How to Build a Business That Doesn't Burn You Out

So here's a question. What if you could build a creator business that actually works for you? Not the kind that runs you into burnout, not the one that's cobbled together with a dozen platforms and a prayer that it all works. I'm talking about a business that is profitable, systematic, and dare I say it, calm. Today on Hey Creator, I'm joined by Dr. Monica, systems designer, Airtable wizard, and founder of the Systematic AF Club. Monica has helped 7-figure creators streamline their operations, track what actually matters and get crystal clear on how they're supposed to grow. In this episode, we unpack the CEO dashboard, how to track your revenue, content, offers, and engagement all in one place. It's the exact kind of high-leverage thinking that I'm starting to implement in the Hey Creator business as well. If you've ever felt like your creative business is more chaos than clarity, this is the roadmap you're looking for. Let's dive in. Monica, I'm thrilled to have you. And the first thing that I wanted to talk about is your concept of the CEO dashboard. What is it and why is it so important for like creators and experts specifically?

So the CEO dashboard came into being because I knew that when I was transitioning from my full-time role, I was running Forte Labs as their COO, into my own solopreneur business that I hope to scale into an agency. I knew it was gonna be really important for me to treat this like a business day one, especially because it, it was my business, right? It was becoming my business full-time. I had done side hustles for many, many years, and something that I found that helped really well, even while doing side hustles, was having a dashboard that would show me all of the metrics that were important to me about running my business. And those business metrics aren't that different from running things like Forte Labs, like what my other clients do. There are metrics around, for example, revenue. And the things that sometimes people always talk about are, you know, what are your sales? Well, that's great, but what are your expenses? And are you profitable? And so I'm always working towards what a former partner of mine recommended, the golden ratio of having, for example, 30% pre-tax profit. That's something that I'm always trying to work towards in my business, if not higher, especially with creator businesses where you can have pretty low overhead. It's possible to have much higher pre-tax profit, but as you scale, if you grow with a team, all of those things become much harder to handle. So having a CEO dashboard that shows you revenue, expenses, profitability, in addition to things that people get excited to track, right? It's like the content, you know, how many posts did I put out? What are the likes? What's the engagement? What's the conversions for my newsletter for sales? But then really getting into the nitty-gritty around what are you selling? So if you are selling products, whether they're digital products or physical products, how are you doing by per product line? What are your expenses per product line? And kind of trying to tie the two together. So at a very high level, revenue, expenses, profitability. Also things related to content. How much content are you putting out? What's your engagement and how is that converting over to sales? Is it converting? Because we were talking a little earlier, sometimes that trend line of how much content you're putting out isn't actually trending up in the same way that your revenue may or may not be going up.

Yeah. And you, you make an, you make an important point about that. 'Cause I've also thought about, as you were saying, I was like, how much time am I spending on different things also? So I, I do like tracking my time, especially like for certain projects, uh, like whether they're new projects or something that I haven't like done consistently for a while and looking at it and saying like, I, I did a course launch back around the beginning of the year and that was really good. But then I looked at it and said, okay, how many hours did I spend on this? Okay, I made $10,000 on it and I probably spent, I probably worked on it for 30 hours. That's a pretty good return on investment for me because I was able to leverage a lot of content that I had in the past. Another thing that like I can like thinking about this maybe more from an investment perspective, but still like really important to see is like I've been running a like 30-day creator challenge. Uh, we're kind of, as we're recording, we're lit. I think this is literally day 15 that we're, that we're recording. And like, okay, this has been really good from a list growth perspective. And it had also been really good for a member engagement perspective. I haven't gotten as many like new member signups as I was hoping from this. So I'm looking at it and saying like, okay, there are a few different ways to like judge the success of this, but. Like the more that I can kind of plan and like have that in the dashboard to be able to say like, okay, when you do this again, like you really gotta like kind of change maybe how you're doing it to focus more on new member signups rather than like just having a bunch of your current members or people sign up for the email list. Are you turning new email list people into members?

Exactly. And something I think that would probably work really well in your circumstance, for example, is when you were talking about when you do it next time. So if you do it next time, Putting the goal front and center with, you know, I am looking to have new member signups, if that's what your goal is. And looking at how you marketed it this past time. And, you know, that doesn't seem to attract or trend quite like you would want and that kind of conversion. So what can you tweak with that? I was talking with someone recently about when you look at the leads, you look at your subscribers on your newsletter, for example. I've had a newsletter for a really long time. I've had moments of growth of where I really send it consistently. I have moments where I've abandoned it. For a little bit. And you know that when you have, especially I find content over a really long period of time, if you've done any kind of pivoting about what your focus is, your newsletter subscribers tend to be all over the map in terms of your ICP, like your ideal customer profile, right? So maybe they were ideal customers at some point in time, but if you're not necessarily putting out content or products in that same vein, they're not all your ICP, right? So they were your original ICP, but they're not now. So just thinking about, you know, what are you trying to attract? And how does your content now support that? And how does that connect to what you're trying to get to, like a conversion process?

Yeah. So what other, are there other things? And what do you use to like create your dashboard? Are you using Notion for that or?

