Why are efficient systems so essential for building a calmer business? And how do you go about finding the right systems and processes for yourself?
We're continuing in our mini-series on my calmer framework for a calmer business. This week, we're focused on my favorite aspect of my CALMER framework -- efficient systems. We dive into the importance of understanding our own processes before building systems, and then explore some of the many ways our individual systems can look.
We're joined by Amelia Hruby, a writer, educator, and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. She is the founder of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. And sheʼs the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients.
On this episode, we learn how to create systems that work fo rus, our teams, and our clients. We also learn what the transition from work without efficient systems to efficient systems can look like, and how it all fits into creating a calmer business for everyone involved.
Listen to the Full Episode to Hear:
How do you create autonomy through systems?
What impact can an efficient system have on business and team members?
How can you operate through a lens of care using systems?
Why do you need to start with a process before building systems?
We value your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to share them with Susan here. Your input is not just valuable, it's crucial in shaping future episodes.
Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here
Chapters
Introduction to Building a Calmer Business
The Importance of Efficient Systems
Guest Introduction: Amelia Ruby
Challenges Before Implementing Systems
Developing and Implementing the System
Impact and Benefits of the New System
Final Thoughts and Encouragement
Why are efficient systems so essential for building a calmer business? And how do you go about finding the right systems and processes for yourself?
We're continuing in our mini-series on my calmer framework for a calmer business. This week, we're focused on my favorite aspect of my CALMER framework -- efficient systems. We dive into the importance of understanding our own processes before building systems, and then explore some of the many ways our individual systems can look.
We're joined by Amelia Hruby, a writer, educator, and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. She is the founder of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. And sheʼs the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients.
On this episode, we learn how to create systems that work fo rus, our teams, and our clients. We also learn what the transition from work without efficient systems to efficient systems can look like, and how it all fits into creating a calmer business for everyone involved.
Listen to the Full Episode to Hear:
How do you create autonomy through systems?
What impact can an efficient system have on business and team members?
How can you operate through a lens of care using systems?
Why do you need to start with a process before building systems?
We value your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to share them with Susan here. Your input is not just valuable, it's crucial in shaping future episodes.
(00:00) - Introduction to Building a Calmer Business
Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here
Creators & Guests
Host
Susan Boles
Speaker, Podcaster & Consultant at Beyond Margins | 15+ years of experience as both a CFO and COO
What is Engineering Calmer Agencies & Consulting Firms: Calm is the New KPI?
Can you build a business based on… “calm?” Host Susan Boles looks beyond the usual metrics of success to help you build a business where calm is the new KPI. With over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, CFO, and COO, Susan shares the business strategies that lead to a business with comfortable margins—financial, emotional, energetic, and scheduling margins. Join her and her guests as they counter the prevailing “wisdom” about business growth, productivity, and success to provide a framework for making choices that align with your values and true goals. Episode by episode, you’ll get a look at the team management, operations, financials, product development, and marketing of a calmer business.
Susan Boles:
You can't create a calmer business without building systems. Efficient systems and repeatable processes are the tactical work of designing and building a business that feels calmer. Hi there. I'm Susan Boles and this is Beyond Margins, the show where we deconstruct how to engineer a calmer business. We're in the middle of a mini series where we're exploring the common elements of a calm business.
Susan Boles:
So what makes a calm business actually calm, and how do you intentionally design and build for that? So far, we've covered clarity, autonomy, a lens of care, and margins in previous episodes. So if you've missed those, I recommend you head back to the beginning of the series and catch up. Today, we're talking about probably my favorite element of calmer businesses, efficient systems. If this isn't your first episode of Beyond Margins, you've almost certainly heard me talk about how important systems are before.
Susan Boles:
I am an operations geek at heart but I really can't overstate how critical systems are because systems are how you make most of the other elements of the calmer framework actually happen. How do you make clarity a reality? Well, you use a system to communicate your intentions and what actions folks should take. How do you create autonomy? You design ways of working, I e systems that create the conditions for autonomous work.
Susan Boles:
How do you operate through a lens of care instead of just having the intention to care? Well, you write it into your policies. Those policies are systems. How do you build margins? Well, you build systems around how you work that create margins.
Susan Boles:
That might be policies about client emergencies or designing how you deliver your services or how you actually execute the work. How do you build rest and reduce urgency? Again, systems. When I'm talking systems, I'm not just talking about your project management tool here. I'm using the word systems in kind of its broadest sense.
Susan Boles:
So policies, procedures, workflows, checklists and yes your software too. They are all part of what I'm talking about when I say system. Basically, anything you use to communicate or do work is part of your systems. And today, we're gonna hear about the impact of building strong systems and how it actually builds calm into a business. My guest today is Amelia Hroubie.
