Using Systems to Run a More Efficient Business with Shannon Shaffer

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Shannon Shaffer is the founder of Purple Finch Studios, a small agency she runs in Pennsylvania, and today we’re talking about the systems and automation she put in place to make her and her team more efficient. But more than just her team benefits – her clients get a much more delightful and clear on-boarding process, communication doesn’t falter, and her projects get off to a great start. The systems she’s put in place can help us all get projects off to a great start, then keep them on track.

Shannon Shaffer: We’re not for everybody. We are for somebody who is basically looking for guidance along the way of building their website, so we’re not copywriters. You’ve got two options. We’re not going to copywrite for you. You can copywrite, or we can recommend somebody to work with. We have a recommended list of people, but we’re not going to write it for you. Some people are full service agencies. We do the part that we do well, so when I say eight weeks when you come to me, you’re going to have your copy ready.

Intro: Shannon Shaffer is the founder of Purple Finch Studios, a small agency she runs in Pennsylvania. Today, we’re talking about the systems and automations she put in place to make her and her team more efficient. But more than just her team benefits, her clients get much more delightful and clear onboarding processes, communication doesn’t falter, and her projects get off to a great start. The systems she’s put in place can help all of us get projects off to a great start and then keep them on track. This is a resource-rich episode, so make sure to visit the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/155 to get all the great stuff Shannon is going to tell us about.

Break: Before we get started, I want to tell you about my online membership and community, Creator Courses. I know that when you want to learn something new, the natural thing you probably do is go to Google or YouTube. I do the same thing, and that’s great for one-off projects. I used a YouTube video to learn how to change a light switch in my house, but I am not a big fan of YouTube for learning new skills. Because there are lots of videos on every topic, but “Which one is best and who do you trust? What order do you even watch the videos in, and will you get the support you need?” These are all things that YouTube or other potentially free videos can’t do for you. So, I started Creator Courses a few years ago with the idea of just putting online courses out there, and I decided to morph it into a membership last year. So stop wasting your time hunting and pecking for the right learning resources and tools, over at Creator Courses. You can become a member and take all of the courses that we have to offer included in that membership, and those courses focus on everything from just basic WordPress up to learning how to build websites without code, something you don’t necessarily need to do in this day and age. All of the courses are developed by me, and if you listen regularly that I’ve been a developer for decades at this point, and I have lots of experience building websites. I’m a teacher at heart, and I’ve created courses for LinkedIn Learning and things like that. On top of the courses, we’re also a community, and members get access to forums and Slack and office hours with me, so I just wanted to let about that and encourage you to join if you haven’t already. Listeners of this show, exclusively for listeners of the show, you can save 15% on all memberships, including the lifetime membership. All you have to do is visit CreatorCourses.com/build. Thanks so much, now let’s get on with the show.

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today I am very excited, and my guest is Shannon Shaffer. She is the founder of Purple Finch Studios, we met at CaboPress a few years ago, and she is going to be talking to us about automation. Shannon, how are you today?

Shannon: I’m well. Thanks for having me on, Joe.

Joe: My pleasure. I was very happy you tweeted that you wanted to do more podcasts in 2020. At the exact same time, I was writing out potential guests for this year, so it was very serendipitous that you tweeted at that time. I’m excited to have you on the show. Why don’t we start with who you are and what you do?

Shannon: My name is Shannon Shaffer, and I run a small agency outside of Philadelphia called Purple Finch Studios. I’m a former blogger turned agency owner. Back in 2006 I started a blog and started writing using WordPress, and I took an eight year journey blogging and growing a blog network, and then I sold that. When I was finished with that, I thought, “There is a market here to help people, small business owners, get their websites and online blogging and content marketing.” In 2014, I started doing that. Today we are an agency of 10, and we serve mostly solo entrepreneurs and small businesses worldwide.

Joe: That’s fantastic. This is great, and you are I feel one of the few people I know personally who was able to make blogging incredibly profitable. You created a blog network, you said, and sold it?

Shannon: Yes. That’s correct. I was an OG when I started there literally was no Pinterest and no Twitter.

Joe: Yeah. You said 2006, right? WordPress was two years old.

Shannon: It was a baby. I originally started on Blogger and then moved over to WordPress, so WordPress.com originally. As things grew, I ventured out, I hired a developer and decided that I had to learn this if I was going to be in this space. My background originally is in finance and marketing, so when I came into the online space, I knew absolutely nothing. I just knew that there was an opportunity there.

