(Quick note! New thing new thing! If you loved this breakdown, you should definitely check out the Brass Tacks Biz Series – it’s going to be more case studies just like this, with worksheets & actionable info, live every month, and the price is supa-reasonable.)

In case you missed it (or are finding this post while perusing in the archives – hi from the past!), last week I ran a 5 day bundle sale called the Don’t Lose Your Shit sale. A quick rundown:

• Sale length: 5 days (August 5-9)
• Number of contributors: 34 (counting myself)
• Total value of sale: $1,749

How I planned & pulled off the sale:

Basically, I started really fucking early. I believe I had the idea in early May, and started contacting potential contributors in late May. I knew that I wanted to outsource some of the work, so I planned accordingly. Most of the work was done in July; obviously, with something like this, there are a lot of moving pieces like:

• approaching potential contributors & keeping a list of who you’ve heard back from and whether it was yes or no
• making sure you have access information for all the products
• making sure all the contributors get inside the affiliate program and have their links
• getting the swipe copy out to everyone
• writing the swipe copy
• the graphic design elements
• the technical/delivery side of things

Again, for obvious reasons, I started early. I’d recommend starting early if you’re planning on doing anything similar. I’ve seen people pull these things off with a smaller turnaround time, but I have no freakin’ clue how they did it, because if I was going to do it over again, I would actually start most of my work in April instead of in May.

The other key piece of me managing to actually get this done was outsourcing. My team consisted of:

Tina Robbins – virtual assistant extraordinaire

Tanja Gardner – copywriter/wrangler who took ALL of the bios/info/etc. and made it not only readable but compelling

Larah Leigh Ritchie – graphic designer (as in, she made the beunicorned buttons + banner that absolutely everyone raved about)

If you need assistance in any of the above areas I highlyhighlyhighly recommend checking those ladies out (and they aren’t paying me to say so, I just LOVE THEM TO DEATH).

I’ll be honest – it was pretty scary spending money on a project before it had made money (especially since I put a lot of my work on hold for July so that I could focus on the sale). But if I hadn’t done it, there’s absolutely no way I would have been able to get the sale done on time and retained any measure of sanity (July was a rough month for me).

Also, though I normally use WooCommerce for selling things (and for my shop here), I used Digital Delivery App for this sale, for these reasons:

• Ease of managing affiliates and adjusting affiliate percentages
• Ease of reporting
• Easier to customize the buy button & shopping cart options
• I had the sale hosted on a different site than this one (www.dontloseyourshitsale.com) and didn’t want to re-install/re-set up WooCommerce on it

Things I did a little differently & how they turned out:

Contributor percentage

Most of the sales I’ve seen like this have the backend set up so that the contributors get 50% of sales through their links. I wanted to switch that up a bit; one reason was that I was planning on having (and did have) non-contributing affiliates, and the standard affiliate percentage is 50%. It didn’t seem right to give non-contributing affiliates and contributors the same rate, so I gave contributors 75% of their sales, instead of 50%. It felt like a good decision and a generous one.

I’m not sure if I’d do it the same or differently, if I did it again. On the one hand, I do think contributors deserve more than your standard affiliate. On the other hand, the percentage being 75% instead of 50% definitely cut into my profit margins a fair amount, and I had one or two contributors contact me saying “Hey, I think there’s something wrong – I’m getting emails saying I get 75% of the sale, instead of 50%! You should fix that.”

Jury’s still out on that decision.

Length of sale

The “normal length” for bundle sales, it seems, is 72 hours. I’m not sure if this is because the trendsetter bundle sale (Only72.com) did it for 72 hours, or if there’s actual statistics/metrics that say that 72 hours optimizes conversions, or what. But I, personally, feel weird about emailing people 3 times in 3 days. I like to give people a little more time to think. With that in mind, I set up this sale to run 5 days – Monday through Friday. I’m not sure if this turned out for the best or not, or if it had any effect (positive or negative) on sales, versus if I’d run it for three days instead.

I do know that both statistically and in my experience, the bulk of sales tend to happen in the last 24 hours, and that didn’t really hold true here, as you can see from the graphs below – days 1 & 2 were so low I was panicking, and then there was a sudden uptick on Wednesday and profit stayed at about the same level until the end of the sale. (Another side note of interest is that Thursday was really effing slow until about 6 PM CST, after which the majority of the sales for that day took place, which is not a pattern that held true for Friday or any other day.)

This is the graph of my profit (meaning, once you take out the affiliate percentages and payment processor fees, which Digital Delivery App does automatically for reporting *happy sigh*) throughout the sale:

This is the same graph, but for total income – not just my profit:

(I left out the dates on this one, because it was making the screencapture weird.)

It’s interesting that total income was higher on Monday, but my take was higher on Tuesday. I’m assuming because the contributors probably mostly promoted on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

A note about payment methods: I used Stripe for processing credit card payments (which also integrates seamlessly with Digital Delivery App *repeat happy sigh*) and almost exactly 1/3 of the customers used credit cards instead of Paypal. Not a majority, but a decent sized enough chunk to light a fire under my ass to offer credit card payments as an option in the shop (which is done now, by the way).

Did I meet my goal?

Nope. In fact. I fell quite a bit short of my monetary goal. The number of bundles sold was less than 10% of my stretch goal, and my gross profit was a little less than half my lowest profit guesstimate. Since it’s gross profit, that means it’s before I take into account the payment of Larah, Tina, or Tanja – after taking those expenses into account, it’s more like a third of my guesstimate.

My theories on why I made not have made my goal:

Unrealistic goal

It may have been just straight up unrealistic. Sometimes that happens. I’d like to think it was based in reality, as I based it off of a few different variables, but there may have been too many factors involved to make a realistic goal, and thus, goal not reached.

