201: Strengthen Your Systems (for Solopreneurs)

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. 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 go places.

What's next?

This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it.

Here we go.

Hello my friends. As I was pondering, what could I bring you that wouldn't add to the noise but would be incredibly helpful, I remembered back to a course we recently did as part of this seven workshop series called Pivot to Profit within my Momentum community. And I just did an episode on Systems mindset that included a walkthrough of exactly how I set up my desktop, Google Drive, Dropbox, textexpander, Asana, all the things that we use every day in my business. I'm sharing the first half of that workshop here because it will help you understand how to build and strengthen a system's mindset and your system's muscles. They're two different things. The system's mindset is how do you think about systems? Not just what software are you using, what application apps are you frankenstringing together.

But how do you think about efficiency.

And ease and flow within the nuts and bolts and the technology side of your work? If you're somebody who is currently telling yourself stories like I'm not good at technology, I'm not good at figuring out new apps. I'm disorganized.

It's not going to help.

My hope is that even if systems don't suddenly start to spark immense joy for you like they do for me, that you'll still find find a way to see what can be exciting about them. As I share in the intro to this session, one of the things that can be so disconcerting about chaotic times is that it feels that so little is in our control. But one of the things I most appreciate about systems and software is that even when there's a very high learning curve, and that can be frustrating, there's that Conscious Incompetence part of the learning cycle.

Once you figure it out, you figured it out. You have a new app in your.

Repertoire of how you run your business.

And your creative projects and the reward.

For doing that is time and ease and allowing you and any team members to do the work that you and only you can do best so that you're not bogged down by a million small things repeated a million times every week. For that reason, I hope you enjoy this excerpt of Pivot to Profit and I will say pretty soon I'm going to open up this course to to people who might want to dive into.

Exactly how I teach setting up a.

Strong systems focused heart based business. It's seven modules, they're each 90 minutes long. I have to say it is the best I've learned in almost a decade of full time self employment and I wish I had this when I was starting out. It's the synthesis of probably over a hundred business books, definitely over a hundred business podcasts. Ten years and the best that I've that I know. So pretty soon this course will be 997 once I release it publicly. But if you want to get in now, if you want to access this full course and the momentum community, it's 2:20 and you can cancel after a month if you're not thrilled. If your life and business is not completely transformed, we always say we're not trying to hold anybody hostage. You don't have to stick around for a minute longer, then it's insanely helpful for you. But I just want to put that out again on the podcast because I think for some of you now can be a really powerful time to invest in yourself and in your systems and in your business. And I personally think that one of the systems thinking mindsets is what can you learn from other people where you can shortcut five years of their knowledge and or 10 years and especially with systems.

Why figure it out the hard way.

If you can watch and many people did comment after this one that I'm.

Sharing the excerpt with you saying wow.

Okay, that blew my mind. I've used Dropbox for five years, 10 years, but I hadn't thought to set it up in this specific way.

So if this kind of episode is.

Your jam, I think you will love the full Pivot to Profit course and you'll get a video version where I do detailed walkthroughs of all the software I use. Join us at Pivot Love Momentum and as a special bonus, if you join as a result of listening to this podcast, let us know after you join and I will extend the bonus 30 minute coaching session with me in the month of May or June. So if you join, that pretty much makes it essentially free to join. You'll also get a bonus one on one coaching session with me to talk about quick starting or any sticky business bottlenecks or systems or anything else really in your business that you want to talk about. I would be thrilled to have you. I know the community would too. If you haven't yet, you want to get a feel for who's part of Momentum, Definitely. Listen to episode 198, our recent compilation episode of comforting words. Again you can learn more and join us at Pivot. Love Momentum. With that, I hope you enjoy this.

Excerpt of Pivot to Profit.

