Welcome back to Lone Wolf Unleashed—the show for solopreneurs who want to slice through admin, systemize their workflow, and win back their afternoons, all without hiring a team or losing a dime. I’m Mike, your host and fellow lone wolf, and today we’re getting hands-on with mapping your business processes using BPMN, or Business Process Model Notation.

In this episode, we dive deep into how you can take the “Qualify Lead” process—from a new inquiry landing in your inbox, right through to scheduling a call or politely passing on the wrong fit—and map it visually, so you’re crystal clear on where your time goes. I’ll walk you through signing up for a free tool called Camunda Modeler, how to define every step and decision point, and where the sneaky time-sucking admin hides. Plus, we’ll talk about spotting easy automation wins—think lead forms zapping straight into your CRM—and how to plug in templates and procedures so your operation runs smooth, whether it’s just you or you’re outsourcing a sliver of work.

This episode isn’t just theory—I’ll show you how real solopreneurs have shifted from 10-hour days to clocking off early, all by mapping, systemizing, and automating the right way. If you’re ready to reclaim your time, boost your efficiency, and finally get your processes out of your head and into action, you’re in the right place.

Let’s get started and put those long admin-heavy afternoons behind you.

Hey, my name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed. And today in this

episode, we're going to be walking through a process

from start to end on how to map it and all the things that go

into identifying automation opportunities, your templates,

your procedures, how you do all those sorts of things. So you can start to

systemize, to free up time so you can have

afternoons off. So let's break it down

first, I need you to go and sign up for

a free account at comunda

IO so you can go to modler m o d e l e

r.comunda c a m u

n d a dot IO you can sign up there,

put in your email address. This is a task engine or a

workflow engine. Different SaaS platforms can use it, et cetera,

et cetera. But we're basically just going to be using this to model processes. You

can literally do it for free. The modeler component is free.

So you can get started here. Now, this is in a notation called

bpmn, that's Business Process Model Notation. And

basically what it does is it allows us to model out what a process

looks like with all the different elements, how things start,

what is happening within a process, the things that differ each task.

Now, because this is a podcast, it's hard to show you what this

looks like, but I do have a video on my website, which I'll point to

you towards the end of the episode that will walk you through

how I'm basically doing this with the assistance of

Claude. It will basically mean that you can generate your process

diagrams with just verbal commands, which

is very, very helpful because it means that you don't have to necessarily know how

to model up processes, but you can end up with a process

that demonstrates the type of thing that you're talking about and

need to document within your business. First things first, go to their

website, Modeler Commander IO log in, create an

account, and then create a project super straightforward.

And then you can create a brand new diagram and you

can call that whatever you want. Right now we're going to walk through a

process called Qualify Lead. So that is the first process off the

rank when you've got a new lead in, and I'm going to walk you through

now the types of elements and things to start to model up. What you need

to understand is being able to see a process that you

are involved in come to life before your eyes as you're having

a conversation with someone is mind blowing. It's even mind blowing today in

2025, I'm still working with teams. We're just like, wow, you can model

that up as we talk and all that sort of stuff. It's very, very useful

to be able to point to things and have discussions about

different aspects of the process while the

conversation is happening. That's a little different for you because you're a solo

operator. So I'm going to walk you through this now. The different elements,

how to make it look nice, and then I'm going to walk you

through how the prompt actually will work if you're going to be using

an AI engine to help you generate these models. Number one,

some technical stuff. BPMN is a notation,

but really the back end of BPMN is called xml. It just

uses XML code. So if we're able to generate XML code

and we're able to have all the shape, dimensions and

placements and all that sort of stuff baked in,

then we're able to generate code which will then show us

a visual diagram. The first thing that we need

to think about is who is doing the job. This is where our pool comes

in. It's like a really big rectangle. Think of a swimming pool. A

swimming pool has multiple lanes. So we have a pool and we

have swim lanes. The swim lanes demonstrate the role that's

involved. And the pool is just contains all of the lanes.

