The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 126: How To Stay Organized
Today I am diving into all the ways that I keep the backend of my business organized. I love sharing with you the backend of my business, so I want you to know exactly how I keep things together and operating so you can do the same for your business as well as you grow and scale into the next level.
How To Stay Organized
By: Melissa Lin
Over the past few weeks, I have been really showing more of the behind the scenes of the systems that we use and the things going on in my business. One of the biggest comments, or I guess one of the more frequent comments I've been hearing from my audience is that everything always looks so organized. I did a question box on my Instagram and the question that came up the most was “Melissa, how are you always so organized in the backend? How does it always look so pretty and just put together? Like you've always looked like you've got it all put together.” This is what I want to talk about today.
I do want to share that this wasn't always the case. Years ago, If you took a look at the behind the scenes of my business, especially when I started, it looked nothing like this. Things were so disorganized and has definitely taken a while to get to this point, to be honest. One of the big reasons that I like to show so much of the behind the scenes is because I remember how it felt feeling lost and really unsure of how things should look on the back end of a business. Now I share all, and when I say all, I mean every aspect of the behind the scenes of our business to our clients and they absolutely love it. And it's for that exact reason. So they know what it needs to look like. Right? No business is cookie cutter, but I want to share how it can look and give them inspiration to, you know, pull different things and create different things and systems in their businesses. Because a lot of the time we just don't know what we don’t know. So that's what I'm here to help you with.
Now, we are always preparing ahead. We're always ready on the backend for the next level, and being organized is something that definitely helps. So when we hit six figures in the business a few years ago, we wanted to make sure that we were starting to prep for multiple six-figures on the backend, so we'd be ready for it. And what do you think happened? Once we hit multiple six figures, our backend and our systems were already ready for seven figures. And you bet that once we hit seven figures as a business, which recently happened, we were already prepared for multiple seven figures on the backend.
So today I'm going to be sharing how to stay organized. These are things you can implement into both your life and your business. The answer truly is that it's not just one magical thing that keeps me organized. That keeps my team organized. It's truly a combination of things. And I'm going to break it down for you today.
My Favorite Tools
So the first thing is using a few of my favorite tools. If you spend any time on my social media, my Instagram, you know, I share behind the scenes. So you may already know some of my favorite tools that I use and that my team and I use together. First, I'm going to give you my top two: Asana and Airtable. Now, if you're already using a project project management system, you may, we'll be using Trello. You may be using Monday. There's quite a few apps out there. Click up. It's another one. I love Asana. I've been using Asana for quite some time and we'll continue to use them for the time being, I just absolutely love Asana and Airtable. Now, you've probably heard me talk about these and it's because I use them every single day in our business.
Now, why use both? Why not just one? Great question. So they serve different purposes for my team and I. Now, I do know some people who use only one of them, some who use both. So, something I do want to say is that you've got to find a system that's going to work best for you. If you create a system and you never use it, then what's the point in creating it. So we use Asana to keep track of tasks and break down all the things that truly need to get done in our business.
So for example, anytime that we go into a launch, we always have our entire launch planned out from head to toe and what we've done to make things so much easier is we have a launch template that we actually duplicate for each launch that includes tasks such as, you know, creating the sales page, what the launch brief is for important dates that need to be on the calendar, checkout pages, challenge outlines, or if we're doing a live stream series or a workshop, outlining what that's going to look like. If it's a live stream series, we'll start to outline what's going to be included in day one, day two, day three, so that we can start to prep the graphics and the emails and all of those things that also need to go into the opt-in pages, such as program details, promotion posts, I think that I already mentioned graphics, maybe what bonuses we're going to have for the launch. So there's those things. Then, of course, so much more. There's a lot more that goes into a launch than just those things, but I think you kind of get the pictures. We have everything in this Asana project and it's so easy for us to duplicate it for our next launch. So we can start to prep ahead without recreating all of that work, instead of retyping everything out, we can just duplicate that template that we've created. We do this in many aspects of Asana, not just for launching.
