Hey, crew. What up? It is Steph, and I am back with another golden nugget. This one’s on admin, and I know, “Ah, I don’t want to listen to admin crap, Steph. Can’t you give me something else?” But this little nugget is going to set your mind up, so that you can start organizing all those crappy little mundane tasks, so that somebody else can do them. Does that sound good?
All right, now, I know when you first started your business, you were like, “Yes, I’m going to do that thing that I love, and I’m going to deliver it, and it’s going to be the best thing ever. Oh my god. #ILoveMyJob. Yeah, this is my life.” What ends up happening is that you actually get stuck in running a business, you get in here thinking that you’re just going to do this passionate task of yours, but then you realise there’s emails to be sent out, there’s accounts to be reconciled, there’s invoices to be produced, there’s debts to be collected, there are processes that need to be communicated as a part of your overall projects that you might be doing. Then you’re like, “Oh my god, this is an entire job.”
So what you might be doing is spending some quality time… What do you say? Changing hats, yeah? You might walk in the office, and you might sit down and start attacking your email, because email needs to be attacked. Or you might sit down and do some design work, or you might do some dev work, or you might do some marketing work, or you might do some writing, or whatever it is, but then, yeah, you’ve got all the other admin stuff to consider as well, like, “Where is this project up to? Have I been paid? Is there proposals that need to go out?” Yeah, there is so much to do. You might say admin is sucking the life out of you.
So you know what you’re always thinking, like, “Oh, damn, I’ve got to make time for that. I’ve got to make time to do my accounts. I’ve got to make time to send an invoice. I’ve got to make time to chase that stupid debt. I’ve got to make time to communicate with my customers that we’re still doing the work. I just haven’t been able to communicate with you because I’m doing the work.” Vicious cycle.
So the next time you do anything, and… Okay, anything’s pretty broad, isn’t it? The next time you do something mundane, that you should not be doing, because you are the visionary, you are the business owner, you’re the CEO, and you should be up in your glory position and just freaking loving life, and kicking back, and these little mundane tasks should not be a chore for you. So, the next time that you start to do some admin, mundane tasks, what I want you to do is open up a Trello board and start categorising what you’re doing.
First thing’s first, let’s open up Trello. I mean, you can use anything you want. You can use a piece of paper. I like Trello. Categorize what you’re doing, so right now, you might be communicating to your clients. Have a think about what type of communication you’re doing. Are you doing inbound communication, someone’s just started? Are you doing outbound communication, someone’s just finished? Are you doing follow-up communication? Like, where in that cycle of your product, where in that cycle of your product does this communication belong, okay? Then, like A, put this in Trello, so you go, “Communication to Clients,” and just call it that.
We use Teamwork, so as you are in there, maybe communicating and writing to a customer, what I want you to do is, at the same time, finish that email, and then take it and put it into Teamwork, into just a template that is just for business management, let’s say. You can also start building Google Docs, because we also have that set up. We have everything inside Teamwork. Anyone could basically jump in and run the business, but we also are backing that up with Google Docs, so that every… Because if Teamwork dies, then what? I don’t want to lose all my processes. We are in the middle of writing up all our processes inside Google Docs, so literally, you know, stage one, have we been paid? Well, stage zero, did we send the invoice? Stage zero zero, did we get a signature? Stage zero zero zero, did we get a proposal out? Did we have a sales call with a person? Like, I mean, there’s just five steps of a 40-step process that we possibly have here.
All right, so let me repeat that. Step one, get into Trello and just categorize the task that you were doing, because what I want you to do… what I want you to end up with at the end of the month is a whole bunch of tasks that you’ve been spending your time with, and then you can categorize them into one sole operator, one junior lady boss, you might say, and then she can just start doing this, this, and this, and then that’s an entire role. “Hey, by the way, here’s all those emails that I want you to send on behalf of me, and I wrote them myself, and you can go in here and go and get them, okay?”
Okay, step two, I want you to make sure that you are recording all the little bits of communication that you send out to your clients. I want to make sure that you’re recording them inside Teamwork, so send them via email, and then copy them out, and paste them into Teamwork. That way, you can start building those processes that anybody could literally jump in and start fulfilling.
A quick tip, done is better than perfect. It’d be much easier to run a business if everything was just 90% done rather than zero, because then your junior lady boss might go, “Oh, Steph, we need to send a debt collection email to someone,” and you’re like, “No worries. Here’s half a message, and you can finish it off, and then you can save it inside Teamwork or update it inside Google Docs, yeah?” But, you know, even being 50% through this process, just like even having 5% of the communication that you send out to your customers all organized, so that someone can just copy and paste it, because seriously, you should be doing the same thing day in, day out.
Like, I talk about the cheeseburger factory. I want to change this to taco factory, because obviously, I’m not a cheeseburger fan. I’m a taco factory person, but anyway, I always talk about cheeseburgers, and the fact that you go to McDonald’s, and you order a cheeseburger, and the cheeseburger comes out, and it’s exactly the same thing as every other cheeseburger that’s coming out. That’s how your business should be running. And, if you are running a business like that, it’s going to be super easy to process the hell out of it. Then you’re going to get really quick. Then you’re going to get really profitable. Then you’re going to be able to have stuff, and the story goes on.
So practice makes perfect, but if you just get started, you’re more likely to finish, and before you know it, you’ll have documentation. Oh my god, you’re a real business. All right, well, I hope that this episode was enough to get you to start tracking your time a little bit better, and categorizing it, yeah? Now again, I use Trello because it’s just so easy to see, but you know, you can drop things around, but I don’t care how you do it. Just start categorizing your day. “What did I do today? I spent some time in email marketing,” or, “I spent some time looking at some server,” or, “I spent some time painting my nails,” whatever.
Whatever is work for you, I just want you to categorize your day, and I want you to start taking note of the notes that you are writing, because nine times out of 10, they’re going to be the same damn thing every single month, and you want to get nice and quick, yeah? You want to get nice and profitable, and when you do the same damn thing every day, that certainly speeds up that profit margin. All right, guys. Over and out. Until next time. Ciao.