Susan Boles:
She's the founder of Softer Sounds which is a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. And Amelia is going to take us inside the system she uses for managing the workflow of client episodes and how that specific system helped her stop trying to hold a 1000000 pieces of information about each episode in her head. If you are unfamiliar with podcasting, putting out a podcast episode basically entails a 1000000 different tiny tasks. And trying to hold that all in your head, well, that's pretty hard.
Amelia Hruby:
I am the founder and executive producer at softer sounds, which is a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. So at our core, we edit cool podcasts. We work with small business owners who are doing great work, and they have a show that talks about that in some way. And I like to tell them that they can have their big ideas and record what they have to say, and then we essentially take it from there. So we edit the audio, we write show notes, we create graphics, and we schedule episodes to go live for our clients.
Amelia Hruby:
Can you describe your team a little bit for me so that we have some understanding of who is actually interacting with the system? So Softr Sounds started as just me. And before it was even Softr Sounds, I just did freelance work for about 5 years and then eventually I created a company. And then over the past three and a half years, I've hired 4 different roles. My current team is me and 2 audio editors and one assistant producer and one show notes writer slash transcript cleanup extraordinaire.
Amelia Hruby:
So we're currently 4 contractors and myself, and I am a, like, full time employee of the business.
Susan Boles:
Awesome. Yeah. I always find that it's really helpful to understand who is trying to use the system and what you're trying to contain because everybody's systems tend to look a little bit differently. Talk to me a little bit about what was going on in your company before you implemented the system. So what did it feel like?
Susan Boles:
What was going on?
Amelia Hruby:
So I'm here to talk about my system for tracking the progress of client episodes through the production process. And in the very beginning, that whole system lived inside my brain. Like, when I had 4 or 5 clients, I just kinda knew, like, oh, this one releases weekly, so I have their episode done by every Friday so it can go live on Tuesday. Like, then the business grew. Five clients was not enough for me to, like, make a full time living, so we became more like 10, 12, 15 clients.
Amelia Hruby:
I brought on my first editor who is a friend of mine, still works with the company. Her name's Jesse. And then the system lived on paper. I wrote it down every week and I would send Jesse some episodes to do. It has really evolved since then.
Amelia Hruby:
So when I brought Jesse in, I realized like this cannot just all live in my brain. Like I have to assign work. I have to actually communicate to someone else what we're doing. That just kind of kept growing over time. So the feeling I was having was just like, oh my gosh, there is too much for me to keep track of.
Amelia Hruby:
I can't keep up with every single episode that's going live every week for our clients. I can't keep track of is it edited, does it have show notes, does it have graphics? So the overall feeling I had was just like overwhelm and I just wanted to burn it all down and walk away from the whole thing because I was so stressed all the time.
Susan Boles:
Yeah. I can imagine. For our listeners who don't have a podcast, getting a a specific podcast episode just for one show out the door is an amalgam of, like, 700 little tiny individual steps and tasks that are all very much like you're doing the same thing over and over and over, but there are so many tiny details in a way that a lot of processes and kind of normal business operations, it's just very atypical, at least in my opinion, because there are so many steps and you do the same thing for every single episode, essentially.
Amelia Hruby:
Yeah. I would completely agree with and underscore that. Like, podcasts are very process intensive, and they require a lot of attention to detail. And that in and of itself is challenging. One of my favorite things a client has said to me is when she started her show, she was like, Amelia, I thought it would just be like writing and publishing a blog post, which I do all the time.
Amelia Hruby:
But then I got into it, and she's like, it is absolutely not. It's like I have to write the blog post, and then I have to record it, and then I have to think about if I liked my recording, and then I have to edit it. And then once it's edited, then I have to write show notes that are not the blog post, but like the blog post. And then I have to think about if those are good enough and write a title and, like, it just involves so much more than I think even many of my clients who are great at creating content, like when they get into podcasting, they're like, wow. This is so many more steps than I anticipated.
Susan Boles:
Yeah. And there's just so many different aspects that you really don't think about. That whole blog post writing thing. You write a blog post. You read it.
Susan Boles:
Maybe you read it out loud to make sure it's good, and then it can be done where on the podcast, if you are listening to yourself, read that blog post, I guarantee you, you hate your voice. Nobody likes hearing the sound of their own voice. And if you have to edit yourself, that's exponentially worse.
Amelia Hruby:
Yes. I would agree. Absolutely. In the beginning, I was like, there is no way on earth I sound like that. This recording is wrong.
