Hello, it is really good to be here again with you all, like, thank you so much from the bottom of my butt for getting so excited about your operations. Like if there's anything that I've learned about being up and running orgasmic ops October so far is that I'm getting messages and comments about how people's perspectives about operations has changed. I'm just like, what more can I ask for? So thank you all so much for being a part of this experience. And I can't wait to put it on some more. But like, the the biggest wins are like you all, like the fact that you all care about your operations. So much more now just makes my heart so happy. So hello, everyone that's already here. And if you could help me by putting the answer to the poll that I have added, like it's the same poll as last time, but it just helps me again, shape the conversation for today, because we're going to actually talk about the systems that support your team. And hopefully, we're going to leave you with some like good nuggets of orgasmic bliss. So yes, please put your put your answer to the chat or to the poll and tell me if you can see my screen, okay. And I will pause the moment so that I'm not just talking to the abyss, so just give me a thumbs up or something to make sure that you can actually see my screen. Hey, Stephanie, thank you for letting me know. It looks good. Awesome. All right. So quick sip, and we're gonna get going.
All right. So previously, on the last episode of orgasmic ops, October, we talked a lot like we talked a lot about systems, especially the buyer facing systems. Remember, everybody's business is different. So whether they're clients, members, students, customers, insert your ideal word here. Like we talked about what systems are as an overall concept, and why they're important. And if you weren't at the last session, you can always get the replay. But we can talk about the definitions of that, like, ask questions like, I want to bring people up on stage today, if y'all consent to that, because this was super helpful. So let me know in the chat, like things that you've discovered, or things that you've learned nuggets you walked away with. And I have this triangle next to it, because the system's definition that we had, the people processes and tools working together to achieve a specific repeatable result gets turned into a hierarchical triangle so that we all know what's most important. And if you don't get needs and requirements, from the people experiencing the system is meaning you, your team, your customers, and your buyers, your apps and automations aren't going to matter. And then we talked a lot and you all got to audit the different systems in a buyers journey. And this is like super overarching, like, by no means are these the end all be all, but it was I tried to zoom it out enough to make it as applicable for everybody. So these were the things that we talked about. And then you all talked about how you could rank them in terms of priority. So we're going to take a quick pause here. For the people that attended last session, I would really love to hear from you like, what are some insights or updates that you had? Since we last saw each other? Please don't be shy. I would love to know because as you might know, I don't like just talking at you all I want this to be in an engaging conversation because co creation is where it's at for me. Okay,
so we're going to move on. So in this session, we're going to talk about examples of internal facing systems. By No, we don't like last session, we had like a lot this time i pared it down by more than half because I want it to be targeted. And if we finish early, it means there's more time that I can chat with you all. And we're going to talk about the benefits of these systems. And then how these systems support your team. And like I showed you last time if this is the first time we're meeting I am getting tired of saying this like I'm Veronica. Oh man like this like like got me all tripped up because I'm just like I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again. But if this is the first time we're meeting, hello I love but stuff business laid bare loves but stuff and we know the operations are extremely important to any startup any agency any e commerce, any brick and mortar business. And so we're on a mission to get people excited. Like I don't want you thinking like oh, this is just something I know it's important and I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole but as we talked about in the very very first session, your operations are the how that makes your goal So your visions, your mission, purpose, etc. The what happened. So when there are people first and pleasure filled, this makes achieving money, goals and mission goals and purposes a lot easier. Because I love talking about profit, not revenue, because if you're turning high revenue but low profit, you ain't gonna make any change. And so this is my team Terry and Mikayla, Terry on top. Mikayla on the bottom. And we just are so excited to be working with so many founders, like we've been able to help them achieve so much that I'm just like, how do we continue to amplify the importance of operations in a way that feels really good. So thank you all for being a part of this mission. And for being here to support us as well as a supporting you like UCS silico creative process. Okay, so I'm gonna take a quick break, I'm gonna look at the chat. Danielle, you ask the prompt questions to your ops person. And you had an amazing discussion. Oh, my gosh, I would love to hear what came out of that. And it really helped us think and understand how the operations are feeling for her. Oh, my goodness, yeah. Like, I would love to hear what she had to say. Daniel, you said, we started planning how to improve our out selling process. I love that, Carly, we started redoing our onboarding process, like you all actually took action. I am so proud of you all, thank you so much for not just like coming to this and thinking of like, Oh, it's a webinar or whatnot. So this makes my heart so full. Thank you so much. Okay, so think of your business like a human body. Because this is how I can best get the concept of operations across like, I've been thinking about this a lot. So I know that my body is capable of taking me on vacation, hiking, all that good stuff without having to worry if I'm just going to like drop dead or be injured. And if I'm an injured, am I going to be able to recover quickly. So your business is kind of like the same thing. Think of your business as a body, your operations, like it's in charge of all the inner workings in your business, and you want your business body to be healthy, right? You want your business to be able to take you places so that you maybe can't even imagine without you wondering like, oh my gosh, am I going to be able to handle this growth, the success, this trajectory. And when your operations are in place, when your business feels healthy, when your heart feels healthy when your blood is pumping, as it should, when there's like, no stuff clogging your arteries, it means that the inner workings, your operations are smooth and healthy. And then when you're healthy, you have like quick recovery from setbacks and injuries. Your blood pressure and glucose numbers are normal, nobody's burning out. And so I always just like to think about my business, like a body and if I'm keeping it healthy, and must mean that my operations are in check. And like last time, let's you're gonna be taking notes and you'll be auditing your internal facing systems, like just use a quick scale of one it's non existent to it's like half assed three, it's good enough and four, it's orgasmic. And even if something is orgasmic, it can always be