No, I am using Airtable. So I'm 100% Airtable for a business hub. And I know that there's a lot of folks who do things in Notion. I like Notion too. For, for example, bringing in different things with data. However, people may not like this, but Notion is not a true database. It's not when it gets down to like database functionality. And I was a database instructor many, many years ago. And I know the power of databases and I wasn't someone who was originally a database geek. But I know that, for example, inside of Airtable, I can very easily do conditional rollups based on certain filters. And without getting into like the API, all the things that you would need to do in order to do that out of the box. Someone who has very limited coding experience can put together a business hub with Zapier and Airtable automations, and you can set it up in 15 minutes to have some basic sales and offer tracking.

That's awesome. Yeah, I love how like systematic you are about the, about these things. And like, I know it's something that you worked on a lot with Tiago and you work with your clients and community members now is just ways to build in systems and automations in ways that make sense and save you time. And certainly that's a hot topic. It has been a hot topic for a couple of years, but it's becoming even more so with how much AI is capable of doing. But I'm kind of curious, like, from a, like, big picture perspective, like, what are the, like, say, more professional level creators, let's say, like, like Tiago, like 7-figure plus creators and entrepreneurs doing with automations and systems that you don't see people doing at the beginning? But actually like everybody should be doing?

I don't see anyone doing the system I built for Tiago, which is the business hub system that I brought into the company and that I do with my clients now. And so this idea of having, you tell me, Matt, I think I've heard a lot of creators tell me that I have products on so many platforms. I have Gumroad, I have Kit, I have Kajabi, I have Circle, and there's various reasons for why they have all the different places, but they don't have a unified place for all of their sales. So even at the 7 and 8-figure levels, I was finding that to be common. And more and more folks were telling me, I have my checking account. Like they're saying that's where all the money like gets centralized and they don't have it by product line anywhere unless you go into those discrete platforms like Circle and check out your analytics around your transactions, for example, per offer. So no one was having a unified situation. And I wish I could say that I, you know, came into the company and was like, Oh, we need this because I think creators ought to have that. Instead, it was honestly out of frustration. It was, I came from higher ed, we had it automatically, and I got there and I was like, where is it? Like, well, why don't we have this here? So then it turned into, well, let me figure out how to build it. What can we do that could be, for me, a no-code solution? Because I'm not a coder. I can, I know enough to like do some basic things, but like, I'm sure I'm a lot like that too. It's not, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, right? So Finding ways to have a unified sales situation, unified offers, but also what I think is really cool and I think— are you on Circle for your community?

Circle for the community for Hey Creator right now. I've used Circle. I've also used Mighty Networks. I mean, I'm kind of similar. Also, I have courses on Podia. I have like some coaching on KitCommerce. There's a few different— yeah, there's a few different places. I will say like everything, everything does dump into Stripe. But, um, you know, that is even still like, yeah, there are multiple platforms and channels.

And Stripe is good, but it can get a little messy, right? Especially because depending on how you sign up, you have different dashboards you have to toggle between in Stripe. And so then it's not quite—

Yeah, there's a Circle Stripe, there's a Kit Stripe.

Uh, exactly. Yeah. So like for Kit, for example, or actually for Circle, for example, that has one of the coolest Zap integrations that I've seen that we were able to use at Forte Labs. I'm on Mighty Networks predominantly now. I have Circle for certain things. Love Mighty.

Yeah, I'm probably going to be switching there this year, but yeah.

Yeah, and I've already put in a feature request for what I'm going to describe on the Mighty side because we can do it in Circle. So you can zap out of Circle comments and posts. It's really cool is you can connect the two really easily. So for example, you make a post inside of Circle, your community, people comment. You then have all of those comments and posts linked to people's client records. So you can see engagement by space, by group, by product over time. It's also really, really valuable during a launch, especially if you have like, let's say Black Friday, Cyber Monday situation and you're trying to get people to be really active for whatever reason. You can see really quickly against all the other data because otherwise you can go into the platform, of course, and see analytics, but you can't see the other things they bought or how long it took them from the time they bought to actually talk. Like those types of things, it's really harder to put together.

So are you zapping it into like the business hub that you created?

Yeah, it's a community.

Okay.

Yeah. And so then you can go for open a client record and see a nice little chart that shows over time by week, by month, by quarter, whatever, how their engagement was and not only how many times they're commenting, but how many times are they making original posts? Because it's one thing, right, for you to have a community manager, if you're solo doing it yourself and you're putting posts out and they comment, great. That's better than it being crickets. But how many times are they taking that action themselves in making a new post and contributing? And I think that that's super important for like kind of checking the temperature of the community engagement.

Yeah, absolutely. That's something that Gina Bianchini, founder of Mighty Network, she talks about that all the time, that if you can't transition— this is something that I struggle with— if you can't, if you can't transition the community away from like the, the founder, if you will, the community founder star power or like personality, then Eventually you're gonna have a hard time and I've experienced that some and it's like a thing to be really intentional about. What are some ways that like, this is a little, a little bit of a shift, but like when you see that for people, whether you're coming up on a launch, you're just seeing like, hey, this person even more so than like, hey, they have a high, like, you know, rating inside of Circle or Mighty, like you're seeing way more data. Like what are some things you're doing, uh, y'all have done to, or did do to try and incentivize more of that or like celebrate the people who were ranking very highly on your internal scoreboard?

