30: Organize To Optimize: How to Create Simple, Streamlined Systems in Your Online Business

A few weeks ago, Kajabi invited me to be a guest speaker in one of their training sessions and I'm so excited to share that training with all of you, our podcast audience. If you want to work with ease and build an online business without chaos and clutter, this is the episode for you. Now if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, I do want to mention that there is a video version of this episode and we've included a link in the show notes for those who prefer to watch this training on our website or our YouTube channel. If you want to take your expertise, ideas and passions and turn them into a profitable online business, I invite you to check out Kajabi. You can get access to a 30 day free trial at Lydiamartin Biz Kajabi and you'll receive free access to my Kajabi training program Countdown to Launch Ready to get organized so you can optimize your business? Let's get started. Hi, I'm Lydia. In 2020, I resigned from my corporate job and took a big leap of faith. I launched a business I had been dreaming about for a long time. I had so many questions when I first started and zero people on my email list, but I was committed to one thing taking massive imperfect action. Within 18 months, I had thousands of students in my courses and coaching programs and was able to retire my husband from his 30 career to work with me. I'm still pinching myself that we get to run a six figure business while living a life we love, but the truth is this overnight success did not happen overnight. For more than two decades, I let imposter syndrome, fear of failure and perfectionism hold me back from my passions and purpose. What is it that you've been wanting to launch? In the Launch Perspective podcast, we share the mindset and the step by step strategies that will help you launch and scale the online business of your dreams so you can live life with more freedom and impact. It's time for a new Perspective. Welcome to the show. I started and launched my business three years ago this month. Just celebrated my third anniversary after dreaming about launching an online business of my own for over five years. So for all of you that are new, maybe you haven't launched yet, maybe you just launched or you've had your business for a while. I just want to share that in the beginning everything is simple, right? We, we want to keep everything simple. It doesn't all look great all the time. We're figuring things out and I just want you to know that when you launch, it's okay. That things aren't perfect, because I look back over three years ago and this is just the very, very simple homepage that I created in Kajabi. When I launched my business, it had like four sections. I didn't even know really what should be on this page. And it was like, what is clutter doing to your business? And the reason why I focused on clutter and organization and systems is because of the story I'm going to tell you in a minute. But I launched this business with nothing more than a free challenge. So zero people on an email list and an invitation to a very simple opt in page. This was a. A template inside of Kajabi. It was even the same image and overlay. Like, the only thing I changed on this template was the copy. And you see how basic it was. So here I am, March 2nd of 2020. I've resigned from my corporate job, a job I actually loved. But I knew it was time to start living my life with more freedom and flexibility. I wanted to be able to travel, to see my parents. I wanted to homeschool our. So our youngest while my two were in college and my older two, and I was like, I've got to replace that revenue. And I want to create things that are going to allow me to live the life that I'm looking for. So this was it, you all. This was the launch of it all. Such a basic opt in page that I just shared everywhere. And within six weeks, I was able to bring in my first 400 subscribers and my first 95 students into my course. And it was a course that had not yet been built. And so I just want to share this because sometimes I think we get into a tool, an amazing tool like Kajabi, and it does so much for us. And we're like, okay, I'm going to spend all my time building this great website and getting everything together perfectly. And I decided that the best thing to do was to take imperfect action. And so I just shared that little opt in page. We went live five days in a Facebook group. I invited them to join me into this course and I delivered it over the next five to six weeks. And this was truly the start of my online business journey. And I'm so grateful for tools like Kajabi that allowed me to do this. Since then, we have been able to grow. Of course, this is the top of my website now. And I just again, want to encourage everybody. You know, you will learn so much in this journey about your audience, about the people you serve, how you can help them about how you like to deliver content, about where to hire others who are skilled in areas that can help you grow and scale faster. It's all things that grow over time. So I just want to share this because I never want anybody to look at me and say, wow, she has it all together. She. This is just easy for her. No, we all start at the beginning and it just, it really does improve over time. So I hope that encourages all of you. This is the reality of what my life was like prior to 2013. Because every time I teach on systems and decluttering and getting more organized, I think sometimes people think to themselves, well, they're born that way. You know, they're, they're just an organized person. You know, this comes naturally to them. I did not come out of the womb an organized person. I came out a detailed person, but not an organized person. And so prior to 2013, I was actually had my own home based business at the time. And I love that business. I