Module eight
get organized
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Remember the colony of ants in A Bug’s Life?
Their goal each summer was to collect enough food for the grasshoppers, sort of as a way to stave them off and avoid interaction with the evil villain bugs down on their level, in the anthill. They implemented a systematic stacking of the food they collected and moved in an orderly fashion, accumulating more and more food each day of summer before the last leaf fell.
Enter Flik. The disorganized, haphazard inventor insisted he had a better idea and a better way to gather and organize the food for the grasshoppers. His enthusiasm (but lack of precision) resulted in a catastrophic loss for the ants, as all the food spilled into the river and, subsequently, angered the grasshoppers, prompting Hopper to issue a new, harsher ultimatum.
Time is going to pass regardless of whether you’re working strategically. Clients will get served (possibly in a haphazard manner), projects will be completed (maybe not always on the timeline you set out at the beginning of the project), and your little business will continue to grow (however slowly). You’ll have much greater success at growing your business, however, by implementing strategic processes that include precise, intentional organization.
There is nothing wrong with Flik’s creativity. But he was too excited to make his contribution to the team and didn’t think things through, and the result was devastating. All that effort was thrown off-track and wasted. Don’t be a Flik.
A WELL-ORGANIZED MIND
As you set about organizing all aspects of your business, organize in a way that makes sense to you. Someone else’s system may not be conducive to your family, your personality, or your schedule.
I don’t present my options as the best for you, but they’re what’s worked for me. And 99% of learning in entrepreneurship is testing out what worked for someone else and then modifying it to adapt to your own life. So, to that end, the point of this whole endeavor to organize your business is that success isn’t measured by speed or dollar amounts but by the outcome.
How does a system feel? Is it overwhelming, or freeing? Is it easy to modify or streamline to suit a variety of purposes?
The greatest blessing of organizing your business behind the scenes is how much mental capacity it frees up in your mind.
How might it feel to have all that valuable mental real estate returned to you? Without the need to keep track of so many things, you can devote your brain to focusing more intently on whatever task is at hand and get those creative juices flowing.
Here are several of my favorite systems and processes that I’ve developed within my business that you’ll likely find useful to adopt in your own:
Develop a project calendar —
This might seem like a no-brainer to some of you, but you’d be surprised how many creatives are out there managing their whole business agenda and itinerary all within their own heads! It’s madness!
I don’t trust my brain to remember anything. I use my family’s shared calendar to add Rachel Work events that represent meetings, travel, client projects, deadlines, etc. This way, my husband is aware of any impending busy days ahead, and I can also keep track of who’s booking when. It helps me to keep these details on our personal calendar, so when we travel or when the boys randomly have a teacher development day and are home from school, I can account for it by changing my workload.
Develop a project pipeline —
A project pipeline tells you, at a glance, where everyone is at in the process of working with you. Again, some people can remember and follow up with leads or know when to touch base with inquiries that haven’t paid their initial invoice yet, but I am not one of those people.
I use Honeybook to manage my new prospects from booking through project completion. I have phases that represent each stage (expressed interest, signed + booked, planning + prep, in-service, and post-project). I love Honeybook and highly recommend it, but you can totally achieve this in a Google or Excel spreadsheet and manually update clients as they move through the stages.
Craft a comprehensive onboarding process —
Despite my best efforts, I’m consistently finding reasons to go out of order with my onboarding process. Maybe the person I’m onboarding is a trade client and doesn’t need to be sent an invoice, or maybe it’s a recurring client who doesn’t need a new contract. Anytime I operate outside my normal onboarding process, I always find that I miss steps, forget to clue a client in to a change in our process, or leave opportunities for upselling on the table.
Learn from my mistakes. Outline what you’d like your standard onboarding process to be, and then stick to it. Use this process, one that most or all of your clients will go through, as a way to cover all your checkpoints and leave nothing to chance. Here are the things I’d recommend including in your onboarding process as a bare minimum:
All contact details for the client
Contract to sign
Initial (or full) invoice to pay
Send them detailed next steps, including any questionnaires or homework they need to complete
Ask them any other curiosity questions like feedback so far, where they found you, or if they were referred
Outline all standard operating procedures —
Standard operating procedures (also known as SOPs) represent a full process or workflow from start to finish, outlined in a step-by-step format. I’ve found having my SOPs outlined and handy to be exceedingly helpful on countless occasions, both so I can offload that sort of information to free up my mind and as I’ve brought new contract workers onto my team.
