Ep. 38 Overthinking what "successfully" managing clients looks like? This is for you.

Want to watch the video version: Watch Here

Can I be honest with you? I am an overthinker by trade. So when I tell you that overthinking what your client management should look like is holding you back. I'm speaking from personal experience.

In this episode, we're getting into one of the biggest traps I see service providers fall into: jumping from tool to tool, borrowing systems that don't belong to you, and measuring your success against someone else's business. It's time to stop that.

Because here's what successful client management actually looks like...

• taking admin work off your plate
• creating capacity to bring on more clients
• making more money
• and going to sleep at night knowing your systems have it handled

That's what we're building toward. Let's get into it.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• Why your system isn't working (and it's not the tool's fault) 
• Start with your goals and your actual capacity 
• Stop comparing your systems to someone else's business 
• Evaluate what's already working before you throw it out 
• Map your unique client journey
• The three tools you actually need 
• Automate where you can — but not everything

🎙️ABOUT THE HOST

Hi, I'm Kenniqua Lewter, Client Experience Systems Strategist, HoneyBook Educator, and the host of the Systems Rehab Podcast. I help service providers create client experience systems that save time, strengthen client relationships, and build a business that runs with ease. 

➡️WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

🌿 5-Star Client Experience CRM Build
A done-for-you HoneyBook CRM that organizes your clients, automates processes, and creates a seamless experience. Perfect for service providers ready to streamline operations. LEARN MORE🌿 Client Experience Accelerator

Systems & Chill is a Monday hangout for service providers who want to simplify their business and finally get their systems under control. Each week we dive into client management, automation, and smart processes to help you work less, book more clients, and run your business with clarity. Plus I’ll share some behind-the-scenes of what I’m working on, answer your questions, and more.

Join Here

If you’re a service provider and you want some hands-on support to get your business systems set up and running smoothly, I have something that might help. My Client Experience Accelerator is a 90-minute strategy session where we tackle your biggest client experience bottleneck, clarify your next steps for systems, and create a clear action plan so your business can run more efficiently. Go to YourSystemsPro.com

Let's keep the conversation going. Send me a DM on Instagram or Threads @kenniqua.lewter

Transcript

Kenniqua Lewter (00:00)
Today we're talking about overthinking. If you're overthinking what successfully managing your clients looks like, this is going to be the live for you because I don't want you to go through and overthink how you can go through and successfully manage your clients. This is going to look like things like you're taking

admin work off of your plate. You're saving time. You're being able to build up capacity in your business to bring on more clients. You're going to be able to go through and make more money. You're going to be able to take vacations and have peace and be able to rest at night knowing that your systems are going to be able to handle what is coming up in your business. So that is what we are talking about today.

So just in case you're new here, my name is Kenequil Luthor. I am a client experience system strategist. I'm a HoneyBook educator and I help service providers turn their one-time clients into repeat bookings and referrals with intentional client experience systems. And so today I really just want to dive into this because I think there's like a trend of us sometimes as service providers, business owners, just people in general.

about really thinking and actually overthinking exactly what we're utilizing in our business. And we're so kind of quick to kind of jump to the next shiny thing, to the next tool that we see everyone else using, that we see other people are using to be able to manage their clients, manage their business easier. And I think sometimes when we do this, we're not building up the most traction.

and what it is that we've already been doing or already been using, right? And so we like to kind of jump from tool to tool, system to system. But what if I told you that the reason why certain things aren't working for you is because you don't need to borrow or use anyone else's systems. When we talk about systems, and I talk about systems all the time on this channel, is that systems are a way of doing things, right?

Tools like HoneyBook, AeroTable, Notion, all of those are tools, they're software. They help you to be able to integrate your system into said software or tool, but those things aren't the systems itself. And sometimes you may find that you may be using something that you see someone else using and that it's still not quite working for you.

And a lot of times that simply just means that you haven't fully established what exactly is your system. What exactly is your way to be able to do that? And I think we overthink this. And I'm not just saying you overthink this. Like I am an over thinker. I would say I was probably like an over thinker by trade, right? Like I over analyze. I overthink all the time. And one thing that has helped me over the years in my business,

is to go through into like, okay, I'm going to do it this way and I'm going to reevaluate the things that I'm doing in my business. I'm going to see how clients are navigating through maybe this onboarding process or this offboarding process. And then I am going to make tweaks to that particular process instead of just throw the whole process out the window, okay?

and trying to do something or use a tool that I see that someone else is going through and using and doing.