love the organization I was building, I love the customers I was working with. But I was frantic, frazzled, mess most of the time. Who can relate to this? Put frazzled in the comments. You know what I'm talking about. Like, you're doing great things, you're accomplishing some things, you're making some good progress, but you feel like you can never keep up. You're drowning in paperwork or digital chaos or all the messages in the communication. And it's because of what I'm going to teach you today. Lots of frazzled rolling in. And I came out the womb unorganized. I just want to say yes, frazzled. Frazzled indeed. We are among our people. Seriously, you all get it. And frazzled to the point of now. This is a picture of a desk. This is not the act, my actual desk. Because there is no way prior to 2013 that I would have ever taken a picture of my desk. So there is no history of my desk because I was so embarrassed by it. And here, my team, my customers, they all thought I was so organized. And all I could think of is if you came to my house and you saw my desk or if you saw my computer screen, you would not say, I'm an organized person. And I just felt like I could never keep up. I was always in survival mode. And we want to be in the thriving mode, not survival mode. And how many of you have ever had this scenario? And then you find something. One time I found a $500 check that was 18 months old that I had never cashed. So you want to talk about losing money. Okay? Losing opportunities. How many of you have lost someone's contact information who you needed to follow up with or you didn't have a system for follow up? And now you wake up in the middle of the night and you're like, I never called. So? And so these are not feelings we want to have. Right? I'm sure you agree with me, but when I talk about the word clutter, how many of you did instantly think of this scenario? Like, if you think someone has clutter, you thought of the desk picture I just shared with you, or you're just thinking, if you have clutter, it's fine. Physical. Okay? Clutter is definitely physical for sure. Look at all the things that can clutter our workspace, our home, where we are. I mean, all the things you have to keep up with. For the first 17 years of that first business, I had no system for receipts. Well, I had to throw it in a shoebox and pray I find it again system. So tax time was not for fun. Let's just put it that way. It was again, I didn't know what I didn't know. I just knew I was struggling. And so all of these different things can overwhelm you. But there's so much more than just physical clutter and digital clutter. Helping business owners create systems for digital clutter is my genius zone, because it wasn't before, but I've spent so much time over the last 10 years realizing that we can create systems through the digital tools we're using every day that help us go faster, be more efficient, be more effective, and not get stuck. I'll talk about those in a minute. But look at all the things that we're organizing. All right, this is an actual photo of one of my clients desktops. Now, this is a judgment free zone. But if anyone would like to admit that their desktop has looked like this at some point in their life, feel free. Okay? Her desktop had so many screenshots on it, you could not see the image on the desktop. And it's because she didn't have a system for screenshots for those temporary files for, like, she didn't have the thing that I'm going to teach you today. Okay, so who's excited? But there's one more area of clutter that really trips people up, and it's the mental clutter. How many of you would say the mental clutter is probably the hardest of the three? Right. You have to handle your schedule, your projects, your tasks, your team, the content you're creating. But now I gotta post it. But where's that thing I did? And like, like, it's so overwhelming. And then you put on top of that all your limiting beliefs of what am I doing? I have self doubt. I have limiting beliefs about. I have imposter syndrome. I have fear of failure, fear of what others think. And all that's going on in our head while we're trying to have clarity on the things we're supposed to do every day. It's. It's insane. And Sarah says it's the mental clutter that creates the physical clutter. Mental clutter 100% impacts these other two areas that I just talked about. And I love this quote by Peter Walsh. Clutter is not just the stuff on your floor. This is literally the quote that I built my business around. It's why I called my business Banish Business Clutter, because I felt that if you can eliminate clutter, all the things I just shared, those three things, it will open up opportunities for you in your business and your life in a way that you wouldn't have had if you hang on to the clutter. So I love this quote, and I think someone asked in the chat, but just so you know, I am going to be sharing these slides with Megan, and she will be emailing them to everyone who registered for this webinar. So you will get the slides. So if anybody's panicked about taking notes and screenshots, you can relax and just listen. Feel free. All right, so tell me in the chat, now that I've told you all of the different types of clutter. When you think about all those things in one word, you're only allowed to say one word. How do those things make you feel? The digital chaos, the mental overwhelm, the. I can't see my desk. I mean, who is motivated to come into a workspace when you can't see your desk? Right? But we're in that survival mode where, like, we have other, more important things, we have other priorities, and I totally get that. But if we never take the time to create a system, that is never going to change for us. So I'm just going to read a couple of these. Ooh, these are so good. It makes me feel anxious and stressed. Frustrated. Frozen. I love that one. I always say it made