Bad timing

More on this under the “too many variables” heading. I think a lot of it came down to that, for some reason, tons of people were traveling or otherwise AWOL last week, plus some people are already dealing with back to school shopping and the budgetary concerns that come with it. And, as also noted under the variables heading, there were a lot of other launches going on. Any time there’s a lot of launches going on, customers are going to have to decide where to spend their money really carefully, and there’s a good chance they’ll spend it with someone they know & trust instead of on a bundle sale where they might not know several of the contributors (or the person running it).

Not enough promotion planned ahead of time

I counted too much on the contributors doing the bulk of the promotion for me. If I was going to do this again, I’d plan to do as many guest posts as I could (probably 3-5) and aim to have them lined up for the week of the sale; I’d also do more interviews and things like that. And probably do 2 or so posts on this site, as well. I had the social media side of things covered, but I could have done more other places.

Too many variables to guesstimate accurately

I think this is really what it comes down to. I’m a planner, and it annoys me that I planned this so far in advance and yet things came up that I couldn’t have foreseen (like, approximately half – maybe more like 75% – of the contributors happened to be launching something the same week, traveling, moving across the country, or having General Life Things going on that meant that they didn’t promote the sale as much as they would have normally).

(Just in case it needs saying: my comments about contributor promotion aren’t meant to sound snarky or judgmental, AT ALL. I’m not pissed or resentful of anyone for not promoting “enough” – I know everyone did what they could with what they had. It was just a different promotion level than I had factored in for in my reach/traffic/purchases estimates. I am still very, very grateful to everyone who contributed to the bundle because without them, well, there wouldn’t have been a bundle in the first place!)

There’s also the factor that a M-F sale might not have been the best idea – maybe it would have been better to stagger it over the weekend, as different people tend to spend time online during the weekend vs. the week, or run a shorter sale, or any number of other changes with the timeline.

In the end, it’s really not worth beating myself up about not making my profit goal, because even if I had planned on doing more promotion, July was such a clusterfuck that I’m honestly incredibly proud of myself that I got it pulled off at all. Let alone while still getting client work done and suffering some hardcore side effects of medication including insomnia (I got maybe 3-5 good nights of sleep the entire month of July, and at one point was so out of it I almost walked outside without pants on, which believe it or not is not my norm), mood swings, crying jags, and my anxiety actually being worse. Even if I had planned on spending July cranking out guest posts and interviews scheduled for that week, I wouldn’t have been able to get them done, and that would have made me feel horrible.

Even though I didn’t make my monetary goal, would I call the sale a success? Yes!

Why?

Increased exposure:

This is a screenshot from my Improvely (which, by the way, I know it’s not free, but I love it so much better than any other analytics tool I have ever tried, I want to make out with it) dashboard of the last 30 days. The conversions marked on it are email list opt ins – you can see that there were some spikes in July (associated with my LifeHack posts), but that the amount of people who have signed up for my email list on a daily basis increased substantially starting with the beginning of the sale, and hasn’t really slowed down yet. (The black box is around the dates of the sale.) Obviously, collaborating/heading up a project that large gets you in front of a lot of new people, whether they buy or not, so I’m going to call that a win.

This sale basically had the same effect as me guest posting on a major site (like Design*Sponge), but in addition to all the exposure I made a few thousand dollars, too. So…yeah. (Of course, it was a fuckton more work than a guest post, but yanno.)

That’s the main reason I’d still call the sale a success. The other reason is:

I actually freakin’ pulled it off

Even if everything didn’t go 100% according to plan, knowing that I can pull of a project of this magnitude, even given the life clusterfuckery I had going on, is a big confidence booster. Everything about it – everything – stretched me out of my comfort zone. I approached people I had never met before and asked them to go in on me with a project together. (And made new friends as a result!) I got to practice my outsourcing skills, a lot. And even if I didn’t meet my goal, it was still easily my most profitable week in business to date and I’m assuming August will be my most profitable month in business to date as a result – not too shabby considering that May and then June, respectively, were previously my highest earning months to date.

Other things I learned:

People get really weird about swearing.

I had two separate people – one contributor and one affiliate – get some surprisingly nasty responses from people for sending out emails with the s-word in them. I guess I should have known something like that would happen, but I think of “shit” as a fairly innocuous swear word (of course, I’ve dropped the dreaded f-bomb four times in this post so far, which means I might be biased…).

A side effect that I didn’t foresee of having a sweary title for the sale is that Facebook wouldn’t let me or any of the other contributors promote it. Because, profanity. Okay, Facebook. *eyeroll*

On the other hand, my people know me! Yay!

Over the course of the sale, I had 11 unsubscribes (which is less than 2% of the total number of people on my email list, if we go off the number of people on it when the sale started). Not bad for a week with four emails when my normal amount of emails a week is 1-2. Out of those 11 people, five didn’t specify a reason for unsubscribing, five said they were no longer interested, and only one subscriber marked “inappropriate content”. And none of them wrote snarky comments (at least not that I can see, and I looked pretty hard).

That’s an encouraging lesson – people know what to expect from me. Which is not to say that they don’t from Annie or Tanja – I’m just as surprised as they were that people got so snarky – but maybe when you have rainbow hair people just expect you to swear a lot. Who knows.

In conclusion:

I learned a lot. I don’t know if I’ll ever do something this style again – but it was a learning experience for other reasons as well, and I’m glad I did it. And I hope this epic write-up has been useful to you as a reader! Good luck, if it inspires you to try any similarly scaled projects.

