Ep 111: Implementing Systems

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:00

You ever wonder what success actually means? How do you get it? And how do you keep it?

Theresa Lambert: 00:00:14

We all want it yet sometimes it feels only some of us get to have it.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:18

Hi, Theresa and Blair here we are to badass entrepreneurs, best selling authors, coaches and business mentors who have had success, built success, questioned our own success and reclaimed it. Let's be real for a hot minute. 2020 has been a roller coaster ride, and many of us a start to wonder if the loser things that made them successful. So we got curious, Ron real about what success is truly about? Can you put it in a box? How can you get it?

Theresa Lambert: 00:00:48

Can people take it away? Or are you the one with the power?

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:52

Does it mean the same to all of us? Or are we the ones that create it?

Theresa Lambert: 00:00:56

From PGA golf pros to doctors, CEOs, entrepreneurs and spiritual mentors, we get together to meet with successful people from around the globe to dissect success for vibrant conversations and interviews. Make sure you click the subscribe button on the app store because each week we will drop a new episode to bust through the myths around success and dissect its true meaning.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:01:22

Welcome back to another episode of dissecting success. It's me Blair Kaplan Venables, and I'm here with the one the only the amazing Theresa Lambert. And, you know, it's interesting because the We've recently been working with the new cohort in momentum. And something that we've recently been talking about is something that we want to bring to you, our listeners. And it's the systems and processes that we have around managing our social media content, and our emails, our email distribution. And this is actually something that people ask me about all the time. And guess what it's always changing. And it was interesting, because Theresa, and I took the people in momentum behind the scenes to show them what our systems are. And so it Teresa, and I have some similarities, but both very different. And so we want to invite you to join this riff, learn, love and implement. So, Theresa, you're ready to dive in?

Theresa Lambert: 00:02:21

Absolutely. I'm excited for this conversation. And yeah, excited to share what we're doing that will help, you know, our listeners on their way to success and by implementing tools to make life easier.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:02:37

So the first thing I want to just put out there before we dive into like tools, and what we each do is that I don't see a lot of you doing this, but it's completely acceptable. And in fact, you should be doing this. And it's repurposing, it's repurposing. If you made an awesome post on August 8 2020. And it's still relevant, you can post it. If you have a product or an event or something that only happens once a year, you could reuse those posts every single year. If someone says, Hey, you made that post three years ago, I would say Congratulations, you have some true fans who know exactly what you're posting. And so before we dive in, I just want you to think about this. What content have you put out that you can keep using maybe you use the same words and have a new photo or use the same photo and have a new words or it's the exact same photos and words. And this goes for emails as well. You don't always need to keep reinventing the wheel. Sometimes things need a facelift or a refresh. But repurposing to me is a big part of content distribution. And it's part of a system. So I just wanted to start with that. But like Theresa's Okay, so, like, I like to say I'm an artist. I try to be organized. I believe I have ADHD, like I'm undiagnosed, but the internet tells me I have it. So I'm honest. So I try to stay really organized. But Theresa is very organized. In fact, she keeps us organized. She keeps us organized with dissecting success and momentum and in life. So I want to start with Theresa and her like amazing, brilliant brain.

Theresa Lambert: 00:04:21

Oh my god. Well, I have to like put a disclaimer here like I'm a naturally very organized person. But we had the joy to actually help one of our clients Patricia build her OPM business and then through the process of getting exposed to what she does and how she does it. We ended up hiring her for our businesses as an OPM, which was really cool. And so Patricia came on board for me in July of 2022. So it's been like, six or seven months almost crazy and it blew my mind like how her organizational brain works. And what she really helped me do is, is organized me digitally because I wasn't organized digitally. And I had an experience in the fall, where my Instagram account went bye bye. And I got it back. But I have like over 1000 posts on my Instagram, I love sharing, I put out a lot of content, I do repurpose and recycle. But it made me realize that I don't have it backed up. And so what Patricia helped me do through me saying, hey, I want all my content pulled from my Instagram, like every post downloaded every meal downloaded every caption doubt, like all of it, she came up with a system for us to pull it into clickup. And not only have it in there, but in a way that I could organize it in campaigns. And so now the coolest thing is, and I showed you this, on our call was the momentum clients. And you were like, Whoa, because you hadn't seen it yet. And now what ends up happening is I have my social media and I'm still working through it are still about 400 posts that I haven't gone through. But now what ends up happening is I have my social, like, I have the posts, organized and campaigns and also unlike value posts, engagement posts, like what programs they're related to. And so if I want to bring a program back, like right now I'm relaunching to weigh 200k. In an upcoming masterclass, I can literally go and I can filter. And I can see all the posts, I can reuse the polls, I can, you know, change them up, like maybe create a new reel, if I want to make a carousel out of reveal all that sort of stuff. But that keeps me so organized. And I still have ways to go. But that is such a game changer in terms of content creation. And so that is what's happening. Now it's all in there. And it just, it felt like a bit of an overwhelming monster when we took it on it. And I felt like all this resistance because it was just so much. And so it's been a long term project. But I can tell you, if you are a content creator, if you're promoting your business online, even if you're writing articles for media, all of that stuff, to have a way as you go to back it up and to organize it in a way that allows you to go back, it is a game changer. And it has reduced the amount of time I spend creating content tremendously.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:07:51

