 Hi everyone, welcome to Study Hall. Today we're going to be hearing from Jocelyn Mosak, cloning yourself through automation. Jocelyn has over a decade of experience building, running, and wrangling a six-figure WordPress website design agency, all having two boys under the age of 13 at home. In addition to running our agency, Jocelyn is a mentor and coach to other WordPress professionals, helping them to create businesses that serve their needs and not the other way around. Jocelyn, take it away. All right, thank you guys. How's work camp been? How are you guys enjoying it? Yeah, I've been really impressed. So I'm from Portland, Oregon, so I flew in to be able to be here with you guys. And I think I'll be back. I like the sunshine, I like the people. So as she said, I have been working with WordPress long before it became cool. 2009 I started, so it's been a while. And I've gone from being a solo business owner to starting to have people underneath me to now a full-blown agency. And what I want to share with you today is cloning yourself. And unfortunately, this isn't going to be AI. I can't make an actual version of you. But what we're getting at here is how we can sort of replicate ourselves, have the tools, do some of the things that we do. And if we can't get the tools to do it, maybe somebody else to do it. But essentially those repetitive tasks, how can we systematize them? It make it such that somebody is doing it and it frees us up to do the more exciting things in our business, probably the higher end things in our business, and the stuff that as business owners, we really need to be focusing on. So I'm going to talk about how I've leveraged automation in my own business. And what I'm going to take you through today is kind of the life cycle of a WordPress built. So everything from that first, so how much does a website cost email we get, all the way to the other end, building it out, and then nurturing our client post launch so we can get referrals and additional business, and how we can use some automation along the way to take care of these things so the tool can take care of our clients while we take care of our work. So here we go, email comes into our inbox. So how much does a website cost? What's our answer, right? Well, it kind of depends. And what we're going to try to do is go from that email all the way to a sales call if this is a client we wanted to potentially speak to. So we're going to have a little bit of a pre-qualifier in there to make sure that they can potentially select themselves in or out, and us to look at them a little bit and get some information to decide if just because they want to be on our calendar they're going to actually show up there. You clicked a second ago. Oh, don't you dare. It helps if I point to the computer where the USB is not the screen word, is it? All right, lesson learned. So we're going to reply to this email with an email and we're going to say something along the lines of, thank you for reaching out. To provide an accurate estimate, I'm going to need just a little bit more information from you. Here's a link to my project request form. So you can already see we're introducing a little bit of automation. We're not putting questions into this email. We are sending them somewhere. We're going to ask some specific questions that we need to on the front end start pre-qualifying, starting to know, is this someone we even want to have this sales call with? We continue on. Once completed, you will be taken to my scheduling page where you can select a time from my calendar that works with your schedule. Again, a little more automation. They're going to be taken to some page. We are not emailing back and forth finding a time. We're going to go to a page where it's going to automatically know what my schedule looks like and then they can pick from that what works for them. We'll also have decided how long this sales call is going to be and so we're going to be specifying the length of the meeting. Again, that's our call, not theirs. So how do we do this? Well, through this presentation, you're going to see a little bit of color coding. I use green to indicate an action where we have to do something and blue where the tools are just kind of moving it along. And so we're going to simply use, if you use Gmail, they haven't added and I'll show you on subsequent slides how to do this where you can just do canned emails. So the trick to all of this is you naturally write the email but then you go and take the next step. You state it. And the next time this comes into your inbox, easy. Grab the canned email, voila, done, send it off, off we go. And so all we've had to do is select our canned email and all of this is going to go back one, is going to show up in their email. And so then we're going to send them off to our project request form. Well, with our project request form, we're going to use a simple form software. I tend to use gravity forms. And when they submit it, it's going to take them to a page where our little calendar is. It's going to shoot them off an email with information just kind of reiterating what they submitted on the form and a link to the scheduling page should they not fill it out when they're redirected. And we're going to tag them. I love to use tagging in my email software just to kind of keep a pulse on where they are in the flow. And here's why. Once they're redirected to my scheduler, which ties into my Google calendar and automatically sends them and us a reminder the day before or an hour before with an automatic link to the Zoom room for where the meeting's going to be. And once they actually schedule, it'll tag them as called scheduled. The nice thing is, is let's say, for example, it's tagged as submitted request, but three days later they haven't yet actually done the scheduling. Well, then I can very easily shoot over an automated email that