If you're overthinking what successfully, and I say successfully because this is going to look different depending on your goals, your business, what it is that you actually do. one of the first things that I recommend that you do

is really go back to the basics of number one, like what is your goal? What is your goal for your business? What is your goal for this month when it comes to what is your revenue go? What is how many clients do you want to be able to get this month or this quarter? How do you wanna go through and serve your clients? So.

I talk a lot about client experience. think client experience is the most, one of the most important things as a service provider in my opinion, right? So how is it that you wanna go through and serve your clients? How do you wanna show up and present to them and be able to fully be able to serve them with your premium offer, your premium services? So what is your goals? What is your goal surrounding that? And really thinking about too, again, like your capacity for all of this.

Like so when I think about me, as I said, I do client experience system strategy is that I typically go through and I can work with four done for you. Like I offer done for you services. I typically work with four done for you services clients. I bring on about four of them per month. I also offer maintenance packages and then I also do have clients that are in support phases. Like literally right now I have 10, 10 active clients at this point in time. Right. But I'm able to go through.

and manage this alone as a solopreneur because of the systems that I have in place. But this is also me considering what is my capacity for doing each one of these particular projects and how I personally go through and like check my capacity is number one, review my calendar. Like I literally, I use Google calendar. I review my calendar. I typically like to do it at least three months in advance to kind of see like, okay, what is it that I have coming up?

as far as like family things, birthdays, my daughter's gonna be graduating for high school in June. So like in June, it's my birthday, it's my husband's birthday. So June is one of those months where it's just like a slower month. And so I don't wanna be doing as many done for you projects during that time because I know I have so many things that is going on. So when I'm at my capacity,

And then I'm figuring out, okay, based off my capacity, this is the amount of projects that I can go and I can take on. This is what I'm marketing for. And I actually mark this down into air table, which this is where I put out my capacity.

But one of the things that I personally started doing, which has been a game changer personally for me as far as managing my clients and bringing on new clients, has been to show my capacity upfront. Before, I would just, I know my capacity, I have it for myself on the back end, but I never actually showed people upfront what my capacity even looked like. Now, it's on my website. If you wanna know how many...

projects I booked this month, you can see it. You can see that it's booked. You can see how many I have next month or the month after that. You can see what that capacity is for. That is a simple system that I have built for myself in order to be able to manage the leads that I have coming in and inquiries that I have coming in where they already kind of know exactly where they're going to be placed based off of my capacity. And from the beginning, they can decide.

Oh, I do want to wait for X, Y, Z time, or I don't want to wait for this particular time. Right. So that's a simple system that I have in place. So going to your foundation to like, really, I think sometimes, and I'm not the biggest planner. I want to be a better planner. I'm just not, I'm not the biggest planner. However, there are certain things that I do plan in my business and that goal setting, how many clients I want, how much revenue I want for the month. Those are things that I actually do.

plan for and then I come up with a way of how am I actually going to go through and achieve that as well. So the next thing I would say is that if you're overthinking how you're going to manage your clients and how successfully you're going to manage your clients is I really want you to think about what does success actually mean for you and your business. I think what happens a lot of times too is that we so easily

compare ourselves to other business owners. And I think with the rise of, well, I'm not even gonna say the rise, because of course it's been here forever, but like social media and threads, I think that it makes it so much easier for us to compare ourselves to what we see other business owners doing, whether it is our competitors or whether it's other people in other industries, it's so easy to compare to say, this person is doing

all of this social media content and they're doing email marketing, doing threads, they can show up literally everywhere. But yet you may not have the capacity to be able to do that. And they're going through and they're booking 10, 15 clients per month. And you're like, how do they go through and do it all? And it's not really about wondering how they do it all. It's really about how can you determine how you can do what you want to do and still achieve your goals?

