Episode 78: A Review of our Favorite Online Business Planning Tools 1

Introduction: Welcome to The Path to Profit Podcast with your hosts Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.

Minette Riordan: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 78 of The Path to Profit Podcast. I’m Dr. Minette Riordan along with my amazing, awesome, and pernicious husband Brad Dobson. If you listen to episode number 77, we were talking about our fun little notepad that has a word of the day on it. We both absolutely love words, and Brad was complaining that his word was pernicious, which made sense because we were grappling over the topic.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, we had a little bit of a spat.

Minette Riordan: We did, a total moment of like-

Brad Dobson: And it was really stupid too because-

Minette Riordan: It was totally stupid.

Brad Dobson: -December was our goal-setting month, January is our business-planning month, and they tie together perfectly, and we had thought that out ahead of time, so.

Minette Riordan: And we made a big mess of it this morning.

Brad Dobson: But what we want to talk about-

Minette Riordan: We’re back on the same pernicious page together, right?

Brad Dobson: That’s right. We want to talk about our favorite online business planning tools, which are in fact also really effective for goal setting and planning as well.

Minette Riordan: And to start us off, I wanted to share an awesome quote by one of my favorites, Jim Rohn, and Jim said that discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment, and as you know if you’ve been following our podcast, and if you don’t know because you’re brand new here, well, welcome, we’re delighted to have you, and our target audience is creative entrepreneurs because we are creatives ourselves, and discipline is not necessarily a word that creatives apply to ourselves, yet at the same time we’re actually very disciplined when it comes to our craft most of the time. And when we can turn a little of that discipline towards our business, we can make progress faster and we can do that with automation and technology. Yay.

Brad Dobson: You bet. Systems, things like that.

Minette Riordan: Brad is so excited. Brad loves it when we talk about systems because even though he’s super creative, he’s also super geeky, techy, and awesome at systems.

Brad Dobson: You know what? I hate it when we repeat things that are inefficient. It kind of drives me nuts. That’s my little thing, and it comes out of a lot of time writing software and a background in that, and so I’m always quick to find a system or a piece of software or some automation as soon as we have to do something more than once. I want it repeatable. So we’re going to talk about some of our favorite tools and techniques that we use to help us plan our business stuff and execute those plans and reach our goals.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. I’m going to say something, but I’m not going to say it. So why we use technology, because even though I am a creative, I love pens and markers and colorful crayons, and in episode 77 we talked about our organic business planning process is using big sheets of paper, markers, crayons, big at-a-glance calendars that are dateless that we can write all over. In every square inch of my craft room/office I’ve got buckets of pens and crayons and markers all around me, but what Brad has helped me to discover and actually we both love technology, so I will claim that I adore technology and it actually nurtures my creativity in some interesting ways, and I’ll share about that more, but the ways that we use technology to help us in our business planning and goal achievement are very specific.
It helps us to deliver our great content in a very timely manner. It helps us to run successful promotions that make us money. It helps us stay connected to our ever-growing and thriving community of other creative entrepreneurs. It helps us communicate with our team. Hilariously, our offices are in the same house and we use Slack, which we’ll tell you about in a little bit, to communicate office to office. You think we’d get up off our butts and walk into the other room, but then it’s actually interruptive, right? And so what we’ve learned is that communicating through Slack doesn’t mean I have to respond immediately to a question or vice versa, but that the question is asked and will get addressed in a timely fashion. And technology allows us to do all of these things on time, on budget, make a profit, and still have fun because fun is important.

Brad Dobson: It sure is.

Minette Riordan: It’s on our core values list.

Brad Dobson: And that’s important.

