Automate Your Agency

How do I reclaim an hour a day to work on my business?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 1

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If we told you that you could save one hour every day to actually work on your business rather than in your business, you might respond with "Ha! I'll believe it when I see it! In what world is this even possible?" 🤨

As leaders, our day is often spent answering an onslaught of repeat questions from our team or dousing fires that seem to spontaneously appear at the most inconvenient times. These disruptions lock us into reactive mode and when "quitting time" rolls around, we're left asking ourselves: "What did I actually accomplish?" "When am I ever going to be able to focus on [insert strategic task here]?"

Fret no more, friends. There is a solution, and it's easier than you think. 😀

Join us in the first episode of Automate Your Agency, as we (Alane & Micah) share the secret we discovered in our own endeavors to quieten the noise and regain control of our schedule. We'll talk you through the details of the systems, processes, and best practices so you can successfully apply these same foundational principles to help you (and your team) save at least 1 hour per day. 

In this Episode, we'll cover...

  • (3:39) Streamlining Operations Through SOP Documentation
  • (7:08) The Delegation Decision
  • (10:17) The Magic of Project Management Tools
  • (16:22) How ClickUp Shaped Our Internal Communication Guidelines and Time Management Practices 
  • (18:41) The Cost of a Single Interruption
  • (20:45) Selecting the Best Project Management Tool for Your Business 
  • (22:04) Empowering Your Team to Find Answers Independently....

Find the Project Management System that is right for you with our selector tool: https://form.typeform.com/to/pdwhka7L

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): What are we talking about today?

0:00:20 - (Alane): I have no idea.

0:00:21 - (Micah): You don't?

0:00:22 - (Alane): No.

0:00:22 - (Micah): Oh, man.

0:00:23 - (Alane): No. We're going to be talking about how to free up an hour of your day.

0:00:27 - (Micah): An entire hour?

0:00:28 - (Alane): An entire hour. And it feels a little impossible when you think about your workload.

0:00:33 - (Micah): I'm feeling like that today.

0:00:36 - (Alane): Really?

0:00:37 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:00:37 - (Alane): How are you gonna solve it?

0:00:38 - (Micah): We're gonna talk about that.

0:00:40 - (Alane): Okay.

0:00:41 - (Micah): So this came, this topic is near and dear to my heart. Not only because I still have that issue of trying to free up time every day, but also because it was a lot worse in the past.

0:00:58 - (Alane): Yeah, we were working 1012 hours days almost every single day early on in the business.

0:01:05 - (Micah): Do you remember the first time we stopped working weekends?

0:01:09 - (Alane): No.

0:01:10 - (Micah): It was amazing. But it was such a habit that we were working so much. We'd work eight to ten hour days and all. Also work all weekend.

0:01:21 - (Alane): Yeah, we did that for a very long time. But I do remember when we didn't have to have our employees continue working through the evenings.

0:01:30 - (Micah): Yeah, they probably remember that too. But we ran into things. I mean, where all this came about is, I mean, I remember logging into slack at 08:00 in the morning, answering questions all day long on slack, and then it hitting like 06:00 p.m. after eating lunch at my desk so I don't miss any slacks. And then just looking back at the day going, what the hell did I do all day long? Like, all I did was answer questions. And then throughout the week, it was a lot of the same questions over and over and over.

0:02:05 - (Micah): And I spent zero time working on the business, but I felt like I was getting stuff done.

0:02:11 - (Alane): Oh, gosh. Yeah. Like, and as our team, the more clients we got, the more team members we had, the more questions we got. And it ended up being all day long. Instead of working on our business and strategizing and putting together growth plans, we were putting out fires, reacting all day, answering teams questions. And that would be 10 hours a day if we got lucky and got to finish work.

0:02:37 - (Micah): Yeah, this was a time where we weren't necessarily worried about sales and marketing. We had the business coming in. We were hiring people to cover the business. But that just meant you and I spent so much time not building strategy, not figuring out ways to increase the business. Like you said, we just answer more questions?

0:03:03 - (Alane): Yeah. And, you know, at one point, we were at a breaking point and we had an employee change positions, and it was really becoming obvious we needed better systems in place. And the. Do you remember my binder that I created for every new hire that was on my team? It was a binder printed out word documents of all of the processes that they needed to know how to do. Well, keeping up with a printed document was difficult, and we started hiring all over the country, so I was having to ship them.

0:03:39 - (Micah): I thought I remember that. I thought I remember us mailing those things.

