BS'ing With Brandi

In this episode I am joined by Barb McGrath from Above the Fold Digital Marketing and we are going to talk about online course platforms - specifically our platforms of choice, which for Barb is Heights and for me is Kajabi.

Here’s a bit about our special guest today: Known as the #GoogleGirl, Barb founded the Get Found Digital Marketing program, and one of the first Google-approved agencies, Above the Fold Digital Marketing. After more than 20 years working with local businesses, Barb knows what it takes for local businesses to succeed and be on the first page of Google.

Barb has worked with some of western Canada’s most well known brands including Conexus Credit Union, Factory Optical, Optiks International and Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

In this episode we are going to talk about our online course platforms in the following areas:

• What kind/format of lesson content can be uploaded
• The overall structure of courses
• The ability to customize the look and feel of things
• Back-end ease of use
• Student experience of the platforms
• Related functionality
• And more!
  

In this episode I am joined by Barb McGrath from Above the Fold Digital Marketing and we are going to talk about online course platforms - specifically our platforms of choice, which for Barb is Heights and for me is Kajabi.

Here’s a bit about our special guest today: Known as the #GoogleGirl, Barb founded the Get Found Digital Marketing program, and one of the first Google-approved agencies, Above the Fold Digital Marketing. After more than 20 years working with local businesses, Barb knows what it takes for local businesses to succeed and be on the first page of Google.

Barb has worked with some of western Canada’s most well known brands including Conexus Credit Union, Factory Optical, Optiks International and Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

In this episode we are going to talk about our online course platforms in the following areas:

• What kind/format of lesson content can be uploaded
• The overall structure of courses
• The ability to customize the look and feel of things
• Back-end ease of use
• Student experience of the platforms
• Related functionality
• And more!

Stay tuned for part 2 coming out next week!

In this episode, I’m going to talk about some relatively simple ways to make your online business more accessible and inclusive. Yes, most of it will be tech-related, but I’ll probably throw in a few non-tech tidbits as well.

So first off, why make your business more accessible and inclusive? There are 2 reasons:

1. Be a decent fucking human being
2. Make more money so you can live the life you deserve
   

Sounds pretty simple right?

In today’s episode I’m going to talk about some of the areas where you have the opportunity to make your biz more inclusive so that you can reach more people and increase your profits:

• Remote working
• Closed captions
• Your website
• Your content
• Plus a few non-techie tips you can implement immediately
  

In this episode, I’m going to talk about why you should not create an online course. That’s right - the girl who helps people set up their courses for a living is here to convince you not to create one. So if you’re on the fence about making your own course, listen up.

The whole “infopreneur” industry has been blowing up, and once COVID hit a lot of business owners were turning into course creators in order to keep their revenue stream flowing.

A lot of things I’ve been reading in the last few months make it sound like a course is actually a must-have and without it your business is doomed to fail.

What a load of bullshit.

No two businesses are identical, and no two business owners are identical, so if you are considering creating a course I’m going to give you some reasons it might actually be a really bad idea, and what you might want to try instead.

1. You’ve never taught before, you’ve never lead a workshop or webinar
2. You don’t have any proven teaching materials or content
3. You honestly have zero extra time
4. You are scared of technology

In this episode I’m going to talk about how I record videos that require almost zero editing. Because I’ll be honest, if I had to edit all of my videos, I’d never make one.

I spent a lot of time figuring this out because I knew it would be worth it in the end. I’m going to explain exactly how I do it, and then you can copy me or tweak what I’m doing to suit you best.

Here are some of the common reasons you might need to edit (I know I certainly do these things)

• False start
• Losing your voice or needing to cough or taking a drink break
• Noise interruptions (phone ringing, partner calling for you, loud TV, etc.)
• Orienting yourself after hitting the record button
• Fumbling for the stop button after you’re done
• Losing your place
• Flubbing a line
• Filler word bad habits

Listen now to find out how I’ve solved these problems for myself, plus what tools and tactics I use when I do need to make small edits.

In this episode I’m going to walk you through my own course creation journey - specifically what did and didn’t work for me, what I would do differently if I could, and what set me up really well for a public launch.

So I recently finished the pilot launch of my new course Systematize Your Online Course - the development, creation, launch, and delivery took a little less than 6 months in total. But before you start beating yourself up for not having your own course launched yet, I want to take you back four and a half years and tell you all about the mistakes I made and what it took to get me to this successful launch.

I tried to launch four different signature courses before I finally got to this one. Some of them got abandoned before they left the ground. One even had paying students that had to be refunded when I quit.

Online courses are a lot of work but the pros make it look too easy. Here are all the sometimes embarrassing, hopefully-valuable nitty-gritty details behind my course creation journey - from choosing the wrong topic to being bad on camera to underestimating the work. Enjoy!