better, because you're always changing and evolving. Like you're always evolving for the better. So even if things are already really great. Okay, so Daniella, you said we added a new approval tool for creative content approvals to ease some pain points she had been feeling. And she told me that everything has changed in the last two weeks, the exact time we've been using this tool. I love this so much. Okay, so here are three internal facing systems that we're going to talk about. And then there's going to be one more that I didn't add, but we'll talk about it if we have time. Because none of that matters. If the internal facing system and you're buying buyer facing systems are not in place. So number one, let's get started. Yeah, it's your knowledge base. So your knowledge base is like your business brain. This is where you and your team members can reliably store and access any information documentation related to your business. So I would love for you to think about your your knowledge base, what do you have one? Do you and your team members even use it? Like we had somebody that we worked with? They have like 300 Plus SOPs, standard operating procedures, great, but guess what? Nobody used it because it was in a place that was not easily accessible, not user friendly. So it's like, SOPs and knowledge bases are great and all but what's the point of creating all of this if nobody's actually going to reference it? And it's just going to be continued on of asking the CEO for help every time. So we'd love to hear from you all, do you have a knowledge base? If yes, do you use it? Do you don't use it? Do you have a business culture of creating documentation like SOPs in place? And are your team members constantly asking you how to do something even if it's maybe already done? documented, there is no right or wrong answer no shame. This is just a conversation so that everybody can learn. Alright, Daniel, you said, we have SOPs and awesome looms for each one, but need a master wiki to reference at all. Hence your knowledge base. So this is perfect. So the benefits of having a good and strong knowledge base is one that provides consistency, right? It's easy for people to access things and to be resourceful. There's no more bottlenecks. So if you have one person, for instance, in charge of, say, onboarding clients, and if that person went into labor last, like unexpectedly or had to fly out and stuff, does that mean that you get to stop onboarding clients, we hope not. Hopefully, somebody can fill in their place and take the documentation that you've all created to make sure clients continue to come into your business with ease. And then don't reinvent the wheel right, minimizing cognitive load by creating structure and frameworks. I know I've said this in the past multiple times. But it's just like when you can follow something, even myself, like I create knowledge based content for myself, because I know that I can't depend on my brain as much as I would like, want to get a quick example. Okay, let me tell you. So business life fair, we change our pricing a bit. And it's, I admit fully that it's like a money, money mindset thing for me, like I come from a background of lack, right? My family's, my family came from Asia, right? So as immigrants, it's like, we're constantly trying to figure out how to make things cheapest. So I didn't grow up with the best money mindset stuff. But when we do update our prices, I wrote a document as to where we all have to update our prices so that everything is standardized, you don't want prices updated on the website. But then if it's not updated in your proposal, software, or even in your scheduler, like for us, we always are like if you
feel ready for an assessment, which is this starting at this price, click here. Right? We want everything to be standardized. So I wrote that document so that when I do update prices, my team members and I can reference it and use it. So here are some examples of documentation like we call it documentations instead of SOPs because SOPs are just a part of it. It's like what are some checklists? Templates? Do you have canned email responses? Do you have a best practice for how you use your proposal software? Who is your ideal client or customer avatar? Like is that in your knowledge base? If not, all of that is amazing information that can be added. Okay. Alexa, use it. We create ton of documentation. Some team members use it and reference but it's not central, easily accessible by everyone. That's all good. Thank you so much for at least starting to have a good so I'm sorry, a knowledge base. Daniel, you said, Yes, we have one. And it's quite bare, we actually just were talking about that, and how we really need to improve and use it more, since we depend too much on our main manager. She's basically our main brain, and she's taking a toll and it's taking a toll on her. Thank you for sharing like these things matter, right? I know, it's not as sexy as some of the other systems. But it's just like, imagine taking everything out of key people's brains and into a place that everybody can reference. So I'm going to show you some examples of some knowledge bases of ours and our clients. And remember the last session, right, all these these sessions build on each other. Don't focus so much on the app, because the apps all are going to show the same thing. But notice how many, some of them may make you feel like do I like the setup? Do I not like the setup, it's all because we have worked through the hierarchy, that triangle of systems understood the needs and requirements for what the process looks like the strategy or their decision trees that need to be made. So the most simple not my favorite, but hey, I would rather you have a knowledge base here that you can move from then not so this is Google Drive. It's my least favorite in terms of housing, a knowledge base, because the UI UX is terrible. And the search is terrible. But we use Google Docs a lot like we create content from Google Drive, and then we populate it into a central knowledge base. Here is business lead bears first ever knowledge base that I created for myself. This was in Trello. And Trello was huge. And then I've learned that Trello didn't actually work for how my brain work because it was too siloed topic about project management. But we had our knowledge base in Trello. And then we moved it to I'm going to skip ahead so we moved it to notion. Remember, apps are not the end all be our we moved to notion and I realized it was too rudimentary. Not good enough. And then our current home for our knowledge base is in our project management app. clickup And the cool thing about clickup is that it was doing exactly what I needed notion to do. Like I have a lot of like categories like where this documentation originated from the strength of it, who last touched it. And when what type of a documentation is, is I was doing this so manually. So then when I was able to move to clickup tasks, and have my knowledge base in there, everything looks amazing. And it's so easy to search. So easy to find, like we have right now over 400 pieces of documentation in the knowledge base, and it's holding up Wow. And here's an example where our client wanted their knowledge base and clickup Docs. It looks like notion, but they they wanted it in their project management app so that the team had fewer places they needed to look. Like I said, there's no right or wrong answer really like the right answer is something that you all have intentionally chosen. So this is spiritual essence, yogas knowledge base, it looks fantastic team members reference it. And this is something that is like a shortcut forever on every single iPad that they use, because they want it easily accessible.
