Welcome to Six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where we explore strategies and insights to elevate your business. Today, we're joined by the incredible Shelly Criswell from Criswell Solutions, specializing in strategic mapping and serving as a Director of Operations for small businesses aiming to scale.

Main Talking Points:

Defining Systems:

- Shelly simplifies the concept of systems, emphasizing their repetitive nature. Whether it's a podcast, social media, or blog posts, anything done routinely requires a system.

- Highlighting the rule of three: If a task involves three steps and is repeated more than three times, it's time to create a system.

The Power of SOPs:

- Shelly underscores the importance of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), especially for those just starting. SOPs become indispensable when onboarding team members, ensuring a seamless transition.

- Regular SOP reviews prevent outdated processes and contribute to a well-organized business.

Learning from Mistakes:

- Shelly views mistakes as indicators of gaps in systems. Each error offers an opportunity to enhance and refine existing processes.

- Encourages viewing mistakes as learning experiences and embracing them for continuous improvement.

Favorite Tech Tools:

- Advocating for simplicity, Shelly recommends Google Docs for creating a centralized database of SOPs. This ensures easy access and avoids the hassle of searching through folders.

- Project management tools like Trello can streamline processes, providing visibility into the production pipeline.

Strategies for Efficiency:

- Shelly offers services ranging from retainer-based Director of Operations support to fractional assistance. Her VIP tech days allow for focused, intensive work on a client's tech needs.

- Strategic planning is a key service, where Shelly maps out projects for a year, aligning with business priorities and goals.

Conclusion:

As we wrap up this insightful episode, if you're seeking to unlock operational efficiency and scale your business, Shelly Criswell is here to guide you. Visit Shelly's Website for more information and take the first step toward a streamlined, growth-oriented business.

Helpful Links:

Criswell Solutions

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Six Figure Business Coaching 

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Welcome to the six figure business mastery podcast, where every week,

Kirsten and Jeannie dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation, mindset to video marketing.

They've got you covered tune in for expert guest interviews on all things,

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So get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

Welcome everyone to the podcast.

We're so grateful that you chose to spend a little time with us today.

And I'm really excited to introduce you to our amazing guest.

Her name is Shelly Criswell from Criswell Solutions.

She offers strategic mapping and she is the director of operations

and she does support small business owners looking to scale.

And today we're going to talk about operational efficiency.

So we are thrilled to have you Shelly.

Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

We are such nerds.

So we're really excited about this topic.

I know for a lot of business owners, you want to put your head in the sand

when you think about standard operating procedures or KPIs or all of those things.

It seems so corporate.

But the reality is, if you really want to grow your business.

You have to have some structure, so I'm excited to have some of the

things that you recommend and share with your clients on how to better

establish their business for growth.

Yes, I agree 100%.

You cannot scale without systems.

What is a system?

And that sounds like a very basic question, but what is a system and then

what are some of your favorite ones?

Yeah, I think a system could be a few things.

It's definitely something that you do on repeat that you can

systematize and do it over and over.

So if you have a podcast that you put out once a week, you

would have a system for that.

If social media, blog posts, anything you do on repeat definitely needs

a system so that it's repeatable.

You could hire someone to jump in and do it.

For you, you would have SOPs.

Those are systems as well.

And.

Anything that you could have a team member come in and do behind you on repeat.

I love that.

Sometimes there's systems within systems.

You said the podcast and I'm thinking, yeah, but it's booking the podcast.

It's being on a podcast.

It's all so much.

So many things.

Yeah.

One little thing that I heard one time that really impressed me and I don't

know who said it was the rule of three.

So if you do something that has three steps and you end up doing

that thing more than three times.

Times you need to create a system for it.

And I thought that was brilliant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I find myself doing that.

I'll do it once.

I'm like, Hey, this is, I might not do this again.

And then I'll do it again.

And I'm like, wait a minute.

The third time, let me stop and make a system.

I feel like I was doing systems before there were systems.

Like I just had checklists and I was obsessed with, so

I wouldn't forget something.

I just got to do all these different little steps.

So now we have a formal word for it.

Systems.

Yes.

What are some of the ones that you really enjoy and you think are really

beneficial to a lot of business owners?

I think that everyone needs to have SOPs, even if you're first starting

out, especially if you're first starting out, they're very important so that

you're ready to bring on team members.

You don't have to scramble and, oh gosh, let me make the SOPs.

So if you just start from the beginning making SOPs, I think

those are very important.

And measuring your Statistics, your metrics, your KPIs, so

that, how are you growing?

What is making you grow?

How can you put more effort into that?

And social media content creation, I think is very important also.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think it's so funny because I think Jeannie broke

it down to the easiest thing.

It's really a checklist, right?

When we talk about these systems and they can be really advanced and very, very

complicated depending on what you need.

