15 | Mastering Automation and AI to Boost Efficiency and Scale Your Coaching Business With Jesse Parker

If you are looking for solutions to save time in your coaching business, enhance your productivity and achieve streamlined operations, you are going to love this episode.

I have automation expert, Jesse Parker, guiding us through the world of automation and AI, offering a lot of options to help us optimize our business operations.

Jesse Parker is a certified LCS life coach and former Zapier employee (9.5 years), who has spent the last decade at the forefront of workflow automation industry. Through their time at Zapier and founding a tech consulting business, they’ve helped countless business owners, from solopreneurs to 7/8-figure CEOs, to Fortune 500 companies, locate inefficiencies and build new processes to maximize their results. Now, Jesse helps life coaches leverage automation and AI to streamline business operations, maximize their time and energy, and unlock limitless scaling ability.

Listen in as we walk along the coach’s journey to growing a business, stopping at each stage to discuss what automation can be used to streamline processes and ultimately maximize the impact we want to make.

There are a couple of things Jesse said that stuck with me.

First, “If you keep using people to do robot tasks, you will not scale. You cannot scale without automation. When you pick out the pieces of a process and automate them, you remove limits…it’s magical.”

Then, “Typing, clicking copying and pasting is wasting.” Use automation.

Toward the end, Jesse shares an example that saved a client $9K! And that was just the beginning.

Warning… Don’t get overwhelmed. Especially if you are not a techy person or if you are a coach who is just starting or if you’re not interested in scaling. Let our discussion expose your mind to what is possible. You don’t have to change everything you’re doing. Just consider what it might look like in your business.

Enjoy this conversation with Jesse Parker.

00:00:50
Welcome to the show. I cannot wait to talk about this topic and learn all I can as I’m analyzing my own business and looking into automation myself. I have a special guest, Jesse Parker on the show and they are going to talk about all these things.

00:01:09
Jesse, why don’t you introduce yourself? Yeah, absolutely. So first I just want to say thank you for having me Tracy. It’s truly an honor to be on your podcast. I love all things organizing and I think that automation and organization pair so well together. So to give you kind of a quick intro about me, I’ve been in the automation industry for a little over a decade so I was one of the first hires at Zapier, which is probably the most popular, most well-developed automation platform that exists today.

00:01:42
And I’ve had the opportunity of working on a lot of different projects and programs and things there. Ended up running my own consulting business for a bit and then found coaching. Now I’m taking everything that I love and I’m helping other life coaches leverage automation and AI in their businesses to streamline operations and also just to save unnecessary time and energy that you might be spending on manual work. I can’t wait to hear all about it. Let’s say we talk to new coaches first.

00:02:15
What are automations that you would suggest they create or have initially? Sure. Well, so for new coaches, like when you’re just developing your business, I actually recommend pausing a bit on getting too in the weeds about automation because you’re building these processes and you need to carry them out manually and really find the things that work. This is where I see some folks actually making mistakes because they get so excited about automation that they’re like, I’m going to automate all these processes and they end up automating things that aren’t working or that are really inefficient. I usually recommend that you actually develop what those look like for you and what you’re comfortable with and carry them out manually.

00:02:55
And maybe a great place to start for new coaches is actually on the personal productivity side. Scheduling, planning. I know there are a lot of coaches that probably listen to your podcast that are LCS-certified coaches. They’re most familiar with Monday HourOone. So, how can we use automation to cut down on the time there?

00:03:16
Yes, tell me everything. That’s such a good point too, that you made as far as us trying different processes and systems and waiting until we get those figured out because it’s changing a lot. We change things and how we’re doing things, and we change our program maybe, and we decide to do eight weeks or twelve weeks instead of six and then everything changes. So, yes, tell me about our calendars, and our productivity, what’s helpful with automation in that? I can talk through a setup that I have.

00:03:47
Everything in my schedule that I want to do is completely automated. So I don’t really spend hours on my Monday Hour One trying to figure out what to plan because I have automation do that for me. And one of the apps that’s instrumental in that workflow is called Reclaim AI. And it’s really lovely because not only can you automatically schedule your tasks, actually they will automatically schedule them for you according to the parameters that you set. So maybe you only want to do deep focus work in the morning and then you want to go to the gym in the afternoon and all of that, but you can set up those habits, like going to the gym, having a planning session.