One of the things that I found works really well is first of all, to pay attention to the data so it doesn't become a digital, like, you know, no man's land of not looking at the data. So when you see those folks that are engaging, tap them for opportunities inside of the community. And opportunities doesn't have to be paid opportunities, to be clear. I am, being from higher ed and K-12 before, I'm a big believer in pay if you can.. But if you can't award in different ways, right? Because people like to be recognized, they like to have badges, they like to be able to have, you know, an ambassador role or like some kind of community manager role within Raisin inside the community. So being able to leverage the data to see that, but also making sure that you perhaps think about things like using AI to help you analyze the sentiment of what they're posting to begin with. Like kind of pull out the themes and the comments because that can help you see where are they kind of expertise or where are they interested in, into that. And also looking at what questions are being asked. Because when you see the questions that are coming up over and over again, although I'm not a proponent— and you mentioned Gina earlier, I know she mentions this too— it's not all about content, content, content, because a lot of people think that it's content. Um, but you can use it to thoughtfully make content, thoughtfully make FAQs, or ask people to do a workshop on this topic because you've seen over the last 6 months questions are constantly being asked about it.

Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. So what else, what else goes into goes into a good business hub and how is that different like from the dashboard, from the CEO dashboard?

So my CEO dashboard or anyone's CEO dashboard really focuses on, for example, I sit down with my favorite cup of tea. For me, it's 9:00 AM on Monday morning and I'm looking at how much money did I make this week, this month, this quarter, this year versus the same patterns in the past. Looking at it by product line, it's very much a review. And because Airtable has filter relative to day, week, calendar month, etc. I'm not constantly changing filters. I'm literally just sitting down and looking at it. The piece that gets a little geeky that I highly recommend is you spend some time actually reflecting and journaling about what you're seeing, right? Because I find that there's one of two camps oftentimes with solopreneurs and with creators and business owners. They're either excited to look at the numbers or they're like, please no, I, I don't wanna look at the numbers because of whatever reason, whether you're scared about the finances around it, whether you're just not sure if you're growing the way you want to be and those numbers feel scary, you gotta get over that. You gotta rip that bandaid off because if it's a business and not a hobby, the only way to make the difference between the two is to make some money and to be profitable. And the only way to do that is if you're honest with yourself about your numbers. And so I like to kind of, you know, have my favorite music, again, my tea, my 9 AM, you know, it's what I do. And then I'm reviewing it and I'm reflecting on it and I'm talking to myself and like writing down some notes and a reflective piece. About, you know, did I meet the goals that I had for a launch or something along those lines? And if I didn't, why do I think I did it? You know, sometimes it's oftentimes it's a lever I could have pulled that I didn't pull. Other times it, it can be external, but I find sometimes people are super quick to talk about people didn't like my product or people didn't buy and, you know, fill in the blank about the reasons around that. But oftentimes there's levers you also could have pulled that you didn't pull.

How do you help people get over, kind of that fear of looking at the numbers, whether it's like, I just know it's not going the way that I want, or I'm like afraid that it might be. I'll give you a little like context or anecdote my size. Like I used to not look at the numbers a ton, or I just be like, you know, very, very vague, like, well, there's a little more coming in than is going out. So must be mostly okay. But I knew that like, I wasn't really growing the way that I wanted to. And like the, the oh no moment was, I think it was 3/2021. This was 2022. And so that was after my first year in business and like financially did, did fine. But one of the things that I didn't do consistently enough was put money away for quarterly. And I think like very, very common, especially for first year, like what do you mean quarterly tax payments?

Like what's the quarterly receipt tax? Like what am I doing?

Yeah. Oh no. Or, and like another thing, say in Tennessee specifically, like even though it's not a like normal state income tax, you still have business tax like a little bit. Anyway, that's a little too in the weeds. But when I like did my taxes that year, I looked at it and it said, and I didn't do a very good job with my taxes. I was trying to do it all. I was trying to do it all myself. I didn't hire a, you know, anyway, I looked at it. I said I owed $30,000 in taxes., and I was like, oh no, this is all like, I'm done. I'm cooked. I'm going back. I'm going back to get a job. I can't do this. And like, you know, I hired an accountant. He went through everything and he was like, well, you still owe $15,000, but, um, you know, like you missed all these things, blah, blah, blah. And so like one of the motivating, like feelings that I have through that besides getting better at systems and everything since then is like, well, I never want to have that feeling again. That's like. Completely within my control is like small, not feeling great every month is so much better than the like, oh no, my life is over and I've made horrible mistakes and I've put my family like in financial danger that I felt in April of 2022.

