 Thank you. All right. Yeah lightning talks after lunch since everyone's falling asleep. We're going to go fast and keep you awake I'm Jocelyn Mosec as she said I have a wordpress agency here in Portland, Oregon I've been working with wordpress for about in 10 11 years now, and I also coach other WordPress professionals business owners and agency owners and today I want to talk to you about is cloning yourself using automation. I'm not a biologist I don't know AI so I can't actually replicate you, but I know for me having another me running around is probably not good either But what I want to talk about is how to use automation in your business to effectively clone yourself To take those tasks that are repetitive and find ways to have someone else or something else do it So it frees you up to do what's important in your business and where your time is best spent So what I'm going to touch on today, and I'm just going to drop into a few points within a project life cycle So I'm going to look at how we use automation for a standard wordpress development project within my business So typically projects start like this again email from a prospect and they ask the exciting question of so how much does a Web site cost to which we all go well it depends and Our goal in this is with using automation is to go from that email of how much does it cost to the sales call? Where we actually if this is someone we want will potentially write that? Estimate and get them onboarded as a client So with the email of how much does it cost we're going to reply with an email and it's going to go something like this Thank you for reaching out to provide an accurate estimate. I'm going to need a little more information Here is a link to my project to request form So you're already hearing a little bit of automation instead of my putting questions into this I am sending them to a form that is going to ask them specific questions I need to really figure out if this is a client. I or a prospect. I even want to have a sales call with continues on Once complete you're going to be taken to my scheduling page Oh a little more automation here where you can select a time from my calendar that works with your schedule Look forward to learning more about your project. So again, we're hearing a little bit more automation in there There's a scheduling calendar or instead of back and forth emails They're going to find a time that works for them based on my calendar We're going to dive a little deeper So this email is actually a canned email for anyone who uses a Google mail You have the opportunity have canned emails. So if you notice, I have it in green There's going to be some color coding as we go through this presentation green means I have to do something But all I have to do is take this email Click canned response and boom done hit send okay With that this has already been inserted sent off to the client. What else happens? Well, here's a link to my project repressed form This is a gravity form on my website and when they submit the form I use active campaign use whatever mail system you want But I tag them and you'll see I tag them as I go along the way in the automation because it gives me a pulse on where they're at It says project request submitted good to know So then once you're completed, you'll be taken to my scheduling page. What am I using for that? Well, I use book me. I got it on a great app sumo deal Acuity works well too that links in it basically gives the opportunity for me to have Appointments that are of the period of time. I'd be willing to do for a sales call. I eat about 20 minutes It's tied into my Google calendar When they sign up it gets tied into their Google calendar. It's automatically put on my Google calendar Reminders go out a day before an hour before They're told that the meeting is going to happen in a zoom room and here's a link and I tag them in Active campaign that the sales call was scheduled So these things if you notice, I've gone from just popping in a canned response to potentially they've gone and found themselves They've answered my questions and only once they answer do they get to go see my calendar They've now found the time that works on that my calendar. They've scheduled it and it's on the books Now there's a lot of their little things I do in here because automation can be refined and expanded upon over time So I've got the tag of project requests submitted and I also know there's this tag of sales call scheduled So what happens if they fill out the form? It brings them to the calendar and they don't sign up Well, I can know this in my system based on these tags and potentially three days later I say send a follow-up saying hey, thanks for submitting the project request inquiry I'd love to get you on my calendar so we can talk about it. Here's the link Right, but if they did sign up right off the bat I also know from the sales call schedule tag not to harass them with that email So by putting in those little droplets of where we are in the process along the way you can further refine your automation This isn't absolutely necessary, but it's something that with time you can get more and more polished And so I have gone from an Auto canned response to them on my calendar I can also take a peek when I see a booking come through at what they submitted because that comes to my inbox and Just scan it and quickly decide if I'm going to be like great or I'm going to sort of send out Wow, we're not accepting clients anymore. Here's a referral. Please go somewhere else, right? So just because they got themselves in my calendar doesn't mean they get to stay So they're on the calendar. We're going to have the sales call unless you have a sales team can't automate that Right the proposal there are some ways to help that out and I speak about that in the longer version