And I really liked the the commentary that Marie gave us so she is the director of operations for STEM for real, they are a professional development agency that focuses on making sure that STEM curriculum is front and center for a lot of educational institutions. And so she showed us or Bielby showed us how to organize our cupboards so that we're not walking to the living room to get salts, everything is where it is needs to be within reach so that getting meals and projects taken care of is done without chaos. So I really liked that she called this out. And that was a perfect example of what knowledge bases did for her crew. So I'm going to take a break, I want to push it back to you all what documentation is important to put in your knowledge base for your business. Daniel, we also use clickup. Perfect. Yeah, I'm loving clickup Right now, so much. And I'm not sure what the mix is. But like both ops people and CEOs, like I would love for you all to just put like, from your perspective, what documentation you need, like somebody from the ops seat or not COC might see something that seat the CEO doesn't and vice versa. So we'd love you all to answer those questions so that other people can get ideas on what it is that they need to put in their knowledge base.
Okay, so the next system that I love for team is project management, like it is a topic. That is everybody's favorite thing to talk about. Because it's like productivity hacks left and right, Asana Trello, Basecamp, click up Monday air table, though I don't believe you should use air table for project management. But we'll talk about next time. It's like this is a topic and system that it's people love to talk about. But it's really hard to get right. If you focus too much on shiny objects, objects and some drums, oh, my goodness, I can't speak today. So this to me is your command center where the business organizes tracks and executes work. Like if your operations are the how basically the actions. It's like your project management system is how you and your team show up to do the work to do work that moves the business needle forward, like just show where it is that people are getting hung up where people are making progress. It's so much more than just tracking your apps and tasks and projects. But it's a great place to start. So I would love to hear for your audit. What are you ranking your project management system as 123? Or four? Like? Does your team rely and use a central project management tool? Is your app a mess? Like do you all have like overdue tasks, things that are not assigned to people? Things like that. And the reason why I say a central project management tool is because we had a client that they do branding, they do brand and logo and other marketing stuff for their clients and they're pretty high end and pretty in demand. But yet every single team member who touches client work has their own way of keeping track of tasks and due dates, which made it a huge headache for the operations manager and client liaison Lily because she never knew where things were in the project timeline and client deliverables, and that means that scope creep happened so much for her because she couldn't keep track of anything, she had to go ask everybody individually because nothing was centralized and everything was siloed. So I'm scrolling down. Oh, okay. So brand assets. Thank you, Stephanie. brand guidelines, product photos, sell sheets. Perfect Alexia, and sorry, if I'm like, butchering anybody's name, please correct me in the chat. Robin, I would love to hear your take on why not use air table for project management. This is a crossroads I'm in right now. Okay, so air table is very much and you can use it for project management. But it's not. And the part about it being not a great tool is if you don't set really, really good standards for it, because we had plenty of clients come to us who tried to use air table as project management tools. And it was not getting the visibility that the CEOs and stuff needed. So after interviewing the CEOs, and the project managers and the project leads were like, what is it that you need to see what is it that you need it to do, and every single time it came down to airtable just didn't have the features that they needed. Like they want to see workload, like resource management, they want to see timelines and Gantt charts that played with each other that wanted to see like when a client started when a client off boarded, so that they knew when to bring on like, it just was not a fit. Like, when it comes to air table. It's very much a database driven app, it's for you to house information, whether it's quantitative, or qualitative, and make it easy to manipulate something like a database. But it doesn't mean that it has the project management tools that you might need, like dependencies, due dates, all the stuff, commenting, that makes it easy to translate into action. So really, at the end of the day, we've seen as project managers, and as a project manager at heart, it just wasn't what people were needing. Like, another example is the monday.com. App. Like it's a to us. It's like a database tool with project management light capabilities, like to create a recurring task took so many steps and automations. And I'm just like,