This is one of the modules I'm the most excited about. It's systems and software. I have to say it felt like Christmas today getting ready for this session. I know that's crazy, but it's a topic I'm really passionate about and and when everything's in chaos, systems are one of those things that I hope you find a way to allow them to spark joy. I know for some of you systems can be overwhelming and it can sometimes feel like a distraction. We were talking before we hit record that sometimes systems almost feels like procrastination or that it creates all this extra bloat of extra tasks and extra work and extra software that ends up just getting in the way and making things even more confusing. That is not my goal here today. My goal is to show you what I've done in terms of systems and software, but more importantly how I think systems building. It's a mindset and a skill set. Just like Pivot and the Pivot method, just like navigating change is both a mindset, okay, I can grow from this, I can grow stronger. And a skill set. Well, how do you change? We talk about pivoting all of our businesses, especially when crazy things like a pandemic hits. It's both a mindset, okay, we are going to make it through this and it is a skill set. How do you pivot? How do you pilot? How do you make the most of a chaotic time to recenter and ground yourself? When my client work slows down, systems cleanup and systems improvements and efficiency are one of the first things that I do. So my hope is that after today you don't feel overwhelmed. I mean, you might feel overwhelmed and I can't control that. But know that what you're seeing is 10 years of systems building, refining piloting and testing. And also know that you don't have to do everything at once. We'll talk about doing a systems audit. Find one thing that's your Achilles heel or that's the biggest bottleneck in your business. Tackle that first and you'll see how systems they add up over time to create a well oiled machine. But it's hard to create them all at once. That said, when things slow down and you're not so busy serving clients or those of you who are newer in your business and you're not yet serving and delivering services all the time, you really have an opportunity to get the foundation set from the outset. In the pre course survey, there's a 4.1 average rating of how satisfied you are with the current level of systems and documentation. Overall mindset when implementing software or learning about Software is a 5.7. But you'll see we had responses all over the board. I encourage you, some of you might have this story that you tell yourself, I'm not good with technology. I encourage you to just drop that story. You use it every day. It just depends. Maybe some of you love learning new software and new tools and some of you, it's not your favorite thing, but if you tell the story I'm bad at it, it will stop you from even trying. How satisfied are you at the current level of automation in your business? This got a 4.0 average rating. And this is really important because the level of automation and SOFTW can actually help you reduce your personnel costs. Not just your own time, but your team's time. And some people criticize that mindset of.

Oh, if we automate everything, no one.

Will have jobs anymore. I think about it differently. I think about it in a way that I don't want anybody on my team doing too much routine maintenance oriented work. In my personal opinion, that doesn't bring anybody alive. Just maintaining things, especially things that could be repeated, automated or systematized. And that way, no matter who is working on my team, we're constantly trying to figure out how to automate the stuff that happens all the time so that their role can become even more oriented toward their strengths.

So I'm going to go through some of the operating principles that we talked about in the operating principles module. It's in Momentum workshops. Some of you may have seen it already, but it's worth a refresh. And I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm just pulling out some of my core operating principles when it comes to systems because this is my attempt to teach you how to fish, not just hand you the fish. So I can show you what asana looks like. I can show you how I set up Google Drive, I can show you Evernote and textexpander. But until you learn the higher operating principles, you'll still probably often feel confused or overwhelmed. The principles are what allow you to generate your own ideas about systems. And by the way, many of you have systems already for everything in your life. They're just in your head, they're just not captured down on the page. Agile systems, automation and documentation. These are the three themes and you'll start to see through the rest of this course of privet to profit and my screen sharing. You can notice. Does this fall under Agile Systems, as in quick to adopt, quick, quick to adapt, quick to pilot, and agile, Meaning when the world goes on pause because a pandemic hits, are we able to very quickly adapt? The podcast has been a good example of that because it's built in such an agile way. We actually don't have a team of 10 people, we don't have some massive production line. It allowed us to pivot really quickly. Automation again. When I say automation, I mean that you're taking a task out of a person's having to do it and you're putting it into software, into a process. And then documentation is making it easy for anyone to pick up the work. The first principle that many of you have heard of, pardon the dog barking, is Oprah or Tim ready? So would we, our systems and our offerings, be ready for an influx of hundreds or thousands or millions of people? This is a question of scalable sources of income. So for example, if you're a coach but you were on Oprah or you are on Tim Ferriss or insert your favorite podcast, you couldn't serve all the people. What if a thousand people wanted coaching from you? You would. I mean, you could have a wait list and that's a great thing. You could raise your prices. But could your business catch all that interest? On the flip side, and more to the topic of today's session, are your systems able to handle that? So what would happen if you suddenly had a thousand emails in your inbox? What? How would it work in terms of your sales systems, your customer support systems? So I think this is a very powerful thought exercise to always be taking yourself to the next level. And of course you don't have to call yours Oprah or Tim ready. Those are my two benchmarks. It could be anything. I also lately I've been asking because as you all know licensing is a big focus of mine, and it has been for several years, but especially in 2020. So I noticed that I kept creating bespoke solutions for clients and it was starting to drive me crazy. So now with all these contracts falling apart due to the pandemic, I'm asking, all right, I have a chance to wipe the slate clean. And in fact, even the last contract that just fell through, there may be a blessing in disguise there, because I was already going to do something that wasn't scalable, that If I had 20 clients I was serving at the same time, how would I organize the sales process, the file delivery, the kickoff meeting, the support process? So it's very easy when you just have one client, you just kind of scramble and you just do what they ask you to. Basically, well, this is a way to put on your CEO hat and your COO chief operations officer, and say, imagine I have 20 of these clients. Would I still set up the whole process this way? Or fill in the number that's appropriate for you? So what if I had 100? What if you had a hundred coaching clients? Forget your time.