of this presentation But ultimately we're going to sign the client Now we got to get them into our system and what I'm going to show you next is the seed for this entire talk So we want to get them in our system and again The goal here is to bring them in to our onboarding system put them in all of our tools with minimal effort And the solution is gravity forms if you haven't noticed I kind of love gravity forms I should probably own stock in the company and Zapier boom So what I quickly figured out was when you bring someone on board you're going to potentially put them in systems like slack for internal Conversation Dropbox maybe for a folder put them in your to-do software your time tracking your invoicing and all of these systems require The same thing the name of the client the email the client the name of the project You know just very basic stuff and you're sitting here setting this up every time This is ultimate cloning. I have gone from one form on my website I've used a peer and I do literally pretty much do a happy dance every time I execute this because I'm so darn proud of it Because it's like magic done done correctly Consistently every single time it is beautiful I also want to while I'm talking about cloning because really at the heart of cloning work or we're talking about an automation We're talking about an efficiency mindset here So just some additional like pro tips is Always try to use the same tool of suite as you're building out, you know Have your go-to theme in plug-in, right? It doesn't every project doesn't need to be a new theme You found on theme forest you need to learn have the ones you love that you know inside and out It will save you time you will make you more efficient Also create a seed development area I have one or two sites with my go-tos with all the plugins kept up to date all turned off my go-to Themes and I just cloned it in boom here set up and ready to go You turn on what you need as you need them when you launch the ones you don't need you delete done Only you know to use hosts that you know and love Who here has had the joy of working with some random host in an environment where you're like where the hell's the cPanel and what is going on? Yeah Efficiency no there's either gonna be it's gonna you got some options here one They can use what you want to they cannot be your client or three There is gonna be some major pain and suffering fee that they are paying and you eat still it might not be worth it and Then really just continue to think about how you can automate. I'm gonna at the very end providing high of time I'll kind of talk a little bit about how you can automate through your process but as you catch yourself doing things that are Basically anything if you can outline a how-to You can automate it and that means either a tool or somebody else not you can be doing it Another thing is decluttering your inbox and efficiency. So filters are your best friend Just instead of going through all this stuff, you know, just have really easy stuff but just funnel all your clients into their own folder and One way to clean out your inbox is to use something like a ticketing system But I have found over the years that sometimes how I implement things change So I actually again like to use gravity forms Where I can then send it on to my ticketing system of choice that way of my ticketing system changes The experience to the user is always the same and there's this wonderful little field. I've added called task urgency Where it's like, okay, so how important is this? Oh, it's a normal task. Okay. We'll have it done in a couple days Oh, it's sort of important. All right, fine. Oh, the sky is falling. There's gonna be a fee for that Do you know how often the sky isn't falling anymore suddenly things are just like not that critical? Who knew I Spoke with someone last night the speakers were talking and I think he did like a 1x a 1.5x and a 2x with his kind of pricing structures like again, so like how important is this to your business because Just little little tips So we're gonna finish the project we're gonna do the work we're gonna wow the client and now let's get some more business shall we Even after the projects over we can use automation to continue to support your business and The beauty with automation is you set it up once and you thank yourself every time it runs and So like a month out simple testimonial time Everything's fresh some sort of auto and so when the project ends you just mark it off as site launched Great one month later. We loved working with you. We'd love a testimonial. Here's a direct link to my Google, you know review page. Give me five stars and tell me how much you love me At month two keeping things humming emails, so I'm sure you've been logging into your site, right client And you've noticed, you know as they log in there's probably like 20 things that need to be updated by now You should probably update those or we do offer this maintenance service. You might be interested in And of course, this is again where we use tags if they're already on your maintenance and care plan Don't bother them with this email, right? Month three. How about we ask for some referrals? How many of us actually ask? You know if you don't mind we love working with you and we'd love to work with others like you We also love to thank our referrals Keep me in mind six months later a year later a couple like hey, it's been six months Can you believe it? We hit a year happy birthday and At nine months something useful, but the point is is you can set up a very simple way of automating touchpoints with your client even a year out of Launching the site where you are still top of mind where you still are their go-to where you still are the one who They'll think of for a referral by being helpful by just dropping in their life