In this episode I’m going to talk about that whole word of the year thing that some of us love and love to hate. I’ve also got phrase of the year, because I’m not one to be satisfied with just a single word.

I’ll talk about how I came up with both of them and how they are going to be driving my business in the next 12 months.

But before we dive in . . .

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #FigureShitOut and #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today I’m loving coconut and oat milk coffee creamer and Star Wars.

So word of the year. This became a big thing about 5 years ago. I have no idea who started it, but I really liked the concept. My problem? No matter how much thinking I did or how many challenges I participated in I could never come up with a single word that felt right or really resonated.

So I gave up. And every time December rolled around and people began posting about their words I would just roll my eyes in fond amusement and secret envy.

Have a listen to find out:

• How my word “magically” appeared after several month of hard work I didn’t even realize I was doing
• How my phrase of the year is going to enforce that word and be the driving factor is what I say yes and no to for the next 12 months
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about my blogging system. I’m going to describe to you in detail, how I create my blog from planning to writing to publishing to promotion, and then I want you to steal the entire workflow or at least cherry-pick the parts that are going to apply the best to you.

And if you are one who doesn’t really want to sit here and frantically take notes, not to fear - every single thing I’m going to talk about today is documented inside my resource library which you can access for exactly zero dollars. All I’m asking for is your email, and I’ll put the signup link for that right in the show notes.

Here are the types of tools & tech you need to think about:

• Blogging platform
• Graphics/stock photos
• Docs for writing
• Task management/content calendar for tracking
  

Here are the processes you need to consider:

• Planning your topics
• Actually doing the writing
• Creating promotional material (graphics, social media posts, etc.)
• Publishing
• Promotion
  

Now that you have an idea of what you could include in your system, you need to figure out:

• What tech you’re going to use
• How much time do you have? How long can you spend on each post, and how frequently can you publish?
• Where can you do your braindumping?
• What parts of your process can you batch?
• How are you going to timeblock and manage due dates?
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about ClickUp. And if you don’t know what ClickUp is, it's a task or project management tool.

So how do I use ClickUp?

• Task management
• Project management
• Content calendar
• CRM
• Weekly and monthly client reporting
• Time tracking
• Business planning
• Team chat
• Internal resource libraries for tutorials and tools
  

Disclaimer: ClickUp can be super overwhelming if you haven’t taken the time to develop a task management system for yourself. It's crazy flexible and you can do so many things with it - so if you don’t already have a plan or a goal for what you need, you may struggle with the initial set up, but there are templates you can choose from to get you started.

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about how to create an online course when you have very little to zero budget.

This is not a long term solution for most people, but it’s a way to get your course up and running so that you can start generating revenue and getting social proof from your students - both of which will go a long way to help you make more money so you can invest in more streamlined and powerful tools down the road.

Here’s some tough love: a lot of you have dreams of online course creation but you get so fricken caught up in the tech details about what platform to use that you never get going. So here’s my challenge to you today: shit or get off the pot.

I’m going to give you a few examples of tech stacks that you can use to create an online course that will either cost you zero dollars a month, or will not add to your monthly expenses because they’re tools you’re already using.

Here are the two free “course hosts” you could use:

• Facebook Groups
• Google Drive

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about how you can’t seem to get all of your shit done and what you can do to stop this problem from happening over and over again.

And what you’re going to notice is that for me, ‘doing less’ actually can mean 3 things:

• Removing things from your to do list - delete them, move them to a ‘revisit in the future’ bucket
• Tricking your brain into thinking you’re doing less but breaking down large tasks/projects into tiny steps
• Outsourcing
  

January/February

• I started the year with no team members and needed to simplify my 2020 projects - cutting it down to 1 project only!
• I onboarded a VA agency to help with ongoing internal and client work so I could focus on that project and work more on business development.
  

March

• I took on a new contract that required many more hours than I’d been giving to my existing clients; I had almost all of those existing clients all launching new websites and courses at the same time; and . . . the pandemic :/
• March was a big old mess and I’ll 100% admit I almost didn’t make it through the month. I had to take time off at the end just to prevent a meltdown - luckily I have super compassionate clients. Sometimes doing less is just ‘Do nothing. Full stop.’
• I stopped accepting new clients.

April/May

• My time was not being freed up, and I didn’t want a repeat of March so took a long look at where I was spending my time. Working with the agency had just shifted a lot of my time from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ so ultimately decided to stop working with them.
• This meant that I also had to scale back the services I could offer to clients, which I had to make myself OK with.
  

June

• Spur of the moment - rehired a previous VA who barely needed any onboarding, only needed training on things that were brand new or significantly different. She was a fast learner and a fast do-er, so I finally saw that extra time that I’d been hoping for since January.
  

July/August

• Launch season again! Most of my clients all decided to launch all at the same time.
• To prevent the March Meltdown, I did a much better job at prioritizing exactly what tasks were critical for the launches to succeed and moved everything to the backburner.
  