And while I haven't been in that exact situation, I empathize, especially because in my 20s I had some debt and it took me a while to get out of it. It was predominantly college debt, but it was something that it took me a while to get out of it. I signed up for law school 2 years ago and that is loans. And that's something that one of my goals like a— it's almost like the United Way thermometer. One of the things I'm trying to fill up is like, and I've put aside money for investing and things like that. I also am putting aside money to pay back law school because that, that is a big nut, as they say, that I will be paying back. And so one of the things that I have found that helps people not have the feeling that you just described and that I had had, right, when I was dealing with that in my 20s, is that number one, you have to hold on to why you don't want to feel like that and what it felt like. To feel like that. And I think that the number one thing to remember is when you proactively look at your data, whether it's good or bad, you are— you have agency. You're deciding, right, what the outcome is going to be, even if right now you don't like the outcome, right? It's still— it's a state, right? But it's not necessarily a fixed state. We can make changes every single day about how we do things, about how we spend, how we network or don't. And if you are kind of making all of your decisions through the lens of paying no attention to your data, right, you're making it in a vacuum. Then when you sit down and you look at your data and it's like that gut punch of, oh no, I'm here. Well, you've been making all your actions totally separate from your finances. And when you do that, it's really hard for them to align. I've seen people align, but it's rare. And the other kind of footnote I would add to it too is, because when you were mentioning the taxes, I have witnessed clients with similar situations. Almost everything can have a payment plan. And people forget about that, you know what I mean? And like, of course, you know, there is interest depending on the situation, it's not the end of the world. You can get out of whatever it is. Yeah, and I think also when you're looking at that data regularly, you can pivot and course correct faster or decide— and this is something especially in our creator world that I've seen to be hard for folks— they— if you're passionate about a topic but you're not making much money on the topic, it's deciding at what point to pivot, cut, and move in a different direction. And I oftentimes see people staying too much on a path of what they're passionate about, but they're also digging their hole even deeper because they're not able to financially support whatever their goals are. And I don't want to say don't be creative, don't, you know, follow your passion and those sorts of things, but I also have the— I grew up on a farm and I got bills to pay. So like, that is something that I think is important to think about too.

And these kind of systems, like with CEO dashboards and so forth, really help with that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, and Correct me if I'm wrong. So you have your membership and then you're still working with clients yourself. I am.

I have a mix of retainer clients for like fractional CEO work, community design, and some kind of one-off projects that I do. I'm in that lovely new business owner phase of if it sounds cool, I'll give it a try.

Yeah, I think that's— and that's something that I encourage people to like. We talk about this in the Hey Creator community. I work with like when I've done coaching, I talk with people, especially early on with this is, it can be really hard to make a full-time income, even I would say like a pretty baseline full-time income just on product sponsorships and memberships, say like the more passive or creative-oriented, non-deliverable type of, type of revenue. I'm still like, y'all, this is year 5 as like as a full-time creator. And right now I'd say like probably 60 to 70— I need to have my dashboard to know this, uh, right away— but I'd say like probably 60 or 70% of my revenue right now is still from clients. Like, that funds everything else. And like, my goal by the end of this year is to get it to more 50/50, and then in 2026 to kind of start to flip that to where 70% is more not passive because I'm still actively creating stuff. Like, you can use higher ticket services and use higher ticket services as a way to fund lower priced, usually type of, type of content. I get even people who have large audiences will often like come to me because my primary like service that I help people with is courses and email marketing. And they're like, hey, I want to do a Justin Welsh style, like $147 offer. I see that he's made $5 million on that. I was like, yes, he also has a massive audience. And so like, it's a great volume play for him. But like just looking at that and kind of, you know, that's another thing obviously to plug into the business hub, the CEO dashboards, looking at saying, like we started out talking about this, the not just the types of products, where they're coming from, what platform they're on, what type of, what type of revenue is it for And I think it's important too, because sometimes I'll hear, I think, what is the phrase?

Um, don't do dollars for time or time for dollars or something along those lines, like, because it's not scalable. Um, I'm paid extremely well with my retainer clients. It's nice. I enjoy that. I enjoy being able to know that at the end of the month, stuff's cool. And I'm picking up some months extra retainers that maybe I wouldn't normally do because I know that not everyone will renew. And eventually I would like to have an all-women-run agency and be able to cover, like, outsource for all of the things that creator business businesses could want. So HR, finance, operations and systems, legal when I passed the bar, like all the different things under one umbrella because I know how expensive it is to get W-2 employees. But I think it's important to kind of like, you know, put a flag too in the fact that it's not a failing to have retainer or project work. Like it's, it's, I actually, I also really like it. It's fun. And I've picked clients that I feel like I can provide value to their organization and I have fun doing it. And it's something that I, I remember thinking, am I going to try to do a play for like, you know, low ticket courses? First of all, no, that was like a very quick thought because I've come out of that world and I know what you just described is very difficult to do. It's also especially something similar cohorts, like live cohorts. Nothing makes a balance sheet do that more than a cohort that's like quarterly, right?

And that was kind of something in my first year also that I had. That was another thing that I had trouble with is like my first and being in the productivity space as a creator, especially you have a great January cohort. You're like, wow, you know, just in my like first year, first one, I was just like, good, this is going to be great. I totally made the right decision. Then April didn't— was not as good. I was like, that's okay because January was so good. And then August was a disaster and I was like, oh no.

