Almost Anything Can Be Systemized!

Almost anything in your coaching business can be systemized, leaving you more time to spend engaging with your clients and building relationships with members of your community. 

In this episode we deep-dive into the top areas that all coaches should focus on systemizing first so that they don't wind up in rabbit-holes of distraction. Remember, the most important thing in a coaching business is the relationships and having engaged connection with your clients, and potential future clients as well.

We shared in the episode several technology solutions that we like the best in our business. We are sharing those details with you below as promised, and in several cases because we like the companies so much we've decided to partner with them as affiliates so we do receive a very small compensation if you use these links. If you prefer to Google it separately, go for it! 

The scheduler we recommend is Acuity Scheduling. We've tested the top scheduling tools out there and Acuity continues to win every time for a new coach starting out. As you grow a sales team and beyond you may choose a more complex solution such as ScheduleOnce, but for the cost, we didn't find that to be the best solution. You can get more details about Acuity Scheduling right here.

The all-in-one solution we mentioned (and where this very blog is hosted!) is using a tool called Kajabi. We LOVE Kajabi because it's a great all-in-one solution compared to others on the market, the learning curve isn't too steep, and it covers so many features that a coach needs in one tool. We love it enough to be a Kajabi Partner, which means we're pleased to be able to give you a 28-Day Trial rather than Kajabi's standard 14-day trial if you want to try it out.

Just a few of the things we use Kajabi for:

• Website
• Blog
• Landing Pages
• Offer Checkout Pages (integrated with Stripe or PayPal)
• Hosting our courses and membership videos
• Customer history record keeping
• Email marketing
• Event management (registrations and countdown communications)

It does so dang much and we've compared this to ClickFunnels and Kartra in particular, and frankly the learning curve and the "techiness" requirements for those solutions make us come back to Kajabi every dang time.

We also mentioned MailChimp which is a cost-effective way to get started with email, but we don't recommend sticking with it because it's so inexpensive that spammers tend to use that tool and it can affect the deliverability of your emails when you're sending emails from the same servers (i.e. whether people even get your emails!)

The free scheduling tool we mentioned is at business.facebook.com/creatorstudio - you may need a Facebook Business account for this, but it's free and straight-forward to configure. This is how we schedule posts to Instagram and IGTV in addition to pre-scheduling posts for Facebook Business Pages.

Phew, there's a lot of nerdiness in the few minutes of this show, but we wanted to dish! 

TextExpander is the software that I use on my Mac, and there are Windows equivalents, just Google for a text expanding software and you'll find what you are looking for. :)

So there you have it, some of our favorite tools for automating early in your coaching biz:

• Acuity Scheduling
• Kajabi (with 28 day trial)
• Facebook Creator Studio

Remember, if you prefer to listen to this week's episode you can always give a listen at Apple Podcasts at thecrushmethodshow.com

Hope you found this week's vlog helpful, and we'll see you again next week on The CRUSH Method Show!

Almost Anything Can Be Systemized In A Coaching Business!

Transcript of Vlog - July 10, 2020

Are you worried about getting caught on a hamster wheel of all the things that there are to do in your coaching business and maybe fall behind in the administration or the followup and the follow through that's so important to your coaching biz. This is the episode for you. We can actually help you with a lot of that automation. You need to focus on to help make the best use of your time as a solo coach,

running their coaching business. Exactly. So we have a few things that, you know, automation is really tricky. You can get stuck in an automation hamster wheel, where you're just automating, automating, automating things, even things that don't need to be done. Exactly. So we've put together a list of some of the top things that you want to make sure that you are automating.

If you are a coach and you want to make the best use of your time during the workday, let's go. Okay. Sounds good. So let's, uh, let's pop up the little list here. There we go. And so we really recommend that you automate this first and that is your calendar and booking your appointments. Now, why is that?