But I think the easiest way to start is just to start a checklist.

And, um, I know that's how we started and, um, with Jeannie's

marketing agency, when she started outsourcing overseas, she would give

the virtual assistant a checklist.

This is all the steps you do when we're creating a website.

This is all the steps that you're doing when you're setting up social.

Media accounts for people, because that's back in the day

when fan pages first came out.

LinkedIn was just on the scene, but what we realized was having those checklists

and then turning it into more of a project or a system of putting it into

a project management software was huge.

And one of the things that very much surprised us is when we started helping

our clients with their marketing and pairing them with a marketing virtual

assistant, we provided the SOPs.

And it was so crazy for us to have so many people say, you know, I've heard

about systems, I heard about processes.

I just didn't know, I didn't know where to start.

I didn't know what to do.

And now that I've seen all of your YouTube production and social media

and email marketing, now I'm able to take this structure and create

SOPs and other parts of my business.

So I think that's the biggest thing is people, we overthink it.

So if someone was going to ask you where to start, would you could just

tell them to start with a checklist of writing things each step down?

Is that what you would tell them?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Just get a Google Doc and just start writing your steps down.

I also like to encourage people to video like with loom or something

to video what they're doing and add those into the steps because some

people might be visual learners.

Some people might need to hear it or see it written.

Um, and so if you have all the different Forms of learning on your SOP.

That could be helpful too, but yeah, keep it very simple.

Step one, open this software.

Step two, log in, you can find the log in here and don't assume anyone knows

or anything and make it step by step.

I think we're going to talk about this as well, but usually when we realize.

We haven't done a good job, like we've left out a step is when someone gets to

a point where they're like, I'm going to the next step and it isn't working.

And you're like, oh, that's because I forgot to tell you to do this, right?

So nobody creates their SOPs.

It's not one and done.

It's usually you do it your best of your ability.

And then once someone's worked through it, usually we try to

work through it a couple of times ourselves and have our team do it.

Before we delegated onto the interns, so it really is understanding that it's not

going to be perfect right off the bat.

It just takes time to, to get it, make sure every little step is documented.

So don't beat yourself up over that.

Yeah, yeah.

And I like to review.

So, please, like, once a year as well, because you'll make changes

and forget to update the SOP and then you go back through and you're like,

oh, we don't even do that anymore.

Oh yeah.

And plus with marketing, it's constantly changing, evolving when you have new

types of posts or you can have a new platform or we've added podcasts to

our SOPs, but yeah, ever changing world with SOPs, but, and it's funny, I think

people don't realize they need them.

Cause I don't know if they understand, didn't understand what they were.

So we're grateful that you're here to talk about it and to educate people.

The other thing I was thinking was when you were talking about.

You need to have them in place in order to hire people to do some of

the tasks, and that's what we find.

A lot of people who have tried to hire, like, a virtual assistant and failed

was because they spent so much time finding the right person, they forgot

what's gonna happen once they hire them.

They didn't have the plan.

Like, great, I'm here, what do I do?

Oh, shoot, now I gotta spend all this time training them.

So, SOPs can take care of a lot of that for you.

Yeah, yeah, I know so many people bring on, we bring on a

team member to lessen your load.

And then, yeah, your load is doubled because now you're having to train them.

And if it's very unorganized too, then that new team member is going to be like.

But you're setting them up for failure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

He's ever had a job has worked for that person.

Maybe so you don't want to be that person and we get that.

And so it really is about having a process to onboard them and then having

a process to train them and then having the structure for them to check off

the things that they're doing so that you can quickly look and see what's

been done and not have to constantly be back and forth and communication.

I think that's the other thing is.

That eats up a lot of time is when you're constantly have to talk to

someone, not that we don't want to talk to our team members, but if it can be

done through the SOP and the project management software, why would we ever

waste or not waste, but spend so much time on that type of communication?

Yeah, a hundred percent agree.

Yeah.

And Kirsten touched on this mistakes.

Mistakes can happen in your business, but how can that

highlight where there are gaps?

That need to be handled.

Yeah.

I think every mistake is because there's a gap.

Here's a good example.

You send out an email and you don't do a test email, and then you have the the

wonderful first name in the email instead,

Yeah.

I think that's happened to all of us.

So there's a gap.

You didn't do a test email.

If you had sent a test email, you would've seen it.

And then.

You're moving forward, you always send a test email.

Yeah.

I just like to look at mistakes as learning experiences and where's

there the gap in the system?

What can I add to a checklist and move on and don't, don't

beat yourself up for the mistake.

And yeah, just look at it as a learning experience or growth opportunity.

Yeah.

And I think it's funny because I think that.

We talk about this a lot.

Once you start thinking about things in terms of SEO, search engine optimization,

once you have that in your head, you can't get it out of your head.

Like, you always have that SEO concept of how you think about things.