Amelia Hruby:
I would rather never deal with this again, but over time, it does get easier.
Susan Boles:
Back to the operational piece, the context that is really important here is you were trying to hold, you know, 500 steps for every episode of every show
Amelia Hruby:
in your head. It was too much. I couldn't do it. The reality was, like, part of what forced me to make the system is that things started not getting done or getting missed or getting, you know, sent out the door not to quite the quality I would have liked because I was dropping the ball. Like, there were too many tasks.
Amelia Hruby:
And for many shows, we're working on multiple episodes at a time. I think there's also something within podcasting that, like, it's the episodes release sequentially, but often, like, we're making them in a very overlapped way. So it's not like I could be like, okay. Here's the 4 episodes I'm doing this week for the 4 shows I have. It was like, oh, no.
Amelia Hruby:
Here's, like, the 12 episodes that need attention across these 4 shows at different stages. You know? And in my opinion and in the opinion of every single podcast producer I've ever talked to, it is too much to keep inside of one break. Yeah.
Susan Boles:
Yeah. Yeah. Like, I only have the one show and only a few episodes kind of in process at any given time, probably more than other folks because we normally produce in content themes. Right now, I've got a theme of, like, 8 episodes that were but even that could absolutely not hold that in my head. So tell me a little bit about how that felt for you as the business owner.
Susan Boles:
So you are not just the producer of all of these shows trying to hold all of that in your head, but you're also trying to do all of the other business things. You know? You're the marketer. You're the ops person. You're the finance person.
Susan Boles:
Talk to me about what that felt like for you. Well, it felt bad.
Amelia Hruby:
I'm like, I need to take a big deep breath and sigh it out. It was very challenging to context switch in those moments. Like, my impulse was always to put the client work first because that is what is, like, paying my bills. And then I would find that I had very little time or, like, mental energy or capacity to do the important business tasks, to market my services, to write the blog post to help bring people our way, to follow-up with people, to get testimonials, to send nice notes to my team, to thank them for the work that they're doing. Like, it was really hard to find space for that when I was just juggling so much client work.
Amelia Hruby:
And when I say it felt bad, I mean, what felt bad is I just never felt like the work was done. I never felt like I was doing it to, like, the quality of excellence that I strive to do in my work. And over time, it it kind of eroded my belief in myself. Like, as I felt like I wasn't as good at my job, that made it harder and harder and harder to show up in my business. And I don't think people talk about this so much even in, like, the small business space, but it's, like, at the core of our businesses, like, we have to believe we
Susan Boles:
can do it. Part of being a business owner is being wildly optimistic to the point of being mildly delusional. Like Absolutely. I I don't know that you can run a business without some element of that, and it's so interesting how you put it because I think you're right. We really don't talk about that kind of getting overwhelmed, leading to losing confidence in yourself and your work, and then being afraid to sell things or hiding from doing the work.
Susan Boles:
Yeah. But also at the same time, being completely full of anxiety because the, if I don't do the work, then I won't make any money and then everything will collapse around me.
Amelia Hruby:
I am also a huge catastrophizer. So of course, I'm like, oh, I missed that client deadline. Obviously, I'm gonna lose my house, which I just wanna say is it's clearly not the case. My overwhelm, because I didn't have a supportive system in place to track the progress of client episodes, it's not that anything ever really went wrong. Like every single episode still went out on time, but there were more bumps along the way and every single one of those bumps was a sort of like death by a 1000 paper cuts to my confidence.
Amelia Hruby:
And I really felt that slipping and I really felt that impacting my ability to run the business.
Susan Boles:
I have absolutely been there, and I think it happens especially when we get overwhelmed, especially when we're mired in the I have 1100 decisions or actions that I have to take today. And I have absolutely no idea how that's gonna actually happen because I have 3 hours worth of work, and I have 15 minutes till I have to go pick up my kid from school.
Amelia Hruby:
Yeah. Exactly. And I think the other thing I noticed before the system was put into place is it felt like every single time I sat down, I had to reinvent my to do list. I was never sure of everything that needed to get done because I was just I had too much on my plate, and I didn't have a system for tracking it in a way that I could rely on. And so that was a big piece of my decision fatigue and overwhelm as well.
Amelia Hruby:
It was like, well, I have 15 minutes to sit down and work, and I need 45 minutes to even figure out what the work is. Right? The math doesn't math there.
Susan Boles:
So take me through what was the trigger. What made you decide, hey. I need to do something to make this better.