Joe: That’s fantastic. So you blogged, you learned the tools of the trade, and then when you sold your blog network, you were like “I could do this for other people.” Is that about it?

Shannon: Yeah. Throughout my time being a blogger, you have to learn WordPress, and you have to learn about servers. To be honest, throughout those couple of years, I ran into some unscrupulous developers who took advantage of me. I decided that I had to learn it for myself, and truly understand how things work. I, in particular, know the pain points of a small business owner who maybe starts DIY, and they grow faster than they ever imagined, and then they’re like, “What do I do next?” My agency really specializes in partnering with people, so we don’t just do a website and then walk away. We tend to work with people who have– Their website is their baby, and it’s important to them, and they don’t want to let go of everything. We partner with them, and I think my unique experience of starting out online and not knowing anything and learning, you don’t want me to develop your website, but I can if I have to. I’m the worst, and I write terrible code. I could do it, but I learned so that I can– One of the things I did back in early 2016 was hire a full time developer, because I knew that I needed somebody who knew more than I did. But I feel like it’s really important as an agency owner to understand all the aspects of your business, but not necessarily have to do them. I think I bring a unique perspective to the clients because I once was them, and I don’t have a technical background. My MBA is in marketing and finance, so it’s just totally different.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s super interesting because it’s true that you can speak the language of your client. Which I think is really important. We were having a guest on this season that talks about telling your story, or telling the story of the person that you are– Your ideal client. That’s also incredibly important, so it’s cool that you have a very similar story. Then you said that you “Partner” with them, and I think that’s also as we move into an era where you can set up a website without having to ever touch code, you have to bring some value. Because people are going to say, “Why should I hire you when I can just do it myself?”

Shannon: Absolutely. That’s one of our biggest differentiators. We offer a maintenance plan, and there’s tons of maintenance plans out there for maintaining plugins and your website. Ours is different because we do a quarterly strategy call to analyze their traffic and analyze what they have going on, and what they might want to do for that next quarter to either increase their conversions or maybe there’s not enough traffic coming to the site. We strategize around what they have going on in their particular situation, and we do that at a fairly reasonable cost because I think that’s an important piece of maintenance of your website that people miss. We can update everything, but if you are stagnant for 12-18 months, you’re probably not using your website to its maximum capabilities or capacity.

Joe: Absolutely. This can happen to anybody. I have been making websites since 2000, and I have a website. It’s my main business, Creator Courses. I was not blogging on it regularly because I just want people to buy the courses here. I’ll blog on my blog, but I signed up for an Ahrefs account– Full disclosure, they are a sponsor of the show. But I signed up for an Ahrefs account, and I realized, “Oh my God. The fact that I’m not regularly writing on my site for search engines to see is negatively affecting me.” So I started blogging regularly, and I have an actual strategy now to get more people into my funnel so that they’ll buy my courses. Hiring the right person, having the right partner who understands your business, and then can help you move forward is super important.

Shannon: Yeah, I definitely think that is a key. Like you said, going forward, people are going to be able to put their own websites online. People are going to be able to– With all the builders that are expanding Gutenberg, there’s so many opportunities for users to build their own websites. I feel that value-add and I feel like we’ve created a team that everybody has their unique– I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I can work with a designer to make sure that it’s not just pretty, it’s conversion based. The developer is not a designer, but he can make sure that behind the scenes everything is solid. I feel like we’ve found a little niche, and sometimes– You’ve probably already heard this story, about three years ago when I blew up my company. I blew up my company three years ago, but it was the best thing. It was hard in the moment. I started over, and it was hard in the moment, but it was the best thing because we’ve hyper-focused on what we do well and we maximize our– That has helped us to segue into what we’re going to talk about, hyper-focusing on what we do well and having key players has allowed us to maximize our profits with a much smaller team than traditionally needed when you’re scaling an agency.

Joe: Yeah. I think that’s a great transition point. You said that you are an agency of 10 people, right? And you work with clients worldwide, but I suspect that you don’t offer 24/7 support. Maybe you do, but I assume you’re not hopping on a call at 2:00 in the morning.

