The first question is, what is an SOP? What does that stand for?

SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure which might still sound a little like jargon. So basically an SOP is a set of instructions for how to do a thing. That’s one SOP.

An SOP does not encompass all of the SOPs. You can call that an SOP manual when you have a lot of different SOPs or sets of instructions for how to accomplish a task (or tasks). Now that we know what an SOP is, let’s talk about why they’re so important in your business.

If you do not have SOPs in your business, you are constantly having to repeat what things need to be done, how they need to be done, and what resources are needed in order to complete a task. Constantly having to repeat these things because they’re not documented anywhere. And if you don’t have them documented, then how are you going to be handing these things off to team members?

Maybe you’re riding solo and you feel like SOPs aren’t super important right now. But if you’re getting to the point of scaling your business, you need to start documenting your processes now so that you can easily hand things off to team members very quickly once you onboard them.

That really gets us into our second question about how SOPs can help you get out of the weeds and focus on more strategic or business-building tasks. Well, really, we answered our question by talking about what an SOP is. If you can document those manual things, those day-to-day things, those time-consuming things that have to be done, but they don’t have to be done by you, then that means it’s going to free your time up.

To actually be the visionary, the strategic planner in your business and not have to be bogged down with the minutiae of the admin kind of work that somebody else can be doing if they have the right tools in order to be able to do it. And according to your standards.

So when you document your processes the way that you do them and the way that you want them done, then that’s going to give you a lot more confidence when you are ready to hand them off to somebody else. Because you know that you have the exact steps of how you handle things. You have the exact tools of what they’re going to need, any videos or related assets that they need in order to accomplish that task, and they’re going to have an example of how it should be done – the way that you want it to be done.

And so the quality of how you do that task is carried through even when it’s somebody else doing it. This then means you have time to actually work on building your business, getting more business, strategically planning for the future, and not being bogged down into your inbox or sending invoices or doing any myriad of manual tasks that you really just don’t have business being bogged down in, not when you’re growing your business.

The next question might be how can you identify which tasks to delegate and which things to keep for yourself.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you download my freebie the Delegation Exercise. It’s a super simple exercise that really just takes you through a brainstorming process of thinking of things that you are currently doing and being able to dump those into one place, see them on a piece of paper, and then identify from no, I don’t have to do that or I need that keep that on my plate.

If I have this process documented, I could hand this off to my VA, my future VA, or whoever it might be. Then that’s going to help you to see what things you really have to hold on to and what things you really don’t.

Something to keep in mind when you are documenting your processes: I highly recommend recording a loom video while you’re actually doing the task, so not forcing it and trying to record what you’re doing, but you’re not actually in the process of doing that task. And the reason I say that is because if you try to force it and you’re trying to record a “fake” example, you will probably miss steps because you’re not actually doing the thing and it’s not as natural.

You don’t have to necessarily explain every single detail as you’re recording a video, but at least showing the clicks on the screen, showing all those details in a video while you’re actually doing it is going to capture all of that information. That’s step one.

Then when you actually go to write the document of the SOP, because that’s just a video, that’s not an SOP. That’s the first building block to building your SOP. When you sit down to actually write the document or type up your document for your SOP, then you’re going to be able to pull out those details.

You want to write this document as if you’re handing it off to somebody that’s coming in off the street, has never worked in your industry, knows nothing about it, and is able to follow those step-by-step directions to a T because you have such good detail explaining exactly where to look, where to click, what to open, how to do it, how to apply it, where to find the information, et cetera.

And it just can leave no doubt.

So you want to view your SOPs, building your SOPs from the viewpoint of somebody who has never ever done this before. So that when you do hire and onboard a team member, it’s seamless and you’re not having to retrace your steps and feel like, “Why did I hire this person if I’m going back and having to redo everything that they’re doing?” And that’s going to free you up to hand that work off successfully.

No questions asked, or very few questions asked if it’s done right. So this is how having SOPs developed, even before you hire, is going to help to get you out of the weeds and more into the role that you should have as the business owner, the strategic thinker and the visionary.

So, again, if you don’t have that Delegation Exercise or you’re not on our newsletter list, I highly recommend that you sign up to grab that delegation exercise, which will also put you in our newsletter, where you will get tips and tricks like this on a regular basis in your inbox.

Something that I recommend is if you’re using a project management tool like ClickUp, once you have these SOPs developed, you can actually link them to your ClickUp. So when you assign a task and it has to do with an SOP that you already have developed, you can just link them right together within the task so that your team members have easy access.

If you want to know how that works, I actually help you get that set up on our ClickUp VIP day. And it is a really awesome feature for keeping everything all in one place and our one source of truth within ClickUp as well. So always shoot me a message, let me know if you have questions about how that works, and I love to talk all things SOPs and ClickUp, like major love language with those two things.

You hear me mention all the time that ClickUp is our one source of truth. My team and I live in ClickUp. Everything that we can possibly do within ClickUp, we do.

And we use it even for task-specific questions. So that means that if a task gets assigned to a team member and if they have questions about that task, if they have issues, if they have things that need review, all of that communication happens within that task.

It doesn’t happen in a text message, an email thread, or a series of email threads, or anywhere else that you can imagine communication happening. It’s task-related, so it remains in the task. This is extremely helpful as well. If that task then needs to get dropped into another team member’s hands, and they have all of the history of the information that’s gone back and forth on a task, maybe a new team member is taking over those responsibilities, or another team member went on maternity leave, but the task isn’t completed, and so on and so forth.

