Three Things You Can Automate In Your Animal Business RIGHT NOW

There are so many tasks in our animal, equine and pet-based businesses that are repetitive. That we find ourselves doing over and over again. And they are often big time-sucks! On this week’s episode of The Business Animal, Cara and Kim give three things you can take off your plate right now through the power of automation. Listen to this episode and lighten your load!

The Business Animal podcast is proudly

sponsored by WP Engine your resource for managed WordPress

hosting, and KEAP the premier CRM software for small business,

head over to thebusinessanimal.com for the

best deals on these two amazing products

Welcome to The Business Animal podcast. Saddle up for a

gallop to the top of the animal industry, where you'll learn how

to tame your wild business beast with tips, techniques, and tools

that will take overwhelm to obedience school, and have you

wagging your tail with joy. And now your hosts, Kim Beer and

Cara Taylor Swift.

Hey there business animals. It's Kim with

Be More Business and

Cara with Fast Horse photography. Hi, Kim.

Hi, Cara. Welcome everybody to The Business

Animal. I know every listener out there listening to this

podcast wishes that they had more time in their business. I

know I do, don't you Cara.

Oh my gosh, especially right now it's so

busy in my world between it being a very busy equine

portrait season, because we're in the early days of spring

going into summer. So it's not too miserable yet, so it's so

busy right there. And then on top of it, we're in birthday

party season for all the kids and children in my life, my

son's birthday is coming up. It's almost the end of school.

So we're making summer plans and life is insane. So one of the

things I was thinking about when we were talking about episodes

is what are the three things we can do right now to just give

herself some breathing room in our business so that we can also

be enjoying all the craziness of the springtime and enjoy it a

little bit more.

Yes. And so that brings us to a topic that we've

brought up on this podcast a few times. And that's automation,

because when you automate things, you take it off of your

plate, and you pass it off to a computer. And I can tell you, My

computer has no birthday plans, it doesn't need to attend

parties, it could care less about what time it works. I

mean, honestly, it is a very good computer. And it really

just doesn't mind. And I can guarantee you that most of the

computers out there in the world unless they've gotten some new

sort of technology don't care either. So let's put them to

work and let the technology do the work for us. So that we can

go off and enjoy graduations and birthday parties and

celebrations and working with our clients with our full

attention devoted to it and our business running smoothly in the

background. So we've come up with three things that you can

automate easily. So none of these are going to take you

weeks to try to cook up, they should be three easy automations

that you can institute in your business that will honestly the

three things we're going to talk about are huge. Either things

that you don't do, or things that suck a tremendous amount of

time out of your business, I would you know, they talk about

those energy vampires in your house. So these little items

that keep running and suck up your electricity. To me, these

are time vampires. And the three things are follow up responses,

billing and appointments. So these are three places where you

can save a tremendous amount of time, if you would put together

a simple automation, none of these should take you more than

a couple of hours tops to be able to put together. So yeah,

I'm excited about passing this information on to people because

honestly, I don't think I would have made it through the last

three or four months of my life without these things in place.

So I already had most of them in place. But I think I would have

definitely fallen flat on my face. Had I not had them with

the the spring that I've had.

And you've got so much coming up over you

know, in the next several months that you've even been ramping up

your automation game just to try to make sure that while you're

taking care of yourself and you're doing the things that you

need to do this spring and summer that your clients aren't

feeling that that they're still being nurtured. And they're

still getting all of the things that they need from you. So

you've been working really hard on this. So it's just such a

timely topic, I think for both of us right now.

Absolutely. So let's dive into number one,

which is follow ups. So follow ups and responses. We all get a

ton of communications in a day and we get communications from

everywhere. I honestly some days I feel like I have way too many

closets that I have to open every single day to look in to

see what my messages are from people because there's so many

ways to get in contact with people. It used to be back when

I started my business the only way people contacted me was over

the phone. Now we have phones, text messages, email messengers

on all the different social media platforms and then we have

these complicated things that have added Things like I have

discord that I have to keep up with I have banned I have to

keep up with which are two apps and I have a client that uses

Slack. So I mean, I don't know, I just listed off like 10 places

that I have to look for communications from people every

single day to kind of keep up with what's going on. And it can

drive you for lack of a better term batshit crazy. To make sure

you look at all of those.