So one thing I had to realize, I know last year I was that person that was like, you know what, I'm going to attempt to go through and I'm gonna attempt to post on Instagram and be active on threads. I'm going to go through, I have my podcast, I'm gonna post onto YouTube consistently. And you wanna know what happened? I failed dramatically at trying to do all of that, failed. I personally at this point in time,

run and operate my business successfully by myself. And so I literally don't have the capacity to be able to, and nor do I want to. So let's add that. Nor do I want to do all of the social media things. Like I don't want to show up on Instagram. I don't even have a TikTok. Like I don't want to personally go through and do all of that. And so even I had to go through and say, okay, what does success look like for me?

and doing lead generation to be able to bring in more leads, to be able to bring in more clients. And then how do I want it to look like for me to be able to manage my clients? How do I want them to be able to feel during this process? How do I want them to be able to get the transformation that I promised at the end of doing their systems builds? Right. And so that's where I had to think about what does it look like for me?

Not comparing myself to somebody that I saw that's doing something different because number one, that person may have a team or even if they don't have a team, their goals may be different. And even if their goals are exactly the same as yours, they may look like they have it all together and then they might not. It might be something else in their business or in their personal life that might be falling on the wayside. Like they literally could be doing everything in their business and then maybe their personal life is going down.

I literally go through and I pick my youngest daughter who is eight. I literally pick her up from the bus every day, I have the ability to be able to do that. I have the ability to be fortunate enough to be able to do that, number one, but also be fortunate enough, like I don't have to work on weekends if I don't want to. Do I sometimes work on weekends? Yeah, sometimes I do, but I don't have to if I don't want to. And typically I don't work on client work on the weekend.

If it's anything else, it's typically like my personal stuff that I might work on within my business as well.

But when it comes to also to like when you're thinking about success, like I said, not comparing yourself to someone else and then also assessing where you currently are in your business journey, as well as what you're currently doing for managing your clients. So for example, I had a client recently that we did a systems build for their business. We did a HoneyBook systems build for them, a successful company.

a company that has won awards and everything, but how they were managing their business was on a whiteboard. Does that mean that that was wrong? Absolutely not. They built a successful business from a whiteboard, right? I love a good whiteboard. My whiteboard's back there. Like, they built a successful business off of a whiteboard. That was their system. That was their system that worked for them.

Now, was that a system that they could technically automate or that it was going to be able to scale? No, it wasn't necessarily going to be able to scale, but it got to it got them to where they needed to be to the point that they said, OK, this isn't working enough is enough. And we know that we need to have some other system in place to be able to move from this white board to them move to.

a system where like HoneyBook where we can go through, put in all our inquiries, we could do contracts, proposals, automations, we could do all the things inside of that, right? So it's looking at where you are now and if you're coming to that point where you are, you don't wanna wait until you totally outgrow the system, but when you are nearing that growth, right? Because what happens is if you wait too late,

to actually go through and trying to switch systems where it's just everything's just busting out in the seams. Like you have leads falling through the cracks and that happens a lot of times too. I get on these sales calls and clients are like literally like I have an inbox full of people that want to do my services but they're not able to respond to them because either A, they're drowning in client delivery or they just don't have the system in order to be able to get back to them and it's taking them days or weeks to actually get back to them.

Well, that's lost money, right? That's lost money. And so we don't want that to happen either. So we don't want to get to the point where it's just like, it's just so chaotic. And now you're so overwhelmed with what you're currently doing that everything just really starts falling apart and possibly just really just destroying your business as well as even possibly your credibility just depends on what it is that you do. Right. So start looking at where where you are, what's working.

And then what's actually falling through the cracks and then moving from there to see about, OK, what do I need to have in place in order to be able to manage my clients better? Now, I don't personally say that you have to have a particular system like I'm not going to tell you, like you guys know on this channel, like I absolutely love HoneyBook. This is what I set up for my clients majority of the time. But you do not have to have a particular system that

Everybody has to use this system. Otherwise, you're just doing it wrong. That's completely not true. You can use a system that works best for you.

I love a good whiteboard, but there's so many things about a whiteboard is because once you write on it.

If you need to write something else, then you're taking pictures about what it is that you previously wrote and erased, and it's a whole thing, right? But I love to go through, and I always have a whiteboard. So it does play a part, but it's not necessarily going to be the system that's going to grow with you for a long period of time, right? There's other ways for us to be able to manage clients a little bit easier. So.

after you're going through, you're assessing what's working, you're assessing what's not, and you're being honest about what it is that you're doing. And then, sometimes too, what I like to advise clients of, just maybe people, it could be leads, clients, et cetera, is if you were to go through your inbox of all the leads that come through, now granted, everybody is not gonna convert, right? But if you go through your leads,

that come to your inbox and like literally just add them up with like the basic package that you have. How many, how much money was actually in there? Like if you look back in the past month, how much money was in there? And I think that also too would kind of like strike like a light bulb or a chord to be like, oh crap, like I just lost.