me feel stuck. So frozen's better word. Nervous. Blocked. Bad. Ineffective. Scattered. Behind. Ineffective. Overweighted. Defeated. Gosh, it's like nobody's even repeating words. Y' all are great. Discourage. I don't want. I don't want anyone to Feel discouraged, inadequate. How sad. You're not inadequate. This isn't defining who you are. Right. Drained, hopeless. Oh, it's just heartbreaking to me. And I understand within the depths of my being because that was me for so long. But this is why I asked this poll, and I'm going to go over the polls just to see where we are on here, because I was curious with this group how everyone was voting. If all of those things are how you feel about clutter, then now let's find out. Are you utilizing systems to eliminate clutter or at least to reduce clutter? Because we all have to start somewhere. So if you're curious about the results, 41% of you voted A. So if anybody is thinking they're alone in this journey, I just debunked that myth. Okay? 41%, the highest response was A. The second highest response was B. 31% of you, and then 22% of you said C. And only 6%, three people said D. And they. Who knows where they are in this journey, what their skill set and experience has been. But my point is, this is something we all need to choose to work on. Most of us are not born with it. We have to make the choice to make changes that are going to reduce clutter so we can have clarity. How many of you would love to have less chaos and more calm? Okay, I love all those C words. All right, this was me. I get it. I was overwhelmed. I wanted better systems, but I had no clue where to start. And I would watch these videos and people would say, go buy this filing cabinet system. Go buy this manila such and such. And I would get the system and I'd. Oh, I was a binder queen. Who. Who were. Where are my binder queens and kings? I had binders on a shelf that looked so beautiful. They were the most disorganized pieces of things that I had in. In my office. It was sad, okay? And because every time I would get pretty binders, it made me feel better. But I didn't change my habits, and I didn't change my systems. Right. I was also feeling paralyzed, like I didn't know how to come up for air. I felt like I was drowning. And when you feel stuck or frozen, like someone said, you don't take action. And without action, nothing moves forward. There's no momentum. So this is holding you back more than you think. And I know it was holding me back as well. And we are all on a mission, right? We all want to have a bigger impact on our. The lives of our family on the lives of those we're serving. But we can't, we can only go so far without systems. So once systems are implemented, this is what happens. So this is a little story, it's not a training on Evernote. But everyone always says, what made the difference for you? If for 17 years in your first business, you lived like that first desk picture, with feeling overwhelmed and feeling paralyzed, what made the shift for you? So I was, like I said, in a business, and a friend of mine said, have you ever tried Evernote? And at the time, this was in 2013, like Google Drive wasn't on the scene, Dropbox was out. I did not have a love relationship with Dropbox at the time. People were starting just to really understand what cloud based systems were. Right? And so she introduces me to Evernote and she was like, it's like a virtual filing cabinet. And I had it on my computer for six months. Didn't touch it, didn't get it. But when I had that conversation with her, this light bulb went off because I had been trying to store everything in physical form, paper, paper calendar. I would get something by email, I would print it, I would get see something online I wanted to read, I would print it. And I was like, I cannot have clutter in my life anymore. I'm just going to make the decision. And I chose to use Evernote and to create an online system to organize my world. And that is what changed everything for me. It wasn't just the tool, it was the decision. And you're going to see my steps in a minute. I'm going to share them with you. But that decision changed everything for me because I committed to creating a system for the things that I was struggling with most. And it was not an overnight change. But that one decision is what led to the change that you see today since 2013. This is a picture of my actual office. This is behind me, the wall behind me, the beautiful burnt orange that the previous owners chose for me. I don't usually use my green screen anymore. That's what you see here in this picture. But is my desk always this perfect? Of course not. But because I have systems in place and I know where my information's going and how I organize it, I can get it back on track in minutes, not days, weeks or months. All right. And what a difference it has made. I mean, just in my confidence alone, I no longer feel inadequate. I no longer feel like, well, I can't get more business because I can't handle what I have anyway. All those mental things that happen when you have clutter. It makes such a difference. In fact, this is the impact it's had. So this is my wonderful husband, Brian. And when I launched my business in 2020, I was a solopreneur. So I was running the business completely my within five months I was like, I cannot do this anymore by myself. So I hired a part time va, a friend of mine that I had known in a previous job. She came to work for me 10 hours a week. A year later I hired my first full time VA within 18 months of launching my business. Because we had implemented systems and because we were live launching and because we were, we were taking imperfect action and because we're doing all the things, I was able to retire my husband from his 30 year IT career. So after working and providing for our family so long and so hard, he now works from home with me. He's my podcast manager. He's