Amelia Hruby:
I think there were 2 stages to this. They're kind of like 2 stages to the system itself and 2 different triggers at different times. So the first trigger was that I just hit a wall with burnout. Kind of after my 1st year or so in business, I was like, I cannot keep going forward this way. I had this moment where I was like, maybe I should just quit my business.
Amelia Hruby:
It's been a nice year. And when I started having that conversation with myself, I was like, no. This is not that hard. I can do this. I just need better systems to put in place.
Amelia Hruby:
But the second turning point then became that I was bringing on an assistant producer, and I was like, this person cannot do their job if so much of this still lives in my head. And so I have to externalize these processes. I have to create a system that someone else can look at and make sense of. And so that led me to, like, totally rehaul the system a second time. But those are my 2 triggers.
Amelia Hruby:
It was like an internal one and an external one that finally got me to make some systems and get these tasks out of my head.
Susan Boles:
And I think those are 2 really common triggers in terms of a lot of the time when we don't have enough margin in our capacity, when we are overwhelmed and we are working well beyond what is sustainable, it it takes some external triggers to convince you to spend the time building a system because building systems, it does take time. It takes energy, and it is capacity that you're using for your own business versus being able to use that capacity to serve more clients. And I think it is very easy to dismiss that investment up until the point where you can absolutely no longer avoid making the investment, whether that's somebody coming in or you just going, I can't do this anymore. We are going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, but when we come back, we are getting geeky. And Amelia is going to take us through the ins and outs of actually implementing this system.
Susan Boles:
Tell me about how you decided on what system you needed to implement, what that looked like. Take me through that process.
Amelia Hruby:
So my first system was the no system system where everything lives in my brain and it's really not working. I went from there to another very common system which was just a to do list on paper. The first step of this was I would start every day with like a 10 minute sort of brain dump of like this is everything I think I have to do, I'm gonna go through my inbox, I'm gonna go through my Notion notifications. I just write it all down. And I did that every morning, which worked a little bit.
Amelia Hruby:
Like, I I would say that took me from, like, 4 to 6 clients perhaps. But over time, it was still too much. Like, I moved that paper to do list into my digital workspace, so I work primarily in Notion. And then at a certain point, I was like, this is still too much. I was starting every week with this template that had a list of every single one of my clients, And every Monday morning, I would sit down and be like, okay.
Amelia Hruby:
This is everything this client needs this week. And then as work got done, I would manually check it all off. And then at the end of the week, I would clear it out, see what was left for the next week, and then the next Monday, I would start over. And that probably took me up to, like, producing 8 to 10 shows. And then when I really wanted to grow the studio and I was working, you know, with now we work with anywhere from, like, 12 to 25 shows at any given time, That list didn't work anymore.
Amelia Hruby:
It took me the entirety of Monday to make that list, and I was like, this is not a good use of my time. So that was also when I was growing the team. So I brought on my assistant producer. I brought on another editor and show notes writer, and I was like, okay. I am dreaming of a database that has every single episode that we make for every single client on it.
Amelia Hruby:
And I want that to be visible by these team members and the people that need to work on these things. Almost a year ago now, when I was on my winter break so I closed the studio for 2 weeks at the end of every year, and I took those 2 weeks to build that system. So I would say this is where I, like, actually built a system. This was the point where I went went from, okay. I've got versions of to do lists that I work through in my head, to do list on paper, daily brain dump, Monday brain dump.
Amelia Hruby:
Those are all systems, but they just weren't complex or integrated enough. And so I built a database in Notion that has all of our clients, like, categories for each of our clients and lists every single episode that they are working on in each month. So at the start of the month, I go through and I manually add all their episodes from their respective dashboards because they have their own dashboards and their own workspaces. I manually add the episodes at the start of each month from client dashboards, and then I created buttons that automate the tasks for every single episode for every single show because every single show works a little bit differently. And when I put in the episodes, I hit all the buttons and that populates all of the tasks and who they're assigned to, and then I add due dates as audio comes in and it's ready for team members.
Amelia Hruby:
You built the system. Take me through the process of actually implementing it with your team. What went well? What didn't go well? What did that kind of look like?
Amelia Hruby:
I think overall, the launch of the system went very well, and part of that was because I already had the whole team working
Susan Boles:
in Notion in their respective workspaces.
Amelia Hruby:
Since the very beginning of me having contractors, I have had a contractor dashboard that has guiding principles for the business. It has policies for all of our contractors, and it has respective workspaces depending on the type of work they do. So I have an audio editing workspace, I have a show notes workspace, and I have an assistant producer workspace now. And each of those workspaces is set up with exclusively the information that those contractors need. And I would say it made the biggest difference for my assistant producer because previously, I was just, like, half hazardly tagging her in things that I had in mind that I needed her to pick up for me.