September

So here we are in Sept, and all of that backburner stuff is catching up with me and I feel like I’m behind on everything. So in this exact moment here are the strategies am I brainstorming and trying out to get through this period

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about tools to help you record videos. Best of all, these are tools that all have free versions, that you might already have or at least have experience with.

We’re gonna talk about Zoom, Loom, Monosnap, QuickTime, Google Meet, and your very own phone. And with each one I’ll also give some examples of what kinds of videos are best made with that tool. The idea is that you could potentially record all of your videos for courses or marketing without having to do a lot of fancy editing, which can be a pain if you don’t like it or don’t have the right tools.

• Record your webcam (along with 1 guest)
• Record your desktop
• Record your desktop with your webcam in the corner
• Record your connected iOS device
• Record a digital whiteboard
• Flip back and forth between them all

• Record your webcam
• Record your desktop
• Record your desktop with your webcam or profile picture in the corner (some options to customize size and can select placement)
• (Mostly) flip back and forth between them all
• Annotate the screen (Pro plan)

• Record your desktop or a specific area of your desktop (can customize recording area)
• Record your desktop with your webcam in the corner (can customize size and placement)
• Can record mouse and visually indicate mouse clicks

• Record your webcam
• Record your desktop (can customize recording area)
• Record your connected iOS device

I’m only including this here because at the time of recording, Google has opened up the recording feature for all accounts, even free. Normally you need an Enterprise account to record meetings but until September 30th we can all record our Google Meet.

• Record your webcam (plus all guests)
• Record your desktop

• Record your face
• Record someone else’s face
• Record something external/physical

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about what you need to do before you start automating things. And unfortunately, what you need is to do the things manually, then automate.

The exception to this would be if you were hiring someone to do something new in your business and they were already an expert in how to do that thing. Then you’re good because guess what - they’ve already done the hard work of figuring out how things are supposed to work so that they understand what and how that thing can be automated.

But this is for those of you who are DIY’ing your shit. You have to crawl before you can walk before you can run.

Crawling is when you’re starting out, you have a goal in mind but you have no idea what you’re doing so you’re just using your best guess on what you have to do, what tools you need, what order things get done in. So the shit gets done, but it ain’t pretty - you got there in the end but it took a long time, you’re frustrated, and your knees are all scraped up.

Walking is when you’ve been doing it for long enough that you have a workflow - a nice repeatable, consistent set of processes and checklists that you can do in your sleep. It’s smooth, but the whole thing still takes longer than you’d like.

Now you’re ready to run - that’s looking to see where there are opportunities to automate, if there are more advanced tools that will take on some of the more tedious tasks.

We’ll also talk about a couple of real world examples that I’ve worked on with clients:

• Setting up an automated appointment booking system
  
• Using task & project management software - and how different each person’s needs are
  

So remember, crawling may be frustrating, but it's a necessary step in the process.

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to do a feature comparison of BeLive vs Streamyard, which if you don’t know are 3rd party tools for live streaming to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. I’m going to start with a quick pro/con of using 3rd party tools and then we’ll dive into comparing the 2 platforms on features like number of guests, production capabilities, destinations, branding, and more. And of course, price.

• Pros & cons of using a 3rd party tool (vs just going live directly on the platform)
• Number of guests
• Streaming destination
• Frequency or length of streams
• Production features
• Mobile capabilities
• Branding
• Price
  

It isn’t really a case of one being better than the other - it totally depends on things like what you need your livestream to do, how often you go live, how many guests you need, and things like that.

So which one do you think you’re going to use? I hope you’ve got a good idea at this point. And as a bonus, I’ll be including referral links for each platform.

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about my podcasting system. I’m going to describe to you in detail, how I create my podcast from planning to recording to publishing to promotion, and then I want you to steal the entire workflow or at least cherry pick the parts that are going to apply the best to you.

And as a bonus, even if you’re not specifically podcasting, this system is a good basis for any type of audio or video content creation from vlogging to live streaming to marketing content to lessons for your online course or membership.

And if you are one who doesn’t really want to sit here and frantically take notes, not to fear - every single thing I’m going to talk about today is documented inside my resource library which you can access for exactly zero dollars. All I’m asking for is your email, and I’ll put the signup link for that right in the shownotes.

So let’s get to it:

• Monthly planning process
• Monthly recording/editing process
• Weekly publishing/promotional process, including…
  • Copywriting
  • Publishing
  • Promo content creation (graphics, videos)
  • And more!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about different ways you can invest in your business - specifically, ways to invest in your business when you can’t afford #AllTheThings, like that coach who sounds amazing but is $5000/month, or that tool that could solve all of your problems but costs $200/month.