PS: Like I said at the top, if you loved this breakdown, you should definitely check out the Brass Tacks Biz Series – it’s gonna have be more case studies just like this, but live, with biz owners just like you ever month + with worksheets & actionable info, and the price is supa-reasonable. ($25/month! Less than your YA novel/video game/other guilty pleasure habit.)

I did something a little different with this week’s video post! Instead of reviewing a particular tool, I did a case study of one of my favorite online businesses, eShakti, and showed how systematizing & streamlining can work even with physical products.

What you can learn from eShakti:

1. Streamline your offerings as you grow, to make things easier for you. (eShakti used to do everything – now they do dresses, tops, & skirts, with a strong emphasis on cute retro-inspired dresses.)
2. If you’re offering customized offerings, find the highest points of leverage when it comes to customization, and focus on those. (eShakti’s specialty in dresses, and the style of dresses that they do, mean that they only have to focus on three main points of customization – bust, waist, & hips – and the style of dresses + the construction of those dresses means that there’s a lot less work involved in making them fit a custom figure.) 
3. Make the intake/purchase process as easy as possible. (eShakti has their checkout process setup so that it’s entirely automated, even if you’re buying a custom sized piece, and there’s no back & forth or Q&A involved.) 

 

The other day I was chatting with a friend. Who I love to death, partially because he’s willing to call me out on my bullshit. Like this time. He was talking about some of his friends and said “and you, you’re a very accomplished woman” and I snorted out loud in derision. 

He stopped, and looked at me, and said, “What?! You are!” I started laughing. He then insisted that I say that about myself, out loud. We went back and forth on it for a solid minute and a half before I gave in and said, “I’m a very accomplished woman.”

And then, I still couldn’t say it with a straight face – I laughed my way through the sentence.

Standing in the shadow of impostor syndrome

I’m willing to bet you’ve had something similar happen. Someone complimented you on your skills and expertise and your first reaction was to counterpoint it – “Oh, thanks, but I’m still working on it” or “Yeah, I guess that’s true, but I’m really sucking at xyz right now…”

Seriously. Who does that?! I’m fully aware of how annoying and self-deprecating it is, but I still have to actively work against the urge to do so any time someone pays me a compliment. (Interestingly, I can accept compliments about my appearance just fine, and only feel the need to counterpoint when someone compliments me on my skills/talents/intelligence. What’s up with that?)

And I’m working on it, I really am. At least one thing that helps me is looking at the facts – on a good day I can say I’m awesome with a straight face, on a bad day, nope. But on a bad day I can still say “I wrote an Amazon Kindle bestseller”, because I have the screenshots to prove it. Granted, I might say it like “I WROTE A FUCKING AMAZON BEST SELLER I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS, DAMMIT”, but I’ll say it with a straight face.

You know what’s the really annoying part?

The fact that you and I hear the whispers of impostor syndrome is a virtual guarantee that we don’t, in fact, suck, and that there is no factual basis for someone to call us a fake & a fraud.

Why?

Because people who suck don’t think they suck.

The people who question themselves, who say “Is this really the best I can do?” and have high standards, and strive for excellence across the board? (Like say, you & me?)

They’re the ones that are likely to come down on themselves hardest, asking “Why didn’t I do better?” or thinking that what they did do wasn’t good enough. One of life’s cruel ironies, y’all.

I wish I had an antidote…

…but I really, really don’t. Which bothers me. ‘Cause y’all know I love me some actionable tips. The only things that have helped me are:

• starting to recognize the pattern in myself
• having people around who will call me on my BS when it crops up
• reminding myself of the facts when necessary (trufax: when I’m feeling imposter syndrome real bad, I go read my about page, and then I remind myself that there are things I haven’t even had time to add there – like that now I’m a contributor at Lifehack and also that I got invited to speak at a women’s business conference in September, WHUTTTT)

So…I guess give those a try and see what works for you. In the meantime, next time that little voice starts whispering, you have my official permission to flip it off and ignore it. 

Further reading: The Two Word Most Feared by the Impostor Complex

Do you sometimes feel you’re two or perhaps only one step ahead of the customer who you’re charging for your professional services?

Or perhaps you dread being caught out. Or when someone praises you for a job well done, you really don’t believe them.

Don’t feel alone. So many business owners and professionals feel that have to ‘fake it to make it’. In fact, it is so common it has a name, ‘The Impostor Syndrome’.

Come with the Word Carnival bloggers on an exposure of this syndrome to find out if you suffer from it and what you can do about it.

You know how sometimes, you put off doing something that you know you need to do, or that you know is a really effing good idea? And you do that for ages, even though you know once you actually sit down and do it you’ll be kicking yourself for not doing it? 

That’s pretty much how I feel about FancyHands.

I started using them about 2-3 weeks ago and since then, I’ve heartily recommended them to other people at least three times…and I still get a thrill when I realize “OH WAIT, this is something FancyHands can handle for me!”

See, in my experience, there’s this weird niggly gray-area of tasks that are delegatable, but kind of a pain in the ass to delegate. Tasks that are so small that I feel weird handing them off to my assistant Tina, or that fall into more of a life-administrative area than a business-administrative area. Or sometimes, just questions I need a quick answer on.

Enter: FancyHands. 

The gist: they have a super-streamlined UI and a team of assistants working behind the scenes. It takes about 3-5 minutes, tops, to submit a task (which you can do by email, phone, from the website, or from their smartphone app). And then, they get to work and you go back to doing the important things in your day. The turnaround time is remarkably fast in most cases, to boot.