A myriad of issues would require a task to be handed off to a different team member. Well, now they have the history of why that task wasn’t completed, why is it overdue, and where we are in the process of completing it. And all of that is right in the task, instead of having to go and search in some other channel or search keywords in an email inbox to try and find and piece together all of the information.

We’ve probably all had that experience before, where you remember something being said about Client X’s Project A but you can’t really figure out where it was said, because things are sent to you in so many different ways, so many other methods of communicating, and that’s not efficient. And really, you might be doubling or tripling up on the same conversations among many other issues with that.

You might be losing information that was valuable to the task or to how you do things in the future and so on. Keeping all of those things centralized and using ClickUp as a centralized communication hub is going to help you to be more effective and gain more time in your business.

Of course, having task-specific discussions helps to enhance clarity by keeping to this practice. It reduces the amount of time needed for context switching, right? And the distractions that come from going from the task in ClickUp to over here in Slack and then searching an email and getting distracted by the five emails that just came in and then they don’t even know what they were looking for to begin with, right?

Then as we’re talking about emails and reducing the number of emails that are going in and out, in and out, and trying to figure out which thread that was in and if I’m not the only one that thinks that threads can get really stressful in the inbox, then I will just excuse myself. But we can have real inbox email overload, right?

And we have a lot of people who will let their inboxes get to thousands of unread emails because it stresses them out, it overwhelms them to have to go in and deal with that. Why are we going to add to that when we actually have projects with deadlines that need to be completed?

Being able to communicate within the task, within ClickUp, et cetera enhances our accountability as well because we’re able to assign those tasks and comments directly to the person that shows up in their notifications, in their inbox within ClickUp.

And really for the team members who are assigning the things, the project manager who is keeping track of everything that’s going on, that’s really important because then that team member can’t say, well, I never got that. We’re going to be able to go back and say it’s right here with a date and timestamp of exactly when we had that conversation. And so that is really helpful for being able to just keep track of everything that’s going on as well.

In ClickUp, you can also update your notifications because sometimes it’s notification overkill, so what we usually keep on is anything that has an @ mention whether it’s in the comment, a task description in a document, or anything like that.

We make sure that anything that mentions our name is sent to an email to give us another heads up that we have a comment somewhere waiting on us. So again, it’s not notifying us for everything in our email, but we do get a double reminder to just check that. That doesn’t mean we’re responding in our email, it’s just saying, hey, make sure you check this comment and then we can just delete that email that comes in.

Well, if you can’t tell, we are pro ClickUp chat and comment feature for communication within our team. Again, we use Slack minimally for bigger conversations maybe planning and strategizing, doing any kind of analytics outside of actual tasks so that’s a bit different in terms of higher-level communication. But for the actual day-to-day work that we’re getting done, I highly recommend keeping that within ClickUp, where your project management is happening, where your tasks are happening, to make sure that you’re minimizing interruptions so that you have transparent project tracking, improved collaboration, and so much more.

You want to have an effective remote team if you’re working remotely, and this will be able to contribute to that effectiveness. So if you have questions about what it looks like to have your team communication within ClickUp, if you’re interested in being able to get this set up for your team, then you can feel free to shoot us an email or a DM. ash@wemakesystemsexy.com is our email, and of course, you have our social media here. You can shoot us a DM and ask us about our ClickUp setup.

We do ClickUp VIP days in a day, which means that after you give us the information that we need to build it, we deliver a product to you after a day of working with you and your team.

Then of course, there’s additional training that goes along with that because we don’t believe that you can just learn everything in one day, but it becomes a much quicker process, being able to do that in a day and gather all that information prior to the day. And then that way, once you have that product delivered to you, you’re ready for that actual training.

If you want to see what that looks like, if you want to see what improved team communication looks like, then give us a holler and shoot me a DM.

Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! We’re going to be talking about delegation. For some people, this is a dirty word. It’s the thing that they want to figure out how to master, but it’s also the thing that stresses them out a lot. So if you don’t know how to delegate, listen up.

Today we want to talk about a couple of things that I commonly hear from people who are at that stage in their business where they’re trying to scale, where they’re trying to hire, but they don’t know what the next step is or really how to go about doing it.

I just want you to sit, think and ask yourself this question… Does this sound like you, or have you said this before? “I’m afraid if I delegate it, the quality of my services will go down”, or “it’s easier to just do it myself”, or “I’m the only one that can do this”, or “I don’t have time to stop and train somebody on everything that I do.”

Okay. Those are big fat lies.

I don’t have time to delegate to someone else. I need help! (this is counterintuitive to say I need help but say you don’t have time to take the steps to get the right help in place)

I don’t even know where to begin or what I could delegate.

These are common things that people say. If you are saying these things in your business and you’re at that point of trying to scale and hire, you are not alone.

Many business owners that have come before you have said the same thing, so that’s why today I’m going to outline a couple of points to help you to be able to delegate or hire somebody so that you can delegate. I created an exercise called the ‘delegation exercise‘, which is available for free download. This PDF is fillable so it can be fluid and easily updated with you as your business grows.

Let’s break down what this involves and how you can use it to actually figure out how you can start to delegate in your business…

We have this exercise broken down into actions.

The first action is that you need to brain-dump all of your tasks by category. Now that seems huge when you just think about it like that, but when you break it down to when you do certain tasks, you’re going to be able to see certain tasks that you’re actually doing and what someone else could do if they had the proper training.

This is going to help people who feel like, “Okay, I don’t even know where to begin or what I can hand off to someone else”, or “I’m the only person that can do all of these things”.

