136 - Automation for agencies with Olivia Look

You're listening to Agency Highway. This is a podcast for agencies that want to grow their business and work less. Agency Highway is sponsored by ContentSnair, a platform that helps digital agencies gather content from clients without digging through a storm of emails, huge attachments and messy Google Docs. Sign up at contentsnare.com and use the chat widget to say you heard about ContentSnair on Agency Highway and you'll get a 30-day trial instead of the typical 14. Now, here's this week's episode. Hello and welcome back to Agency Highway. This is episode 136 all about automation for agencies and I am speaking with Olivia. Olivia, thank you so much for joining me. Yes, thank you for having me. I think this is going to be a very easy podcast interview and chat because I mean anyone that's been listening to this for any amount of time knows I'm the automation nerd as well. I mean, yeah, it sounds like you are as well. This is going to be an easy chat. Yes, yes, I'm really excited. So tell me a little bit about yourself, like how you got into specifically automation and then automation for agencies. Sure. So I kind of started out my whole career as a developer. So I was working on automating in a very manual sense, I think. And then I started freelancing and I have been doing that for seven years or so working mostly with agencies. So development agencies, marketing agencies, sort of things in between that. And I noticed the no code stuff happening, which is all really exciting. And I had always kind of been a little bit, I guess jealous. So I learned how to code in college. And I learned like a basic basics, like pure PHP in HTML and CSS and JavaScript. And I got out and I didn't know what react was. I didn't know about Laravel. I didn't know about any of that. And I felt like I had been shorted kind of this, this easier type programming. And then I started learning all of that because I felt like I was behind and then boom, a bunch of no code tools show up all around me. And I was like, well, I better figure this out now. That's how that went. And then I've always been interested in sort of helping the businesses that I work with in small businesses especially. And the potential in agencies, I think, is just massive. And as a freelancer, I saw firsthand how messy things can get in agencies. 100%. It's so funny. You mentioned that, like, what you study ends up being like not the most optimal code. I remember in university and I mean, I was like, 2006 ish. I was learning assembly language. Do you know what assembly languages? Yeah. It's like literally moving bits around. It's saying like move the ones and zeros from the, well, these eight ones and zeros over to those eight ones and zeros. And then I was like, this is ridiculous. And like, and then add those two numbers together and then put the result in these 16 zeros. And obviously I've never ever used that again. So 100% sympathize there. It's killer to get out and see all these amazing tools. And you're like, they were here the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. So no code's interesting. Like, it's quite funny because I am a little bit, I don't know what the word is. I hesitant on, like, I don't know. I kind of laugh at the whole no code thing because it's become a buzzword. I saw the other day a standard forms tool, you know, just like a, you know, something that we want to like, I don't know, type form, you know, that kind of tool. I don't want to name them here, but like I heard an ad and they're like, oh, the no code forms tool. And it was like, wait, so does that mean that every single SaaS product ever is no code now? Okay, cool. Contents and there's a no code platform. Like, that's like lit. Just you can't just call the SaaS product a no code tool. So in your mind, what does a no code tool mean? I think specifically in from my perspective, it's about being able to build and particularly on the app side or maybe the API side of it because I'm obsessed with the Zapier right now. And I call it a no code tool because it does sort of in a way, it's sort of about letting people who I can set of themselves non technical or even people who would be intimidated by that kind of thing, do things visually. And do these technical tasks without necessarily having to know how to code. So that's kind of where I'm out with it. Yeah, I think that's a big differentiator is being able to build like obviously in a lot of SaaS products, you know, in context that you can build a form, but I'm still not going to call it no code, right. And we might have workflows and stuff in there one day. But to me, that's like a no code tool is almost like a blank canvas where you like a table. And you can create example if people listening to this haven't heard of it, it's essentially like Google sheets were on steroids where you can link a column to something else. So like, you know, classic like developer example is like you can have a spreadsheet about different cars and a different spreadsheet that is like the different engines that might be in a different car. So this car has an engine and then that will link to the other spreadsheet of all the engines. And then the engine has like components that might be a component sheet and you can like click through from car to engine to component, you know, and obviously in a, you know, probably more relevant examples like in a business sense is kind of like project has a client has contacts. And you can sort of click through all of these with that like if you're trying to do that with a spreadsheet, it's such a pan in the ass. So like I, our table is a great no code tool. We use it for our like content marketing pretty much. So, you know, I've things set up where it says when a writer marks something is ready for review, you know, it comes into a special can ban view just for me for me to review it and also puts a message and Slack to say, hey, something's ready for review. And same deal when I approve it, it pushes that to the right. I mean, says, hey, you can publish it. So that's kind of where I see no code, you know, like Zapier air table and obviously in tegrum app and becoming a lot more partial to integrity, even though I'm technically a Zapier expert and I teach people Zapier that I literally have a cause on this. But in tegrum app is like super powerful. It's just not where I recommend people stop because it's I call it low code because you almost have to know how to code it's so complicated. I think that's fair. A little bit. And I think it's not quite it's still got the visual aspects and everything there, but Zapier, I feel like lays everything out like step one step to step three and it's very easy. Whereas in tegrum app, you've got this like big giant flow, depending on what you build. But the price point is a lot more attractive. So there is that if you can figure it out. Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone would like to sign up for integrity, I will drop a link in the show notes at agency highway dot com slash 136. That will get you one month free on the cheapest plan. But honestly, they're free plan is pretty generous as well. So highly recommended. What are the tools are you loving before we get into like specifics, because I love it's love talking about tools. So what tools are you using a lot right now, especially with agencies that you work with. So I end up using a lot of different tools when I work with different agencies. They're all using something a little bit different. But I think everyone has a project management platform of some sort. And if you don't you should. But things like a sauna and Trello or click up I started using most recently, I think is really cool. I think my favorite is still a sauna in terms of project management platform some things you can get done, although click up has a lot of built in automation type things that you can do as well, which I think are really powerful. And then otherwise, you know, I'm using Zapier to connect the tools that everyone's already using. So it's their CRM's and their project management platforms and things like that, even slack. Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that's kind of what we have to do when we're automating for people right is to use whatever tools are using it's quite it's actually quite annoying as a, you know, what you're trying to quote someone, because it's like I'm using these tools and I want to plug them together. It's like, well, I can kind of create a quote for that. I've not used that up before because of some random obscure one and then you dig into it and it turns out their API is just awful, you know, like one thing I wouldn't have expected is that HubSpot API is super unreliable. At least when I used to when I've used it with clients before I think they've updated this app your integration since but it would disconnect like every three or four days. So this is ridiculous. This is HubSpot. It's like a, you know, and you start learning a lot more about these products that have really big names, you know, like they might have neglected their API even though for everything else they're really like big brand and they're really good like because active campaigns kind of the same like I've had, you know, I get errors on zaps. [BLANK_AUDIO] not that regular anymore. It goes through phases where like it just the API is struggling or whatever, but luckily, you know, things like Active Campaign, sorry, Zappier and Integrimat will re-try those things. >>And shoot you that email when they screw up too, so you can go and see what happened. Hopefully it's a simple disconnect. >>Yeah, that's right. Okay, so let's talk about some specific things that you want to make, what kind of processes you want to make. Because I know like there's a few things on my list to talk about here today and I mean, I speak a lot about onboarding automation, obviously, with content snares, big part of what we do and you know, with proposals and like invoices. So I think we should cover that a little bit first, because I can redirect people to a video of mine as well if they want to learn more about that. I am also so because I know you talk about service for film and automation, which to me is mind-blowing, because that's like the one thing that I don't know how to automate. So let's start on the onboarding. What are some of the main processes you automate with agencies? >>So for client onboarding, I think like you mentioned earlier, sometimes the quoting process and the proposal process can be really killer. So automating things like that with templates and frameworks, it doesn't all have to be these ifs and that type things. They can be these sort of non-technical process simplifiers. So there's tons of proposal apps out there and I think a lot of them are really great. And the sort of plug-and-play or just check a couple of boxes like this client wants this, this, and this. But what's your past that and sort of into onboarding? It's things like making sure data gets from, you know, you might have your leads all in one CRM, but then once it's an actual client, you need them in your project management platform. So making sure that data gets over properly or putting together a nice little welcome kit for a client where here's all of your information, everything you would need to contact me. Here's a little background on who you'll be working with stuff like that. And then things like client portals, we don't want to build those out custom every single time for every client. Maybe you do. I don't. So that kind of thing, again, either templated or you know, you can really put something together where you just input a little bit of information into a form or something, click a button and then boom, client portal is put together and an email gets on top of the client with their little welcome kit. Well, two things I kind of want to dig into there. They're related, actually, because you said something about automation doesn't have to be, if this, then that. And that is huge, right? A lot of people kind of think like that where, you know, a type of automation to me is just, yeah, like you said, process simplifies, yeah, simplification. So, you know, saying having a process that initial clients go through like a questionnaire that acts as a filtration of bad