160: How to Get Better at Spotting Automation Opportunities — 5 Questions to Ask

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and Winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

If you are somebody who says to yourself, I'm just not good with systems, I'm not great with technology, I don't really know the first thing or I don't have a natural aptitude for things like automation, I'm good then this episode is for you. Because one of the topics nearest and dearest to my heart when running a business is not necessarily on the revenue generating, the hyper growth side. It's on the operational efficiency side that the more efficient we can be in the back end in our operations, the more time we can set free. And of course, earning abundantly is great too. But I'm going to share with you today five ways that you can get better at spotting room for more automation in your business. The reason I'm so passionate about automation is that it follows that principle of what small steps can I take today to set my time free far into the future? Coolest thing about automation is that if you can just spot areas for improvement, areas that you have room to implement something or help your software tools talk to each other in a more streamlined, automatic way and you're done. You're good. You can set that time free until you might need to tweak those automations a little bit in the future. These five strategies that I'm sharing today are going to help you think like a truffle hunter in your business. You will start to increase your awareness, heighten your senses and be able to find those golden nuggets of opportunity that might be right under your nose but you're just not seeing currently that can help you set even more of your time free. Before we dive in, this is the perfect time of year for you to join us in bff. You are cordially invited. If you're running your own business and you want extra support, accountability, encouragement, ideas, recommendations feedback. I would love for you to join us in the BFF community. This is the perfect time to dive in. It is such a wonderful group of people. We do a monthly Q and A call with me. We then do a live Brilliance Barter round of hot seats the following week where you can get feedback on a new project you're considering or a challenge that you're stuck on. We have a private community forum where we discuss all kinds of things, exchange ideas and feedback, and a private podcast feed where you get bonus episodes and access to bonus BFF courses. Anybody who joins within the next month will also get access to our special FreeTime workshop. Big thanks to Stephanie Houston for helping set this up on trademarking and ip. She's bringing in her heart based business attorney to better understand this space and how to protect our business and our IP. To learn more and join us, visit itsfreetime.com BFF and enter promo code Podcast for a discount on your first month. That's itsfreetime.com BFF all right, without further ado, let's get into today's topic 5 Key Questions to get better at spotting automation opportunities in your business this is a muscle like any other. So the more you can keep these inquiries in mind as you go about your day to day work. Not just working in your business and on your projects, but taking a step back at the same time. Almost like they recommend in meditation to become the watcher of your life. Not just the character in the movie, but the person watching it all unfold so that you can have a higher view and perspective. And that watcher energy is what can be so helpful. Especially if you feel like you're not naturally inclined to quote systems thinking or tools and technology. It's a skill. You can practice it. These five questions will help.

Number one does this repeat? I always tell you this agile development mantra. Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. So as you go about your day to day work, be thinking does this repeat all day, every day does this repeat. Especially if it involves pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, or exporting and importing. Let me say that again. When you're going about your day to day work, especially if you find yourself pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, or exporting and importing more than once for the same type of of area or information in your business, this is super ripe for automation. Let me give you an example. The backend of my business is powered by Kajabi that hosts all my courses, my affiliate programs, event registration, landing pages and pipelines as they call them. My email newsletter, it does a lot. It's not necessarily perfect at any one thing, but I love that it's all centralized. So when you fill out a web form on Squarespace, it actually talks to and sends that information to Kajabi. But I like to have all my information handy in Notion because as you know, as I've talked about the Notion Operations Dashboard that I've built, I've already done it for you. I'll put that link in the Show Notes. What I love is being able to have all my information about my business in one place so that it's searchable, interlinkable and customizable. So it doesn't do me that much good to have to go to Kajabi, log in, go look at a form like the FreeTime Toolkit. How many people have submitted? What is the number one thing that you all would love some help with or would like me to create content around? I've shared in previous episodes how referencing and always listening by embedding a key question to access certain things like the FreeTime Toolkit helps me generate ideas and keep things fresh for you all who are here listening. So for example, without automation, in order to view that data from the FreeTime Toolkit submissions, I would need to log into Kajabi, make sure I'm in the FreeTime account and not the Pivot account, because I have two that are connected. I would then navigate to Marketing. In the sidebar I would click on Marketing, wait for the page to load, click on Forms, and then I go find the form for the FreeTime toolkit that is set up. By the way, there is a zap automating sending from my Squarespace website page over to this Kajabi form called FreeTime Toolkit and then in order to look at the data in any coherent way, I would click on FreeTime Toolkit and need to export all the submissions and review them. Of course, I could look at the submissions right in the web browser, but that's kind of a pain. I'm doing this live right now as I'm recording, and it looks like we have 1400 submissions so far. So that's really exciting. Just as a side note, because it means that those of you who are reading the book are also accessing the toolkit. The toolkit's completely free by the way, it's freetime.com toolkit. I'll put it in the Show Notes, but you can see how in order for me to say what topics could I cover? What are Some ideas I have to do all those steps. That's a lot of pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, importing, exporting. I would rather say, oh, I have a recording day today in the podcast studio. I click on my little Made by Monday. That's my card that tells me everything I want to create that week. I'll put the link to the Made by Monday episode in the show Notes as well. And I want to just be able to Basically reply my FreeTime toolkit database in Notion. In order to do that, I need to set up an automation that says anytime there's a submission to the FreeTime Toolkit form, please send that information, pass it over to a Notion database. Now. I don't have to leave Notion to know that Michael submitted that. He runs a consulting business and feels a little bit trapped. Trading time for money, working this year to get out of that cycle. Cool. That might generate a topic. Shout out, Michael, thank you for filling out that form. Kate's looking for more time to develop her business. Christie wants her business to run without her. Lisa wants more confidence in negotiating. Julia has email overload. I hear you. Hilda is wanting to create more systems. I mean, yes, it's rich with information and I really want to say thank you to all of you who have filled out to get the toolkit. So you could just see how automating this allows me to eliminate all of those steps that I described. As soon as I need to log into Kajabi, it boils them all down into a database in Notion that I can reference as needed.