Starting with brain-dumping your task by category, we’re going to talk about daily things that you do, so list the tasks that you do on a daily basis, whether you think you can delegate them or not.

List them out and then go down to weekly. Then biweekly, monthly, quarterly, and, annually or even semi-annually basis. Once you have all of these tasks broken down like that, you’re going to be able to see, “Okay, so some of these things are actually repeatable”, right?

These are things that occur multiple times a year, a month and a week that I could get off my plate and free myself up.

Then you also want to think about other tasks, like those one-off or as-needed tasks that you have in your business. Maybe you’re not doing them on a regular, recurring basis, but there are things you could do more than once. Just brain-dump them and list what they are directly into the Delegation Exercise PDF.

The second action that you’re going to take is from that list that we’ve just created, you can ask yourself, “What do I absolutely need to keep, what do I need to do? What can possibly be delegated and what could be automated?”

Now, you may not know the answer to all of those questions, but just run through the exercise and see what comes up for you. Decide what tasks you absolutely have to do AKA no one else can handle them for you. Then, take a look at what tasks you see that someone else with proper instructions or training could do if you delegated it to them. Next, see what could be automated.

Possibly brainstorm by using your project management tool and your CRM tool. In thinking about those things, what could possibly be automated using those services? Now you may not know what all the automations are that are available, but if you do know, then that’s something that could possibly be automated into that category.

For example, I use (and love) ClickUp as my project management tool. I use some of the automations and I use a lot of the workflows. Then when there’s something that isn’t within one of those tools, automatically, I need to know that. So from there, you put these items either into your master list or actually put them into your project management tool.

Now I can see who I could actually delegate these tasks to, or who needs to be my first or next hire according to what kind of tasks or brackets these tasks fall into. If you want that Delegation Exercise to simplify that process for you, here’s the link again.

Some questions that I’ve heard before about this subject are along the lines of how you actually go about delegating this to a responsible team member or to the correct team member. Once you’ve gone through this list, you can kind of organize the tasks into certain subsections.

If some are marketing tasks and some are admin or data entry tasks or Tech VA type of tasks, organize them into these blocks, and then you can see either people who are already on your team who could take these things off of your plate or if you are looking for just a general assistant that might do a little bit of everything or somebody specific that you’re seeing that you need to hire, you’re going to have those answers. Doesn’t that feel good?

From this point, I highly recommend starting by documenting the process. You can start by at least creating a video. That video does need to be documented into an SOP at some point (standard operating procedure) that can later be updated if that task changes hands or the way that the task is carried out changes because, let’s be honest, platforms and softwares and the way that we do things change over time.

Start by building those SOPs but in the very least, start by recording your process while you’re doing it. This isn’t wasting time. You’re actually recording it while you’re doing the thing. Once you actually have SOPs written out, then I love to connect those with my project management tool, in my case, ClickUp.

Now, I’m not saying that you absolutely have to have the SOPs first before you can assign something in the project management tool. That’s not necessarily the case. It’s just best practice in my own view. If you already have a project management tool and right now you don’t have the time to do the documentation, then absolutely you can start adding those kinds of tasks, especially recurring tasks, into something like ClickUp or Asana, whatever tool that you might currently have.

So if you have questions about what that looks like or if you’re like, “Yes, I want and need to get this done, I want to get SOPs created, I want to figure out how to get things set up in my project management tool, or set up my project management tool”, we offer services for a lot of what we’ve discussed today. For our SOP manuals – we offer a VIP day style or we custom-create packages for larger organizations.

We also specialize in ClickUp project management setup, too. Delegating and hiring and being able to manage your teams, SOPs, and ClickUp project management tools really go hand in hand. Being able to take action and make that happen is a process.

That’s right, ClickUp automations can help you to work less and live more.

If you’re on the business plan (especially), try this Tip Number 1:

Use a ClickUp form, along with templates to actually save yourself using a few extra automations.

Yes, you do get some allotted automations with ClickUp, but if you’re already using a ton of them, they add up quickly. So let’s say that we want to create an automation that says “when the task is created, change assignees and add a tag”. How do we do this?

With a form, we can actually use a template ON the form and we don’t have to add an additional automation for that. Workaround #1!

By creating that as a form so that it also includes and assigns the assignee or team member automatically, you can add the tag into the form and then basically have it as a template to apply to whichever task that we then need to create.

Let me break this down again: Basically, we would just create tasks using the form instead of just creating tasks directly within the list. So yes, that would be a new way of doing things that you’d have to get used to. But you would end up having allllll of these automations happen for free just by routing it through the form instead of a creating it as a task initially. Pretty cool, right?

And again, on the business plan, you have the option to always assign the task to a certain person and to apply it within a template when a task is created without using a single automation. So that’s pretty cool if you have the business plan, and you’re actually utilizing forms.

If you’re using ClickUp templates, maybe for something else, like in a multi-action scenario, whether you’re on the paid plan and you are able to have multiple actions or on the free plan and you’re not, you can still use templates to avoid having to put together multiple actions and having to upgrade to the next plan.

Once again, it’s kind of a bit of a workaround… but by using a template.

Rather than having so many unique actions in each automation, we would just have ONE action in the automation, which applies the template and then includes several different elements. By having those multiple actions as one template, we just blend them all together into one thing. This is a huge, huge cost saver, obviously, because we go from multiple 2 to 3 or more actions, just to basically having 1 action.

So utilize those forms people! And utilize those templates.

Now, Tip Number 3 might come as a surprise because I’m actually saying that you can step outside of ClickUp and their automations and kind of double your work spectrum using something like Zapier or Integromat, which is now called Make.