00:04:25
And Reclaim will take all of the rules that you make about your schedule and your life and it will start to piece in a new schedule for you. And what’s great is if you’re using Calendly or Acuity or something like that, to schedule appointments with clients, you can also set up, I guess, how serious that event is, like how long to hold it. Like, when to make it permanent on your calendar so you don’t have to worry about well, I would schedule all these things in for focus time and the gym and picking up the kids, but I know if I do that, my clients can’t book with me on that day. So Reclaim is like a perfect way of saying, hold this spot for me, don’t actually block it on my calendar. But if nobody books within 24 hours of the start time, then definitely put my focus time here.

00:05:14
Definitely put my gym time here. So again, you can change the level of seriousness that you want your calendar to consider for that event. Okay, I think I’ve gotten ads for this or ads for this service using AI and I can’t remember the name of the company now. So you use that. Does it work with your Google Calendar or is it its own calendar?

00:05:38
It syncs to your Google Calendar if you’d like it to. I think they might integrate with Office 365 as well. I’d have to double-check, but that’s exactly what I do, actually, if I could take a step back, I have to get all of my tasks onto my calendar, aside from all of the focus time that I like to block and my habits and things like that. So another app that I use to do this is called ClickUp. Now, ClickUp is a very full-featured task and project manager.

00:06:08
When I recommend this, I don’t recommend just start building this massive flow inside, use it as a simple checklist. The best part about ClickUp is that you can use Zapier to automate things into it to create tasks. For example, I like to listen to every single LCS call that happens so I subscribe to the LCS calendar, and I use a Zapier Zap, which is just an automated workflow, and I trigger off all of those calendar events, and they add themselves to ClickUp tasks for me. And then Reclaim sees that I have those things in ClickUp.

00:06:44
If it looks at my calendar and it says, all right, well, you wanted to do classes at this time and this time and over here, but you have a client call, and it actually puts it on my calendar for me in the most optimal time for my schedule. I never have to worry about fitting anything in, and I don’t have to worry about doing the manual labor of looking at my calendar and moving things around. So it just goes there automatically. And another great thing about ClickUp is one of the things that’s really important when you want to get things done. I see a lot of coaches.

00:07:12
Like they have a journal where they’re right things they need to do, and then there’s, like, a sticky note on their desk, and then there’s a random Google doc, and then there’s a note on your computer, and then there’s something in your email and it’s like you have to really centralize, like, have that one central inbox where you’re collecting information. And the thing I like about ClickUp is that there is a mobile app for your phone. So when you’re on the go, you’re in line at the grocery store, you think of a brilliant idea or something you need to get done, you can just add it as a task. When an email comes in, there’s a ClickUup integration for your Gmail inbox where you can just say, oh, create a task from this email. Remind me to follow up.

00:07:46
And then there’s like a little Chrome extension for those of us that use Chrome that there’s a little bubble that follows us around whatever website we’re on, and we can save pages and make notes and save tasks. That way, it all goes on to ClickUp. Reclaim sees that I have these tasks and knows what I want to get them done, and boom, it just puts them on my schedule for me. Literally. There’s no manual work involved.

00:08:06
My mind says, what if they don’t all fit on your calendar? What does Reclaim do? The thing with Reclaim and ClickUp is that in ClickUp you choose a start date, an end date, and a duration. If it’s looking at your calendar and we’re really not going to fit this in this week. But you said that you wanted to get it done in three weeks, it’ll just bump it to the following week or whatnot?

00:08:31
Then if you have a conflict, it will show you these things are at risk of not getting done. It’ll be very clear, like in the sidebar. So you can then make intentional decisions about what you’d like to do with those tasks and if you’d like to reschedule them, or if you need to move something around, or you need to ask your spouse to take the kids to soccer practice. Because this absolutely has to be done this week, so you have that kind of flexibility and visibility. Okay, so I’m thinking of well, myself, but other coaches out there who might be like, oh, that just blows my mind.