Minette Riordan: So, that’s a little bit about why we use technology. I think it’s automation and organization are the two keywords that we could really address here with all of the different tech tools that we use, and we use lots more than these, but we came up with kind of a core selection of the ones that we seem to use every day and most effectively.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and I think I want to add to that in terms of using technology, most of the things that we’re going to talk about today you could easily do with a notepad and your traditional calendar planner handheld thing, and that would be fine if it’s just you on your own and you’re effective doing it that way and you have a system and you can repeat it efficiently. That’s great.
But where things break down is when you have more than one person and you need to communicate those ideas and have them consistent amongst multiple people, and you need to be able to delegate and have things done efficiently. All the other people in your office, they might have watched you draw on all the big pieces of paper during the planning session, but that’s not captured in something that’s shared that they can see all the time. There may be nuance, they don’t have the ability to comment on it, and so on and so forth. So promoting those nice creative things into digital versions that can be shared and commented on and communicated about is pretty effective, and so we do that for things like our editorial calendar and so on and so forth.
So I think one thing that would be nice to start with from a coaching perspective is a technology that we adopted I guess just last year or this last year with the addition of an iPad Pro to Minette’s coaching tool set, and we found a piece of software called Notability, an app called Notability, that I feel like has really upped our game in terms of being able to engage coaching clients, and maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Minette Riordan: I can while I’m working on my sketch notes for the show over here.

Brad Dobson: Maybe we should be doing those in Notability.

Minette Riordan: Should be. I’m learning. I’m practicing how to draw my sketch notes on the iPad, and I can totally do that. My skills with the Apple Pencil aren’t quite where I want them to be yet, but it’s one of those goals for 2018 is to get my sketch notes going on the iPad, but I am creative, right? I love the combination of technology and still being able to connect with paper and pen as well, but what I noticed as a coach is that I was not doing a great job of keeping track of my client notes or having them in a format that I could easily share them with my clients following the sessions, and so I needed something that would allow me to take handwritten notes, because that’s the way I prefer to take notes. I’m very kinesthetic. I tend to doodle a lot while I’m listening to my clients, draw out plans and ideas and maps for them as well as we’re working together.

Brad Dobson: Not keyboard.

Minette Riordan: And the keyboard … So I use Zoom. That’s an app we didn’t even put or a technology that we’re using.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: That we didn’t even add to our list to talk to you about, but Zoom is the tool that we’re using to record our podcast. We use it to record our client sessions, and if I’m typing on a keyboard while talking to my clients, it’s incredibly distracting. The noise is distracting, the action is distracting, and so I needed to be able to be 100% focused on my clients, whether it’s on the phone or visually on Zoom, and I needed to be able to easily keep track of all those notes. I was finding myself getting buried in paper and in notebooks. I’d have like one spiral notebook and every week I’d be keeping all my client notes, and then I’m flipping back trying to find the notes. It was a mess.
I was a mess, and I needed a better system, and I wanted a system that didn’t require paper, and I wanted a system where I could take those notes and share notes with my clients. So with Notability, using my awesome Apple Pencil, I can take handwritten notes, I can doodle on them, I can convert them immediately to a PDF, share them on a Google Drive with my clients, or email them directly to my clients as well.

Brad Dobson: And you can do the share directly from the app, right?

Minette Riordan: You can share it all directly from the app. It actually does the whole conversion is automatic to the PDF process, and it has a great organizational system for files inside of it so that every one of my clients has their own folder. I use it for live events now as well when I travel to live events. We mentioned we were just recently at the Thrive Academy Transformational Leaders retreat, which was an amazing weekend, and I took a lot of notes and I had a lot of followups to do. Well, this morning it was so easy. I was not digging in my purse for business cards. In the app you can actually take photos. I took photos of all the handouts and put them right in the notes.

Brad Dobson: And we record audio, too.