my tech support guru. We were having issues with my Sony camera right before the live. He fixed that. Okay. And guess what else he does? He homeschools our son. That would not have been possible without the online business I've been blessed to have. But that business only would have taken me so far if I had not implemented systems. So I hope this is inspiring everyone. Okay. Because you don't know what doors will open for you and this may not be your dream to work with your significant other. It is, has always been mine. So I am so thankful that we do have that opportunity and I want you to know why spending time on this is worth it. What will organization and organized systems do for you? What word jumps out at you right away that you're like, I want more of that. I want to be more productive. I want to have more revenue. I want to have peace. I want more time to be more creative. I want to make an impact. These are all the things that you can experience when there's a well oiled machine. Okay? And that's what we're going for. I love it. I see a whole bunch of different responses in here. Fantastic. I love this quote by Katrina Mayer. Get rid of clutter and you may find it was blocking the door you've been looking for. And that is truly what I feel happened for me. So who's ready? Are you ready? Now remember, I'm going to be sharing the slides with you so you don't have to jot down everything on the slides. But if you want to make a personal note for yourself, if you want to write down a question that we'll answer at the end. Or if you just want to, you know, put an action step or star on something so that you remember what you want to take action on after this. That would be perfect. We will be doing our Q and A at the end, so just write those questions down. So here we go. Let's do it. I love it. Everyone's like, yes, let's go. Three steps to efficient systems in your business. And I will say, I'm a teacher at heart. I don't use big fancy words. I love to break things down into the simplest of understanding. So you won't hear me use. I did not go to college or get a degree or get a certification and how to be an organized person. I am. I'm literally speaking from personal experience and growth. And my first step, you. These are so simple when you hear them, but they are profound. And I'll explain in a minute. So step one in creating an efficient system is to determine the place. Where is that thing? Okay, Think of physical items, digital items, right? Task list, to do list, whatever, whatever I shared with you in the previous slides. Where is that thing going to be stored or placed so that I can easily get to it again? Because if my customer needs it, my team needs it, someone I'm collaborating with needs it. I can get it in a click. You have to pick a place. Now, you heard me say Evernote changed my life, but it wasn't the tool. It was the habits I implemented with that tool. There are so many tools out there. Okay. As a digital systems coach, I love helping people determine the tools that are right for them because it's different for everyone. But most of us are not choosing the place. And this is what happens. Someone sends us a file, someone sends us an image, a document, a message. We need to remember this thing. And we have no plan of where it should go. So we throw it as a screenshot to our desktop. We take a screenshot in that way. We throw it into some file on our computer. We might put it in Evernote today, but we might put it in Google Drive tomorrow. There's no determined place. And if you don't have a determined place, you are going to be frustrated. You have to decide where. Even these little things. So these are the eight main systems that I teach inside my digital Clutter Care program. Because in different digital organization, these are the things that trip people up all day long and they don't even realize it. I call it saving microseconds. Think about it. You need to save this thing and you've got to log in, right, to look up something and you go to log in and you have no idea what your password is. So you have to go through the reset process. You have to go to your email to verify the code. You have to go to your phone to get the code, you have to paste the code. So do you have any idea how many millions of microseconds you are losing simply by not having a system for your passwords? This is so small and so huge. I'm not going to go into training on how to do this. I just want you to be aware that there are systems out there for these tools. How are you handling your email? How are you handling your tasks? When someone sets an event with you so that it shows up in your calendar so you don't double book, so you don't miss an event, where are you putting all of the assets for your business so that you can get to them quickly? All right, and I'm going to show you an example of this. We're going to, I'm going to show you an activity, but this is the teacher in me. I want everyone to stay with me. I know you're going to be excited when I share the link to this tutorial, but you're not allowed to leave me yet. Don't go to the tutorial. You can access it later. I want you to watch with me live so that you can really see the magic of what I mean. So links is one of those digital things that trip us up every day. Think about it. You have to look up links to websites, tools, the back end of kajabi, you know, where, where do I update such and such, you know, your Google Drive system or OneDrive system, or you know, all the social media links that you get to. And I know some of you are thinking, I use bookmarks, but my bookmarks are chaos. I have hundreds of them running off of the screen. And so I don't understand how bookmarks help me. Well, I'm going to introduce you to my bookmark system. This is a bookmark system that I'm going to be sharing with you for free. I've had over 3,000 people download this tool from me, this