How do you figure out WHAT and HOW to automate your small business? Learn why you should always start with a manual process.
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Amanda: Okay. Great.
Nathan: Hey Amanda. How are you
Amanda: Hi Nathan. I’m good. How are you?
Nathan: Good.
Amanda: Good. What’s new? What did you do in the last 15 minutes since I saw you?
Nathan: I sat in on the bug meeting.
Amanda: What is it called, the study of bugs? Not insectology.
Nathan: Definitely not.
Amanda: Let me Google this. Oh, entomology. You know what? I almost said etymology, but then I was like, no, that’s the study of where words come from.
Nathan: Yes.
Amanda: Yes. Entomology, E N T O. This is a long winded way of getting to … just a bunch of entomologists over there.
Nathan: A very roundabout way, yeah.
Amanda: Well, before we even get into anything, I have two questions for you, but they’re both personal. How was the dentist?
Nathan: Super fun.
Amanda: How do you feel about your gray hair
Nathan: I have it. I don’t know
Amanda: Can I ask when you started going gray?
Nathan: It’s advanced considerably in the last four years
Amanda: I have a gray hair now, just one, but it’s right where I part my hair, I really like it. I’m waiting for more to go gray, but you can’t rush that process. You know?
Nathan: You’ve got a very healthy perspective.
Amanda: I also was really happy to turn 30 and I’m really excited about my gray hair. I just think that there’s something really beautiful and magical about getting older. And I am just always curious. How other people feel about those things.
Nathan: Yeah, yeah. I don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about what I definitely can’t change. I mean, it’s gonna happen. It’s not worth any effort to cover anything up anyway. And you’re not really fooling because not everything matches up, right? Like your face looks older and then, you have perfectly brown hair at 60. That also doesn’t really work.
Amanda: Yeah. All right. Well, cool. Do you want to ask me any personal questions?
Nathan: I didn’t come ready, but I’ll make sure that I record them when I do.
Amanda: Okay.
Coming off of our conversation from last week, we talked about agencies and why you should be saying no to certain opportunities because they don’t fit within your exact process. And you talked a little bit about how that process came to be, which was you were starting to wind down.
So you were like simple, simple, easy, something that fits into this cookie cutter model. And then you ended up being the most profitable you’ve ever been while working the least amount on it. My natural inclination is to talk about how you decided what tech to use to solve different problems.
Nathan: In general, I really love automation. I really love systems. I really love building out robust and scalable systems, but kind of to save myself from myself, I will often start with doing it manually. Do it with pencil and paper.
Do it in a spreadsheet as the first version so that you have the flexibility of being able to figure out what the ideal system could be. You really understand the problem better and know what to look for in your tool, like you’ll select a better tool once you understand your process more.
If you can’t document your process on paper with a flow chart, little boxes and arrows, or, you know, a bulleted list or a numbered list of the order of steps, you kind of have no hope of automating it. Or you will automate it, but then you’ll realize that you forgot some critical component. So doing something manually a few times, my favorite number is usually three.
Three different cases, three clients in a certain category, three projects that you project manage without project management software, three clients that you kind of run through your sales process before you actually have a CRM or a fixed process in place.
And then start looking for tools to solve the whole thing or just like one specific part of your problem to start speeding it up.
Amanda: Interesting. So you’re recommending figuring out your process before buying any tools?
Nathan: I don’t know if I’m officially recommending that or not.
I’m recommending no tool or just any tool at first, like not to get yourself into this comparison game where You’re looking at listicle blog posts and you’re looking up comparison head to head videos on YouTube and you’re doing like 30 hours of research and you have a spreadsheet with all the different options and their pricing and their limits and the number of reviews and ratings that they have. You will learn more from just doing the process in any tool, even if that’s no tool, like three times.
So if, if you’re not sure what tool to pick, like. Choose no tool and do it on pencil and paper or a spreadsheet or choose just the most popular tool that has the most generous. free trial, like the industry standard and just don’t spend a ton of time on that decision.
And then you’re only doing like three things in it, so you’re not heavily embedded in those systems then you can make a much more informed decision.