Minette Riordan: And you can record the audio as well, so there were a couple of lecture segments that I really wanted to capture the content, so I took audio as well. It’s all time-date specific, but it makes it so easy to keep this [creamsy 00:10:43] creative brain of mine organized and on track, and I was able to sit down and do all my followups. It makes it so easy before a coaching call, 15 minutes before a call, to go and review the notes. I know exactly where they are. I’m not scrambling looking for buried notes. Notability works on your smartphone or on an iPad. On the iPad Pro, what I love about it is the connection to the iPad Pencil, but it’s a great tool. It’s also highly recommended in doodling and sketch note programs as well is a great tool for capturing sketch notes.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and we actually took the time to-

Minette Riordan: I reviewed them all.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, to review a bunch of different things, and we knew ahead of time the organizational capability and the sharing capability were crucial to this. From my systems guy standpoint, it was a real struggle for Minette, I could see it, because she tends to have a lot of paper out and has her own magic file system,-

Minette Riordan: Piles.

Brad Dobson: -in which things just appear magically, but that really starts to-

Minette Riordan: It eats up that transition time, right? [crosstalk 00:11:53] talked about before.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and it starts to break down really quickly as soon as you get more coaching clients. In fact-

Minette Riordan: You could do the same thing if you like the keyboard model and you’re speaking on the phone and you’re good at typing while you’re taking notes or you take notes after a client session and like to transfer them into a file. One of our other favorite things because it’s so easy to share with clients is using Google Docs, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Minette Riordan: It’s another great way to collect client notes and to share them.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and you have at least the ability to put stuff in folders that are client specific because that’s critical, too. You don’t want your client information mixed over different clients. So Notability in conjunction with the iPad Pro was a big win. Definitely-

Minette Riordan: It was totally worth the investment to get the big one.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I would definitely suggest it for any of that are … that like to write physically with a pencil or pen during your coaching sessions. I know not everybody is that way, and actually just talking about this makes me think potentially there are some other uses we could put this to, so.

Minette Riordan: You could talk about the next one.

Brad Dobson: Moving on, we want to talk about how we’re using automation tools for our social media posts. When we first got under way, we were just manually posting to Facebook, manually tweeting, that type of stuff when we had new blog posts or new content that we wanted to share. We upgraded from that to Hootsuite, which is a fantastic tool. It has a calendar view where you can pre-schedule things in Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube even, Facebook, and Instagram. The Instagram has a manual step in it.
And then at the suggestion of another coach, we moved onto MeetEdgar. The neat thing about MeetEdgar is you can put older posts in queues that will be randomly pulled from, so it allows you to keep your content in front of people, not boosting posts but rather just continually posting at different times, and there’s all sorts of really neat things that you can do to have different types of information that you post at different times on different channels. So MeetEdgar super effective. I would definitely suggest that. It’s a little bit more than Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a great way to start.
Other people use a system called Buffer, which I don’t really know anything about, but we’ve been really happy with MeetEdgar. Their client care, their blogging is fantastic, super helpful as a user of their tool, and I think it’ll be part of our work to then take MeetEdgar to the next level. I think we’re going to have a queue of quotes that we have come up on our Facebook feed. There’s just a lot of things that we can do to keep our older content more current and continuing to appear in front of people without it overloading people, because as you know, or as at least some of you know, Facebook, it’s harder and harder to get your content seen without paying for it. So unless you’re continuing to post like MeetEdgar does, your posts might only get seen by a few people and then flow off of their feed. So, that’s what we’re using for social media automation. We would be paying a ton of money or wasting a lot of time without using that tool, so that’s well worth any investment.
Move on to our contact system for email management and campaigns and pages. We use ONTRAPORT. We are happy ONTRAPORTers. It’s a great tool. They’re based here in Santa Barbara. Super nice people. Super nice team. Incredible community, and their tool does most of the things that you want. We see a lot of people who invest in combinations of tools, for instance Infusionsoft plus lead pages, plus this, plus that for doing all of their-

Minette Riordan: Which also work great, right?

Brad Dobson: Oh, definitely.

