SHOWNOTES
We all have habits, things we do in the same way so much that it’s automatic. We don’t have to think about it; we just do it.
Business habits are the same way.
It’s really a way to put structure around good habits that are going to help things run smoothly. When these things are getting done regularly with your systems, then you can put your time an energy into the things that only you can do.
Listen for the details of the 11 Ways to Automate Your Business:
Email Sorting. This will save you tons of time and energy. I also use emails as inspiration and when you hear this you’ll see why. If you aren’t using templates to handle email responses you are going to love how much time this saves you.
Social Media. There are great tools that help with this and all of them make it easy to post your great content regularly. Because posts get done automatically, it’s going to be easier to show up and connect in real time with your audience.
Canva. What did we do before we had this? Using Canva is an easy way to create great looking graphics that are branded with your look and style. Add Template Tribe for amazing templates you can customize.
Zapier. I couldn’t live without this. It allows you to connect tasks from one app to another. Just one example: an email that needs to become a task > Zap > now on the Trello board! And that’s just one of many.
Leads Automation. This allows a lead (from Facebook leads ad for example) to get forwarded for immediate action. This is a game changer. Lots of time and energy goes into creating leads, this will help you wow them with a quick response.
Customer Support. We use IFTTT to set up a logic/response so you don’t miss messages from clients.
Client Onboarding. I use Kajabi so when someone buys something, there’s an automatic sequence that happens and the new client gets exactly what they need right away. We also have a sequence for exiting clients as well.
Spreadsheets and Tracking. It’s great to track things and I love a good spreadsheet, but the data entry part is no fun. Automating data to your spreadsheet is a must.
Shipping Automation. This may be my favorite. ShipStation software and a thermal printer makes this so easy. A shipping label and postage are printed, and I get to box things up and mail them without ever leaving the house. I love it.
Bookkeeping. This is one of the things I wish I’d automated much sooner. I was afraid of this for a long time. I use Bench and I’m sharing a code in the resources below. If you haven’t automated this yet do it today and thank me later.
Delegate. My team runs daily, weekly, monthly, and annual processes for me. Together we’ve created great systems to keep all of our detailed processes and tasks running.
Automating parts of your business with systems and apps to keep things running is key if you want to be able to grow beyond what you can do on your own. Start sooner than you think you need to so as you grow you can have systems and a team to support every step of the way.
RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.550] Hey guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:00:14.570] As human beings, we develop certain habits and some are good, some not so good, but we are definitely creatures of habit and the better our habits are, usually, the more enjoyable our life is. Right. If you're a regular listener, then you know that I am a big fan of personal optimization and programming your life and just always striving to be better, to live better.
[00:00:39.500] And I think at this point, when we're optimizing, when we're really in our groove, we've turned those habits into systems, personal systems and in business. We also have habits, good habits, bad habits. And when we optimize those good habits, we create systems and in both cases, personal and business. A system is just a checklist, really. So, for example, your personal morning system might look like this. Wake up, check, meditate, check, journal, check, yoga, check, green smoothie, check, go for a long walk, check and so forth.
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[00:01:20.300] But it's a checklist of things that you run through each day. And in business, we need these systems to function smoothly and consistently as well. So the more these things we can automate, the easier it becomes to be smooth and consistent. And this allows you to free up time to focus on your talent and on tasks that actually grow your business. And who doesn't want more of that.
[00:01:45.440] So today I'm going to share with you 11 things that you can do today when it comes to automating your business. And the truth is, I'll probably do several episodes about automations because we're really just scratching the surface today. Also, I'll put a link to each of these automations on the show notes page at jenlehner.com/055. And my name is spelled JENLEHNER.COM/055
[00:02:17.030] Number One. Let's talk about email sorting. If you're a Gmail user, there are so, so, so, so many time saving features in there that you need to know about. And actually all of these features that I'm going to mention are pretty much available with all the other email clients as well. So Gmail filters allow you to create rules to automatically filter out certain emails. Now, this is way more powerful than you think between sending automatic responses, taking care of filtering and labeling and getting rid of some emails completely.
[00:02:51.620] Rules can handle most of your inbox triage and decluttering for you. That way, when you log into your Gmail, what's right in front of your face is only the important stuff.
[00:03:02.750] So one of the ways that I use filters is that whenever an email comes in from a certain marketer who always launches and launches really well, I set the filter to skip the inbox and then apply the labels. Sally Jones, we're going to pretend that that's her name. Now, when it's time for me to launch something, I might go and deconstruct her launch. What kind of freebies was she offering? How many closed cart emails did she sent? This is so, so valuable, especially when you do this with several people so you can look and see trends that, oh, OK, this whole thirty seven dollar funnel thing is really trending right now.