Why automate that first? Well, because coaching is an appointment heavy kind of a business you've got to talk to people, or that usually means scheduling appointments. Exactly. You're going to be talking to people to get to know them and like them and trust them and vice versa. You're going to be talking to people in sales consults on a regular basis. And then of course,

let's not forget about your actual coaching appointments, so this can take a lot of time. And that means it's a good candidate to automate. And since it's such the lifeblood of your coaching, business sales, coaching discussions, et cetera, getting this part automated, frees up a lot more of your time. Exactly. And I'm a bit of a nerd.

So I've tried all the different kinds of scheduling softwares out there. We really recommend Acuity for most coaches that are starting out. Now, if you don't want to use Acuity, you can get started with Calendly, which is free, but the features in Acuity are very feature rich, including the reporting feature, which I really love for coaching, because then you can track your hours.

Well, absolutely. And Acuity also connects with a lot of other tools and systems like Google Calendars and other various systems and works back and forth, very seamlessly, making it very easy to even further automate that process. Exactly. We do recommend it and we will include the links to that in our detailed show notes on amandakaufman.net/blog. But even if you use Schedule Once or a Calendly or 10 to Eight or any of those other tools,

the point is, is that you want to make sure that you've got a really fluid process for not only making the appointments, but also automating the followup and the reminders. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's another reason we really love Acuity is because you can customize that without it being too techie and too overwhelming. So assuming you've had your calendar and your booking tool all set up,

then the next thing that we would automate is your email list for daily communication with potential prospects. Very next thing. Why this one next? Why is this number two then? Well, this is definitely number two because when it comes to a virtual coaching business, email is still King. I know that there's a lot of like buzz out there about email,

not having the same open rate that it used to. That's true, but it's still the most intimate form of communication and really, really powerful for a coach consultant. So we recommend that you have an email marketing strategy and you will want this because you want to be GDPR compliant. You want to manage the opt-ins. You want to give people the ability to GDPR.

Uh, I honestly, I can't remember what is it called? It's a privacy regulation in Europe, particularly. Yeah, it's applicable to the EU, but there's also CAN-SPAM and spam regulations and laws. So you really want to make sure that people can unsubscribe from your marketing really, really easily. Um, and that you're, you're managing all of that.

So to Amanda's point, absolutely. It's still one of your key points of contact from the people who are going to be working with on your mailing list and otherwise, but it's also a very easy one to automate. That's another reason it's number two as well. Exactly. Now tools for this. I started out with MailChimp and it is very inexpensive. You can get started with MailChimp for like $15 a month,

but I graduated very quickly out of MailChimp and into Kajabi, which is the main tool that we recommend for coaches because it not only has your email automation, but it also has your landing pages, your offers, your checkout pages, your website, all in one place kind of solution. It's lot more than just email list automation. It's very comprehensive and their email tool is decent.

Now, if you don't want to go with Kajabi, if you already have say ClickFunnels or Lead Pages or something like that, then the email tool that we really like is Active Campaign. So I'll make sure I include all of those details. Again, the detailed show notes available amandakaufman.net/blog. So once you have your email lists all fired up,

there's more number three. And that is your regular batching of your content for blogs, your social media and podcasts like this. Yes, exactly. This is part of a series of the videos. We're actually shooting all of these in an afternoon, but it's going to be dripped over the course of weeks, even months in our business. So this is a real time meta example of exactly how we recommend doing that.

And this is number three, because this is a great way, especially if you're kind of on this journey on your own, that you could get dressed up one time, shoot several effects. You'll see us in these clothes and the next one too. And then you can get all of these done in an afternoon and get it ready to move without dropping time going in and out of context over days and weeks,

you can just do it once it's done. And it's out on the way. Exactly. Now I started blogging with WordPress and that's a fine place to start. Um, but then I moved it over to again, Kajabi. So I really love using Kajabi for our hosting, our blogs we're present on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, primarily, maybe Pinterest in the future.