Amelia Hruby:
But now all of her work is assigned through this central client episode database. So every time there's a task that I need her to do, I just tag her and I'm like, this is ready for you. And she knows where to go find it and she knows where to put it when her work is done. And that was honestly pretty seamless. I think that the thing that has been more challenging to implement is that some things are still pretty siloed.
Amelia Hruby:
So the audio editors are not currently working directly inside of this client episode database. There's a separate audio editing database, and I use a relation in Notion to connect the 2. This has been a big question for me is, like, who needs access to what information? I think that with my team, we can all work off of the central database, but I've had some moments where it's like, oh, no. Somebody accidentally deleted 8 episodes, and I have to go figure out what happened.
Amelia Hruby:
Those are the moments where sometimes it feels easier to just be like, I've made this thing for this type of work and it lives siloed in this way rather than living in the core system that I need to keep the business running. Like, I think I make myself a bottleneck even within this system, and I would like to stop doing that so much.
Susan Boles:
Yeah. I think it's interesting in systems like Notions. It's so heavily customizable, and it doesn't really have any universal rules, which makes it inherently flexible. But it also means that as a user, you have to be the one thinking about how to silo information versus other tools like ClickUp or Monday or whatever that have roles and permissions already created that inherently I think that's a particular challenge with Notion especially, but it is always really important as you're thinking about particularly working with contractors or other team members, making sure that they have enough of the big picture to have the context to be able to make choices in whatever their individual work is, but also not overwhelming them or not giving them access to information that they might not need or maybe shouldn't have access to. And I think that is something when we're designing system that is always a hard nuance to get to.
Amelia Hruby:
As someone who worked as a contractor in many different businesses, I've been in all sort I've been in the position in all the systems. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I've been in the space where, like, I didn't get enough information and I had no context for my work and that doesn't go well. And I've also been in the position where I had way too much context, and I'm like, I don't need to know every single task on your to do list for this, like, 2 hour a week thing that I do for you.
Amelia Hruby:
And so I'm always thinking about that balance in how I share information.
Susan Boles:
You have to have a really good understanding of how data is structured and how relational databases work to really be able to use it effectively, and I think that's what a lot of people find challenging is that that is a whole that is a whole subset of expertise and information that most people just don't have or want to spend brain space on.
Amelia Hruby:
Part of why I kind of tried to take care with talking through the iterations of the system is I was producing podcast episodes in the exact same way for two and a half years before I built this system around it. And figuring out the way that I produce podcast episodes is a system in and of itself. Right? The system I'm highlighting is how did I document those tasks and automate the, like, pop up of the tasks themselves so that those could then be distributed across myself and my team. But, like, before I even got there, I spent 2 years figuring out, like, what's the best process for making podcast episodes for clients.
Amelia Hruby:
I couldn't build this Notion database until, a, I knew what that was, and, b, I had been working in Notion for years and knew how to do all the Notion y stuff.
Susan Boles:
I think that's an excellent point because when we think about systems, we normally are thinking about, like, a software tool or a project management thing. And I think there is really a distinction between the process, the workflow that you actually do have to spend time iterating on and learning and then the documentation or distribution of those processes. And I think they're 2 separate things, and you're right. A lot of people go into the software tool expecting the software tool to solve part a, and the software tool is really just a mechanism to deliver that workflow that you've already spent time thinking about refining, iterating, making it more efficient. Heading back to permissions, this this is a question that I get all the time with consultants who are people who work with multiple clients or who in some way they're interacting with their clients' task management system, whether that is, you know, a different software tool or they have to somehow interact 8 different client systems.
Susan Boles:
When you were thinking about building this, did you think about giving clients access to some sort of client view and forcing them into your system versus using their system. When I started my business, I told clients, like, I'll just do whatever you want. And I was making podcasts. Like, I always had shared files in Google Drive. I had shared files in Dropbox.
Susan Boles:
I had shared files in Notion. And I was like,
Amelia Hruby:
this is not gonna work. Like, I cannot work on 15 shows where every single one is a fully different process. There has to be more cohesion or coherence between the processes. And so I would say within the 1st 6 months of my business, I had moved all my clients into Notion. And so every client gets their own production dashboard in Notion.
Amelia Hruby:
And I tell clients that this is where I request that you share files with me. I don't require that they do much more than that. And I just think about Notion, like, they can just link to the Dropbox folder where they have the files and it will embed that for me and I can grab the file from there. Every client uses their production dashboard in their own way and I encourage them to personalize it. When I say I make them a production dashboard, what that means is, like, I have a database that's pre created for them.