So good. First of all, like, yeah, as you're saying that I'm like, Okay, I want to first of all, I also work with Patricia, I'm like, I'm just gonna message and be like, whatever you defer, I'm not going to have her poll on my posts, because I had that a lot. Like I have, I don't even know, but a lot more than 1000. And, but I love that organization. And as you're talking, I'm like, You know what, I want to go and pull all the articles I've written all the blog posts, I've written, all the media, I've gotten all the podcasts I've been featured and like this is an endless project. But it's great to have everything in one place. And you said you use clickup I also use clickup. But we shouldn't talk about like the systems you can do. So like, you can be really basic like right now, like before Patricia came on. I still use it but Google Drives and spreadsheets like very basic making my own things. But there are systems out there that especially if you have a team that you know, you can work cohesively in them, like clickup It's amazing because Teresa, you have team members all over the world. And so you and you can assign different things to different people. And so click up as a management tool, right? It's a CRM.

Theresa Lambert: 00:09:04

Yeah, it's a management tool. Like it's really great for team management, task management planning, like it is like a it's very like I call it headquarters now. It's my headquarters so I don't have a physical office right and I'm obviously traveling all over the place. Team members are all over the world like literally spread around the continent and I have got to have a way that we can all communicate with each other and see what's happening right and I think this is this comes back I think through like my organizational mind a little bit to that once I realized what that thing can do. I was like ooh, this is great because I can go and I can see is real progress on something people can make comments on something and when there was no once you have more than one thing going on in your business like once it's not just like one sad thing that you do like even with us right like you have a Couple of podcasts I have a couple of podcasts like the podcasting alone is like a beautifully orchestrated effort of multiple people and communication that happens just to get a podcast episode. Recorded, show notes down, uploaded, edited, pushed out like it just and multiple people are involved in this process. And so when you don't have a way to keep it organized, it is a mess. Like I even you know, this is interesting actually. Remember when we didn't have a jot form that we sent two gifts, and we didn't have a calendar to send that had? My gosh, yeah. And it was like, it was a freaking nightmare trying to even do to get gifts on to get the information for them. And then the information was on five like emails and like, you now we have a sophisticated system, using jot form, people fill out the guest form, and then they get sent an email with a link to book the calendar, like the Yeah, but like booking our calendar, you and I coordinate, and we're like, Okay, what day's work for both of us, like, systems make life easier. So and I agree, I still use Google Drives and sheets and stuff like that above and beyond but where you can link? Yeah, yeah, everything links. Yeah. So I love like app for that. But I think that, above and beyond having a team, I wish I would have started to use something like clickup far earlier than I did. Yeah, by the time I did, it was like a monumental for Are

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:11:45

you are you paying for it because there's a free version and a paid version, and I'm paying for it. But I started off on the free version.