says, wow, hey, thanks for filling out my form. I noticed you didn't schedule anything. Here's the link. If for some reason you can't find a time that works, you know, shoot me an email. I'm sure we can make it work. Likewise, if we see it three days later, we've already scheduled the call, we don't bother them. But either way, you can see how this is kind of a conversational natural correspondence, but I'm not actually doing any of this. This is all automated. All I did was this canned email. The rest of the stuff is just kind of rolling. And the other nice thing is, is I do see these inquiries come through my desk. So just because they decided to put themselves on my calendar, if I saw that request form come through and I didn't really like what was on there, I've got a couple other canned emails that kind of politely let them know, you know, I don't think we're the right fit for you. And here's a few other places or we're not taking new clients right now. So to give you sort of the nuts and bolts, and if you follow me actually on Twitter, I will post right after this, a link to these slides. So I see you guys taking notes, which is fabulous. But do you know that all of this is gonna be available to you? So you can, but also just go ahead and follow me and I'll post them right after. I think they'll also be put on the wordcamps page. But Gmail itself has this built-in setting in labs which gives you canned responses. And so all you need to do, in comes the email, how much does it cost, boom, down here, save canned responses, this one, there it goes, hit send, voila, onto the next work for the day. And then I wanted to show you also inside the project request form. Some people have been asking about this so I've included this slide. We asked them for some of the basics but then there's a couple of fun questions we can ask them and this is where some of the pre-qualification. One that I love to have on my intake form is how did you learn about us? Because I often forget, right, you need to say how did you hear about us, I forget to ask it. And so it's nice to know, did they find it through Google, was this a referral? This gives you some useful information just to know personally and it might be something that in the sales call you reference. Are you the key decision maker for this project? I don't wanna have a sales call but someone who actually can't decide if this project's gonna move forward or doesn't hold all the information. And I found people are actually honest on this question which kind of surprises me. Sometimes people are just kind of filling out the form. I'm not having a sales call unless everybody who's gonna buy into this and really make the decisions isn't there. So I will write back and say, I'd love to talk to you but here's the way it goes and here's why. How do you envision this project impacting your business? Why are we doing a new website? Why today? Like I'm sure it's been in this state for two years. What's the pain point? What just happened? Do you have an event coming up? Are you selling the company as something launching like why now? And that why now is another powerful thing going into the sales conversation because you understand their motivation and the value. We are selling websites but more than that we're selling solutions and this why is what we're solving. They've got a pain, there's something going on and really what we're selling is solving and helping support their vision for why this new website needs to happen now to help their business move into the future. And then I love, this is the one why I don't get tire kickers anymore. What's your budget? This is also a great way to frame and to price anchor. So we all have kind of our sweet spot. For me there's a certain range that I love. It's the project that I just know how many hours it takes I've done enough of them that they're just kind of my happy sweet spot. This mini project is kind of the clue of this is the smallest number I'm willing to accept and even that small number that's not a website. That's a mini project. We don't even think project until we're in my sweet spot range and then I set the form to pre-select my target, ideal client price point. So then they actually need to radio button away from it but it set expectations. It said no, our websites are about this range. And so if they radio down, they kind of know, all right, I'm radioing down from what this shop does. And then I actually like crazy budget. And when I say crazy budget, it's my crazy budget. For example, right now I don't want to do sites that are much above 25K. Now there are companies out there that won't touch anything below that. But that pre-qualifies in a good way on both ends. If you're gonna budget of 75K, I'm not your provider most likely because I'm not wanting to take that on. And likewise, you're gonna look at my price range and go, oh, she's not a fit. Likewise, if you're a $1,000 person, you're gonna look at my range and go, she's not a fit. So the people that come through who actually submit this form already I set expectations of what's the range. I've already kind of figured out, do they even have a clue how they thought about this? Are they really serious? And so all this information really arms me when I go into the sales call that I have sales calls with people I want to have sales calls with. And this is just an example of once they submit the form, it's taken to this page where I've got a built-in calendar. And so what it does is, again, these are 20 minute meetings. They'll automatically be put in Zoom. All this software just does it for me. And yes, there does come a cost of doing this. And no, when you start off, you don't need to buy into all of these solutions, but just know that they're out there and you can grow into them if you want to. And if they make sense for you financially. I love the fact that literally it goes from that