$10,000 or something like that, right? Like if you really went through and added it up, because a lot of the clients that I work with, they have premium services. Like most of them have four figure offers and above. And so every single lead is typically worth a thousand plus dollars. And so if every lead is worth that and you miss five leads, that's at least $5,000 that you missed for that particular month. And as small business owners, service providers is that we can't necessarily afford to do that.

Like I I'm actually kind of side note, but this month, not this month in May, I'm hosting an in-person event, right? I'm hosting an in-person event with a young lady that is also local to me. Her name is Alita. We're doing an event is called Clicks to Clients, and we're going to host it right here in my office. And but basically what it is, is that and she's talking about she's a social media manager and an expert.

⁓ in social media, right? And so basically what happens is even as service providers, we're getting, some of us are getting the leads, like some of us are getting the leads, but then what happens is when we get those leads, if there's no system in place to kind of catch these leads, then all the work that we did with creating content,

running ads possibly, like they all go to the wayside if we don't have the two kind of connected together. And so that's what we're doing in the in-person event that we're hosting in May. It's actually gonna be on May 17th. So I'll probably post more about that just in case you're in my area. I'm in Virginia. But that's the point that I'm making is like where...

you don't want to be doing all of this work and missing out on the leads that you're getting and allowing those to kind of fall by the wayside because you don't have a system to actually go through and capture your leads. So successfully managing your clients means that you have a place where you can at minimum when someone goes through, they inquire about your services, about your business, that there is some type of like automated. They have a centralized place where they can go.

and then they get a response immediately, right? And I would say immediately, but less than two minutes that they get a response because what happens is, is that people are typically kind of shopping around depending on what services that you offer. Like people might literally be shopping around. Like if you're a photographer and you're going through, like I recently went through and I was looking for a photographer and I put it on threads. Of course the people that,

was a comment back first. looked at those people even though I kind of already had somebody in mind. just didn't know she was offering that service. So I did end up going with her. But people typically are going through and they're going with people that are responding to them the quickest, the fastest. And you want to be that person by having some type of system in place to go through and capture those particular leads. But if you're thinking about, if you're overthinking about,

what that successful looks like and you can't decide on, well, how am I actually going to have a place to be able to go through and capture leads? What tools am I going to be able to go through and use is I would recommend is, and I say this to everybody, if you don't know, like if you talk to me and you tell me what it is that you do and you describe to me, okay, this is what my goals are.

You know, we're looking through all of that goodness. If I know that HoneyBook can help you with that, then I'm going to tell you HoneyBook, right? If I know that there's something else that you need, I'm going to tell you that other thing that I think would be a really good tool for you. However, it's not all about using the tool that other people are using, because sometimes our brains are wired, and the way we work

could be different and different tools accommodate that a little bit differently, right? So what I mean by that is I can say, okay, for managing my projects, so like, again, I do system setups. So managing the project itself, like within each project build that I have, there's different phases of the project. I wanna check off each thing. I have everything organized, have templates for them. I personally like to do this in Asana.

I have seen all the systems, I've seen Notion, I've seen doing it in Airtable, which I also use Airtable, I just don't use Airtable for that part because I don't like the way that I view the information in there. But I've seen Notion, I've seen ClickUp, I've seen Monday, right?

And so sometimes it's easy for us to be like, ⁓ everyone else is doing it this particular way. Like everyone is using ClickUp to be able to manage our projects. So maybe I should go through and use ClickUp, but maybe as a solopreneur, maybe you don't need to, maybe you don't need all of that. Maybe the simplest thing is the best thing for you, right? Because that's the thing that you can actually go through and keep up with if that makes sense, right?

So going through and using what works best for you. The other part of this, and let me know if you have any questions as we're kind of discussing all of this. But the other thing is, and I think this is so important, and I probably say this, like if you've come to any of my lives before, which I'm live every single Monday at 12 p.m., we wasn't live last week, but I let you guys know that. But other than that, we're live every single Monday at 12 p.m. Eastern.

is that, I probably say this often in my lives and in my other videos, is that in order for you to really be able to know number one, how to successfully manage your clients, but also create the client experience that you desire for your clients, that you desire, not anybody else desires, that you desire is to really understand what is your unique client journey.