I know. And then you're waiting until like December for like annual review slash something related to productivity that could kind of new year, new you sort of thing, right? And so Similar to what you mentioned, I'm working towards kind of a 70/30 split like you described eventually, where 70% is not dictated by my time in the sense that I would like to be able to do more things that are more flexible and are not necessarily as time committed. But right now I'm riding the retainer client wave and I'm enjoying it. And it's just kind of setting me up for later so that I can make thoughtful decisions to kind of pivot it later.

One of the things that I want to, if I'm, if I'm kind of reading your business model, uh, properly, like I think we have some similarities here in like in, in a type of setup that I want to encourage people on as well is, um, what you're doing in your membership is very closely aligned to what you're doing with clients. Right. And so, yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, it is what can make it easier y'all as you're, you know, listening to or watching this is like, what are you doing as a service at a higher price for a few clients that then you can also teach these same principles to people who like can't hire you full-time or retainer right now? And so like when I am working on an email marketing launch for a client and even like I'm doing my own launches or I'm working on YouTube videos or even like something that I'm writing about in the newsletter tomorrow. I pitched Tom Brady on helping with his new newsletter because like his newsletter is actually quite good. I was surprised because his landing page for signups is quite bad. And I was like, this is not— and I'd like did a whole breakdown video. Maybe I was too negative if he, if he or anyone on his team saw it at all. But it's like, people are going to sign up because you're Tom Brady, but can we not just rely on you being Tom Brady for signups? Like, You have, you do all these things. So, um, what I was able to do is like, I'm working on pitching that for Tom. I've talked about this specifically with my newsletter, like retainer clients that are paying me to help them grow their newsletter. But then I'm taking these same lessons and I'm saying like, we're going to do a session about it tomorrow with the Hey Creator community. Be like, hey, here's everything that I talked about trying to help Tom Brady. Here's something that I talked about with this other client. And here's how you can use these same lessons. So it sounds like you're doing like a lot of that same stuff as well.

Very much so. And my goal with my community was for it to be my passion project that is the most accessible price point that we can spend time together. Because, and I know there's high-ticket communities, I've clients with high-ticket communities. Mine is not. My goal is for as long as possible to keep it at its current rate, which is $250 for the year, $25 a month. And it's enough for someone to remember hopefully that they're paying some money and maybe they ought to show up in addition to all the automations and engagement pools I have to get them there. But I don't want it to be something where, you know, if you're deciding what you can do for fun this month, it feels like a huge pain point, right? Like, I want it to be enough pay so you pay attention, but not something that is not accessible. And so I was mentioning earlier when we were chatting that I have different types of things I put into the community. So the big thing about mine is that we have 2 office hours a month. We get together and we kind of jam about different things we're working on in our businesses or for personal or professional productivity. And they have 2 tutorials a month that I show them kind of a soup-to-nuts tutorial about how to do a thing. And one of the things that we're doing this month, for example, is the CEO dashboard business hub situation. And I had mentioned, I know I'm jumping ahead a bit, so I hope it's okay. I would have put it in a higher ticket. I was actually thinking originally this spring, then it was next spring. And then let's just be honest, I don't have the audience for that yet. And I know about what kind of conversion rate I expect based on past purchases in my list and so on and so forth. And I also just don't feel right having small business owners pay the kind of ticket I was thinking about doing. I was thinking about pricing it somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000. And although I know it's worth it, I also just don't want— I feel bad about it. So I was like, how do I find a way to feel good about this? I give it away to my community. I give it away to the people who believed in me when I said join the Systematic AF Club and no one else had ever heard of it. And the excitement they're having in the community, Matt, is so cool. Like someone was like, holy shirtballs, Monica. I was like, oh, shirtballs. I haven't heard that in years. Like so excited to see it. And I get to geek out about making video tutorials that literally I hit record on Loom and I talk and I'm pretty coherent and consistent. I was a teacher for a very long time, but I'm not doing a ton of production. It's not like YouTube style with post-editing and stuff like that. It's sometimes stuff doesn't work, you know, and I'm like, Let's wait for the automation to run and kind of talk through that and explain why it works. But I believe that adding the best of you into your community, no matter the price point, in my opinion, is, is the long game play.

Yeah, I, I really like that. And I'd, I love how, and this is, this is the thing that I was trying to, people listening and watching is that if you can like align your services, your like low, let's say lower ticket offers, your more public offers. Then like you can do a lot of the same things just for different, different people at different levels. And that allows you to kind of work on both ends of your business without feeling overwhelmed. I think where, where it can feel like you're like doing two completely different things or two significantly different things and you're, it can feel like a whole lot of extra. Like if I was trying to run email marketing for people, but then also like you know, a parent influencer or write a book that had nothing to do with email marketing. I'm like, okay, well, just going to do, you know, I'm going to do this. And I, I know there are some people, and, you know, I know there are some people who are like, hey, I want to be able to do something that pays the bills so that then I can like turn that side of my brain off and then go do the other thing. But I have found, uh, you know, like you, that the more that I can align, like, hey, I'm doing like high-level creator stuff with clients and then personally for, for myself on YouTube or whatever it might be, and then I can take everything that I'm working with others on and teach it to you who like may not be able to like hire me directly.