Minette Riordan: If that’s your system. We’re not here to knock any of the other great systems out there, just to tell you why we’re kind of raving fans of ONTRAPORT.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. A lot of people will start with something like MailChimp and just do a basic email list, and then they’ll add lead pages or something like that. With a tool like ONTRAPORT, you can get all of those things integrated from the start. ONTRAPORT also allows us to create campaigns that include sequencing of emails, different pages. They give us all of the statistics, and we’re able to sell things out of those campaigns. So once you reach the level where you’re starting to sell things online instead of just being someone who’s posting to social media and maybe you just have one page and a website and your email list, once you start doing a little bit more complex things, you need to start looking at a CRM type of system like ONTRAPORT or other ones.
ONTRAPORT saves us just so much time, and in fact I look at it a different way. It’s not that it saves us time so much as it allows us to do so much more than we could if we didn’t have this type of automation. We spend time creating the automation in the tool, but it just allows us to run large campaigns that two people wouldn’t normally be able to do. I think that’s what these tools are for. It’s to make you able to do a lot more than you think you can.

Minette Riordan: Which really brings us right back around to some of the other online technology we’re using to stay connected with our team, right? We have a team of five people now, sometimes six when our son is around helping out, and making sure that we are consistently and clearly communicating tasks and those tasks are being accomplished in a timely manner, and often times that’s tasks for each other as well as for our team members, and so that clarity around best practices for staying in touch is kind of what led us to this whole question I guess for the right tools for us, and so Brad is going to talk about a few of the tools.
I want to talk for a second about one of our, actually two of our favorites. So we are pretty hooked up with anything Google at this point.

Brad Dobson: Definitely.

Minette Riordan: I would consider my Google Calendar to be I can’t live without it. In fact, I live by my calendar. I’m getting much, much better at blocking time in my calendar for me first for the things, the tasks that need to get done, but along with Google Calendar we use the whole suite of Google Drive products. We have shared Google Drives with our entire team where we’re sharing things back and forth, like one of our team members just created some really beautiful graphics, quote graphics for our Path to Profit Academy Instagram page specifically, and we’ll be rolling those out through MeetEdgar and other tools, and what I’ve noticed is how easy it was for her to go create those in her Canva account, another one we can talk about. We could go like just go really deep in the tech thing, so maybe we’ll do a couple of episodes on tech, but we’ve used Google Sheets to create our lead magnets, so that it’s easy for Brad and I both or-

Brad Dobson: Google-

Minette Riordan: Google Slides.

Brad Dobson: Slides, yes.

Minette Riordan: To create our lead magnets so that Brad and I can easily share them and both edit them. We use Google Docs for almost everything for sharing documents back and forth, course content. We use a Google Sheets it’s called, right?

Brad Dobson: Yep.

Minette Riordan: Not spreadsheet but Google Sheets for our editorial calendar that is shared with our whole team. So everything that everyone needs to see is all in one easily accessible place, so I’m a huge fan of everything Google from a business perspective.
And then the other communication tool that we use that we’re becoming more and more addicted to I think is Slack, and we’re actually going to have an amazing guy named Duff Gardener on the show early next year to talk about how to use Slack to deliver course content, but we use it to stay connected to our team and to each other.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and it’s nicely integrated with Google as well. Yeah, we can go pretty deep on the Google products that we’re using and kind of why we went that direction. A lot of it was because I was stubborn about it. It’s awfully easy to jump into Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word and so on and so forth, and in fact Google will read all of those formats and produce them, but the ability to be anywhere in the world, log onto your Google Drive, and for instance edit our editorial calendar. All I have to do is put in one column that my VA needs to do this one item and she’s checking it regularly or gets a notification and boom, that’s her next task for our editorial or promotional.
That ability means, maybe I don’t have my computer with me, maybe I have to do it from my phone, but I can do all of that with the Google suite of products really easily, and the sharing is all built in. We can hook all of them together. Yeah, like Minette said, the larger content we can stick in a Google Doc to share editorials just line by line type of items. Google Sheets was fantastic. I think Minette with good intent wanted to design stuff in Adobe InDesign, which we use for-

Minette Riordan: And I still do.