Would it be burdensome? Are you scheduling by just writing times into the email instead of using a calendly link? And that's not going to scale times 100. You spend all your time scheduling. Same thing with invoicing. Do you have automatic monthly recurring invoicing or are you always having to make up every invoice? Those are the types of things that this question can inspire. The next one. You've heard me say this so many times, but I'm going to say it again because this drives everything I do. Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. This even sparked the kernel for pivot, which is if change is the only constant, let's get better at it. What do they have in common? Same thing each time you repeat a task. I don't even care if it's working your way through an existential crisis, let's get better at it. And the way we can do that is you should never type the same thing twice. If you type out your phone number or your email address every single time by hand, it's inefficient. And I know it sounds like nothing when it's something so small like that, but these things do add up. And then you'll find bigger and bigger examples of ways that you can automate. And of course I'm going to show you many and document. Have good documentation of anything you do that you're going to repeat at some point in the future for you or your team members. So when Stephanie joined Momentum, when she joined behind the scenes of Momentum as Community Director, we already had a manager manual, although we did improve it quite a bit in preparation for her arrival. So it's like the business version of Nesting. But Marisol and I made sure that it was up to date. And then at various points, if Marisol, Brenna or Stephanie were out of the office or on a vacation, it was so easy. It was seamless. There was no extra work that had to be done to pick up where they left off. Time blocking and task batching definitely free up founder time is where to go to learn the details of this. But there are certain things I always have open on my computer and there was a question, I think it was Kathy's question, about what's my software stack? So we'll get to that. But I always have Asana open and I encourage myself and my team to batch any tasks that are low priority and not time sensitive. So there's no point to update some spreadsheet every time an email comes in. It'd be inefficient. Email should be batched and updates related to a certain category of the business should be batched. That way we're not splintering our attention all day long. It also helps eliminate task bloat for low priority items where low, small things just like grow in terms of the time and attention and context switching that they create.

Proactive problem solving. If you have a team, I ask for all team members to own the solution. And we're always improving this. They're not going to say, oh, this is a problem. Like a recent one is we are at our max capacity on Zapier. It's software that connects two pieces of software together and so Brenna can write and say, we're at our max capacity. I recommend note the shift. It's not do you want to upgrade? It's I recommend we upgrade to this tier. It will cost this much. If I don't hear back from you by Friday, I will go ahead and do that. In this case, I ended up writing back and saying, ah, that's so expensive. And we together brainstormed a new solution which was we now have two Zapier accounts, one for the podcast only, because every time we do a freebie it has to connect to Kajabi. So I know that might sound like I'm speaking a foreign language. We'll get to it. But we have one Zapier account just for podcast Zaps and then we have another zapier account that has everything else.

The other part of this is we should all be trying to work ourselves out of a job. This is a systems mindset that as special as we all are, and as special as we all like to feel, each of us should be constantly working ourselves out of tasks that we're doing. It doesn't matter who you are on the team. It doesn't matter if you are project manager or CEO. That always, always, always we're trying to say, how can I remove this from my plate and this from my plate and this? How can I automate that? How can I make it so easy that if I got whisked off to Fiji for a month and couldn't give notice, there would be no gap in service or delivery? One clear owner. It might just be you and your business, but I encourage you not to.

Have that be the case.

So really, truly find the money to have a virtual assistant. Find it. I know you can do it if it's $200 a month. If it's $500 a month. There's a team that I'm going to engage for a book project called the Virtual Hu. They're based in the Philippines. But the founder, Barbara, is wonderful. She's amazing and she trains the whole team and monitors everything for you. That's I believe 650amonth for a full time employee who can help with all kinds of social, social sharing, podcast production, Kajabi course setup, anything you need, Shopify stores, They're incredible. So that's the virtualhub.com there's also zirtual.com if you want us based on. You should have someone that's not just you because.