Amelia Hruby:
I have different resource pages. They get a little note from me. This is all set up when I onboard them, and then they get to adjust it as they see fit. And they get to use it to the extent that works for them. And I just run it from there.
Amelia Hruby:
And then I have clients who have, like, fully transformed their dashboard and do every single part of their podcasting inside of there. And I just go in to be like, oh, cool stuff you did and grab my files and do my pieces. So everybody's in Notion, but it's very flexible, and I encourage them to make it work for their brain and the way that they work. Largely because what I found with podcasting is that there are a 1,000,000 ways to make a podcast, and if you don't do it in a way that works for you, like, if I try to make my clients do it my way, they'll just burn out and quit. And so the more I can empower them to find their own path through it with my advice, then I've found just the greater longevity they have in podcasting.
Amelia Hruby:
I did consider whether or not I would want to have just client views of my database where they only see their episodes, but I decided against that primarily for two reasons. One is I like the clients can really customize their databases to work for them, and that can't happen if they're working in my database. Like, I can't have them adding a 1000000 different properties that only they use and nobody else uses, and then all of a sudden my database is littered with all this stuff. I have no clue what it is or all their notes that I have no clue what they're talking about. Right.
Amelia Hruby:
I don't want all of that in my like core database that I run the whole business from. That's not gonna work for me. So I want them to be able to customize without it messing up my workflow. There may be 2 more reasons. One is that, like, clients change their mind in their episodes a lot, and I prefer to check-in with that monthly and update as I go, as opposed to just, like, be at the whim of them moving everything around.
Amelia Hruby:
Thirdly, just sometimes the view properties in Notion get a little janky. I would constantly be getting messages from clients that are like, where'd all my episodes go? I can't see anything. I just decided to not deal with any of that, and they have their own databases. I have my core database, and I do the manual work of updating so that the 2 align in terms of what episodes go live on what days.
Susan Boles:
Oh, I love that where that's kind of a hybrid approach of it's sort of in your system, but their process And there's a little bit of manual work involved, but at least it's manual work within the same system. So streamline it a little bit.
Amelia Hruby:
And I think part of the reason this works for me, I will say, is that I'm not doing major corporate or government or university contracts. Right? I think that there are types of consulting work where you don't get to dictate what the system is, and they're like, great, we're paying you to work how we work. And I think that those are not my clients. And I'm typically working with small businesses or independent creators.
Amelia Hruby:
And so they're pretty happy to work within my system. And I would say for at least half, if not more of my clients, they don't have any system that they've been using to make their podcast, and so they're just really glad what now exists.
Susan Boles:
So talk to me a little bit about the impact. We talked about the before picture. What does it feel like now both for your team members and for you personally now that the system is up?
Amelia Hruby:
Yeah. It feels so good. Like, life feels so much easier. I start my weeks typically by, like, opening up the client episode dashboard and going through the database and kind of being like, okay. Here's what's on deck for each client.
Amelia Hruby:
Let me make sure that the work is assigned to the correct contractors. Let me make my own little list of what I need to do. Although I say make a list, but actually, I have a view of that database that lives inside of my weekly agenda dashboard. Board. So I just assign things to myself and then it populates all those tasks for me, which feels great as opposed to me writing things in 20 different places.
Amelia Hruby:
All of that just feels so integrated and streamlined. It feels like a relief. Like, I can relax, and it feels like I can actually do the work without stressing about the work all the time, which is, I think, really important just for my overall capacity. The other thing it's really done is empower the people I work with to, like, notice when something needs to move from, like, one stage to another or to start tagging each other to pass off work. And I've gotten, like, much more integrated.
Amelia Hruby:
And that's a space where I've become less of a bottleneck because it's not like someone sending me work and then I have to send it to someone else. That has been a huge just like streamline and shift in the process that has made my life so much easier. And I wouldn't say the business can, like, run without me now, but it can do a lot more without me, which I really love. And I
Susan Boles:
think that's an underestimated piece of systems is having a really well thought through, well executed system means that instead of spending all day Monday trying to decide what is the work that I'm doing, you skip that process and you just look and say, great. Here is my list that I have of things to do. And instead of using my energy to decide things, I can just go do the thing that it's very clear that that's what I am supposed to be doing on this particular day. For me, when I implemented my own systems, just having that burden of, I don't actually have to spend very much energy deciding what to do. We really underestimate how much time, attention, energy, decision fatigue goes into what am I supposed to be doing today.