And heads up, the language in this on is extra salty so you may want to put your earbuds in :)

Our topic today came from one of the members of our group, School for Heartful Entrepreneurs. I started a discussion around barriers or hurdles that people have to face when running a business that don’t get addressed much publicly. There were some amazing comments, but today I want to focus on one specific comment, and I’ll read it to you directly:

“Sometimes people actually don't have money to invest in themselves or their businesses. Several coaches make it seem like you don't believe in yourself if you're not willing to spend your last dollars on a coach without knowing if it's going to pay off.”

I know this was specifically about coaching, but the idea about not having money to invest really struck me so I want to put this in a little bigger context of not just people resources like coaching or consulting or even outsourcing, but also the technical resources like devices and software and services.

Here’s what I touch on in this episode:

• Guilt marketing
• What “investing” means
• 5 ways to invest in your business without going broke

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about G Suite - in particular Gmail, Google Drive, including docs and sheets, Google Calendar, and Google Meet. And I’ll also touch on the myriad of integrations that I use with all of those apps.

Here’s what I go over:

• Free vs paid G Suite accounts
• Things I love about Gmail
• Things I love about Google Drive and docs
• Things I love about Google Calendar
• Things I love about Google Meet
• How all of those things work together
• Favourite G Suite Integrations

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about some tools that you could be using in your business to help with things like sales, content curation, online events, social media, productivity, and more! And the really cool thing about all of the tools I’m going to highlight today is that they are all from companies founded by people of color.

Some of these are tools I use now or have used in the past, and some of these were completely new to me before I did my research but I’m super happy to be adding them to my collection of kick ass business resources.

We’re going to do this in alphabetical order, so here are the tools we’re going to discuss today:

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about productivity and what getting shit done really means. Our topic today is something that has been bothering me as we navigate our in-pandemic-mode world. Do you often overhear or find yourselves in conversations where there’s a discussion about “So what new skill have you learned during COVID?” Or how many articles have you seen with titles like “COVID is the perfect opportunity to launch your business/online course/podcast/etc.!”

If you are in a position where you do have extra time and are learning new things, developing new products and services, or even launching that business you’d always been dreaming of and you are happy to do so - great!

However . . . people think that they absolutely should be doing these things. That if they have extra time it suddenly means that they are obligated to do these things. And then when they don’t, they feel guilty.

And that is extremely fucked up.

It made me realize that our definition of productivity is often wrong. When people think of productivity they think of it as how to get more shit done. I’ve probably been guilty of this too, and maybe even guilty of making people think that what I mean by productivity.

But what we need to be talking about isn’t how to get more shit done. It's about how to get the right shit done. And then how to make that shit as efficient as possible so that you have more free time to do whatever you want.

So what is the right shit to get done? Because half of the world is telling us this is the best time to start an online business or launch a course, and the other half is telling us to use this time to slow down. How do we find a balance?

So I’m going to share a story with you about my experience over the past couple months, and then I have some listener stories from some of the amazing people inside my School for Heartful Entrepreneurs membership group.

Enjoy!

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about selling what you know online.

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about what I use to create these podcast episodes, aka my podcasting tool stack. This is going to cover everything from the podcast planning and management, to the actual recording, so the promotion.

Podcasting is more popular than ever, and the tools out there make it more accessible than ever for anyone to start a podcast from home. Podcasting seems really straight forward, but like all content creation, it's about more than just sitting down and making the thing. Maybe you want to have some kind of strategy or plan for your topics. Maybe you want your episodes to be syndicated to get the biggest possible reach. Maybe you actually want people to find and subscribe to your podcasts after you put them out there. Maybe you want to monetize your podcast with sponsors.

There’s a lot to think about, but to help reduce the overwhelm today I’m going to walk you through everything I currently use to create these podcast episodes from start to finish. We’ll cover the tools for:

• Planning and management
• Recording & editing
• Promotion
• Monthly cost
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about the lonely life of the entrepreneur - or maybe I should say the myth of the lonely entrepreneur.

So ever since I became an entrepreneur, and in fact even before that when I worked a 9 to 5 and remote working was becoming more and more commonplace for businesses I would always see articles about how people working from home would go to coffee shops or libraries to work, just to have other human interaction. Or there would be tongue-in-cheek comics about entrepreneurs in sweatpants and messy buns who flinch at sunlight because they haven’t been outside in so long.

I hear a lot of my peers bemoaning this very same thing, saying they need to get out, or cringing if someone else hadn’t been out. It’s led to the growth of coworking spaces, and in fact, in my city, there are a couple of really amazing coworking spaces that are beautiful and filled with awesome people. I think coworking is great. But . . .

I will never be their ideal client.

Why?

Because working in my own comfortable space has been my dream for as long as I’ve been in the workforce. And being constantly told by people that I need to work or get out of the house was starting to grate on my nerves. I’ve tried it. I’ve done coffee shops. I’ve done coworking spaces and shared offices. And you know what happened?