It's so true, I can spend an hour in the

morning, just going to each one of those, like you said, closet

doors that you have to open looking to see who's reached out

Who do you need to respond to. And then on the flip side, if

you're not funneling those people, which is kind of what

we're going to talk about, if you're not funneling them to one

place, and you need to contact them, then you have to spend

more time finding them. So where was I communicating with them?

Was it a text message? wasn't an Instagram, you know, DM? Was it

an email, and you have to like, go find them in that can take

forever? It can be so time consuming. So frustrating. I

know, I saw that piece of information. Yeah. So when I

work with people, photographers that I'm mentoring around their

photography businesses, one of the first things we talk about

is this issue and how to get this piece cleaned up so that

you're not losing people you're doing the follow ups that you

need to do we know how important follow up is, and that you're

creating a space for yourself that isn't in the crazy making

mentality, like you're able to funnel those people all to one

place so that you can find them and work with them. And you can

have automation setup. So yeah, this one is a favorite for me.

Absolutely. So our recommendations here are to

start simple, don't make this overly complicated, right, for

the majority of the communication, I actually do get

usually comes through email. So in email, you can create common

responses to things because honestly, owning a small

business is pretty repetitive, like you say the same thing over

and over and over and over again. So you're going to have

some very common responses. Even if your automation is as analog

as typing up the common responses into a Word document

and then cutting and pasting them into your emails as

responses and then customizing it, you're going to shave hours

off of your month. I mean, it may seem like a minute or two

every single time you use it. But trust me, it adds up over

time, little small things add up over time. And you can also use

software to automate the responses. So when a customer

does one thing, then you can either add a tag or

automatically even if there's enough automation involved in

it, to be able to just go ahead and respond to them right where

they are with information that they need. I like to do the very

first email I like to be able to create for automation for my

clients is the one that follows up from like networking or

contacts, because that email is almost exactly the same every

single time it has contact information and maybe has a link

to an appointment scheduler, which is our third item that

we're going to talk about today, which is another huge time suck

in our lives and communication suck. But just setting up a

simple response email to say, you know, hey, it was nice to

meet you. Here's my contact information. And here's the next

step and writing it up in advance and then setting it up

so that all you have to do is drop a tag on the contact in

your CRM software, and it sends off the email, it just saves you

so many hours, so many hours over the year, it's time back,

you can actually take a vacation. That's brilliant,

you know, all the time we're out networking,

because

we're meeting people, we're collecting business cards, you

know, we're doing all of that. But then where we fall short is

that stack of business cards sits on our desk, and we always

have the intention of getting back to them. So it's another

area of and I'm putting this in quotes where we feel like we're

failing or failure in our business because we're not

following up well, but that's a great starter for automation.

Literally just create your follow up email from

interactions that you can drop in there in personalized and and

send it out and you don't even have to go so far as to put it

in a software system. Like Kim said, you can create a Word

document if that's where you want to start or an email draft

that you copy over and over again and have them saved in a

folder in your emails. My favorite that I like to start

with because I get a ton of inquiries about portrait

sessions daily. I like to start with a welcome email and it's

something as kind of a qualifier email, where I'm welcoming them

thanking them for reaching out and then I have some common

questions that I asked to determine more about what

they're looking for. It's easily customizable. It's something

that I can do really quickly. That used to take me a long time

to sit down and craft and because I was able to put just

you know, and I think I spent 15 minutes creating it originally,

and just sat down and really thought about my wording and the

language that I wanted to use and the feeling of my response,

I was able to do all of that. So now I have an email I'm really

happy with vs before, when I was responding to all of them.

Sometimes it was an email I like sometimes I wasn't feeling like

I could write it, and I wasn't feeling creative. So they were

all different, if that makes sense. So being able to create

one that I was really proud of and happy made such a big

difference. And now I can just shoot it off in two seconds

flat, and it puts the ball kind of back in my clients court to

be in a place where they're determining if they want to work

with me or not by are they going to answer some of the questions?

Are they going to take the next step? So that's a favorite one

for me. Kim, do you have any tools that you really like for

email automation? I know you do.