Now I also use Asana to track other things, too. Such as daily tasks, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly tasks, high level project overviews. We also have on the side panel of Asana, you can create, they call it “teams”, and they're basically different sections that you can house, or host, in Asana. So if you ever see the behind the scenes of ours, it's because we've got those different sections. So we're always looking at this and it always helps us stay organized and on task for what needs to actually happen. All of our tasks have an assignee, someone to do the task and an assigned date for when the task is going to get done. You can make notes and all of the different things in Asana, in any project management tool really, Click Up, Trello, all of those things. We also track our client care inside of Asana, and so much more than that, I even use it to keep track of my personal tasks to make sure that I tackle some of those items as well. Again, you can use it for both your life and your business.
Now, Airtable. Oh, our best friend Airtable. We use Airtable again every single day in our business. We really use it to organize more of the backend of the business. So we use it to house our content. We use it to organize the actual content. This is where we track our clients and our programs as well as is where we track our leads and company metrics. We have an entire dashboard that we've created in Airtable. There are a lot of different things you can do inside an Airtable. It's really cool. Now, both myself and my team members have access to various parts of Airtable.
If you're a business owner like me, if you could have some kind of tool to help you stay organized and on task is probably one of the coolest things ever. It's definitely helped us just streamline things in the business, making sure we're on top of things, making sure we’re on time and really being efficient with our things as well. What I really love about both Asana and Airtable. And again, most project management tools can do this, is that you can view them in various views. So you can look at all of your different tasks in list format. You can check to see which tasks are getting close to overdue. You can look at them in board format or grid style, there's just a lot of different options. You can really customize it to make it work for you and your business with calendar view and those types of things.
So if you're not in either of those, I definitely recommend hopping in to at least give it a try. They all have free versions. So give some of these tools a try, they're going to help with so much in the business and just staying organized and on top of things. What's even cooler there, again, using the word cool for project management systems and tools is that you can use some on many different platforms. You can download the apps to your computer, to your iPad, to your phone, so you always have it on the go. Of course we have boundaries, so we know those business and life boundaries. So you're not going to be hopping in them all the time. So maybe don't have them on your phone, but you can have them on various different platforms for easy access.
High Level View of the Company
Now, the next thing that we do to stay truly organized is we always have a high level view, like a high level overview of the company, of our clients, and the projects that we're working on. So we always have a pulse on what's going on with everything in the business. As CEO, we always want to have some type of pulse on what's happening. So the team knows what needs to happen daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually. We also often run audits in the business to see where any gaps may be, because there's always room for opportunity. There's always room for growth, right? There's always room to move all of that into the next level. So, for example, at our weekly operations meetings, we always go through our 2021 projects that we're working on for the quarter and see where we are with completing the projects and reaching our goals. We always have a pulse on how our clients are doing in every single one of our programs, and we always have a pulse of what the next quarters projects are going to be. We have a great idea, such a great pulse of all of those aspects of the business and as CEO, at least for me personally, this is my experience, I believe that's very important to have a pulse on those aspects.
Creating Systems
Now, the next thing that has really helped us become more organized is creating systems on the backend of our business. Now, we're always improving. We're always tweaking our systems so that they're working smarter for us. I'm sure you've probably heard the saying, you know, “work smarter, not harder”. We always use this for our systems as well. Our content marketing system, our social media system, our sales system and the systems that we have inside our business to help with our client experience, with onboarding and with off-boarding. As you continue to grow your business, I want you to look at your tasks that you do, especially the ones that really aid you in generating more sales, your money making activities, and see where you can create a system or process around. Because to be honest, you have a process or a system around it right now. It may just not be laid out and it may not be easily repeatable. We want to create that simplicity in your business. Easily be able to repeat a process or something that you do in your business. So as you start to give each task in your business a home, you can start to kind of connect the dots and streamline more of your business. Now, an exercise I like to do in my business, usually once per quarter or so is audit a few of our business systems.