Everyone's client journey is going to be different. What I mean by client journey, this is going to be basically the phase for which your clients say, hello, like I'm interested in your services to the time that you off board them, the project has ended and beyond. Like if you build in, like we build in nurture sequences and stuff like that for the clients.

to because my goal is to help my clients get referrals, help them to be able to get repeat clients. And so in order to be able to do that, even though systems help you to be able to do that, it does still have to be intentionally built in order to be able to do that. But every business is going to be different. Every business is going to be different. And it's very important to really go through and map out.

And when I say map out, this literally could be done on a piece of paper to just write out, this is what I want my clients to do from the time that they come to my door, right? Wherever door that's gonna be, if that's your door on your website to say, okay, I'm ready for an inquiry after they submit the inquiry, this happens next and this happens next, right? You can literally write this out on a piece of paper.

Now, when I do this for my clients, I typically do this in a visual way. We use a tool, a software, to be able to go through and map this out where we can put in each touch point. We can determine what emails we need here, what forms we're going to use. ⁓ Like if there's schedulers involved, automation, et cetera, we can go through and map that out. But this is where, even if you're in the same industry as someone else,

This is where you can show your uniqueness, right? This is where you can do something different than maybe even your competitors are doing. Like literally, I have gone through and set up like I've done several setups, various industries for clients inside of ⁓ inside of HoneyBook. Right. So I've set up several different tools for clients and I've worked with some of them are in.

the same industries, like some of them are venue owners, for example. I have a lot of venue owners. So some of them are venue owners, right? But I've done photographers, I've done interior decorators, I've done pets concierge, I've done business coaches. I've done quite a few different industries. Even with someone like venue owners, where I've done several of them, those, how I go through and build out those systems, have those systems, put them into Honeybug, it is not the same.

Because the process for which they want their client journey to look like, it isn't the same. It's not going to be the same because they're unique. Some of them want to go through and have people directly go through and book their services. Some of them want to go through and put an inquiry and actually be able to pre-qualify them before maybe jumping on a call. Some of them want them just to go ahead and just book. So it really just depends on that client journey. So you want to be crystal clear.

about what that journey is going, and you know what? I'm not even gonna say crystal clear. I want you to have a idea and somewhat of an understanding of what the client journey is going to look like. I'm not gonna, I'm taking back crystal clear because this is going to change. And I think sometimes that part is underestimated that it's going to change. The reason why,

your client journey is going to change. It's going to evolve with you as your business grows. But then also too, you're going to start to see, and you want to start to pay attention as you're managing your clients. You want to start to go through and pay attention to what's working and what's not. Because the true indicator is going to be not this system that you created, right? So you're creating the basis of your system. But like, okay, when a client

submits an inquiry, then I want them to go through and book a call, then I want them to go through and do this. But the true thing to figure out whether or not that's really going to work is going to be your clients. It's going to be the people that are actually going through your system. You're going to see what's working and what's not. If you're seeing that people are having you to go through to repeat something.

Maybe that's something that you need to add into your process. Maybe you see people are skipping something. Maybe that's something to evaluate. Maybe you're getting complaints about a certain part that you're doing. Then that's something that you need to go back and evaluate. So you're constantly going back through and you're thinking about, okay, looking at, especially when you first set it up, you're really thinking about, how are my clients actually experiencing this? Because as service providers,

All the service providers that I have worked with, they all do an excellent job. They all do an excellent job. And I feel like as service providers, even you that's on the live or just watching the replay when it comes up, is that you probably already do a good job. I think a lot of times what is underestimated is the experience that the client feels. That's all that client experience really is. It's about the feeling and how could you control the feeling of how they are experiencing your services.

So like you can go through and let's say you offer website design, right? When you offer website design and you go through and at the end of that project that yeah, you designed a very beautiful website, but if it was so hard to get information to you, it was so hard to communicate with you when they had questions. It was so hard for them to make payments or update payments, et cetera.