Theresa Lambert: 00:11:51

Yeah, I started on the free version. And now I'm paying made most sense with what I needed to do. But

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:11:58

yeah, and it's very robust. But you know, if you're just starting out, and you're like, Whoa, I need to get more organized, please do it. Now I'm 15 years in, and I'm just cleaning up my shit. You know, like, I mean, I'm organized for my clients, but I come last when it comes to business. And I have like, click up and I have, you know, I use post it notes. But there's other tools out there too. Like, I have a client who uses monday.com. And that's a free, there's a free version of that. There's Trello. There's notion. So there's lots of organizational tools out there. The reason I'm on clickup is because Patricia or OBM told me that we're going to be on clickup. And I you know, now that I understand it, it's amazing. And I absolutely love it. And I think the possibilities are endless with that. But you don't need to start with something so robust start with trying out like Trello. And I was using Trello before and Patricia converted everything from Trello over to clickup. But not just that, like what we were just saying about our podcast being organized. It's about creating these systems. And there's these tools out there that free up our time, that helps us stay organized. Like if you want to be on our podcast, we send you and we want you to be on our show, we send you a link to a form to fill out. And then once the form is filled out, you get the link to book in our calendar, where that's something like that would take five emails before back and forth between us and the person or their booking manager. And it became this convoluted process that we were wasting our valuable time and time is one of the most precious resources we have. We're never going to have more time. And so I think also that has to go with we have everything stored and organized. But now what do we do with that content? How do we get those emails out? How do we put out that social media and I've been trying different platforms. And you know, in the beginning of my business, I didn't want to spend money on tools, like I was even making my own invoices in Word. Now I use QuickBooks and PayPal, and I love it. And it's easy, and I have stripe integration. And I probably could get rid of one of those, but I'm not there yet. But I used to send my emails out for MailChimp, MailChimp, to me was free. And then when I build out my, when it builds up my program empowerment, I use kartra Well, it just makes more sense to collect email addresses and cartridges because my lead magnets send people there and so I you know, got rid of MailChimp and now I'm collecting, you know, using cartridge as that main source, I use cartridges, plugins and applications to collect payment for those programs. And you know, instead of using a bunch of different tools now I'm just using one specific tool. And that's like social media management and with the other thing that people always ask me is like, What tool do you use? Because there's so many tools out there? Well, and it's also do you want to pay how much do you have to manage? Like if you're only using Instagram and Facebook, which I don't recommend you do you need to be elsewhere but if that is all you're doing, Facebook has a business content scheduling tool right in there, like you can just use it and it's free. I manage multiple accounts for different clients and myself and my global Resilience Project. So I use HootSuite and I paid for the higher version of HootSuite. And I love it. I love it. It's a dashboard, I can engage, I can follow along, I can, you know, repurpose, I could schedule, I could see how my contents doing, there's a dashboard for analytics. I want everything to be in one place. I don't want to schedule something here and scheduled Twitter and Twitter and schedule, Facebook and Facebook, why not do it all in one place? So I want to talk to you, Teresa like you because you're clickup is so advanced with the social media stuff. What's your process? Like? Do you schedule content? Or is it getting posted live? And then what's your like? What system do you use? Like, I know, I use Karcher but use something else.

Theresa Lambert: 00:15:42

Yeah, so I have a couple of different things. So for social media clickup is really like, again, headquarters, it's where I keep everything and like look at it as like a very super organized content bank. And like it is still like a project that I'm working through. But the idea is that, like, once I've gone through the rest of the posts, my next step will actually be to, to outline 30 Post campaigns. And so once I have the offending post campaigns outlined, I could literally say to Patricia, please go in and schedule the 30 post campaign for strategic scheduled a fatty post campaign on, here's how you build your business to like, here's how you get your business to from five to 10k months. And it's like a month of content just focused on that. So that is like the next evolution of what I'm blacking on with in my clickup. But what we do is clickup Has the captions and the hashtags and the like imagery, but I like to like change things up creatively a little bit, but I use it from them. And I can easily schedule it out and later. So it's just a matter of copy and pasting it over. So I use later for social media scheduling. I do want to look into Hootsuite. So I love that you're using it so often cast by will ask you off the couch off the off the MC I will ask you some more questions about that.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:17:13

I just want to interrupt you on purpose, because the one thing is I was trying to use later because I really love later and that you can lay things out. But if you're want to schedule content that doesn't have images, like scheduling to LinkedIn is challenging. So yes, so the only platform that I found that suits my needs that has that I'm comfortable with is Hootsuite to do everything. But

Theresa Lambert: 00:17:37

the that's so interesting, and I love later because I'm so visual on my Instagram and I was started to use two platforms because LinkedIn and Facebook like it was like, they all have their limitations. But for now, like I still ultimately I'm on a 12 month plan for later. And I was like, You know what, right now, even though I could I don't want to spend money on a different platform, and I'm still paying for something that totally works. And