Amelia Hruby:
Oh, absolutely. But now I think I have the same number of tasks per week. I don't actually think that the workload has lessened. It might even have increased because we work on so many more shows than I did when it was, like, all in my head, but it feels so much easier for all the reasons you're mentioning because I'm not spending so much time figuring out what to do. I know what to do, and I just have to do it.
Amelia Hruby:
And so I can do more in the same amount of time or even less time than I could before thanks to the system. This is why I love systems.
Susan Boles:
I love systems. This I should title this episode an ode to systems.
Amelia Hruby:
Truly, though. This system specifically has just transformed my whole relationship to my business, and it's been such a relief.
Susan Boles:
So did anything surprise you during this whole process?
Amelia Hruby:
It was way easier to make the system than I thought it would be. Like, when I made the database on that break a year ago, I was like, oh, this only took, like, 2 days of work. And then I was like, oh my gosh. There was only 2 days of work between me and life being this much easier. Amelia, come on.
Amelia Hruby:
Like, I waited.
Susan Boles:
It's such a universal experience. Like, it's just everybody who's ever procrastinated. Like, how many of us have on our to do list that we move from day to day, week to week is build system for x, right process for whatever. And in reality, it takes us 15 minutes, maybe a couple of hours to do the thing that ends up saving us. You know, in your case, this was an entire day of trying to figure out what to do every single week.
Susan Boles:
Assuming that you work every week, that's 52 workdays. That's, like, almost 2 months' worth of work that, you know, you just had to sit down and say, cool. I'm gonna spend 2 days doing this.
Amelia Hruby:
Oh, don't drag me like that. So real. I am laughing because I am a systems person. I'm an operations person, and I still
Susan Boles:
do this. No. Absolutely. Person, I'm an operations person, and I still do this. No.
Susan Boles:
Absolutely. So, yeah, least surprising surprise ever.
Amelia Hruby:
It did not take as long as I thought to build the system and put it into place. The other surprise, perhaps, for me is that it really hasn't required a ton of upkeep or changing over the course of the past year. I have set aside, like, a day this winter to kind of do some fine tuning and revise some stuff and update the buttons where client systems have shifted. I built it specifically enough, but also generally enough that it can flex with us as the work shifts, as the process shifts. I felt a lot of pressure for it to be perfect, but, actually, like, it just needed to be good enough that I can keep working with it.
Amelia Hruby:
And then now, like, I look forward to doing this, like, annual update of it. I think it'll be fun to implement some new spiffy things, but, like, it's working great as it is, and that's a nice surprise.
Susan Boles:
I love that. And I think we underestimate how iterative processes and systems really are. And I also think that's a testament to you spending 2 years figuring out what is the workflow because then you were very clear on how you thought about information, what tasks actually needed to go in. And I think for most people and most of the clients that I work with on operation stuff, the hardest part is figuring out what is the process. The system all of the systems, whether it's Notion or ClickUp or Monday or Trello or they all do the same thing, and it's not about the system.
Susan Boles:
It's about what is the system doing and spending more of your time really iterating on that process, really refining how you think about episode production and how that works for you at your company in your brain. All of those kinds of things is a critical piece. And I think that's the piece that most people miss, which is why they implement a new software and go, well, this isn't working. This isn't doing what I needed it to do. And it's because they skipped that step that we sort of skipped over.
Susan Boles:
But the reality is is that you spent 2 years figuring out what should be in the system, and you did all of those iterations before you got to the system. That's the piece I think for a lot of people is surprising as we want it to be perfect when it happens. But depending on where you are on that development of the process and the workflow versus development of the system, it's more iterative at the beginning, less iterative towards the end.
Amelia Hruby:
Yeah. That all feels incredibly true to me. I love this point that you're really bringing to the forefront of, like, the process has to come before the system. Trying to implement a system that doesn't have a strong process foundationally underneath it, like, will just get you nowhere and waste a lot of time. The reason this system works so well for me and, like, the pieces I've been able to automate is because of the type of work I do and because podcasting is so repetitive.
Susan Boles:
And I think there there are certainly parts of every business that are equivalent to podcast accounting. There's a reason that, like, the finance systems are usually the first ones I tackle because you do the same thing every week, every month. It's the same checklist. And I think there is the opportunity to do that in a lot of consulting or agency projects. But, again, it's really dependent on spending a lot of time on that first part where we're really defining the process.
Susan Boles:
We're really defining what are the actual deliverables. What is the process through which we are delivering this service and standardizing that as much as you can and allowing standardized container for customized consulting where the actual packaging, the delivery of what you're providing is kind of the same. You're always doing this meeting or this process or this deliverable or this template or whatever. And the consulting piece is interactive, but kind of the steps, the container, is as standardized as possible, which can sort of bridge the gap a little bit between something like podcasting, which is very process oriented and something like doing a lot of website design. Right?