Of course I do. Of course I do. So keep is going

to be my my go to tool. It's KEAP and it is a full fledged

CRM and I'm not going to give anybody sunshine that it's not a

little bit of a hassle to set up because it is you've got to

think about a few things. But here's the cool thing about KEAP

is KEAP has this incredible force on I am one of them have a

partner program. And all CRM programs, by the way, in general

have one of these right there are individuals who own their

own businesses who really understand maybe a niche market

or they understand a local market. And they're really damn

good at what they do. And they help you set up automations. And

so KEAPs partner network and again, I am one of their

partners, we will help you set it up. And many of us like

myself have a program where if you buy KEAP through me, then I

will help you get started, I have some basic classes I can

teach you, I will do a couple of consultations with you to help

you get ramped up and started. So it is a tool to be able to do

this. And when you're ready to move away from that Word

document or draft folder in your email, then this is a good step

up for you. There are other tools, but I think keep works

really especially well for small businesses, because it seems to

make sense to small business owners where a lot of the other

tools do not. So that's one of the reasons I like it. And I

think that people who are developing it really take time

to understand what small business owners need in a CRM,

and they don't need a lot of stuff in their way, what they

need to be able to do is to get in there and work with their

contacts. And KEAP does make that easy once you have the

setup part done. So that would be my favorite tool for that

other tools that there are tons of them out there. And you can

use them. And again, I don't want anyone to feel like okay,

it's not really automation, because I have a Word document.

And it's not like the technologist doing all of it.

But trust me, it saves you time. So if that's the place you

start, and it builds you up. So when you're ready to step into a

CRM tool that will allow you to do the rest of the automation,

you most certainly can do that much easier, because you'll

already have all of those scripts written and the

automations can just come super fast. So that's my two cents on

that one,

I have been dabbling in keep as well, since

you, you know, got me started on it with calculus with cameras

and you know, some of our events we have coming up. But as it as

a horse photographer, one of the programs that I really like that

I have found useful for automation is a program called

17 hats, which is really geared towards photographers. So I know

we have a lot of photographers that listen. So I wanted to

throw that out there it is a beast, I feel like I only use

20% of it at this point. And I have so much room to grow in it.

But I do really like it for managing my clients and also the

automation part around sending emails, it's very easy to set up

and to work with. And it also has, this is gonna sound kind of

crazy, but it has a template marketplace and templates that

you can use that are geared towards photographers that you

can do you know, emails that kind of handle all the different

stages of your business. And if you're someone like me, that's

not always able to come up with like the best words all the

time, without really putting a lot of time and energy into it,

it's nice to be able to have a starting point with some of the

template packs that they offer that kind of are through the

standard process of a client lifespan in photography. So

anyway, I would throw that one out there. And I would also

challenge folks to look at the program that they're using for

their website. I use Squarespace for my website, and it also has

an automation component, and they keep adding more and more

you can do contracts now and invoicing is coming and all of

that. So there's so much you know, just take a look at the

program that you're using for your website because it also

might be that there's tools wrapped up in that that you're

not even using yet. All of those things. Yeah, all of those

things. So those are some tools for you guys to think about. The

next thing I would add is some things to consider with your

follows up and responses, you know, even though you're

automating there is still room for personalization. And that's

still really important making sure that if your client asks

you a specific question that if you can take a moment to answer

that, that's awesome. Or just adding, you know, making sure

their name is included in there, nothing is icky or than when you

get a cold email from someone that says hello. And if your

business name or some awkward, you know, thing that the

automation has picked up. So do your best to kind of weed

through some of that stuff. I would also say that if you are

automating, and you're setting up templates that make sure that

your templates all have a consistent look and feel that

you're using your branding fonts and colors, and that it looks

like it's coming from you and that each one that you send

looks like it's coming from you. So you can actually create an

email template that you use over and over again, that's in line

with your branding. Another thing, sometimes if you're like

me, you wake up in the middle of the night, and you feel like you

want to get ahead on your emails, but you don't want to be

emailing your clients at two o'clock in the morning, right?

They don't need to get a ping from you. Or it's not always

professional for them to wake up in the morning and see that you

were working all night long, that doesn't represent your

business all that well, sometimes. So it's okay to

schedule your emails. So if you're doing a flurry of them at

night, and you want them to go in the morning, when people are

more likely to open them when they're sitting down in front of

their computers, you can schedule that to happen. Kim,

did you want to add anything to that? Because I know you do a

lot of scheduling I do.