Amanda: Yeah. Can I ask you another personal question?
Nathan: Sure. Is this one going in?
Amanda: Yeah, this one’s going in. When you were first starting off NSquared with Natalie Mac and you were working on it only a couple hours a week, can you take me back to that time and place and talk about: did you have any systems or how you started implementing systems or implementing at that point in time when things were like brand new?
Nathan: Yeah. As we were very first working together, we just decided we both had web agencies. We both had other things going on. We decided to just meet up at Coffee Bean, our local coffee shop, and we would just work for four hours a week, um, just on this new plugin idea that we had, which is Draw Attention, which is our first WordPress plugin that we built together. But I had had previous plugin ideas that I had built. And so I had them on my agency website at the time, and I had already set up the e-commerce system and the licensing and you could, credit card and get the download and get the license key and do the updates.
I’d already done all of that infrastructure set up. So the first three months, six months, it was actually on my agency website. I had a products page and I had four or five other plugins and we put Draw Attention right up alongside there and it had a product page on my site. So we just. Started very simple. The simplest thing we could do is, well, this may not be the right project or we may not like working with each other. So we shouldn’t spend the first, you know, two months building a marketing website and building the e-commerce system and recreating all of the stuff.
Like we’ll just use the simplest thing we have, which is, my website. Just because the biggest risk is that the idea was wrong or we weren’t the right team.
And so we got to discover that and discover that it was the right fit before we overly invested in the tools.
Amanda: What was the first tool you guys purchased?
Nathan: Support desk software was the first thing we bought.
Then, we’ve got a free plan on Slack and started aggregating notifications in there. Then we actually launched WPDrawAttention.com and built out a marketing site for that. And got a license for e-commerce software and all of that.
Amanda: Yeah. So it sounds like the first tools that you purchased were communications tools, Help Scout – communicating with customers, Slack – communicating with one another. Would you recommend that that’s where other companies start?
Nathan: I think it depends on the company, right? If you’re like a home services company, your first one might be like a CRM. Like you’re just trying to get leads and push them through and get people on site. So maybe you have some kind of dispatch software, a CRM and dispatch.
It depends on the team, and the company that you’re in, but wherever the bulk of your time is going, right?
Amanda: So in talking with both you and Natalie, I know that you’re KPI guy, like the metrics guy, the data guy, and you care a lot about, just the metrics tracking and BlinkMetrics is an example of how you like to automate processes. Do you think your philosophy or the way you approach organization differs from your co-founder Natalie?
Nathan: Natalie, my co-founder and I have different philosophies on how to run a business and when to do things when running a business. I’m just enough, just in time. And she is much more methodical. There’s, there’s benefits and downsides to both approaches.
I think trying a bunch of stuff with duct tape, there’s so much learning that happens from doing those things.
And freedom to make changes in the future, rather than tying your hands with the decision you made with little information. But sometimes that bites me. Sometimes, like I end up in this, unmanageable mess that I have to work my way out of, um, and Natalie will be much more methodical from this outset and evaluate the options and make a plan and make 10 steps of the plan and execute and it won’t be as stressful as you’re going through it. Um, but sometimes, we spend a lot of time on something that doesn’t work out, and it takes longer to figure that out.
Amanda: Hmm. So do you think if I ask the question of what tools do you need in place at the beginning of something, do you think Natalie would have a much different answer?
Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. Probably a different, different answer. She’s also very comfortable with processes as long as there’s a clear process. I’m fine operating with no process, or once we have the process, I want to bulldoze my way to complete automation as much as possible, so Natalie kind of forces me from the no process into the process.
And then I force her from the process into automation. And, we have some fun debates at various points, but in the end we get there.
Amanda: Yeah, there’s, there’s two personal examples I have, which is last week when you didn’t come to my 2:1 meeting, I finally learned that there is an agenda for those meetings after being here for over six months,
Nathan: I think I mentioned it. I’m pretty sure I must’ve mentioned it. She told me about that. I absolutely had to have mentioned it.