I was sooooo unproductive almost every time. It wasn't my space. It didn’t have my things. The temperature was too cold. The temperature was too warm. People were having loud conversations and distracting me. If I needed a break I couldn’t just lay on the couch for 15 minutes and listen to music. I couldn’t just wander around and visit with my husband for 5 minutes. I couldn’t play with the dog. I couldn’t change into looser pants if I ate too much for lunch.

But here is the thing that really drove me to today’s rant: just yesterday I read a lengthy post from someone who was reading all of the same articles as me and seeing all of the same jokes and comics as me and they were wondering if there was something wrong with them for actually not minding “being lonely”. They liked the comfort of being at home, which other people are referring to as isolation. They liked that they didn’t have to conform to a dress code and could wear whatever was comfortable, which other people are referring to as lazy. They liked that people couldn’t just barge into their office or interrupt them at any time, which other people are referring to as bad customer service.

I call all of these things boundaries, and self-care, and knowing what makes you most productive. If you are forcing yourself into an environment where you feel uncomfortable just because society tells you that’s what you should do, how can you give your clients your best work? How can you show up as your best self?

So for any of you out there who are busting your ass from your couch in your yoga pants and telling yourself, you are lazy - cut. it. out.

If putting on business casual and doing your hair and makeup make you feel better and make you more productive - then go for it. If those things don’t concern you, then as long as you are clean and you don’t smell who the hell cares what you’re wearing?

If interacting in person with other human beings makes you feel like a better human being that’s great. If people are distracting and they suck your energy then sit down in your comfy home office and work away...

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about webinar software. I’m not necessarily going to tell you what tools to use, because there are a lot out there and I haven’t tried all of them. What I'm going to walk you through are the steps for evaluating which platform is going to work best for you based on what you need it to do.

At the time of recording, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people doing videos, live streams, and webinars due to the global pandemic which shall not be named because on one hand I’m sick of it, but on the other, I do realize that we need to acknowledge what is happening in the world.

Here’s what we’re going to cover in this episode:

• Do you really need webinar software or just online meeting software? What is the difference?
  
• What do you need the webinar platform to integrate with? OR What tools don’t you have that you need the webinar software to do for you?
  
  • Email reminders/marketing
    
  • Registration form and/or landing page
    
  • Payment or checkout software?
    
• How tech-savvy are your participants? Will they need to be able to watch on mobile devices?
  
• How is your internet connection?
  
• Will you need people to break out into smaller groups during the webinar?
  
• Do you need to be able to track analytics like how long people stayed, who didn’t show up, how many people attended, etc.?
  
• Are you going to be selling during your webinar?
  
• Will you be sending a replay?
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about one of the biggest reasons you’re not doing the video for your business. One of the big reasons is tech confusion and frustration, but I talk and write about that all of the time. Today’s episode is tackling something a bit more personal, a bit more uncomfortable: fear. Specifically fear of criticism.

Our topic today is coming from my personal experience with doing the video for my business, but also discussions with members of School for Heartful Entrepreneurs.

What I’m going to do is break down this fear into 3 specific subtopics, which are:

• I suck at speaking
  
• I hate my ________ (insert characteristic or body part here)
  
• To get dolled up or not - that is the question
  

I’m pretty firm on what you can do to address the first two, the last one is still something I’m struggling with and haven’t yet come up with an answer I’m happy with.

I suck at speaking: let’s talk about the words “like” and “so” and those wonderful “umms” and “uhs”. Whether you sign up for Toastmasters or get a speaking coach or just start practicing speaking on video in your car the key is to speak with confidence - if you’re hesitant or unsure, all of those vocal habits and tics will stand out.

I hate my _______: for me, it was my voice. That is a very common one. For many other people, it has to do with weight - even crazy successful people like Amy Porterfield avoided putting her face on camera for a long time because she wasn’t comfortable with her weight. If you are doing things to try to hide or cover-up, chances are you are creating more of a distraction.

To get dolled up or not: I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. As a work-from-home online entrepreneur, when I go live in sweats and a messy bun am I being my authentic self? Or am I just being lazy? Am I giving a bad impression or am I being relatable?

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about when you shouldn't automate in your business. I'm often talking about automation and how you should do it as much as possible but there are definitely times when automation is going to do your business a disservice.

I wanted to talk about those times specifically so that people can kind of understand I'm not saying that you should have bots and Zapier and everything running your business 100% of the time. There are times when it is not appropriate to automate but that differs from business to business and situation to situation. What I want to do is give a few general guidelines for when you shouldn’t automate if you're in a position where you're trying to figure out what you should do, and then I want to dive into some really specific examples of when you should never automate or maybe an example of where an automation went wrong.