I think it's the same thing with SOPs.

When you really start to use them, because it makes it just so easy

to get things done, a lot of times, And we're like maxed out, right?

When we don't have time to think about other things and you think

about people who wear like a uniform, like the jeans and the hoodie mark

Facebook guy, whatever, but when you think about people who just are really

busy making a lot of decisions, just wears them down and it drains them.

So by having your structure allows you.

To do things that need to get done without a lot of brain power,

like, Oh, where's how do I do that?

So if it's documented, it just, it saves you all of that wasted

mental energy of recreating the wheel every time you do something.

And I think that's, that was really, really powerful for us to understand.

Yeah, I love that, especially if it's something you only do once a month,

like metrics or KPIs or something, and then you go to do it and you're

like, how did I do that last time?

Yeah, so right.

Yeah, that's what I found with the, like you said, things that you do maybe once

a month or once every two months or once every six months, it was like, I did it

really well, but I don't remember how.

Yeah, been there, done that.

Yeah, so definitely, I like to bust out my SOP for things like that and thank myself.

I thank my past self.

Past self, you were so smart, you did a good job.

I love that.

And it's true, like when you, It sounds so silly but it's so awesome.

It's like giving yourself credit for the fact that you took a breath and you

documented a process and then when you needed to do it again you just pulled

out the process and you were able to go through it quickly and efficiently.

So I think that is something people should celebrate.

Yeah and you don't want to slow down to have to make SOP.

Who wants to do that?

But it will save you time in the long run and I worked on a team Once

that we spent two hours a week was allocated to me to go through the S.

O.

P.

S.

Do we need to create any do we need to edit any things like that?

And that really helped to actually allocate time to S.

O.

P.

S.

Yeah, and it's cool.

We live in a tech time, so there's all kinds of tech tools that can help you.

Right?

And so what are some of your favorite tech tools to help business

owners start to really create S.

O.

P.

S.

And not just create them, but to actually use them.

Yeah, I like to keep it simple.

Google Docs and you can create a database.

in the Google sheet or air table, but you can just create like a database

of all of your docs with links and separate it out into categories.

So you can easily, you don't have to keep scrolling in that Google drive folder.

Where's that SOP.

You just go to it in the Google sheet, click the link, open it and off you go.

Also in a project management tool, you could.

Link to the SOP and if you have the podcast parent task and all the subtasks,

you can have the SOP linked in the parent task and it's always right there as well.

Yeah.

So we use Trello.

I think over the years we've used a lot of different project management software.

And Eugenie started off with Basecamp, I think back in the day.

And then we loved Asana.

But when we decided to actually share our SOPs with our clients back then, one,

Asana didn't allow us to share things.

So Trello did.

So we ended up moving to Trello.

And this is going to sound really, it's not going to make me look so good.

When Jeannie was creating SOPs, like I have to have things in a certain way.

So I will actually follow it.

So one of the things we talked a lot about.

It's a lot of entrepreneurs are probably more like me, like ADD,

ADHD, and like, definitely not always tech savvy and always moving

like a hundred miles an hour.

So when we put together, um, our SOPs in Trello, we would always

come back and ask ourself, is this the easiest way to do this?

That's the simplest way to understand how to do this.

Is this a way that people are going to use for us?

We have almost everything documented each for us.

Each video has a video production card for YouTube.

And every is in that card templates.

Keep copying it for each video or, or realizing, like you said, inside of

the card that has all the steps for production, there's links to different

videos or links to different resources that they need right there in that card.

So it's always at everyone's fingertips when they need it.

So that I think project management software is something that could just,

you know, make it easier for people who are really busy, maybe not tech savvy.

To just have a system that works and you can see exactly where

everything is on board is where it is in the production process.

So that was helpful for me.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

You got to do what works best for you and what is the easiest way for you

and definitely you don't want to be clicking around looking for things and

to have it right there makes it so easy.

So I'm glad that you found something that works for you.

And I think that's so important just because I like something done

something a certain way doesn't necessarily work for you and to always.

Try different things and see what works best.

Kirsten was our, our baseline.

If it didn't make sense for her or she couldn't find it, we had to do it.

We had to find a better way.

We dumb it down.

Like a piece for dummies.

No, but yeah, I think that again, just having that brain that's

working a hundred miles an hour as an entrepreneur and having everything

else that's on your list, it's gotta be something that is simple to use.

And I know like when we switched over.

To Trello, I know you would have much rather stayed with Asana

because you really enjoyed it.

You had your systems in there.

Sometimes the change, you have to make changes to make things work.

And we do have a lot of clients that will come on and say, I use Asana or I

use ClickUp or I use these other things.

And usually what we tell them is that your virtual assistant, like, we've

trained them, they've been in our paid internships, so they have learned all

of our SOPs and they're all in Trello.