clients, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, there's no point automating things when you're working with bad clients because the bad client's going to ruin my whole month or several. So, you know, if you've got just a form up front that asks some questions and all like a, you know, framework for the initial call that you go through that will highlight the people you shouldn't be working with. Like that's, you know, to me, it's more about productivity than it is automation. And it's like you, that's a really big productivity when if you can shut down bad clients and say no before, before you get there. And then things like the proposal, yeah, like it's pretty hard to come up with a catch-all process for every project you're going to do. Where someone ticks these five boxes and they get a quote, you know, specifically on that. But you, like you said, you can create templates that have most of the different things you can do. You've got a pricing list, you know, like you create your own list. It's like if someone wants e-commerce, this is how much, you know, we charge for a basic e-commerce setup. And then if they have like, you know, a thousand products, this is what it would cost, how many payment gateways, like you're going to building blocks to create proposals, right? That's, I love that kind of system where it's not necessarily fully automated, but it helps you get through. Now, the other thing you said, which is kicking off automations with forms, I think a lot of people don't consider this because you can, you can fire off lots of things with one form, right? So can you give us some examples of workflows with that? Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of the way that we're all similar with the contact form on the website. And somebody submits that and a marketing process starts or a sales process starts depending on what kind of customer you're looking at. But basically you could do the same thing on the internal side and remove a lot of the sort of back and forth and very time consuming communication between just like email or Slack. So in terms of like cross team requests, you can say, maybe marketing needs a new design, needs a new graphic for a new ad. So they fill out a particular form. All the details that any given designer would need are right there in the form. The marketing team fills that out, sends it. Then you can kick off in your project management platform, a new task, you're going to sign the right person, you're going to sign a deadline. And then one thought task is completed, notify the original sender. And then if all the details are accounted for in that form, you take care of, you know, possibly 90 to 100% of the back and forth email communication or wherever you happen to be trying to communicate back and forth. So that kind of thing. Yeah, perfect. Like an internal forms are way underutilized, I think. Because most people think like, "Oh, automation, it's like contact form." When someone contacts us, what am I going to do with their information? I put it into my CRM, whatever. But yeah, you can use forms internally. I think this is very overlooked and quite powerful. Like even if you wanted to add a new client, right? Like you mentioned before, you probably want to put a new client in several systems. So it's going to be your invoicing like I use zero, you know, bookkeeping products. We've got CRM, we've got the chat app is separate than the CRM, you know, there's the billing platform. There's like lots of different places where the person has to be added. And so you can create a form that you just enter at once, right? This is the classic double handling problem of automation. And so you could just have a new client form internally that pushes that information through his app or whatever into all the places it needs to go. So you just got to do it once. It reduces the risk of, you know, screwing the data rock as you paste it somewhere else. So just a really simple example of how an internal form can be used. I love you, bro. Yeah, they're really cool and underutilized. Like you said, just not even a thought or you'll end up replacing it or not replacing it. But instead of doing something like that and automating it with maybe the tools that you already have or free stuff like Google Forms, you end up buying a whole separate app integrating a whole other SaaS product into your tech stack for a one-off feature. And that's killer. So what forms tools do you find yourself using? The most. I love the way type form looks. I think the user experience of type form is just unmatched anywhere else. But when we're just trying to get something done quick and dirty, like it's an internal form, nobody has to see this. It's Google Forms. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's some Google Forms is kind of the go-to because it's free ride or at least like, you know, everyone's but G Suite. It's pretty easy to set up. I too like the UI of type form. Depending on how long the forms are, I find they kind of struggle. What really annoys me that I can't scroll properly. That's the one thing with type form that drives me nuts so for longer forms. But it doesn't matter if you are entering everything one thing at a time and it's fine. But we actually modeled our, well, a designer modeled our initial user interface for content snare on type form, right? Because it is just like for a client, it's really easy. It's one entering one thing at a time. It's quite simple. However, we've just received a new design that because we've been sort of looking at different options for a while because for someone that wants to scroll through a form and work on different pieces here and there, for those not familiar with content snare, it's more of a collaborative kind of thing where you don't fill out everything in one go. You like the client might go through and submit one or two items within that form. But yeah, so we've just received a new design that I think is freaking amazing that I haven't seen on any other forms tool and I really, really love it. I've sent it out so a few of our people and the feedback's been amazing so far. So watch this space. We might have another better UI