This Business System Tracks Everything (So You Don’t Have To)

This is what planning for my business used to look like. But this is what it looks like today. This one tab, which I call the Bird's Eye is one spot where I can see every event, time off request, holiday project, hiring initiative, YouTube video marketing campaign. Everything I need to know to know what is happening in my business is visible from this one tab. Now this drool worthy master calendar of all the things in my business is something I've chosen to set up inside my work management tool. Whether you're in SmartSuite or Notion or Monday or Airtable or Coda or ClickUp, whatever you're using, odds are you can steal this exact same technique with a few modifications and make it work for your team as well. Because truly it is a game changer. With that, let's dive in. So here you can see the Bird's Eye view we have set up. It includes three categories of information in ClickUp terms meaning three locations, our YouTube and content publishing, our major projects, and our events database. These are three different source areas that we have set up inside our account. And the way we've created this view for anyone who's in ClickUp is by going to the everything level and creating a timeline view with the following filters. The combined effect is that ClickUp is looking at all of our stuff and filtering it down to just what meets this criteria and then showing it on a timeline view. If you're using a different software, your setup would be a little different. But inside whatever your dashboard or overview area is, you can probably create something similar. But don't let the three categories that ClickUp shows you fool you here. There are actually a lot of different sources of information happening behind the scenes. So right here at the bottom you can actually see what I consider to be the most important one, which is the priorities that we have each set individually in terms of our time off. So, so when I'm doing planning for a quarter for a year, time off is usually where I start. It's my vacation planning, the team's vacation planning. We plan everything around the team's schedule, not the other way around. So here at the bottom you can actually see the time off for each individual who has submitted it for this first quarter, as well as the time off company wide. So we've got off for all federal holidays and we've got some holidays here in the past. So sometimes with time off it can be helpful to switch over to my week view just so I can zoom in a little bit more detail to see where these things fall. But this is my first stop when planning, because it allows me to see, all right, what is exactly going to be happening in this case on January 20th in the whole company. I can just scroll up and down and see all of the things that are happening. And just to show you the source data on this one, this is what the PD Events database, our kind of area to track events looks like. It's very, very basic. It has a few automations in place to move things around and it literally tracks every key thing that has ever happened in this business, from every price change to every new offer being born, to when, you know, we first hired employees. All of the key events in the company history are tracked here so anyone on the team can see. And as we move into the future, things show up here as well. This is what's being pulled in automatically into that bird's eye. All right, coming back into this view now. The second category of information that I like to think of are promises. Things that we have committed to do or to fulfill in some way. While I'm recording this, it's around year end and so we don't have a lot of outstanding commitments, but there's one here that is super important. It's in red, which is our cohort. Our main program is called Foundations. At the time of recording this, we are working through live with a group of people. And so fulfilling that promise is something we have put in our key events database right, right here that we are currently working on. And it's an ongoing effort that needs our attention and brain space every single day until it's done. So up at the very top, we have our content production kind of pipeline area. As you probably know if you're watching this video Here at ProcessDriven, we commit an enormous amount of energy and time and money in creating free content because I believe part of our mission and the reason this business needs to exist is because there is a real glut of process education out there, especially especially for small business owners. So we have made that commitment and I take that commitment very seriously. And so just as we are fulfilling our client commitments to our foundation's clients, which by the way, you can become one in the description below, I view YouTube as a commitment as well. A commit to each of you. If you click the subscribe button, I am entering into this informal contract with you to deliver great content every single week, which is no small feat. So on this master calendar, I actually like to see each of those public PDF pieces of content that we are committing to creating. Now, each of the pieces you see Here is a YouTube video that's going to be released, a piece of major content, and inside it you can't see here are, you know, emails being written, social posts being written, blogs and blah, blah, blah. All the other stuff that happens is inside each of these and oftentimes these are things that are being worked on months in advance. As you can see here, this is the other layer of the calendar, my commitment to you. So, so even though you don't pay for these videos, I pay my team for 20 to 30 hours a week to create this content, to make sure that we're putting out high quality stuff that hopefully helps you and maybe someday inspires you to become a client of ours in the future. But anyway, that is our YouTube area and our second level of kind of promises. Here's what that source data looks like, by the way, for the YouTube pipeline. Here's the video that I'm producing right now for you. And as it moves through the cards here, it'll move through the whole process, but there are a lot of little pieces that move into each of these videos to finally get into completion mode. So this is a little meta, but this task that you see here with the script and all this becomes a YouTube video through this process. And I keep tabs on it through this bird's eye view. By the way, at ProcessDriven, we have a whole template library thing inside our IndieOps network membership. This one's currently not in there though. So if you're watching this video and you're like, man, I really want this template. Write the word ion in the description below and I will get this template added into the ION membership. So anyone in there you want to join that membership, you can get this template in there as well. Just let me know if that would be helpful. Now, the very last section of this overall view is what I call our growth projects overview. Now, to explain this last section, I kind of need to back up for a second and explain a little bit about ProcessDriven's approach. Our philosophy, if you don't know if you're new here, hi. We have our own framework when it comes to how to operate a team in a systemized way. We believe that capacity, the way you spend your time and energy, really only goes in three different categories. You spend it on fixing things, maintaining things, or improving and preventing problems in the future. And when it comes to fixing things like, ah, shit, the website's down, we can't really plan that. So you don't see that on this calendar. When it comes to maintaining Things such as making sure that we pay out our affiliates on time. That's so predictable and boring that it's not something we put in this kind of overview. But for the very last category of improving things, well, that's really all. This section is our growth projects. At ProcessDriven, are us