Since we can’t clone ourselves, we creative mamas are either left to remember everything and do it all alone or hire competent people to help us out. Defining your baseline operating procedures for everything within your business takes you one (very large) step closer to spending less time in your business and earning more for the time you do spend working.
In my opinion, a good SOP starts by stating the objective of the process. Then, it includes actionable checklists with a comprehensive overview of all tasks required to complete the process in full. You might also consider creating screenshots or tutorial videos using a tool like Loom.
To help you get started, I’ve put together a Process Template that you can duplicate for each new process you establish within your business. You can duplicate this document and reuse it for everything from internal business efforts like how to update your website or send an email newsletter to generating client-facing content like how to schedule your social media posts or what your order fulfillment looks like from purchase to delivery.
WORKING SMARTER, NOT HARDER
Isn’t it funny to think back on times when we didn’t have as much going on in our lives and laugh at how “busy” we felt life was? Before I had kids, I worked a full-time job, and just that alone made me feel like I was at my maximum capacity. Now that I have two wild kids, I’m probably doing more in a single day than I was back then in a full week, but if you’d told my 22-year-old self how much I’d be handling in my 30s, I would have laughed at you. I “knew” my capacity, and I’d hit it.
The secret to balancing our full lives and managing a greater capacity is one that all mamas know well — working smarter, not harder.
We’ve talked about working smarter in your family before, with home maintenance schedules, recurring events on your shared family calendar, or even eating the same thing for lunch each day so it’s one less thing to plan.
Now let’s see how we can apply that same concept of working smarter, not harder (a skill you creative mamas already have in spades!) to your creative business. Here are several of my favorite time-saving hacks and productivity tips that help me improve the quality or efficiency of my work without taking more time away from my family:
1 — Develop canned responses
Canned responses are scripts or templates for emails or messages that you’ve prepared in advance. You can make sure they convey the right tone and deliver all relevant information clearly and concisely. Save these scripts somewhere they’re easy to find (a note on your phone? Google Drive?) and when someone asks a question in your Instagram DMs or sends an email that you were expecting, you can quickly address their query with a well-crafted response.
I organize my canned responses into two categories:
Frequently asked questions, and
Process communications.
Frequently asked questions, as you might imagine, are common questions that I receive on all platforms, like what marketing services we offer, if we design on website platforms other than Squarespace, what our payment options look like, etc. I find that these canned responses work best if I keep my response script short and specific so that I can copy any number of relevant answers in any order to address a specific question and how it was phrased.
Process communications are the emails I’m highly likely to send throughout a routine process, in the order they’re going to be sent, like invoice reminders at the start of the month for our online marketing clients, the brand reveal email for brand identity clients, etc. These types of responses are less likely to be customized and therefore can be a little longer and more in-depth to communicate the value and voice associated with my offerings.
2 — Use a marketing calendar
Again, some will be surprised this isn’t common practice, but there are still creative mamas out there wearing themselves out by reinventing the wheel each week (or day!) as they plan out their marketing content.
Planning ahead is always better for your sanity. Start by planning your marketing content one month at a time, and then increase how far in advance you’re planning. Imagine what it would be like to take the entire summer off because you know all your content is planned, created, and scheduled to post on its own.
Here are some of my tips for developing your marketing calendar:
Come up with a system/rotation for the content you share on each platform. Don’t share the same topics too frequently — mix it up!
Share your content across multiple channels. Don’t create all unique, original content each month. I like to create a chain of repurposed content, which might look something like this: Post an email, which gets turned into a blog post, which then has multiple thumbnails to pin to Pinterest and also gets broken up into a few Instagram feed posts.