for forms. Nice. Can't wait to see it. I like UX is crazy when I don't know how people do it to be honest. It's like when people create new designs for how users interact with things, I'm just like, this is like, which are you reading me? It's very thoughtful and very, very intentional. Every little thing. And I feel like when you think about using any given app, you're like, oh, somebody makes all these decisions about whatever, but when you get into it, it really, really is somebody thinking about the best possible experience you can have. Yeah, and I think it's really clear when apps do that, because a lot of apps don't, you know, like I'm thinking of a certain project management app that I use, I can obviously say it, like I used to use ClickUp as a post, like when I wanted it a UI idea, or UX idea, I'd go to ClickUp. But then what happened is they released too much too far, and it all kind of became a mush, and there's stuff everywhere now. And, you know, so I just find, because you're talking about like how intentional it is, and it makes me think, like when I try to come up with ideas for our UX, I literally go to the gym or do something that's going to take me like an hour with just one problem that I want to solve. It's like, okay, how are we going to, what's the best way to show the new discussions feature to clients, right? And I'll just go to the gym, or go for a walk, and like think about just that thing, and take notes, and come home, and then I'll have like a sketch, like in my case. Yeah, it's, so 100%, it's really important. And I think that's something you need to take into account when you are bringing in apps for your team, right? All these like automation tools, because yeah, you look, you can't, I saw a post the other day about, you know, this, someone's team was resistant to implementing, click up, they'd like done all this stuff, and their teams didn't want to use it. So, you know, that's a hurdle you're going to have to get over. So UX is really important there. I love that you described, click up as mush, because I think that's the perfect way to describe it. I was also kind of resistant to it when one of my clients started using it. But one of his former teammates started working at, click up, and gave him this whole demo, and it looked great, and all that. And it does. It's really cool once you're in it. But looking at it first mush is exactly what I would use to describe it. Yeah, I don't know. I was really hopeful with it, but it kind of, they had this culture, not like, I don't know, the expectation to create features like every week. And they're pushing out new features every week. And I don't think you can really keep up that kind of cadence without having problems come on. You need time to fix things and adapt things. And they do. They do, but it's like, I don't think they're doing that anymore, which is good. They're like stepping back and actually fixing problems. But yeah, anyway, that's enough. So, that's enough on them. So we've spoken about client onboarding. So, some of the things I think about, are that initial contact form and then creating a proposal and then collecting information, obviously, I'm going to recommend content snare, but feel free how what other systems do have you worked with for people to get information from clients. And then you also mentioned a client portal. So how kind of things going into the portal, how's that working really interested in that? Do you manage WordPress sites for your clients? If so, you should probably check out WP Remote. It's a central platform to manage all of your sites in one place. That includes security, malware, uptime monitoring, and it's even got a built-in staging system. But my favorite feature is the visual regression system that will give you an alert if something breaks on an update so you can get in there and fix it. It was created by the same people behind BlogVolt and MailCare. Now, BlogVolt is one of the best backup plugins I've used, and it's also trusted by some of the biggest WP maintenance agencies out there like GoWP, WP Buffs, WP. So if these guys rely on it, you know it's rock solid. You can try WP Remote for free and get 10% off any of the paid offerings by going to WPRemote.com/highway. Now let's get back to the show. Yeah, so client portals are really just a little hub, like a one-stop shop for your clients to find everything they can possibly need. So if you imagine, you know, everything that a client has emailed you to ask a question about before that maybe you've answered previously or not, instead of sending that email, they could go and find that information in their portal. So that's contact information. That's a copy of their contract. That's, you know, background information about your company. That's their account manager's contact information. Not that they shouldn't be emailing that person right off the bat, but you know how it goes with clients sometimes. And then any important documents that they have, and I think some people, some agencies will even use it sort of as a protection method in a way because you can put all of the deliverables link to all of those in a portal. And if maybe a client ghosts you or ends up missing multiple payments, you can revoke access to that portal. And then the deliverables that you have provided, unless they've saved them on their own, which of course is possible. You then sort of get them to hold up their end of the bargain as well. So it protects you a bit too. I like that idea. So what kind of tools, like how do you see client portals being created, how have you set some up? But yeah, let's talk tools. Yes. So Notion is my absolute favorite. Oh, by a long shot. So I've seen multiple people who create, you know, they call them OS's, but a template, a notion template basically. So I have a couple that are on my radar right now. That's just kind of depends on what kind of visual you're looking at because I can't design for shit. So I need somebody else to do all of that. And every month, I think God for the designers, you can take my ugly, just I'd draw it up on a piece of paper and take a picture. And I'm like, can you turn this into something