00:09:02
I can’t imagine setting all that up. Is that something you help people with? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I help anybody automate pretty much anything. And I think that I’ve automated gosh, I can’t think of any use case that I haven’t touched at this point in my career because I’ve spent so much time working with solopreneurs seven to eight-figure CEOs, Fortune 500 companies, and if I’ve never touched it before, guaranteed I can figure it out very quickly.

00:09:29
So, yeah, if anybody wants to reach out to me, I can certainly help you with the automation piece of that and getting everything set up if we. Wanted to try that by ourselves, just with the calendar. If you get on Reclaim AI, how long would you say that would take to set up? Does it take a lot of testing and trying to figure it out? I don’t think that it takes very long at all to set up and Reclaim

00:09:49
I think where the work is going to be is the step before that where you’re sitting down and you’re designing your schedule and you’re saying, okay, what do I want my dream week to look like? What are all these habits that I might have been putting on the back burner? When do I want to focus on my coaching business? That’s going to take the most amount of time is to make the intentional decisions about what you want your calendar to look like. But as far as setting it up, it’s as easy as setting up a task, and then it pops it on the calendar for you.

00:10:19
Oh my gosh, I just want to try that and see. Now all the objections in my mind are like, okay, what if you don’t get it done? In the time that it takes. What happens then? That’s a great question.

00:10:29
So Reclaim has a reschedule button. So if things went crazy, your mother-in-law called, your schedule just completely went off of the rails, then you just go to your tasks and click the reschedule button. Reclaim will find the next best time in your calendar to do it. So I’m assuming that’s a paid service and ClickUp is paid, but could you do the checklist and have it be a free service or not?

00:10:51
Let me double-check the pricing because I know I pay for Reclaim. I can’t remember if I pay for ClickUp, but it’s pretty affordable. And you have to also ask yourself, like, how much is your time worth and how much do you spend on planning and scheduling and calendaring and things like that? That’s such a good point, though, thinking about the time that you spend doing all that and going in and moving appointments around. Yeah, it’s the perfect area for automation because especially when you’re an entrepreneur solopreneur, you want to focus on creating value for your clients and you have to be really intentional about where your time goes and if it’s on admin sort of task, that’s valuable time that you could be spent reaching out to your audience.

00:11:35
I like to think of it as a surprise every morning. Then you just go into your calendar and think, what did my assistant plan for me? It’s so great. That’s what it is, though. You can view the week ahead of time and see how it’s all planned out – when I have my client calls.

00:11:51
It’s so easy. I just get on my computer in the morning, I just look at the daily view from my calendar and I’m like, all right, all that stuff I wanted to do, it’s been taken care of. It’s been scheduled. Like, here it is. It hasn’t been forgotten.

00:12:04
It hasn’t fallen to the bottom of a to-do list in a notebook somewhere. It’s on my calendar till I want to complete it. Love it. Okay, so the new coach is focusing on automation via the calendar. Then what is the next step?

00:12:17
What are some automations you think maybe every coach needs to have in their business or the flow of them, the progression of them? Yeah. Once you start getting some clients coming in, you want to start organizing that information. That’s usually the first step that coaches take. It’s like lead management, lead organization.

00:12:37
I know you talk a lot about your spasm framework, so like sorting through that information, figuring out what you don’t need, assigning homes, all of that. And the best way to make sure that you have this information organized and accurate is to lean on automation because there’s little room for human error. And actually, this is a really important piece about automation that a lot of people skip is the data integrity piece. If you don’t have your data organized and structured and clean and accurate and relevant, when you go to start implementing automation to go back and forth between applications, you’re creating more of a mess. And so for coaches that are established a bit and just starting to set up automation, there are things that you can do like take new scheduled consultations or new scheduled meetings and automatically create a contact in your CRM or whatever database that you’re using.

00:13:32
So that’s a very simple, wonderful example of an automation they can build. Another is when you get a new subscriber on your mailing list, maybe you want them in your CRM as well, or maybe you want to look them up in your CRM and actually check a box that they’re subscribed to your mailing list or vice versa. Right. As long as you have their permission. Of course, when somebody is added to your CRM, add them as a subscriber.

