878. Why Less Is More When It Comes To Systems And Workflows

I just want to acknowledge everyone who is an ideator. You can feel really disorganized. You can feel like you're not going to be a good CEO or founder. You can feel like you're not a good leader. You can feel all over the place. But you just need to learn how to manage that rush of ideas that comes in before you give it to your team who does not think in the way that you think.

Hey everyone.

Welcome back to behind the Scenes of Building a Business. I am sitting here with my co host Lauren Coleman, who is also my chief of staff at Light Pink. And if you have not heard any of these episodes yet, we are talking all about what it looks like in real time every single week to be building a brand new business, to be building a startup. All of the wins, all of the challenges. And you know, I think the cool thing, Lauren, is that we are super challenged every single week, especially in this industry right now with manufacturing, with supply chain, with alcohol, with beverage. All areas that we were told would be challenging because of licensing and just hold ups and just the state of the world right now. But I'm not really sure that we knew what percentage of you or how do you feel now that we are a good year and a half to two years in on your journey of knowing, do you feel like it was better to not know all of the challenges and how do you feel about the challenges now?

Definitely think it's better not knowing all the challenges because you will definitely question why you're in it every single day. When you think about the mission, you're like, okay, this is why we're in it. But knowing all the challenges before, you'd be like, why would I ever put myself through that? It seems impossible. Like hearing everything that we're going through, it literally seems impossible. Especially because one hurdle is no one wants to work with a startup in a certain part that we need. They don't want to work with startups until you have proven success. So it's like, how else are you supposed to do it if you don't have proven success because you're a startup? So if we would have heard that in the beginning, with that being one component, we would have been like, okay, maybe we'll figure something else out and try a different route. But once you're in it and you hear all these things, you just know that there's still a million other contacts you can reach out to. You can always figure everything out. As Marie Borleo says, everything is figureoutable. You figure out ways to make it happen. You reach out to sources and you also get with the right people who are willing to give you a chance. So even though you're told no a million times, somebody's going to say yes.

You know, that really makes me just think about the beginning of so many things. I know there are people out there who have gone through the whole idea of, okay, every job that I'm applying for wants experience, except how am I supposed to get experience without getting hired and not having experience and getting experience.

And that's really what I thought. Yeah.

Literally what we're facing all of the time is like, no, we need proven sales. And we're like, okay, but we are not launched yet. But we need our warehousing and we need our shipping. And that's really what we're running into right now, which we're finding a way. But if you guys are listening, you know, anyone in warehouse shipping, you can always message us because it's always great to have more options. And we will keep it in our folder, which we're going to talk about today. So we're kicking off today only with just talking about how to get through challenges, but we got some questions from our listeners. If you guys have questions, you can always send them to our inklightpink Instagram DMs, or you can DM Lauren or myself on Instagram, and let us know what questions you have about running a business, starting a business, all the challenges, mindset, whatever you want. And today we got asked the question about how do we really keep track of and organize our ideas, plans, marketing, and what tax systems do we use and what workflows do we use? So overall, I took this question as how in the heck do you stay organized with all of the ideas coming in and with so many different directions that you can go? And that's what I really want to highlight is that you're going to go completely different directions than you thought you were going to go. You're going to go a completely different direction than you actually are seeing other businesses do. So for us, what we do is we use a whole lot of different systems, and we're going to tell you a little bit about those and how we found them. And there are so many systems out there that you can use, and at the end of the day, the answer is always going to be that you have to try a lot of things on to find out what works for you and your team. So, Lauren, let's start out with ideas. I think I'm kind of the idea manufacturer in this in this company. So I'm going to start off with ideas and as we get more into organization, that is going to head on over into Lauren's zone of genius and kind of how we work best together. So for ideas, I probably get anywhere from 10 to literally probably 10 to 20 to 50 ideas in a day, depending on how many books I'm reading, podcasts I'm listening to, how many walks I'm taking. Because that's literally what I do in this life is I'm an ideator. I like to come up with ideas. I like to to think about ideas from start to finish. So with ideas, a lot of them come into my brain and I'm starting to learn what is for me and what is not for me and also what is for now and what is for later. And what I'll do is if I have a good idea, I will put it. Especially because I'm usually out in the world when I get them. I'm usually out on walks. I have a note section and I have a lot of different folders in my notes section. So I have them labeled under Ideas for now. I have light pink marketing ideas, I have light pink PR ideas. And what happens is I store them there for a little while and sit with them. And sometimes I sit with them for a day and I know they're the right idea. And sometimes I sit with them for a week. And a lot of times if I sit with them for a week and they haven't kind of gotten back with me or come up again, I kind of let those ideas die. So if it's an idea that I think that I want to do, it typically makes its way to Lauren rather quickly. So I ask her to then file it in a permanent folder of some sort that she labels either for marketing, for pr, it either goes under our tree of life. So let's say I have an idea. I was listening to a podcast and there was, let's just say there was a guy on there who's a marketing genius. This is an example that we had. And I say, hey, I loved this podcast with this guy. There's an opportunity for us to book an hour call with him. I think that we should do this right before launch to make sure we have all of our low hanging fruit for launch ready. She'll file it within a file, put a date in the calendar for us to go and see or for us to follow through when we go to launch. So there's different systems, as you can see, that kind of work for us. For ideas. So, Lauren, I kind of want you to chat about the different folders, but I know for me, I want to talk about. It starts with the notes on my phone, if it's an idea that I really, really think that I want to do. And then from there, if it's something that by the time I get home or later that week, I know that, you know, if I go back to that folder and it's still really lighting me up, what happens is I either still have a really incredible feeling about it, like, we have to do this, or it's almost like I read it and I'm like, why did I write this down? There's no in between. I'll be like, oh, that's. No, that's not for now. That was just like, I was in the moment listening to it. It felt really good and all. So then I'll delete. And then as far as people that I hear or think about, who could be allies, who we could work with, who could be future investors, who could be maybe someone like a social media partner, an influencer, we will put them on something that we call a tree of life. So a tree of life is anybody who has said that they will help us out in the future. We'll write their name down and say with notes, exactly what they said they would help us with. So it'll be their name. Help me, Lauren. It's their name. It's like what they said they would help us with. And then notes on exactly all the.

