Welcome to Take Control with Nicole, as business owners, we experience firsthand the fine line between our personal and business lives. During our conversations, we will look at simple hints and tips to create time, reduce, overwhelm, and help you to navigate through your journey to where you want to be. If you’re looking for smarter ways to work, and create space and time freedom in your day, then you’re in the right place. All right, let’s go.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to take control with Nicole. Communication, chatting with people, sharing information, sharing documents, knowing where is the right location for you and your business to actually create that communication strategy. This is something we investigated or discovered, diluted, what’s the right word explored, even in the members lounge last month, and really looking at how when you are clear and concise in the way that you like to communicate, everything starts to become a little bit more easier. Everybody is now aware of where the information is going to go, which channels to use for what purpose. So let’s look at an example of how this could work in a fabulous way and how it could work in a non so fabulous way.

So if we imagine you have your business right now, you have some of your systems set up, you’ve got some processes that are sort of happening, you’re welcomed on your fabulous team who are really complementary in skill set to yourself, and are really driving home and for your vision of building big for your business. But there’s a bit of a mismatch, things are getting missed. We’re finding that you have this vision of where you’re wanting to drive your business, move your business forward. And there are tasks and actions that are really essential for that to happen. But your team are just not quite getting it. How to stop and think about have you actually explored or created a way that you each know what is the location that you like to communicate. So for instance, I love voice messages. I love voice messages. So my tool of choice for communicating with my team and my clients is WhatsApp. So that’s the general day to day I have a question what’s what’s going on here, general updates, general connection chatter, we use WhatsApp. Whereas for more projects specific task, action specific items and updates, we do all of that communication and clickup.

So you can see there the different intentions. So I know that if I we’re, if I want an update on something, if I’m looking to see where we’re at, for instance, this podcast production, all of our podcast production is beautifully designed and managed in clickup. By my team, I have the fabulous Cass who does all our editing from ECO ASSIST and then I’ve got Brooke as well from Audacious Empires who helps with all the admin and getting all of my guests welcomed in and ready to rock and roll and obviously all the beautiful social posts as well.

There are a lot’s of moving pieces. We have guest invitations going in and out. We have information coming in, we’ve got question, our guest questions that we created a document and clickup. Then there’s the actual podcast recording, has there been a time booked in the diary and do we have that noted on our calendar. Also, once we actually done the recording, there’s a whole series of things that happens that Cass managers with the editing and the creation and all of that, and then the follow on as well with our social media and sharing that information in our newsletter each week. Lots of moving parts. You can see how easily things could get misplaced if we’re not looking and understanding where each of us are communicating. So anything to do with the podcast we communicate in our podcast list in clickup in the individual tasks that’s allocated for the planning of that episode. So if I go in there and I go in and I check what’s happening look forward our schedule. Really exciting. We’re all scheduled up past may now actually, which is fabulous. Got things in the works. I can go in and see okay, these are the tasks where we’ve actually invited some guests but we haven’t heard back from them yet. So we can actually go and I can add a comment in there. Hey, Brooke, can you please follow up on this fabulous guests we haven’t heard back from them yet. We haven’t got a booking in the system. So she knows then notification pops up in clickup off she goes emails directly from the task in clickup. So again, then if I pop in, I can see, okay, we’ve contacted them a couple of times, maybe they’re not getting the emails, or maybe they’re not interested anymore. Either way, that’s probably time for me to personally reach out and be like, hey, you still interested to come and join me on the podcast.

The other thing as well is the general day to day of the communication there, if once Cass has gone through and edited and the files ready to go, she actually updates the status. So we now know that the next part of our process is unlocked, that dependency is unlocked, and we’re ready to do post production admin. That’s when Brooke comes in and works her magic and makes it all beautiful, which are the posts that you see out on the socials.

Just interrupting this episode for one little message, if you have been listening and love what you hear and want to come in connect, we have a Take Control with Nicole Facebook community right over there on Facebook that I would love to invite you to come and join us. We are a supportive community, we are looking to really take action in our businesses and change the way or evolve the way we’re working right now. So I invite you to come on over and join our community and connect with us all. Community is the essence of everything in business, being able to really build those relationships that you can nurture, and grow and support and celebrate each other. Oh, how fabulous, I hope to see you over there, pop on over to Facebook, Take Control with Nicole , see you soon.

If that wasn’t clear, we could have messages going all over the place, things missed. The process itself feeling really clunky, me not knowing if guests have been invited or if I’ve invited them or if they’ve gone from this email, or that. Everything is central, we know that that is the location for all of that conversation. So when we’re thinking about our communication plans, and our strategies as a whole, really design them with purposeful intent. So this way, when especially we’re communicating with those really key important people in our world, our clients, our team, our family, we all know that this is the way that you’re going to get hold of me so that you can have your questions heard, or we have that conversation. And it’s really easy to then locate that information in the future. You know, you’ve had that conversation about and I’m planning, you know, by the time this episode comes out, we would have actually, no, we’re going away on at this weekend.

We are going away for Simon’s 40th birthday. And there’s a lot of planning, we’ve got you know, 15 plus adults and kids and going away to this beautiful property and lots of coordination. There’s lots of things that I’m trying to pull together. But I have a space, I created a Facebook chat for all of the people that are coming because that Facebook is my way of personal communication when it’s a group setting like that. I also use WhatsApp for a different purpose. They’re more business focused conversations. So really identifying I know where I’m going for the different purpose for conversations that we are creating in our worlds.

Applying that back into your business, you can see if you have that structure in place, you set those guidelines up, when you start working with your clients or you start working with a new team member, it’s really clear so they know how they can actually communicate with you. And when they would expect a response. Also, you may have things even in your world in your business that could be urgent. Now, I really encourage the don’t reply directly to messages or emails, if it’s not in alignment with where your focus is right now. However, sometimes there are those things that are really critically urgent for whatever it might be. So what is your method there to really highlight that that is an urgent action that needs to be responded to, how do we communicate that. Primarily that will be within your team, to make sure that you as a business owner, as a leader are really giving and supporting your team to do the best job that they can so that’s going to support your business to continue to grow and develop and be wherever you’re heading.

So when you’re thinking about this, take a moment to think about the communication in your business right now. What’s working, what’s not? Where are those friction points and those gaps that you’re starting to experience? As you’re growing your team as you’re growing your client base, these things all evolve, as we always speak about every step of your journey, you learn new things, you realise that there’s something missing. What are those little gaps, those friction points that you can actually start to design a solution that’s going to be able to be clear and easily communicated and accessible for all of the people in your world. Well, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and enjoy creating space and time freedom by now.

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure having you on board. Have we connected on social shares yet? If not, please come on over say hi, I’m on all the platforms @theartisansolutions. So I’d really look forward to seeing you over there. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to tag me and I’d love it if you could leave a review. And of course, share this with others so others can come and join us next time. Alright, then everyone have a fabulous rest of the week, and until next time, see then.