00:13:56
Now thinking about someone that, I mean, if you’re an experienced coach, you’re going to know what a CRM is, but define that. So I’m thinking, okay, do I have that set up? My consults would go in through Acuity and then I actually do have a Zap set up so that it tags them in Kajabi, which is my CRM, what I use for my list. And so what’s another example you see a lot of coaches use in that? It’s all over the place.

00:14:26
For newer coaches, I actually find a lot of people are tracking things in a spreadsheet, which I don’t recommend. But your next step up from that would be an app called Airtable. So it’s like a spreadsheet, but it’s really pretty and it sort of forces you to stay organized with the rules that they have in place. But there are coaches that use so many things. Kajabi is certainly one of them.

00:14:47
ActiveCampaign, I see a lot of folks using that ConvertKit. Yeah, those are more like email marketing, and email automation platforms. I mean, the same thing a little bit with ActiveCampaign and Kajabi is an all-in-one sort of solution. But I’m not sure I’ve seen a consensus of what everybody is using. But I do recommend something like Airtable when you’re just starting out or if you want an all-in-one solution that has its own pros and cons.

00:15:18
Some folks are using HoneyBook or Dubsotto. Let’s see what else I think I believe HubSpot might have a free plan for a CRM, but expect to pay money for one unless you’re using Airtable. That’s why I recommend it. It’s a good free solution that will get you by for a bit. And the point of that, the purpose of having that is what?

00:15:38
Yeah. So CRM, I know you asked about what that stands for before. So that stands for Customer Relationship Management. All it is is it’s an application that helps you manage client information, client communication, and progress that you’re making with a client. So you’d have things in there like information about the client, right?

00:15:56
Their name, their email address, maybe their phone number or whatnot you’d have probably their activities in there. Did they send you an email? Schedule a call with you? Did you make a note about them somewhere? You might also record payments in there, so you might want to understand your lifetime value of that client or if they’re late on a payment, who is your highest paying client, and things like that.

00:16:17
Then the last thing that folks like to track is stages. What stage is your client in? Are they still a lead, not yet a client? A client in the onboarding stage? Or a client in the delivery stage?

00:16:29
Are they up for renewal with you? Are they no longer working with you? So those might be a way that you can organize and segment your client base. Yeah. Awesome.

00:16:39
Okay, so you have your CRM set up and new subscribers being added to that and then what do you see as the next automation to focus on? It really depends on what you want to track. If you have your CRM set up and your email marketing and email subscription set up, you could probably start leaning into automating your onboarding process. That’s an excellent opportunity for automation that a lot of coaches lean into because the faster that you onboard people and the faster you deliver to them and the less manual work, the more clients you can take on, the more value that you can give. So for example, let’s say a client pays you and you’re using Stripe as your payment processor, which I highly recommend.

00:17:21
Stripe is great because it’s simple enough to set up when you’re just starting out and it scales with you to when you’re making tens of millions of dollars so you could trigger off of a new payment. And when I say trigger, that just means like start a process, a series of actions that are going to happen from that payment. And then you could record the payment in your CRM and update the client to say that they paid. Maybe you are creating then a folder for them in Google Drive with some worksheets or templates. Maybe you’re sending them a contract to sign.

00:17:55
Maybe you’re then updating your email list to change the tag or the segment that you have that person in. You don’t want to continue selling them the same product that they already bought. So those are all steps of the onboarding process or onboarding process that you could potentially automate. I love how you said that the Stripe payment triggers it. So would that look like you set a Zap up with Stripe and whatever other thing you want?

00:18:23
If you wanted to create something in your Google Drive, is that how you would do it? Yes, exactly. So you’d set the Zap up. So the free Zapier plan, it always allows you to have like one trigger and one action with their nonpremium Zaps. You’d have to look up what those are.