And a lot of the scheduling I do with emails or

marketing emails in for me and my evolved email practice that I

like to put forward to my clients is the scheduling is

really important because it's really key to meet people where

they are in the sales process. So gone are the days when you

just sort of send out something to all of your list every single

week. Instead, making sure you meet those clients where they

are. That's where the automations come into play in

keep is being able to create basically workflows or flows for

customers to go through in the different stages that they're in

in your business. That's a little bit more than 10 or 15

minutes to set up, however, so scheduling emails, I do like to

schedule them according to time wise, I like mid morning and mid

afternoon if you're talking about specific times, because I

think people tend to have a delete fest first thing in the

morning and right when they come back from lunch. So I know I do.

That's my delete fest time. Speaking from personal

experience speaking from personal experience, yeah, but

you also have to look at your target market, right? If you

work with farmers, farmers only read their emails, like super

early in the morning or super late at night. They don't tend

to check their email during the day. So you got to look at your

target market, right horse people are the same way. They're

not usually in the house during the middle of the day. And so

look at your target market and who you're working with. But

then also scheduling your marketing emails out. We've

talked a lot about batching on this podcast over the time we've

been doing it and batching helps and you can schedule batches of

emails out as well. But yeah, scheduling is key.

Are you looking to bring awareness to

your equine based product or service or create a unique way

for your audience to feel connected to your brand quality

horse photos tell your story and breathe life into your marketing

they draw your customers in and create an emotional connection

powerful images, communicate your core values and highlight

the benefits your product offers. Ultimately proving your

business is a voice your customers can trust it's time to

use dynamic images that define your small business and separate

you from the rest of the herd. Fast Horse photography is

professional photo library features 1000s of searchable

images available for businesses just like yours. And guess what?

100% of those images are horse related. Now finding the right

horse images for your website. Social media and marketing needs

is easier than ever help your audience see that your brand

offers the answers they are looking for search for the

perfect images for your equine business right now spur your

customers into action with Fasthorsephotography.com

That's fasthorsephotography.com So yeah, the last thing I want

to mention that happens a lot in my life is I get a ton of social

media inquiries. So I get DMs you know on Instagram I get

Facebook Messenger. I even I'm having LinkedIn stuff come in

it's it's can be so overwhelming. So like we said at

the top of this episode, we're talking about opening all those

doors in the morning and figuring out who we need to

respond to one of the things that I have done that has been

just a breath of just a breath of relief for me was I set up

automated responses on all of my DMs and my Facebook messengers

so that when I get client inquiries from there, I don't

have to necessarily respond to them right away if I don't want

to. So I set up automated responses, they're just out of

office responses, it says something to the effect of thank

you for reaching out, I don't normally check these on a

regular basis to reach me, please send me an email, and I

give the information and I can put a direct link to the contact

form on my website, which then pulls them into my system when

they email me. So I would definitely recommend that as a

very easy, super simple thing you can do right away to just

get a little breathing room, and you're not having to battle all

of the inboxes

Yes, that's a wise decision is being able to

tell people where it's best to contact you, you can also put in

I think my direct message responder for Facebook even

tells people like if you're contacting me, after a certain

hour, I don't check messages after five o'clock, I'll return

your message the next day. I mean, it just lets people know

that you're conscientious but you're also a human being. And

what to expect, I think is that you're setting a good

expectation with those responders. And if for those of

you who want to take that one step further, Facebook and some

of the other social media channels that have direct

messaging, also have what are called chat bots, where you can

even choreograph things further, like really common questions,

you can put responses into the automations, that will the

person can choose a question that they would like a response

to, and then you set up the response ahead of time. And then

they can choose that question. And it'll give them the

response. And then their next step. So sometimes that helps

further the conversation. And I do say sometimes, because I've

found in practice, what happens is when you even when you set

those things up so that every question gets answered,

customers will still call and ask you the question. I don't

know if it's like, do they want to see if your answer matches

the direct message answer or what, but they'll tend to ask

you again anyway. But I think it's a good reiteration of it.

