What systems do you need today?

If you don’t have any systems in your business, “oh my God, what are you doing?”

Now, I know I’m saying this now, but years ago, I ain’t had no systems.

So who am I to be condemning you about systems?

But seriously?

If you do not have systems in place in your business, it’s going to be really challenging to run your business, but also to grow your business.

Because here’s what I have learned over the years through the hard way, is that if I know everything and if I’m responsible for everything, nobody can do anything without me, then that means I am always working.

I started a business to have time and financial freedom, and that meant I needed some.

In this article we are talking about what systems do you need today to have a successful business?

 

I wanna walk you through eight of the different systems and tools that we use in my business in order to have success.

So they’re not gonna be in any particular order.

I knew that we’ve made lots and lots and lots of money in my company and when I was talking to somebody about how to grow my business, he said, “You’ve gotta get an assistant.”

And as soon as I started the process of trying to find an assistant, he said, “But you also need to have systems and processes in your business, or your assistant is going to be so frustrated, so confused in all the things that you’ve gotta give him or her. What they need.”

And honestly, that was really hard.

It’s been a year now since we’ve been doing this, and so now  I have a little bit more experience to share, our process.

Now, obviously in a year I may have some different recommendations for systems, but today this is where we are.

So the first thing that I wrote down here is payroll.

You have to have a system to pay your people, and here is what we did at first.

So we found everybody on upwork.com, and so we were constantly paying people through upwork.com until one day I realized, “Oh, not only is Upwork taking 20% of their money, But Upwork is also charging us even more money to be able to pay them.”

And so we just kind of got to the point where we were like, “Woo, we’re spending a lot of money on Upwork fees. We need to hire these people onto our own system.”

That way we’re not spending all this money every single time we’re paying somebody.

And so we learned about a tool called Gusto.

Gusto allows you to hire people, whether it’s in the US, in different countries, and you can pay everybody all at the same time.

Now we know in our company, everybody gets paid every other Friday.

So Friday morning I have this link from my assistant of everybody’s how much time they work that week and the hours that they get paid.

I literally just go into Gusto and I type in the hours and then boom, it’s automatically taken out of my account.

And then it’s at the end of the year when it’s tax time, I get all these documents back so that I’m able to know what it is that I’m doing with my taxes.

It gives me peace of mind knowing when they click, I know exactly what to do.

But also for my team members, they have the confidence that they’re gonna get paid because they do what they do and then we  always pay.

And so if their country or their bank has any kind of issues or if Gusto has any kind of payroll issues or whatever, notifications go out.

So there was a time when something had happened between Gusto payroll and people getting paid.

Gusto sent me an email and it said, “Hey, payroll’s gonna be delayed by two days because of something.”

And so I screenshot that and I send it to all of my employees and say, “This just came from Gusto.”

That way they weren’t wondering if ,”she is gonna be paying us or not?”

 

But they could see that it was a Gusto issue.

But also if somebody on my team switches banking accounts and they can’t pay them because of whatever’s going on. It sends me a notification to notify that person, “Hey, don’t forget to update your bank account.”

And so it’s a really great system and tool.

It will do a lot of things for you. 

So I would highly recommend you look into that for payroll.

The second tool that we use is time tracking. And it’s called Toggle.

Toggle allows everybody to log in, like when they came into work, when they went to lunch, when they came back in, and then when they logged off. Period.

Then at the end of the two weeks, my assistant sends me this little Excel spreadsheet and I have everybody’s names.

Here’s the hours that they work, and then we just plug it into Gusto and it’s free.

We’re not paying anything right now to use Toggle.

It’s a great way to do time tracking.

Now, again, this is gonna be very beneficial for you if you have an assistant.

She or he can be a virtual assistant because mine is in the Philippines.

It’s online, so they have access to everything so that you can onboard them.

It’s a whole easy system using Toggle.

The third thing you wanna have is some type of team communication tool.

Our communication tool of choice is Slack.

So it’s not cheap. But we use Slack and it has every single contractor that we work with.

So when we’re having back to back conversations with each other. And if we’re having small group conversations, it’s a really great tool.

So I have a Slack where it’s just me and my assistant.

I have Slack with me and my assistant and her assistant.

Then we have the main channel where I can send a message to everybody.

We have different categories, like here are ideas for content and we’re constantly dumping ideas for content inside of this little channel where I can pull from, our team can pull from. 

And when we’re coming up with social media, you can send files, you can send links, you can send videos.

It’s really, easy to be able to talk to everybody all at one time.

The lady who does all the tech work for us, I will always have a conversation between her and my assistant and it’s just easy.

She’s in India. While my assistant’s in the Philippines.

It’s just this a great easy way to have communication.

Again, a year ago I did not have any of these things, but all of this has completely changed my life.

I’ve been on this journey of life, health, and doctor’s visits, and have that surgery soon and like I can be sitting in the doctor’s office waiting to be seen, cuz your appointment is eight o’clock and then it’s like 8:37, haven’t been seen yet.

Y’all know exactly what I’m talking about.

I can literally be on Slack just talking to them.

They can send me a link to Google Drive, check this.

All this stuff can happen through using Slack.

The fourth tool you wanna use is maybe a social media management tool.

At this point we have a lot of different feelings about social media management tools because all of the apps really want you posting content natively on the platform.

That’s what they want.