Amanda: I’ll be honest. It did not look familiar to me. That said, it’s possible that during my onboarding, which was incremental over a very long period of time, we talked about it or it was shown to me. The thing is in my meetings with you both, like we make it through, right. We get through the things I need to get through. And we had been doing probably 50 percent of what was on the agenda and that was good enough for me. I guess it also led to last quarter, my … I hesitate to call it a nervous breakdown because that sounds so intense. But when I was like, we need this information for the scorecards and how am I supposed to do the scorecards? And you’re like, what, like, why are you just telling me now? I was like, Oh, I guess if we had a process and I was saying week after week, this is blocked. This is blocked. This is blocked. Like maybe it would have led to no nervous breakdowns.
Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a benefit to the process. And you’re probably seeing that polar flip of mine with our CRM, with Pipedrive, like I’m fine operating with no process at all. Not even having a CRM once I decide to use a tool, I go really far into it, like taxonomizing and making sure that we have all the right fields that we can filter and slice by everything that we can extract out any piece of data that we want. That we can have as many automations in place and I can drag it to this stage and will automatically create follow up tasks, um, because I know that that creates the scalable systems that everybody can forget about.
The best, like standard operating procedure in a business is one that nobody has to ever even look up or think about. It’s like baked into the tools where you do the work, right? Like I don’t have to remember, Oh, when it hits this stage in the CRM, I need to go create an invoice and an estimate and send it over to the client.
Like you could have that in an SOP document in a Google doc somewhere and eventually that gets into people’s minds, but every new person has to learn that process and figure it out and remember it. And each person every day has to remember that process and. Not forget or not kind of create their own sub process.
But if you just build that into the tool, like as soon as it enters this stage, that task gets created or that estimate gets created and sent out automatically. I mean, everything happens faster. And when you’re building a company that’s growing, if things are going well in sales and marketing and it’s growing, like the company feels like the wheels are about to fall off and like.
Everybody’s just so overwhelmed and exhausted and confused because now you’ve got like 10 different balls in the air and you forget those steps and the standard operating procedure. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been victim to it myself many times. And so I will operate with no system, no process.
Okay. We’ll just throw things in Pipedrive. We’ll just throw them around in different columns. No rules, anything goes. Let’s just figure out how the tool works. Let’s figure out the edges of it, what it’s good at, like what it’s not good at. And then at a certain point I start refining and using that system then kind of prematurely.
Like then it kind of feels like. We went from no process to a ridiculous amount of process, like, overnight, like, uh, now there’s 16, you know, required custom fields and, you know, there’s 17 stages in this pipeline as it’s going across the board, um, but the benefit is then when those start to get filled in and all of a sudden we have, you know, You know, 10, 000 deals instead of 10, right?
Then the systems all still work, right? And you can see where everything is. And even if people are tired, even if you’re onboarding new people to help fill in the gaps, even if you’ve just forgotten the process, cause you’ve got 20 other things going on, you know, the system maintains all of that and, and, uh, implements your process for you that, you know, the sane and calm version of you created that process, In a better time and then it just gets implemented and nobody has any documents to maintain or read or forget.
Amanda: I hear you. And, you know, there has to be a fair amount of process, but then, I think you’d agree with this, enough leeway for variability and sort of unexpected circumstances. And, you know, you don’t want one missed meeting to break down an entire process, but you should have processes where that one meeting is important and it doesn’t get missed often.
You responded “no” to our podcast recording next week.
Nathan: Yeah, our, our many listeners will I’m sure have no idea that this is not a polished process internally yet.
Amanda: We’re getting there. I mean, we started a podcast and we’re incrementally getting better. Small increments, small, tiny, very small.
Nathan: Glacial. Glacial. I think we are getting way further than we ever would have if we just, thought about having a podcast and how we were going to disseminate all these different clips to different social media platforms. And if we were to map it all out, I think we would exhaust ourselves doing that.
We wouldn’t have any podcasts for many months. We might get so exhausted. We never do it at all. Then even if we did do it, we’d probably find out that like half of our plan was wrong. So, um, it wouldn’t actually be all that valuable.
Amanda: So we’re both saying that this very messy podcast is actually wonderful because at least it’s actually happening.