So far, for me, they’ve:

• Called the IRS & sat on hold for me, patching me in when they actually got someone on the line
• Rescheduled a doctor’s appointment and then called to verify it
• Refilled prescriptions and called back to verify them until they were actually refilled (apparently, what happens is that my last name was misspelled in the pharmacy database – sigh)
• Done apartment research for me (which I could have spent 3-4 hours on alone – with their help, I narrowed it down to two options with about 15 minutes worth of work)

That’s more of the life-type tasks I’ve sent them – here’s an example of a more business related one:

Okay, I need some payment options researched. For each of these below, I’d like to know:
-what their fee structure is
-what their application fee is (if any)
-what the application process entails
-which 1-2 seem to come the most highly recommended for entrepreneurs delivering digital products

The payment options are:
Google Wallet
Stripe
Authorize.net
Paymill
SagePay
Thank you!

I had an answer within an hour. I’ve had them do some other research-related tasks for me too and been fairly impressed with the results.

As of writing, they’ve spent 319 minutes on the phone for me – which is damn-sure a better deal than me spending those minutes on the phone. (I signed up for the $45/month plan, and I still have 6 tasks left this billing month.)

Other features they have that you might be interested in:

• Integration with Basecamp so that you can assign tasks from directly within Basecamp
• They can make purchases on your behalf (So, for example, you can say “Find me a digital camera with these specs in this price range, with the highest average customer reviews; once you’ve found it, purchase it and have it shipped to this address.”)
•  Appointment scheduling/calendar wrangling is free. And they integrate with Google calendar. When I had them reschedule my doctor’s appointment, they automatically put in the new appointment without me even having to ask. *fans self* 

And it’s not just me benefitting – my clients are winning from this arrangement, too. The other day I was on Skype with one of my clients who was talking about how she needs to find a free or low-cost WordPress theme for a side project she’s working on, but she’s really busy preparing for a market this weekend. I tasked it out to FancyHands; I had results for the client within an hour of sending in the task (for what breaks down to $3 for the task – which is better than either of us could have done).

(In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve had nothing but a fabulous experience using FancyHands so far & I plan on keeping using them, so all links to them in this post are my referral link – which gets you 50% off your first month and gives me account credit.)

Why FancyHands is a borderline must-have for busy biz-owners:

It trains you to be really specific.

This is something I consistently see people struggle with with they start outsourcing. Instead of saying “Yes, I need a list of 3-5 WordPress themes within this price range, with these features, that have average user reviews of four stars or higher”, you say “I need some WordPress themes that’ll work for this project”. Which, depending on how much you’ve explained the project to whoever you’re delegating to, can work – but is more likely than not to just create a mess as they spend more time than necessary researching a ton of different options, since they don’t have the details & constraints they need to do a great job.

It gets you in the outsourcing/delegating mindset.

You start to see all of the little time leaks in your day that distract you from what you’re actually meant to be doing. Once you start handing them off, it’s addictive – I know for me it’s made a huge difference in the way I feel day to day and removed a burden of stress/annoyance that I didn’t even know was there. (Plus, on the more woo-woo side of things, I think it’s excellent training for the rest of your life – learning to ask for what you need, specifically, and then getting it. It’s an experience than many of us often-overworked biz owners aren’t used to, and it can definitely shift things & open them up for you.)

It frees up both you & your team’s time + energy.

Aside from it freeing up your time, it can also free up your team’s time. Delegating the little niggly gray-area things to FancyHands lets your assistant, or your coder, or your project manager spend their time on projects & tasks that’ll have a much bigger impact on your business, and helps to keep everyone in their zone of genius – not just you. Which is something that your team will appreciate, trust me.

That’s been my experience with FancyHands – I’ve loved it so much I can’t stop gushing about it, and I really think it’s a valuable tool that I’d love to see more biz-owners using. Have you given it a whirl yet?

(Note: In the interest of attempting to be unbiased, even as a happy customer, I did some research on employee treatment/wages on FancyHands to see if there was anything negative that came up that was worth including in this article – I couldn’t find anything.)

One of the questions I get a lot is:

Michelle, how do you find all the awesome stuff you share in your newsletter?

(Not on the newsletter? Missing out on those awesome links? Sign up to the right or at the bottom of this post!)

It’s actually a pretty simple process – I made a quick video showing you exactly what I do and what tools I use (Feedly, Evernote, & Pocket)

And then, when it comes time to schedule my newsletter, bada-bing! I just head to my Evernote and pop the links in the appropriate spot. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Oh, and if you liked this video, you might also be interested in this post: three ways to make scheduling your next newsletter easier + faster. (You know how I talk in the video about how I have a template? Personal note, shop talk, link love? That’s one of the tips from that article.) 

And if you want to start getting in on the link-lovey goodness (plus, yanno, Systems 101, VIP discounts & other good shiz) then sign up below!

In May, I did a talk for RISE on Systems for Creative Entrepreneurs & thought y’all might be interested in seeing the results!

Here’s the speaker reel from it (the talk with Q&A took up the full 90 minutes, so this is preeeetty condensed!):

(video via Cuya Productions) 

Here’s pictures of the whiteboard after I was done (click for larger versions):

And, if you wanna get the talk handout that attendees got – well, you’re in luck! It’s going out in the next newsletter on Friday. You can sign up below & get the free Systems 101 course to boot.

The Declaration of You will be published by North Light Craft Books this summer, with readers getting all the permission they’ve craved to step passionately into their lives, discover how they and their gifts are unique and uncover what they are meant to do! This post is part of The Declaration of You’s BlogLovin’ Tour, which I’m totally jazzed to participate in alongside over 100 other creative bloggers. Learn more — and join us! — by clicking here.