00:18:37
But Stripe is not a premium app, so it’d be free to have Stripe as your trigger to start the process and then take one action from it. But if you just bump up to the next plan, which I think is like $20 a month, that’s why again, I recommend too that coaches have some clients, you have some revenue coming in. I try to keep folks on free flexible solutions and not have to pay money on software until you actually have revenue coming in. Te next plan up is about $20 a month, and then you can add multiple actions from that as I said before. So Stripe payment comes in, you automatically create the folder, then you copy a spreadsheet into the folder, then you send a contract, then you update the segment in the mailing list and you don’t have to touch a thing.

00:19:19
Right. You just set up that automated process once and every time that payment comes in. And you can set filters and parameters and things like that. All those steps happen automatically for your client. So it’s a really great way also to delight your customers and help them feel cared for.

00:19:33
You’re not worrying about this long list of contracts you have to send and things that you have to remember to update. That is so good. Now why had I never and I’ve paid for Zapier before, am I saying that right? That’s how you say Zapier? Okay.

00:19:46
I’ve heard Zapier makes you happier. Oh, nice. I love that. I never thought to connect it with the payment. I don’t know what I guess it’s a form in Kajabi that I connect it with, but then I don’t think I realized that you could have multiple things happen after it.

00:20:04
I thought you had to create an individual Zap for each of those. So that’s amazing. Yeah, you can have just one long Zap with just like and you can title it client onboarding and just have all those steps taken care of. Can you schedule things out? So about halfway through my program, I usually send a gift.

00:20:21
Can you make that automatic? Yeah. So there are two ways to do that. It really depends on the timeline of when you want to send the gift. Right.

00:20:28
If it’s a couple of days later or a week later or something, you can use a built-in Zapier app called Delay by Zapier, and you can ask it to delay for a certain amount of time, but I don’t believe that you can delay longer than a month. What you’d want to do essentially is to set something up in your CRM with that date field. Some CRMs have their own little automation features that say when something reaches this date, then that triggers a whole other Zap to happen. And this is like just taking another step back and going back to my Airtable recommendation. That’s why I like that so much as the beginning lightweight CRM because you can set up filtered views in Airtable.

00:21:10
So let’s say you had a client in Airtable and you’re like, okay, this is the date that I want to send them a gift. You just put that date in or have automation write that date for you by calculating the amount of time from the payment to when you want to send the gift. Then you don’t worry about it. And then there’s a view that you can say, okay, only show records where the gifted date is today’s date, the record appears in the view that triggers the Zack. And then you can take all of the other actions that you want to take.

00:21:39
That’s a way to get around that kind of delay for only a month’s limitation. You can set it for years in the future, and then when that date comes up and matches today’s date, you can take whatever actions you want automatically. This is where that starts to feel a little overwhelming for me. This is where I can see your service is so valuable because I’m like, can you just come in and do all that for me so I don’t have to think about it? So good.

00:22:06
What else? What comes after that? We have the onboarding process automated. Yeah, I know a lot of coaches are starting to dabble in AI a bit. So, for example, if you have an AI meeting notetaker, definitely let your clients know if you’re using that just out of respect.

00:22:27
If you use something like Fireflies AI, that’s a meeting notetaker. I use that one a lot because they have a Zapier integration. What you could do is after that meeting ends, it will trigger a Zap using Firefly’s AI and take the meeting summary or the notes or whatnot and add them as client notes in your CRM. Or you can even create an email from your Gmail account, right? Hey, it was great chatting with you.

00:22:53
Here are the things that we talked about. Here’s a summary of our meeting in case you wanted to remember anything. That’s just like another way where you don’t have to worry about, oh, what was it? What did we talk about in our last session? What was it they wanted to work on?

00:23:07
Where did that conversation go? It’s like, no, not only do I have the entire transcript and recording of the meeting, but I have that short little summary that I can glance at in whatever kind of CRM system I’m using to just give myself a quick refresher before I hop on the next call with them. Love it. Like I said, there are a whole bunch of other meeting notetakers, but the trick is to find apps that integrate, I’m going to say with Zapier just because they’re the most robust and support the most number of apps. And I know that if an app integrates with them, it integrates with my entire workflow.

00:23:41
I’m going to be able to automate so much. But there are other wonderful meeting notetakers. Otter AI is one I can’t remember right off the bat if they have a Zapier integration, but they might, I’m not sure, but yeah, definitely check. Because if not, you’re doing something that I like to call island building. You might find this amazing app and you set everything up.