So I like that thought. But I also know, as a consumer, I

don't typically click on those. I want to talk to somebody and

actually hear the answer from them. Maybe it's my generation,

or maybe it's just me, but

I'm not brave enough to set those up yet for

my business, I feel like I would really need to like go through

and test it out. I'm just not brave enough yet. I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of how to respond. I would love to hear from other

people, though, that are running animal based businesses out

there. If they use that or not, it'd be really fun to hear how

that's working for them. So if anybody's using the what did you

call it the bot, the response bot,

their chat bot chat bot chatbots. And some of

them come directly with the social media for a long time I

actually used on my website, one that is a separate from social

media. It's called drift. And it was it sets up you know, the

little thing you get at the lower right hand corner of your

website that says, Do you have a question technician here or live

chat with somebody now chat now? Yes, and the majority of the

time, you know, small businesses, we can't stalk

people to respond to those chats in live form. But what they will

do is you can choreograph them, I call it choreographing, but a

scripting is probably a better word, you can script a bunch of

responses back to people and drift was really nice. I

actually made clients with drift it several of them as a matter

of fact found that incredibly useful. But I took it off of the

newest version of my website, because I had a little bit

better response system through keep because I had drifted

before I had keep. So drift is another one that you can take a

look at and understand what a chatbot is a little bit better.

That's a little bit more advanced automation. I know for

this episode, we're trying to keep it super simple. But

automation is one of those things that just grows, the more

you use it. So take baby steps don't feel like you have to jump

right into the deep end of the pool. But definitely take those

first baby steps because it'll make your life easier. And then

as you take the baby steps, things will keep growing out.

Are we ready to move on to billing? Let's talk about some

money.

We are let's talk about billing, money, money

money. So one of the things that I see in my

clients is that this is kind of a double threat benefit to

business owners. So one is saving time. So billing in and

of itself like I have a service oriented business and billing

honestly, doesn't take me long because I've got quite a few

automation setup for it, but I maybe spend five to 10 minutes a

month on it. But I have worked for small businesses where this

is something that people work on for days is getting the monthly

billing taken care of and getting it sent out and that has

not been And last on software companies. So a lot of software

companies have set up automations, to be able to help

you process your billing faster. And with you having less hands

on, right, because a lot of times billing, it doesn't change

a lot like the same client gets billed the same amount every

month on the same date. And your clients, it's better if they get

their invoices on time. I know for me, as a consumer, if

somebody bills me at a different date, sometimes it gets lost

because I pay bills on a very certain date. And if I don't

have them all in front of me at that date, having automated

invoicing really, really helps because it saves you from having

to sit down and do those invoices by yourself having an

automatic statement system is super beneficial as well. So I

am not an accounting software guru, and I don't think Cara is

either. So one of the things that I would suggest the first

thing you do if you want to do a more automation in your billing

is talk to your accountant and ask them how can I make this

process easier for my business? How can I set this up so that

things do things behind the scenes without me having to

touch them. So that is an important thing. Tool wise, if

you're using key keep does have a billing system and an

invoicing system attached that allows you to set up automations

around invoices and product purchases. So that really helps

it actually helps with product follow up if somebody buys

something from you. And it's a very specific product that you

set up, then keep will be able to send out you know, follow up

emails, review emails, all kinds of things that need to come

after that for marketing, customer service, and continued

purchases, and so on. So that all helps as well. Another thing

that really helps when automating your billing is going

ahead and entering ahead the information into your accounting

system for the products and services that you have the

prices that you have slated the information about each thing, so

it looks pretty on the invoice and then having them there. So

they can be chosen most of the accounting software allows you

to do it like out of a drop down menu, or if you type a couple of

letters, whatever it is, will pop up and fill in the

appropriate items. So that all helps. So taking a few hours to

just sit down and really get your accounting software set up.

So it can really benefit you timewise is important and

setting up your invoicing, the more automated you can make that

invoicing, the better a lot of the software that is available

now offers a reoccurring payment system. So if you have the same

client that you're billing every single month for the same

amount, then you can set that up as a recurring bill. And this is

where the psychology starts to come into play. Because if you

have a little bit of trouble collecting money, and I'm going

to be honest with you, there's a lot more of you out there that

have trouble collecting money than there are that don't. So a

lot of small business owners really struggle with pushing the

button to send on an invoice. It's sometimes it feels a little

weird for people, if they have some residual stuff leftover

from their childhood or other experiences around money. This

is a place like follow up where we can start to feel some polls

internally that don't have anything to do with our business

and may stop us from doing things that are beneficial for

our business. So the automations, in addition to the

fact that they save us time, they also keep a square because

they take our personal stuff out of the equation, because the

computer just like it doesn't care about what time it works.