It's usually a higher order of magnitude than what the

roles sitting within are. So typically you'll have multiple

roles under a department or multiple departments under a division,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Your business is not that complicated. It's

literally going to be one lane. It's going to be you, because you are

the only one in your business doing stuff. Now, if you're outsourcing to

contractors or you're doing outsourcing of some kind,

like I do a little bit of. You might want to bring those people into

their own lanes instead of having it out to external parties and things like that.

But we will get there as we go along. The second thing is

we want to think about why this process is important. So before we start to

model anything up, we want to think about what is the result that

this process is going to be driving. Just keep that in the back of your

mind as you start to talk about the elements and the activities that

go into it. Right. So then we want to start at the beginning.

What kicks this process off? We're dealing with the qualify lead

process. And the qualify lead process kicks off when.

When a lead is received. So there's a start event. It's a thin

circle A circle with a thin outline. And

you're going to want to throw that on your page and call it Lead Received

and then you can put a task on there. So you want to think about

what do I do when I receive a lead? What's

the first activity I do? So the first activity in my example

here again video coming later, is

Log lead in CRM. So this is going to be

connected to a system. I use the database

icon, which is like a big cylinder. So call that CRM

or the name of the CRM that you're using. If you're using one,

you might have a really simple setup. It might just be in Google Sheets,

in which case just name it Google Sheets. Attached to

that might be a form that is used to collect that lead information.

And you use the data object, which looks like a

document with a folded corner. And you're gonna wanna put that on your model and

connect it to that task. So you'll have a task called Log Leading

CRM and it will be connected to the CRM of your

choice along with a data object called Lead

Intake Form. So now we're starting to paint up a picture about what this

task is. We're utilizing a form, the Lead Intake form,

and we're putting it into Google Sheets. When you

go to improve a process, you want to be able to see what

types of impacts and different changes might have on that process. So

it's really good at the moment to be building up a baseline so you

can start to paint that picture in your mind about what that is supposed to

look like. Also, if this is a new process you've never done before,

or a new process that you're trying to build and ideate, then

it's really, really helpful to think through the types of systems you're going to be

using, especially if you're going to be setting up automation.

This is pre automation, right? This is just understanding what the process is

supposed to be. So you don't have to build the

plane as you fly. This is just planning what the plane is going to

look like once it's in operation. Okay, so you're going to

have a circle, which is the start event. So lead

received into a task, which is a rectangle, log lead

in CRM, which is going to have an arrow, then to another

task called check Referral source. So you might

be really interested in knowing where your different leads are coming from, whether

they're coming from referrals. You might also then have another

task called Research Prospect, which

happens in a system. In this case LinkedIn Sales

Navigator. You might Google your contacts, you might search for them on

socials, you might do whatever you have to do to understand what you need to

understand about that lead or that prospect. And so you might

even come up with some sort of sheet there about what their profile

looks like. Or you might be utilizing your CRM to document what you

find, etc. Etc. So make sure that you attach your system to that

task as well. Then you might set up a call with them, or you

might try to reach out to them. When you finally get on that call, you'll

have another one, another task called Assess budget range.

So you might reach out to them, might be by DM or phone call. Do

you have budget for this type of thing? You know, if you're following the Bant

framework, what is it? Budget authority, need

timing. And you know, if all those things are true, you might be a good

fit. So assess the budget range. And then after assessing

the budget range, you're going to want to find the diamond.

And the diamond is what we call a gateway. There are different types of gateways.

One has an X in the middle. So the X is

basically saying that it's exclusive. So now we're going to split the

process. There's going to be two paths coming out of the X diamond

gateway, the exclusive gateway. And it can only follow

one or the other because it's exclusive. So it can only follow one path

or the other. And there's going to be two tasks that come out of this

gateway. Each arm is going to be labeled with the condition

on which the process will follow. Okay, so one of them will be

the budget is greater than $10,000. And then we have a

task after that called evaluate problem fit. The other arm coming

out of that gateway will be budget is too low. So there'll be a second

task that then happens if it follows that path, which is

just to politely decline. You know, I don't think we're a good fit.