0:03:42 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, trying to keep up with that, and you're mailing. I mean, we get to a point where we're like, emailing things and stuff, but then where do you have the most recent version? It becomes just chaotic. And we were burnt out, our employees were burnt out, and we needed to get to a point where we weren't just putting out fires all day. We had no visibility, hardly at all. We used basecamp early on, and that worked great for new client onboarding. It was their very first version, but we didn't have anything else in place after a new client onboarded checklist in basecamp.

0:04:19 - (Micah): Yeah, that's right, that's right. But that was the first version of what actually started working, which is documenting our processes and identifying how do we get stuff out of our own heads? How do we stop answering these same questions over and over? So while we did it, printed form at the time, I feel like we're really dating ourselves. Technology was invented, computers were invented at this time.

0:04:44 - (Micah): You know, we weren't handwriting this stuff, or dot matrix printers, but the collaboration tools just weren't quite there yet when you were doing this. And since then, obviously, it's all digital, it's all online, and there's major tools. But that first step, and I would say that's the step for anybody who wants to start saving time, start documenting your stuff. This was when we were doing it. My favorite tool right now for doing this is loom.

0:05:13 - (Micah): It's so simple, like, record a loom of how to do X, Y or Z. That's it. Add a title to it, put a loom, get your share link, and put it in a place that people can access it. Whether you're using the loom library or some other type of knowledge base or resource, get it organized and get it structured. But that's it. Don't spend 100 hours creating one SoP. Spend five or ten minutes creating SoP, get it out of your head, get it documented.

0:05:42 - (Micah): And then improve it later.

0:05:44 - (Alane): Yeah. And when you do it like that, it can be on a reactionary basis, because you can't go and say, I'm gonna create a sop for every process in my company, and I'm gonna start today. Because you never get there. That's way too much to take on.

0:06:02 - (Micah): Been there, done that, or didn't do that.

0:06:05 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:06:05 - (Micah): Never finished.

0:06:06 - (Alane): How far did you make it, Micah?

0:06:08 - (Micah): Like, two pages. Because the reality is, too many other questions came in, too many clients items came in. Your day to day pulls you in that it has to be something quick and painless.

0:06:19 - (Alane): Yeah. And you can just do it as things come on. Okay. Come up. I'm gonna record a video on this. I'm gonna send this out. Cause once you do it once, that's it. You have a record of it and can send it to the person or have it accessible so they can search and find it.

0:06:34 - (Micah): Well, not only that, too. The ability to say, okay, like, I didn't have to record everything. You don't have to record everything. We can divide and conquer. But once we get the basics of the questions that we are the ones answering, well, then we can train our team on also how to record looms. And the team leaders, the department heads, all those types of leadership roles, can do the same thing to free up their time and also delegate, so that you as the founder, or me as the founder or co founders, we're not feeling like. I know that's like.

0:07:08 - (Micah): I think that's my kind of initial inclination for all of this is like, oh, it's our responsibility. We need to, like, tell people how to do stuff. But let's face it, a lot of people that work for us know how to do things a lot better than we do. That's why we hired them.

0:07:22 - (Alane): Yeah. Or they know a part of the process to get you started.

0:07:25 - (Micah): Yep.

0:07:25 - (Alane): And so, a lot of times, you have an admin or a manager on your team that can do that. It doesn't have to fall on your plate. But for whatever reason, we feel like we have to be the ones to carry that burden.

0:07:37 - (Micah): I think it's hard to delineate, because sometimes I look at this, and I'm like, all right, let's delegate. Which we're gonna talk about next. But, like, let's delegate these sops to somebody. And then it feels like more work to delegate the Sops. Cause all they're doing is answering questions. So sometimes it's hard to identify, should I just do this sop myself? When we say sop. Standard operating procedure, super cut and dry, simple way.

0:08:03 - (Micah): We're not even talking about, like, a government official SoP. This is literally a title, a video. Five minutes. Improve it later, add descriptions later, do everything else later. Once you get feedback on it. But it feels like it's sometimes hard to determine, should I do it or should I delegate it? And so that's part of, like, if it's questions that only you can answer, don't delegate it.

0:08:24 - (Alane): Right. You're the expert on it.

0:08:26 - (Micah): Totally. If it's questions that you hired somebody to handle, creative director. Well, don't be making sops for the creative directors to then distribute to their team. That's where I think the mistakes come in.

0:08:43 - (Alane): Yeah, for sure. And so we're talking about delegation.

0:08:47 - (Micah): Let's do it.

0:08:48 - (Alane): So, you know, how do you get to the point where, okay, I've got some sops, and then now I'm gonna just go delegate.