And we tend to schedule natively in those tools. So if you use something like a Hootsuite or a meet Edgar or something like that, those scheduling tools, it can be a convenient way to organize, but the big downside, the big, but is that the reach of those posts is usually going to be suppressive socially in the social platforms. Usually now have their own tool for scheduling.

And of course they give preference to their tool first. So using their native tool often helps with reach exactly now quick little pro tip. If you go to creator studio.facebook.com or excuse me, facebook.com/creatorstudio, I'll make sure they have the proper link in the notes for this episode. It will allow you to schedule on both Facebook on any and all of the public pages that you have and Instagram yes.

And including IGTV. So you can, you can use that as a scheduler and you won't have the reach problems. And then finally with podcasting, we've used Libsyn for years. So Libsyn is a very popular podcasting platform that many of the big influencers use and other resources and tools out there for it too. Yup. Yup. Exactly. Anchor right now is catching a lot of catching,

a lot of momentum in the podcasting land, whatever tools you use. The point is we want to systemize that we don't want to sporadically be like, Oh, you know, Hey, if inspiration strikes and you want to write a blog power to ya. Absolutely. But when you're in this for the long haul, you need to have a system and a rhythm for how you're doing this batching process in a patching process.

So you can do it, um, very, uh, regularly and efficiently. And by the way, we teach this in great detail in our program, the The Coaching Biz Accelerator Program, we have specific methods that we teach for all of this. So you can always just reach out to us and find out more about the accelerator. All right, last,

last one on this number four is any communication. You can see yourself sending more than 10 times. So that doesn't mean you've sent it 10 times. That means, you know, you just wrote something to, gosh, I bet I'm going to send that to a lot of people. Like over 10 times, that's a good candidate for this last automation step.

Exactly. Now what I use is I use a tool called Help Scout that is basically interfaced with our G suite email. And it allows me to save replies, which is very, very handy. You know, it means that I can just automate or, you know, hybrid automate, basically having a manual aspect to it, but basically automated. It's like,

Oh, well, you know, I just sent a response. It would be very applicable in this case last week. Let me go get it exactly in it. And you can even have it so that it will pre-populate with the customers there and all that kind of stuff. Now, um, that does cost money. And so when you're first starting out of the tools that I invested in early on that I'm like,

Oh my gosh, it was so worth. It is called a text expander. I love that. Oh my gosh, I love it. So the way a text expander works is you put just a few key letters together. You know, they're called snippets and they're not words that you would normally type character combination. It's a character combination. Exactly. So when you,

when you type in that character combination, then the text expander recognizes, Oh, she put the code in and then boom, it's going to have all of the be more than even just a single sentence. You could literally have paragraphs functionally and entire communication just by a couple of key, quick keystrokes. Exactly. Like we have multiple coaching programs, right?

We have The Coaching Biz Builder, we have The Coaching Biz Accelerator Program and we have Let's Launch Your Coaching Biz. Those are all long titles. And usually when we're talking to people, we have to use the full title. So they know what we're talking about. Keep it clear, but I have snippets for each one of those. So it cuts down the number of keystrokes that I need to make.

There's the whole thing. And there's the whole thing. And it literally saves time. Like it's, it's such a tiny thing, but it saves so much time over time. Oh yeah. Yeah. So that's a text expander. And so when you are planning your systemization one big word to the wise, don't spend more time automating than you spend getting out there prospecting and having conversations because it really can become a bit of a rabbit hole,

but to put you on the right foot forward, we're going to encourage you to grab like a note pad, put it next to your computer and just jot down what you think might be some of the more common communications that you're going to be writing in your business and go ahead and start crafting your best version of those. And you'll be well on your way to systemizing your business.

There you go. Keep the main thing, the main thing, and use these little tools to help you on your way. Exactly. We'll see you later. Bye guys. Hey Amanda, here. Be sure to tune in for our next The CRUSH Method Show by following us on www.amandakaufman.net/blog, or you can look up The CRUSH Method at the YouTube at the Facebook's of the Instagram and even on Twitter, we'll see you next time.