Thanks for reaching out. Really appreciate your time, et cetera, et cetera.

Might just be in an email. If it is, then, you know, attached to that

will be another document called email templates.

It might be a script that you have to write, in which case there's another

artifact that you have to generate or think about just so it's

consistent. Now we have two branches of a process that are

coming out at the point of sending that decline

to a customer. You might want to have an end event. So it'll be a

circle, which is like the start event with a Thin one. The end event has

a thick border to it. So if we go back up to where the

budget was greater than $10,000, there's going to be another task now called

evaluate problem fit.

This is where you figure out whether the prospect really

has the problem that you solve. And if you don't solve for it,

then again it's going to be, oh well, you know, maybe there's some alternatives that

we can send them or maybe it's another decline or it's not a good fit.

Or it is a good fit. There's another gateway there, the problem fit.

It's a good fit. You know, we're branching off. Is it a good fit, is

it not? It is a good fit. Let's calculate their lead score. So maybe

there's a qualification scorecard of some kind of. Maybe they have really

high budget, maybe have really low budget that will affect their score,

things like that. So there's another artifact or a document there called the

qualification scorecard if they are qualified. So we've got

another gateway. It's another question. Could one condition be

true over another? It will determine what activity you're taking

on. You're going to have now whether the lead is

qualified or not. And if they are, you're going to schedule

a full, full discovery call. Then there is

another gateway which is within 24 hours or there's a

delayed response. It might be another one that sort of. You schedule it again

or you might go off to another process now which is conducting the

discovery session. Then you'll lead into another process with

its own set of activities called conduct discovery

session. Now, if any of these branches aren't right, it will just

mean that the lead is not qualified and that we just need to change the

status of that lead in our CRM and that's it. Now you can

see that you've got a process end to end and you're able to see the

tasks sort of laid out. So we're just going to go with the happy path

for now. So I'm going to reiterate. Okay. Start event done

by consultants or sitting in the consultant lane.

Log, lead and CRM using the lead intake form,

Check referral source, research prospect, assess,

budget range if they're a good fit, evaluate the problem

fit if they're a good fit. After that, calculate the lead score if

they're qualified, schedule a call if they're scheduled a

call, conduct the discovery session.

Now, how do we automate this? How do we make this really fast?

I can already see that there's Going to be some opportunities here for

systemization. What are those? First of all, we have

a log lead in CRM, there's a lead intake form. So we're

going to assume here that there's a form somewhere, maybe on a website

that someone has filled in to express

their interest or, you know, contact me,

et cetera, et cetera. So we have a form. What we want to be able

to do is we want that form to inject directly into the CRM. We

don't want to have to get an email with those contact details and then

have to pick up that email and then enter them into a spreadsheet

or a database. What we want is for the form

to go directly into the database. So that's

automation point number one. How do we make that happen? There's a lot of

solutions. CRM should be able to do this out of the box, basically.

But you might have a Google form that does this into a Google spreadsheet

that is totally appropriate for a small operation. So don't worry too

much about your software stack at this point. Then we're going to check the referral

source. The referral source might actually just be a field that you have on that

form. If we're going to check this referral source here, we might just

delete this one and you just go, well, we're just going to include that on

the lead intake form. Where did you hear about us? You know that

is the referral source, right? It's where did you hear about our

business? So you could totally just delete this task

off and fix it with that. Okay. Then

there's research prospect. So what details do you need

to research that prospect? First name, last name,

maybe a link to their account or LinkedIn account, things like

that. How do you research them? Do you research them at all or do you

wait for a discovery call to do that? How much information do you need to

be able to conduct and land a sale? I highly recommend that you

still do this. Although there is now a whole bunch of

AI stuff going on out there now through the use of

N8N or other automation platforms that allow you

to basically send an agent out on the net

to gather information. In this case, if we're looking

at LinkedIn profiles, then they might be able to

scrape some information off there to feed back into a

document or your CRM. I totally think that that's possible.