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:18:03

it's like a gym membership, right? You're like, why would I have five different gym memberships? I'm paying for what

Theresa Lambert: 00:18:08

it is. And I've really been like, taking more responsibility for my financial choices. And also saying, okay, I can transition but I'll transition. Once I once I've finished using what I've already paid for. I don't always do that. But right now that's something that like, I think it's important. So that's what I use for my social media to click up for content organization. And then it's the latest for scheduling, I do still post a lot of like, I do a lot of prompting for publishing. So like it'll prompt me and then I just upload it. But everything pretty much that's on Facebook and LinkedIn is automated. And then I have Kajabi. So Kajabi for me is like my main communications platform, if you will, it hosts my website, I have my payment processing set up through it with Kajabi. And it holds programs like evergreen programs that I have. It's my email marketing tool. Like all those things, in Kajabi, which is amazing and ibdv love Kajabi I've used it for a long time it is a lot of people say it's expensive, but for all the things that it can do, quite honestly, I have to say it's it actually worked out to be less expensive for me to use Kajabi for everything then to use multiple different platforms based on my type of business and business model. Everyone's different. But so yeah, so I use Kajabi for that I love Kajabi I have a slight obsession with Kajabi and they keep adding more and more and more features but it really allows me to streamline communication, including communication when I onboard clients and like it's all just like, I just love tools that not only allow us to spend less time doing things manually, like I've gotten so much time back for it. But that also increased a client experience at the same time. So when we sell high ticket programs and services, I want my clients to have a certain experience, I want that to be an immediate email a welcome a point that points to mentor the next direction, even if, hey, I'll be in touch personally and 24 hours feels better to me than somebody purchasing and they get a receipt and then they don't hear anything, do you? Not? I mean, so yeah, it's things like that. And I love that. So that is what I use. And honestly, and you hit on this for me, and I feel like it's for both of us. But time and energy are my highest priced most precious commodities that I have. Money, sure, but like, for me time, and my energy are huge. And so investing in these systems to help us successfully build our business, reduce the time it takes us to manually do a lot of these things, has opened up time and space in the calendar that allows us to a take on more clients, but also to just have time to enjoy our lives, which you and I have spoken about extensively, because we both have the desire to have space and time in our lives to actually live our life and not work all the time.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:21:27

Amen. Amen. So just a high level recap the tools that I swear by right now at this moment in time that I've invested in that I recommend, I you know, we both recommend click up. If you're not gonna use click up use a different tool organizer, shit, do it now, while you're waiting. And if you can't, you know if it's overwhelming hire Patricia, or a VA or an OPM to Hootsuite, a content management tool and a dashboard system that basically manages everywhere that I am visible on social media, and where I put my clients so I can do it all in one program, one platform, I love it. And for me kartra Karcher has been a really big game changer for me. So those are three, the three tools that I'm in love with right now. And then Theresa Theresa said she's like, again, click up, she uses Kajabi. She loves Kajabi and she pays for later. Laters later is phenomenal. But I also as a social media expert and a business professional who's a vintage millennial. I can tell you LinkedIn is one of the most valuable social media platforms out there. I literally get business from people who I've never met from LinkedIn. Hey, I found you on I was typing in social media expert you came up, I send you a DM you know, I just dmg because I need someone we have a call and then boom, they hire me. It's it has happened a few times. It's not like it's dripping in all the time. But it's because I show up and I showcase my expertise. But I think that's a conversation for another time because I get really passionate and can go down vortex and we've been jamming on systems and tools. And you know what? I think this might be a great point to wrap it.

Theresa Lambert: 00:23:09

I think so. Yeah, I think this is fun. And and you know, don't be overwhelmed with all the tools we're giving you but maybe just you know, try something new. Think about what you need, where you want to save time, and energy. And to yeah, like I think we can both agree that bringing somebody in to help you figure out how to organize your business is a really smart idea. Both plan I've done it. I feel like we're both organized people. And regardless of that, having somebody who specializes in organizing. Honestly, can be like even if you spend 500 bucks one initial meeting with someone whether it's Patricia or not the OPM can make the world of a difference to guide you in the right direction of what the next best systems are for you. But stop doing everything manually. Just stop. That's all. I'd say. That's what I said. So please, everyone, and we'll chat soon.