pretty? And they do. And it's great that this can exist because it's not me. But yeah, so people have a bunch of different templates in Notion. And I've built my own business hub type thing for my agency that doesn't look that great, but it has everything that needs to be there. So new team members come on and all the information they need is there. And that's kind of similar. They're not a client, but it's the same type of thing. Like a business hub or like an intranet that bigger companies will have. So Notion is my number one tool though. I like that because then it's kind of there's a God, I can't English this morning. Like I want to say that it's common to both your team and your client. So like if you go and update something, you put a new deliverable in the client portal, like your team can see it and they can see it. So I kind of like that idea, misspecial because I like the idea of Notion for an intranet as well. That's kind of where we're moving to. I'm also playing around with Coda. I really like Coda. I just don't want to move all my stuff over there. So that's kind of it's quite funny. Like a lot of people in the Coda ecosystem almost like turn their nose off at Notion. It's become a little bit like. Have you ever heard of like PC master race? It's like a thing. So for people listening, that's like, you know, people who game on PCs are like console gamers, but essentially that just of it. It's like I always feel it's like the same thing. It's like Coda master race versus other tools like Notion. Social media guys seem so friendly. So if anyone does want to check out Coda, well, these all will be linked up in the show notes at age see how we.com/136. But Coda is CODA and I believe that's I.O right? Oh, not sure. Yeah, they have a really funny website header. It's definitely worth checking out. Go to Coda. I love it. It's it says enough of this sheet and it's a lady like slamming a spreadsheet against her face. It's quite funny. Well done. Anyway, we'll link those up. But yeah, okay. So is that's your favorite? What are the tools do you see getting used? Because I know there's client-portal.io who has been I think Laura, Elizabeth, she's been a guest on this podcast before or something like I've definitely interviewed her. I know a lot of people use her product, which is basically a way to create portals on WordPress. So I like because I'm interested if you know any tools where like this can be semi-automated, right? Because I imagine the notion one is fairly manual. So it is I think they're getting there. And there are automation features within notion that I haven't sort of gone into too deeply yet, but it's on my list, my ever-growing list of apps and things that I want to try with them. So I've seen stuff as basic as like a Google doc that's just a hey right here kind of thing. Because really all you need is just the information, just the links to the important stuff. And then if you can personalize it, I think it's a lot better. So again, like your specific employee contract or your copy of the NDA, things like that are really useful to have just a click away. But otherwise, I use notion for all of my personal sort of task management as well. So I'm really, really stuck on notion right now. I don't think I'm going anywhere either. Well, they recently released a Zapier integration and API. So I can, I haven't played around with it too much yet, but I can see it being possible now to have like a master list of all client documents or a master list of all invoices, for example. So every time an invoice is raised in X tool, whatever you're using for invoices, you could push it into a list in a notion and have the client there. And then from what I understand, you could embed a view of invoices filtered by the certain client for that client portal, right? So you've got client ABC, you could put a view and say, show all the invoices here for client ABC. And that way, every time there's an invoice and you push them into your global invoice list, that view would automatically update across all of your clients. I haven't actually done this, but I believe that is what would be possible. The way I understand how notion views work and how the API would work, that should be possible now. So that'd be really cool to be able to push in like, any document you could have, like every document you receive from a client, you could forward it through Zapier or something and have Zapier pick up those documents and push them all into your notion based on the client's email address and then have them automatically show up in everyone's portal. So that's just me talking shit. Have you done anything like that? Yeah. Nothing crazy. No, so they just this week updated and introduced like synced blocks. So a block is like one tiny piece of something in notion that's sort of clickable and dragable and what have you. And so you can have synced blocks. So anytime you update something in one block, if you've got that block copied in other pages, it will update over there as well. So kind of similar to what you're talking about. But you mentioned air table earlier and the sheets in notion, I feel are extremely similar to air table in that there's lots of like, you know, pretty tags and different types of things you can put in the columns and then the automation features in notion let you kind of do what you're talking about. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I like that that block is kind of cool because that could be for example, the thing my mind went to straight away was like our contact information, which could be a block that you've got in all your client portals and then so if you need to change a phone number or add an email or something, you would just add that to the block and then bam, it's in all the portals. Yes. Yes, I know another thing system that people use for portals if anyone wants to investigate if anyone's thinking about going down this road using advanced custom fields on WordPress to sort of lay out a portal and create pages for each client. So that's another option if you're technical enough to do that. Okay, so what's next in the process? I think we kind of jumped over information collection. I, how do you use type form? Is that what you use with people to get information from their clients? Yeah, for the most part, or I'll build it just directly into the website kind of full information that way. So a lot of different WordPress plugins. I use Squarespace a lot and then Webflow as well. Pretty much any form tool you can make if you can get the person to fill out the form, which is tricky, then most forms will go straight into Zapier and Zapier will send it along wherever they need to be. But you can either, you know, even if they don't want to fill out the forms themselves or like you keep constantly reminding them, you can just hop on a phone call and fill out the form yourself. And that's fine. And it still helps the conversation flow. We need to get you on the content snare for sure then, 'cause that you literally just described the problem that we solve. Constantly chasing people to fill out forms. That's literally why content snare exists. Because people use it for like initial onboarding questionnaires or gathering content or, I mean, now we've even got like lawyers and accounts using it to collect documents from their clients like at the end of the year and whatever. It's crazy. But dammit was the last thing you said, oh yeah, getting on the call, that's huge. Like I know, obviously not automation, but you know, sometimes people don't work that well unless you call them. You know, some people need to be on the phone. Like you need to get on like an hour call maybe longer and literally go through every question and get answers. A lot of people do that. Like we've got clients with content snare who have an initial call, they fill out as much of what they can on behalf of the client in content snare. Like they actually create the form, publish it and then fill out everything they can and then leave it to the client to sort of finish off. Like they might be asked for your questions or they might just have to approve it or whatever. So yeah, 100% onboard with the call. So I think that's most of the process now. We've talked about sort of that initial contact and then collecting information proposals and the client portal. Now let's talk about service delivery 'cause you mentioned that when we were speaking earlier offline. Now what kind of automations have you seen in service delivery? - So it really comes down to the architecture in these sort of cases. So when we're talking about service fulfillment, we can automate a lot of different stuff in terms of the non-technical automation. So we're looking at like templates. So somebody may document somewhere that has all of the individual building blocks that another person needs to make sure everything gets done. And frameworks, which are all a part of your agency's core competency, but how does somebody think through this specific problem so that everything is accounted for in the solution and that kind of thing? And then it's all kinds of little things within your project management system. So let's say somebody changes a status on a task to block. Can we automatically assign that to you so that whoever is overseeing everything who's gonna be the most capable of removing whatever that block is, can get in there and fix it. And they're automatically assigned to something. Little things like that. And then, and this is the part where I think it takes a lot of mindset and architecture shifting. I'm really not a fan of building out custom one-off contracts and proposals for every single client. If you can move away from doing that, you can standardize a ton of your processes and a ton of your fulfillment. But it's as much of a struggle to convince people to do that as it is to get newer business owners to like niche down. (laughs) Yeah, that's kind of like a productizing in a way, right? Like in a way, yeah. Yeah, like I get that. I know some people, there's always gonna be projects that can't be standardized. I get that, but for a lot of people, they often can be in some way, shape or form. Or you can start stripping out different services that need lots of customization and just stick with the simplest off. I like to just spoke about there with the project management, like small things that when task got assigned, set to block. I've seen things set up where if a task is in a certain status for a certain amount of time, 'cause someone might not set it to block, especially if they know it's gonna notify you. (laughs) But you could have things that, you say if something's in a certain status for too long, then notify you or automatically set it to block. One that was always really, really important for me and back when I was looking for project management system in like 2014, so things have changed a lot then. I think they all do this now, but at the time, teamwork was the only one that I could find that really did it that would notify the next task assigned when the previous task was done. So like you could say, like obviously, you don't wanna develop the website until the design's done. But so just having a system where it's like, as soon as design is marked as completed, it sends the notification to all the relevant people that are going to be in the development phase to get started. So that was huge, right? And I think, you know, also like dashboards for each person, like I've heard, you know, that can be a big resistance point for team members, if they have to go to multiple places to work at what tasks they've gotta work on, but if you can bring it all together and like one little dashboard for them, have you worked in that kind of space much? - Not much on that side. - No, but that is really interesting. And I know like, Asada has a little dashboard for you, but what if your design team uses one app and your development team uses another app then, - Yeah. - How to get them together. - Yeah, that's always gonna be hard, 'cause I know like some people might use something like Jira for like hardcore software development, you know, we used to do that. The exactly what you were talking about where we had our normal project management system for back in the past. basically everything else. And then Jira for the software development, because