It's like your internal flywheel, right? Because it is very similar to when I was publishing in academia because I talked about information literacy, educational technology, and academic assessment all within colleges. And whenever I would go to write something new, I tried to write something that extended former research. There's a lot of reasons for that. One of the big ones is it helps with searchability. It makes more sense if you're writing about common topics and similar topics But it's the same thing now. Like I geek out about automations, systems, dashboards, how to be able to have kind of mindfulness practices with that while you're building your business, whether you're a solopreneur or you have a team and how to do all of that, whether it's you by yourself in your house, you know, or in your coworking space, or it's you with your team, or it's me helping a client or me being like a team member in a fractional way with another team. It's all the same thing. Like I kind of talk about all the same things over and over again, but I like talking about those. Things. And I also find— you tell me— it makes me better at those things because I'm looking at it through all these different lenses, right? Myself, the creator, my clients, as a team member, all of that. As opposed to, like you said, if I put on a different hat and now I'm going to talk about basket weaving, and that would just not work.

Yeah, no, I, I agree. It does give you a lot of different perspectives, um, because also, like, I'll start explaining something to someone who's pretty new and they'll be like, let's go back to the part where you said landing page. Is that like, is that different than a signup page? No, not really, but let's talk about that. Yeah. One of the things that obviously super hot topic, uh, right now is the impact of AI on productivity, on systems. Kind of what, what's, what's your take on how things have been progressing, especially lately? Like say the, the ChatGPT operator that just released. I've tried it a little bit. I signed up for the, like, super duper pro plan for a month just to play around with it. I've been a little disappointed in Operator, but Deep Research is incredible and I might just pay $200 a month happily for Deep Research. But like, where do you see, like, what has been your experience with it? Like, and how has it kind of changed the way that you're working in systems and automations?

So I heavily use AI. I have AI open all day long in probably too many things to admit. I went on that, I think they call it pro, $200 a month plan on ChatGPT the day it came out. Out. Okay. And I justify it as it is my employee. Yeah, not a tax man, if you're watching this, no, it is not my employee, but I, I treat it as such because there are things I'm having it do, Matt, that I normally would have needed a VA to kind of do some just like basic data analytics and things like that. Um, very much agree, deep research rocks. I had it write for me last week because I was just curious when it came out. It was last week or the week before that. I wanted to do a The state of online communities through the lens of creators. It's really good. And I'm still checking the references as the academic. I'm like, let me look. And it's, it's right.

It's as you gotta, you do gotta check those. But like deep research is even better at it than like the regular models were for ChatGPT. 'Cause I, I check on some of those sources and be like, ah, I don't, that's not really a source.

But I'm like, mm. I know. And, and especially if you ever go down the rabbit hole of on X or Twitter and looking up people using, for example, GPTs in like legal arenas. It hallucinates cases till the cows come home. Like, it's terrible. And people have been disbarred for having like inaccurate citations in court and things like that. But for things like this, especially the deep research with looking at— I told it to use Reddit and I gave it certain creators to look at and to try to find their blog posts or published content. It found it. And so one of the ways I'm using it, and this is like a really approachable, easy way for someone watching who's like, I'm just getting started with AI, maybe I have the ChatGPT basic plan or I'm just on the free plan, what can I do with it? If you wanted to try to make your own CEO dashboard and you wanted to make some formulas, it knows how to do that from Airtable. And you could say, here's a screenshot of what I have. What fields should I include if I want to make this dashboard that Monica is talking about today? And she's saying you can have these kind of views. What fields do I need? What formulas do I need? And how should I set it up? It will do it. And like 95% of the time with the formulas, it is correct in Airtable. I have found Notion formulas to be less than accurate when I've tried to do it with ChatGPT. That's also probably because I am less comfortable and familiar with Notion. So I kind of can't formula side do it myself as well. And like, I know what to expect with Airtable. It's just when it gets into something complicated, it is lovely to pass it over to ChatGPT.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's something like for that in particular, another way that I used it is so like we've talked about our mutual friend, uh, Darryl Westerfeld., and he has an annual planning system he calls the OGSM, the Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Metrics. And like, he and I have talked about that for a couple of years. I basically gave ChatGPT like the outline of OGSM and like the description of everything and said like, okay, well, here are my objectives here. Like really, like even with the voice text, just kind of talked through my plan for it. And I've created basically an ongoing conversation that every week I just bring it back up. And I'm like, okay, hey, we're gonna, you know, talk about what numbers they hit this week. And hey, you know, you're falling a little bit short on this one. And like, have you tried these other, like, have you tried these other things? Or like, why aren't you spending more time on this? As in, is it actually not as big of an objective or are you just like, whatever, whatever it might be. But it's all, it's kind of like a, it's a little bit like a business coach with some of these things also. Like, it's not like it doesn't have all the context, but for the context that you give it, pretty astounding.

And something that I've been recommending a lot to people right now. So I use Claude too. I wish Claude had a pro plan level because it's funny, my husband teases me because he's like, you ran out of Claude minutes again too, didn't you? Because he knows that I'm like going hard and working on something and I kind of make a noise and he knows I've like run out of the time on Claude and I have to wait for the time to run out.