This tip would be about utilizing the automations that you already have within ClickUp with also something outside of ClickUp. And yes, these programs also have their free versions (and you get a lot still out of the free versions without having to pay).

If you and your team are just not ready to upgrade to adding more automations within ClickUp, or even upgrading to adding a paid plan of Zapier or something like that, and you want to get the most bang for your buck for the current level of ClickUp automations, then you can supplement, ta-da!

We love Zapier for certain things but Integromat (or Make) is also really stepping up their game with available automations. I would say just check out both of them and see what kind of options in terms of automations they offer and how it communicates with the tools that you’re using. And often, we underestimate features of these tools because rather than just using them to connect two totally different pieces of software, we can also use them to create actions within the same tool.

Consider ClickUp: Basically doing kind of the same thing that ClickUp does within its own automations and within its own software, except we’re using Zapier to “click it back” to or add it back to ClickUp. See what I did there? Click it back into ClickUp.

But wait, this blog was all about ClickUp? The reason that we mention these two extra tools is because it’s a cost-saving way to add more automations to ClickUp without having to upgrade your plan if you’re not ready to yet. From our experience, having an account with Zapier or Integromat/Make (or even both), and using them in addition to your ClickUp automations, you can actually get pretty far before you even need to pay for either of them. Money in the bank, y’all.

With multiple tech tools and different automations, you obviously will have to keep track of making sure things are firing in each place. So yes, there could be a couple of cons to having your automations in multiple places, but keeping a good track record (or even a spreadsheet or a table view in ClickUp) of what automations you have and where then creating a recurring, updated task to check on those automations and make sure everything is firing, would be a good way to keep track of all of those automations that you have in multiple places.

But it’s just a quick little money-saving tip if you’re just not ready to upgrade to those paid programs.

Alright friends, so these are your tips for today for using ClickUp automations and thinking outside of the box in terms of the other features that ClickUp has to offer. Hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to hearing all about your exciting automations and if you decided to try using forms as a workaround feature.

When you’re ready to schedule your ClickUp VIP Day, you can contact our team here.

So the first question is how ClickUp can help you as an entrepreneur to achieve a better work-life balance. And there are so many things that we can dive into, but I’m just gonna pull a couple of little points that are things that I really love about ClickUp.

For example, if you are running your business solo but you need a place to organize all the things and make sure you’re not missing tasks, ClickUp can be as simplified or as robust as you want it to be. So something that I recommend to everyone that starts using ClickUp is to start by always going Home.

The home view in ClickUp is going to show you what is assigned to you. So if you’re not working with a team and you don’t need to see the whole bird’s eye view, you can create your workspace the way that it needs to be created and add your tasks where they need to be organized but you can work out of your home. It’s super simple and effective for somebody that’s doing this solo so as you login, you’ll get to see everything that’s assigned to you for that day, including things that are overdue and things that are upcoming all from your home view.

A way to keep that even more organized, I also love utilizing the task tray. What I like to do is when I go in at the beginning of the day I like to say, okay, “I actually need to get this done first and then this done next, this one is depending on that one”, and I make my plan, and then I open the tasks and minimize them into my task tray in the order that I want to get them done.

That way, when I enter into a task, I’m not having to constantly go back to the home screen to see what’s next. I’ve got it all down at the bottom in my main view in ClickUp.

Basically, anywhere where I’m at, I’m gonna be able to see the task tray and the things that I have lined up in my task tray. Then you can complete them from your task tray and remove them from there and see exactly what is coming up next.

Now, if you’re working with team members, you can still see what you have going on in the home view, but that’s not the most effective way to see everything that’s going on in your workspace. I would recommend utilizing the ‘Everything View’. You can play with filters and play with how you group the information from everything in your workspace using the Everything View.

But I also love just creating a simple dashboard to be able to monitor your team, your team tracker progress or whatever you want to call it. There are so many little widgets (or I think they’re called cards now in the dashboard) where you can organize things by list, you can pull from the entire workspace, you can pull from a certain client list, etc.

You can organize it by which team member it’s assigned to, if you want to see if tasks are still in to-do, if they haven’t been started, how many tasks are in progress, how many tasks are overdue, and so many things. Who’s behind on their tasks? You can have all of those widgets organized to be able to just go in and see everything at a glance.

Then you can start seeing what information you need to ask questions about and follow up on. And it’s all right there without having to dig all throughout the workspace. That’s super helpful in being able to quickly go in and see everything that needs to be done whether you’re working solo or with team members.

Now again, as an entrepreneur, you may feel like your work-life balance is not so balanced, right? You’re spending a lot of time getting caught up manually and doing things over and over and over again because you’re onboarding new clients or are going through the same processes and this is an indication that you need to document your processes and what you’re doing currently.

 

This is super important when you’re utilizing ClickUp because there’s a lot of ways to use the workflows and automation that you have in ClickUp to stop doing those things manually. Make sure that you’re utilizing templates in your processes. Again, this means that you need to take the time to work out what your processes are, but it’s worth every second in the long run if you can do that.

Create templates based on what your processes are and then you can start to utilize all of these additional features like remapping due dates and utilizing those templates being able to quickly assign things out, setting automations in order as well.

So much of that manual entry that you’re doing, (repeating the same task over and over again), will then be taken off your plate, giving you more time back in your day to actually do things for your family or do things for your health, being able to have that work-life balance.

Then the question to ask yourself is: Do you want to maximize productivity and reduce the time that you’re spending on nonessential tasks?

 

If you want to, you’ve got to take that time now to document your processes and then we can talk about the details of how you can get that off of your plate using those templates and automation to reduce the hands-on time.