00:24:03
There are some all-in-one solutions that don’t integrate with Zapier. And people are crazy about them because they’re like, it’s so convenient. It’s all in one. I love this. And then you’re building and then you realize you’ve built yourself on an island and now this feature breaks.

00:24:18
This one, they’re discontinuing, this one doesn’t work the way you want it. And you have no way of connecting that to whatever solutions you need to put in place. So if I could have your audience take one thing away from this, it’s like be really intentional with when you’re picking your apps and make sure that there is an opportunity for automation because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to scale your business. And it’s why I’m so passionate about automation. Because it removes the limits of time for you.

00:24:46
Because you’ll run into a limit of time, right? We all only have 24 hours a day and we need to do things like take care of ourselves and sleep and all that. And then you’ll hire an assistant, right? You’ll buy some more time, but they’re going to run into that as well. And then you have the costs of that assistant.

00:25:00
But automation is so cheap and there is no time limit to it. So as long as you can keep paying it, it will keep working for you. 24/7. That’s amazing. So it’s almost more important to spend the money on getting your automation set up than hiring at first maybe or hiring first to see until you get your system or your process down.

00:25:25
And then hiring automation in 100%. Yeah, and I see a lot of coaches and it’s like right away, it’s like go right to the assistant, go right to the assistant. But if you have your assistant doing things like copying and pasting, something that involves a lot of clicking and a lot of typing, I like to say typing, clicking, copying and pasting is wasting, right?

00:25:48
You are wasting the more money you pay to have somebody else do that now website edits and things like that. That’s a wonderful thing to have your assistant do, right? You can’t always do that kind of intentional updating with automation. But if it’s copying pasting, data entry manual admin work, try to look to automation first before you lean on an assistant to carry those tasks through for you. Do you think you were naturally organized, naturally driven in that kind of way?

00:26:17
Because I always look at people and I think not to compare myself to that because you’ve had nine years, nine and a half years just as a Zavier employee practicing the skill and so what a beautiful skill and knowledge you have around that. But do you think you are always like that? I always wonder about people. I’ve definitely always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I know that’s not automation related, but I had some  Pokemon card buying, selling, and eBay thing going on when I was like ten.

00:26:52
In the group of friends, like, figuring out how to get the best deal. But I’ve always liked figuring things out and finding a better, more cost-effective way of doing something. And again, the reason why I like automation so much is that you don’t have to be a developer to do it. You don’t have to learn code. I know there are a lot of folks that are like, I’m not tech savvy.

00:27:12
I’m not tech-savvy. That’s a thought, not a circumstance, right? Technology in itself, in its existence, it’s always going to break. You’re always going to run into issues. Because I have nine and a half years of experience, or however many years of experience doesn’t mean that technology just works perfectly for me and nothing ever gets in my way.

00:27:32
I’m solving problems every single day. But the reason why I love automation is because it empowers me to solve those problems myself. I don’t have to learn a new technical language to do it. And some folks might look at automation as this technical language, but when you look at the grand scheme of technology and all the things that you could learn, automation and AI are the most accessible forms to just creating whatever you want. And I think that that’s what the core is for me is like I love creating.

00:28:04
When something pops into my mind, I want to know that I can sit at my computer and just make it happen. And that’s not always easy when it comes to technical development and things like that. Yeah, that is so inspiring. How have you helped people? Just tell me,  you had mentioned you’ve helped Beginners and Fortune 500 CEOs and all of that.

00:28:26
What do you do? How do you help people? I help people really scale their processes. So a lot of times when I’m working with folks, they’re exhausted, they’re tired, they know that they can scale further, but they’ve got all these things going on, right? They’re like, I have to do this.

00:28:41
And then I have to talk to my assistant and delegate this. And it becomes almost like this monster that you just found yourself buried in, and you don’t even know where to start. You have ideas of like, oh, I know I could automate this, and I could probably be doing this better. But you’re so busy trying to run your business and you’re working in your business that it’s hard to make that transition and get yourself out of it. And so what I do with folks is we really sit down and we talk about some of the core processes that run in their business.