Brad Dobson: -nice layout things because it can do things that other things cannot do, but our ability to rapidly prototype things and for me to, for instance, update spelling or update a word, if it’s in InDesign then I’ve got to go to a computer that has InDesign, learn InDesign, which takes a long time and so no and so forth, whereas if it’s in a shared Google presentation I can just jump in there and do it immediately. So that’s pretty effective, and then I can create a PDF out of that or whatever it may be.
So those things allow us to share documents. Slack allows us to chat between each other. You can send Google documents through Slack or the links to them and get notifications either on the phone or on your desktop. It’s a group chat or one-to-one chat. So more effective than something like Facebook Messenger I think. You don’t have to have Facebook open all of the time. Slack can run as a separate app, and has a lot of nice features. Well worth your time investigating if you’re working with a team.
One thing that I had underway last year was actual more project tracking type of stuff. We were using JIRA from Atlassian. That’s a little bit of a stretch for folks that don’t have a software background like me. I was familiar with it. I really like it.

Minette Riordan: It was a stretch.

Brad Dobson: But it was an ability to-

Minette Riordan: A good stretch, but a stretch.

Brad Dobson: Right, to plan a week or two worth of work, which actually helps with our, the internal cadence for our company and we kind of got off track with that.
A lot of people also use a system called Trello to communicate with teams. It allows you to sort of do group chat but also dump different documents in there and have descriptions of things and so on and so forth, so a lot of people using that for just sort of team organization. Definitely one to look at, Trello.
So, yeah, team, it’s super important, and Minette mentioned we have different offices within our house, and it sounds silly not to just walk over and ask a question, but interruption is a big deal, and so being able to just ping someone on chat and have them respond asynchronously is effective and appropriate in a lot of cases, so that’s something you can look at. It allows us to rope in, pull in our VA who’s off in Sacramento and another coach who’s off in San Francisco and be able to real-time chat with them on lightweight matters. You’ll notice, and this is the first time after 20 minutes, that we’re going to bring up the “E” word, email. Right?

Minette Riordan: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:26:03] “E” word.

Brad Dobson: So the whole point of this stuff is to reduce email communication. I worked for a long time in a company that just was horrible about email, giant email chains and just-

Minette Riordan: Everybody is copying everybody.

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Minette Riordan: And, yeah, it’s a mess.

Brad Dobson: Tremendously ineffective. Come up with specific channels of communication that work for you that are lightweight. So I mentioned for instance our editorial calendar. I showed our VA how to set up Google to send her a notification when edits were made on that document, so she can get a little ping from Google when there’s an update to that. There wasn’t an email exchange and all of the associated crap that goes on with that back and forth and asynchronous and all of that type of stuff, and similar for Slack. We don’t need to communicate one sentence or one question type of things over email. It’s ineffective, and it will really eat up your time.

Minette Riordan: And inside of Slack is now actually integrated with Google, so my assistant yesterday updated a couple of folders in Google that we’d been working on for podcast guests, and I got a little ping in Slack saying that these files had been updated so I could go see what she was up to. So learning these little notifications to remind me to go look doesn’t mean I have to go look right now. My challenge personally with email is that I want to go read them. If I don’t read them right away, I tend to forget about them or sometimes even if I read them right away they get lost in an email chain, I fail to respond in a timely fashion. So it’s looking at eliminating inbox clutter, overwhelm, as well as increasing the responsiveness that we have with clients. And one of my favorite things …
So I want to just pause for a moment and say I am married to a techy, and so Brad has made some of the integrations of these things really seamless, and I know not everyone listening has an awesome Brad like I do. In fact, all of our clients all wish that they had a Brad. They say that all the time, so I’m very lucky to have a Brad. But none of these things are complicated. I could have set up Slack by myself. It’s really, really simple. I can do all the Google stuff myself, right?
So are there little bells and whistles that are geeky things that I might not even know about if I didn’t have a techy on my side? Probably not, but I love the opportunity and the ability to be able to do all of these things on my time. Before Brad joined the business, I did all the Hootsuite stuff myself or my VA did all of that. So these tools are easy to use. Even ONTRAPORT when you get inside the back end, have the system set up, it’s really easy to use. They’ve made so many of these things, WordPress as well, drag and drop. So don’t be intimated by technology. We have a lot of women in our community who are really afraid of the technology, and you have to, again, just like we talked about with the goal setting last time, make time to play with this stuff. Don’t put time pressure on yourself to figure it out now, but carve out some time in your calendar to play with this stuff.