email to literally the Zoom meeting, all of it, without me doing anything. So we're gonna have the sales call, we're gonna write the proposal. And now what we wanna do is we wanna go from that proposal being sent to having our kickoff call. So this is assuming this is someone we wanna work with. We have the sales call, we write our proposal and we wanna go from proposal basically being sent, potentially follow up with them if it goes sent and it goes quiet. Once it's sent, we want our deposit before we do anything, guys. No money, no work. And then we wanna send an onboarding email so as soon as we get the money, kids, yay, we're so glad you decided to work with us and you'll notice more automation because we're gonna send an online email and a kickoff call and I bet you can guess where that's going to again. So I like to use online proposals. They're kind of fun that way. A lot of them, the one I have has tracking so I can see if they actually open the proposal. If they viewed the proposal. Which page of the proposal they viewed? How long do they hang out there? Kind of gives me a little quiet pulse as to what the client's up to. And I use my tags again. So for example, when it's sent, I know it's sent. When it's signed, I know it's signed. If it's in this little gray area in between those couple tags, you know, I'd really love to work with you but our schedule's kind of filling up and we're planning our next however months or whatever weeks of work. If you wanna work with us, you might wanna, you know, sign the proposal before we get busy. Drop a little hints, we're here to help but you know, if you wanna work with us, you might wanna get on the calendar. And then once they sign it, and in this case actually mine's kind of nice cause it automatically collects the deposit at the same time. Just feeds them right to the, here's the deposit. We go and send them an onboarding. So as soon as, and again, the automation is nice because whenever they pay, they get the welcome email. They're so excited that you decided to, you know, put your faith in our agency. We couldn't be more happy. And so again, I'm busy working doing something else. And they're getting the email saying, wow, we are so excited to work with you. And off we go again. The first thing we need to do is to schedule the kickoff call. Here's a link to my scheduling page. Please go pick a time that works for you. And of course that's a longer one, that's a 50 minute walk. And that works that way. And again, down here we got the scheduler with all of the lovely buildings. Again, it sets up the Zoom room. All this stuff automatically goes in my calendar, goes in their calendar. All this stuff just happens. How are you guys doing? Am I going at an okay pace? All right. Now, this next slide after this is the whole reason this presentation came to pass. Now, should give you the history that I am an actual engineer by trade. So automation is one of those things that geeks get really excited about. So, I don't know about you guys, but I have a lot of internal systems. When clients come into my agency, I have time tracking software. I use Slack for internal communication. I use Dropbox for file sharing. I have teamwork for task management. I have time tracking all this different softwares that I want to set up for this new project. I want to, and most of them I realize, take the same information. What's the name of the project, the name of the client, the email. Just some very basic stuff. And I was noticing myself setting up all this tedious stuff everywhere. And then one day, I realized I could do the ultimate cloning. I could use one form, an app connector, aka Zapier, and magic would happen. So, I'll show you the form. But basically, a form that has something as simple as, again, the client's name, the project name. I fill out one form. It gets fed to Zapier and boom. Slack channel's created. Dropbox folder's created. Profile in harvest is created. Profile for, actually this one's profile for harvest. This is profile for time tracking in harvest. And this is teamwork, my task management. One form. Instantly, they are put into all my systems. Accurately, immediately, correctly, the same way every single time. And I will tell you, if you ever set something like this up, you will do a happy dance in the privacy of your own office every single time it runs, because it is pretty much that cool. And really, this is what I have. I don't know, how many people have heard of Zapier before? Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing. And so all I have is the gravity forms on my website with this information and off we go. Gravity form to harvest, gravity form to Dropbox. And I'll show you a Dropbox example in a second. Slack channel, teamwork, another thing for harvest. One form, all the setup. Nice, neat, clean, done. Saves a lot of time, saves a lot of tedious time. And so how you do it, if anyone hasn't used Zapier before, here's a very simple example with Dropbox. What you're doing is you first connect your form to Zapier, then you connect your Dropbox to Zapier, and then you tell it what action happens. So when the form is submitted, we are going to create in our active client folder the name of the client, and actually now I have it as a subfolder, not a hyphen, the project. What does that mean? And this is probably my favorite part. What this means is for every single project I have client one, project one. And if the client has another project, client one, project two. I have an organized, systematic, clean Dropbox file folder system for all my clients. Yeah, exactly, I actually know where to find things. And because it's amazing, one of the great things about automation is that when you deal with, actually you are setting up a system and it becomes neat and clean and repeatable. Your quality goes up. Your cleanliness goes up because it's so easy to just drop it here