So, what I want you to do is pick a system that you currently have in your business and write down all of the tasks. Every single thing that is associated with that one item. So for example, creating a podcast episode, if you have a podcast. If you don't have a podcast, then maybe pick, you know, writing an Instagram caption or publishing an Instagram caption or putting up a new blog post. So I want you to do the same thing that I'm about to walk you through. What I want you to do is pick that item and start to write down every single thing that needs to be done either by yourself or a team member. In order to go from A, to publish, you know, actually how that task happened. So for example, creating a podcast episode, those tasks for us include, you know, picking a topic, outlining the episode structure, choosing the commercial, recording the podcast, editing the podcast, uploading the podcast for our team, creating graphics, creating the show notes, schedule it for release, you know, draft captions around the episode, create Instagram stories around it, transcribe the episode for our blog. So, if you don't know, we transcribe every single podcast episode and upload it to our website in case anybody wants to actually read through the episode. We're always adding that episode to our blog as well. So there's another thing that we add. So write down all of the tasks that need to happen.
What we do is we have this in Asana as a project, and we're able to duplicate this for every episode, right? If you have it for a task, you can have subtasks, both of them work, but we can duplicate it for every episode and then reassign every task that needs to happen so we can see where we are, if we're on track for the podcast episode to be released on time, those type of things. So all of the tasks that are required are of course assigned to somebody and if that somebody is you, awesome, but let's create some organization that, you know, shows what needs to happen and lays it out visually. Again, we do this in Asana. You can also do this in Airtable.
This way, when you do start to hire more team members and grow and expand, they'll easily be able to see the process for that particular item and start to help and really be there to support you in the business. I know for the longest time, for me personally, before I had this incredible team helping me and aiding me every single day of the week, I had so much just kept up in my head. I just thought that, you know, people can read my mind, they know what I'm doing, but they don't. So we want to get this stuff out on paper, or if it's video training, create some kind of standards, some kind of procedures, some system. Write all the task items down so that you can teach somebody else to do it as well, because if you're going to continue to grow, you will definitely be hiring help over the next few months, over the next few years.
Honesty of Communication
Now the next thing that helps us stay extremely organized is communication with my team and not just communication, but to be honest, over communication. I absolutely love my team and I appreciate every single one of them so much. We have over 12 team members now, and I say over 12, because we're currently in that hiring process of another team member or two. Something that I believe to be true is that you can never communicate enough. That's definitely something I learned, you know, in my engineering days, college days, and I'm sure you've experienced this yourself as well. So we communicate to our team and throughout the team a few different ways. So we actually have a Team Melissa Lin Slack channel. So all of our team members are inside of our Slack channel and we communicate there every single day of the week. We're always checking in with the team, supporting team members, seeing where things are. We also have weekly meetings with various team members with agendas where we cover certain projects and overviews, and we even communicate in Asana. Us checking off and sharing that a task is done in Asana is communicating and letting other team members know what we're doing. So we can see what tasks are being done, when they're being done, that type of thing.
So again, I hope this was helpful. It wasn't always this way. We were not always as organized. It definitely took us a while to get here. Which is why I'm sharing all of this with you, because if you can get there even faster, that's amazing. I definitely made mistakes in my early days. So that's why I'm sharing so many of these tools and resources. This is why I have over 120 podcast episodes. We have weekly videos that go out and just so much free content, because I want you to get there even faster. I don't want you to struggle like I did, at least not as much as I did in the beginning years ago. So, again, I hope this was helpful. I hope you're able to get a sense of some of the things that happen behind the scenes in the business and the things that just help us stay organized.
Thank you for hanging out with me today. If you have any goodies, questions, anything you want to share with me, you can share on Instagram @TheMelissaLin. I'm always going to be your biggest cheerleader. So you taking time out of your day to hang with me, truly means the world to me. I'll see you next time.
Topics we cover include:
How Far In Advance To Plan Your Content
What You Should Offer First
How To Increase Your Sales
Where To Start Automating
How To Scale While Working Less
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Times to check out:
(7:36) How far in advance do you plan your content?
(10:12) I am starting my business. What should I offer first?
(18:39) I'm not getting any bites on my offer. Any tips?
(24:06) Any tips on what to automate first in my business?
(28:20) How do I start to scale without working so much?
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