It really, truly will continue to free you up to do what you do best. I even, I saw this somewhere. Somebody said hashtag goals, an assistant for your assistant or something. And I don't like the word assistant because it just, I don't like it. But let's say Brenna on my team who helps with the podcast, podcast production, she's a project manager for that. Well, if we engage the virtual hub, at some point down the road, I may have her delegate the stuff she doesn't like to someone who is good at creating infographics and quote cards and all the stuff that could help spread the word of things that happen in the podcast. So that's an example of I'm always looking for how I can even get support for the team without creating some huge, massive team. So I know people who have teams of 10 or 11, 15, and they have similar line of work as me. And for some reason that just, it just doesn't interest me right now. So every task has an owner and every task has a deadline. Period, end of story. I like. And if, and if you can't make the deadline, renegotiate it before it hits. One of my pet peeves is a deadline that just comes and goes and there's no word on why or what happened. And as I say to my team, I almost never care. It's almost never urgent. I never care, just renegotiate it. So it's like, hey, I'm, I'm actually going to be out this Friday. I thought I would get this done.

Can I get it to you Monday?

It's almost never a problem, but communicate. Be on the lookout for bottlenecks. So if the flow of work is a river, where are the eddies? Where's the water?

Stagnant?

Where are the turbulent rapids? Either now or up ahead? This is so important and this is a constant. This is a habit. You can, every single week, every month, you can be looking 1. Where are the bottlenecks? And not just, oh, I don't like that thing. Why? What is bugging you about it? What is creating a stagnant part of your business where the energy just isn't flowing? The tasks are piling up and we've talked in previous modules, you know, 80, 20, what can you do? Drop, delegate, automate. But the first step in that process is understand where your bottlenecks are, where are things slow or inefficient, and if you're always tackling your biggest bottleneck, which, by the way, the book fix this next will be really helpful for that, then you're always freeing up energy in your business. On that note, procrastination and stress are systems flags. Look anywhere in your business that you're procrastinating or that you feel stress, think of it as a systems flag. Not always. Sometimes it means you're just going down the wrong road. You're tackling a line of work or project or an income stream that does not spark joy. And the answer is just don't do it. But a lot of times stress is a systems problem. So, you know, I'm constantly saying, email is my Achilles heel. It creates a lot of stress for me and guilt because I'm slow to respond. I can't control what comes in. I just constantly feel guilty that I'm not better at it. But at the same time, I don't Prioritize it more than, say, momentum. Like, I worked on this all morning not answering emails, so I clearly made a choice there. So I also want to recognize the choices that I make in my business. But I can look at, okay, well, this is a big bottleneck. What can I do about it?

And that has led to any and.

All experiments that I have tried over email over the years happen. Because I look at it and I say, this is a systems problem. What would help me fix it? Keep an eye out for diminishing returns on time, quality and effort. Diminishing returns is where you keep putting more effort and energy in or even money, and it just is falling flat. So there's a lot that just piles up in business. It's almost like a closet in your house and in your systems where it just kind of. It's like a junk drawer. Sometimes things just pile up. And especially if you have a team, sometimes you're all just doing things because you've been doing them. But it's not clear that that thing is so vital that it requires as much time, quality, effort, money. I'll give you an example. Show notes for the podcast. The show notes actually take quite a bit of time. We've gotten more efficient at them. But I have friends like Jonathan Fields who his show notes are one paragraph. And I said, but don't you want to put the resources mentioned in the show notes? Don't you want people to have all the links and the books mentioned? And he said, no, they can just look them up themselves. It creates too much work. And he doesn't do the show notes at all. Jonathan just does the interview and then he doesn't touch it after that.

But according to, for me and my brand, I love documentation. I love having links. I would love that. If someone goes to pivotmethod.com 160 the episode for Fix this, next they see the links, the books, the templates. You know, that's consistent with my brand. So we're continuing to do it. But I've said to Brenna, look at what in the podcast, or I'm creating a book project where I want to transcribe interviews. And I said to the team, we're going to work with the virtual hub. I said to the team, what's taking the longest? Let's drop whatever piece of this project is going to take you the longest. Or within a single transcript, let's drop it. So I'm always looking for the 80, 20, what's good enough without having diminishing returns. The manager and Sales manual. I'll show you what these look like. These are in a Google Doc. In Google Docs, the manager manual is how to run my entire business. This is the document. This is the holy grail that when somebody new joins, they go, look there. It's all documented, it's all current. And when I give feedback over email about how something should be done or improved, it gets updated in the manager manual so I don't have to say it again the next time or if a new person comes. And any improvements that we make at all is documented. Now, as of 2020, I'm also working on a sales manual. So this was a big bottleneck. It was an area that I was conducting all sales calls, all client onboarding, whether it was a coaching client or a corporate client. What I noticed was that if I.