Details of the conversation and their contact info. The date we talked to them, dates. Maybe we want to talk to them in the future. Promises they made.

Yeah, I love that. Promises they made. So, especially for people who have a podcast or if you are helping out a lot of people, let's just say that you're someone who likes to add a lot of value to people. And you're like, hey, I'm going to share your stuff when you launch. And they say back to you, thank you so much for sharing my stuff when I was launching this course. If there's anything for you that you want shared when it comes out, I'd love to do it. How many times do we say, oh, my gosh, thank you, but never write it down. So we have all of these people who have said that. It's kind of like, oh, well, we're definitely going to have a favor to ask you. So we're going to put that in our tree of life so that we can circle back when we need that favor, when we're at launch, I also keep a running list for ideas, whether that is plans for marketing or whether that is people that I want to work with in the future, whatever that looks like. Keep a list as well. I like to write things down. Down, Actually physically write them. So I keep a notebook and my list says now. And then I have a list that says later. And I try not to ever let my now list get longer than, like. I mean, Sometimes it has three things, sometimes it has maximum 10, as long as they're easy. But my later list is extremely long and it keeps growing, but it's there and it makes me feel really good. And for me, the later list is just things I like to write out. And I go through and see what things need to go to Lauren. If they're really, really important, I give them to Lauren. If I'm still marinating on the later list, because I'm just not sure, but I like these ideas, then it's going to stay on the later list until I know it's a for sure thing. And it goes to Lauren's list of things that I might want to do later. So Lauren's probably like, oh, my God, you don't even give me all the lists.

This is crazy.

That's how much I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Hold back the crazy. Like, you don't need to tell your whole team that these are the things you're doing yet, because if you're listening and you're an ideator, you know that you have hundreds of things that you want to be doing and just giving yourself some time before you give it to your team. Because trust me, I have absolutely overwhelmed my team in the past by not doing this, by not sitting with it. And every time I would have an idea, I would just shoot off texts every single day while listening to a podcast, and it would just overwhelm them because they're integrators. And they'd be like, well, number one, I'm not going to have the energy to do all these things. Number two, like, this is really, really, really overwhelming. And you just said this, and now we're talking about this. I just want to acknowledge everyone who is an ideator. Like, you can feel really disorganized. You can feel like you're not going to be a good CEO or founder. You can feel like you're not a good leader. You can feel all over the place, but you just need to learn how to manage that rush of ideas that comes in before you give it to your team, who does not Think in the way that you think. So just learning how to manage that has been really important for me. So that's what I do for my ideas, plans and marketing. As you can hear, a lot of the things that I do go to Lauren. So this is going to be huge for people who think they have to do this all on their own and be organized. I am not super organized. I've had to learn how to be that. And I also have to surround myself really closely with people who are especially one person in my life. We can really get on the workflow and get organized and that is Lauren. So Lauren, I would love to hear when it comes to ideas, plans and marketing, how you either then take that but then also also manage everything that you are doing as well. Because truly I do think your superpower strength is really project management and pushing things through, like getting things done.