Number two, is something falling through the cracks? Where are things falling through the cracks in your business where you're forgetting things? A team member might have missed something. You've had a miscommunication somewhere that is an area that is ripe for automation because it's likely that you can set up some redundancy in terms of communication and notification. For example, if a customer makes a big purchase. In my case, the FreeTime operations dashboard is one of the biggest kind of off the shelf products that I sell that isn't to large corporations. And so I want to know, I want to know as soon as that comes in because there's also still a little bit of a manual process on my end to duplicate that dashboard into, let's say, your Notion account. And so I'd rather do it right away. I don't want you to make a big purchase and then hear crickets. So an automation that I implemented is that when somebody joins our private BFF community or when they purchase The Dashboard it also sends a Slack notification to the corresponding channel. So in the case of Dashboard the courses channel gets a ping. And by the way when that notification comes through Slack it links to the Notion page where I have what's called the Dashboard People tracker so that I can immediately from that Slack message if I didn't already see it come through somewhere else like our Help Scout email, I can then jump to the page and take all the next steps to onboard that person. If somebody joins the BFF community, same thing. Although we do get emails into Help Scout that's the software we use to manage our team accounts and write notes and assign things to anyone on the JBE team. I'm not always looking at email or I don't always get those notifications. It would drive me friggin crazy to have any sort of notifications for email just all day. I mean I do have Help Scout on I don't have my personal Gmail doesn't send me any notifications that would drive me nuts. And I use Slack very sparingly but it's hard to distinguish. Help Scout doesn't show you the subject line in the notifications. So I don't want to be jumpy all day looking at Help Scout. I just want to know when a purchase comes through for someone that I want to respond to very quickly, as quickly as I can. Slack is really helpful and I make sure that when I set up the automation in Zapier again that it links to the corresponding Notion page. So whether it's me or a team member, we know exactly where to go in our Operations Dashboard so things aren't spread out. In this case setting a zap from a purchase in Kajabi. That purchase gets transported over to our Notion database for that product, a people tracker. It's not as creepy as it sounds. It's just who are the members of this program? And again then that add on step would be sending it to a Slack channel. So this question of what's falling through the cracks is a good one of how can you build in some communication redundancy so that you don't miss something. Why do you think I asked this question? Because I've missed so many things in the past. I've shared some of my mortifying business moments. One of the most mortifying of all time was a corporate speaking client who purchased 10,000 workbooks and I didn't see that the funds had been deposited for a month. I didn't thank them, we didn't send them the workbooks. It was a huge error in my business. And so that would be a good example to say is there something we can automate here? How can we improve our process? Tools like Zapier would also enable you to trigger an email to yourself or to the customer. I did this with anybody who was purchasing the Buy one Get one, Give one for the freetime book that we actually sent an email that clarified, you know, confirmed and then told them next steps and cc'd my main freetime account. I don't love automating emails to customers just because you just never know. Maybe you had already been corresponding with them on a separate thread. I do have purchase confirmations that are sort of automatic and templated, but if I'm going to automate an email getting sent, I usually like it to be just sent to myself. And in that case you might as well do a Slack message instead. Just to keep things out of your inbox.