Susan Boles:
If you're doing a website design, the website design for each company is gonna be very different. You're not building them the exact same website. The copy is gonna be different. The vibe, the visual design, all the pages, that's gonna be different. But the process through which you collect information from a client or deliver the design that can be very much repeatable.
Susan Boles:
As long as you spend time thinking about that first part, that first phase where you're saying, what is the process? What are we delivering? How are we delivering it in the same way that you did it? It is applicable. You need to have had multiple clients who you do the same sort of thing with before you can really know
Amelia Hruby:
what your process is and then build a system from it. And I work with a lot of beginner business owners who I see try to, like, build these really involved systems. And I'm like, you have literally not had enough clients yet to know what this process is such that you should develop a strong system for it.
Susan Boles:
It is the hardest part for me always is to not systematize things Yes. At the beginning. Like, you have to conceptualize it and then do it, not systematized a few times and figure out where do things go off the rails. And as much as it pains me to say it, you absolutely have to do it really ugly and inefficiently the first couple of times to realize where you can systematize things or even what problems you're actually solving for clients. One of the things that I do with clients a lot of the times is help them develop productized service offerings.
Susan Boles:
So we're doing this process. And it's always easier to do when you have data about, I've delivered it this way with this client and at this price and this way with this client at this price. And I actually liked version 2 better, but there are pieces from version 1 that we can pull in. It's always so iterative and ugly at the beginning, and that's how you figure out what you're solving, what repeatable problems you're constantly solving for clients, and how you're gonna do that because I think it looks different for everybody. We've been talking here specifically about a podcast production workflow, but this process can apply to any system, any process in any business.
Susan Boles:
So take something like client onboarding for example. This is something that we all do in our businesses, but there are lots of parts and pieces to it. You need to send a proposal or a contract, send an invoice, accept payments, send onboarding communications, set up client folders and resources, schedule live calls. There are a million things to do and it happens every single time you bring on a client. But like podcast production, it's also something where you do the same steps over and over and over.
Susan Boles:
So taking time to build a system for this process can save you a bunch of time which allows you to build some margin or some space in your overall capacity. Even just starting with a reminder checklist of all the things means that steps don't get missed. But you could do what I do in my own business where the onboarding is completely automated. I have a system that does all of those steps I just mentioned and it does them automatically. So every time I onboard a client, it probably saves me at least 30 minutes if not more.
Susan Boles:
Less time working means more time that you get to do literally anything else including potentially building more systems like that. So you can see how those systems can really quickly snowball. Taking a small action or setting up a small system in one area of your business can create the breathing room to do it in another area. And eventually, you realize that most of the admin stuff you have to deal with is all taken care of and you have a much calmer business. That is really the power of systems.
Susan Boles:
So do you think there's anything we should talk about that we haven't touched on yet that you think we should bring up?
Amelia Hruby:
I think there are probably many more folks listening who have a podcast like yourself than there are who have a podcast production studio like me. And if you're in that position, I highly encourage you to have a system for your own podcast and to have some type of database spreadsheet situation where you are organizing your episodes. Over half my clients come to me and don't have any system for tracking their show, and I just think that my shows are so much better for having a clear production dashboard and a system for, like, here's how I make every episode, and I make it sort of the same way every time. I guess I just wanna say, like, even if you have no need to make a client episode database and track 20 shows across time like I do, if you are making even one show, systems can really transform your relationship to the show because one of the leading causes of burnout in my podcasters is when they make every single episode a different way or they feel like they're starting from scratch every single time. And the system will keep you from feeling that way, and I want you and your amazing podcast to continue being made.
Amelia Hruby:
I don't care how you make it, but, like, please support yourself with your own podcast system.
Susan Boles:
If you only take one action from listening to this entire miniseries, it should be this. Lean into building systems because it's the way you actually engineer all the other elements in the calmer framework. It's the how of building a calmer business and you don't have to do everything all at once. Start tiny. Build one checklist.
Susan Boles:
Outline one workflow. Streamline one meeting and then do another one. Tiny actions can build on each other like bricks. Eventually, you lay enough bricks and you end up with a calmer business. You can support the show by leaving a rating or a review.
Susan Boles:
It really does help new listeners hit play with more confidence. And you can support our sponsors by using the link in your show notes. All of this helps me keep this independent podcast going and growing. So thank you for supporting us and thank you for listening. Until next time.