recurring tasks happen all the time. Like why is this difficult is because it's not a traditional project management app. So we can totally talk about that some more. And I could totally bring you on stage. And we can chat about that at the end, if you want to. Okay, so Alexa, you said to Daniel three, Robin, one to two, okay. And Stephanie, you said this was my 100%. My previous experience with air table wasn't intuitive for our needs cannot get update info with ease. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so some quick wins. Make sure that your tasks, start with action words, if possible, because when you just write things like newsletter, for instance, it doesn't help people to know if you're supposed to write the newsletter, edit the newsletter up, upload it or, and schedule it, you know what I mean? So when you have action words that precede the thing that you need to do, it's really clear, create graphics for XYZ send deliverables to XYZ. And then also, unless it's like a, an idea that you have for the business, like, oh, maybe we should run a summit or a virtual conference or whatnot, have assignees for all tasks. And then bonus points, add start dates and or due dates, because you don't want things lost in the business, project management, abyss with all the things that you all are as founders are doing right now, there's a lot going on. So the last thing you want is to have things fall through the cracks. Here's an example that I took a picture of for our assessment, like, we created a dummy account for our clients overall. Because we often have our clients do work like they need to do work. And it's easy for us to see when things are in a client's court. So when we have a new client, it's really easy to see who's in charge of what was happening, when are things happening and like what everybody needs to do so that we can organize when we can take on more clients or not. All right, and then so here's an example I took a screenshot of this for and I know it's small, but I'll give you access to the slides. Like when we talk about client work or any work for the business. It's really beneficial to think ahead and to create templates, especially if you are service basic. This is what are done with you and done for you project templates look like because it's better for us to over add and to over create tasks and to delete them than to like scratch your heads going What do we have have to do. So anytime we get a new client, this project template always gets applied depending on like, what route they choose so that we know when to send things out who to interview, what systems we're going to be focusing on. And it makes it a lot easier for us to focus on the work instead of managing. So I have a question for you What tasks and projects are important for you and your team to track. And it doesn't have to be like revenue facing to like we have a list in clickup that talks about all the SOPs and documentation that we want to create. So that that can either be done by me or somebody else on the team. But the fact that it's tracked and assigned to somebody makes means that they'll get done and then put in the knowledge base. And this one is a this one's a hard system to talk about. But it's an important one that every business should have. So I would love to have here any or all questions and comments, so that we can talk about them. Alright, Carly, you said we're currently updating pieces of our training library. So documenting that process would be great, especially as I continue building out courses, etc. Perfect. Love it. I'm just gonna check the polls really quick. So most of you all are still selling services. Perfect. Okay. Website improvements and edits asset development. Thank you for sharing that Robin. upcoming launch is a top priority for tasks right now. And if you are planning on doing things more than twice more than three times, like launching client work webinars, like if like say I plan on doing orgasmic ops October again in a year, document the stuff of what you're doing, and then turn them into task and project templates in your project management app so that the next time this comes around, you're hitting the ground, running even more quickly than you were before.
Alright, so the last system we're going to talk about quickly is team communication. And it's not just using the apps like Slack or discord, or whatever you all communicate with, but it's more of an intentional practice of how this happens with your team. So for instance, Marie that we just saw in the testimonial, she and Lina and the rest of her team, were communicating via text message, WhatsApp, DMS, emails, Slack, like, it was crazy. Like they poor Marie, she was just all over the place going I don't remember, I know when Lena sent me this message, but I don't know where to find it. And it's just like when you're wasting time, having a hard time communicating with everybody. And it's not well lubricated, it slows the work down and information gets missed. Like at the stage of business, you all are out right now you're moving pretty darn quickly. So how do you make sure that communication is tight, so goes back to setting intentions. So I would love to know for your communication audit, what the number is for that, and like what you all plan on doing for your team communications. So when you're saying two to three, can I ask why?