We'll be right back just after this.

Hi, this is Deechen Lackman and I am here to tell you Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's started get go Places the.

Uniswap Wallet makes crypto easier and safer to own and use, discover new tokens, research confidently, swap instantly, and manage it all securely in one place. The Uniswap Trading protocol has powered over $3 trillion in volume and it's trusted by millions worldwide. Buy your first crypto assets in a few taps and experience the freedom of decentralized finance. With Uniswap. Tap the banner to get started.

That relates to number three Would more communication help? So as you go about your day to day, be asking would more communication help around this? Like I shared Slack notifications for big purchases or a notification when status changes. Maybe you want to set important reminders. For example, in Notion I set reminders. I actually have two fields in our Tasks database. One of the things I love about Notion is that it allows you to really deeply, intricately customize any database, including tasks. So we have a deadline for that task, but we also have a next due field and so we could set reminders for both. Sometimes I'll indicate next due and I'll set a reminder and you can set it for same day, day of two days prior, one week prior. And I just found that yes, there was a final deadline for certain projects, but I also appreciated having a next due. When is the next step on this due and having those two different dates. That's not an automation per se, but it's a way of adding clarification and putting your mind at ease so that you and your team are just clear on what happens when. And I guess the piece of that that is automated is the reminder. I'm a big fan. I use the Reminders app in my iPhone. I use Notion reminders, I use canv calendar. There are certain things that I just don't want to miss. So I like to have redundancy in terms of what I'm seeing when. For example, even in my reminders app on my phone. I like that. That's such an aggressive push notification. I have a recurring category, financial category that includes what credit cards are due. When I even have peloton and yoga. It kind of reminds me every day, hey, have you done this yet? I have storyworthy reminder at 4pm every day. Hey, have you logged a story yet? I mean all kinds of stuff that in those cases of things that are important to me, I do want that reminder in my face. Comes through my Apple watch, you know, it's just hard to miss. And so by me automating reminders, especially recurring ones, I feel more secure knowing that things aren't going to fall through the cracks.

Number four is my data centralized where I can reference it easily. I gave you the example of my people trackers for things like the toolkit, our BFF community, the dashboard. You might remember episode 125 where I had a chat with our Notion Dashboard pro, Alex Sherwood. You get two one on one sessions with him if you get the dashboard and he shared how to create your own CRM. An example he shared of an automation is that he has connected his Google Calendar to Notion so that every single meeting on his calendar gets added every single person, every single meeting to his CRM database so he can track people and colleagues and clients very easily and automatically. This question of is your data? Is your information centralized? Where you can reference it easily is so important. And the reason I use Notion is I don't want fancy software. I don't want to pay a lot for this. I don't want tools like formerly Infusionsoft, now keep Salesforce. These are really expensive and they're complicated and you often have to hire professionals to help you customize them. I just want all my data in the same place again. I don't want to frankenstring them together by having to go look at Kajabi and then hubscott and then Notion and then somewhere else. I like to just know who's in the free time and jbe broader business orbit and is it centralized? Can I even cross reference? One of the things I love about Notion is at replying different cards. So if somebody joins the BFF community and they purchase the dashboard, I'll link those two cards together so that I see okay, this is the same person. Cool. Just FYI. Kind of. As a heads up, another example of an automation is having travel plans automatically sent to tripit Pro. I've shared my love for tripit on previous episodes. I'll put some in the show notes on travel tips and tools. The reason I love Tirpit Pro first of all, I believe it's $50 a year and you easily earn that back through the services they provide. It's often the case that if there are delays or cancellations in your flight, you're notified first before they announce it in the actual airport so you can get a jump on rescheduling rerouting I shared in a previous episode on A Tale of Two T's on customer service how I booked a flight and I got a couple days later an email from Tripit saying you can save $250 on this flight, call this number, tell them this reference code for your flight and ask to meet the current fare. It took me five minutes to call Delta. I got $250 off and then the Delta rep told me, by the way, you're at a certain level of status where you don't have to book Comfort plus anymore. You can book main cabin and we'll automatically upgrade you. That saved me another many hundreds of dollars throughout the year, if not thousands. So the reason I mentioned tripit Pro is that one automation is anytime I book flights or hotel, they get automatically imported into my Tripit account so I can go, I can look at my upcoming trips. All my travel plans for that trip are in one place. If I was feeling extra automationy then I would also set up some kind of zap to have travel plans forward to my Notion database because I have a JB Travel planning dashboard or database where I map out all my upcoming trips. That's a little bit redundant to what tripit Pro offers, but I like in Notion again that I can reply other cards, I can pull it in, I can create extra notes down in the field below all the travel plans, just giving you examples of ways to get things to talk to each other so that all your data is in one place.