They want you logging into Instagram, logging into TikTok and YouTube, Facebook, and actually hitting posts directly from the app.

And so as much as we want to use all the tools out there, like a Gore Post later, Metricool, Hootsuite, and all of them, the platforms don’t want that.

But if you’re like,“I need to be able to schedule this stuff and get away from it and not have to be around it.”

Then you wanna get some type of social media scheduling tool, and the ones that I like the most are Later and Metricool.

The fifth thing you wanna have is you wanna have your payment processors.

There are people out there that still only send PayPal invoices that still only send through Zelle that still only say, pay me through the cash app, or here’s my email for PayPal.

I’m not saying those are bad, but what I am saying is that you want some automated type of thing.

And so we have it to where when people are buying our products and services, they can pay through credit card, they can pay through PayPal, they can pay through Stripe.

That way we’re able to generate the money we wanna generate.

Now, eventually as we are making even more money per transaction, we will probably have a different tool that will take out less money from us when it comes in.

Cuz right now PayPal takes what it takes, Stripe takes what it takes.

It’s a lot of money that gets taken.

And so eventually we’re gonna wanna have more control over that and spend, give less money to all these payment processor places or whatever.

So you wanna make sure that you’re starting to use some type of processor and not send me a cash app because you just don’t wanna do that.

You want people to be able to enter their credit card information in pay through PayPal, pay through something like that.

The next thing you wanna have is you wanna have some type of project management system where your team can go, “Here’s their projects and here’s what they need to get done.”

So the system that we are currently using is ClickUp.

Now, the interesting thing is that ClickUp doesn’t work for me the way that my brain works. Like I have to be able to see it all.

And so my assistant and everybody is working in ClickUp with their task, and then my assistant, just every day there’s this sheet and this sheet shows me here’s all the things that I need to do for the day or for the week, and here’s what’s urgent.

And I’m able to knock things out a lot easier.

But every time I had to go to ClickUp, I wasn’t getting anything done.

But my team was doing a great job with using ClickUp. So, and then what that allows is that, it allows one person to enter in everybody’s task and ClickUp, assign them the tasks, and then you’re off to the races.

So ClickUp does a lot of different things. We’re giving people a task, it’s like a Zapier type thing. It’s a whole thing of what can happen when you use click up.

So my whole team uses it. I personally just use a sheet because of the way that my brain functions.

The last two systems you wanna have are email marketing system and a lead capture system.

So what do I mean by that?

We all know that one of the things that I teach is social media marketing, especially with TikTok and short form video.

But I always tell people that we don’t stop there.

We don’t just focus on how we get to a 100,000  followers, 200,000 followers, a million followers. No.

We focused on how we can get in front of a hundred thousand people or whatever, get them to say, I want more from you, and then get them off of social media onto our email list so we can have complete and full control.

Right now so many people are nervous about the potential of a TikTok band.

And now some of these people have millions upon millions upon millions of followers, and they have no control.

If the TikTok got banned, they would lose a million followers or however many they’ve got.

But if they have been focusing on getting people off of TikTok or social media onto their email list, they wouldn’t be as anxious about it because they would have more control.

So we make sure that we have a system that allows people to move from social media. And so our email system is Kartra.

But what we also do with Kartra is not only do we send emails and capture emails, but we also host our courses there.

So if you’re someone and you purchase our Monetize Talk program, it’s in there.

If you’ve purchased a webinar from us and it’s on replay, you’re actually logging into Kartra because it is such an easy way.to be able to put our products there, you’re able to log into and you’re able to watch at your leisure.

We have that system that allows people to opt in and then get emails from us.

Now, when we are usually building out some type of offer, let’s just say a free offer.

Typically what’s happening with us is that we have our page that we design is typically on WordPress.

Then we have the lead capture with Kartra. Then usually we’re using Zapier.

And Zapier is allowing us to zap in people from the elite, from the email, the email submit form into Kartra.

And it’s an easy, easy tool that’s allowing for that to really, really, really happen.

I know that it’s a lot. When I said, with all these systems.

But again the system you need are payroll system, time tracking, team communication, social media management tool, payment processor, project management, email marketing and lead capture.

You don’t have to start with all of them.

But if you’re gonna grow and you’re gonna have an assistant, then you’re gotta have your system for creating processes.

You’ve gotta have your system for communicating with her or him.

Then as you add more team members, then you’ve gotta have systems for file sharing and all that.

I didn’t even mention that. We use  Dropbox to be able to house all of our videos and some of our photos and stuff.

And then there’s things in Google Drive that we house.

We have all these different tools that we use, but they work really, really, really well with our team for everything to be systematized and automated.

So I, as a CEO, can focus on running a company and working with my clients.

Now, if you are someone and you’re like, “That’s a lot of stuff, that’s a lot of systems. I need help with that.”

If you are saying to yourself that you need help with that and you want me to help you with that, I can help you.

I do one-on-one consulting.  Just click here for more information about this program. You can book a one-on-one call with me and I can help you with all the things that we have talked about in this article.

We do have some courses that really walk you through all the things of TikTok, how to market your business and make money on a TikTok platform.

And also, we do have a TikTok account management service where you are able to just record the videos that we give you, the scripts, and then done. We will upload and edit the videos and we will do all the comments for you. So if you’re interested in this, just fill out the application form here and we will keep in touch with you. 

We look forward to working with you.