Even though the end result of what you delivered to them was great. you're like, yeah, they should be able to give me a client testimonial. They should be able to, they may say that that's served. They may say that the actual product deliverable was good, but the experience may not have been as good as you may think. If you had not intentionally thought about how the client's going to feel during the process.

and each client is gonna feel something different. But this again is where we go through, we test it out. So getting your client journey and really just mapping it out, writing it out on a piece of paper to figure out, what is it that I want, how I want my clients to be able to go through and navigate when they are working through me, working with me, right? So we talked about starting with the foundation. So basically your goals. We talked about your goals, how you wanna go through and work, what is your actual capacity.

for working with your clients. That's point number one. Point number two was looking back at what is already currently working for you and where you wanna go through and update and what's not working, right? Evaluating what is not working and not worrying about what other people are doing, okay? Don't worry about what other people are doing. You want to go through and simplify your systems. As a service provider,

I think that the main systems that service provider needs, and when I say systems, really mean, so two things, systems and software. So what I mean with a service provider is a couple things and categories that you need, which means that you don't need multiples of these categories that I'm about to say, okay? Is that you wanna have a way to be able to manage your capacity, so to have a way where people can book calls with you, you know.

when your meetings are so you can use something as simple as a calendar for this, right? Simple as a Google calendar, whatever it is that you use, right? So you wanna be able to have a way to be able to manage your capacity for your projects, your business, you're creating content, you're working on your business because we have to work on our business as much as we work in our businesses as well too, right, at times. Managing your team if you have a team, et cetera. Then also too, you wanna have a way, like what we're talking about.

managing the client. So when you were talking about managing the client, typically we're looking at to have some type of CRM, a client relationship manager system, right? You wanna have a way where you can have a place where all the information about the client for the most part goes. So this would be how are they inquiring? So this could be your forms.

When you're sending out proposals, you're having your proposals done in that place. You're doing your invoicing in that place. Maybe you have your scheduling done all in that place, right? Communication. So that's very important. Communication is one of the ultimate things when it comes to manage your clients as well as managing your, the client experience as well as communication, because if communication sucks, that client experience is going to suck. I mean, there's no way around it if the communication sucks, right? And so

having that place where you're managing your time, managing your capacity, so some type of calendar, whatever it is that you decide to use, some type of CRM where you can have a centralized place to be able to manage everything with your clients, and then depending on your business as a service provider is that you may wanna have some type of project management system, right? So this is going to be a place. Now, you don't have your calendar.

and your project management tool don't necessarily have to be separate, dependent on what it is that you do and how granular the tasks that you're going to be doing, right? So kind of give you an example. So let's say, for example, you are a photographer. You're a photographer, you may not have that many steps in order to be able to do the deliverable, right? So you go, you show up for...

You show up at the venue to do the photography services that maybe you have to go through you edit the you take the photos you edit the photos then you send over the Google Drive or whatever it is that you use to send it and then is done, right? So there might not be that many steps in order for you from actual payment of booking to actually delivery of the product, right?

So maybe to manage, excuse me, maybe to manage that particular ⁓ project itself and all of those details, maybe you're just keeping those in your calendar. You're just maybe time blocking it out or just at like, I know like Google calendar has like a, like a little task button there where you can add tasks there. So maybe you just need something as simple as that, right? You, don't have to make this complicated if that's the type of business that you have, right? You don't have to overcomplicate it or

you may need something a little bit more robust, a separate, totally separate project management software, because you have, you deal with projects that have a lot of different details, you're collecting a lot of different information, maybe you're collaborating with the client on the project, you're also collaborating with team members. So in that case, having like an actual project management tool,

may be something that's going to be helpful for you. So that might be something like Asana, ClickUp, Monday. Maybe you can put Notion into that category as well, right? Airtable, possibly. Like Airtable's kind of loose project management to me, but those are things that you can use, right? And when we're talking about the CRMs,

We're talking about HoneyBook, we're talking about Dubsado, we're talking about Moxie, we're talking about Go High Level. These are the things that we're talking about. So having basically those three things, and if you're also wanting to have a place to communicate, but typically if you have a CRM, you have a communication thing. So those are the three things that you really need in order to be able to fully successfully manage your clients. So anything else that you have outside of that?

is really things that maybe you're using for internal things with yourself, with your business, or maybe things that maybe you're using for content, for like your marketing, maybe finance type of deals. But like, other than those three things, those are only three things, only three tools that you really need to be able to use in order to be able to successfully manage your clients and not getting caught up in what tool to actually go through and use based off of someone else, okay? Use something that's simple.

that you can use in order to be able to do it that gives you space to be able to grow. My recommendation is that you don't want to do a method that only is good for you being able to do it for the next couple of months. It's kind of like where I talk about kind of like the whiteboard situation and granted.