proactively thinking, how can we make better? How can we devise a project to either create something new, fix something that could be improved, or just generally evolve an area of the business? Now, immediately you'll be able to tell compared to the other sections, that these kinds of improvement initiatives, these growth projects are longer term goals. They usually last anywhere between two weeks to 13 weeks to fully execute. And we have a whole set process for how we actually run these kinds of projects. And if you'd like to learn more about that, I have a video on it up here. When we just say, ah, you know, as you go through your day, fix things you notice are wrong, that can be great for little issues, right? Continuous improvement, it's wonderful. But when there are things that impact multiple people, you've got three people heavily impacted. We want to completely change how an offer is formatted. These kinds of big changes, in my experience are very hard to purely democratize. You need to organize a little bit and say, all right guys, on this date, this program is switching from a cohort to a two day retreat. That's a huge change. Not something you want to do individually. You want a team effort. And so these projects are our rallying cries where we have a set structure, but we're on that up here and we just follow through on that. These, as you might imagine, are where I spend most of my time as the business owner, planning out these projects and making sure that each person has an error. To active projects right now, two that are starting soon. And for our active projects, we actually have a routine in place that every single week we're giving in. Update from the coordinator of the project describing where the project is at and what's happening right now. Are we on track? And so on and so forth. So this is where this information is coming from that feeds in to the bird's eye view. By the way, write the word ion in the comments if you'd like to see me templatize this area so you can steal this template for yourself. And if you are a member of the Indie Ops Network, our membership, you'll be able to steal a copy of this template as soon as it's published. If you are not a member yet, what are you doing? Support this Free content by becoming a member in the description below. Now, before we move on to the next phase, you might be wondering how is information actually getting into ClickUp? So it can be in this view. There are three methods that we are using to make that happen that you can copy as well. Number one is the easiest one, which is manual. We simply train everyone on the team that if they are doing something that is important, it ends up on this calendar. We consider important to be things that are significant that we want to add into the company history book. So price changes, new offers being released, offers being archived, anything like that that we are kind of creating, we want to add as we go, just manually off the bat. So if we're working on a project where we're deciding, oh, we're going to make September, September every month, we're going to make it a special event, that's probably something we want to add to to our events database, since it's a holiday we're creating and that's actually a real one. By the way, we have parties every September in the description below. The second way we get information in here are through routine tasks. So we have repeating routines for team members that reminds them to do certain things. Actually, you can see an example of such a routine right here. This is a routine assigned to my team member, Mariah, and every single year it prompts her to submit her time off for the following year, as much as it is known. Back in 2023, we got feedback from the team that it would make it a lot easier to plan things if we could plan around people's priorities. And so we created copies of this routine for every person in the company. And the routine is very simple, just looks like this. There's not a ton of policies. We just have people go into their profile inside our HR software and submit time off requests. We use gusto, by the way. That's what we use for payroll time off, holiday tracking, benefits, healthcare. It is an amazing tool. Like if you were in the market for an HR tool, this one, I would just say it's highly recommended. We'll put her link in the description below. Why not? But that's what we have people do every single year. And for some people, they actually change the interval of this routine, so they're doing it every quarter. For others, they do it every year, which is our default. But this is how we can start planning ahead around priorities versus the other way around. Now, this routine about requesting time off is actually one that me as a business owner has found really, really challenging and Important. At the same time, you know, I'm going into my seventh year of business here, and for the last six, if I'm being brutally honest, I have not given myself equal treatment to the employees on this team. I know what you're thinking. If you're an employee, you're thinking, gosh, how are you being abusive? No, no, no. It's actually kind of the opposite. For the last six years, I have had the same paid time off policy. I've had the same everything else, but I've used less of it. I've worked more hours per week than anyone on the team. I've taken fewer weeks off than comparable people on the team. And to just get personal for a second, I think for a long time that was something I took pride in. It was like hard worker. Yeah. You know, that lower middle class work ethic that we're all so proud of. So actually, this routine that I'm demonstrating, this video is one that actually was due and assigned to me for last week. And when I did it, I. For the first time in six years, I have fully mapped out an entire year's worth of time off. Not just some time off, but all of it, maxing out my PTO in the same way I would expect my team members to. That is a total aside here, but if anyone else here is a manager, an owner, or anyone else who is raised with kind of a working class work ethic, definitely pay attention to this routine because this is one that's been really helpful for me personally. Side note, just out of curiosity, how many weeks of paid time off do you take each year? I would love to compare notes. Leave me a comment in the area below. Maybe we'll start a poll or something. The third way information gets in here is through automations using Gusto and Zapier. So let me explain how that works if you're particularly nerdy. Gusto, our friendly payroll tool, tracks our holidays and time off requests when they're approved and when they're not. When Gusto has these things happening, it automatically adds them to a Google Calendar that the whole team can see. Awesome. When things are added to that calendar, we have an automation tool called Zapier, watching and waiting. And whenever anything happens on that calendar, the zap that we created automatically creates a task in ClickUp, copying the information from the Google Calendar, which is a copy of the information from Gusto. Okay, you got it. Gusto to Google Calendar to Zapier to ClickUp. That is the process that gets our paid time off and our holidays into the tool itself. Oh, but wait a second. Even if I give you this template, we're going to have a problem because we have this great structure, all this information. Amazing. We've got all these data sources feeding in, but if we just set these things up, they will pretty much immediately be out of date. So how are we going to make sure that this calendar is not only updated, but also used to inform decision making, to make sure that people are checking it, to make sure you are checking it when you're making your annual plans. How are we going to connect human behaviors to this master calendar? To answer that, well, you got to watch this video next. Thanks so much for watching. And until next time, enjoy the process.