It could care less that I'm worried because Sally's having

family problems this month, and I know it and it's pressing send

on Sally's invoice, I still have a business to run no matter

what's going on out there in the world. So automating those

things is super beneficial to your business. Another thing

that you can do is and this is not necessarily a technical

automation, but one of the biggest benefits I had for my

business was when I stopped random invoicing and started

doing like packages with people where I could get them to pay

ahead maybe do three months of a payment at a time or six months

at a time and I got a good enough reputation with my

clients that they're pretty comfortable that we're still

going to be working together in three to six months that they

would go ahead and pay ahead and I offered a small discount for

that so that I didn't have to worry about it. So you can also

make that little alteration in your business if it works for

you there.

Every small business owner wants to gain traction in their

marketing. After three decades of working with small business

owners just like you I have developed what I call my four by

four marketing method in just 119 In this session, you'll

discover the four major focus areas of a successful marketing

plan. And together we'll uncover where your business is getting

stuck, you'll leave the session with an action plan of next

steps that engage your revenue engine dropped by

bemorebusiness.com To request your session today, that's

Bemorebusiness.com. See you there.

You know, you were talking about the money

issue and issues around hitting the send button. Oh, another

element of that, that I hear a lot when I'm working with other

photographers, but also that I experienced in the early days of

my business was the issue of selective pricing depends, you

know, you had that area where you were feeling like maybe

someone couldn't afford your services. So you were offering

random discounts, and then trying to keep up with what you

offered one person versus what you were charging another

person. So that's another area where it kind of cleans all of

that up, if you can go in and set up your common invoices, the

things that you commonly invoice for. So for me, I do a set

retainer for every client that I work with. And it's the same

amount, I can set that up, and I don't have to think about it,

and then I know what I've sent, I can just send it, send it send

it when I need to. So even if you're not at a place where

you're ready to set up automated billing, even just setting up

those common line items that you bill for on a regular basis with

the prices that you want to charge and then get in the habit

of just creating those invoices and sending them because it's

first of all, it's easier for you, you've already set up your

line items, your common things that you invoice for either

products or services, it's already done for you, it's ready

to go. And you've just got to enter your client and send it

on. I mean, you don't even have to go to the the level that Kim

was talking about setting up the automated billing, I mean, just

literally getting that into a system so that you can click

instead of having to recreate it. I mean, there was a time

when I was doing invoices, and I was having to every single

invoice, check my pricing, write a description of the item and

send it out and it got to where it was it was never consistent.

So just adding that consistency is so empowering. And it gives

you I don't know, it kind of helps with that issue around

having anxiety around hitting the send button.

Absolutely. And it keeps you more honest.

Because if you change the price, you have to think about changing

the price. And you look at it and you say should I really do

that? Sure. Is that that important for me to change.

That's what I said the price was going to be so at least it's a

reminder there to keep you focused. And definitely just as

a side note, if you have difficulties with money in your

business, like collecting money invoicing, people value, those

kinds of things, get some help with that, because honestly,

life is too short to be stressing over that. So

definitely reach out to a coach or a gestalt toast or somebody

to kind of help you move past that, because it's a painful

thing. I feel Yeah, because I've been there. So yeah. All right,

appointments. Appointments are the next one. And this was of

all of the things we've talked about today, like automating the

emails was great, but I type 100 words a minute, and I don't have

any trouble writing things. So that was a nice thing to happen

for me and it was definitely it's helpful now automating the

billing stuff really helped me with a lot of different stuff,

but I'm going to tell you the biggest and the most dramatic

change in my business as far as administrative time was creating

automations around my appointments because I have a

very busy calendar if you ever look at it, it's a nightmare.