How much time would that take you? That’s the real question. If you are working with team members, the third point here, you might be concerned about how ClickUp can support you to effectively delegate and collaborate with the team. And again, this is something that we know can take things off of your plate and give you back time in your life.

ClickUp has the ability to assign tasks to more than one person if that’s needed. Subtasks to more than one person as well. We really, love and utilize the comments within a task, which means that when it’s task-related, we’re going to actually comment within the task to keep the information all within that task, so then if another team member becomes involved later on, they’ve got all information that they need within the task.

You also want to make sure that when you set up your ClickUp, even if you’ve already been using it for a long time, you’re not getting distracting email notifications that you just don’t need. Those can be very distracting and take you away from essential work that you’re doing. Make sure that you go into your notifications, then down in your settings, you can actually choose how many notifications you want to receive, and where you want to receive them, what kinds of notifications you want to receive. I receive very minimal notifications. Basically, if I’m mentioned in something or something is commented on and @ me, then I’m going to receive that notification.

But otherwise, I don’t need to know that something has been assigned to me because I’m going to see that when I go into the home screen of ClickUp. I’m going to see anything that’s assigned to me, anything that’s coming up, etc. I can see that all at home and I don’t want to be clogging up my email inbox and receiving notifications all the time that are stressing me out and distracting me from the work that I’m doing or from spending time with family, or from going to little league practice, or whatever it is that’s important to you that you need to be focusing on.

These are just a few ways that ClickUp can help you to maintain that work-life balance without having to sacrifice or shortchange your business. In the meantime make sure that you’re putting your family or your priorities in their place as well. There are so many more things, so many more reasons why we can say that ClickUp helps us with this.

If you have questions about that, just ask me how can ClickUp can help you to have this balance in your life.

If you wanna know how you can work with us on our ClickUp setups, we work in ClickUp VIP days or VIP weeks, depending on how your business is structured, and we also do consulting calls and coaching, which is a done with you service.

Those done with you ClickUp services help you figure out how you want to do it if you don’t need the level of service like the VIP day or week. And also hop onto our newsletter if you want to get more information about what these services look like as well.

5 hours a week… I really think that this number is the minimum of what you can possibly save yourself by getting together an SOP manual and figuring out what you can delegate.

Some people have asked, where do I even start? How is this possible and how can I save myself time? This is what I’ve heard from a lot of business owners that are at the point of hiring or have hired, but feel like they’re kind of just stuck in this tiny space. Like, “Yes, I’ve hired out, but I feel like I’ve caused myself more work.” This is not how this was supposed to be, to be able to delegate work, right?

Have some SOPs created for your most common tasks, at least to start out with, otherwise, you’ll find yourself in this perpetual circle of assigning a task to your new admin, VA or whoever it might be that you’ve hired, and then it comes back around to you because they have questions and they don’t understand the instructions that you just jotted down for them really quickly, or the document that you threw together, or they can’t find the document again because it’s not in a place that makes sense or we’re in a place that’s unorganized because we’re doing everything…

Phew, that was a lot

Because of this, when the moment of necessity comes, everything is on fire and nothing is planned out. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is documented the way that it should be for following an actual standard operating procedure. And it all burns down to the ground.

So let’s put that flame out.

How can you delegate? Let’s start off by talking about what to delegate.

You might even be at the point where you really need to hire, but you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t even know what I would give to someone else. I’m desperate for help, but what would I give them?”

Just start by thinking about the recurring tasks that you complete on a regular basis. If you need help with this, download my free delegation exercise. I made this for business owners like you that need to get all those things out of your head and onto paper in order to sort it out.

It’s designed to help you actually work through the process.

Think about what you do on a daily basis, what do you do on a weekly basis? Biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. We all have tasks that we are repeating. We might not even realize it because we’re just on repeat. But once you really start to sit down and dissect those repeating tasks, those can be the first things that you hand off to someone else because you know how often you do them. You know what you have to do for those tasks and it’s not going to be a whole lot of guesswork.

You don’t need to be the ONLY person doing those tasks. You can have somebody come in and help you to actually take that work off your plate. Now thinking about those one-off or one-time tasks, maybe it’s not a set recurrence, but it is something that you do with every client or an every-so-often kind of task, right?

Start writing down what those one-off tasks are and then write down what you think can be automated. And if you don’t know what can be automated, reach out to me and we can actually work through that *together*. We can have a consulting call and talk about what can be automated because truly you need to start with what can be automated before being delegated.

You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money by automating first and then seeing what can be delegated to a person afterward. If the automation can do it in place of a person, you’re saving yourself hours of paying somebody to do something that could just be done with actual tech or software, right?

So you need to sit down, and just document what those items are, your recurring tasks by the daily, by monthly, by quarterly, by annually, etcetera.

What about those one-off kinds of random tasks? Throw them all onto that document (see our delegation exercise), get your ideas together and then start working on going through that list. And the next time you do that task, make a loom recording yourself doing it. It’s not that challenging. Just record yourself when you’re actually doing it, store it in a folder in Google Drive, and then when the time comes, it can be documented as an actual SOP.

Remember, videos can be outdated really quickly, so it’s important that a video is not your only form of an SOP. You need to have a written form that can easily be updated. This is the way to get started on that path of creating your SOPs and your SOP manual. It’s the most simple way, especially if you’re confused and sitting here like, “How do I even get started?”

Start with our Delegation Exercise. Document those things. Then start picking off that list of items that you made. Every time you go to do that process, make that recording, dump it into the Google Drive folder, label it, and then you’re going to be ready to start actually documenting those things and hiring the person to take those items off of your plate.

