm happy to be here, brother. How about you?

I'm doing good, I'm doing good. I'm glad we don't have any problems as we go into this. We didn't have to sort any of those out. But I know that as agencies, it seems like all we're doing is solving problems. And so what we're going to dive into today is how we can make those problems easier to solve in the future. So you want to kick us off, give us some examples of what this looks like in the wild and how we can go about making these things simpler to address on a daily basis.

Yeah. Overall, it's a pretty simple idea in concept, but it's hard to actually enact when it comes down to it. It's this idea that when you come across a problem that you haven't solved solved yet, that you haven't seen before for a client, just take the time to document the solution to that problem as you move through it. It's always harder to go back to something like that once you've completed it and then document the process. So if you want to become more profitable over time, just take the time while you're going to document the stuff you're coming up with, you're going to become more profitable as you move through.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of those things where there's really nothing new under the sun. And if you deal in the same space for a long time, you're gonna notice that you're gonna have recurring problems that just continue to just crop up every once in a while. It might not be, you know, today, might not be tomorrow, but maybe it's next week. And really you want to be efficient and you want to be able to say, you know what, I have just the thing. And so as you're tackling these, it can be so effective to have those planned and documented and it really, it's gonna save you time in the long run.

Yeah, it definitely is. And so A couple examples of situations where this might be helpful. You share with one before we hit record here. Ben, do you want to share that with everybody and just kind of walk us through the journey that your clients have gone through and lessons getting there?

Yeah, absolutely. It's always those little tidbits before we hit record. Little golden nuggets. So very recently, an agency partner of ours had one client who had all of these SEO and page speed and website development issues. Things were rendering above the fold. So they were render blocking scripts, the images needed compressed. There was all this extraneous WordPress stuff that comes from these prefab themes and out of the box, literally. We did a ton of work in the functions PHP file to remove some of those scripts, to remove that junk, to reposition things below the fold, and then implementing a solution to mass resize and compress images. I was like, okay, we did it. And I just so happened to document all the PHP in a file. I had the plugin. I created actually a folder for this in optimizing WordPress in case you would ever come up with again. Two days later they said, hey, we have another one of this exact same thing. And I was like, well, I know exactly what to do now. And so having that on hand made me help them help their client a lot faster. And so you make yourself a more valuable partner. But also, you know, for me, it was just, hey, I know exactly what to pull and what to do. And it worked like a charm.

Dude, that's so nice. It's got to feel good because, you know, like we're solving a problem that the client has. But also it's not more work for you because you took the time to document the process. You have it all laid out so it's not additional stress on top of your plate. You know, typically we think of like, if we go above and beyond for a client that we're putting in late hours and putting on another pot of coffee. It doesn't need to be that way. It if you solve one problem, you can just document the process and then if you just save it as a template in whatever your project management tool is, save it there so that the next time you solve that problem, boom, whip it right out. And I think it's cool because your team gets more profitable over time when you do this because you're investing time and resources to come up with solution to these unique problems. Well, if you just let it kind of float off into the interwebs, you lose that time. You got to pay for it all over Again, when that problem comes up for another client, you have to go out and solve it because you how many times this happens, you just kind of like oh, I know I did this four months ago but I forget about the process now. Or Ben, I heard you did this, but I'm in the other department so I don't know about it. How do we go and fix stuff like that? Just take the time from the get go to document the process as you're moving through it. If you've got a tool where you can kind of manage a project, you add in like a task or a deliverable and you can document as you go. And then when you're done, just save that as a template. That can save you some time. I know you can do that inside of do inbound other tools out there. Asana I know you can do that as well. Save projects has templates. So whatever tool you're using, just think about how do we take what we invested in this project and make it last a lot longer than we would otherwise. So any other things you want to throw in here Ben?

That's pretty much it. I'd say just a couple of high level notes as you're diving in. If you don't have a centralized file management system for your agency, if you don't have a project management system, these things are going to be very hard to do. So it's important to have a very structured file management system to save these things in and then a project management system to document the actual steps. Because maybe you get hit by a bus. Knock on wood. Maybe you get hit by a bus and suddenly someone else has to dive into this. You want to make it so that it's not bottlenecked to you and that you have someone else on your team. So those are some prereqs for that and will really help this come to life.

I love it. And so a quick tip to get started is just think about some wins that you've had with your recent clients. Look at those wins and figure out is this something that could be replicated and applied to our other clients? Is there a repeatable process hidden in here somewhere that we could capture and use over and over again? So thanks for tuning in to Happy client show guys. We will see you next week.