Okay, so I love getting all the ideas and the tasks from you that I can then put into systems and check things off or give them to somebody else. So that is where it works very well with our workflow because nothing really feels overwhelming to me because I have systems already in place that work for me. And one thing that we have is for you to give me the information. Sometimes you text me or email it over to me. But we also have a to do tracker that we share. It's just a Google Doc and if I have things that I need to ask you further information on or get your follow up or feedback on, we share that tracker. So that's an easy extra way for us to communicate that we love. And it works. But also sometimes it gets to be like two pages long and then sometimes your brain's like, okay, I don't even want to look at that right now. Like just tell me the main things that need to be done today. So we also found a system of having your folders be flagged or having your email be flagged. So and I'll get to the organization part but just for like the ways that we work best together is the tracker and then emails. So anything that is urgent that you need to look at in 24 to 48 hours, we put a little red flag on. You'll go through the email, get back to the person or give me an answer of what we need to do. So that's our best way of communicating aside from text as well. Just so it doesn't get too hectic to take you out of your zone of thinking and getting creative with me pinging you throughout the day at any random time. And Keeping it just like in one section with everything that we need to go over. So it's all in one place of questions and answers. So as far as systems, I love using Google, I guess Google Drive, Google Sheets, Docs, everything in there. Because I tried Asana, I've tried ClickUp, and it seemed to be that I was putting way too much time into working the actual system that it was taking away from getting actual work done. So when Lori sends over something, it depends on what it is, if it's for now or for later. If it's for now, I'll usually just put it on. I have a. If you go in Google, you can see there's tasks in your, like email over to the right, there's a little thing for tasks. Then you can start creating tasks. You can assign dates to them, you can add details. You can even link it to certain emails. So if Lori sends me something, I'll just create a task. You can create folders for those tasks. And if she sends me something that's maybe for later, that might be an email that we like for an email flow or something for a website. I will save the actual email in a task. You can link it and put a date to it for whatever date seems better down the line to come back to. So I know it's there. It'll remind me when it needs to happen. It's out of my brain and her brain for later. And when you were talking about saving things from podcasts or marketing ideas, we like to save a lot of them in Google sheets. I'll just create sheets, create bullets of things in different topics. Like, maybe this is a TikTok idea, maybe this is Instagram, maybe this is an email idea. Whatever it is, there's different bullets in there, different topics with different bullets underneath. And we can share that with our agencies that we work with. We're finding that most agencies we work with in different teams use Google. So I've decided to keep everything in Google. It's easy to share rather than taking things in and out of ClickUp or Asana. But that is something easy for us to gather. Everything from podcasts, say what podcast it's from, what's the idea? When do we want to implement it? Keep it all in this running list, share it with the agency, since they're also going to be implementing it, then even put it into my tasks in the calendar. So that's one way Google. I think Google, though, for everything, is seamless. One thing that I've found to be really helpful is making a Dashboard in Google Sheets. We do it with our social media marketing team. Right now we're all using this dashboard and it's really cool because we can link out other Google Docs, other Google Sheets, we can link to a website. So if we have ideas, we either collect them in, say, ideas for May Social, it's collected in this doc and then we even plan out social in a Google Sheet in May. So everything is linked into this dashboard with tabs at the bottom. So it could be investors, social media, pr, whatever it is. And for me, that's been easier to find than actually using the Google folders inside of Drive. Those are just sometimes hard to search for me. So I'm making a dashboard and just linking everything out there, which I am obsessed with. It's so easy to find. And then I have one personally for me for like all of the operations and how I work with different people. What needs to be done for insurance, what needs to be done for supply chain. So if your business has tons of different buckets that you just need to keep an eye on, especially like if it's your website stuff that maybe no one else really needs to know except your website team, you can keep all of those for you and then make one for each department that you have, depending on how big your business is, or if it's just you and one other person. So still in Google though. And I think that's pretty much it. Is Google everything.