0:08:57 - (Micah): Yes. I'll tell you what not to do, because this is what I did for years, and it drove, I think I know it drove you crazy, and I know it drove the team crazy. And then I would get super frustrated. I would say, hey, we need to do x, y, and z, just verbally, and I would give no priorities, and I'd give no context, and yet I would still expect that to somehow be magically done.

0:09:21 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:09:22 - (Micah): And in my mind, that was gonna, like, I said it, so, like, obviously it should happen. Right? Yeah.

0:09:30 - (Alane): I'd probably fall into that trap, too. Like, well, I said it, so it should be done.

0:09:33 - (Micah): Right. But I think a lot of founders and a lot of leaders do that. They're pressed for time. They're reacting to something, and it's top of mind, oh, crap. We need to. Whatever we need to get this done. And then it's, you can, as a founder or leader, you breathe that sigh of relief. Cause I just delegated that. Obviously, we're gonna get it done. But the people hearing that have no idea of the urgency of the priority.

0:10:04 - (Alane): Of who's gonna do it.

0:10:05 - (Micah): Who's gonna. Is it them?

0:10:07 - (Alane): Yeah. Is it. Can they delegate five other people? Is it in slack with three other people? Like, no one knows who that person is that should take that responsibility.

0:10:17 - (Micah): All right, so that's how not to delegate, what not to do when delegating what we implemented. You mentioned basecamp earlier. That was our first foray into work management tools or project management tools. And after base camp, we went to Asana, which at the time was big leader, really worked well. We got the very we were very early adopters of Asana when it looked horrendous at the time. It looked great to us. But compare what it looked like. Do you remember what it looked like way back then?

0:10:50 - (Alane): I mean, it looks exactly the same to me.

0:10:52 - (Micah): No. I'll show you some screenshots after this. You'll be surprised what it looked like back then. Anyway, the whole point is delegate with a project management tool.

0:11:03 - (Alane): Yeah. Then you have clear due dates, clear assignees you have who needs to be collaborating on there. You can tag in comments if they have questions and it's all in the place that it should be.

0:11:15 - (Micah): Yes.

0:11:15 - (Alane): You have tasks associated with projects, and for any department in your business, it doesn't need to just pertain to clients. But that's where delegating can actually happen, because it's clear. And you can use descriptions and different things to outline exactly what's needed.

0:11:32 - (Micah): So you can make a complete request with the context, with all the assets that people need to understand. The way that I like to think about it is I want to answer any questions that they might have before they ask them within that task so that I don't have to ask anything. And it takes a lot less time trying to answer those questions upfront, even though it doesn't feel like it, because I know for years I did the same thing. Like I would just create a task, assign it, maybe put a date, and that's it.

0:12:05 - (Micah): And because I felt like that was the quickest way that I could get it done, but then it was ten x, the amount of time in the back and forth, even if it's in a project management system. So now I have a template that every time I create a task, it prompts me with all the questions, what's the objective? What's the purpose? What are the assets? Do they have access to all the things that they need to complete this task, all of that stuff. So then I work through that whole thing.

0:12:29 - (Micah): It takes me a few minutes to create a task. Yes, but it has zero x. Yeah, yeah. Saves hours of that back and forth. And when you multiply that by however many tasks you want to delegate during a day, that's again, substantial time.

0:12:46 - (Alane): Or what worse happens is then the person goes, I'm just gonna do it myself.

0:12:52 - (Micah): The person delegating. Yes, yes. Because they're sick of being delegating questions.

0:12:56 - (Alane): They didn't properly give the person the context and what they need to execute on, and so they automatically revert back to, I should have just done it myself, I couldn't delegate this. Nobody knows what I know.

0:13:08 - (Micah): Yeah, I think about that a lot with single, threaded and multi threaded approach. I know that sounds technical, but the idea being anytime a founder or a leader or an owner tries to do everything themselves, they can only do one thing at a time. When you delegate now you can do two x, three x, four x, five x at a time, and you can have multiple things happening, even if they're only done 75% or even 50%, as well as what you would do normally.

0:13:40 - (Alane): So why don't we talk about, we talked about using Asana.

0:13:43 - (Micah): Yep.

0:13:43 - (Alane): And so let's talk about, maybe just for a second, the, the three that we most commonly see with agencies and b, two b companies and what project management systems we see work best.

0:13:55 - (Micah): Yes. The three platforms.

0:13:57 - (Alane): Yes.

0:13:57 - (Micah): So Asana, ClickUp and Monday.

0:14:01 - (Alane): Yeah. And so why do you think those three are the most common between them?

0:14:08 - (Micah): Well, they're all good at marketing, first of all. So that has something to do with it. They've all raised substantial amounts of money, but they're all a collaborative platform. And this is my favorite part of those three. They can fully replace internal email. And when we got on, we were still using email with basecamp. When we got on Asana, our internal email was reduced by, I don't know, 90, 95%.