Shannon: There’s two things that we have. Obviously, we have a hosting partner that we use, we manage hosting with Liquid Web. So that takes away that years ago we used another great hosting company, SiteGround, but the problem was that we would have to get on the phone and call. Now everything is taken care of with a ticket, so if I am the only one available at 2:00 AM, it’s simply a ticket. I’m not having to dig in to C panel and see what’s going on or anything. I’m just sending an email. I’m more of a facilitator, so finding a partner that has helped us be more productive. We do offer if a site goes down at 2:00 AM, fortunately, we do have European staff, so it is 7:00 AM there. We do have– Not 24/7, but we do have somebody on our help desk pretty much from 4:00 AM until about 10:00 PM Eastern time, just based on our distributed team.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I’m sure managing clients like that, I know that you have clients of a certain size, and then a globally distributed team. You probably have tools, processes, and automations to help you with that.

Shannon: Always.

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Joe: Let’s start with maybe some automations for your clients. Do you have a client onboarding process that’s automated or anything like that?

Shannon: The first step that a client takes with us is, obviously, most of it is filling out a form on our website. From the day that a client comes into us, they’re entered into an automation. Our website has a form, and we ask them, “How can we help them?” We have drop-downs, and they choose the thing that we can help them with, and they are then automatically entered into an automation. If you tell me that you need a new website or you need email marketing, you’re going to get a different auto-responder. That auto-responder is delayed, so it doesn’t look like it’s an auto-responder. It’s delayed, and it also has time windows, so if somebody comes in at 1:00 AM and fills out that form, we don’t want them getting a response at 1:15 AM. We have a window of time from 9:00 to 5:00 PM Eastern that our auto-responders work, and then you’re funneled in. You get to auto-responder, you get a link to schedule an appointment, or the appropriate action that you need to take based on your requirement. What that does for the customer is they always get the same experience, every single customer. But also what it does is it helps your productivity of your employees. There’s nothing worse than getting a new lead and saying, “Who needs to talk to this person?” Funnel around, three days emailing, “Do I talk to this?” With this onboarding process, or this not even onboarding. This is a prospect process. Everything is automated, so they will– A lot of times I don’t even talk to a client or email a client until I show up on Zoom. We send them a link to fill out a form based on what their question is, and I review that. Sometimes that allows me to not even have the Zoom call because they’re not a fit for us. Nothing’s worse than jumping on a call and being like, “OK.” Forty minutes into it, “We’re not a fit for you.” By having them fill out that form prior to the appointment, it allows us to determine if we’re a fit, and then we can send a response to them saying, “We’re not going to fit. But here’s somebody that might be a fit for what your needs are.” So, it starts as early as the initial contact.

Joe: That’s great. And that, like you said, saves you a bunch of time. Because everything is going to where it needs to go, but then also it’s a good litmus test already. Because I’m sure many people who are listening, anybody who’s done freelance work, you’ve met with somebody at a coffee shop, or you’ve gone on a Zoom call and 40 minutes or an hour in you’re like “This is not–” Or even worse, maybe you get to the proposal process, and you’re like “They’re not a good fit for me,” and now you’ve wasted hours that you could have spent doing something else. This is a great first step for prospects to take. What tools are you using? If you can tell us, I don’t know if you’re using something proprietary.

Shannon: We, after a long time of trying to find one product that does everything that we needed to do, we upfront we use a software called Dubsado, and it was created by a husband and wife team who were photographers. They were looking for software that specifically met the needs of small creative agencies. Web designers, photographers, and all the way to wedding planners. What that does is it allows for– Dubsado has created forms and contracts, and we stay with Dubsado all the way through our contract and invoicing process. Then we use a Zap to send all that information over to ClickUp. I wanted to mention one other thing, Joe, about doing your automation and your onboarding of a new prospect this way. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with progressive profiling for people, but one thing is going to websites we used to have this long-form on our website to get somebody into our funnel. People don’t like to fill out forms. With Dubsado, we fill out a form, and they fill out that form and then going to that next form that I send them it adds onto the same profile, so they aren’t having to fill out the same information over and over again. What we found is by asking them for small chunks of information along the way, we get that information faster and it’s more complete. Because nobody wants to sit down and fill out this long process just to get an appointment with you, so it’s been a cool way for us to get more information quicker and more accurate, but it’s the same amount information. But to the client, it feels less daunting.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Again, it goes back to getting the minimum amount that you need to move to the next step. Because I think there’s that psychological necessity for people to want to complete things, that’s why you might want to have a two-step signup process or something like that.