You know, it's crazy because I actually am just loving hearing this right now and I know that we have pretty much switched over everything to Google because in the beginning I know that we, and you especially spent a lot of time just trying to figure out, because we hear from different people, this system works so good on our team, or we hear from a big company that they're using this system or that system. And at the end of the day, the more that we started, like really hearing from very large, very effective companies. Like when I was interviewing people I know even just I interviewed the founder of like to know it or reward style. And she was like, honestly, at the end of the day, as we grew, everything was just in Google, like everything was in a Google Doc because everybody knew how to use it, everybody had access to it, where it's like, okay, so let's say we did everything on ClickUp. That's great potentially for the internal team. But what about if we have to hire new people right away? And what about if we have to have this project that we're now sharing with an agency or another person that we've hired from outside of our company, which is a lot of what you do in the beginning. So I know that we're talking to a lot of people who are in startups or who are early stage entrepreneurs. The easiest thing that we have found is truly, truly being able to share those docs. And whenever you can't find them, you can email them. Like that's a huge thing for the way my brain works. I'm like, okay, Lauren just emailed me exactly the doc that I need to go in and it's right there. So it's really exciting just to know that there is something out there or to share with everybody that there's something out there that is so much easier that you don't have to spend all of your time learning how to get organized. I do know that sometimes Asana is really great for so many people and we do use it for some projects.

Correct. I personally don't anymore. We were for some of your podcast things, but we actually moved out to Google sheets too to pop into your calendar. So no, I'm not even using Asana anymore right now. I did love it, but I have no need for it right now, which.

Is really incredible because also I just feel like sometimes the moving parts of all of those different programs, like just having it ping you all the time when it's not something that's important, which can be a mixture, massive, massive distraction. I don't know about you, but once in a while when I'm in like software like that, I'll get all of these notifications that aren't for you, but you don't want to necessarily miss them. So I actually like Google because it does train you to go and look at when it's important. So you're actually like kind of scheduling that into your schedule, like learning to make sure you go and look at it or if it is really important, that particular person who put something in Google will either email you that doc and let you know that it's urgent so that it's more timely. Otherwise I do really feel like there's a lot of things right now that we use in our life that pings us and takes away our focus from what we really need to be focused on.

So true. My thing right now is Slack, but you can turn your notifications off, but I'm sure a lot of people, if you're using Slack, it's just non stop notifications. So it's either turning them off or learning to ignore them and just checking it on your own. Time, maybe every 30 minutes or hour, whatever it is, maybe longer.

That's so good. That's a really good hack as well.

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Well, kind of finish up here talking about how less is more and with big ideas that come into your brain, how do you know if they're the ideas that you should be doing right now? I know, Lauren, you and I and some other people had some really big ideas that we wanted to do this summer. And at the time it felt really, really good. We've had meetings on it. We had in person meetings on it with a few other people we wanted to set up kind of either. We had a couple ideas, a podcast tour, light pink tours when we thought we were going to be launched in the summer. And after the meetings, we were all like, okay, right now. This energy, we went around the table, this energy feels really, really good. Like, this feels like a hell yes for us right now. But all of us all had a few very uncertain things. So when we went around the table, like, okay, is there anything that we see that could, like, stop this or maybe not have this be a great idea and every single one of us had something or we weren't sure or we just needed to sit with it for a while to see how different things panned out. And you know, in the past, we may not have gone around the table to be like, okay, but what are the. Like, what's the pros and what's the cons and, and what could come up? And after we did that, we've all decided that instead of scheduling it, we would put a pin in it, meaning we would put the dates down in our calendars. But we weren't going to be a for sure yes yet until we could all come back to it and say, this 100% is a yes, this feels really good. These other things landed within the business. So now let's just move because we feel really good about it. The schedule won't feel too busy.

It won't.