Definitely something to consider on that one. Now we're assessing the budget

range, so can this person afford your services? The

only real way to do that is to ask and you might actually have to

wait for the discovery call. Here again, this is just an example process.

So how are you finding that out? It might be initial phone call, it might

be an email exchange. How are you doing that? How do

we evaluate whether they're problem fit or not? You could combine these

tasks. You could ask do you have budget for this and is this

a problem that you're experiencing? Then you can move through. So you might

combine those tasks and go, well, we're going to hit that in one go. We're

not going to have two tasks for that. We're going to hit that

with one task and we're going to evaluate the prospect essentially

then we have a lead score. So based on those responses

that will go back into the CRM. That's fairly straightforward. And then you have a

schedule the discovery call. So how are we doing this? At

the moment there's no system allocated to that task. But you

might do it through something like calendly. The Microsoft Stack has

a way to book that. You might just do that manually. You might just do

that on the phone. If it's value adding and people are showing up to meetings

that you book manually versus sending out calendarly links, it might actually

be worth doing that. Have a think through your numbers.

Is it more effective to be doing this myself or

is it acceptable enough for me to be sending out a link that people can

book into? Okay, so definitely be thinking about that.

Have a think about your numbers as you're going through as well. Could this positively

affect the outcome of this process which is really to book a call? Right?

We really want to book a call in this process, but we

don't want to put that at significant risk. If sending

out the link is going to deteriorate people from

signing up or booking a meeting. There's definitely things

to consider there in terms of how successful the process is

versus how much time we're saving. Booking the call could be

a five minute job, but if you automate that

and you put it in the hands of the prospect and you don't book

five sales meetings a week, that's not actually worth that.

If your conversion rate's 20% now, just because you

saved 25 minutes in that week on those five calls, you've

lost a deal. Think about the numbers that you're going through to

make that worthwhile. Then there's, you know,

where it's not a good fit. How are we actually updating the records? You'll go

into your CRM, you'll update the record to, you know, not

qualified or not a good fit or not suitable, those sorts of

things. So now we have a process. We're thinking about how we're automating

that. We have a lead form. It's punched into your CRM

directly without you having to do it manually. How much time has that

saved you already? This month, this year, within the next 12 months?

How do we evaluate it? Might be an email that's sent straight away.

Once it hits your CRM, there might be an email that goes to the prospect.

Thanks for your inquiry. Would like to know more about xyz.

Can you give us more details about ABC that will

determine whether or not they have the budget, whether they're a good fit, that

sort of stuff, or it might be a phone call. You have to think through

what each one of these things looks like. So now we have a

process scope. We've got a little bit of a scope for

automation. We also now have identified some

artifacts that we can go away and standardize. Okay, so we have

email templates. If we're sending an email to

decline a lead because they don't fit,

write it up, save it, use it, reuse it

all the time. You can then pick up that when you go to automate it,

you can pick up the template. It's already done for. You don't have to write

it again. It's standardized and you know it works because you're already using it.

You're already doing it. There's also the systems that we're using. Okay, so you

standardized it. Where can I find the information for this, etc. Etc.

Just because you've decided not to hire today does not mean that tomorrow

you'll be in the same boat. Circumstances change over time

and having this stuff ready for people to be able to see and use

when they get hired into a business, I mean, it reduces training,

onboarding costs, etc. Drastically. You can

also then go through and start to document how you

do each thing. So how do I research this prospect?

What's the type of information, what's going through my head, all that sort of stuff.

Document that into a procedure. You're going to go, well,

Mike, I'm a solo operator. I know what I'm doing.

