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What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.
Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.
With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.
One of my favorite Disney plus shows is Loki. It's a truly fascinating look at time travel, predetermined events, and controlling your own destiny. And now, I'm going to give you a major, if not very simplified spoiler if you haven't seen it.
See, in the finale, Loki Masters the ability to time slip or transport to any time, any place, and in any timeline. For all intents and purposes, a timeline is a parallel universe. If you're not familiar with the multiverse in Marvel. This also allows him to relive events over and over again, so as all of existence faces eradication he can take as much “time” as he wants to learn how to save all of everything and everyone on every timeline. He continuously over thousands of years, learns everything he needs to learn and practices through trial and error to improve his process and his odds of saving everything in everyone.
And while we don't have thousands of years or the ability to time travel, we do have the ability to take a step back and consider the question. What's missing?
Hey everybody. Joe Casabona here. This is episode 404 of How I Built It, and I'm going to ask you the question, what's missing from your process? You can find all of the show notes for this episode and you can join my mailing list over at [howibuilt.it/404]. For members, I'm going to be talking about thinking about my own production toolkit and process, and wonder if it's time to ditch Descript for my recording and editing. If you want to become a member, you can click the link in the description. Or you can find that link over at [howibuilt.it/404]. But for now, let's get to the intro and then the episode.
Hey, everybody. And welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their businesses without spending too much time on it. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And each week, I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It's like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs.
By the end of each episode, you'll have 1-3 takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business, or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.
Okay. So back in November, I asked this question of my members, when do you burn it all down and start over? In the member's portion of this, I discuss my current and future toolset for recording, editing, and transcription. And I can't help but wonder if I'm just a chronic app switcher I am, or if I'm looking to legitimately improve my processes.
Here's what I said back in November.
“So, when do you burn it all down and start over? I think it's when the frustrations start getting in the way of you working efficiently. If what you have is working and you can continue to afford the tools you use, leave them be. But if your processes suddenly start fighting you, or there's a consolidation of tools, like with Descript and Squad Cast, you should consider changing.”
So that's again what I said back in November, but that's not the whole story. That's the burn-it-all-down story.
Reviewing your process is a bit different and it's something that you should do more often than every couple of years or so in the show.
Loki could have continuously gone back to a happier time, relived that until it got bad, and gone back. He was living outside of time as they put it in the show. He was burdened with glorious purpose.
“I am Loki of Asgard, and I'm burdened with glorious purpose.”
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, which by the way, I just realized that that's like an homage to Phil. And then I am assuming John Connors from Terminator.
Anyway, in Groundhog's Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors is stuck on the same day and after realizing selfishness and hedonism aren't the way, he uses the time to improve himself, until spoiler alert, he breaks the cycle.
In both instances, the characters took a step back, looked at what needed to be fixed, and solved their problems.
So let's talk about reviewing your processes, but first, let's take a break to hear from our sponsors.
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Not technically savvy? Don't worry. LiquidWeb offers fully managed hosting, which means they have a team of knowledgeable experts looking after your website for you so you can focus on running your business. If you need fast, reliable, and secure hosting for your business, check out Liquid Web. Head over to [howibuilt.It/liquidweb] today.
Hey there. One of my goals in life is to help busy solopreneurs and creators like yourself win back your time and spend less time in your business. It took three kids and a global pandemic for me to understand the power of using my time wisely, and I wanna make sure that you don't need to go through the same thing I went through.
That's why I want to tell you about my membership. If you want more insights into how creators build their businesses, more automation tutorials and templates, and even more great content, you should become a member. You'll get ad-free extended versions of this podcast, access to my Automation Library, my Friday members-only newsletter called the Automated Solopreneur, Livestream Archives, and more. All of that for less than two cups of coffee from Starbucks. So, if you want to win back your time and get even more insights into how creators build their businesses, head on over to [casabona.org/join] and sign up today. You won't regret it.
Okay. So let's look at reviewing your processes. Bringing this point back to reality, how many times have you ignored something until it got truly painful to experience? A light bulb that flickers, an ache in your foot, having to comb through your email to find that contract you sent one time so you can make a copy of it to send to a new client. It's easy to view these fixes as inconvenient. You're taking time away from what you're trying to do after all, but you find that the fix, changing the light bulb, visiting the doctor, and saving that contract in an easily accessible folder is actually much easier and could end up saving your time and or frustration.
The same thing goes for your work. Making a video, writing, or creating a podcast episode, you are so caught up in the actual creating that you don't feel you have the time to step back and evaluate. Does that sound familiar to any of you? But my friend, doing this exact thing, taking a step back and evaluating your process, this has the potential to unlock or properly reallocate hours of your time.
So how do you do it? Well, I think that there are two paths. The first one is to think about what takes the most time. You can ask yourself what takes the most time and eliminate or improve that. For example, when I first started this podcast, I would edit each episode, but I quickly realized that this was the longest part of the process and I wasn't particularly good at it, which is also something I hear from my clients and students. Editing easily takes the most time. So, I decided to hire an editor. He does for about 50 bucks an episode which would usually take me one to two hours per episode. So not only was I eating up a lot of my time, but in terms of billable hours, I was losing hundreds of dollars per episode.
If there is a bottleneck in your process, that's a great place to start improving. If you do something and it's just eating up your time, and especially if you don't like doing it, it is a prime area for improvement.