Let me know if you have any questions about delegation and an SOP manual. If you need help in trying to get this information together, or you just don’t have the time or the brain space to create SOPs or an SOP manual, please reach out to us. SOPs are our specialty. It’s my love language, I am one of those people.

If you’re looking to see how to best build out your SOP Manual in a hands-on approach, you should definitely join our 4-week ClickUp workshop! We’ve designed a framework to take you from Systemless to Systemized in just 4 weeks!

Each week has a specific theme, and we’ll cover everything from planning your hierarchy to utilizing templates and automation.

The workshop is interactive, and I encourage questions and scenarios so that you can truly benefit.

You’ll also get a workbook, my top five requested templates, and lifetime access to the recordings.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or seeing future growth in your business, this workshop is for you. It’s a done-with-you service, and I’ll be here to answer your questions and help you build a system that makes sense for you.

Sign up today and we’ll send you the details about the Zoom link and how to join us for each session. Can’t wait to see you there!

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I know it can be challenging to think about actually removing yourself from the day-to-day operations of your business and even the thought of doing so might stress you out, but that’s exactly why I want to have this discussion today about how it actually is possible to make it happen.

Maybe you’re thinking “Yeah, but I don’t really want to be out of the day-to-day. I truly love my business.”

Newsflash: You can still love your business and work to build that business without being the person your business completely depends upon. So let’s discuss what that actually means in order for you to scale and grow your business even more.

 

You shouldn’t be the person doing all of the day-to-day tasks. You really should step into that visionary role. Be thinking about how to grow the business, how to support the team members that you already have, how to support the clients that you have, and expand and grow.

But how can you do that when you’re involved in even the tiniest of details that you truly don’t need to be involved in?

The key is making yourself repeatable and replaceable.

 

“I don’t wanna be replaceable. I wanna be the head of this company. I wanna be the face of my company.” Maybe that’s what you’re saying to yourself. We don’t mean that somebody’s going to come in to replace you, but you need to make yourself replaceable.

I’m not trying to scare you here. It’s actually a positive thing, it’s good for your business. Businesses that rely so heavily on the owner for daily operations are setting themselves up for failure. You really need your business to work for you rather than vice versa. This means you would set yourself up to have a disaster recovery plan, as it were.

How can we do that?

I know I talk all the time about ClickUp and SOPs (standard operating procedures) and their importance within your business, and yet I’m not over-exaggerating when I talk about those tools. The first thing that really is important is documenting what’s being done. Creating those SOPs, not just having the SOPs, but implementing them, having your team members be able to implement them.

Having your team members be replaceable, not because we’re not trying to encourage team members to be replaced, but if one role in the company is only ever dependent on one person in the company and they get sick or they take a vacation or they decide to pursue another opportunity…Where does that leave you in your business?

 

In a very vulnerable state.

It’s so important that you start documenting what you’re doing from day one. I’ve talked about this a million times because I know how it will save you. You don’t have to think about optimizing what you’re doing at the moment but start to document what you’re doing right now, from the smallest task to bigger tasks to client onboarding, and client delivery, to how to add a team member to the Slack channel. All of it.

Document those things so that you’re not the only person who knows how to do them and so that your key team members aren’t the only people who know them as well. We don’t want our businesses to also be dependent on just key team members because what if something happens? It’s just the question that we have to ask ourselves to be realistic about what can possibly happen.

 

And because of this, we have to create a repeatable support system infrastructure in order to have these daily operations run without us there and without being afraid that everything’s just going to completely blow up.

Talking about SOPs and documenting those items and keeping them updated – linking them actually into a task within ClickUp and having them in a place that’s accessible is going to be so important in making it to where you can have a business that runs without your constant oversight, without you having your hands involved in every single little piece, all the time.

Have you ever reflected on how you know you need SOPs built out but you just don’t have the time to do it yourself? That’s the thing that always gets pushed to the back burner. If you have thought that way, you are not alone. And I’m here to tell you that we would love to help you work through your SOPs. We offer the SOP Manual in a Day VIP day to clients looking to panic-proof their business.

Basically, we come in and help you identify the top processes that need to be documented. We help you understand how to keep them in the same location, in a cohesive way so that team members and any additional hires that you have coming on board will easily find and be able to access them. These SOPs will be easy to digest, easy to find, and easy to use.

Then we train your key team members on how to keep that process going as well. If you’re saying, “Hey, I have way more SOPs than can be tackled in a day”, don’t worry. We can help you do that, too. We do offer custom SOP Manual packages because every situation is unique and we understand that.

If you want to have a business that runs without your constant oversight (that means you can take a vacation for the people in the back), slide into our DM’s, let us know and we’ll talk about how we can work together.

Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there. Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. Today I’m really excited to talk to you about another feature of ClickUp and that’s how you can maximize your productivity with the ClickUp Chrome extension.

In order to be able to utilize the Chrome extension, you need to actually use a Chrome browser. So if you are using Safari or another kind of browser, you’ll need to download the actual Chrome browser to use on your computer.

What I simply do is I just get to the Chrome store by googling Chrome extensions. Very simple. (there’s probably another nicer way to get there but this works for me). It’ll be the first thing that pulls up from a Google search and you can find the Chrome extensions there.

Search ClickUp under the Chrome extensions and then add it. It’s super simple to install. Just click the install button and it’s going to go up into the top right corner of your Chrome browser. I have all of my little extensions there. To me it just looks like a little blob. Maybe it’s a puzzle piece.