I also want to clarify what I mean when I'm talking about automation. A lot of people hear the word “automation” and get scared because they are thinking about really complex things happening with supercomputers but when I'm talking about automation in terms of business automation it’s anything that you can set up that runs without the intervention of another human i.e. you.

Let's start with some more general situations where you probably don't want to automate.

1. When you don't know what you're doing.

If you have some sort of business process and you don't actually understand it or know how to complete it or have a clear idea of what you want to happen at the end of that process then you shouldn't be automating it. The best advice I always give people when they're trying to decide should I automate this or not is “Do you have all the steps worked out manually? Because if you don't then how are you supposed to tell the computer what to do?”

2. When it's something that isn't a repeatable process.

Automation is good for straightforward repetitive tasks, but if you have something that you do every month but depending on what's going on in your business the process changes every single time you do those are the kinds of things that are not a good candidate for automation.

3. It happens infrequently or the set up is more work than what you’d save.

Something that you just do quarterly or annually can sometimes be more trouble than they're worth to set up an automation for. To be fair you could hire someone to figure out how to automate tasks if you think eventually it is going to save you time and sometimes it's about frustration as well so even if there is something that only takes you half hour but you just absolutely hate doing it then having someone you hired to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to automate that task is probably going to be worth it to you

What about some specific examples of when you shouldn't be automated in your business or examples of when automation went wrong?  These are typically the things that I see the most and a lot of the time I think I think people do them because they're so focussed on saving time that they don't realize the impact that they're having on the people interacting with their business or it's just they haven't properly worked through the steps of what needed to happen and then the automation has kind of gone awry.

In today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi I’m going to walk you through my decision to stop recording my podcasts as on-camera videos. Lots of podcasters out there are doing their podcasts as videos and uploading to places like YouTube or Facebook in addition to extracting the audio for their podcast channel. The idea behind this is that it makes it easy to distribute to more channels, and it’s a lot easier to turn a video into an audio file than vice versa.

Here’s what I discussed:

• Why I did on-camera video out of the gate when I relaunched BS’ing with Brandi as a podcast
  
• The workflow I had to accomplish this
  
• The issues I started to run up against (i.e. Facebook Premiere time commitment, low live attendance, inability to turn the videos into ads because of swearing, staring at camera vs notes, and more)
  
• What ultimately made me decide to remove my talking head
  
• What I’m doing now instead (spoiler: I’m still recording the ep as a video, just in a different way!)
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today I’m going to share some quotes with you that have been particularly helpful throughout my entrepreneurial journey.

I thought this topic would be nice to dive into close to Valentine’s Day, which is when this episode will be coming out. It’s also National Heart Month and February 14th is also National Organ Donor day, so anyone who has been following me for awhile will know that these topics are highly personal to me and play a significant role is how my business was formed and has been shaped over the last eight years.

I want to encourage you to share your own meaningful quotes with me, so please comment or send me a message or an email - I’d love to hear from you!

I have six quotes that I’m going to share with you. Most of them are by women. I don’t know if that’s meaningful but I thought it was interesting.

1. “Feel the fear and do it anyway” ~Susan Jeffers
   
2. “Life is tough my darling, but so are you” ~Stephanie Bennett-Henry
   
3. “Take care of yourself first. You can’t pour from an empty cup” ~Unknown (similar to a quote by Eleanor Brownn)
   
4. “Done is better than perfect” ~Sheryl Sandberg
   
5. “Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing” ~Ron Swanson (Parks & Rec)
   
6. “Everything is figureoutable” ~Marie Forleo
   

Today we’re going to talk about outsourcing - specifically, the things that you, as the business owner, need to keep in mind when you are outsourcing your tech work in order to keep your service provider from being confused and frustrated. In the end, that will make you happier because you’re likely to be getting their best work!

This came from a LOT of personal experience, both as the service provider and as the person who needs to hire some outsourcers. So when I get into the details I’m going to be giving a lot of personal examples from working with past clients and past contractors.

What I’m going to cover is:

• Understand what type of service provider you’re looking for
  
• Give them as much advance notice as possible
  
• Provide the context for the work
  
• Give them as much information as humanly possible about the work
  
• Get clear on what they can and can’t (or won’t!) do
  
• Emergencies
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about Facebook Groups and what steps, processes, and considerations you need to think about before you start one.

This is something I’ve talked about before on the blog, but it has been coming up a lot lately since so many people are creating memberships and online courses. You could use other forum software or find a course or membership platform that has some sort of discussion feature built in, but what my clients have found is that people don’t engage in those very much, but they engage a lot more inside a Facebook Group.

I’m going to go through nine things you need to think about:

1. You do not own your Facebook group.
2. Don’t create a group just because your Facebook page is sucking.
3. Do you have time to moderate a group?
4. Will you moderate as yourself or as your page?
5. What is the purpose behind your group?
6. What are you going to talk about?
7. How will you promote your group?
8. What do you need to know before people join?
9. What will your group rules be?
   