You might. A lot of people don't. And if you're one of those people

who doesn't do the same thing every time, don't be ashamed of that.

It's normal. That's why we document what we do, so you can check against the

procedure as you go. Am I doing What I said I was going

to do, am I doing this to the standard that I

would expect anyone else to do it to? Oh my goodness. I've got

so much time, I'm spending so much time on this stuff. I don't have

enough. Time is a common thing. And you rush through it and then you don't

get good results because you rush through it. Document it,

check your work against what you expect against that procedure

for those tasks.

So we've got several things. We have a process, we have tasks,

we have documents that we're going to template. Those tasks are going to have their

own procedure and those systems we're going to connect to each

other through the means of automation. You can see now that the process

map is not useless. It is scoped out for us. A

pathway, a roadmap for improvement so that we can start to free up

time. What are we going to do with that free time? I have customers that

have used that free time to make more sales. I have customers

that have used that free time to take more time off. The choice is

yours. As Captain Planet said, the power is yours. You can go

out and you can start to improve your processes,

systemize your business so you can start to free up that time to

take that time off or do whatever it is that you want to do with

it. What is the thing that you said that you were going to have

when you started your business? Was it freedom, flexibility,

all those sorts of things? Systemizing,

understanding how your processes work is going to

really make it so you can have those things. Without

this stuff. You can't do that. You're going to continue working the 60, 70 hour

weeks that you're doing now. You don't want to do that. I'm going to

leave you with that. On my website, Lonewolfunleashed.com

my first map. That's

Lonewolfunleashed.Com forward slash, my first

map. You can find the prompts that I use

with Claude. I'm using Claude. You can try it in ChatGPT. I

cannot guarantee results. What it does is you

can brainstorm a process with it. You can put in the prompt,

it will generate a BPMN diagram that you can then import

into Commander and you can start to use that. You can

move the things around on the screen, you can save them, you can

xyz. There's also a documentation part where you can type in,

you know, if you select a different task, you can type in

element documentation into each element. If you've got a

procedure or you Want to make some notes against things you can do that in

the system. And then all I would do is just take up, say

your document template. I'll create a Google Document or a Word

Doc with that title, save it in a

documentation folder and then do up your documentation in

there and then simply take the link about where that is saved

and put that in your documentation off your process map. So they are

connected. So you might have your process map open while you're running a

sale and you'll click on your thing and you can go to that document and

it's all linked through and you can sort of see how it all connects. There's

traceability there. So I highly recommend you check that out.

Go to Camunda, sign up for an account. It's free. I'm

not affiliated with them at all. It's just a free tool that you can use

to get started. If you want to just try out BPMN for the

first time without having to worry about accounts or anything like that. You can

literally do that at BPMN IO and you can

just create models there. They do not save to the cloud or anything. You have

to download models that you create there if that's the way you want to go.

But doing it through the Camunda account means they're just saved in the

cloud so you don't have to worry about that. That's a way you can get

started. I haven't covered off on other tools like Obsidian that I use

today. They are generated in a different way through JSON.

I'm hoping to create some resources for how to do that because

that's where I'm keeping all my maps and my notes today. But if you want

to get it started in a free tool to today, you can absolutely do

that. Feel free to listen to the episode again to go through the process that

I did. Have fun. And if you have any questions or need any help,

just feel free to reach out to me. You can do that at

mike@lonewolfunleashed.com

thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. You

could have been doing a million other things, but you decided to hang out with

me instead and talk about how to map some processes in

bpmn. And for that I'm very thankful for you and your time.

If you want to join a community of

like minded solopreneurs who want to systemize their

business and help each other understand how to systemize,

automate, use AI, all those things to

create efficiencies so you can free up time. I am

running an expression of interest to join the Lone Wolf pack.

You can do that at lonewolfunleashed. Com.

That's lonewolfunleashed. Com. And you can

sign up for an expression of interest there to join. Yeah. Thanks,

everyone, and I'll see you next week.