Once you get it installed, you’ll need to click the three little dots to manage it and just make sure that it has the correct permissions to be able to access your ClickUp as well.

So why is using the ClickUp Chrome extension such a big deal and how it can actually help you to maximize your productivity?

While we have lots of processes in place internally in our business our clients don’t always follow the processes that we put in place. So while we have certain ways that they should be giving us tasks, a lot of times we get tasks via email. But I don’t want those things to be living and being dealt with out of the inbox. So I try to deal with them as quickly as possible by getting them into ClickUp.

I don’t want to have to try and copy-paste the information, download the attachments, and then open up ClickUp and try to create a task from there. It’s cumbersome and unnecessary and it’s another reason why we do everything from ClickUp. But by using the ClickUp Chrome extension, you can just open it and create a task directly, even from an email that comes in there.

It will actually grab the whole content of that email and add it as an attachment into that task.

Now for us, we have multiple clients where we are invited to their workspaces within ClickUp. So the question might be, can I use this with multiple workspaces or am I going to have to log in and log out to make it work for different emails that I have coming in from clients?

The answer is very simple: You will be able to use it with multiple workspaces. Fabulous

All you have to do is just click the little avatar and then change which workspace you’re actually creating the task for. It’s just such a wonderful and easy-to-use feature to get things out of the inbox and then into ClickUp where they belong.

You can also create tasks from information that you actually find on web pages as well. You’ll just see that ClickUp icon hovering there. It’s just a little bit different with how it functions within your actual inbox, but so wonderful that you could just grab information, create a task directly where you’re browsing, and it communicates directly with ClickUp and creates a task or adds a note. There are multiple features that you can do, connecting it with your workspace.

Even using the ClickUp Chrome extension, you can actually grab a screenshot of what you’re looking at and then add it directly to a task. Maybe you weren’t in that task, you weren’t even thinking about that task, but you came across something while you were browsing, while you were doing research for something else. And it relates to some tasks that you already have existing. Get that screenshot from the ClickUp of Chrome Extension and add it directly to the task.

Another cool thing is that you can actually track time directly from the Chrome extension. So all you have to do is open that Chrome extension and then hit Track time and then choose the task that you’re tracking time on. Of course, that Click app has to be turned on within ClickUp for that feature to actually work. If you don’t have the ability to track time within your workspace, then you’re not going to be able to do that with the ClickUp Chrome extension.

So today’s tip or trick was very basic. Just make sure that you’re utilizing things that people have already created to make your life easier, such as the ClickUp Chrome extension.

I’m not getting paid for this, but I am sharing that this Chrome extension helps me a ton. Trying to clean up things out of my inbox and keep my inbox to inbox zero multiple times a day.

You can keep your inbox clean by using this ClickUp Chrome extension.

Of course, if you have any questions about how this works, shoot me a message and I can walk you through the steps. It is very simple though. It’s just doing a quick search, making sure you’re doing it on a Google browser, a Chrome browser doing a quick search for Chrome extensions and then installing the ClickUp one.

Definitely follow us for more systems tips like this. We’re not always just diving down into ClickUp, but how other things can integrate with this awesome system that we love so much.

Make sure that you are subscribed to our email list as well, where we do put special videos from time to time within our newsletter. Especially videos like walking through how to do something like this.

Did you hear about our 4-Week ClickUp workshop?!

ClickUp is very detailed, it is very robust and so this workshop is very interactive including plenty of opportunity to ask questions. I will also ask for specific use cases so I can show you how I would strategize and set up that use case in a real-life situation right within ClickUp.

In addition to some amazing resources, you will get a digital workbook to take notes for each day of the workshop. Your takeaways, the things that you want to implement, and questions that you might have to ask later.

You will also get my top five requested templates to take home, as I mentioned, and the workshop recordings. And yes, you’ll get lifetime access to those as well.

I am just really excited to be able to share this workshop with you.

If you’re not a person who is ready for our VIP day, this is a way to work with me to get our team’s expertise here at We Make Systems Sexy for how you can set up your ClickUp without having the investment required to do a VIP day.

The Systemless to Systemized Workshop is a four-week hands-on workshop where each week we will dive into a different aspect of ClickUp and how to set it up in a way that makes sense for your business.

If you know me, you know that we talk about ClickUp a lot, but I talk more specifically about our VIP day. I recognize that the VIP day that we offer may not be for everyone. And I fully believe in meeting people where they are.

So that’s the beauty of the workshop that we’re going to be running. Not everyone is ready for a VIP day-style service in getting their ClickUp set up.

You might have a smaller business, you might have a smaller operation, and you just need a little bit of something to be able to keep yourself organized and accountable, to be able to assign tasks out to team members. And it’s just not that complicated. But you still need help in trying to figure out a program that you can grow with as your business grows and the best way to do that.

Well, here’s the best way to do that: Join our Systemless to Systemized with ClickUp four-week workshop.

Let’s talk just a little bit about the details that you will benefit from in joining us for this workshop. Each week is broken down into a specific theme or a specific area that we’re going to be focusing on within ClickUp, starting from scratch.

Week one will be digging more into planning your hierarchy and understanding the terminology of ClickUp because it is different than other project management tools that are out there that you may have already been using. This week you will be figuring out how to adjust the settings and notifications in a way that makes the most sense for you and your business and choosing the right plan as well.

Then in week two will dive into really creating the bones for your business according to what we discovered in that first week. I want to explore the different views. There are so many different view options within ClickUp so we’ll discuss how to use them, what they are, when to apply them, how to use filters to actually give more information that’s practical for your business, and the process that you’re actually building out.