And for the quick wins, like say you start a Slack channel. Slack is great, like people used to hate slack. And then for some reason, when they see our Slack channel, they're like, Oh, my God, I want that. It's because it was just not done with intention. So how do you make sure to draw lines in the sand so that you know what gets communicated? In slack, Discord, whatever? What gets emailed what merits a meeting, you know what I mean? So it's like this is all about setting good intentions. And when you draw these lines in the sand that everybody can follow the same guidelines. So for instance, I tell my team, I hate emails, like the only time we ever email is if we're sending a deliverable out to a client. Or we are sending an email out to somebody outside the BLB business, but everything else we're either communicating in Slack in our designated channels, or we're communicating in clickup, which is our project management app. And the comments that we leave in there actually are integrated with slack so they get sent over to slack as well so that everybody knows exactly what's happening. Okay, so I'm going back to the chat For the team just to comment clickup comments in Slack. That's what Daniel says like that not everyone on the team is on Slack, everybody is using slack, okay? Slack mostly, but we split and click up airtable And sometimes Voxer. And like I said, you can communicate in many different ways, just make sure that you all are doing things with intention, and purpose. Okay. So wrapping the session up, when your internal facing operations are well lubricated, your team members feel taken care of and have buy in, at this stage in your business, like buying is everything like these team members are here, not just for a paycheck, they're here because while maybe they were but now they have reasons to care, like they feel like they have a say in the business, because then that means that they can confidently run the business and keep it going if you the CEO are not there. Or if team members are sick, everybody can contribute and pitch in in the easiest way. And three, quality of life goes up for everybody like this is not something that we talked about an operations enough. But when you have good operations, quality of life goes up because you're not wasting time, energy. People don't feel guilty when they take vacations, they can be present. And they have to be at their family member side because it's their last days here on earth. All of these are true stories. And if your operations are a hot mess, the last thing that are the first thing that Go is the people because they're not going to feel taken care of. So that was just like the main three reasons why like good operations internally, help your team because your team members are everything. And if you haven't downloaded this resource already, like this is the perfect resource for this session, because we talked about the knowledge base and you if you need ideas on SOPs to create, you can download our guide, I'm going to share it here so that you can get started. And even if something doesn't quite match up to what you're looking for, it's like oh, well, you can get an idea to make it work for you. So download this guide, create your SOPs, create your knowledge base documentation, because the best thing you can do is to populate it. And of course, make sure it's in a centralized place that's like, easily searchable that your team will has buy it on. And if you haven't continued to interview your team members, because they're the ones that need to get excited about this, as well. So I know interviewing team members was session one, but it's like never ending. I'm constantly asking my team like, Hey, how's it going? What could be better? What's not going well, because when you can actually hear what they have to say it makes their experience so much better.
And since the last time y'all have been with me, we added a new case study to the website. So if you want to check up a case studies, I would love to share that with you because the stuff matters. And yes, we all talk about revenue, but then it's revenue, and then some so it's revenue and other parts that make running a business much more easily. So check that out if you'd like and then I'm going to share the just the tip because if you haven't been because I'm going to be starting those again now that orgasmic operations October is coming to an end soon so I just wanted to be quick about this because I want to spend more time chatting with you all. Then me just talking like bring I want to bring people on stage I want to workshops and stuff like if you're down for that I would love to So who has questions or things that they would love to work out that be that'd be open to being brought on stage. I promise it's going to be great. And you're so kind Danya Okay, so Daniel, you want to come on board. I'm going to move my screen here so that I can see everybody Okay, so I'm going to bring you up
oh my god, this is exciting. I love doing this
okay, and then after Daniela we got Robin Excellent. Everybody volunteers this tribute. Oh my God, look at your plants back there. I'm a budding plant mom and your Monstera is just getting me all hot and bothered.
I know they're thriving. They're thriving.
I'm living life cleaning my plants. cleaning my fish tank doing my skincare.
I didn't know that you're supposed to clean your plants. I just discovered this and I felt like I was mistreating them. So now I'm into it.
There you go. So that's what I've been doing. Okay, so what I didn't bring you want to talk about plants, but we could. Let's talk shop.
Yeah, well, the plants are very orgasmic. So it's part of the combo. I love it. Okay, so am I just stating one of the things that that are
that were workshopping that we can we have time. That's why I was like, trying to go through this today. Because I'm like, three systems. People want to come on board. So I want to make sure you feel heard and taken care of. And I can always bring you on stage again, if you want to stay a little bit longer. So
yeah, no one. Want any anything. You just wanted to throw it out there.
Yeah, whatever it is you want to workshop or talk about, it's just easier to talk in person like this, you know, instead of
I agree. I agree. So right, now we have a process for fulfillment, okay, the process has been very painful. And because we've been rowing, right, and we were kind of in that duct tape, but we have the process that was outlined while we were in the duct tape phase, because we were trying to figure out the best way to do it going forward, we don't want to pull the trigger too soon, we're trying to make sure we're doing things manually and really understanding what we need it to optimize, right or to automate. So manage everything manually and click up became very painful. And so we're at this phase now, where we brought in, and we're kind of looking at it through both lenses, right, the client lens versus our lens, like from the client lens, the client needs to know what is going on with their project, and they need to know what stage they are with their project, right. And we realized that clickup really wasn't going to give them all of the detail that they needed, because there's so many little itty bitty pieces that we're working on within a creative project. Right. So at the end of the day, like I still think that that part, as painful as it is has to be done manually. Because there's such a high level of high volume of assets that needs to be approved, and we need everything in one email. So the clients are seeing everything at once we did layer on a tool that is making that a lot easier for the clients to give us those approvals faster. So that's really working well. On the backside for us, we also need to know as the project managers, what is like where is each piece of this project? And the pain point is that because it's going from JotForm zapped into clickup as one ticket, well, there's really four pieces of that project, or sometimes three pieces, or sometimes two pieces, because we sell three packages, and they each have a different number of components. Right? So we're zapping from like, I guess I'm trying to like explain the pieces, but I'm trying to also explain the the overall pain point is that it's nothing's automated. Right? Like everything is like coming in. And then we still have to like manually figure out okay, how do we best manage these pieces of this project. And we don't have a clear, like sightline of the timeline for this project. So because we don't have that the projects can fall behind. We don't have a view of like, where are all the projects for each client? Which ones do we need to focus on that are falling behind? So we can zoom in on them every week? And just be like, Okay, let's get these fixed. Right. So that's kind of at a high level, on our back end. What's challenging us right now?