Some people can do that for months upon months, right? But ultimately that doesn't really grow with you,

And then the last thing too is automating where you can. So the last point about automating where you can.

I think that sometimes we overthink automation as well. OK, we do want to automate where we can. like even the clients that I work with, some of the clients that I work with, service providers that some of them have like custom service offerings, maybe bestoke offerings where certain things are they can't automate it, right? They can't automate certain things. And that's fine. Automate where you can.

Automate where you can. Every single thing doesn't have to be automated. And in my opinion, should not be automated. Not everything. Everything doesn't have to be automated. When you do go through and automate things, you also want to make sure that like the things that you would automate. So let me kind of give you an example of that. So things that you would automate is things that you are repetitively doing. Right? So when someone, example, puts it in a query with you.

and you want to have some type of response back, right? That's gonna be automation. Most people are gonna automate something like that, right? Like, thank you for putting in your inquiry, blah, blah, blah, here's the next steps, whatever it is that your process is, right? So that part, yes, automation. However, automating sending a proposal to a client usually is not going to be the best case scenario for most clients, right?

You're not just going to automatically send someone a proposal, especially if your services are custom, they're unique. Of course, you're going to put the proposal. You're going to make it kind of unique for that particular client. So that's not something that you would go through and automate. Even times where I'll have clients, like when we build into their processes, like we built into like a retention strategy into the back end. like after their client

off boards, then we build in like a retention strategy after, is that I always, I don't always set that up for, depending on what it's for, but I don't always set that up for automation either. So we may set that up as like to be like a reminder to my client, so the service provider, to be able to do X, Y, Z. We may have like a templated base of an email or a form that they can send to them.

But ultimately, depending on what it is, we want to add some personal touches about what it was that we did with the client to be able to give them the proper next steps of working with us. Right. So like if I worked with a client and I'm like, OK, we set up your air table. Here's what's next.

I want to be able to reference what I did for that client and to be able to truly give them what's next based off of the work that we did together versus just like a blanket thing like, Hey, thanks for working with us. This is what's next. That might not be what's next for that particular client because it's not custom and personalized to them. So systems don't systems and automation. Neither of them have to be where it takes away the personal touches.

What I love to say to people and even when I'm doing the lives and stuff like that is that the personal, when you put automation in place into your business, this actually is what creates the space for personalization. Okay. So let me say that again, automation creates the space for personalization. If we're so bogged down on doing delivery.

sending every email manually, creating proposals from scratch, answering every single email from scratch, manually doing that out, manually going through and sending out scheduling links and bookings, that doesn't give us a lot of extra time to do the personal things, the things that are going to go through and increase the client experience.

That handwritten note that you would love to send to your clients to say, you know, thank you for your services. I really appreciate you working with me. That allows having automation on the things that you can automate, freeze up the time. Because literally when we work with clients, when we put in the automation that we put in, when we set up their honey book systems, it literally frees them up on average at least 10 hours a week. That allows for them to then do that personal stuff.

Like I recently went through, I was working with a client. We actually will be playing. She I did a case study client case study interview with her. So her name is Tina. So you will be hearing and seeing that episode on the YouTube channel as well as on the systems we have podcast soon. But literally when I got done working with her, we sent out the client gift like I normally do. And I wrote a personal note, which I write to all of my clients. And one of the things she said, she was like, oh, thanks.

Excuse me, thanks so much for the gift. And she said, I can use it for, I forgot what she said. I think it was something for like when she was going on the golf course, but she was like, thanks so much. was a Tumblr. But she was like, yeah, thanks so much for this. But she said, the best part was the personal note. I wouldn't have time to write personal notes if I had to do everything else, If I had to go through and do everything else, I would not have time to add in those extra touches.

I would not have time to be able to do that. And so that's what automation allows for you to be able to go through and create. It allows you the time that actually equals the freedom. It equals the space to be able to personalize and increase your client experience.

I will see you guys in the next episode.

please be sure just to like this video, share it with a friend that you think that this will be helpful for because yeah, this will help to be able to get this information out and help service providers just like you to be able to manage your business much easier too this year. So I will talk to you guys next week. Bye.