(brilliant image courtesy of Nathan Briggs)

The theme for this week of the tour is self care, and what’s more self-care-y than boundaries, after all? Without them, your life as a service provider and/or business owner can be overrun with stress & unreasonable demands. And generally, people want to avoid that, so let’s talk about boundaries. Howeva, let’s talk it the way I talk it – sans fluff, and with actionable tips.

(And also, the disclaimer that I’m still practicing some of these things myself…so please don’t hold me up as a perfect beacon of boundaries. Puh-lease do not.)

Boundaries for your inbox

I have two favorite tools here:

Inbox Pause

TOTALLY FREE. Oh yeah. This is a fairly self explanatory concept – you download it, use it, pause your inbox, and while your inbox is paused, nothing hits it. The emails are hidden in a special folder until you unpause your inbox, at which point the app moves it back.

Boomerang

Boomerang makes it so much easier for you not to forget about an email (you can set it so that an email shows up back in your inbox after 5 days, if, for example, you’re waiting on information to move forward, or you can set it to boomerang only if there’s no reply from the other person in a few days). It also makes it super-simple to schedule an email to go out at a specific time. Plans start at free and go up to a very-reasonable $15/month.

How do I use them + what are my email tactics?

• I pause my inbox before I dive into my own business work for an hour or two at a time – otherwise, it’s really easy to get caught up in putting out fires or stay in reactive mode. I usually pause it early in the day, work through everything in there that I can, and then work on other projects until lunch; I unpause it about 15 minutes before I go on my lunch break to see if anything urgent came up, and then pause it again for my lunch break. After lunch, I address anything pressing and then pause it again until 45-60 minutes before I “clock out” for the day (depending on what I’m doing), and I have another email processing chunk.
  
• Boomerang is great for if I’m replying right before the end of the workday, or if I don’t want to forget an email thread. I’ll use it to remind me of an email in a few days, and I also will schedule it so that the email goes out during business hours, if I’m working outside of my office hours (see below).
• Also, filters, y’all. Filters are great. And Unroll.me. These four tools together = inbox bliss.

Office hours

I cannot stress this enough. It gets its own heading because that’s how much it needs stressed. HAVE SET OFFICE HOURS. Mine are Monday through Friday, 9-5 CST. I will very, very occasionally work outside of these hours or book appointments outside of them (really only in cases of my Australian or New Zealand clients, who have time zone wonkiness to contend with and thus a valid excuse). But other than that, outside of those hours, I don’t work, reply to emails, or schedule meetings. Before I had office hours, I regularly found myself working until 7 or 8 at night with no breaks.

Which brings me to my next point: have set breaks. I used to work 8-10 hour days with literally no breaks except to get up to pee and to take my dog out, until I realized that working someone else that way would be, yanno, totally illegal, so maybe I should not do that to myself. My lunch hour is from 1-2 PM and I also take 5 minute breaks every 30 minutes to get up and walk around/do some exercise/etc.

Policies

There’s three main groups I see here:

Cancellation & rescheduling policies

Things to think about here:

• How many times will you allow a client to reschedule before an appointment is void?
• How much warning do you need to reschedule an appointment? 24 hours? 48 hours?
• If a client cancels the day before an appointment and decides they want a refund, what’s your refund policy?

Have these and communicate them to your clients, either pre-booking or immediately after booking. Recently, a friend of mine had a client who booked a one-day-intensive type service, and then cancelled three days before – when the appointment had been on the books for three weeks, my friend had already done most of the prep work for the appointment, and my friend had turned down other appointments because of that booking. And she didn’t have a refund policy that had been set ahead of time. Ouch. 

Client screening policies

These don’t have to be things that the client sees. You don’t even necessarily have to write them down (though I’d recommend it, it’s a good exercise). For me, these are phrases that set off red flags. Mine are: “I’m totally ADD all the time”, “I just need someone to stand over me and make sure it gets done”, and “I can’t ever seem to actually take action”.

The first one is 50/50 – if I hear it in a consult I’ll ask more questions around it. (Especially because people use  “ADD” all the damn time and mean entirely different things with it.) But 99% of the time, if the other two phrases turn up, the potential client would be a horrible fit. Neither of us is at fault, just like it’s not a dress’s fault if it’s a size too big or too small for you, it’s simply a bad fit. Having some kind of screening policy has saved me a lot of headache – especially now that I know who to refer people to for specific problems, so that I don’t feel like I’m just leaving this person out in the cold. (This is one reason I specified in my video about Rock the Rest of 2013 who the course is definitely not for.)

Communication & turnaround policies

This is a big one that a lot of people don’t think about. What kind of timeframe do you expect from your clients (and should your clients expect from you) when it comes to things like:

• answering questions?
• sending in the first draft of a project?
• responding to email?

Not having + sticking to communication and turnaround policies is how a two week service package stretches out into a six week one. (Another contributor is not having actual systems for your services, but that’s a whole ‘nother barrel of monkeys. Check out Rock the System or the Kick Burnout Kit for more on that.)

And of course, actually communicate all of these policies to your clients + any peeps on your team. Having them in your head is great for your personal boundaries but you need to build boundaries that other people can see and thus actually honor.

Honor your boundaries (and honor the boundaries of others)

This is the part that tends to really trip people up.

For one thing, you can’t expect people to honor boundaries you don’t have (or set). Yes, they might be asking too much of you or being totally unreasonable – but it’s your job as a business owner to make sure that they understand that and that they understand why. Every time I’ve felt taken advantage of or thought “holy shit this person is high maintenance”, I think back over my behavior and realize I sent mixed signals to them at some point.