So why don't you just Trello is free.

Copy it and work through your first five or six videos with your virtual

assistant in Trello using our SOPs, and then build that relationship

with your virtual assistant.

And then you guys talk about how you want to move it to Clickup or to Asana,

like how do you wanna move it over there?

So it's more in line with your SOPs and how you do things.

It's always easy to take what someone else has done and

then we work it to a way that.

Fits you.

Yeah, exactly.

I love that.

So, Chris, Shelley, do you wanna tell us a little bit about how you

work with your clients in helping them become more efficient and take

advantage of good systems and processes?

Yeah, so a few different ways I can either come on on a retainer

basis as a DOO or fractional.

And you can hire me just to come in and look at your systems and give

you strategies, or I can come in and actually work on your systems.

I also offer VIP tech days where I can come in and for an entire day.

You have me for 8 hours to come in and.

Do whatever you need to do for your tech for your business.

And I also do strategic planning.

It is where I go in and look at your business and your priorities and

your goals and map out projects for a year broken down into quarters.

So I can also do that as well.

Excellent.

So two quick questions on that.

One, if somebody doesn't have a system in process, do you still want

to work with them to set this up?

Yes, I loved it.

I'm actually working with a client right now and there are

zero systems and processes.

I said, Oh, we got to get this cleaned up.

Excellent.

And the other one is when you say come in, do you work virtually with people or do

you actually see them in person or both?

Oh, that's a good question.

Yeah, it's just virtually.

Okay.

Yeah.

So let's say someone doesn't have any structure right now and they know that

they need it because they know they want to take the business to the next level.

The first step is you actually just have a conversation with them, right?

You find out what their need is and what their expectation is.

And before you actually have that VIP day with them, you guys

actually put together a strategy.

So that you guys know what you want to accomplish or attempt

to accomplish in that day.

So if someone, do you have a free consultation where you can talk to

someone first to find out if it's a good fit for you and if you're a good fit for

them, is that something you do as well?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

You can book a consult call and we can just chat about your needs.

What I offer, would we be a good fit?

And then.

If you did decide to go through the V.

I.

P.

day, then we would have a strategy call after that and actually map out the day.

I would get to know you and your business, especially if you didn't

have anything really set up.

I would learn.

How good are you at tech?

Do you need to?

Do you need to dumb it down?

I'm just kidding.

You want the Kirsten version or the version, right?

Because I'm not building it for me.

I'm building it for the client.

So I need to know how tech savvy are they?

Do they need to have something super simple or do they really

want it built out intricately?

Yeah, I would just get to know you make a strategy and then your

VIP day is about a week later.

And then I work on your business for, and I can get a lot done in eight hours.

Also build funnels for people, correct?

Yes, I'm a certified funnel pro, love funnels.

I love all the strategy that goes behind it.

And it can be something super simple, like a lead magnet funnel

that just goes to your, an email welcome sequence or something like a

webinar funnel or evergreen webinar funnel or something like that.

Something very intricate as well.

And I think a lot of people don't think about it, but a funnel is a system.

It is, that must be why I love it.

Yeah, and I know earlier we were talking with you about funnels and

actually mapping out the funnel.

So you can, because I feel like that's an SOP for a funnel, right?

You go in and you set up the funnel and there's a million different moving parts.

And if they do this, they go here.

If they do this, they go there.

And so it's nice to have a map of that funnel.

So when you go back into it a few months to test it to make sure it's working,

or if you need something changes and you want to change something, you

have that map of knowing exactly.

How that particular funnel is built because they can all

be a little bit different.

Yes.

I love looking at funnel maps and in my VIP day too, at the end, I will record a

video and show you exactly what I've done exactly how to there's maintenance to be

done or any upkeep or anything like that.

There's going to be video training so that you're not like, what the heck did she do?

I love that Shelly.

Do you want to say your website or the best way for people to reach out to you?

Yeah, it's just my website chriswellssolutions.

com and I'm also soon going to have a lead magnet as well.

It's going to be a quiz and it's going to ask you how tech savvy are you?

So hopefully I will.

I'll make Kirsten take that quiz.

Yeah.

It'll be not, no, it'll be like.

Technology.

What is that?

Shelly, when you get that finished, give it, reach out to us.

And we can put that also in the show notes for people who

might want to take that as well.

So that'd be perfect.

All right.

Thank you.

It's been so delightful to have you.

Thank you for coming on and talking about one of my favorite subjects,

checklists, which are actually systems and processes, and we're grateful that.

People like you are out there to help produce them for people who

don't want to do them themselves or don't know where to start.

So thank you so much for joining us.

Like her, since I will put your information in the show notes.

And thanks everyone for being here and we'll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to the Six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the Done For You and Done With You

program at themarketingvaadvantage.

com and take your business to the next level.