Shannon: I think it helps if you have a product, or whether you’re an agency, that two-part sign up allows you to get information faster. It sounds counter-intuitive, like “We’re going to ask them to do things twice.” But it seems to work if we’re just asking, and it makes them feel like you’re engaged.

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. That’s called progressive profiling, and I will link more information to that and everything that we’re talking about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. So, let’s say your client has gone through this prospect process. Everything looks great, and you are ready to have the contract and invoice signed, what’s next?

Shannon: Our proposal, contract, and invoice is all automated. When it’s sent out when they sign it they will automatically sign the contract and they will immediately upon signing the contract, the proposal will come up. They make a payment right there at that screen, and immediately then from there, they’ll get their onboarding documents. Again, we use that delayed workflow, so we don’t seem like “It’s all automated.” We use that psychology around– One of the things that we don’t want to do is make them think that they’re always going to get– We try to be proficient, but we don’t want to make our clients think that we’re going to respond in one minute every single time, so we use these delays to set some expectations of interactions. We have a full onboarding document that everybody gets, and it’s a nine-page document. It sets expectations down to how long it takes us to respond and what it takes to get us on a phone call. If you set those expectations, some people are really afraid to tell their clients that, “This is how we work.” But setting those expectations early and often, I think, allows you to be more successful and for the project to move forward. Right in our documents, it says, “This is your projective date that we will be able to go live, but it depends on you.” It’s blunt. It doesn’t say, “We’ll do our best,” it comes right out and says exactly how we work together. That’s all automated all the way through onboarding, all the way through that onboarding document. They get that all through– No person has to touch sending those onboarding emails.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Again, you’re automating something that can be automated, but you’re also setting expectations for your client. People are afraid to say, “I charge this much,” or “I only enter emails at this time.” But it’s much better to say that upfront then to surprise your client by saying, “I’m not–” One of the first things I say if I have a client, in our meeting, is “Look. You’re hiring me, I have a family, I work 9-5, and I don’t work weekends. If you need somebody to– If your site crashes on a Saturday and you need that, I am not your guy.” We know immediately at that point if we’re going to be a good fit or not.

Shannon: Everyone is not your client, and that’s OK.

Joe: Yeah.

Shannon: I think that we, as a small business, to be successful and productive, we cannot take clients who– We have an analogy in our group, “I’m the captain of an airplane and we cannot have passengers flying our plane.” As a group, when we feel like a customer who we may be letting the customer take over the plane, we literally on Slack will say to each other, “We have a hostage situation, our plane is– We’re going to California. We can’t stop in Florida and Texas first, and we have to get to California.” I think setting those expectations, and I’ve learned that the hard way. Because we’re all afraid that we’re not going to have customers, and we’re all afraid that we’re going to be all sitting around twiddling our thumbs if we set expectations. So those documents upfront, automating those and having that process, it also helps your team know how to respond. One of the things, when you grow a team, is that we always want our team to be like us, do things the way that we do. The only way that we can do that is have those hard written rules about how the processes work.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I love that analogy. “We can’t have a passenger flying the plane,” because you’re absolutely right. It’s not like if you’re a passenger on a plane, you’re like, “I know we’re going to California, but I just need to stop in Texas real quick. That’s easy for you, right? You know how to fly the plane.”

Shannon: Things like that have become an easy way for a team member to wave their red flag. Instead of saying, “Customer X is being a jerk” or whatever. We know that our goal is that our goal is to get to California from Philadelphia and we have to stay on our path if we go different directions, we’re not going to be able to work together as a team. It also has allowed the team to be able to say it in a way they don’t feel like they’re complaining. It opens our eyes, like “Yeah, right. I’m no longer captaining the ship, or piloting the plane, somebody else is.” You can use a ship too, for that analogy.

Joe: Yeah. Either way, I think it’s great. You’re right, and it keeps morale. Because I’ve been in groups where people just complained about their clients, and I’m like, “This is not healthy.” I was actually on the Clients from Hell podcast talking about this, because I tweeted that I didn’t think that was a website that was healthy for freelancers to regularly read. The guy who runs the podcast over there was like, “Let’s have you on the show and talking about this.” I’m like, “This is great. Killing me with kindness.” But it’s important, and you got to find the right balance between venting and then always complaining.

Shannon: Yes, absolutely. I think if you take away the customers, the problem, versus “This is our goal as a company. Does it align with our goals?” It becomes a different conversation.