This is why I don’t feel like it’s disingenuous to sometimes have a late night working on email, but use a tool like Boomerang to schedule the emails to get sent during business hours. If you send an email wayyyy outside of business hours, it means you’re not clearly communicating your boundaries to your client. Which means they’re likely to get confused, and then think: “Well, she replied to an email once when I sent it at 8:30 PM, how come she didn’t reply to this email when I sent it at 6? She worked that one weekend for me, why won’t she work this weekend?” Then nobody’s happy.

This is not, of course, a get-out-of-jail-free card for someone who’s being a total asshole – they’re still an asshole – but if you manage expectations & set boundaries from the get go, it’s likely that:

• less assholes will show up, if any, because jerks who take advantage of people can smell good boundaries a mile away
• people who could have turned into jerkish clients given the chance will not, because they’re totally clear from ground zero on what’s going on and what they can reasonably expect from you

For another thing, if you’re not holding up your end of the bargain – if you’re not honoring the boundaries of other people (or sticking to your own rules, like, for example, expecting clients to answer email within 48 hours but taking four or five days to answer their emails on a regular basis), you tend to wind up in shitty situations. I don’t know if it’s karma or what, but it’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to other people.

So. Those are my boundaries suggestions – what do you do to enforce boundaries in your biz?  

 The last few months have been a bit rough over here at Chez Bombchelle.

(Hence the radio silence here at the blog.)

Nothing major – well, sometimes major, but nothing life threatening – and part of the bumpiness is that I was continuing to operate in systems that weren’t really a good fit, which led to a general feeling of disorganization (not true chaotic clusterfuck disorganization, instead it was “umm…I feel like I’m missing something but I can’t quite figure out what…” disorganization, which is almost worse).

Once I got the background issues sorted out (which could, and might, be a whole ‘nother blog post in & of itself), I realized the next thing I needed to do was overhaul my task/project management system, practicing what I preach, and I figured I’d bring y’all along for the ride.

First off, here’s the video that goes over the process, in case you’d rather watch that (or want to both watch and read, you good student you!):

And for the detailed notes, read on!

Step 1: Recognize what’s not working

When I chose Teambox for my project management tool, there were several very specific things that drew me to it:

• the notes feature (ability to add notes from Google Docs or Evernote – with an API – and a built in notes feature) 
• the calendar view
• additional features like time tracking and Gantt charts
• ability to function with large teams

I still think Teambox is a great tool & I actively recommend it to others. However, these things didn’t wind up being that helpful to me once I actually got to using it – my clients who use larger teams tend to have their own preferences for project management systems so the awesome team capabilities were mostly lost on me, I use Google Docs and Evernote so much that I almost always have a tab open with them anyways, I never used the built in time tracking or Gantt charts. The calendar view was really the only feature that I used, and even then, the inability to drag and drop tasks on a calendar or view things on a weekly calendar bothered me more than I thought it would.

I also discovered that Teambox was lacking a few features that I didn’t really think would bother me but that wound up contributing to my larger sense of disorganization. Namely, there’s nothing for recurring tasks or the ability to add tasks quickly and easily. There’s no shortkeys to quickly add a task without having to add a due date, project and task list, and user to do it (which seemed unnecessary since I was mostly the only one using it and 95% of the tasks I put in it were for me).

The lesson here is that sometimes you don’t find these things out until you actually start using your systems and tools. And when you do realize that something isn’t working, you need to acknowledge what it is so that you can fix it.

Step 2: Create a plan of attack

I remembered being impressed with Flow before when I had done a review of it, so I signed up again. The first thing I did was check for the things that were important to me, which I knew from trial and error with Teambox – Flow has recurring tasks and a few other features I wanted (drag and drop calendar view, quick add tasks, weekly calendar view); plus the features that I needed (ability to duplicate task lists, for example).

I knew that I was ripe for:

1. adding recurring tasks & old habits back into my workflow
2. creating templates for everything I possibly could (I had kind of half-assed templates here and there, but nothing complete)
3. making and organizing a list of low-priority things that needed to be done when I had the time (as is, they were listed in Teambox with deadlines, but they just kept being moved back, which made me feel unproductive and slackerish)
4. making a list of projects that I wanted to work on when I had the time/energy and storing them someplace easily accessible

I also remembered what worked before – assigning different themes to different days, and roughly sticking to them. Knowing all of this gave me a clear path to use as I was rebuilding my productivity systems.

Step 3: Implement your plan

Once I had a plan, here’s what I did:

Set up Flow in a way that made sense to me

Flow has folders and then under each folder, there’s task lists. I created folders for Bombchelle (which has task lists for content creation, business development, and administrative), marketing and promotion (because there are so many sub-projects under that that a “marketing and promotion” task list would quickly get cluttered), client work (with a task list for each client), workshops & classes (with a task list for each workshop or class), backburner projects (see bullet points #3 & #4, above), and templates (see #2 above).

Made a list of those recurring tasks & habits I wanted to put back in place: 

 Created a list of templates that I needed

This is fairly self explanatory – I created a list of everything that I did on a regular basis. I already had some task list templates built into Teambox that I copied over, but I added more. My total list of templates looks like:

• free teleclass
• one off class (like the Systems Don’t Suck class I ran recently)
• the one day intensive service
• action party
• workshop
• the service streamliner service
• launch management
• client intake for project management clients

As I’m writing this, I realize I should probably add a template for the Get Your Shit Together sessions, but that’s low priority since it’s such a simple service – so “Create template for GYST sessions” was just added to the “biz dev & systems” task list under “Backburner projects”.