These are, these are like, questions that service based businesses run into all the time and including ourselves, which we've also we've solved for, for ourselves like, and I know that you asked a lot of things and I'm happy to chat with you after like longer, because I love you and your business and what you do. So I'm I'm biased that way. But for us, we have a well, why don't we have weekly team meetings, because we love seeing each other because we're remote first. But the biggest part is we leave all those things in terms of visibility, we lean on clickup for like we have these, like we have our clients set up in a folder structure of way and sorry, this is like over everybody's head so I'm just trying to answer as best as I can. Like, we have our client your folder and then every client is a list depending on the templates, I get zapped in like you said, it's depends on which scope of work we're doing. However, right? On the folder level, I have a new view. So when I click on the folder and have a view, there is a calendar view that lists all the client work that needs to be done that week. Because when so maybe I should backtrack when we know know how long it takes us to get a project done, we can easily scope for projects. So I guess my question it goes back to even before project management, how long does it take for you to go from start to deliverables for your three take? And does it? Not right now? Okay. Could you give yourself some grace and say it takes 12 weeks? Or is that too much?
So we say we say eight to 12 weeks. Okay, the client, we say we're shooting for eight weeks. But realistically, it should take eight weeks. Okay. It's not taking eight weeks because of things, you know, oh,
that's fair. Yeah,
I think it has to do with the project. Part of it is the project management that we're we need to be more like, we need to have a better idea of what's happening. So we can get to things faster. Because any delays in our project management creates delays in the whole project. Right. But then the other side of it is maybe the side of the client said that we can't exactly control like a vacation for a week and not approving the project.
Well, and that's something that needs to be talked about, like at the beginning of a kickoff call. So I'm showing you this template project template again, because like so say you work with us. And you're just like, after the assessment, you want to do that done with you, because you want your team members to take action on the strategy we give. We plan out and I'm looking to the site because the screens bigger, we plan out everything way before the kickoff call. So I'm a lover of Gantt charts. I don't know if you know what Gantt charts are, but because I'm so visual, Gantt charts, allow me to, let's see if I can even stop, I'm going to stop sharing. So we can actually get into me showing you a Gantt chart, Gantt charts allow me to scope out the work for our clients before we even hit the kickoff call. Because we need buy in. We're like, Look, if you want to be have this done by here. These are all things that need to happen. And here's a visual of what that looks like. So I'm going to share my screen really quick. And I'll show I'll show this one. Window coming. So here is our latest client. Do you see my screen? No, not yet. Okay, there we go. There it is. Okay, so before I ever jump on the kickoff call with them, I have a Gantt view, like I am a lover of Gantt charts, because it allows me I'll see if I can minimize this.
Visual too. But I've just never latched on the Gantt chart,
right? And maybe it's not up to you, right? You're not supposed to do everything right? This but again, I'm a project manager. So like I tell my team, I'm like, This is what the scope of work looks like. If you do have done with us done with you. It's five months, one month per system. And sometimes things need to get dragged on. But if you have your project manager do this. And it's really easy to say like, oh, well, this should take a week. So here's the visual, they need to get everything done here. So maybe before we even jump, talking about like project management stuff, you need to one, figure out how to make sure projects get delivered on time so that there's no scope creep, and then work with your ops person or whoever is in charge of timelines to get this going. Because if they can visually see how long something takes, they actually have buy in, they're like, oh, team, like, look, we're coming up to the last week, we need to like, get this done. So this is like a high level thing that we work with our clients on training them on, especially if they're visual, because then it helps them scope out projects appropriately. And every client
Yeah. And ours is, I mean, our we're selling three packages. So it's really the same every time we get templatized it. So we do have these deadlines, I have to go into our clickup and see if the Gantt view is showing us something like this, or if it's something we have to play around with a little bit more.
And the same for us like when somebody buys a done with you package, a new list gets created with the den with you. prefix. This is on Zapier and then the business name gets pulled from we use dubsado. Right? So it's like all this information comes in meaning I'm telling this because we only have three templates as well, we have the assessment templates, which technically are task templates. And then we have to list templates a done with you and the done for you.
But when they're buying are they buying through like they're buying one of those offers, and they're buying through a proposal and dubsado
Yep, we are our standardization is everything goes through dubsado except for we have an accelerator that we're opening at the to the public at the end of the month. So it's like that goes through thrivecart Because it's not a one on one contract. We use a different system for that, like an app system. So I guess what I'm trying to say is before to minimize that scope creep, like talk to your ops person and decide on what these timelines look like so that they can start planning. And then the next claim that you get it's easier to say Oh, well, onboarding takes a week. And then we have
this we have our timelines figured out of what it should be. It's just not hitting that. And I'm trying to pinpoint why is it not hitting it? Because it really is realistic. Like we put in buffer time and everything of like, worst case scenario would happen. Let's add some more days. Right? So we have that, and we've adjusted the timelines. But I think it's because I'm trying to figure out why, you know, like, why
is hard to,
it's hard. The why is, is hard figuring out like, what is the piece that's not allowing us to achieve these, these, these things? So we're at that, like, we're transitioning so many pieces right now to try to figure this piece of the puzzle out. I think we're like on the cusp of figuring it out, like alleviating a lot of the pain point with our product manager because of this other software we brought on is going to help and then adding some more automations to click up I think is going to help but figuring out how to get the automations like working exactly right is tricky.