Brad Dobson: And feel free to ping me on Facebook in one of our groups. I’ll try and chime in with an answer.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, absolutely.

Brad Dobson: I’m not going to fix your computer for you. Somebody else can do that, but-

Minette Riordan: No, but in our Mentors, Makers, and Mavericks Facebook group would be a great place for them to chime in and ask some of those questions. But one of the things that I love about Slack, it integrates with ONTRAPORT in a really fun way where every time-

Brad Dobson: Well, I integrated it with ONTRAPORT.

Minette Riordan: Well, Brad, using another plugin called Zapier, he has it set up so every time we make an online sale we get this fun little “ka-ching”. So no matter where we are, like one day, I think it was the day after Thanksgiving, we were up in Solvang, California having lunch with our family just touring around this cute little Danish town for the day and it’s like “ka-ching”, “ka-ching”, “ka-ching”, and here we are playing and cash is flowing in, and it’s a great reminder then to, “Oh, do we actually have all the back end pieces of that set up? Are we ready to be delivering on all these things that we’re selling?” So everything integrates really beautifully.

Brad Dobson: Definitely. Definitely. We’re going to jump onto the last one, although actually before we do that just a huge shout-out to Canva. C-A-N-V-A.com, Canva.com. We’re not going to talk about it too much or a lot here, but-

Minette Riordan: Life changing.

Brad Dobson: Any type of web graphic for your social media posts, for your blog posts, for your emails, get yourself an account on Canva and do it there. It’s just so easy, and, yeah. It’s great.
So finally we want to talk about what we do for financial stuff, and we use QuickBooks Online. On and off we’ve always used some version of QuickBooks. I haven’t always been a fan, but we’re at the point where we have a bookkeeper that helps us out.

Minette Riordan: We’ve always had a bookkeeper for QuickBooks. You don’t have to do it by yourself.

Brad Dobson: And it’s what all the bookkeepers use. She would have used FreshBooks as well, which is a different option that you have. These are online-

Minette Riordan: And it’s designed for creatives. I just want to add that about the FreshBooks piece. It’s designed by a creative for creatives to be super, super simple without all of the accounting bells and whistles that QuickBooks offers that most of us really don’t need.

Brad Dobson: Right, and so it depends on whether you’re doing your own books. We don’t do our own books because that’s not our zone of genius. It’s not even close to our zone of genius.

Minette Riordan: Definitely not our zone of genius.

Brad Dobson: You do need to be comfortable. If you’re not comfortable putting your private information online, you’re not going to use a tool like this. We’re comfortable with that, and these tools are super effective for this main reason in my mind, which is that I can communicate with a quick email to my bookkeeper, “Hey, let’s close out this month and here are the statements,” and I can get to January or February and say, “How are we looking for taxes?” and my bookkeeper can say, “Yeah, it’s all ready to take to the tax person.” It’s a simple, quick conversation. I don’t want to be in a place in the winter time or coming into the spring time where I’m looking at a month’s worth of work to figure out my books for tax time. That’s just not an effective way to do business. Maybe you’re the person that does all your stuff on your own and you’re really confident with it. That’s not me, so anyways. A couple of fantastic tools there, QuickBooks Online from Intuit or FreshBooks from I think it’s FreshBooks Accounting, I can’t remember. Super effective ways to work your way through that.
If you’re just starting out and you haven’t got your business books separate from your personal books, which we insist we really want you to do, but if you’re that person take a look at something like Mint, Mint.com.