every once in a while And again, you set this up once It's set up. It runs every single time So this is all great. Where the hell do I begin right? Well, let's start with we'll begin with one step at a time The easiest way is whenever you catch yourself doing tasks Just you know, especially the repetitive ones just think can I standardize this? Can I streamline this when you catch yourself writing emails save them? Cut and paste is still less work than rewriting the wheel every single time. How many of you have done that? I know I have yeah exactly and I know I shouldn't be doing it and yet there I am doing it and I Love to so I hate doing documentation But I know how important it is where I do well is in just video recording So I use loom so for example, how do we set up a development site simple I put on a screen record. I put on my headphones. I talked through it I record it doing it and then I give it to my VA to spend the five hours turning it into a screenshot documented whatever Right well, but that's I'm getting a laugh, but it's true It's okay because two things happen when I do that maybe three one. I don't have to spend the five hours To that person is learning how I want things done and three I have my very first system and process documented in my business. I'll be damn. I'm a fresh professional here Okay, and then if you really want to start thinking about automation from a really high-level perspective This is where I start for the you know those you've heard me talking about setting up an agency and stuff This is where I get more into these things. This is where we start to think about things from that top level Some books that are great built to sell was really influential for me a work. The system is actually free I think they just make you share stuff on social media once And traction I haven't read but I've heard great things about I think I find I must have been at the you know burnout phase I just couldn't read one more book on the topic But the whole point of this is when you want to really go in and start automating stuff Which is what I've done in my business is I looked at my business from an iterative level of breaking things down Because when we think about documenting and doing systems and processes it can feel overwhelming We have so much in our head so much happens from start to finish when we're building a project But we can just approach this in an easier way. We can say, okay. It's a high level. What's going on? Well, we have sales and onboarding discovery than design development and launch post launch and off-boarding, okay, and Then we iterate all right onboarding. Let's look at onboarding. Well when I onboard a client I usually send a welcome email and schedule a kickoff call and then I add them to all my internal tools Okay my welcome email well my welcome email, you know I use a mailing list and I have triggers that cause it to go out and I have a follow-up series that go along with it And when they actually do stuff I do other things So what I would encourage you is if you want to start doing systems and processes in your your business One of the ways that I found most effective was instead of getting Overwhelmed with all of the scope or deep diving in one step where I just got like so clear here But I really didn't have the Capturing of my entire business was to do things in kind of going in a sort of recursive pattern of like, you know What's the top level? Okay, let's go through it again. Go to the next level of depth. What are those levels? Let's do it again And so I was documenting my entire business Getting incrementally deeper as opposed to just going so deep in one and being like, oh my god. I'm exhausted So I just share that I mean automations a bit like teaching your kids to tie their own shoes, right? It does take additional work up front But here's the thing you plan to go to college with your kids just to tie their shoes Or do you not once you've taken the time to teach them how to tie their shoes celebrate every single time? They just do it and Automation is the same right? It's one of those things where you're gonna have to put in some upfront work But you are going to thank yourself each and every time it runs And then I just added two slides this presentation actually in its long form So if you liked what I shared today, I'm gonna go a little deeper into some more examples next week I'm actually up in Seattle where I'll be speaking for a full 30 or 40 minute time slot, but And that's the presentation. That's at mosaic design slash word camp But these are some of the tools that trade I often get asked What are the tools I'm using in my business for each of these things and do you know that they'll change? And do change with time, but in this moment of time These are the tools I'm using and you can see I have a love at the moment is they peer the magical online application connector For those that don't know what it is It is basically this online tool that an action in triggers actions out So simply completing a form I can then say when a form is submitted do this this and this so it's kind of one of those like hubs that connect a bunch of online software and Then additional things on manage WP is what I use for my kind of site management and cloning Google of course gravity forms and then Profitable project plan by Jennifer Bourne has been a great one for if you want someone who's already helped produce a lot of things that give you the automation and the Steps of a development process. She's great for that and even through WP elevation with Tori Dean I also got some of this mindset So I just wanted to have credit where credit is due for people who have influenced my life that have brought me along the way To have some of these thoughts So I'm guessing I'm getting kicked off stage But that's me and thanks for listening