00:29:11
And everybody has the same core processes. Like you have your marketing and your lead management and follow up and things like that. You have your onboarding you have your delivery you have your renewal These are things that exist in every business. But we look at every single step and we’re like, okay, what are the steps that are adding value to your business? And what are the steps that are adding cost?

00:29:31
Adding cost isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes we have to pay for something to happen. We have to pay for our assistant at $20 an hour to do something because we don’t want to pay the cost of our time, which is worth $200-300 an hour or whatever it might be to carry something through. We figure out what those are and the things in the process that are the most important, that are costing the most, and we figure out how to automate them. We completely just get them out of the way so that you can actually work on your business and be the strategic decision-maker and decide.

00:30:08
Okay, now that all this stuff is running really well, how do I want to improve it? What do I want to do next? What about that coaching program that I’ve been dreaming about for the last year? I can implement that now. What does that look like?

00:30:20
I open up the world of possibility when I work with my clients, and I just remove all of the limits to scaling so that you can just press the gas pedal and just go just deliver value nonstop. Love It. Now. When you think about automation versus systems, what comes up in your mind? Well, I think systems are essentially just a collection of processes that are all sort of working together, towards a common goal.

00:30:52
So you can have systems and you can have completely manual systems where you are doing everything and your assistants doing everything. But the key is to implement automation because then your systems start running themselves so you can have this whole ball of everything just working together and you can put it aside because you know it’s working. You don’t have to be in that system anymore. Did we talk about what you think? The best areas of a coaching business that would benefit from automation.

00:31:20
We talked through most of that. Is there anything else you would add to that? It’s hard for me to give a concrete answer on, like, these are the absolute things outside of those areas because, yes, there are very common coaching business models of one-to-one group membership. We hear about them all the time. But I also love working with clients that have sort of an unconventional business model.

00:31:44
I have people coming to me all the time that they’re like, hey, I want to talk to you about this. Now, I don’t operate like other coaches. I do this special thing over here and I’m like, bring it on, bring it on. I was chatting with a coach a couple of weeks ago and we got on a call and completely unconventional business model things that I wouldn’t have been able to even advise. Hey, these are things you should look at, like, on a podcast, right?

00:32:09
Just through that 1-hour call, we figured out how to save her $9,000 by specifically looking at her process and figuring out what pieces that were unique to her and the way that she wanted to serve her clients, we could automate. And that’s calculating the time you’re spending doing it or paying someone to do it. What other ways is that calculating that cost? Yeah. So that $9,000 was essentially just the cost of paying somebody to do the other manual because, at this point, she had already moved things off of her own plate and gotten it to an assistant.

00:32:43
That worked for a while. Like I said before, you hit a limit and you’re like, what do I do now? If you keep using people to do robot tasks right. We want to use people for their brains, for their creativity, for their strategy. Right.

00:32:58
Not sitting on a computer copying and pasting data and updating things. What a waste of the human experience, in my opinion. Right. So she had hit that limit, and so we automated it. And so that $9,000 was the cost that was immediately eliminated from moving everything to automation.

00:33:16
But now that doesn’t even include the fact that now she could sell more products every single month. She was kept on what she could sell. She could probably double it. It’s such a hot product. Like, people are on a waiting list for it, but she couldn’t deliver it.

00:33:32
That frees up that assistant to do all kinds of other valuable work. And that frees up her time to not even worry about her delivery process anymore because she knows it’s working. Now she can just focus on the value. So $9,000 is the quick, immediate savings. If you double your revenue, I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars, really.

00:33:52
Just from picking out those pieces of a process and automating them and removing limits, it’s magical. That is so good. Okay. Do you help people talk through this and see how they can save that money and what areas need automation then? Do you actually do that for them or how does that work?

00:34:09
Yeah, so we will talk through it. I usually have people break down their processes and then we understand that cost add versus cost value sorry, cost add, value add. And then I will identify all the areas that we can automate and how to automate and then we’ll actually work through that together. The reason I don’t do completely do it for you is that I want to empower people. This is how I feel empowered of being able to create and fix something on my own.