Minette Riordan: Oh, yeah. That’s a great one. I forget about Mint.

Brad Dobson: Which is a really effective way to look at your expenses in different ways and track them all. So I know we just dumped a lot of stuff on you,-

Minette Riordan: Yeah, we did.

Brad Dobson: -but there’s definitely some favorites in there. Notability on the iPad, MeetEdgar, ONTRAPORT, Slack, almost anything that Google has online, and QuickBooks are all … You could do … I just think that with that suite of tools, yes, there’s monthly fees, but gosh, they allow us to do-

Minette Riordan: Not for Google, there’s not.

Brad Dobson: No, but gosh they allow us to do so much with those tools, so.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, and we just cannot emphasize enough that the reason why we’re even having this conversation on the second of January 2018 is because the fastest way to make a profit in your business is to automate your systems and processes, and as creatives we tend to resist automation, we tend to resist processing, and planning even sometimes, but what I can tell you as a creative is that the more I’ve been able to automate the business systems, the more freedom and fun I’m having and getting to create the content, which is the fun part. Do more painting, right? All of these other things that we love to do, launch new websites, which we’re both doing in 2018. We have a whole new passion projects that we’re working on, and we’re able to have the time to do that because of the use of technology to automate our systems and processes.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and I think I would add to that if you’re not using tools like this, you’re not doing everything you can for your business to move it forward. The other thing is that if you’re a creative and you’re working with a business partner or a team, you need to take these systems on and use them so you’re not driving your team crazy.

Minette Riordan: I’m still learning that one with one of my team members.

Brad Dobson: I would be insane if we didn’t have these things in place because it’s-

Minette Riordan: Yeah, and so would our virtual assistant, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Minette Riordan: She’s actually awesome at systems, too.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, you’re just not able to have any level of organization that you need to move a lot of these puzzle pieces, move the puzzle pieces forward. I’m killing the metaphor here.

Minette Riordan: You are killing the metaphor.

Brad Dobson: Anyways.

Minette Riordan: Stop. Stop. Don’t.

Brad Dobson: I think we got everything.

Minette Riordan: I think we did. I’m trying to fit them all into this little tiny sketch note.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, we barely talked about calendar.

Minette Riordan: I know. We didn’t even get to Google Calendar and all the different ways that we use Google Calendar. We could probably have a whole show just on Google Calendar.

Brad Dobson: Exactly.

Minette Riordan: But we would probably bore out sweet creatives to death talking about technology for too much. One of the things that technology can really help you to do around automation is to automate your marketing, and so we have a fun resource we want to share with you today. You’ll find it in the show notes at PathtoProfitAcademy.com/podcasts with an S on the end, and it’s our marketing basics checklist, and in that checklist, especially if you are newer in business, we have an awesome step-by-step these are all the things that you need to automate and implement from the very beginning of your business to start to grow an online digital business. It’s just a great way to keep track of what you’ve already set up and how little you need to set up to get started. It’s not about overwhelming you and saying you need to be on every social media. It’s about showing you where to start and what strategies are going to work for you, so you can find a link to download that checklist in our show notes.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff, and hit me up in the comments of this episode or online-

Minette Riordan: Yeah, for more tech stuff. Absolutely.

Brad Dobson: -if you do have questions. I’m always happy to answer.

Minette Riordan: And in our next episode, wow, episode number 79.

Brad Dobson: Business planning.

Minette Riordan: We’re going to be talking about quarterly project planning specifically.

Brad Dobson: Oh, nice.

Minette Riordan: One of the things we learned-

Brad Dobson: We’re going to be talking to ourselves about that.

Minette Riordan: We are, because one of the things we learned this year is that you’ve got to break it down, break it down, break it down, and if you start to look at your business from a 90 day or quarterly perspective, you will be able to be more agile and to move a lot faster in your business, so we’ll see you on episode number 79.

Brad Dobson: Bye, guys. Thanks for listening.