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Joe: OK, so we’ve gotten to the point where the client knows what to expect now. I assume from here it’s probably a fairly customized process depending on what the client needs, or do you have a set of productized services that you offer?

Shannon: We do every single– Obviously, the delivery of the actual product is different for every client, but that is the one area where I feel like a lot of agencies could systematize a little bit more. I feel like we do a more budget-minded website. Most of our websites are in the $5-8,000 dollar range, where for a corporate company that’s inexpensive. We have to have systems in place to allow us to move quickly through the process. I met with a client and a partner– A marketing partner for lunch last week, and they said “How soon do you think we can get this up and running?” I answered and the other agency answered at the same time. I said, “Eight weeks.” They said, “Five months.” Everything that we do has every customer goes through the same experience, whether or not the product is a $2500 website or a $15,000 dollar website, it’s the same process. We have some tools that we use, we use Milanote. We have a project board that we use for every single client, and we have a “Start here” video where it’s a video of us talking to them using Loom. Every client starts there, and when they start they get a checklist on Milanote that the team can work together. We have simplified, we’ve tried having portals, we’ve tried all these different things. Honestly, customers don’t want to have to remember log in, and they never upload things. On our Milanote, I’d be happy to share an example with you of all the things it has. Everything that the client needs to work with us throughout the entire process, while we do have some customization, the process is pretty much always the same of what they get. They always get that within five days of signing the contract.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I’m looking at Milanote right now, and it looks amazing.

Shannon: Yeah, it’s awesome. Milanote, Loom, Google Drive is this part of our process. It’s all– We use that exclusively as far as our internally, while we’re doing this part, we’re using ClickUp. We’ve tried so many project management, we’ve jumped around, and I’m sure all of us have. But for today, we’re on ClickUp. It integrates nicely with everything that we’re doing, but we don’t have our clients sign into that side of things. We just have them use Milanote, so that process happens, and then we get to the point where they sign off, and we’re ready to go. Our entire go-live process is also systematized. We have a checklist that we have different people that are assigned to that checklist, and it goes through code review, all of the stuff, and then for go-live. But it’s a process, and every single customer goes through the same process no matter how much you’re spending with us. I think that’s crucial because, again, it sets expectations for the employees more than anything. It allows us to know that it goes through the same process every time, and we have a great offboarding.

Joe: Yeah. I think that’s so important. We both know Brian Castle, he’ll be on the show later this year. But one of the things he said is when you’re doing, especially productized services, but when you’re doing work, you want it to be predictable. You want to be able to say, “I’m going to do this in this amount of time.” I suspect one thing that I might worry about, is you said eight weeks and the other agency said five months. Were you worried that the client was going to say, “Why is there such a difference?” Like, “Why does it take them so much longer?”

Shannon: The funny thing is they were speaking for me because we’re a partner. They do billboards and print media, so we partner together. They were speaking for me because it takes them five months when we’re building– We do some white label work for them, and when they’re doing a website, it takes them five months because they take forever with everything. We do talk to our clients– Again, we’re not for everybody. We are for somebody who is basically looking for guidance along the way of building their website, so we’re not copywriters. You’ve got two options. We’re not going to copywrite for you. You can copywrite, or we can recommend somebody to work with. We have a recommended list of people, but we’re not going to write it for you. Some people are full service agencies. We do the part that we do well, so when I say eight weeks when you come to me, you’re going to have your copy ready. We’re not going to start that process while you’ re– We can do everything, but it’s eight weeks from that day that you give us. We’re not going to start the process until you have those things ready. It helps the client get their stuff in gear because I think that’s one of the big things. I learned the hard way that I’d spend months waiting for content. I would spend months, and they’re like, “Can you design something so we can see it?” OK. So we do that, and then it would sit for weeks, and so we are fast build because we have all these things in place that you must have ready before you start.

Joe: We’re coming up on time. We didn’t touch on employee onboarding, and I don’t know if you have any quick tips for that or any automations for that.

Shannon: Just use Gusto.

Joe: Yeah, Gusto. This is great. Another full disclosure, Gusto, is a former sponsor.

Shannon: Really? I had no idea.

Joe: This is great, yeah. They sponsored at the end of season seven, so definitely check them out. I’m sure you can find a link somewhere on How I Built It. But just use Gusto, I love that.

Shannon: It has changed everything. So, yeah.