Next, week three will dive into utilizing templates and automation, which is a really big bonus that ClickUp has and it hosts really big capabilities so we’ll be introducing really different scenarios.

In week four, we’re going to dive into the email feature within ClickUp and create Dashboards. And then we’ll discuss a little bit of how ClickUp can play nice with external automation and the different things that ClickUp will integrate with.

That is the bones of the structure of the workshop. And remember, we’ll be going over all of this information together, each of these weeks. The thing that is cool about this workshop is I am not just here to preach ClickUp at you. It’s very interactive.

And again, I’m all about meeting you where you are.

Even though we have the structure of each week of the workshop, I also allow for time for question and answer. And I really love to put somebody on the spot in the hot box, as it were to actually pull out a real-life scenario and see actually how we can build from somebody in the workshop’s business to show an example of how I would strategically build something out based on the information that one of those people are telling me.

The other part of this workshop is, aside from the four 1 hour workshop sessions that we will have together, you will have access to me via WhatsApp or Slack, just depending on what application you use. I’m fine with either one. But between the sessions, you will be able to send me questions and even loom videos of certain scenarios. And within 24 hours, unless otherwise discussed, I will get answers back to you between the workshop sessions so that you can actually be actively playing and utilizing the scenarios that we discuss in each session.

Now, to reassure you, this is not my first rodeo. I have been featured in several groups:

1 Lauren Golden’s ‘Riches in the Niches’ workshop. Lauren founded the Free Mama Movement community

2 Brittany Kramme’s Right Hand of a Real Estate Agent community. I’ve done several workshops for her and collaborated with these awesome ladies and their communities in showing their people how to actually utilize ClickUp.

3 I’ve actually done another four-week workshop in this same style.

I’ve had all this time and experience to be able to hone exactly what I want to be involved in this workshop and what I see works best for my participants.

• One participant said, “Ashley provided so much value for my business and the skills that I can offer my clients. The workshop was a great investment for my business, and I would definitely buy again.”

• Another participant said that “the ClickUp Workshop that Ashley hosted was so thorough that it walked us from the beginner phase all the way through to being able to create automation to optimize my systems and processes. I feel more prepared to assist my real estate agents in a way that will deliver a great client experience. Plus, I’m so glad we received the recording so I can rewatch this workshop when building out my ClickUp database. Thank you.”

That is another point: Even if you can’t attend the workshops live, (I do highly recommend, if at all possible, be there live), you do get access to the recordings, and all participants will get lifetime access to the recordings to be able to go back and review this information in your own time.

One final testimonial from our last workshop:

• “Ashley was amazing. I now have templates that will help me track client leads, and networking connections, and list custom to the different clients I work with. I now feel confident in setting up ClickUp, so it benefits me for the long term.”

This is the kind of feedback that we want to hear. What are the actual benefits to you being able to build out ClickUp in a way that makes sense for you and your business? As she mentioned in her testimonial, you also will get some custom-made templates that you can actually just copy over and use just right out the gate in your own ClickUp workspace. So that is another resource that you’re going to be able to get from this workshop.

As I already mentioned, in terms of the format for this workshop, this is not a webinar where I’m just going to be going through slide after slide talking. My ClickUp workshops are very interactive. I encourage questions, I encourage scenarios. And so I want all of the participants to be as hands-on as they wish to be so that they can truly benefit.

ClickUp is very detailed, it is very robust and I want to make sure that if you see a feature that you have a question about that you think might benefit you, that you ask the questions. So it’s very interactive. And I will ask for specific use cases as I mentioned earlier, so I can show you how I would strategize and set up that use case in a real-life situation.

We talked about some of the materials or resources that you’ll get but in addition to all of that, you will get a workbook to take notes for each day of the workshop. Your takeaways, the things that you want to implement, and questions that you might have to ask later.

You will get my top five requested templates to take home, as I mentioned, and the workshop recordings. Again, you’ll get lifetime access to those as well.

I am just really excited to be able to share this workshop with you.

If you’re not a person who is ready for our VIP day, this is a way to work with me to get our team’s expertise here at We Make Systems Sexy for how you can set up your ClickUp without having the investment required to do a VIP day.

When someone fills out my lead capture form in Dubsado, a new task is created in my ‘Client Lead Tracker’ list in ClickUp.

Imagine: A new lead comes into Dubsado. It gets added into ClickUp as a task in my ‘Lead Tracker’. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward.

What though if you don’t use Dubsado and you use Honey Book or something like that instead? Very likely you’re going to have that same kind of option when a new lead is added or a new project is added to Honeybook or one of the other CRM tools out there. You would be able to create that new task and direct it to your lead tracker list in ClickUp.

I love this one. I receive my payments via Stripe integrated through Dubsado.

I have a Zap set up that when a payment comes in through Stripe, it actually adds an entry into a sales tracker that I have created in ClickUp. What I love about this is that I also utilize a ClickUp dashboard to then pull in my information and I can see monthly sales and yearly sales and the totals of my fees as well.

I only accept payments through Stripe and all of my invoicing goes through Dubsado so that’s really simple for me. You could set up multiple zaps if you use Square, or something else like that, to where that information is pulled into the sales tracker. And then you can see all of your sales at a glance, where they’re coming from, how much the fees were, the gross, the net sales, etc.

Did I already say I love that one? Payment made in Stripe and the Zap adds it to my sales tracker in ClickUp.

Get a sneak peek at my sales tracker dashboard in ClickUp with this exclusive tutorial I created.