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Business Workflow System for Creative Entrepreneurs

Feb 18

Are you feeling overwhelmed by your small business—juggling clients, projects, endless emails, and never ending to-do list… just praying that you don’t miss anything important? Sounds like you need a business workflow system!

By the end of this video you’ll know how to set up the workflow and systems you need to make sure everything gets done, on time—and you keep all those clients happy!

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Are you experiencing Entrepreneur overwhelm as your business workflows can't keep up with your growing workload? This video is for you! Watch now to learn business workflow for beginners including business workflow automation, business workflow software, and business workflow systems to help take some of the strain off your shoulders! #businessworkflow #creativeentrepreneur #productivity #moriahriona

What is a Business Workflow System?

As you know, I LOVE helping female entrepreneurs build not just brands, but LUXURY brands—and a big part of having a luxury brand is creating a flawless luxury experience for your clients.

And that’s why I LOVE talking about business workflow systems.

Now, at first glance, the two might not seem related. But your client experience and workflow systems are actually two sides of the same coin.

So, let’s actually chat about your brand experience (or client experience) first.

I’ve got several videos dedicated to helping you craft a stellar brand experience including this one: Luxury Experience: How To Build Brand Loyalty For Your Small Business In 3 Steps so be sure to check that out!

Why Client Experience Matters

But here’s a quick recap: Your client experience is the culmination of all the individual client touchpoints or interactions that a customer or potential customer will have with your brand.

This includes everything from initial exposure to your brand/creating brand awareness (like a potential client discovers you on Instagram) through the process of connecting with you, booking with you, working with you, and then becoming a former or returning client.

A well executed brand experience has the potential to turn clients into your biggest cheerleaders and promoters, allowing you to consistently book ideal clients at premium prices.

So yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.

But here’s the catch—you’ve already got a client experience established in your business whether you know it or not. But a great client experience doesn’t just happen—it’s very carefully crafted.

Now, knowing how important your client experience is (and the impact it can have on the future of your business), you can understand why it’s vital that you are consciously curating that experience—and not ‘just letting it happen.’

How Business Workflow Systems and Client Experience Work Together

So, now that we’ve talked about your client experience, let’s discuss your business workflow system—and what those two things have in common.

Your client experience is the outward facing system that takes clients through the process of working with you.

Your business workflows are the internal systems that help processes (like your client experience) run flawlessly on repeat (and also help to make your life easier in the process).

You’ll most likely have multiple workflows in your business. For example these may include:

  • Marketing workflow
  • Client onboarding workflow
  • Project workflows
  • Client off-boarding workflow

I have all of these workflows in my business. And when you look closely—you’ll notice that they all coincide with the various stages of my client experience:

  • Marketing workflow – a client’s initial exposure to brand/creating brand awareness
  • Client onboarding workflow – the booking process and how I set the stage for a one-of-a kind luxury branding experience
  • Project workflows – the actual process of working with my clients one-on-one (various workflows for various types of projects)
  • Client off-boarding workflow – moving my client from active status to former or returning client

Now, of course this is not a comprehensive list of the various workflows you may have in your business—and there are certain workflows that will likely have little to nothing to do with your actual client experience.

But here are a few reasons why you’ll want to create workflows in your business…

Why Workflows are Important for your Business

Workflows Create and Support Consistency in Your Business

If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know where I stand on consistency—it’s one of the most important qualities you can create for your business and your brand.

Consistency shows your audience that you’re that you can be trusted. You’re reliable and will deliver on the promises you’ve made.

Being inconsistent, in even seemingly innocuous ways can do irreparable harm to your brand. 

Just imagine forgetting to send an important email to a client or being late to a meeting (or missing it all together).

Actions like that make you seem untrustworthy to clients—which means that they will suddenly be questioning the money they’ve paid for your services, and feel like you’re no longer worth the price.

To avoid mishaps and misunderstandings like that—and to promote consistency in general, across your entire brand, you need to implement business workflow systems. 

Business Workflow Systems Promote Productivity and Save Time

Now, I think some people would argue that workflows are the less sexy side of your brand experience.

As a designer and brand strategist myself, I love the power of a beautifully crafted brand experience—especially because it includes all of my favorite service offerings, like your logo and brand design, website design, and more.

However, I am one of those weird people who also loves organization, productivity, and time management—so I think a well crafted workflow is pretty sexy too.

Regardless of whether you love workflows or hate them, there is no denying that they will help you be more productive, save your precious time, and help you make more money over time—and I think that’s a pretty great ROI

Workflows Promote Scalability

I’ve definitely been dealing with this in my own business over the last year.

At the beginning of 2020 I shared with you that one of my goals for the year was to start to grow my team—and I have been doing that!

I’ve currently got several contractors working in my business—including a Virtual Assistant which has been amazing—and it’s helped me grow and accomplish so much more.

However, this change has not been without some growing pains—namely my workflows.

The thing is, I already have well established workflows in various aspects of my business. I have a very certain way I like to do things and provide a superior experience to my clients and I’ve established the workflows to make that happen.

The problem is, I’ve been a solo entrepreneur for so long, that all of those workflows and processes have existed (until very recently) almost exclusively inside my own brain.

And that’s very hard to hand off to my team to get their help.

So we’ve been working together over the last year to take those workflows and process and write them down step by step—so they can be handed off and handled by other people, like my VA.

If I could go back and tell my younger entrepreneur self one thing, it would be to start getting those workflow steps on paper early on—it definitely would have made this whole transition (and scaling my business in general) much easier. But c’est la vie!

Comment below—what’s one area of your business that definitely needs a solid workflow system?

How to Create Your Own Business Workflow System

No matter where you’re at in your own business journey—it’s never too late (or too early!) to start crafting your business workflow systems.

ACTION STEP: Grab a pen and paper—or open up Google docs—and craft a workflow for one area of your business.

For example, maybe you want to start with your Client Onboarding process (or the workflow you use to bring new clients into your business).

Lucky you—I’ve got a video to help you with just that: Client Onboarding: 4 Things You Need To Do Immediately After Booking A New Client

But before you watch that—take a second to write down your own workflow.

Write out each step you do in that process on a new line (and it doesn’t have to be in order).

Then assess your current workflow and ask yourself, is there anything you’d like to add, change, or take away completely?

Once you’ve written everything down, you can go back and order the steps first to last. Now you’ve got your first business workflow—out of your brain and on paper!

Project Management Software

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about using a project management software to track and maintain your business workflows. These are applications like Trello, Asana, Basecamp—or even Client Management Software, like Dubsado (which I use and LOVE!)—where you can essentially build lists with additional functionality to help you track the status, delegate tasks, and much more.

Honestly, I’ve used both Trello and Asana—and I do still use Dubsado as my CRM (to include pieces of my workflows).

But to me, especially in my business right now, with a small team, I still love the simplicity of a list in Google Docs.

In the future I do plan to incorporate a dedicated Project Management software into our workflows—it’s just not a priority right now. And because we have our Google Docs lists, I’m able to hand those off to my VA—and she translates them into Trello for me—which saves me a ton of time!

If you want to learn more about Trello and how you can use it in your small business—you have to check out this interview I did with Operations Expert, Mariah of Bloom Hustle Grow

Now you know how to set up the business workflow systems you need to provide an exceptional luxury experience to your clients every single time! But what about the rest of your brand? 

If you’re wondering how to start attracting high end clients then you have to check out my free 20-page guide: The Brand BluePrint.

Wanna learn more of my favorite productivity tips to help you run a successful business? Be sure to Subscribe to my YouTube channel.


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