[00:03:41.840] Maybe I want to take a look at this. Let me see how they're doing this. We all pay so much money for courses to learn this stuff. But the truth is, if you get inside somebody's launch like this, you will get all of the education that you need, or at least that part of the launch. Another feature I love in Gmail are the email templates. Templates in general are amazing, right? They're so useful. These used to be called canned responses.
[00:04:08.150] Basically, you set up a whole collection of responses to questions you are asked often. And I find that we're constantly adding to our template lists, sometimes deleting, but really adding a lot of templates so that the next time we get asked that question, we don't have to start from scratch. It's not one hundred percent automated, but pretty darn close. So, for example, I get a lot of requests to be on my podcast. Now I just add the person's name to this templated email and hit send.
[00:04:39.710] I'm done. And I'll be honest, most of the time the people who are reaching out to me to be on the podcast aren't really a good fit. But I do send a link to a Google form inside that template where they could tell me more about what topics they'd like to talk about and so forth. This is also great for saying no to opportunities that come your way. Sometimes these are the hardest emails to write, right? Because you've got to think about how to write it without sounding harsh or rude.
[00:05:10.580] Now, you don't really have to think about it, you took the time once to write a really thoughtful thanks but no thanks email, and now you can use it whenever you need it. And yes, it's you're going to have to tweak it a little bit for each individual situation, but not too much, actually. And I really, really love having these at my fingertips.
[00:05:30.000] So, number two, we have to talk about social media. If you're like most people with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of them, you know that social media really eats up precious attention span during your working hours.
[00:05:43.760] Don't let it take over your life. Social media management tools like Recurpost, MeetEdgar, HootSuite. Although you know what I'm hearing less and less about HootSuite and I haven't looked at it in probably five years. So let's just say recur post and MeetEdgar and I know there's a several others. They let you run multiple social media accounts for your business, all from one dashboard. You write the post, you schedule them in advance, and then these tools send it to the right people in the right places at the right time so you can market your business on the timeline while saving time for your most valuable one on one customer interactions.
[00:06:23.120] Of course, this doesn't take the place of showing up as your real human self on social media, but it's a wonderful way to share your great content and other people's great content as well.
[00:06:36.530] All right, let's talk about Canva.com. If you're in marketing, then this is you've known about this for forever. It's canva.com. So for ten dollars a month, I think it is for the pro version, it's definitely worth getting the version.
[00:06:52.490] You can create your brand's visual identity with logos, colors and fonts in one brand kit, plus something like sixty-thousand free templates, and even with the free version, you can get you can get you could go far.
[00:07:09.330] And also I found this really, really fantastic resource called Template Tribe, which I'll put in the show notes every template that you could ever need for your business. And they are gorgeous is in there. It's basically it's a monthly subscription program. And all the templates in there you can upload into Canva and they're branded for your business and they're really super gorgeous. And what I like about them is that they've included a lot of free PDF workbook type templates, whereas in Canva alone, there's not a whole lot of those or there's not a place to put like a lot of text.
[00:07:47.080] I don't know why. I don't know why they don't have those. But in Template Tribe, you can there's a whole bunch of these. And so in our business we're constantly creating freebies, checklists, workbooks, that sort of thing. We found that to come in really handy, really, really super time-saving. And we have this whole library of templates that are grab and go.
[00:08:09.480] You want to get things on your task list from other apps. OK, so tell me if this happened to you and this is number four. Somebody tells you about something that they need in an email or text message or whatever, and maybe write something down in your notes, your note taking app, and you make a mental note, OK, I need to follow up with this and then you forget about it completely, only to hear back from the person saying, hey, did you do that thing?
[00:08:40.790] And that's a terrible feeling. And that's why it's really crucial to send those one off your request to somewhere actionable like your to do list application. You can automatically turn those requests into tasks with Zapier, one of the tools that we absolutely cannot live without. I've got several zaps I want to tell you about. Basically, what Zappier lets you do is connect your apps and automate workflows. Zappier moves information between your Web apps automatically so you can focus on those revenue producing tasks.
[00:09:17.240] So, for example, if you're a Trello user like we are, but you don't have to be I mean, there's a million a million different applications that that work inside of Zappier. But if you're a Trello user, you can create Trello cards from new Gmail threads. You can create Trello cards from new Gmail emails that you start. I mean, and there's and that's just a couple of the things you can do with the Gmail and Trello integration.