So question, why do you think the timelines aren't landing?
I think it's two things. I think one. Initially, when we set it up the timelines that we set up, maybe the way that we set up clickup didn't accurately use that timelines, that time deadlines feature, and we didn't accurately do it every single time as a ritual guy just has to be set every single time. And because we're doing it manually, and we might be managing 30 projects at the same time, and we have 30 different elements inside of each project, you know, or not 30, but 30, subtasks, we have to update manually all of these things every single time. And if one of them falls behind, we don't exactly know how to use the remapping feature to reset all the deadlines for everything else. So it just literally everything's not accurate, because we're not really using the tool the way that it needs to be used. So that's the first thing. The SEC yeah, that's, that's probably the biggest thing.
And like within ours, like we have six sub six, seven, top sub tasks within but we're, we've gone I've productized our services so much that it's like lather, rinse and repeat, not to say we get great results, because we know what we're doing. But it's like, we know that we have to get strategy, we have to have a kickoff meeting, we have to do this, we have to It's like every little tiny piece of action needs to get accounted for. And if you account for it once, it's like, it's so much easier to have them happen again, and I don't know why this doesn't want to load. And then once like this gets applied to our clients is view, I immediately go here. And this is where I'm just like, Okay, today is day one. housekeeping stuff needs to get done this week, so that we can hit our kickoff call here. And then I just keep I just keep building it out. And some things might need to happen simultaneously. So it's like, I'm just randomly doing this. And then you can and you can physic visibly show the clients because like, it's always it's the clients don't always right. Like if they take forever to get back to you. It's like, look, you're we're trying to get this deadline done. And if we don't miss it, well, we're going to charge you more or whatever you do, but it's just like when you show them visually, like how long something takes. Or they're like, Oh, I can't do this, because I'm going on vacation, can we actually extend it? Everybody has buy in and there's more grace and understanding. So it's like, this is a discipline of in project management that's hard to just get right away. You have to work at it. But I think this might actually really be helpful to, like, follow this cadence when you first get a client like this is what y'all need to do to scope out the work. Yeah,
even just taking a screenshot showing them with this type of visual I think would be helpful too. For sure.
Okay, so I'm gonna bring I want to bring Robin on and Robin Sal and then if you have more questions like, let's chat like I love this, like I love just chatting. Robin, are you still here? Okay, no problem. Thank you, Robin, I'm bringing you on. Wait, does that mean that we can have multiple people on? I'm just continuing playing with these features. Okay, so Robin, invite on stage. Hello, hi.
Okay, so I don't have any fun plant babies or anything. But, um, okay, so I guess a little backstory. Very brief. So the main business that I'm working in, it was for a good year, it was just myself and like the business owner, the CEO. And we didn't use a project management tool because it was just that like, it was easy to house. Things just between both of our minds and we mostly chatted on Voxer. Then we have grown so we've taken on another team member. And so now things are a little bit more complicated because we're doing more because we have more team members. So we went through this whole like Tech's log to like, learn clickup. And it seemed like that was a big feat for us to like, get our minds wrapped around how we're going to use clickup. But we're still, like not satisfied with it. And it could be because we're not using it properly. And so now we're trying to think, Okay, we also want to be really organized. And we're like, oh, well, maybe air tables good. But then the thought comes up that well, we don't want to be using clickup Air table. So we're like, oh, well, let's just use air table for everything. And then you make this comment about how you wouldn't suggest using air table as a project management tool. And that's just now my call, man, like, I don't want to go start going down a path if it isn't going to be good, right? Like, I want to do something, ideally, like at least the heaviest lift once and then just like tweak along the way. So that's kind of where we're at. And that's, and we're heading into a launch in December. And so we don't really have any templates created yet. And so now I'm just like, Oh, my time block for this afternoon about starting this and air table. I'm like, Oh, what do we do now?
