{HBR 47} Systems Don’t Have to be Scary with Michelle Nickolaisen

Holistic Business Radio – The Podcast of the Love and Money Revolution – with Andy Dolph and Rhiannon Llewellyn

What if systems created more ease and spaciousness in our business rather then constraining us to doing things in a way that doesn't feel good because we "have to"? Michelle says that this is TOTALLY possible. Scroll down for show notes! We love your feedback! Please let us know what you think – email us at [e-mail], or leave us a comment below. If you’re not subscribed, please join us! How to subscribe: Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes; click the button to view the podcast in iTunes. Show notes from this episode with Michelle Nickolaisen: In this episode, Andy talks with Michelle Nickolaisen of Bombchelle. Michelle works with mostly creative folks to make the boring parts of business less boring and easier to deal with so they get done. Andy points out how big of a deal this is for creatives because we just want to be about the creating or the healing, the business parts of whatever our business is. Michelle uses the word “systems” a lot and says that it really kind of sucks to use that word because it has a lot of negative connotations with it, but she hasn’t really found a better word for it. When she uses that word with creatives, they usually think of either really boring corporate shit or Tim Ferriss. Michelle says that the way some people try to automate and streamline their business so that they never have to touch anything is a crock. The way Michelle does systems is to set things up in your business to make things easier: if there’s something that can be automated, she shows people how to lovingly automate it, and things that can be streamlined are streamlined as much as possible. That way, you can show up and rock your clients’ world and all the great stuff instead of dealing with all the shit you hate to do over and over and getting frustrated. People so often get frustrated with having to spend time on admin-y stuff and getting caught up in all of that. Sometimes, half a day is spent on admin stuff, which leaves the creative business person pissed off to “waste time” like that. Andy says that all creative business people have pretty much been in that situation before. He asks Michelle for some specific examples of how she works with systems so that listeners can get a better grasp on it. Michelle mentions how Chris Guillebeau sent a welcome e-mail to his first 10,000th e-mail subscriber. Chris says that one of the things he has done to help his business grow has been to send people e-mails when they signed up for his newsletter. He recommends that any business person do this. He would write the new subscriber an e-mail and say, “Hey! I noticed you’re here. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions,” etc. He would get replies from people saying things like, “Oh, what a clever auto-responder.” And he would e-mail back to say, “No, it’s not an auto-responder; I just wrote it myself.” Michelle does something similar. It is a template that she copies and pastes into an e-mail, but then she tweaks it to be specific to each person. The template is part of what makes welcoming new people doable. She’s also working on something that otherwise would not be sustainable at all: she just signed up for a Contactually account, which is a Customer Relationship Management tool. This program goes through all your contacts and lets you sort them into different buckets: clients, leads, previous clients, colleagues, family, close friends, e-mail subscribers, and it syncs up with MailChimp. She’s still working on the logistics of this, but she’d like to set it up in such a way where everybody who’s on her newsletter dispatch list gets added to this e-mail subscribers newsletter in Contactually. Then she’ll be able to set up a reminder so that Contactually will ping her every 90 or 100 days so she can follow up with those people personally. Doing all of that by hand would be almost impossible, but using this template or system gives her a way to reach out to peo...