[00:09:46.840] Number five, you can message your team about leads or customers or something important, like failed payment.
[00:09:54.830] This is a really, really gold for me. It's a really simple automation to set up. All you need to do is to connect whatever source you're getting leads from to whatever communication tool your team reacts to most quickly. That way, your team gets notified every time a new lead comes in in the place, they're most likely to see it so they can take action right away. For example, let me use Facebook lead ads as an example here.
[00:10:24.230] If you run a Facebook lead ad, then you can set up a zap so that when that lead comes in, then you automatically send a Gmail. And this is only available for premium users on Zapier. But honestly, it's worth every penny. Like once you start using Zapier for a few things, you'll end up using Zapier for a lot of things. And I know some people call it zapier, but I like Zapier because it's like zap, like you create zaps. So then. I think it's Zapier, but whatever Zappy or Zapier, all I know is that it is it is a must to have in your business.
[00:11:04.970] All right, let's talk about customer support. Number six. Suppose a customer submits a support request on your Facebook page. An automated response sequence can deliver a thank you message to the customer and an alert message is sent to your team members. So we do this with another automation tool that we use called IFTTT, and that stands for if this, then that.
[00:11:30.410] And it's free. It's Web-based and it creates chains of simple conditional statements that they call applets. If you've ever used it before, way back in the day they used to call these recipes, they've changed it to applets. So an applet is triggered by changes that occur with other Web service services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. So let's say a potential customer send you a message on your Facebook business page. You can trigger it to send you a text message so you don't miss it.
[00:12:01.550] And you could go a step further and introduce chat bots, at least for the most basic interactions. And that's a whole other topic that we'll talk about another day. No.7 seven client onboarding, so with client onboarding, it's really similar to customer support, it can and should be automated, but only to a certain extent. It's perfectly OK to fully automate some simple tutorials and education programs that can be carried out without human involvement. If everything about your product or service is simple and straightforward, there's really no need to waste time and resources on customer support reps at this stage.
[00:12:40.450] But nevertheless, this is rarely the case. Automatic onboarding programs can be extremely helpful when introducing your customers the basic concepts and functionalities. But having a just in case human rep waiting to provide additional support if needed is still critical. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. We've set up our onboarding sequence email with Kajabi, our email service provider, and when someone buys one of our products, they'll immediately receive an email with all the steps they need to take.
[00:13:12.040] It's a good idea to have a customer off boarding process too or maybe exit process is a better term. So when someone leaves our private membership community, Front Row VIP an automation kicks in, that tags them. Actually, it removes a tag. So let's say they have the tag front row VIPer when they unsubscribe or they cancel their membership, there's an automation that happens that removes that tag and adds the tag former Viper, because we want to be able to identify our former people, our former members.
[00:13:48.280] Maybe we want to create a special offer to bring them back at a later date. So I want to know who has been with us and then left us. OK, so we remove a tag and we add a tag and then an email is automatically sent to them that asks them for feedback about their experience. We basically we want to know why they're leaving and we want to thank them for the time that they spent with us. We need to know why they're leaving so we could continue to improve the membership. This is really valuable information that you don't want to miss out on.
[00:14:22.910] Number eight, consolidate information in a spreadsheet or a database. So spreadsheets are a great way to store all kinds of information, obviously. But manually adding information to them is really super time consuming, which is why I have this love hate relationship with Google Sheets and I just asked my team to handle it. It's easy to set up automations that send information to a spreadsheet so you don't have to spend time copying and pasting it yourself.
[00:14:48.910] For example, you can send the information from forms that your customers have filled out to a spreadsheet. Again, we use Zapier for this. And shipping, OK, once you start an e-commerce business or even if you don't have a full on e-commerce business, but you just have like maybe one physical product like we do, you soon become a familiar face at the local post office, which is actually my least favorite errand in the world. I don't like to fill up gas and I can't stand to go to the post office.
[00:15:23.970] So if you want to skip that and save time and money, there are a few really easy solutions. And this has been a lifesaver for me when I started to sell my Front Row CEO Content Planning System. It's a wonderful little well, not little. There's a wonderful content planner, a physical content planner that ships straight your door and we use Stamps.com because you can print off postage from the comfort of your own, your own home or office, and it takes all the guesswork out of the shipping prices to and they own ship station.