Nathan: It’s not accidental, incompetent chaos. Just intentional, deliberate chaos.
Amanda: I wouldn’t describe either one of us as incompetent. I’m sure plenty of people watching my video editing are like, “Nope, she’s incompetent.”
Nathan: No, it’s, it’s all intentional. This is the storm before the calm.
Amanda: You know, we were talking to a customer earlier and they were talking about how they enjoy working with small businesses because they move really quickly and they shift quickly and there’s a lot of. and passion that you don’t necessarily get at larger companies. And that’s why our customer likes working with small businesses, even though they work with businesses kind of across the board. Um, and I think we definitely fit the bill there.
Nathan: Yeah, definitely.
I think one example of my extreme over process and over automation projects was StagingPilot, which was the previous SaaS business that I ran for updating WordPress websites.
We were automating WordPress updates and that was something that I had done manually many, many times for a lot of sites, you know, when you’re an agency and constantly turning from one client to the next, one of the things that really helps build the business is building these kinds of maintenance and retainer plans.
So building a site, launching a site, typically there’s lots of mistakes that are made. You underestimate a lot of things that the profit margin on that is not usually the best, but then I would follow it up with a maintenance plan where for X hours a month we would work on their site, do all the WordPress plugin updates, which is a major deal any one of them could break your site. And so typically you make a staging. There’s a copy of it and then you do the updates there and then you click around all the pages and make sure that no page is totally broken as a result.
Then you go and do those updates on the live site. You do another quick check there as well. Um, he logged down what are the updates that I did so that you can show your client what you’ve done for them. Uh, you send them that report at the end of the month. Um, you’re also running tests to make sure that the functionality hasn’t broken.
Not that it just doesn’t look the same, but that your e-commerce system is still working, that the forms are still submitting. Um, so lots of testing in QA and I had done all of those steps manually. And then, started building scripts and automations to speed up individual pieces of that.
Like, okay, let’s make a copy of the site from a production site to a staging copy. And I’ll run a script for that. Cause that’s like a big, tedious ordeal every time. And then I’ll just write a little script that updates all the plugins on the staging site. So I don’t have to click there and go update, you know, 12 different things.
And then I’ll have it automatically record the versions and slowly piece by piece, we’re cutting out the most time consuming or error prone pieces. And then we would start making our process faster and faster. And then we ended up, of course, packaging all that up and turning it into the SaaS business because there’s lots of people who are maintaining WordPress sites who face these same issues.
So I kind of designed the process as what would I do if I had all the time in the world to do this the best way possible, I had my way, which was a balance of efficiency, but also safety. But then, well, if I had all the time in the world, I would probably not just check the homepage of the site.
I would check like 20 pages of the site and I would see if anything was off, even like, you know, one pixel. And then, you know, if time is no object, like I would update one plugin at a time instead of updating all 12, I would just update one and then I would check all 50 pages of the site exhaustively. Um, and then I would update the next plugin number two, and then I would do it again.
Because that way I can actually tell which plugin broke something rather than, you know, updating all of them at once. So with the power of automation, it really unlocks things that you wouldn’t even really consider possible because it’s so ridiculous to do manually. So you’re getting better coverage.
You’re getting it more consistently. Like you can run this stuff every day instead of like once a month when it was update time. You’re doing it granularly. So you get all this detail. You can automate the reporting and can automate all of these steps that don’t actually happen in reality.
Amanda: StagingPilot was acquired. Wasn’t it?
Nathan: Yeah. We sold to Pantheon who is a very workflow focused, built for agencies originally was their main target. Um, so they, they have an opinionated workflow that has a development and staging and production environments for every website. So it was a very good fit for StagingPilot to be acquired by them and rolled out to their portfolio of agency clients.
Amanda: Congratulations on being a successful SaaS seller. What do you say? Congrats on selling out? Did anyone say that to you?
Nathan: Yeah.
Amanda: Is it considered selling out?
Nathan: I don’t know. I, uh. That’s a whole nother podcast.
Amanda: Um, all right. Well, thank you, Nathan. This was great. Thanks so much.
Nathan: Thank you. See you very soon.