It's beautiful because it's rainbow colored but it has I

have lots of different appointments I have tons of

commitments my calendar is dictates my entire life I cannot

live without it in a single day and then being able to find time

for people and a great deal the reason why my calendar so busy

is a great deal of my time is spent working with clients over

zoom or in person or teaching classes and so there's all of

this like scheduling that has to happen and when I was doing it

before it was either texts phone calls emails in order to you

know, are you available next week? We Yes, I'm available next

week. Here's the time slots that I have Okay, I'll take this time

slot will no sorry, that doesn't go to work. Because that's time

so I got taken by somebody else who just emailed me so I can't

do that one anymore. This is what I have left. What do you

have left? Nothing in there. Can we go to the next week? Okay,

no, that's not going to work. My project deadlines this I have to

see you before then. And it is just hours and hours and hours

of my life got sucked away into these inane conversations about

scheduling something on my calendar, and it just was

ridiculous. And my customers were angry with me, oh, I can't

ever get an appointment with you or and things got dropped. I

mean, it was just a mess. It was a hot mess. So I started looking

for a calendar scheduler A while back, I mean long years ago, and

I've been through a bunch of different ones over Over the

years, and the one that I finally settled on is called

schedule once and I can sing its praises and kind of like keep

once you have it set up, it's like it this one keep it

requires a little bit of upkeep, but schedule once once you have

it set up, it really runs without you having to worry

about it, the setup is a little bit challenging. But once it's

set up, it's so detailed, I can like dictate down certain types

of appointments to certain hours of the day, I can set up intake

forms, so I no longer have to collect that information. When

people make the appointment, it will let me charge people when

they make the appointment. So if somebody signs up for one of my

coaching packages, they will pay for it and then put their

coaching times on my calendar, it's like automatically done,

and it just shows up on my Google calendar. And when I sit

down to work in the morning, I look at who am I going to be

speaking with today, and I can prep for that. And then I can

open up my key folder, look at who I'm going to be talking to

see my notes, see their notes, and boom, I'm just I'm

organized. It organizes me in a way that no other thing

organizes me and my business. So honestly, do yourself a huge

favor. If you do appointments, Discovery calls anything like

this, having an appointment scheduler is absolutely crucial.

Do you use one Kara? I don't think you do. Do you

know. So that's why I wanted this on our

agenda today to talk about because I've been thinking about

adding one to my current process, because that whole

thing you were talking about the beginning where you're going

back and forth with dates, and then another client takes a

date. And then you're back and forth. Again, trying to confirm

dates, I really liked that idea. And I've been wondering how to

fit that into the type of work that I do. And just listening to

you talk, I can already see some ways that I can probably be

scheduling, viewing and ordering appointments to my creative

consoles, that sort of thing. And I can get some of those

things on the calendar and take away some of that back and

forth, back and forth. And I think that it's not just that

piece of it isn't just about freeing up your life and your

business and giving you a little more organization. But it also

is more professional for your clients. They don't have to go

back and forth with you. Because that's taking time out of their

day and you're becoming while you're doing a service for them,

it can become a little daunting for them and a little It's like

another step to confirm them if that makes sense more work they

have to do to be in your system and to be working with you. So

I've been thinking about that. And I've was kind of hoping you

would share what you use that you love. So I'm excited that

you've dropped that I think you said it was called schedule one

schedule

one. There are some other options out there

that work for businesses acuity is another one that my clients

will use that if I have the option to choose what we use.

It's going to be scheduled once because I know it inside and

out. But acuity is one. So calendaring options for your

business, like these appointments schedule are things

they really need to be chosen based upon what it is that you

need, you have to look at your business in order to determine

you know, how much do you want to invest in in a scheduling

software? And how complex does it need to be. So let me dive

into that just a little bit for your edification and for our

audience. So there's a software program out it's called

Calendly. And oh, Adobe bought it. That was it. So it that is

just a really recent development in this episode, which we're

taping on May 19 of 2022, just to let you know where you're

going to be listening to it in the future. But that was just

announced like this last week that Adobe purchased it. So I'm

sure the name of it's going to change and it's going to alter,

but as of this moment in time, you can get it as Calendly. And

if all you need is you have a business flow that you need to

be able to set up an exploratory call with people Calendly works

really, really well. If you need a little bit more than that they

do have a paid version, I think that that's their free version,

you can do like one appointment. And oftentimes for my coaches

who typically don't book their coaching sessions based on the

auto scheduling, they will do those on that discovery call. So

somebody calls in gets a gets information about it. And then

they book the sessions and look at their calendar right there.