0:14:36 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:14:37 - (Micah): I mean, today with this business, hardly at all. Zero.

0:14:40 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:14:41 - (Micah): I do not think we email each other at all.

0:14:44 - (Alane): We don't. But there is a caveat to this, is that we tag in front and.

0:14:48 - (Micah): We do use fronts.

0:14:50 - (Alane): So there is a little bit of a nuance here, but that is maybe two tags in a day that we do our communication and our client statuses and moving things forward all happens in our project management system.

0:15:05 - (Micah): Yeah. So we, in this business, we're now using ClickUp and we follow the same process. We created simple sops, we delegated ins, we delegate everything inside of ClickUp. If it's not a task in ClickUp, it hasn't been delegated. If it hasn't been fully fleshed out with the template, it hasn't been delegated. If it doesn't have an assignee and a date and related to some sort of project or team or backlog that relates to what the request is, it hasn't been delegated.

0:15:35 - (Micah): We do no internal email and we also minimized slack.

0:15:39 - (Alane): Yeah, I mean, it's very minimal because you can't be accountable, you cannot truly delegate, and you don't have a real history outside of searching through chat streams like that. It's not specific to a client, it is a nightmare. And if we're talking about which we are saving an hour a day, digging through Slack to find out who's doing what is not saving you time.

0:16:03 - (Micah): That's a poor use of time.

0:16:04 - (Alane): That is extremely poor use. Poor use. Then searching through email, trying to dig up stuff is also a poor use. So in a project management system, everything has a place, everything has a status, a due date, a person assigned a backlog, everything you need to manage everything properly in your business.

0:16:23 - (Micah): Yeah. And one thing that we like about ClickUp, Asana doesn't have it, but it's threaded conversation. You can still have threaded conversations even within a task or even within a chat window. So for us internally, for our whole team, Slack is predominantly like urgent. Its announcements, its urgent items a slack we really use for urgency. So if somebody on our team needs to ask a question that is urgent, they're not going to put it in ClickUp because we're treating ClickUp. The big difference between slack and ClickUp is slack is interruptive, which is perfect for urgent items or announcements that we want to tell the team about. Right? Like a new client coming on board.

0:17:08 - (Micah): Perfect use case for Slack.

0:17:09 - (Alane): Oh yeah, I love our sales automation. As soon as something closes in pipedrive, it goes into our sales channel and we all get to cheer and be excited about the new client coming on board.

0:17:18 - (Micah): Yep, yep. And then in ClickUp, it's asynchronous, or it's, you can think about it as non interruptive. So that means people can put questions inside of ClickUp in context related to the stuff that we've delegated. But if you or I are busy focused on something, or in a meeting or recording a podcast, we're not actively getting dinged through this and being interrupted. When we're done with this podcast, we're both going to go to ClickUp, we're going to check our ClickUp inbox, and we're going to catch up on anything, and we're going to batch that, which is really, really good time management skills.

0:17:53 - (Micah): Because now we're going to spend five or ten minutes catching up on ten or 15 questions or tasks or updates that we have waiting for us in ClickUp. Instead of that constant slacker teams ping where we're like, cannot focus. Let's pause recording this podcast and see is it emergency? Whatever it is. So all of that together, ditch internal email, right? We're going to use slacker teams for urgent items for the most part only, and then all of our collaboration is also done in ClickUp. Or the project management tool like Asana or Monday, where it can be non interruptive and in context and like you were saying, then everything is in its nice place instead of having to do all that searching and this.

0:18:41 - (Alane): There's been a ton of research on just how interruptions impact your time in a day. And, I mean, what we found from people doing research is that even if it's just a quick slack question that takes you 1 minute to answer, it actually pulls you out of deep work for 20 minutes.

0:18:59 - (Micah): Geez.

0:19:01 - (Alane): So every question you're getting is taking you out of your work that you are focused on. And for you to get back in, it takes 20 minutes to get back in the flow of that deep thought.

0:19:11 - (Micah): Yeah, I believe it. I mean, I feel like. I can feel that some days with my brain trying to change gears. And I used to really not have patience for that. Now I only have a little patience for that. But, you know, it was a frustrating experience to be focused in the zone, in your flow state, whatever you want to call it, and then getting pulled out by a question or something that you probably just answered a few hours ago.

0:19:39 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:19:40 - (Micah): And then having to get back in. Absolutely.