we wanted that tight integration with source code control and whatever, which is pretty serious, right? Yeah, that's, I mean, hard to manage. That really was just a manual process, which isn't that much of a big deal when you're talking big projects. If you're talking mid-five figure projects, then it's not a big deal to set up a new project. But you mentioned it before in having templates. If you've got a project template that you can just duplicate, it's got all the stages for each feature, we would move through certain stages, like it would be, gets peer reviewed, like once it's complete, it gets peer reviewed and all the automatic code quality checks then peer reviewed, then it's deployed and whatever. And so all of that, you don't need to set up every time because you're using templates. I think templates are a great automation/productivity thing across the board. Even emails, I just text expand to pre-populate emails all the time. Like after this podcast, I'm going to send you an email that tells you how to send me your site of the audio. It's going to say where we should connect what social media. It's like, I've got a whole bunch of stuff in it. It's going to take me like five seconds to put it in the thing and then I just customize the delete the bits that don't matter and now you've got that email, right? So emails, massive templates for everything. Basically, that's what I want to say. Yes. Yes, the text expanders, the candy emails, all of it, yes. Entire sites, you can start WordPress builds with everything ready to go and you just duplicate the site with all the plugins and whatever theme you use. Yeah. Oh, the one-click install now, yes. Well, you see, it's even past that now. Like you can, when we were, a lot of people listening, probably already do this, but you create a website, install all the plugins that you use on pretty much every client site, install your base theme, generate press or something. And then instead of installing on a new site, you literally just duplicate it. Like a lot of hosts now, especially cloudways, you can just hit one button and it'll duplicate that entire website with everything ready to go and then you just have a process to change the website name and whatever and then you start on the custom development for that site. But it saves a hell of a lot of time rather than trying to install everything instead of everything up each time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Any other notes on service delivery automation? I think it's really about the mindset. It can sometimes take some real major shifts and even the way you do business. Like the core fundamentals of what you're offering and how you're fulfilling your services. But-- Yeah. You know, agencies have a bad reputation for being difficult to work with and being difficult to own and run. And I don't think it has to be that way. And I think you can do a lot with automation and productivity and process simplifiers. They can really make a huge difference for you and your whole team. Yeah. I tend to agree that with all the process to the resider, I think a lot of the optimization comes down to what mindset, like you said, and it's because it's literally changing the way you do things. Right? It's-- It is hard to stomach like the idea of productization. I think a good book worth reading is built to sell. I don't know if you've read that. But it's basically like, go follow the story of an agency who do all this random custom stuff. And then they kind of strip it back. And then they're able to hire more focused people because they start doing only logo design or whatever eventually. And in the end, it's basically a productized logo design service. They stripped everything back. And now they're making a ton more profit. Obviously, that's not going to appeal to everyone. But there are different levels of that, where it's stripping away. Some people say, yes, everything, even like these crazy custom builds, they're going to take the months, have to learn all this new stuff to do it. Whereas if you've got the right mindset, you just don't do those kind of projects. You've referred those to someone else. And you stay within your wheelhouse of stuff that you can do really well and actually productize. What was that book you said built to sell? Yeah. It's one of those-- I'm going to put that in my reading list. Yeah, nice. It's one of those fake story ones, though. I find it really strange to read, where it's like, oh, yeah. And then they go and do this. And then they do this and this. And it's like, you know the whole thing's bullshit. But it's like about the lesson behind it, whatever. Yeah, I really struggle with those kind of books, but the message is good. I think it's a good read for the agency owners, especially ones doing too much custom work. Yes, the custom work is so killer. And I've even worked with clients that are software products. But they do custom builds as a part of their service set. And you only have so much developer time. And if you use it all on building out customized implementations of your app, you're losing out on a huge portion of the actual part of your business that will scale. Because custom work does not scale. No. I would say if you're going to be in that space, though you want to be charging for it, like probably a lot more than you think. I think that's a big problem with a lot of agencies is not charging enough. And I mean, it's pretty crazy. The amount of people that come, like they used to come to me and be like, oh, you know, I want to build a mobile app, blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, I get cool if you got like at least 50 grand. You know, like for what? And they're like, oh, I was thinking more like three grand. And it's like, no, like maybe now with no code tools, you know, that's a potentially, you know, I know a guy who productized mobile apps. But for a very specific industry, it was like for coaches and sort of membership type platforms. So, you know, the classic like marketing coach, they have like a course, they have a podcast, they have a blog, you know, maybe a membership community. So he basically packaged that up that he built