And when you're on the phone, that process goes a little

easier, but a lot of people I'm not always available by phone,

so people need to be able to get to me another way. So Calendly

would be like a starter option. If you don't need a lot of

latitude and you just need to book one appointment it's a

great place to step into this acuity was designed more for

salons massage therapists, people who maybe have more than

one person working in their business like a dog groomer

acuity would be really good for because you can set up multiple

calendars for the employees in your office and people can book

appointments with this very specific person. So acuity works

really well for that I liked acuity. And I've set it up for

several clients, I thought it went really smoothly, but I

preferred schedule once and a couple of the reasons I

preferred it is because one it integrates with keep so since

keep is my CRM and my scheduling is so connected to my CRM keep,

by the way does have a scheduling tool in it, it just

doesn't have a lot of options. Like you can't, you can say when

appointments are available, but one of my complaints about it is

I don't want to take same day coaching calls, I just don't

this scheduler and keep will schedule the same day call. So

if you went to my calendar, and I have free time this afternoon

available on my calendar, it will book the call. Now I can

get around that by marking my day out first thing in the

morning. But I'm lazy and don't want to do that. So I like to

schedule a once. Because schedule, once I can tell it,

this type of meeting, I will only take that meeting, they

have to be 24 hours ahead of time, or 48. Or it would be to

book it out a week. It also keeps from people booking out

too far ahead, I travel a lot, I have impromptu life, I don't

want people book an appointment six months from now, because

frankly, I don't know what I'm doing six months from now. So I

want to cut it off at a certain date schedule once has the

capability for you to be able to really really define your time

that you want to work very tightly. And then it also lets

you set up different calendar or different scheduling options for

different groups of people. So I have several centers of

influence that I work with that I do consulting services for

their people, and I offer them special times and special rates

and and things that are very different from somebody that

would come in in a different like singular way. So I have to

have different calendars available for them. And schedule

ones offers me that latitude as well. Schedule once costs $15 a

month. And I would say it saves me six $800 a month in time. I

mean, it's the amount of time I spend on calendar stuff. It's

minuscule compared to what it once was because I adopted using

that software that's

really interesting. And you know, I've

mentioned 17 hats on here a couple of times, that's, you

know, that's a CRM for photographers. And they have a

scheduling option as well. And I am going to dig into it a little

bit since I'm already using 17 hats to manage my clients. But I

haven't set it up yet. So I'm interested to see. And it's just

a great example that you may have providers that you're using

for one aspect of your business that have features that you

didn't even know that they have. So if you've got a website

hosting program or something like go look and see what

they've added and what they've used, because you may not need

to pick up another monthly service charge, if you know what

I mean. Like I can't tell you how many times I thought I

needed something went to subscribe to it, and then

realize that something I already am subscribing to and I'm

already paying for has that function or that feature, I just

need to go look at it. And you don't always get updates when

they add new things. Or maybe when I started using the

program, I didn't need it for that reason I needed something

else from it. And I never went looked at the other stuff. So

definitely recommend look at what you're already paying for,

see what services they have and how you can add those to your

business before going out and getting something new. So that

was such a good, this was a really good conversation for me

because I'm at a place where I'm ready to take even a second

level of automation. So this has been very timely. And I hope

it's been very timely for our listeners as well as we're all

probably in our spring crazy season. All right. So are we

done for today? Kim, is there anything else we want to add?

Nope,

I'm good. Go automate stuff, folks. And maybe

what your time save is is to sit in the hammock with a margarita

and just enjoy.

That's right. All this automation will give us

more Margarita time I like it. So that's it for us today. We

hope that we've given you three things you can do right now to

add just give yourself a little breathing room in your business.

Number one, think about your follow ups and your responses.

There's a ton of stuff that you can do there to free up some

time automate your billing is the second thing that we

mentioned. And then finally, the third one is around appointments

and scheduling. So we hope you enjoyed this. We would love to

hear from you guys. If you use any of the programs that we

mentioned today. Let us know what you think about them what

you liked what you didn't like, if you are doing something

really amazing in your business that is automating and freeing

up time for you. We would love to hear about that. So hop over

to our social media channels at The Business Animal on Instagram

and Facebook or shoot us an email. We'd love to hear from

you guys. Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Business

Animal. Be sure to subscribe so you will never miss an episode.

And if you learned something today, leave us a review. To

learn more. Find us at the business animal.com We'd love to

hear from you. Until next time, keep you Business well trained