tip, this tutorial, because nobody that I've ever met has utilized bookmark folders in the way that I do. And this one system is going to be life changing. This is why I wanted to share it with you. Okay, so before I share the link, I'm going to show you what it is and how it works. So let me just move a few screens around Here. And I'm just going to go ahead and go to my main website. All right, so I'm going to switch to my screen and I'm going to show you what, what I mean by a bookmark folder. So great example are things like your social media site. So how many of you maybe are going to Facebook groups that you manage or you follow certain people on Instagram, or you, you have your own profiles that you go to all the time. You can create what's called a bookmark folder. And I. Mine's called Facebook because that's where I'm going most often. You could call it social media whatever you want. And notice how from any tab tab that I'm on in my Chrome browser, I do use Chrome. It's just, I love Chrome for many reasons. But you can set up bookmark folders in any browser, just so you know. But I don't have to go to Facebook and then use Facebook shortcuts or search for something on Facebook. At any time, I can go right to my business page. All right, at any time, I can go to any link on my website. Somebody's asking me, you know, do you have. Where's your blog post on such and such? I can go website blog takes me right to my blog. I can go to my Google Drive account. I can get to any of my docs, any of my sheets. I can even break them up into subfolders to keep it even more organized. Where are all the course hoarders like I am? Okay, the. This is my bookmark folder for all the courses I've purchased. It's probably not even all of them, but these are quick links, bookmarks to my logins for those courses. So I literally come in here. Look at this. Favorites, fast track courses, completed courses. Like, you can literally add so many things to this bookmark folder system. All the things I'm an affiliate with. I can log into any of my affiliate programs. I have personal links, links for my podcasts, I have financial logins, recipes I don't want to forget. Even things for my family, things for Google Analytics. Like, are you all getting this? I don't see the chat at the moment, so I'll come back in a minute. But launches. Every time we do a live launch, look what we do. We put all of the quick links that we need for a launch right here at my fingertips. Do you have any idea how much time this saves? Okay, I don't have to go to a document and look it up. It's just always sitting up here at my Browser. And don't worry, I'm getting ready to give you the tutorial and a PDF guide on how to set this up. Okay. So you don't have to worry about the how. I just want you to see the why. Now, one of my favorite folders is my Kajabi folder. Does it. Does this look familiar? Familiar to anyone? These are the quick links in your Kajabi navigation, right? So if you go to your Kajabi navigation, notice how we have all these tabs over here on the left, right? How many of you have been ever said to yourself, where is offers? Right? And so it's like, is it under sales? Is it under whatever? Now, just a little tip. If you don't know this, you can always come up here to your little search. Sure. You can type offers, right? And if you scroll down, it will take you to creating an offer. So, yes, there are quick links in here. Yes, Kajabi's navigation is awesome. I don't want to even go through that step. So I went through all these links and once I pulled them up, I simply bookmarked them, titled them what it is, and saved it in my Kajabi folder. I'm like lightning when I'm working inside Kajabi because I'll switch to forms, events, coupons, whatever. Some of them I even put into miscellaneous because I don't use them as often. But I'm like, oh, affiliates, right there. I don't have to go and look at my navigation bar and be like, where is that again? I just click on it and it takes me right there. Okay, I gotta come back to my sl because I have to pull up the chat. I want to see what everyone's saying. Okay, now Cynthia is saying I'm having anxiety looking at your bookmarks. So couple things you can do. You can organize them alphabetically. And you need to remember I've been utilizing this system for three years. So most people I work with only save the things they go to most often. And that is what I recommend. You do not have to save everything. Okay? So you can just have a few. When I first started, I didn't have subfolders. I didn't have a lot of links, right? But now that my business has grown, I have a lot more connections, a lot more courses. So you only go to the things that you're going to go back to again and again. The things. I'm not talking about bookmarking everything. I'm not talking about booking things you want to read. I bookmark that in Evernote, right? There's a lot of other ways you can save things like that. I'm talking about the things that you go to all the time. And you can delete bookmarks, you right click, you can delete a folder, you right click you can delete a bookmark. But I want you all to try it. And yes, as long as you are using the same browser on all your devices. So even though I'm an Apple girl, I love Chrome. So I have Chrome on my iPhone, I have Chrome on my iPad, and I have Chrome on my computer, my Mac, and I'm signed into Chrome on the same email on all devices. Just by doing that, everything syncs. If. If I would lose my computer, all I have to do is sign into Chrome on my new computer and all my bookmarks magically appear. This is the sort of time that is saved when you have a system. And I work with clients, they've never signed into Chrome. So everything they're doing in Chrome, nothing is syncing that one little step might change somebody's life today. Okay, so we don't have a lot of time to talk more about this, but