00:34:37
While I don’t think that coaches need to be automation experts and know everything, it is really great to just have an idea and be like, wow, I think that I can just add this other product or service on and I can just automate it and have it happen. So I will walk through how to set everything up. That’s what I was wondering earlier. If you were more the teaching, like if you could teach more in your style of coaching or if you do it all behind the scenes. Because I like to learn how to do it.

00:35:05
Because if it’s something little I can go in and do myself, I could easily add new automation or something. I love that teaching side of it. Yeah, I don’t like to create any dependencies. Imagine if you did pay somebody to just do all of the stuff for you and then something happened. I don’t know, that person stopped doing that service or didn’t want to work with them anymore or whatever.

00:35:29
Now you’re like, oh my gosh, now here’s this piece of my business I have to figure out all over again rather than like me including you in the process. You understand how it works and you can feel empowered to know what’s going on and to make changes yourself if you want. Then if you don’t feel like it’s right, we’ll hop on a call and I’ll walk through it all over again or we’ll walk through something new. But it’s so important that I mean, automation is a skill set, right? And it’s so important to learn that and to figure out how it works and to figure out just even how the building process works and how that translates into growing your business.

00:36:03
Perfect. Anything else you think that someone listening might want to know? If automation is something that you feel intimidated by or scary to you, reach out to me. Ask me questions. I am always happy to chat with folks on Facebook through email.

00:36:20
Like hop on a quick call if you have questions about, I don’t know, I’m looking at this app versus this app or like I’m having this problem in my business you don’t have to do this alone. I’m here to help point people in the right direction. But automation is something that you want to learn to scale your business. I don’t know any business that has scaled into the millions or even the hundreds of thousands without some piece of automation built in. So it is one of the most valuable skills that you can learn as a coach, as a business owner, and as an entrepreneur.

00:36:54
Love it. And you have a Facebook group, you said, so if people have questions like that, that’s the perfect place to go. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I have a Facebook group called Automation Mastery for Life Coaches. Completely free to join.

00:37:06
I try to do a couple of workshops in there to teach folks how to do things like set up your first CRM or how to even learn Zapier. Understand what that is. I will be scheduling soon an upcoming workshop on some of the scheduling and planning that we talked about during this call. So if you want a free resource to just learn, I’m there sharing all of my knowledge and expertise with you. So come join and we’ll include the link to that in the show notes, of course.

00:37:31
Perfect. Okay, this has been so good. As you said earlier, you’re here to open and expand our minds to what we can see as possible. So thank you so much. If someone was going to take one action, even if it’s the way they look at their business or think, what would it be?

00:37:49
I think it depends on where you are in your coaching business. I think if you’re a newer coach, just focus on figuring out the processes that are working for you. Don’t be afraid to experiment and lean into your calendaring and scheduling system to make sure that you get the things that you want to get done. I think folks that have a couple of clients take an intentional look at what you’re doing every day that’s the same over and over and over again and find an opportunity for automation. Ask yourself, is that really what you should be doing?

00:38:22
Like with your human brain? Or is that something that you could delegate a robot to do for you? Jesse, thank you so much for being on and sharing all your knowledge. And I just love that you have such a generous, helpful spirit. Tell people where they can find you.

00:38:37
Yeah. So in addition to the Facebook group, my website is Lifecoacherations.com. If you go there, you can read a bit more about me and what I offer and also schedule a free automation audit. So this is where we’ll just hop on. If you have something that’s taking you a lot of time, you think there might be an opportunity for automation, whatever it might be, schedule that with me.

00:38:57 Tracy, thank you for having me on. I love your podcast and I think that everybody should get organized and definitely use automation where you can to help organize your life. So it’s been a pleasure.

00:39:15
Thanks for listening to the episode. Please share this episode with your coaching bestie and tag me on Instagram at @Tracyhoth. And of course, I would be so grateful if you could subscribe and leave a written review on Apple podcasts. It’s the number one way you can thank me. To thank you, go grab the File Naming Formula Cheat Sheet and watch the workshop replay Three Secrets to Organize your Digital Files.

00:39:39
Both are linked in the show notes. Until next time, have a beautiful week.