Yeah, I just saw like, success from air table can happen. But just knowing all the things that project man that make projects, successful air table is not built for that. It's like, it's very much good for if you have like a content calendar database. Or if you're tracking like, like, we have a friends with benefits referral program. And like when somebody signs up, like we have a database tracker, right, it's tracking information. And like doing math to calculate dates and stuff, that's fine. But it's like taking action should happen in a proper project management app, like some people don't like, they don't believe in that, which is fine. Like, at the end of the day, we have to make what works for our client, like one of our clients uses notion because, like, say clickup is too much for her and her team and her team is very app, not illiterate, but not as advanced. And so it's like, I'd rather create an app that you all would use or proposed something that you all would use and not use. So in terms of like, click up stuff. It's not an easy, it's not easy, because you have so many options that you can play with, right? So the biggest thing is, and I'll share my screen again, the biggest thing for you if you're looking at setting up your clickup to begin with, is I'm all about making your business Oh, I'm waiting for the screen to load. Okay, there we go. I'm all about making one space for your actual business. Because if if you are Did you happen to say that you were like a walk in closet type of person? Or was it nobody else? Okay, okay, well, for regardless of you are you aren't, it gives the opportunity to make it easy. I'm trying to like change my screen. So you can see. Like, we have everything all in one space, because then it's easier to say if I have to click on the business as a whole. I can see everything. Everything at once. Like if you clicked on the everything view, it's a hot mess if you don't have it organized, but like we all know, what is being what's on our to do list. What are we all doing? We had some client review stuff that we're playing with and like what's done. So it's just really easy to manage when everything is one is one space. So maybe for you something like what are we tracking in terms of high level projects. You always need operations and admin. So for us in here, we have things like routine tasks, documentation to create, we have when we need to update our offers and services, we put projects related to that here, because there's quite a bit of updates that we're making. Right, our client work is in a folder. So when you simplify everything in one space, then everybody knows where to go. And it's just easier to track and see. And so to go back to our client work thing that I mentioned, if I clicked on this folder and looked at the calendar view, I know exactly what we're doing this week for our client. Okay, just makes it easier for me and who's who's assigned to it. Right? So and when we have like, this is like kind of like an off week because everybody's on vacation. Usually there's a lot more tasks and stuff, but then I'll see like who's responsible? Is it us? Is it them? So I think for you, if you were to look at setting up clickup focus on how you could organize everything in one space to start and then add from there because you want to start off easy and clean.
Right? Yeah, we did. So I think maybe we've just organized it in a different way and that's that's why it still kind of feels like we're like kind of like walking through the mud like when we want to go through it. But we thought that we You'd set it up nice like we have like headquarters marketing and a delivery like we tried to like silo the like different departments like is it internal, external or just like a mix of it could be anything. But that's still,
I don't think siloing is helpful. I know, I know what you're trying to do. But like in an ideal business world, you don't want to silo things anyways, because sometimes your dev team might need to see what the marketing's doing so they can like they can create accordingly. I'm just making that up. I mean, it's true, but you know what I mean. And so like, the reason why I have different spaces is because like the CRC or and when we track our leads, and stuff, these actually have different statuses. So the knowledge base is in its own place, but everything happens within here. And I wonder if not siloing things is going to help you like I don't know the extent of what your click up looks like, we can absolutely like, chat offline, let's like figure out a time to like, get on Zoom or something. But like, having simplifying your project management and starting easy is the best thing that you can do. Like even if you had three folders, like you said, delivery, marketing and like headquarters, having like three folders, feel the line? Yes, each of them having their own space, because then you can't see everything if you need to, or whomever is the project manager can't see everything. And I would that'd be really stressful to start, like start easy, and if going to different spaces is going to help them do that. But at least find a way that everybody enjoys using it without making it feel like you're wading through
the mud first. Yeah. And that's the thing is, when we know we have to go into click up, we all kind of like hesitate. We're like,
ooh, right. And that's not what we want. We want you to get hated other than
enjoyable experience. So that's why we're thinking we should wait. But
it's definitely gonna be worse than air table, because you're gonna run into the same thing, you're gonna have different bases. And then within each base, you can have a gazillion tabs. So if you don't have a way that you already love it, air table is already going to fail you based on what I know.
Yeah, I know, that definitely makes sense. So
okay, homework for you. And this is what we give our students like, open up a Google Doc or pen and paper and like write down all the things that you want to track in your project management app, and then group them together in a way that makes sense for you and your team. Again, it's co creative collaborative, right? It's not you just telling them this is how our clickup is going to be set up. Like what if we combined everything into one so that was easier? Because you said you like seeing everything at once but you like to see only one thing at a time. How can we make it a win win? clickup would allow that if you combined everything into like one space, right? Okay. Okay, awesome. I will do my homework. And then like, let's check in like I want to check in and make sure like you're, we can we can talk we can chat more. Okay, awesome. Great. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Okay, so we have a few minutes left, like Daniella, do you want to like schedule some time to hop on or we can hop on now if you don't have anywhere to be, but like, I am happy to stay because the stuff is not easy. And the fact that you all want to work on it makes me so excited. So I want to be here to help and to share what I know. So let me know how I can be of service.
Alright, I'm scrolling through. Okay, so it looks like we've had time and if there's nobody else that wants to come on stage to chat. I'm going to close this and we will reconvene next week. Like if y'all have questions like, feel free to send me an email like you should have been getting emails in terms of reminders and stuff. Let me know send an email to Hey at be laid bare.com and we write that in the chat. Hey, it'd be labor.com And like, if it's beneficial for us to work together or just even check to see how we can help. Let me know I'm here to be of service. So y'all are amazing. Thanks so much for spending time with me today. And I can't wait to see you all next week. Thank you. How do I end this series? Oh my god. Okay, here we go. All right. Bye, everybody.