The other thing that you can do is think about the lowest effort improvement. Perhaps, the improvement that would take the most time would also take a high level of effort to fix or would cost funds or cost money that you don't have yet. So conversely, you could consider the easiest thing to improve and do that. A great example of this in podcasting is using a scheduler to book your guests instead of figuring out a time via email. the scheduler is easy to implement, free to start, and saves a ton of time and confusion getting guests booked.
I've gone back and forth over multiple days getting a time set. There's the whole what works for you dance because you don't have direct access to their schedule. You have the time zone dance. Where are they? Are we close to daylight savings time? Are they in Arizona? Arizona has its own rules for daylight savings time. No one knows what time it is in Arizona in November. No more because I use a scheduler. And the great thing about this approach is because you're looking at low-effort improvements, it allows for quick wins without monumental process shifts. You can make a change here and a change there. And over time those will compound.
Now, I know I said that there were two ways, but there's actually another way to think about improving your process. And I suspect that the cold open and the title of this episode betrayed what I'm about to say. It's to ask what's missing. This is the most open-ended question, and it could yield a bunch of answers.
You could find what's missing is an extra step that makes your content more popular. For example, I started publishing my articles on Substack as well as my personal blog this year because I have a suspicion that thanks to Substack Discovery Engine, more people will find my work. You could also find what's missing is an automated reminder to follow up with leads so they don't fall through the cracks.
Around the holidays, I forgot to follow up with certain people because I moved systems and I realized that I was missing those reminders, and so I fixed that and now I know exactly what I need to follow up with everybody.
Maybe what's missing is an assistant or a coach. When I'm looking to improve my process, I like to start with the question, what's missing? Because it allows me and my coaching clients who I do this exercise with as well, to think bigger picture about the overall process. Moving through each step and wondering if there's something better that we can do here. Usually, when I sit down with a coaching client for the first time, I ask them to tell me everything that they do when they publish a single episode of their podcast. They go through it and they say, okay, but what's missing? What do you do before you book the guest? What do you do after you edit the episode? What's missing from the process that you just told me? And we usually end up with a much longer list than they anticipated and plenty of places where we can save them time.
Here's an example of me doing this exercise recently with these solo episodes. The original process was to make an outline and record some thoughts in Descript. Make some light edits for content and then publish. So as I approached this process, I asked what's missing? and here are some of the answers I came up with.
There's not a clear story I'm telling. These episodes aren't as polished as my interviews, which are edited more for both audio quality and content. And there's not a clear show document or notes for my VA to use to upload the episode to Transistor, because I'm usually just doing this based on an outline that I created. I'm not creating the full document, and so usually she ends up asking me what to do. I realized that I was spending all of my time doing basic edits because I didn't have a clearly defined thought progression every time I recorded. I would just have an outline, so I would talk a little bit, get off track, ramble, and then make an edit point to edit that out.
Then, as I said, when my VA went to upload those episodes, she never knew what to write in the description box because I didn't provide anything for her because I just recorded the episode. These were big problems in my workflow. Because I thought solo episodes were going to be easier than interviews, and I should say that there were big problems in my workflow because I didn't take the time to define the process because I thought that they were going to be easier than interviews.
And they are. I mean, but I'm still trying to produce good content here. So how do I fix these problems? Well, through this exercise, I found that the main issue was the lack of a clear story. I've been talking for at least the last six months about the importance of good storytelling in podcasting, and how storytelling is going to help you differentiate from every podcast out there.
And I wasn't doing a good job of that on my own podcast so I knew I could kill two birds by adding a script. Which in turn becomes articles that you read on my blog or on Substack. The script allows me to hash out my ideas and formulate a good three-act story with a hopefully gripping open, that got your attention, but it also gives me a clear copy for my VA to add to the description. I usually just copy and paste the text that is serving as the cold open.
I also made the decision to send solo episodes to my editor. He can edit for content and polish up the audio better than I can. By asking what's missing, I was able to make several improvements to these solo shows.
So to wrap up, I want to point out something that you may have realized. It doesn't seem like I'm saving time by swapping the edit for writing a script. And you're right. It may not always be true that you're saving a bunch of time by improving your process, but as I talked about in my piece, great things require time. It's about taking the right shortcuts or saving time in the right places so that you can focus on the really important bits.
In my opinion, swapping the edit for scripts or for writing scripts creates much better content and early indications on my podcast stats show that you think so too. Plus, I usually write an article for my blog and newsletter. Anyway, some minor tweaks and that content now serves three purposes, which ultimately does save time. That's not really the point, right? I swapped out editing for script writing.
When both Loki and Phil from Groundhog Day had a problem to solve, they weren't trying to save themselves time. They were trying to leverage the time they knew they had and make the most of it. That's what a good process does for you. It allows you to use your time wisely so you can do your best work. That's what you can gain from asking what's missing.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How I Built It. You can find the article for this episode as well as the ability to join my mailing list or the membership over at [howibuilt.it/404. You will get bonus points if you write in and tell me the little Easter egg I hit on the topic of this episode.
Now, if you do join the membership, members will hear the extended version, the ad-free extended version where I'm thinking about my podcast production toolkit and I kind of think out loud about if it's time to ditch Descript which has been an integral part of my process. But I have some reasons that I'll explore in the members-only episode.
Thanks so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.