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my goal is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about why you need to work out a detailed process and workflow before you start paying for the business tools that are going to execute or automate that process. I’m going to use email marketing as an example and walk you through what would happen if I suddenly had to choose a new email marketing platform.

Our topic today came from a couple of recent experiences with email - the first was a client who needed to set up a lead magnet funnel that turned into the most painful email experience of my life, and the second was the 3-part series we just did inside our membership group School for Heartful Entrepreneurs where we covered, in quite a lot of detail, a comparison of the features across about 9 different platforms.

What I’m going to cover is:

• What can go wrong when you pick your platform first
• The number 1 business platform people seem to be constantly jumping around and how this is wasting your time and potentially harming your business
• The process & workflow I’d document if I had to choose a new email marketing platform

Before you make a switch to any email platform, consider how much time it takes you to import and tag all of your subscribers, to recreate your welcome emails and automations. On top of that, think about all of the other tools you use that are connected to your email service - don’t forget to switch them too otherwise things are going to get missed. And finally, there is always a risk that constantly switching platforms will damage your deliverability - a new service may have different settings and suddenly your emails are going to spam, and it’s difficult to recover from that.

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about things more on the personal side of business - the emotional/mental rollercoaster of entrepreneurship, the idea of “finding your passion”, and I’m hoping to get a little vulnerable about the whole thing.

This is part 4 in a 4-part series on this topic and in this particular episode, I’m wrapping things up with the rest of our viewer questions

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about things more on the personal side of business - the emotional/mental rollercoaster of entrepreneurship, the idea of “finding your passion”, and I’m hoping to get a little vulnerable about the whole thing.

This is part 3 in a 4-part series on this topic and in this particular episode, here is what I discuss:

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about things more on the personal side of business - the emotional/mental rollercoaster of entrepreneurship, the idea of “finding your passion”, and I’m hoping to get a little vulnerable about the whole thing.

This is part 2 in a 4-part series on this topic and in this particular episode, here is what I discuss:

• My struggle with clarity, decision making, and visualization - and how Marie Forleo helped
• How I deal with visionmakers and passionmakers who are just trying to help
• The issue with niching that I’m having right now & how that has impacted my service offering
• The face that I’ll never quite be able to escape marketing
• 75% of my team - the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in business
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about things more on the personal side of business - the emotional/mental rollercoaster of entrepreneurship, the idea of “finding your passion”, and I’m hoping to get a little vulnerable about the whole thing.

This is part 1 in a 4-part series on this topic and in this particular episode, here is what I discuss:

• My struggle with the idea of having to have a “passion” or a “vision”
• How that has manifested into feelings of shame and guilt, especially during the busy fall event season
• How Merilyn Beretta’s recent WowArchetype Bootcamp helped me come to terms with my thoughts & feelings
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about automation services and compare the top 3: Zapier, Integromat, and Automate.

Our topic today came from a couple of webinars I’ve done this year about automating your business, the most recent of which will have already aired by the time this podcast episode is going public. Most people understand the concept of automating when they are thinking of a single application. For example, someone fills out a form and they get back an email with a free download automatically. But when it comes to connecting multiple services, sometimes people struggle with the concept or to understand the possibilities - you don’t know what you don’t know, right? So I want to take a bit of a deep dive into these services to help you wrap your brain around them.

Now, my recommendation is always to get tools that have the automations you need built in as opposed to using automation services to make things work. But sometimes that’s just not possible. Sometimes the tool you absolutely need just doesn’t do this one thing. Sometimes the tool that has all of the automations you need is out of your budget right now, but these other two tools together are affordable - you just need to make them communicate with each other. Sometimes you just love those two other tools and want to keep using them.

Here’s what I’m going to cover today:

• Why & when you should be automating
  
• Comparing the features of Zapier, Integromat, Automate
  
• Look at which one is best
  
• A shit ton of examples of how I use them
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about calendar management, and the tools and strategies I use to automate as much as possible and to always know when and where I’m supposed to be at all times.

Our topic today came from a random conversation I had with another business owner who was lamenting how confusing it was to avoid double booking herself between her work calendar and her personal calendar. The fact that this was an issue for her kind of blew my mind. The fact that it *wasn’t* an issue for me blew her mind. A great reminder to me that not everyone whiles away their life figuring out how to get tech to work effectively.

Today I’m going to lay out how I manage my calendar, why I do it the way I do, and what tools and integrations I use to make everything work. We will definitely be talking about things like:

• G Suite
• Plutio
• Assistant.to
• Doodle
• Book Like a Boss
• Zapier/Integromat
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about digital detoxing, especially for business owners and entrepreneurs who are in situations where they legitimately can’t just completely turn off their phone.