[00:15:58.950] So we buy the stamps through Stamps.com. But actually I never go to Stamps.com. I do it all through ship station. So it's all super automated. So when an order comes in, this is probably like my favorite, my favorite, favorite, favorite app. It's first of all, their customer support is amazing, and so when someone places an order for a planner, all these things kick into action.
[00:16:23.570] I get a notification, but I can automatically create a label. And then the label gets printed from this cool little thermal printer that I have. They need to figure out how to make these big these thermal printers. You never have to replace the ink. And it's funny because as I'm talking, I'm like I'm like moving my hands in such a way to show you how it's shaped. But you can't see me. Basically, it's it's not much bigger than a deck of cards. Let's say surface area is about as big as an iPhone.
[00:16:56.700] And then it's about as in and oh, you know what it's about the size of like. Yeah, it's about the size of a big iPhone, but as tall as a big coffee mug, that's a terrible, terrible description. My point is, it's a really, really, really small I mean, it's it's a fraction of the size of a regular printer and it prints the labels with heat, hence thermal. And I guess it's the heat that burns into the label or something that makes it like it's not actually ink.
[00:17:33.090] That's my guess. I'm not I'm not exactly positive. Or maybe there's ink underneath. I don't know. I don't know. All I know is there's no ink with this thing in. It is it is a miracle. And they really need to make printers out of these. But of course, they won't because the ink is how these printer companies make all of their gobs of money.
[00:17:51.560] OK, so order comes in. It goes into ship station. It automatically prints the label from this cute little printer that sits on my desk. And it's just amazing. And it feels like I'm running like a real little factory over here when I walk into my office and I see these labels that have been printed. And I just get to slap them on the envelopes after I send in a nice personal note, of course, in the package, and then the mailman just picks it all up from my front door.
[00:18:17.690] I mean, what is better than that? Another thing that we automate around here is the bookkeeping, oh, goodness, if you're like most entrepreneurs, you you might not be great at the financial stuff in your business. And honestly, I was afraid of it for years and never really did such a super great job with it. And I wish I would have known about the service years ago. It is bench there out of Canada.
[00:18:47.020] I'm going to put a special link for you on the show notes page at jenlehner.com/055. But honestly, I can't say enough about it. All of our receipts automatically go to the application and we can print out these wonderful reports and they file our taxes for us at the end of the year. And it's just a wonderful thing that I don't have to worry about. But if I want to talk to a bookkeeper once a week, I can. And and it makes me really feel like the grown up business that I now am.
[00:19:21.050] All right. Here we are in number 11. When you can't automate, that usually means that you can delegate. Without my team, I would be so stuck in a bunch of thorny little tasks that would slow me down. For example, we have monthly systems that we run daily systems quarterly, weekly and annual. So each month my VA Neeca posts in our group screenshots of our most engaged members. She prints out a report for affiliate payments. She creates a monthly content planner for our VIP members and just thinking about posting the screenshot of our most engaged members.
[00:19:59.720] If I did that myself, I'd have to go to each of the groups, look at the group insights, take screenshots posted into the groups, make sure that the screenshots got filed into the right folder, tag each of the members that are in the screenshot. And it's going to take me twice as long as I think it's going to take me. And most importantly, I'm going to lose focus on the important stuff that I need to be doing, like creating this podcast or writing a blog post or making sales calls or something like that.
[00:20:27.500] When I do anything in my business, I basically just show up to do the main thing that only I can do and my team takes care of the rest. This podcast episode, for example, after I record this to the cloud, Neeca is going to grab it and send it out to our production team. And then she's going to produce all the zillions of things that have to accompany this episode, like the social media post the email draft. The links for the show notes the audio grams.
[00:20:54.470] She's going to research the hashtags. All I do is hit record and talk. And when we host our accountability challenges in Front Row VIP, it is Neeca who is running the show on the back end, keeping up with the participants, calculating their points, making sure it's all running smoothly. I just show up on live streams and do what I do best and cheer everybody on. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I'm always beating the drum of the importance of hiring a Virtual Assistant before you even think that you're ready.
[00:21:28.220] And also, you hear me talk about creating smart, simple systems in your business. Well, I'm really excited to let you know that our free video series, Solopreneur to CEO Secrets is launching soon. And I'll be talking all about how you can go from being a Solopreneur to the CEO in your business. Just text SMARTCEO, all one word to 44222. Or you can go to ceosecretstraining.com.
[00:21:58.680] And I'm really excited about this. I hope you'll join us for the spring training series. And don't forget that you can grab all the show notes about all the things that we've talked about and all the zaps that we mentioned and maybe a few extras at jenlehner.com/055. See you next time.