and next time I'll do it correctly and everything ends up everywhere. It's, this is one of those things where I did it for the efficiency but the side effect of organization has just been an amazing benefit. And again, to anyone who knows Zeperi, you know you can hook up with basically anything. It may or may not be complicated. I will say that Dropbox is an easy one. Slack is an easy one. Some of the other tools require a little bit of, you know, brain power to figure out and or to reach out to them. But it's pretty cool. And as I said, it's basically ultimate cloning. One action, leading to five. You've cloned yourself. So now we're gonna do the work and we're gonna wow the clients and what comes after that? Let's get some more business. Automation can help us get some more business. One other thing that I know I'm very, what's the word? I'm trying to think of the right word. Basically the mistake I often make is we're so excited to have the project done. We're like, yes, here you go, client catch. Goodbye, leave me alone for a little bit. We forget in the moment we're celebrating being done. That's when they love us the most. They just got their new toy. And this is when we actually, they love us and we can kind of capitalize on it. And we can use automation to do this. This again falls into the you do it once, you save it and every time it runs and you love yourself every time. And so after a client is done, all you need to do, this is just like a drip campaign you'd set up for anything in marketing. He just marked them as, you know, website launched. A month later, they still love you. I'd be ever so grateful if you would write me a review and link them directly to that Google review, Facebook page, whatever. Make it as easy as possible, but while everything's nice and hot and everybody loves everybody, at about two months, this is my favorite. So one of the things I do is I sell website maintenance care plans. And most of my clients do go on it, but there's the occasional one who's like, no, no, I'll maintain it myself. Month two is a great time for this email. And again, we use tags because if they're in our care plan, we don't send this email. This is the keeping things humming email. This is the, I'm sure, you know, congratulations, I'm sure you're having fun with your new site. I'm sure you've logged in and updated it, right? Remember like we went over the backups and stuff, you've done that, right? You know, and so they'll go look and they'll probably be in there like, oh, shit, there's like 20 updates. And you go, yeah, this is a great opportunity to let them know, by the way, we'd be happy to take care of that for you. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, this is where you could totally, one of the best ways I found to sell maintenance plans is to be completely honest and transparent. Like you want a 20 step guide on how to do an update, happy to provide it. Here, you got to do your backup and you need to do the this and you need to do the that and you should probably do it every week. And I'm sure you know which ones will blow up your site and they're like, okay, you can just do it for me and everyone's happy. About three months in, we loved working with you and we would love to work with people like you and we take really good care of people who are for us. You know, whatever you want to put in there, but ask. This again falls under the stuff most of us never ask. I like to have some fun ones. So as we get a little further out after six months, can you believe it's six months at your happy birthday, your website just had a birthday? How the heck did that happen? And then maybe at nine months, just another touch point, something useful. But the point is, is we stay in their lives for the first year and beyond after launch. And I think I've given you what, so this is four and that was, so six emails. Six emails that you write once and you use client after client after client. And the funniest thing is you'll forget you've done all this, like all of a sudden I'll look and have a bunch of new Google reviews and I'm like, how'd that happen? Oh yeah, it's good, it's a good thing. And this is just kind of showing, I happen to use active campaign, use MailChimp, you as a developer, but as I said, you know, you wait about a month, you send the first email, wait about another month, based on whether or not they're already on your maintenance plan, you may or may not send it. Then we've got our referral request. Then we're waiting in some cases three months, we're getting the useful email, happy birthday, all of the stuff that I went through, but that's kind of like the flow, you basically are gonna send an email, have a time delay, send an email, have a time delay. A few more pro efficiency tips, since we're busy, I mean, cloney is really at the heart of it, we're trying to be efficient in our business and think of creative ways to do so. Decluttering your inbox, another great way. Filters are your friend. Set up your used email, set up some filters so you ought to back per client just in it goes, so that way it's not this like jumble of stuff. Then you can just scan on the side to if there's numbers and you can look at them all at once and you can kind of, I actually keep it out of the inbox. So if it's gone in one of those client folders, it doesn't get in my inbox. So when I wanna look at client work, I'll look at client work, otherwise I'm not seeing it. And then this is a really fun one. So I highly recommend ticketing systems and I actually like using a form that then connects to whatever ticketing system I'm using because I found my ticketing systems have changed what I've used, sometimes I use them, sometimes I just use the form and filter it. But there's some fun questions you can put on a form for tickets and my favorite one is the urgency question. This is great. So you know how everything is