0:19:42 - (Alane): I believe that that's happening to you, but it's also impacting the other person and their work day and however many team members that they're having those same interactions. So not only are you saving that time in a day, but the rest of your team, if you have ten people on your team, that is substantial money for your company, that you turn that around and now they're more efficient also for an hour a day getting things done, man, that's profit for your company.

0:20:09 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And that made me think about, too, is slack channels alone, because they're so interruptive. When you have team channels, when you have group channels, a lot of times it just becomes habit to go post something in that. Well, you're interrupting every person in that channel, and they all need that ten minutes to get out, you know, to look, to be interrupted, and then ten minutes to get back in the flow state. Like that could be 2 hours worth of billable time for a cat picture.

0:20:39 - (Alane): I don't know.

0:20:40 - (Micah): I don't know. Whatever your team's working on, whatever people are working on in slack.

0:20:46 - (Alane): So there's a lot of companies that we work with that want to be using a project management tool. They see that the future, what it could look like, but they don't even know where to start. And so what Micah and I developed is okay, it really comes down to, like, eleven basic key comparisons. Yeah. And so we mapped out what it can look like for the best tool for your organization based on these eleven key things. And so it's our selector tool.

0:21:15 - (Alane): We're going to link it here in the description. But if you're wondering, man, like, I don't even know if the one that I'm in is the right one, is there a better one for me? Then you can use that and it's going to tell you based on these things that are important to you and how you run your organization, this is the one we recommend.

0:21:29 - (Micah): Yeah. And it'll even, once you fill out the eleven requirements or eleven key questions, it will show you a comparison across all three so you can contrast and compare. And it goes, the comparison goes beyond those eleven. It goes into some of the different nuanced things like guest users and dashboard capabilities and stuff like that, which is a pain in the butt to actually try to figure out if you don't know what you're looking at across the system. So you definitely check out the tool.

0:21:57 - (Micah): That's an excellent point.

0:21:58 - (Alane): Yeah. It takes less than two minutes, so it's easy, risk free.

0:22:02 - (Micah): Did we just sponsor our own podcast?

0:22:03 - (Alane): We did. We sponsored it.

0:22:04 - (Micah): Okay, cool. I like that. All right. So one of the things that we did in our last business, and we automatically put that in place here in this business as well, is we turn this whole concept into a system. The SoPs, partially the delegation, but then the communication. And we had our knowledge base at the last company and the policy was, or the system was ask the knowledge base first. And so the concept is, instead of asking me, instead of asking Elaine, instead of asking your team leader, you ask the knowledge base first.

0:22:37 - (Micah): You don't interrupt a human at all. You don't post it on slack. You don't even make it to ClickUp or Asana or Monday, yet you check out the Sops. Is there already an answer to your question? If there is, problem solved. Nobody got interrupted and you got your answer right away. If there isn't, then it's up to you and whoever's responsibility it is to help answer that or to solve that problem is to create an SOP, get it into the knowledge base and you.

0:23:08 - (Alane): Really have to do this. If not, you're not solving the problem, you're creating extra work by having the knowledge base, but you're not actually using the knowledge base. So any of that time savings doesn't play out because nobody's using it. And so, like, when we first really started doing this, we were like a broken record. Well, did you check the knowledge base? No. Okay, well, why don't you go check that first, then let me know what you find.

0:23:35 - (Alane): Because you have to train people. Their first inclination is, well, I'll just ask somebody. That's the easiest path for them.

0:23:42 - (Micah): That system worked really well and it builds upon itself.

0:23:46 - (Alane): It does. And you have to build that culture so that people see the value in that and then take ownership of their position. Cause at the end of the day, people wanna leave their job and feel like they really kicked butt that day. They don't wanna feel like they had a run around in circles trying to figure out what they needed to do.

0:24:03 - (Micah): No, nobody likes that feeling. Leaders included. Yeah, like we. I don't want to run around all day feeling like, what am I doing? Or trying to find stuff. So. Yeah. All right. So that if you, if you're looking at how to scale your business, whether it's from sales and marketing or whether it's from an operational standpoint, that is our best advice on how to free up at least an hour a day. You get in, record some sops, start delegating that. Start actually delegating with the right project management tool.

0:24:36 - (Micah): Use our project management tool selector to figure out which one will work best for you. Ditch the internal email, ditch all day slack in team conversations. Focus on collaboration in the project management tool, and then build an easy system where you can consistently build the Sops in a knowledge base that people check first. And break everybody's habit of asking questions because that's currently how we're all trained and the path of least resistance.

0:25:05 - (Alane): Yeah, and that's how you get an hour back in your day to work on your business.

0:25:09 - (Micah): Love it.

0:25:11 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:25:22 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:25:27 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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