with no code tools and sold that as a thing to coaches, right? So there's got to be a lot of niches like that. I know for some reason, accountants go, so leave for apps. This is mind blowing to me. Like I always, I met this company that do custom apps for, obviously made of building blocks. That's the word when you cut them. It's not like off the shelf, but they they they slightly customize apps for accountants. And it blew my mind that accountants would even think that their clients want to use an app to communicate with them. I was like, how how are you selling them on this? Because I'm not downloading my accountants app. This is a dumb idea. But the amount of the amount of things I've seen where accountants seem to go nuts for apps anyway. But just just my point that there's so many options like you could you can productize into so many different ways and different services that it's worth investigating. Definitely. I've used the no code, but keep charging 50k. Yeah, there's that too. I mean, the big thing with any of this too is like ongoing maintenance. It'll be, if you can get them into some kind of retainer afterwards or like a lot of these no code platforms will have partner programs where you can resell it. So they still need to pay a monthly fee. They just pay it to you and you mark up, and add puts and value added services on there. Like, if they have want to change something small, they can message you or whatever. All right. Well, is there anything else before we sort of start wrapping this up? Is there anything else you'd like to cover? I think that it covers just about everything. For me, I just really want agency owners to understand the potential of automation. And then it doesn't have to be this big scary technical monster. And it can really make a massive difference, both for yourself and for your entire team. Yeah, nice. That actually one thing. Do you have like a specific story you could share? Like of an agency you've worked with and like their journey? Like, obviously without any personal details or whatever. But like, just to give people a bit of an idea of transformations that are possible. So I think, honestly, in my own experience, like with building the agency that I'm building, I started out as a freelancer. So seven years worth of that worth of taking every client, no matter what they paid and like slowly stepping up and getting a little bit better about that stuff. And I always resisted the agency aspect. And I know a lot about the freelancers that feel the same way. The natural step up from freelancing is agency. But we've all worked with so many agencies that are so killer to work for that it's sort of this resistance type thing. And even I think maybe it's hustle culture to just this concept got to be working all the time, got to be doing your best 100% of the time, got to get 10 hours of sleep and work all the time and also eat nothing but fruits and vegetables all this. all that that happens. I got sort of caught up in this, you know, I've got to be working nights and weekends and on vacation to have a successful business. And at some point I realized that that was this major block in starting an agency and really scaling to my fullest potential. And I was just like, screw this, I'm not going to, what if I just don't, what if I just close the laptop when I'm done with work, what if I just go to about what I want to and what if I just refuse to answer emails on the weekends and in the evenings and stuff. And of course, I would want that for anybody working with me as well. And I realized like I really just didn't have to. So that's kind of where the automated agency came to fruition. It was just this realization that it doesn't have to be as shitty as it seems like it has to be. Yeah, 100%. You know, I, that's all it's like not sort of super similar to my story. But in a way, like I had a breaking point where I was just doing too much friggin work all the time. And it was through, you know, process and it's, um, automating as much as I possibly could, you know, I went through a phase of just buying every bit of software I thought it could save me time. You know, spending a little shitload of money, but it was totally worth it. Like I, I've canceled a lot of that now and sort of, it's like the pendulum swing, right? You know, I was like, I was on the left, like automating nothing and then like trying to automate everything and then sort of brought it back to a nice, nice, heavy little medium where I wasn't so overworked. I think that's, you know, it is a good message there that you like, you don't have to check emails on weekends. A lot of people do. You don't, like, you know, you don't have to take client phone calls whenever they call you. You can just leave it ring out if you're doing something important at the moment, call them back later. That's allowed. Yeah. It's your business. So builds, build something you want to work for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm on vacation next week and it will be one of the first vacations in a long time where I'm just not, not touching it. Not at all. Like I worked through, like holidays and stuff before I worked on vacations in the past. It's like, what are you? What was I doing? 100%. That's a whole lot of the topic for another podcast, I think. So, let's, before we finish, finish up, where can people go to find out more about you and what you're doing? Sure. So my agency is at the automated.agency. So that is my website where you can see what the automated agency is working on and how to get involved with that. And then I'm on Twitter. And that's pretty much it. So yeah. I will link up your Twitter in the show notes at agency highway.com/136, which is how we connect it. I'm pretty sure I saw a tweet of yours talking about automating agency stuff and I was like, got to get her on the show. That might have been it. I think about it. I do love Twitter. So for many reasons. Yeah. All right. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. Love talking automation, love talking shit about apps. Oh yeah. I could do that all day. All right. Thanks a lot of you. 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