like the sky is falling? The sky is falling till there's a price tag for the sky to fall and you're gonna find very quickly the sky isn't actually falling. And so just one of my questions in addition to name, email, URL, for the tickets that it goes to support at Mozak Design, you know it's a standard IE like, you know, normal turnaround, is this kind of pressing? We should probably need to get it done. There'll be a slight fee. Is this urgent like the sky is falling? Cause like there's a two X rush fee. So are you sure the sky is falling? Did you know the sky doesn't fall anymore? Suddenly nothing's urgent. It seems like almost just about everything is like yeah, when you get to it. It's amazing how when money is involved, it's not that important. I mean, obviously if the site is hacked or things really happen, we as service providers just jump and step up and do it. This is more a self setting of expectations. I mean, we are juggling many clients right now. We may have been able to just jump and save the day when we had a couple. But as our businesses grow, we can't do that anymore. And we sometimes do need to set expectation that like, yeah, you're not the only person I'm supporting and so here's what you can expect. And my goal is to obviously do better than this. My goal is to wow them and to do it. But this is at least setting and protecting myself to at least reasonable of what they can expect. And again, I don't always bother with this. I pull that on and off. But definitely the like notice of like if this is urgent, note you will occur either a two X or whatever baseline cost increase. Powerful, sky stops falling. Other things I like to do is if you can, just get to know a solid theme, a solid set of plugins. Going to theme forest and learning a new theme for every client, it's just, it's inefficient. Just don't do that. I mean, we kind of all maybe start there, but really once you get good at your craft, pick a strong foundation, know it inside it out and work it. Also have a seed site. And this is what I love to do. I actually use, you heard me speak earlier about WP Engine if you were by the keynote. And I use their tools because they make it so easy for me. I basically have two main builders I use. And so I have two seed sites where I have the latest version of WordPress running. I have all the plugins that I always use installed and turned off, kept completely up to date. And my themes and my, as I said, the plugins. And so whenever I get a new build, all I do is copy it. Boom, there's my new development area ready to go. It's already up to date. It's already got my themes, it's already got my plugins. At launch, I basically turn on plugins as I need them. At launch, anything that's not turned on gets deleted, done. This way I know I and my team are using the same standard plugins all the time. And how many of us, and I was at fault of this for a long time, you're always doing the install of WordPress and then you're literally typing in the name of all your standard plugins, right? It's so much time wasted. And the other thing, if you've ever heard me speak before at a different camp, I like to talk about is the fact that as agencies, we are, especially as you move, your business matures, you really are starting to produce a quality product, a consistent product. What does a website out of my either solo freelance business or bigger business look like? And so by starting with a consistent seed site, which always has the same foundation, you're ensuring a certain level of quality to start and as a result, a certain final product. You're building consistency in and when you're looking at profitability, your best friend, like someone else was talking about, special cases are not your best friend when you're trying to be profitable. They're kind of fun when you're starting because it's like, oh, I can solve this new problem, a new challenge, but as you mature into kind of wanting a well-oiled machine that financially is there for you, my experience has been really honing your sweet spot is where you really grow into a business that just is less stress, more profit. Only use hosts you know and love. Has anyone had the joy of logging into like an area and being like, where the hell is, you know, you're like, what? What? I only work with certain hosts and other hosts, there's either gonna be a pain and suffering fee or they're just not worth, I'm not working with you. You know, this is again your time when we use spec a project of your budget, you're specing how much effort you're putting into this and if it's going to be a whoever host that is going to be, you're gonna sit there forever trying to figure out where the heck do I install WordPress, how do I get access to this, like what is this crazy system that is costing you time and that is hurting your business's bottom line. And so, as much as possible, I would, whoop, I clicked ahead, go back. Nope, that was forward. Oh yeah, computer. That's gonna laugh. Only no hosts you know and love. And then really the other way is to use efficiency is really just to continue to use automation throughout all of your project flow. A lot of the years I gave you may or may not fit exactly in your business, but my goal here is to plant the seed of different things that you can do and you can figure out where it might fit in your business. So yeah, this is great, where the heck do I begin? Is, how's everyone doing? Like, are minds kind of like overflowing or are we kind of good? Good, all righty. So where do we begin? We begin one step at a time. That's how I, this didn't just magically happen. And I really say probably the best place to start is exactly where I start this presentation, which is the canned emails. How many times have you rewritten exactly the same response? Probably quite a bit. It's free, if you use Gmail. It's easy, and so start there. And then things like the