Joe: As we end here, I want to ask you for a piece of advice and then a trade secret as I often do. What’s maybe one or two things that somebody, a freelancer or a small business owner who’s not automating anything right now, what do you recommend they start with first?

Shannon: Joe, I think the thing that you should consider automating or procetizing is the thing that you spend the most time doing. If you spend a lot of time in your business onboarding clients and you find yourself sending emails back and forth, start with your onboarding process. If you find it’s the offboarding process that you are– It takes you four months to get a client out of your system because they keep asking questions, you know that you need to provide better offboarding documents. I think it ‘s– I don’t think there’s one answer. I think you have to look at your individual situation, but it’s the thing that you do over and over again. The other thing is the thing that you get the most questions about if your client’s not clear, you’re not doing a good job with that process. So sit back, write that process out, come up with some ways that you could automate. Zaps are your friend. Use those all day, and if you’re bringing on employees look at your employees and the questions that they ask over and over again, and start there.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. Start with what you do the most, sit back, and write the process out. I think this was important in summer of 2018, and I started automating. Especially a lot of the podcasting stuff that I do, I realized that I was manually doing things that robots could do. I wrote out my whole guest onboarding process, and now Zapier and Calendly basically take care of that whole thing for me. Zaps your friend, I will link to Zapier in the show notes if, by some chance, you have never heard of it. It’s amazing. Both that, and IFTTT, but IFTTT is more like smart home device stuff. This is great. Shannon, thank you so much for coming on the show. I need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Shannon: That’s a great question, and I thought about what I was going to say. I think my biggest secret is when it comes to employees. I have found that growing my company, looking for employees who don’t always have the skill that you want, but have the personality traits that you need for your company. I have taken people who are not necessarily in this space and have never been in WordPress, have never looked at a website, that have worked at Target. But they are the most amazing employee. Every time I go there, I’m like, “Yeah. I need to have her.” I think my success, my team is– I have such a wonderful group of people. I think going out and finding people that fit your culture that you can train, and don’t be afraid to do that. I think sometimes we’re so afraid that people don’t have the credentials that we want them to, that we don’t hire them. But if they have the personality, the work ethic, and they’re going to be a company culture match, do it.

Joe: I love that. I could not agree more. Skills can be taught, and skills often need to be taught. I got out of school with a master’s degree in software engineering, and I still needed to be trained on my first job. Like, I knew how to program, but I didn’t know how a particular company did it. I think that’s super important. Such a great trade secret, I wrote it in the notes as “When it comes to employees, you can develop the skills, so you should look for the personality traits.”

Shannon: Absolutely, 100%.

Joe: Awesome. That’ll be the tweetable. Shannon, this has been great. Where can people find you?

Shannon: I am on– Where am I? Where can they find me? Twitter, that’s it. @ShannonTSchaefer, and LinkedIn. Yeah, that’s about it.

Joe: All right, and LinkedIn.

Shannon: And hopefully coming to a WordCamp near you.

Joe: Awesome. Definitely follow Shannon on Twitter, I will link Twitter and LinkedIn and everything we talked about in the show notes over at How I Built It. Shannon, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Outro: Thanks so much to Shannon for joining us today. I thought this was a great episode. I love her story, and I love all of the tools that she told us about. I definitely am going to check out Dubsado For sure. I think what she talks about, especially about systematizing their process, is incredibly important for really anybody who’s doing this sort of work. She went over the benefits, great. I don’t want to rehash all of that, but I will say that putting systems in place for me has made me more efficient. In a field where time is money and time is the only thing you can’t get back, I think having a good system in place is important. Thanks again to Shannon for that. All of the links that we talked about, all of the tools and the extra resources can be found over at HowIBuilt.it/155. I want to thank our sponsors for this week, and they are TextExpander and FreshBooks, two tools that I use every single day in my business. Be sure to check them out as well. If you liked this episode, be sure to like and subscribe in Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to learn more about my online courses over at CreatorCourses.com, you can get a free PDF that tells you five tools to help you build websites faster. Talking about efficient processes and tools, you can find those again over at the show notes, HowIBuilt.it/155. Thank you so much for listening and spending part of your day with us over here at How I Built It. Until next time, get out there and build something.

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for the podcast. I’ve learned a lot about WordPress blog writing as well as website development from Shannon Shaffer. I think I need to bookmark her blog and read her latest updates.

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