It defaults to concise responses. I'm like, no.

And I'm like, no, I don't want Kinsight. But, and you've probably seen this, Matt, you can connect a Google Doc. So I use that and of course with client permission. So I don't do this with all of my clients, but when I use, like, for example, I record our sessions. So it's something that I always do. And I've lately started using Loom because Loom has a meetings integration. So it can actually join like kind of a, like an Otter AI or a Fathom note together.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

I didn't know you could Fathom. Yep. Loom is so much better too. It goes right into your Loom meetings. You can set it up. It's, if you search for it, I'll find the link and send it to you. But there's, It's I think in beta, but it's just free to add to your account and it's unlimited storage. So I'll take the transcript from the meeting and I will put that in a Google Doc. And because the context window, meaning how much it can ingest in the LLM, in the ChatGPT, in the Claude is so much bigger than it used to be, I'll do reverse order of all the meeting transcripts and I have that connected to Claude. So I'll sit down and want to work on something for the client. I'm like, hey Claude, take a look at— I call it Copilot— take a look at our meeting comms. And tell me if anything interesting or unique you're seeing and tell me if there's any topics that keep coming up and we're not resolving them before I continue to like work on it.

It is invaluable. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, I do it a lot with my newsletter clients also because I'll go through like, hey, we're, here are the newsletters we've written. Here's like the conversations that we have or they're like, sometimes I'll even throw in like, hey, this, you know, this person had a tweet or a LinkedIn post or like, here's a transcript from a YouTube video that did really well. Here's, How can we like create new content out of this? Because one thing that I'm always trying to do is like most of my— and, and for myself also is like we've kind of already made enough stuff, which is wild to say. And so it's like I want— one of the things that I want AI to help me with more is to create like more of the— because I still think like weekly and even like daily social media content and weekly newsletter content I still think is super valuable. But I think because of how noisy things are, even in our own channels, we can reuse, repurpose, remix. And I'm like, okay, how can I think of something that's— how can I spend more time working on something bigger that's more unique? Because I just know that like the machines are working on stuff that I've spent, that I've talked about for like 5 to 10 years.

You've already invested so much time in it. You actually gave me an idea because I do a fair amount of remixing. But I was like, and this tells you my ADHD, I 100% was like, I need to dump my academic articles into Claude and ask it to come up with user-friendly, my ICP style content because I really talked about the same thing then, just the tools were a little bit different and I could get a lot of mileage out of those 25+ academic articles. But, and also to that point, when you're thinking about, you know, remixing and using like systems and automations to do that. Something that I think is worth saying is that you and I and anybody, you're gonna get tired of your content way before anybody else gets tired of hearing you talk about something. Mm-hmm. Algorithm, how much they see it, all of the things. And someone taught me a while ago, Jeff Felton, I believe he's, he's an email marketer. Oh yeah, I know Jeff. Yeah, we were working with together on my newsletter and something that we were talking about was related to, you know, being consistent about what you talk about. Because even though you might not wanna talk about it today, going like on a totally different path because it feels right for you is okay sometimes. But if you do it consistently, what are you being known for? Like if the, I wanna be known for systems and operations and geeks out about that kind of stuff and someone who can help you do it in like a non-scary way. Like that's, that's kind of the approach I like to take. I think that having a systemized approach to content remixing and to content development can help kind of put those guardrails in place for you. It's almost like having your content pillars, like, is this a pillar? Should I be talking about this right now? Mm-hmm.

Um, and systems help with that. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree. I think the people who I've seen that kind of make it long term are people who are willing to talk about the same thing an uncomfortable amount of times. Uncomfortable for them. I would say it's actually not uncomfortable for people who are learning about your work, or especially for people who are learning about you for the first time. The more that you can say the same thing or slightly tweak it many, many times for many, many years, like, just increases your your surface area of success. You know, there's a— especially for a creator, I do think that it is a big temptation for me because we are multi, you know, people with multiple interests. But it's like, what's the difference? And you said this earlier, like, what's the difference between your business and your hobby? The thing that you want to make money on, the thing that you want to be known for. I think something that has, that has helped me is like, especially from the social media perspective, is like, okay, I kind of pick out I kind of pick my spots, whether it's the weekend or like late afternoon or evening sometimes. Like, yeah, I'll talk about other things that I'm interested in a little bit, but you know, like those are just so if some, if people follow you on those channels, they're like, okay, they're not like, that's not your necessarily pillar content all the time. It's just like, oh, now I know Monica a little bit better. Now I know Matt a little bit better, but I'm not, I'm not like just talking about my kids for a month, or I'm not saying like Well, you know, I've been getting really into jiu-jitsu, so now I'm just going to talk about jiu-jitsu for like 3 months. Like, what happened to the newsletter stuff?