It won't feel too crazy. It won't feel like, what the heck did we do now we're putting our energy into, like, five different things instead of just focusing on one. So as time went on, we all learned that it was not a good plan for any of us within the time frame that we had put the pin in it. So I think that that is the difference between, like, trying to figure out what is a hell yes idea that literally needs plans immediately, and then what is it that you put money down on, right, that you're just like announcing to the world, this is happening, this is where we're moving, this is our North Star. And then the plans that just feel really, really aligned and right. But you're not sure because there's so many things that are up in the air. So that's kind of what we do every single time we weigh pros and cons. What could get in the way? How could our energy be really depleted? Because this is what all ideas come down to. And we learned this when we had that meeting with the boss babes who are some of our investors, Natalie and Danielle. And they said that they're so focused on their energy and where it's going. So they drew Simon Sinek's circle, where he talks about. He's the start with why author, but he also talks about how energy all in one direction will make you grow exponentially. More than energy, obviously, in a whole lot of other directions. So if I look at the energy of our team, which our team is really small right now, we only have so many people to integrate an idea, and we only have so many people to push this idea out into the world. So what does that look like with all of our energy behind one or two ideas, rather than our energy behind all of these great ideas that we think that we have, or this email marketing and this thing over here and this thing over here. And you can get really, really exhausted if you don't have the things dialed in that you want to be doing. And I'm just going to use this as an example. I know when we were talking about opt ins, I was like, you know what? I'm just going to create three opt ins, meaning opt ins for our email and text list. Because what we want to be doing is converting all of our podcast listeners and all of our text and email on social to get on one of our lists, if not all of, of our list. Because when we launch, we want a really powerful to launch you on the text list and on our email list. So I was like, you know, I think it feels smart to do like three different opt ins to make sure. We're capturing all different types of people. And as I started to flush that idea out more with you and Nick, Nick Harder, who also helps us once in a while, who's my brother in law, but he does a lot of tech, we decided that we were going to do one opt in to start and it was going to be the most basic opt in we could do and it was going to be the one that requires the least effort and also the least thought for our people listening. So at first I wanted to do something very extensive. I wanted it to feel like tons of value and really in depth. And instead we went with something a lot easier, which you guys are going to hear about soon. Just teaching people the Power nine, which is what Chris and I do every single morning. And after talking to quite a few people, I talked to my friend Danette May, who's the queen of gathering emails or getting people on opt ins. She said to me, less is more like go with the most easy route, go with the basic one, go with the one that's easy for people to say, yeah, I want that. That sounds like something I could learn within three to five minutes and integrate immediately so it doesn't feel overwhelming. I don't have to sit down with it. I can literally read this thing from a text or from an email. It's a few paragraphs long. I can take away that thing and I can feel like I learned something or I'm going to change my life in a way, certain small action. And so instead of the three, instead of writing in depth, instead of doing all of this crazy stuff, it's like, what is the easiest path and how can you get it out the fastest? So that really is where we've decided to look at. Where are we just overdoing it? Where are we overthinking it? Where are we trying too hard? Like, I know that we've done that in social media before. I know that we're like for March, for Women's History Month, like we wanted to go all in and then realized that if we go all in on that, that it's taking our energy from some other places right now where that may not be the most important thing. So any thoughts on that, Lauren?

What kind of came up to me is like you're putting all of your energy into less things, but it's opening you up to do all of the things better. It's such a weird thing if you're putting too much energy into everything, you're kind of sucking at all things. But if you put A ton of energy into a few things. It gives you the creativity and like the extra mind space to improve something else in another area as well, to keep all things afloat.

It does. And you just, you feel so much better. You feel so much better. I know when we thought we were doing a million different things, I felt like we were stressed and chaotic. Like it just felt. It felt like nothing was getting good attention, therefore nothing was good.

And now.

Yeah.

And the value of it, like the actual quality of it is we found out wasn't even like exactly what we wanted either. We put a ton of work into one thing, but then we put a side by side, we put a lot of extra work into things that were similar, that didn't have to be done. And the equality in the end was not as great as that as what we were looking for. So we should have done less time and energy there and we probably would have got the same results.

And it takes learning. You guys, some of you are listening right now and you might be working on a really extensive project that you think is going to be the thing. And it might be. But also if you look around at what is successful out in the world, a lot of times the most basic books on the most basic learnings and the most basic principles are the ones that sell millions and millions of copies. When you look at sometimes maybe. Let's talk about products that work. A lot of times they start with one product and their message is just so dialed in on that one product that all their energy and all their marketing is going towards that one thing. And they're just talking about that thing all day long, finding their people, going deep with it. There's many ways to be successful, but depending on your team size and depending on how you work and depending on your energy, like for us, I know that we are so grateful right now that we have two SKUs that are just the same message, meaning we've got a non alk and we've got our rose spritz. So it's like, here's our message. We are a better tasting spritz or a non alcoholic. It's just what we do. This is the message that we're going to get out there. We don't have to talk about a million different flavors. We're not trying to like put other things under that category right now. It's just one dialed in message that we're working on. So. All right, you guys, we're so grateful for you. And if you have again any questions that you want us to talk about on the podcast. We'd love to answer them. It's helping us so much to know what you're interested in. Lauren, any last thoughts before we go?

Less is more for sure, even as a consumer. So don't think that you're not being as productive if you're not thinking about a million new things and doing a million new things and going really, really in depth. Because your consumer probably wants something that's not going to take them long to read, figure out, understand, or save for later. So put it out there, be less, because it's probably going to actually get picked up and into the hands of people rather than sitting on their to do list to do later because it's a little bit too complex.

Totally. So easy to think that we have to be all things and sound super smart and that's just not the stuff that typically hits. So that's freeing in and of itself. Okay, you guys, we're so grateful for you and we will see you next week.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.