Don’t be afraid to share old or existing content. As your email list, social following, and website traffic grows, you’ll have new eyes on your content, which means only a small percentage of your audience might have already seen something you shared months ago. And even if they did, maybe they could benefit from a refresher!
3 — Create templates for all offerings
One of your biggest time savers will be to create some templates to duplicate for each new project or order to fulfill. This might look like:
A client folder on Google Drive that you duplicate for each new client, which already houses all the relevant forms for them to fill out and folders to organize their content
A design mock-up you can update with a client’s content to share with them for review (and you can also reuse this mock-up by adding it to your bank of social media posts!)
A framework or template to start from when creating a client’s purchase, even if you will customize parts of it.
It’s kind of hard for me to outline exactly what you can do, but depending on your business, there might be a lot of ways you can create some internal “cookie-cutter” templates to speed things up when you book a new client or customer.
4 — Automate anything you possibly can
The creative mama's best efficiency hack is to automate things. In your family and personal life, this looks like setting up auto-pay for your utilities, scheduling grocery pick-up, or using Amazon’s Subscribe and Save feature to order toiletries and household goods at a recurring frequency.
For your business, you can get just as savvy and creative by finding small tasks to automate. Here are a few examples:
Set up an auto-responder in your email that addresses some common concerns and save yourself the time spent responding
Require that clients use Auto-pay, meaning their payments are drafted automatically and you don’t have to send any additional manual invoices
Use a scheduling software that includes automatic email and/or text reminders so you have less of a chance that clients will forget or not show up to a meeting with you
I use Honeybook as my project management software, which is filled with automation. I manually send one Smart File, which takes me 30 seconds tops to customize for my client, and Honeybook takes care of sending the contract (or following up until they sign), sending each invoice reminder before their payment is drafted (or sending reminders if they’re not on Auto-pay), and sending Next Steps or follow-up emails during and post-project. It’s awesome!
One tool I’ve not used a ton but I’m sure can have a really powerful impact on your business is Zapier. Zapier integrates with tons of software and tools to allow communication between the programs. This means that you can create automations that cross over between the various platforms you might use!
My last recommendation for working smarter, not harder, as a creative mama is to get better at working in small chunks of time. If you know it takes you an hour to plan your Instagram captions for the next week, you might be tempted to wait for a free hour when you can get it all done at once. Or maybe your emails are piling up and you want to wait until the kids go to bed before you sit down and respond to all of them at once.
Here’s the thing — if you’re always waiting until you have large, luxurious free chunks of time, then your business is going to be at a stand-still for a while. If you’re ready to take immediate action, don’t let the fact that you’ve only got 10 minutes until your kids exit the school and enter your car be the thing that keeps you from a little forward momentum!
Of course, these may not each work for all seasons of life, but here are several tasks I’ve routinely completed in 10- or 15-minute chunks of time during my creative mama journey:
Answer emails or DMs on your phone. I like to prioritize my work tasks so that the most important, money-making aspects of running my business happen when I’m best able to devote my attention to them. This means that anything I can do on my phone is more likely to happen during the day when my kids are around. Even if you just are able to respond to one email or message while your kids are finishing up their lunch, that’s one less that’s looming over your head the rest of the day (and progressing your conversations more promptly might open up more opportunities to work with others).
Engage on social media. Interacting with your social media following is an easy task to fill your spare time (as long as you’re not getting distracted by scrolling!) because it’s something you can pick up or put down whenever. The amount of social media interaction that’s taken place on my couch with the dulcet tones of Bluey, Bingo, Chili, and Bandit echoing in the background is pretty high.
Craft an intentional to-do list. I am a big fan of offloading anything from my brain that I can. I can’t trust myself to remember why I came into the kitchen half the time, so anytime I have a few spare minutes and think of things I need to do later, I outline them in my To-Do List note on my phone. This means that, when I finally am able to sit down and work for a solid chunk of time, my work is more intentional and prioritized.
Check on missing/late payments or content. While these types of emails aren’t the funnest to send, they’re necessary. This task is usually pretty simple and quick, and easy to do on your phone, making it a top candidate for something to do in just a spare few minutes.