nurture sequence that I mentioned at the end. The way I've made most of my campaigns is literally to force myself when I'm writing the email because these are authentic emails. I just save them. So decide to put a stake in the ground, have a moment where you're like, okay, this time I'm gonna actually save and perverse, or even set this up, and have a project finish. And say to yourself, okay, I'm gonna write this first email and just sit down and write it to that client. But then you're gonna take one more step. You're gonna pick it up, bring it into your list, your email service, mail stream, or whatever. You're gonna place it. And then when month two rolls around, you're gonna write that next email. And you're gonna pick it up and place it. And so you're not doing more work. You're doing what you need to do anyways. You're just stately taking that next step of taking that work and saving it. And I have found that even when I write email campaigns for list building and things of that nature, when I do it that way, I end up writing the best ones because all of these things are really one-to-one correspondence. So when I take an email, I've actually sat down and written to one client. I'm really speaking in a heart-to-heart client provider-to-client space, and so that becomes the perfect language, even in an automated sequence because it originated in a much more personal, authentic energy. Another thing I love to do is screen record. So for example, I have a process that that's the other thing I was gonna say. I'd be happy to share. I have an internal process that I made for creating those transferable installs in WP Engine. So I have a document that basically says, how do you have a seed site and how do you take your seed site and make it be your development? And the reason I did this is I wanted to document for my own business how do we do things around here? Well, I have no desire to write a document. I'm an engineer, I don't wanna write. I happen to like video. So what did I do? Again, my philosophy is don't create new work, so I put a stake in the ground. I said the next time I have a new client and I'm setting up the development area, I'm recording it. I used Loom, L-O-O-M dot com, free screen record software. I used Loom, I record myself doing it, chattering to myself as I did it, right? Took me all of 15 minutes. It's not really a big process. I gave it to my VA and to, well, yeah, I gave it to my VA. My VA then, who I have a mixed team, part of my team is US, part of my team is overseas, this particular person is overseas, so I was able to leverage from a cost-wise, be completely transparent about that. And so my VA took it. He then for the next project, so again, I didn't waste work, I just simply said, next project that comes, I want you to go through it. And as you go through it mimicking my flow, i.e. learning my system, I want you to one, get this next development set up, and two, you're gonna transcribe it into a document that will become my system and process. So as the CEO of the company, I spent 15 minutes and I chose to give a more straightforward task to someone who was a much lower expense to me. To sit there and make a nice, pretty document, which as I said, I'm happy to share with you guys. You can have your own first system and process should use WP Engine. And so I not only trained him at the same time, I got live documentation, and so that way, should someone new come on my team, should he leave, should whatever, it's like, and here's how we do things around here, follow this document. And that way as a business owner, because I feel like as if you choose to grow, one of the most important things is to start getting stuff out of your head and how do you communicate it to your team and how do you set them up to be successful and how do you ensure the quality continues when you're no longer the one doing it? It's by you setting the stage for what do things look like around here. When you hire someone, I highly suggest it not be, you let the new hire figure out what are things gonna look like at your business. No, as the business owner, you need to find what things are gonna look like at your company. So you're again ensuring the quality. And so this was me saying around here, this is how we do things, but again, leveraging somebody else is to both learn it and do it. Whose time I wouldn't, I don't wanna say was less precious, but it was a better use of his time and for me, the business owner, I needed to be, that would open a waste of several hours for me to do. My time is not more value, but we could be used on unique things that only the business owner can do. There's a question. What is a VA? A virtual, so a VA is a virtual assistant. You can also have a front-end developer do it. Basically, it's someone who you bring on your team to do typically more straightforward tasks. So really, when we talk about all of this, it's a lot like teaching your child to tie their own shoes. Is this more work the first time? Heck yeah, why do you think we all avoid doing it? You know, we dance around it next time, next time, next time. But the problem is, is how many times do you see yourself doing it again going, this is stupid? Like right, the first time, fine. The second time, there should be a better way. If you're doing it a third time and you can actually spell out what the tasks are, you shouldn't be doing it a third time. Especially if you can spell out what the tasks are step by step. You can usually at that point either find a tool or a team member who can execute them. And so, I like to joke the reality is it is just like teaching your kids to tie their shoes. Are you planning to go to college with your kids just so you can tie their shoes? You know, at one point, you need to suddenly go, okay, this is getting ridiculous. And break down and spend the time today to, I promise you, thank yourself over and over