Last but not least, do you need two or more software tools to talk to each other? I've given many examples now of Squarespace to Kajabi to Notion or I do a lot of things like surveys in Typeform and so Typeform is going to collect the data. You know what to do next. Connect Typeform to Notion because I don't want to have to log into Typeform and export those survey responses. So for example, the Freetime quiz, you can take that if you haven't already@itsfreetime.com quiz and it's really interesting to look at the data and see what's coming in aggregate. It maybe share it back out on the podcast like an episode like this one. So Typeform now automatically can connect to Notion without something like Zapier in between. Another example of needing two or more software tools to talk to each other would be for our Pivot Coaching program. If somebody wants to work with a Pivot Coach, they fill out a Typeform that's kind of the pre survey asking what they're interested in doing. This helps us match them to the coach. It even asks are they prepared to make the investment? And we share what the current investment is in Pivot Coaching. If they say yes, the next screen points them to choose their coach and then automatically puts that coach's calendly link. So then they can schedule that intro call, that free 30 minute intro call with the Pivot Coach. If they enroll with the Pivot Coach that's through Kajabi. And you know we have an automation where that person who enrolls automatically gets sent to our active clients database when their monthly payments come through. Because Pivot Coaching is set on monthly retainer, Kajabi automatically emails our main hello at Pivot Method account and the coach to let both of us know that the payment has come through. These are all examples of little automations and connections that really go a long way toward giving a seamless customer experience, a seamless coach experience and also taking the pressure off of my team and I to not have to remember everything or manually pass things along. So when a coach can see that one of their retainer clients, they get an automated message saying woohoo. So and so's monthly payment just came through. That means they know they're good to go to deliver those next two sessions for the next month without having to ask us, the admin team. Hey, did their payment come through. Are we good? Are we up to speed? Same thing when a pivot client is wrapping up. We both get emailed if they cancel their subscription and then it can instigate that next set of steps to close them out. For example, I could automate an email saying thank you so much for being a coaching client. We love your feedback. Could you please fill out this survey when you get a chance? I kind of bungled what I would actually say in that, but you get the idea. So then we could even automate some of the closeout steps to make sure that we get feedback for the coach and for whoever else is running the program.

I can't resist but share one more bonus tip. Think about what can I put on subscription? I have all kinds of things on subscription. I really am a fan. Yes, you have to remember to turn it off if you're going to travel. I share in free time my love of trade coffee where I have coffee on subscription and they send me a bag every month automatically. I've piloted all kinds of meal services. My favorite are the pre made meals, not the meal making kits. So right now I'm piloting factor for example and that's automatic. It just comes every week. Now I have to remember, you know I have a reminder set recurring to go in and edit my meals for that next week and make sure it's stuff that I like. I have a Lola subscription. I have a few key household products in Amazon on a recurring subscription like dog food, toilet paper, paper towels. The really go to stuff where I can have a good estimate of the cadence that we're using those. I even just saw a medicine company on Shark Tank called Cabinet where they are doing some kind of cool thing with lower cost medicines. Plastic free packaging. You just refill the packaging that they give you. They're very beautiful, they stack nicely. So I'm always looking out for what can I put on subscription so that I don't have to remember this again. That can be on the work front or the personal front.

I hope you found some of these pointers helpful. Let's review five key questions to get better at spotting automation. 1. Does this repeat? 2. Is something falling through the cracks? 3. Would more communication help? 4. Is my data centralized where I can reference it easily? 5. Do I need two or more software tools to talk to each other? And our bonus number six what can I put on subscription? You hereby have permission not to be a software expert or an engineer. You don't have to be a coder. You don't even have to love systems or software. Become an observer instead. Where are you repeating yourself? What's falling through the cracks? Where would extra reminders be helpful and put your mind at ease? Get creative with this what did I miss? I always want to hear from you. I always know. And sometimes right after I record, I go shoot, I missed something. Something so big and central to this topic or this set of ideas. Let me know. Send me a voicemail or a voice note@itsfreetime.com ask and it'll include your strategy for thinking about automation and building that skill in a future episode. Thank you so much for listening everybody. Let's all set even more time free in 2023 and I would love for you to join us in BFF or the Dashboard community if you want some extra help, assistance and tons of done for you templates. Learn more at itsfreetime.com BFF and itsfreetime.com dashboard.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would.

Most love to hear from.

Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

Hey Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.