Schedule a couple of social posts. If you don’t already have a scheduling app like Planoly, now is the time to get started! You can sign up right now in under 10 minutes for a free account and, if you’re lucky enough to have another 10, schedule out a post or two to publish to your Instagram account later in the week. You could get caught up on future posts within a day if you take advantage of all the short little breaks in this way!
Update your budget. Have you had a chance to review my business budget template e-book yet? It’s hefty, but my process has had a profound influence on my success as an entrepreneur. It only takes me 5-10 minutes to update both my business and personal budgets daily, and it’s a habit I rarely skip.
Get yourself set up for success later. Similar to crafting your to-do list, there are plenty of other tasks you can achieve in less than 10 minutes, even if they’re not directly related to your business so that later when you ARE able to sit down and work, you don’t have to think about them. If you’re like me and hate spending precious work time doing less-impactful chores like housework, picking up, or getting ready, then do them with or around your kids, during wake time, and save nap time for more powerful work.
Take some product photos. It’s always frustrating to sit down to create content for a social media post and realize you don’t have any good images to use. Consider using your spare time to snap a few styled photos of your products or tools you use for work. You’ll be so grateful you don’t have to interrupt your planning process later to take them (and likely the lighting is worse when you’re working without distractions, anyway).
Follow-up with past clients. We’ve heard that it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than to try to win a new one. Consider using a few spare extra minutes to follow up with past clients and see if they’re still loving your product or the results of your service, and whether they’d be interested in working with you again. Or, invite them to share about you on social media or see if they can think of anyone who’d also appreciate your offerings.
It’s not always easy to work in small chunks of time, but by recognizing the value of these little pockets of opportunities, and the way they can transform your business bit by bit over time, you’ll be better set to work on the more high-impact and revenue-generating work during nap time or when you have dedicated work time.
MY TOOLKIT
To wrap up this section, I wanted to give you a clear look at the tools and programs I use most often within The Unburden Studio to keep my business organized and running smoothly.
Just a head’s up — a lot of the links below (and in this course) are affiliate links, which means you may be entitled to a discount or reward if you use them to purchase the program, but I’ll also likely get a kickback as well. If you’d prefer not to use my affiliate links, just search for the tool on Google and use the authentic links there.
Honeybook — My project management tool, which I’ve used for 3+ years to organize my onboarding process, send + sign contracts, schedule and manually send invoices, and process payments. Honeybook also has the ability to create automations and workflows, send mass emails, and communicate internally about projects.
Google Drive — I use Docs, Sheets, and Google Drive folders to organize everything shared with my team and our clients internally. This is how we collect and organize images, text, and other content from our online marketing clients as well as our design clients. We also house our Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) here so the team always has access, and my contract workers update and save their invoices each month using a Google Sheets invoice template I created for them.
Asana — Asana is a task management tool that my team uses to keep track of our recurring work. We mainly use it for our online marketing clients, but sometimes find other uses as well. My content manager updates the pipeline each month to reflect the new client tasks on our agenda, and we can assign individual tasks to specific people. We can also add deadlines and comment back and forth on specific tasks. This is also where I try to keep the majority of our team communication, out of respect for each team member’s schedule and time, so they can review messages the next time it’s convenient or just when they’re working.
Notes (on iPhone and Mac) — Apple’s Notes app integrates seamlessly between my laptop and my phone, which is super convenient for an on-the-go mama like myself. I have notes for everything in my life, organized into folders, including trips I want to take, my gratitude journal, canned responses for inquiries, my marketing ideas, and even the outline for this course (I’m writing this in Notes right now!).
Having ambition and creativity is wonderful, and those are key characteristics that a creative mama needs to retain in order to be successful as an entrepreneur. But if you’re not operating strategically, your ambition can come back to bite you in the rear, just like Flik’s did.
Starting with a plan and an organized mind will ensure that your efforts take you much farther.
Remember to start slow, with what you have, when you can. Implement your new ideas for your business one piece at a time, and you’ll begin to see those tiny tweaks compound over time into a more peaceful, manageable business that’s still serving you and your family.