The CEO of the business was the.

One scheduling meetings, having the sales call, having the onboarding, sending the contracts, negotiating, then serving the client, it kind of conveyed that I'm a one woman shop. And what I started to feel toward the end pre pandemic was that you're not going to know how big our business is and everything in terms of selling pivot programs to companies will be documented. I did a lot of reading thanks to my brother and his book notes on Sales Best Practices. And so I'll show you the sales manual.

Asana is a must. If you don't use Asana, you could use Basecamp. If you don't want to use either of those, you could use Trello. But I've had friends who hit a ceiling with Trello and it became prohibitively expensive. You just must have some task management. Every single task that happens in your business has to live somewhere. It cannot live in your head. That goes way back to David Allen getting things done. It's easier to do that. It's easier to kind of get sloppy when you're alone because you're just kind of juggling everything. And maybe you write it by but once you have more than one person, every single thing needs to go in Asana or some task manager because otherwise you're going to have too much cognitive load. What did I assign? When was it due? Who's taking care of that? Oh, what happened to that thing I mentioned last week? And I only learned this the hard way, but Asana is so much easier to just always at a glance you can see what's happening by when and it gets bloated as well with little tasks that aren't going anywhere. This is a must. And it also takes a Lot of communication out of email. Email is not good at project and task based communication. Evernote is where I clip things I'm observing and also how I manage the podcast. Primarily Dropbox and Drive. Dropbox are for hard files. So when a company sends me a Word document, that's part of a legal agreement that goes in. Dropbox and Drive is where I create all new documents that are not for a old fashioned company. Everything should be created in the cloud. It's so much easier to collaborate. I would never initiate a Word document or anything that was a physical hard document. It's not physical, but they're called hard documents if I could help it because it's just inefficient. You have all these file versions, you have to keep re saving it, redownloading. It just creates five extra steps every time you want to send it to someone or update it. That said, the way I use Dropbox, every single file I have is in Dropbox. So there's no desktop, there's nothing on my computer that if my laptop was stolen tomorrow, there's nothing I would lose because all my files are in Dropbox. Textexpander is a must. This is where I create shortcuts for everything. And some of you asked about canned responses that goes in textexpander.

Help Scout. We've been using Zendesk for email. As soon as it's more than you, it's helpful, but this is a bigger expense so I put it in italics because you can use Help Scout later. We're going to switch. We're not that happy with Zendesk, so we're going to switch to Help Scout. But it does allow you to have a whole team in. For example, for us, the hello at Pivot method inbox. And that way, depending on who's most appropriate to answer it, we're able to assign messages and even make internal comments if people have questions. Stephanie says, I vouch thousand percent for the manager manual and it's going to be the number one thing I prioritize.

Wow.

Moving forward, just create a scrappy Google Doc and start draft outlines. It'll unfold from there. So true, Stephanie. And that's true of all the systems that we're talking about today. Take five minutes before we start doing the walkthroughs and do a mini systems audit. Give yourself a pat on the back. What systems do you already have working and why? Why are they working? I know that's a weird question to ask, but what is already working in your business? What feels smooth, seamless, efficient, and why is that? What did you create that allowed that to be the case?

What systems you have that are in your head? That yes, it's a system, but only you know it. And then what are your biggest bottlenecks?

That concludes this first 30 minutes of the Systems and Software module of Pivot to Profit. If you want to access the next hour of the course via video to.

Get walkthroughs of all the tools I.

Just mentioned and more, I encourage you to join us in Momentum. Soon this course will be sold for $9.97 a la carte, but right now you get it as a free bonus when you join Momentum, learn more and enroll at Pivot. Love Momentum. And don't forget, mention that you listened to this episode and you'll get a bonus 30 minute one on one coaching session with me. I can't wait to meet those of you who feel like now is the time to clean house systems wise and set your business up for success. Success now during this crazy time of uncertainty and beyond. Wishing you a beautiful rest of your day everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to welcome to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on on Twitter at Jenny Blake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.