Our topic today came from my experience with this exact situation combined with a whole lot of articles about young people and phones. Articles that, to be honest, really pissed me off. There is one, to this day, that still kind of makes my blood boil. I don’t remember who wrote it or where it appeared, but it was praising this group of friends who had implemented a policy when they got together for drinks or dinner: all of the cell phones get stacked in the middle of the table, whoever picks up their phone first before the meal is over has to pay the bill. Apparently this young group of friends were more enlightened than their counterparts since they put their phones down and talked to each other - “ooh, technology is bad, fire is scary, thomas edison was a witch”.

Why does it piss me off so much? Because clearly this group of friends has nothing urgent going on in their lives - no seriously sick kids or family members, no waiting for test results, no client emergencies. If I was in that friend group I would have gone BROKE picking up every bill and here’s why - I had a really sick husband who nearly died on me twice from 2008-2012 and then for 5 years after that was on the heart transplant list waiting for the call.

No shitting way was anyone going to make me put away or turn off my phone.

Now...this is probably not your exact situation, but there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons why you need to stay available...

So today I’m going to break down some of the ways that you can detox even if you can’t 100% turn off your phone or put it in a drawer or escape to the mountains where there is no signal. This is loosely based on a blog post I published a few years ago - I’ll share the link in the show notes - before my husband got his transplant, so as I go through the points below I’ll mention if I have changed how I do them now:

• The #1 reason you struggle to detox
• Practice self-care by ditching the guilt
• What to do with social media
• What to do with email
• What to do with your phone notifications
• Customizing ring tones/text tones
• My 3 foot rule
• What to do with clients
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about systematizing your biz.

Our topic today came from my own life events that affected how I do business and why it’s so important to have systems and processes and workflows in place.

What I’m going to cover is:

• What does "systematizing" mean to me
  
• System vs process
  
• Process vs workflow
  
• Why it’s important to have a system in place before you start looking for tech
  
• Examples of how I have systematized my biz: blogging & podcasting (process: planning, admin, writing/recording, graphic design, website, email, social media)
  
• How automation and outsourcing fit into your processes and workflows
  

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about a couple of productivity tools - Trello & Plutio.

I talk about Trello a lot, so when people find out I switched they were very curious. Truth is, I still use Trello and haven’t 100% migrated everything to Plutio. But my business changed, and I was at the point where I was going to have to start paying for Trello or paying for more advanced plugins and add ons (or both!) - so that prompted me to begin looking for a more advanced tool, and it just happened to be kismet that Plutio was running a Black Friday promotion.

Here’s how I used Trello:

• Weekly to do dashboard
• Business planning
• Project management
• Internal team communication
• Customer support/project portal
• CRM/lead management
• resource hub
• Business hub
• Content planning/calendar

What I was missing:

• Recurring tasks
• Multi-board calendar views
• Colour coding
• Privacy/permission settings
• More automation for CRM
• Time tracking

What do I miss about Trello

• Drag and drop everywhere
• Board backgrounds

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where our mission is to #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about how you can reduce shiny object syndrome, save time, maybe even save money by using these 6 steps to choosing the best tech for your business.

Our topic today was inspired by the dozens of members who have asked over the years questions like “should I use A or B for something” or which app is best for doing “this thing”. At a more detailed level, this is what I do for my consulting clients who generally have more complex business needs, but I recognize that sometimes people just have a simple question or need a place to start that doesn’t require a full consultation.

What I’m going to cover is [break it down into points]:

Step 1: The thing that you probably shouldn’t do first

Step 2: Be clear on what you need before you start shopping

Step 3: Is this really a DIY thing, or should you outsource

Step 4: Understand your *must have* features/functions

Step 5: Budget

Step 6: Support/Recommendations

Resources mentioned:

This topic came from a recent podcast episode that I recorded for Allie at The Educated Boss. The episode isn’t out yet, but as soon as it is I will update the link in the notes. Allie asked me what was the one system in my business that I couldn’t live without. For a few seconds my brain flashed to my website, or lead magnet funnels, or my online booking software, but really, if it wasn’t for the system I have set up for task and project management - what I’ll refer to as my productivity system - my business would completely fall apart.

Here’s a quick outline of what I want to cover and then we’ll dive into more detail:

• Why a productivity system trumps everything else
• Why it’s important to take the time now to save time later
• 7 steps to figuring out your personalized productivity system
  • Boundaries
  • Listen to your body
  • Work with life & distractions
  • Time blocking
  • Scheduling, todos and reminders
  • Desk vs mobile
  • Adjust as needed

Want to know what BS'ing was, why it went away, and why it's coming back? This will answer all of your questions.

Oh, and there are some great tips about why you might not want to do a regular Facebook Live show :)

I mention:

• what happened with the original BS’ing with Brandi show
• what lessons I learned from doing a twice-weekly FB livestream with a Q&A format
• what BS’ing with Brandi is going to look like going forward