and over again in the future. The other thing I will share with you is that it is amazingly freeing to get stuff out of your head. I know as I transition from being a solo person where I held it all in my head to actually creating documents about what are my checklists, what are my processes, I was no longer sitting there going, did I do this, did I do this, did I do this, did I do this? I didn't have to remember it. It was the list, done, done, done, done. Getting things out of your head is amazingly freeing. Even though you feel like no, no, I got it, I got it. It's surprising. It just requires a bit of a mental shift and sometimes just biting the bullet. So questions I get asked a lot. And again, these slides, I will be tweeting them out along with tweeting out the document once I go through it and just make sure I can share it because I came up with that idea last night. So I need to check it and get it out probably in a day or two as a PDF. But this is also all gonna be, obviously when I share this out. These are some of the tools that I'm using right now. So as I said, we got Zapier or IFTTT, if this, then that. Both of them the magical online application connector. Basically like as I shared there, it's this kind of online hub that will connect different tools so you can sort of have an action in, triggers an action out. You can connect a lot of things with this. It's pretty beautiful. For my booking online software, I happen to use BookMe. I got an incredible deal through AppSumo. I don't know if AppSumo is a good or a bad thing. It's like where you can get amazing tech deals. You can also spend a lot of money there. Getting software you didn't know you needed. So it's that double-edged sword. But it's a lot of fun. Acuity is another one. There's a lot of different options out there. Better proposals is what I use for online and other AppSumo purchase. Proposed to FI is a good one too. I use Active Campaign right now. MailChimp has come a long way and I actually think I might use MailChimp if I were to start over. They used to not have as much. Now I think they have quite a bit at a low or almost free price point. So I would probably start with MailChimp. I like Harvest for my invoicing, my time tracking. 17 Hats is really good if you're solo but they don't work well if you're moving into having a team that needs to time track. But I find that works really well. I'm using Teamwork PM for my kind of to-do management similar to Basecamp, people use Trello. There's, you know, what you'll find with all of these is there's no perfect solution. You kind of have to just sort of go with one and unless they're really not working for you then pick another. Otherwise, it's more important that you know your systems in flow than have the perfect tool would be my thoughts. Really knowing your systems and processes is what's important. Slack is great. We used to talk in Skype and it was just all this chatter. Slack, you can set up channels per project so you have context. Great for internal conversations with a team. Dropbox, Google Drive for your file management. Manage WP, anyone who is doing care and maintenance of sites would want to check this out. It's basically a hub where you threw a plugin on all the sites you're managing. It kind of aggregates together. You can basically say it'll run daily backups. It'll run the security scans. It can send monthly reports to your clients. One thing that's nice about that is they don't necessarily understand it but at least they're getting something for their money. They can see that says she updated like 20 things in the last month. Okay. And it gives them something tangible for their money which I find can be important and it's just very convenient for doing that. Hosting, I happen to use WP Engine predominantly right now. As I indicated, it's probably the one host that I found that at the moment I'm really happy with which has taken me years to be able to say. I live and breathe gravity forms. There's other great ones. There's WP forms. I think there's Caldera. I'm probably mutilating the name. I just started with gravity forms, happened to know what inside it out and know their tech support is amazing. Google Calendar, Gmail. And then I wanted to also share these other two resources because I think it's important to share those that have influenced us and have brought us to where we're at. I haven't gained all this information. Just in a vacuum, certainly a lot of it has been years of the hard way but a lot of it has been listening to people ahead of me. And so Jennifer Bourne has profitable project plan which is a really cool program for sort of a lot of email interaction as to taking clients through kind of the build out process from onboarding to offboarding with a lot of the emails and a lot of the correspondence. And then Troy Dean has WP Elevation which is really a great program. They've got an online community about 700 worldwide. He's based in Australia. But worldwide WordPress freelancers and agency owners that we basically lean on each other, support each other, lift each other up. Sometimes you need to say, oh my God, congratulations. That's a crazy win you just had. And likewise, it's fun to have a place where you can say I wanna crawl under my desk and hide or I'm shouting from the rooftops that I just signed this major deal. And it's a really fun place where you can do both. He talked a lot, a lot of his stuff has to do a lot with, I don't want to say agency, but business mindset. I would say where Jennifer Borns is very much sort of a client interaction program. Troy Deans is much more of a business structure, a little bit of this, hey, I'm running a professional shop here mindset. And so they've both been great resources to me through the years. That is all I have about that. I do have some additional slides but they kind of go off a little bit and I wanna pause here and