I know, but I think it humanizes you, right? And I think I saw this morning, it was like a bird's eye view of what your desk looked like. And I think in talking about what it's like to kind of work from home and manage the kids' schedule and go back and forth between doing different things, I think right now—

I think I might have— well, I saw one similar to it. I think it might have been Tom from—

Yes. From Kit. And I was looking at that one and I love that because it's a different side of someone, right? And, but it's also not the same content all of the time. And I also know what to kind of expect from someone when they're kind of, because I'll know that I want to fire up my LinkedIn because I have kind of things bookmarked and there are certain people I know I want to read certain things from because I believe in their content. It's valuable. But it also is kind of like with mine, I don't want to come across as just like a systems spot and that's it. So I'll post about other things like my husband and I doing a 5K or going to the gym and, and those sorts of things. Um, just cuz it kind of makes things— being in Prague. Yeah, putting in being in Prague. But you also won't find me, for example, anymore, and I did this years ago, so if someone were to Google me, they'll be like, yes, you did. I don't anymore. I used to be really gung-ho about constantly posting about certain apps, whether it was Airtable, Tana, my favorite note-taking tool, Notion, like different things. I had this realization about 6 months ago that I just don't want to be app girl. And there's nothing wrong with if you want to be app person, I won't genderfy it, but I just don't want to be the person that just talks about a certain software for a lot of reasons, whether it tanks and is no longer around for any of the tools or just also because maybe I change my mind. And we've all seen those YouTube videos where someone is like, I'm no longer using insert tool.

Yeah, I can see the thumbnail.

Yeah, exactly. And, and they've been doing it for years and they built their brands on it and those sorts of things. I want to be the person doing the systems behind the tools. So no matter where you go, there's things that you can use for it, but it's not making it so the only people I will attract at a given time are the folks who happen to be interested in that tool.

So Monica, we're recording this at the beginning of the year, pretty early. So this is mid-February that we're recording this. So we have like And so much has already happened with AI, it feels like, which we were just talking about. But like, as you look forward into the rest of 2025, like what is a like prediction or trend that you like see accelerating as the year goes on?

Online communities. And I'm so excited about that because I have been hearing an awful lot of people tell me lately, I'm so excited to be in person again. And I get that feeling. I get that feeling. I'm going to a mastermind next week in Colorado. And I have almost every month this year, I have some in-person things. Cool. But everything is more accessible when you have different ways for people to participate. Mm-hmm. So having high quality online communities and having hybrid experiences, that is what I'm bullish on because that's what I'm really pushing. Because every time I hear of the in-person, that not the small ones, but like a 300+ person event that has no online component with it, you're just closing the door on so many impactful things that could happen. If you don't include it. So I'm bullish on pushing for hybrid experiences, especially for that, just because of the accessibility point and everything for accessibility, meaning money, access, time. You know, what if the employer doesn't give you time off work and it's someone who's really excited but they can't go, but they could log into a Zoom whether they're sneaking it or they plan it, right? So that is what I'm bullish on. High quality, well-designed online communities and hybrid experiences.

That's awesome. Yeah. And I know that that is something you're working on. Specifically, like we've talked about a little bit with your membership. So tell us a little bit about Systematic AF.

So my community, my membership is called the Systematic AF Club. Very tongue in cheek. Love it. I can curse like a sailor and try really hard not to. And that is something I thought it makes people smile. I've had people write me and tell me, like, I couldn't believe you called it that. And I was like, and I got the domain. So I was just so excited to be able to do that. But the point of the club was to be able to bring everything we're talking about really today. Systems, automations, workflows through like a productivity lens to people who are interested in those topics, whether it's because they work in that space, whether they are a quote-unquote knowledge worker or they are someone who is an employee and they want to have a more productive day. But the focus on like the— and I think the word that we often hear is, what's the transformation? What's the promise here? My thing is I want you— yeah, the transition. I want every single member to spend more time on what matters to them. I don't want— I'm not like, let's spend hours on automation. I mean, if you want to, okay, but like, I want you to spend time with your family. I want you to spend time working towards your goals. And I know with every fiber of my being that systems, workflows, and automations make it possible to spend more time doing actually those things that matter, whether it's in person or online. So that's what we do inside the club. We have office hours twice a month. I do 2 tutorials or more because I geek out and tend to drop more. And I'm sharing my full business hub system between now and— it originally was going to go from February through like June. And then I realized, ah, I'm just gonna drop it all in here. So we're gonna have everything from how to build your sales client and offer tables to how to do community engagement and onboarding and offboarding. And those pesky words no one wants to talk about, which are refunds and chargebacks. We'll even learn how to handle those and some processes related to that. Yeah. And how to look at your numbers and have things like goals and KPIs and connect those to your data. So put it all in there so everybody can get that literally at $25 a month.

That's incredible. Yeah. Thanks so much. Uh, that I, I learned, I learned a ton and this has been really fun. So Monica, thank you so much for joining Hey Creator. Where, where's the best place to like either sign up to your newsletter or follow you on any of the socials or YouTube? Uh, where's the best place besides, uh, the club?

The best place to find me online is LinkedIn. It's where I'm the most active. Secondarily is Instagram. And I have a YouTube channel that I actually posted on today. I would not have mentioned it if I didn't have a great video up for you to take a look at. But those are the best places to find me. And of course, if you're interested in the club, go to systematicafclub.com and you can find information about it there.

Monica, thank you so much for joining Hey Creator.

Thanks for having me.