Started creating those templates

The next step was to actually create the task list templates in Flow. This was really pretty easy for a few reasons:

• When you go to the main screen for a task list, you can easily add tasks by just typing it in & hitting enter, making it simple + easy to add multiple tasks in a row as you think of them
• Like I said, I already had several of these templates either done and in Teambox or kinda halfassedly done in Google Docs or in my head
• The templates for several of the services were pretty similar – for the action parties, workshops, and classes, I created the workshop list first, then duplicated it twice, adding or subtracting tasks as needed to turn it into a template for an action party or a one off class

As I created the templates, I did two things: 

I wrote down the one-off tasks that would make things run smoother, and filed them under either the “biz dev & systems” or the “admin” task lists under the “Backburner” folder:

I also wrote down the task lists & noted down which of those tasks should have how-to manuals written for them, so that they could be easily delegated later:

The resulting list of how to manuals was put under “how to manuals” under the “Backburner” folder.

Last but not least, I’ve got placeholder tasks to help make sure this all actually gets done:

• do 1-3 tasks off admin backburner, every Monday (since Monday is admin day)
• do 1-3 tasks off biz dev backburner, every Friday (since Friday is biz dev day)
• write a how to manual, every Friday

Step 4: Make sure that it makes sense to you

All the organization in the world won’t help if it doesn’t work with your natural patterns & rhythms. This way of doing that I just described? It might work fabulously for you. It might not. Parts of it might work and parts of it you might find too complicated. For me, it’s just the right level of knowing where everything is at and having a way to sort it that makes sense to me.

I seriously considered creating and adding a tagging system (because you can tag things in Flow and sort by tag, too) to prioritize backburner tasks (with #P1, #P2, #P3) and to sort them by time (#short, #medium, #long) so that when I went to do tasks off the backburner, I could choose to do a quickie task or choose to do a high priority one that might take longer (or attempt to find the highest priority task that would take the least amount of time). However, although the idea of having that system set up gives me organizational tingles of happiness, I know for a fact that it wouldn’t work very well for me in practice. So I didn’t do it.

Whew. Okay, now that that’s all done – any questions on how I use Flow? Any questions on using these four steps to get yourself organized? Any commentary on the crazypants weather? (I talked to my mom in Missouri on Friday – they woke up to six inches of snow. SIX INCHES. WHAT?! Get your act together, May.) 

Maybe not everything, but…let’s face it, Buffy was a pretty instrumental force in my teenagerdom (and is something I still love with a fierceness today). It’s my “security blanket” show that I go back to again and again…not just for the witty repartee (“I mock you with my monkey pants”) but there’s all kinds of smartness within…including some business lessons.

Prophecies are tricky creatures.

You tried. It was noble of you. You heard the prophecy that I was about to break free and you came to stop me. But prophecies are tricky creatures. They don’t tell you everything. You’re the one that sets me free. If you hadn’t come, I couldn’t go. Think about that.

At the end of season one, it’s revealed that there’s a prophecy that says that Buffy will face the Master (a powerful vampire) to keep him from breaking free, and she’ll die. At first, she wants to avoid her fate (because o hai, she’s sixteen), and then decides to face up to it…only for the Master to tell her that if she hadn’t gone to fight him, he wouldn’t have been able to break free. Oops.

Lots of potential lessons to be learned from that scenario, but the one I want to highlight is that when it comes to our business, our prophecies can be self-fulfilling, whether we realize that or not. If you’re convinced you’re going to fail, it’s really easy to not put in 100% effort, after which – shock! – you fail, and you get to say “I told you so” to yourself. Luckily, the flip side can go for being convinced of your success – if you know that eventually you’ll be successful, you are thatmuch more likely to stick it out until you actually are successful.

There’s no such thing as controlled circumstances.

Wesley: I have, in fact, faced two vampires myself. Under controlled circumstances, of course.
Giles: No danger of finding those here.
Wesley: Vampires?
Giles: Controlled circumstances.

The first…I don’t even know how long…I was in business, I kept trying to do things the way they “should” be done. I want to have a well-defined USP that fit the formula everyone touted and I wanted the popular blog theme and I wanted to base my services off of what had worked for other people. I wanted a cute, tidy catchphrase for my business and I wanted successful, easy launches, and blah blah blah.

I was endlessly frustrated that I didn’t have everything down pat already, and it took me forever – forever! I still have to remind myself! – to realize that 99% of my fellow biz-peeps don’t have it all down either. (And the longer I’m in business the more I have a sneaking suspicion that the other 1% are just good enough bullshitters to fool themselves & everyone else.) I recently listened to an interview with Charlie Gilkey and one of the things he emphasized is how long it took him to have any kind of a semi-streamlined description of his business & what he does, and how he still feels like that’s something he has to continually work on.

There’s something to be said for constant improvement, and there’s something to be said for trying something that has a high success rate for other people, but in business as in vampire slaying, there’s no such thing as controlled circumstances – a should-have-been-successful launch can fail, a slapped-it-together-in-10-minutes post can go viral, and something that didn’t work for you a year or two years ago might be just the thing you need to try right now.

You need a support system.

A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.

Over and over again throughout the series, it’s pointed out that the only thing that keeps Buffy the usual Slayer fate (a young and brutal death) is her support team of family and friends, affectionately referred to as the Scooby Gang. Without them, she’d have died unpleasantly in season one, despite her initial reluctance to having any kind of backup.

This is a common observance for business and life success, too – we know that we’re the sum of the five people that we spend the most time with, and we know that our friends can bring us up or drag us down, and we know that mastermind groups are a good idea, and all that jazz, but do you actually put it into practice? Do you know who your Scooby Gang is?

Being a leader isn’t easy.

Xander: You’re our leader, Buffy, as in “follow the”.
Buffy: Well, from now on, I’m your leader as in “do what I say”.