let me give you the link so that you can go to this. I love. I love it. Omg. So this is what we call this in my community. We call this a Celestial Angels singing moment. And what that means is that thing you have always wasted time trying to find. The first time you're like, it's in a bookmark folder, you're going to hear what I call celestial angels singing. Okay. Because that is how it's going to feel when you get to that thing quickly. Now you can use any. I personally love Chrome because I find it's the least glitchy and it is the most compatible with all of the apps and extensions that I use. You can 100% use the browser of your choice. And when you go to this link, lydiamartin.info bookmarks, it will take you to a free Tutorial that's only 10 minutes and a PDF download with links to where you can get instructions for the other browsers. Susan says, woohoo, I hear the music. You got it. So have fun with that. Just don't go do it yet. I know y' all are excited. Stay with me. All right, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this slide. I just wanted to use it as an example because what is it that's tripping you up? Everyone says, well, where do I start? What system? If you're tired of looking for links set up your bookmark folders. If you're tired of resetting passwords, you need to pick a password manager, right? If you're tired of finding folders, you. You got to get a system for your files, right? So the things in parentheses are just things I use because I know people ask me all the time, they always want to know what I'm using. But it does not mean you have to use that tool. Okay? I want you to use what you know, what you love and what you're going to stick with. But listen, all of the things you're brainstorming on for your business, where are you writing that? Where are you typing that? Is it on post it notes in seven rooms of your home? Is it on five spiral notebooks or 10 binders? Like, is it in five different digital applications? No. You need to pick a place. Where is the one thing you are going to brainstorm ideas for content in your business? I use Evernote. I've all used it for 10 years now. You wouldn't believe the different note brainstorming notes I have in my Evernote app. Links like just showed you. I put them in my bookmark folders, passwords, a password manager. You have some great choices there. Where do my files go? Yes, I do save some things on my computer and on hard drives, but a lot of my course content, videos and files get saved in Google Drive. It's just my preference. Digital assets, all of the images, a lot of the videos, that's all in Canva. So we have all. Our entire system that we use in Google Drive is also in Canva. So if you're in Canva, you have no organization whatsoever. It's really important to have a system now. You get unlimited folders if you have a pro account. So that I do recommend as well. I have a Make the most of Canva course that teaches you how to organize Canva. But that's just an example. That's what I'm saying is where is it going and where are you getting to it and how are you going to get to it? And then there's tasks and projects which we could talk about all day. I use a tool that used to have a forever free plan. Basecamp, unfortunately is now $99 a month. So I don't recommend it to most of my clients because most of mine are brand new business owners. But oh my word, there's a plethora of tasks and project management tools, tools out there that are all wonderful. But you have to pick your place. All right, a place for everything. And Everything in its place. Remember, the magic isn't the tool. It's step two. Step two is now you have the place of where this is going to live. What's the steps? What's the system? What's the operating procedure like? Like, what are we doing? Like? And let me just give you a very basic example of this. This. One of the reasons why I struggled with clutter is because I didn't have a system for mail, how to handle mail when it came into my house. My office at the time was all the way upstairs at the other end of the house. So I was famous for coming into my home and putting mail down on my kitchen counter. Worst thing you can do. I did that for 17 years, y'. All. Then I decided, I'm not saving mail like this anymore. I'm going to come into the house and I'm going to sort it the minute I walk in. So one of the systems I teach is sort, scan, shred. So because I have been introduced to Evernote, I got an external scanner. I now was creating this online system. So now mail didn't touch the counter. It would come in, I would sort it. I would recycle what was trash, and I would create a to do pile and a to scan pile. And then every Sunday, I would scan those things in. So I created a system for mail that reduced clutter. Same thing you're going to do in all of your digital things. What are those steps that you're going to do consistently? You want to be doing this inside Kajabi? Okay, now, I don't know. I would love to hear in the chat, are you new to how long have you been using Kajabi? Or you can say not yet if you're not yet using Kajabi. I'm just curious how long everybody has been on this amazing tool. Because if you don't have systems in Kajabi, you're going to get frustrated because things will take ten times as long. So what I mean by this is, okay, I see some not yet, eight days, three months, a lot of not yet. 2017, two to three weeks. Whole bunch of you. Okay, so this is going to be. You're going to be so thankful you heard my voice before you got into Kajabi. Because the beautiful thing about this tool is all the things you're creating in there, once you've set them up, they have this wonderful thing called a duplicate button or a clone button. Right? And so you're creating what you want, and it doesn't have to be perfect. You always Tweak it and fix it later. But once you have it, so you have a form, you have an email sequence