just open up for questions since what I've presented is the core of, the next stuff gets a little bit more into systems and processes and the first part there was the lion's share of talking about automation. So I wanna see, does anyone have any questions on what I have shared so far? Okay, question front? So someone asked me if I am using a CRM. I actually haven't really bothered in the sense of, I don't know, the right leads just kind of come in, usually they end up transferring into being a client or not and I just kind of go with it. If you notice I was kind of using Active Campaign as my CRM in that once they became part of my business I was using tagging almost in that context. So I would say that's an area where either I don't need it or I haven't really explored how to use it. And I don't know the truth in that. I mean, I haven't given it the time to really evaluate whether or not I need a CRM but I'm kind of half using it that way and I can see that. I know Active Campaign also upgrades to that functionality. I choose not to pay for it but I know it exists. There's another question? Yes? So how did I find my virtual assistant who I say that he's actually more of a front-end developer? So I found team members different ways. Some are accidental team members kind of where someone started working and expanded from there. So especially if you're talking about this is how I found I would say my best hiring story. I was looking for someone and I wanted to use someone overseas in the Philippines or India because I was intentionally looking at the price point. But this story I think works no matter where you choose to go looking. I had used, was using Upwork at the time but again, if you wanna look even in the US you've got Craigslist, there's a lot of places. What I think is the reason I wanna tell this story because it has to do with my hiring process which I thought was actually was good. I was looking for a front-end developer in this case and so I was looking for someone who could take a PSD, take a theme and execute the build and also in my case I was looking for someone who could fill in the creative gaps. So someone who wouldn't necessarily just take the letter of the build but just kind of could intuitively see where it was going. And so I had put the job offer on Upwork but I kept it private and I looked at profiles and I looked for people that looked like a fit to me. I was concerned that if I made it public I was gonna get slammed and I was just gonna be like, this is like overwhelm. And so I only presented the proposal to people I was willing to consider. They were in the right, their skill sets looked about right, their wage desires looked about right and so they looked like fits. So I actually probably sent out the application to all of 10, 15 people. And then some replied back and I kind of at that point had dialogue with them. I got it down to about two people who felt like good fits and then I put them through a test and I think this is probably the best thing I could have ever done. I wanted them, no, I wanted them to be front end developers and so the best way to test is to test exactly the skill you need. And so I set up for both of them a development area. I gave them both the same scenario. I said, here's the PSD, here's the development area. In this case it was overseas so I was looking at probably about seven bucks an hour. Even if it was in US, I still think it would have been worth this monetary investment, I must say. And I said, you each have 10 hours. I want you to spend nine hours doing it. I want you to spend the last hour writing up what you didn't get to and what you would do next. I want you to make sure you hit the homepage, the contact page and like one other page. In that test, I was floored at my ability to see that these were two completely different people who approached this differently and how they asked me questions when they had issues, what the quality of their work looked like. I knew I was looking for a front end developer, I immediately looked at did they comment, did they do this, did they do that? And very quickly I saw their personalities, their skillset. So that was, yeah, so I probably spent $150 for that test and again, if it had been someone in the US I would have spent more than that. I might have limited it to five hours. I mean, there is the reality. Granted, if you're hiring someone at a higher hourly price point, you probably have a budget. But remember, it's expensive to onboard someone. It's painful to fire someone and we tend to do, okay, I'm still trying to fire someone and I feel awful. So it's not easy to let someone go. So the best thing I can say is to give them, if you need this skill, have them do it and have a couple people do it. It will speak volumes to whether they're a fit for you. And then the other thing is know your values in your company, like people have said about personality being so important. I like an environment of fun. I love it when my team pokes fun at me. Like if you can ridicule the boss, then we have a great working relationship is the way I see things. And so I was also looking at their personality, just how that engagement worked over that very short period of time and it was so telling. So do that or when you even bring someone on, have an understood trial period that this is not quite set in stone just yet and you can even stagger their wage. You can say, okay, look in the first three months because there's a ramp up or it could be at this pay grade and after three months providing all is well, you're gonna bump up to here. So I answered the question and told a story on top of it but I hope I sort of gave both. I talked too much. Yeah, and I'm gonna be at the after party tonight. So certainly that. And then again, you can always ping me with questions and I'm more than happy to reply and continue the conversation. Thank you guys.