Multiple times throughout the series, Buffy has to balance being the leader (and in many senses, a general of sorts) with being a friend. It’s not always easy and it causes rifts more than once. We can learn from some of her missteps (like, yanno, “do what I say and don’t ask questions” doesn’t generally go anywhere good), but seeing that dynamic play out also points out how difficult it can be to balance a leadership role and a friendship role.

You can be friends with your assistant and the people on your team and your business partner, but everyone involved needs to know that there are boundaries and differences between the “friendship you” and the “leader/manager you”. You need to be able to give directives and honest feedback without it ruining your friendships. Not an easy skill to learn but definitely worth the un-burned bridges.

That’s what I’ve got for Buffy-based business lessons (say that three times fast) – think I missed anything? 

This post is part of the awesome Word Carnival. Read more posts on this month’s theme: Close (Biz) Encounters of the Sci-Fi Kind.

My week did not start well. I had a super-awkward ending to a date* on Sunday (which was kinda my own fault, but still not fun), didn’t sleep well, and woke up headachey and groggy. (Which was also my own fault, given that I decided pink lemonade with tequila** and staying up late with friends was a good way to feel better about the date snafu. Knowing that it was my own fault didn’t make me feel any better on Monday, though.)

Plus, I was still catching up from SXSW. I know the signs of burnout and I know when I’m there, and while it’s been a while since I’ve wound up well & truly burned out, I can recognize when I’m teetering on the edge – the combination of the final push of work to get Rock the System done and the usual conference shenanigans (lots of new friends, lots of walking everywhere ever, lots of free drinks) almost did me in.

I was also looking at a reallyeffinglong task list for the week…with the knowledge that I had to get as much as possible done, because my little sister is visiting me for five days starting next Sunday. And bringing a friend. And they’re staying with me (and my dog), in my 400 square foot apartment. Which, don’t get me wrong, is great – I don’t get to see my family often and I’m really looking forward to some quality sister time, but the fact is that I will get little, if any, work done next week and then I was supposed to lead an all-day workshop next Friday.

Cue hyperventilating. 

I was looking at everything to do, feeling overwhelmed, upset, and still ego-bruised from the date, and I very nearly had a panic attack. Yikes.

And an hour or two later, I was feeling much better. Not 100%, no, but better than hyperventilateypanicattacks. What did I do? And more importantly, what can you do next time panic comes knocking when you’re already on the verge of burnout? 

Get some support

The first thing I did was go somewhere I knew I could be supported. I posted a request for virtual hugs in the Love & Money Revolution Community (which is awesome – new members are added on Monday, so feel free to message Rhiannon & ask to be put in, or just request to join the group). It’s a lot easier to walk yourself back from the verge of tears when you have other people reminding you to calm the hell down (with love, of course) and be kind to yourself.

Where do you get your support from? Do you have a specific person or group of people that you can turn to when things get rough who’ll have your back?

Take a step back

Once you’ve got some support and you’re at least a few feet away from the “everything sucks hairy donkey balls” zone, it’s time to take a step back and look at what’s on your plate. Look at what’s overwhelming you and see what you can do, even if you don’t want to.

One of the things that was freaking me out was the knowledge that, at the end of five days of having people all up in my business, I was going to be teaching a workshop (ironically, on avoiding burnout!). I didn’t really want to push it back a week, but when I thought about it logically, that was easily one of the highest impact things I could do. That way, I’ll know that I’ll be able to deliver a kickass experience to the attendees, and I’ll be able to enjoy the time with my sister without having the workshop hanging over my head.

In the same ballpark, is there anything you can do that will make you feel better even if logistically it’s not that big of a deal? I changed the wording on my services page to let people know that I’m currently booked up for project/operations management clients. It took all of about five minutes, if that, but it made me feel infinitely better knowing that that was out there (even though, realistically, if someone had emailed me wanting to work together, I would have just sent an email back to the effect of “sorry, booked up for now, here’s who I’d recommend”).

Reprioritize

Once you’ve done the immediately obvious things, you can reprioritize. One of the projects I had on the to do list (in priority slot #3) for this week was the Making Habits Happen Kindle book. Which definitely ties in with my larger goals for the year (building a platform, increased visibility, writing more), but it isn’t going to be an immediate money generator and it’s probably not going to bring me new clients (since the topic isn’t 100% aligned with what I do here at Bombchelle).

When I did my brutally-honest assessment of what I could do, I realized that it’d be fine to push this project back a few weeks and that doing so would free up a lot of my time/mental energy. Nobody’s waiting on this except for me and the return on my time-investment is more long-term than short-term. Pushing it back is what I decided to do, and I felt a lot better for it.

Back the hell away

Not to be confused with step #2. That step is all about getting an accurate assessment, this step is about getting away from your work. Take a break! Go outside, walk your dog, go sit at a coffee shop, read a book or a magazine. Just get away from the computer, whether it’s for an hour or the rest of the day.

After I did all of the above, I felt so much better. I still managed to get some work done (including outlining & starting on this post!) and I was no longer on the verge of tears. There’s still the need to keep from being burned out – especially since this week is pretty heavy on client calls & socializing – but I’m off the brink and aware of what I need to do to stay away from that brink.

If you’ve found yourself on the verge of crispy lately and want even more burnout-combating strategies & tactics, check out the Kick Burnout Kit. Learn how to price for burnout prevention, systematize & streamline your services, & create self-care systems and start putting it all into action in one day!

*I am a magnet for awkward. I seriously am. I keep repeating to myself during these dating adventures/mishaps that someday it’ll be good material for my memoirs. 

**Yeah, I’m classy. 

Photo credit: Jody Art via Compfight cc