or you have tags that you're using. Whatever you're doing, you want to get in the habit of documenting what you're doing so that you can quickly repeat it again. And not just you, but your one day team, right? One day, hopefully you are not going to. If you're going to scale a business, you are one day going to have a team. That's just a fact. You can only get so far by yourself. And if you don't start working on your systems now, then it's going to be a lot harder to onboard a team because what are you going to tell them? They're going to be starting from scratch because you don't have your systems. Right. So what do I put on my checkout pages? What are the settings that I have on my checkout pages? You know what, what kind of graphics do I need for, for those things when I'm setting up my courses? I just did a membership like, like what is my process for making sure this membership hub stays updated? Okay, what's my system for email titling? Right. How many of you have written an email and you know you have this genius email that in Kajabi, you have no idea what you titled the thing. So you have no way of going back and duplicating that email to repurpose that it. Right? So there's just so many things. And yes, there's Kajabi's new AI creator hub, which is amazing. So all of these things are helping you move faster. But when you're thinking about systems, anytime you're doing something inside this tool or another, you always want to be thinking, is there a way to be more efficient? I about jumped over the moon when Kajabi introduced email templates. And some of you are maybe not utilizing this yet, but when you create that one email that's branded the way you like, it's got your colors, your look, your fonts and everything, save it as a template. Why would you want to start over again? Right? So very, very important. So all things to keep in mind. I do want to spend just a minute or two on this topic because this is huge. You must be consistent and detailed. When you are titling content, it doesn't matter where it's being saved. But I put some examples on here and you'll get this in your slide deck. But when I first started with Kajabi, I wasn't thinking ahead. So as I would create email Sequences and I was creating automations for things I wasn't detailed enough. And so I would say things like signed up for lead magnet was my tag. I now have like seven lead magnets. That is not very helpful. Right. Or I would say signed up for my challenge, I think was probably the first thing I set. Said we don't do that anymore. We've had nine challenge challenges slash boot camps now. So now our system for titling is we say the action the person took, they registered, they purchased, they opted in, they, they did whatever. Okay, so what action did they take? What was the specific event, when was it? If it. If it's important to know. Not always. But what other details do you need? So these examples. Suanne says, I love the laugh. It helps me laugh about this. Listen, organization and systems is not a fun topic. You have to make it fun. Okay? It is fun because when you hear celestial angels singing, you're gonna think it's fun. Trust me. But signed up for bootcamp is now registered for declutter your business Bootcamp. So the action was registered. The. The event was that boot camp. And when was it? It was our March 2023 launch. This is going to save you so much time because when you're looking for things to clone, you'll go right to them. You don't put a tag bought program. You put what they purchased. And I will even put things like full pay, payment plan, monthly, annual, depends on what you're selling. Okay, so all of these are examples, even in our emails. So we just. We just wrapped up our ninth live launch. A free boot. It wasn't. Sorry. A $7 boot camp. That led to our new Ignite membership. And let me just tell you, if you've never done the live launch, in the beginning, I think our live launches had like seven emails in this whole sequence. Right? It was like to promote the challenge, deliver the challenge, and then to invite people to join our program. It was like seven emails. Our challenges and bootcamps now are like 21 emails. They don't all go to everybody. They're segmented and the whole bit. But it is a lot of copy, a lot of things to remember, a lot of things to keep up with. So we are very specific on how we title the emails so that when we do our next live launch, we just clone everything and update it with our dates and our info, if that makes sense. So our emails might say promo email 1. We say what the event is and then in parentheses right there in the email title. This is an internal title by the way it says send two weeks before, that means two weeks before the actual first day of the bootcamp. This email has to go. We'll say three days before, three days after, one week after. Sometimes we say things like sent to those who did not buy, sent to buyers. Like, like, you have to be specific in these things. We even put things like in Canva. We title things. We specifically say FB for Facebook, IG for Instagram, PT for Pinterest. But then we also even say square story real. Because if I don't, if I'm not specific, it's very, very hard to find things. Is this slide helping anybody? Maybe this was worth the price of admission right here. Even though your mission was free, this would have saved me so much heartache. I wish someone had told me this earlier. All right, so remember, as you're thinking through your systems, because I know at this point of the webinar, people start to go, I don't know if I can do this. This sounds really hard. I want you to know that you don't have to fix everything from the past. The best thing you can do. And this is exactly what I did when I committed to doing this in 2013. I did not say to myself, I have 7,000 piles of paperwork to go through. So let's start sorting. No, you're not going to jump into your files and think, let's create every folder we need and start dragging and hopping folders files into it. You're going to start from today. What can you change about your habits today? Moving forward? Because until you're committed to the habit, there is no point wasting time organizing the past. It's everyone hearing me. Okay, do I get an amen on this one? You have to to start from today. So I started by changing the way I worked with mail. I started changing the way I worked with email, with links, with passwords, with all the things once my system was down and created, then on a rainy day, I would go back and fix the old stuff. Okay, you have to spend your time on revenue producing activities. You can't spend seven weeks of your life organizing your files. It's not going to make you any money. It will eventually make you money because it'll make you more productive and profitable. But you have to keep focused on the priorities, right? So please just start from today. I recommend clearing your desk and putting those papers in boxes so they're at least out of sight. Create your systems and then you're going to start working for going through that system. And then you can go Back. But your systems will not be perfect to start. They will be messy. They will not be right. They will. You won't even like some of them. And that's the whole idea. You are going to learn as you go, but definitely create those standard operating procedures. I hardly ever use that term, but I know a lot of people know what that is. What we call them is this is how you do something sheet. Okay. But basically, like. Like, for example, I'll give you a great example of this. So my podcast. Let me go ahead and just switch scenes here. Okay, so. Nope, some on the wrong thing. So my. I have a podcast, like I said, my husband is my podcast manager. So we have an entire system of what happens when it. When I record a podcast. So we have a podcast page on our Kajabi site, and this page just shows the most recent nine episodes. Okay. But when you click on any of them, it actually opens to our blog page. And this is what I mean by a system. What goes on this page? We have a here's what to do sheet, or an SOP you can call it. All right, we need an image. So as soon as it's recorded, my team knows. Okay, we need an image. My husband takes the embed code from the podcast. We use Buzzsprout. He puts it right here onto the page. We need a description. We need the link. Links. We need links to the tools that are mentioned. We have links to the podcast. We have a pin that people can have. We have the transcript. Every single thing on this page is intentional. But the reason why it goes quickly is because we've created our system. Okay, so did we have this in the beginning? No way, no how. I mean, I didn't even have a lot of the things you see now, but. But we built them over time, and that's what you're going to do. I love this quote by James Clear. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. That's why this is so important. You need systems because it makes all of this easier. Without systems, this is where we get tripped up on those millions of microseconds. I'm sure that's making sense. When you have a plan and a place, you will hear celestial angels singing. Okay, I can't wait to hear your stories on that. All right, but let's leave you with step three, because I used to just teach two steps. Once you have a plan and a place, you're golden. But you could determine a plan, and you can determine a system. But if you don't make the decision to consistently implement that system and you don't take action and do it again and again, it's not going to stick. And I don't want you creating systems that don't stick. If you've ever heard that quote by Barbara Hemphill, it's clutter is nothing more than postpone decisions. And so if you're putting off, oh, I don't know what tool to put that in, you do your research, you ask your mentors and peers, and then you pick. You just decide. They're all great. Let me just help you feel good. Some are better than others. You'll figure it out. But until you decide and make a decision, nothing happens. No motion happens. No momentum happens. You have to decide and do. I love this. The perfect plan that's unexecuted is not as effective as the imperfect plan implemented consistently. Okay, so that is a quote you are going to want to remember. Don't worry about it being perfect. Don't feel like I can't really start until I have it all together. Nope. Not. Not true. You also need to remember that clutter did not happen overnight. Decluttering is not going to happen overnight. I love this Kermit meme. I love this meme. It says, when you've been eating healthy for the past 15 minutes. Minutes. And still see no progress. That's how I feel about all my diets. Like, why am I not losing weight? Why is it just not falling off of me? Right? But this is how we are. We're like, okay, I did my bookmark folders. Why do I not feel any better? Right? Okay. It is a lifestyle change. It's not a diet. It's not a quick fix. This is going to take time, and it depends on how much you need to declutter, but it is worth, worth the effort. Y' all just take action. Stop overthinking. Stop over analyzing. Stop putting it off. You just have to do it. I added my version, my, my words to the end of Barbara's quote because I truly believe it's the indecisiveness that's holding us back. Like, what tool do I use? What should I do? Pick a plan, pick the place and do it. Because that decision is what leads to momentum. Thanks so much for joining me today on the Launch Perspective Podcast. Looking for more? Head over to launchperspective.com for show notes and quick links to the content and tools that we shared today. Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes or ask a question that I answer on the show. You can do this and more@launchperspective.com See you there.