Episode 291: Why you need to be templating
In this episode, Fiona talks about the importance of using templates in business and outlines five reasons why they are beneficial. Fiona also shares her experiences and how using templates helped her to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Five reasons why you should start templating in your business
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 291 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today, it is a quick tip episode, and that's where I share a tip, tool, or tactic that you can implement immediately in your business. And today it is an important one because this will save you time, it'll save you sanity. Believe me, it has changed things in our business. We've been doing this for years, but when we don't do it, do we feel the effects hardcore? You want to stick around for that. Before I get stuck, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land on which I work and play and record this, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that today is officially the last My Daily Business Coach podcast. Before you stress out and they're like, we're not going anywhere, we are just changing our name. As of the next recording, we'll be using that name, which is very similar. Lots of people will be like, why have you been talking about this rebrand? It's not that different, but for us internally, it is different and it has meant a lot of work. Look out for that. We are not going anywhere. We will still be one of your favourite small business podcasts, but we will be having a slight name change. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
For this particular episode, I want to give you a little bit of context. Years and years ago, I worked at one of the biggest online retailers in the world. I think they are probably the biggest in terms of volume and money, I guess, or financials. Outside of that, one of the best things that they implemented was templates for everything. In one case, we had a PDP, a product detail page, PDP template. This is at least 10 years ago now. If you can guess who I'm talking about, it may well have changed, but we had a PDP template, which meant that for every single product page, this particular retailer at that time in the country that I was in, had about 16 million products.
For every single product page, we needed to have certain things ticked. You had to have the name and the name had to be in a particular file name so that you know that it was brand, product, category, colour, like it was these certain things in that order. You had to have that. You had to have the price, you had to have, if there was skew, like variations. If you could get different colourways and stuff. And then you had things like the five feature bullet point at the top, then you had benefits, a paragraph, and so on and you wanted to have reviews at the bottom. The reason that we had this template was that if something was updated if someone decided that this would be better if we did this or that, or they'd more likely tested it, and the data had told us that people buy more, if you focus on this part of the product detail page, it could easily be changed throughout the whole company.
In different teams, it wouldn't matter what product you were listing, it could be changed and it could be changed easily and effectively. I think this is where today's topic comes into play, because templates are so important, particularly if you're running a small business and your time is even cut short than bigger businesses that may have more resources and more people. Today I wanted to talk about five reasons why you want to start templating if you haven't already. To me, templates are just part and parcel of business because we've been doing it for so long. We still have things that we could be doing better in that regard, but I always think if I have to do this more than once, and more than twice, there has to be a template for it because it's going to come up again and again in business.
I'm going to walk through five reasons why you want to start using templates or improving your templates if you're already using them. The first that I just mentioned before when I was talking about that big retailer is consistency. It allows you to have a level of consistency across whatever you're doing. Let's say you have a template as I mentioned, a product detail page. Every time you are adding a new product, instead of starting from scratch and thinking, what am I going to say about this? And should I include the specs on this? Or should I include the weight on this, or should I not? Or where to start? Instead, you'd be like, our descriptions add this many characters, our specs need to be filled in, and this needs to be put in. Maybe you're selling internationally, you're like, we have to have the US version and the British version, or whatever it is put in.
For example, I know in the US they use ounces when they're buying things like a can of Coke versus here in Australia we use millilitres. There are all those things. Let’s say you're selling drink bottles, it's like ticking these things off so that you're not having one page that incorporates everything and is getting a higher conversion rate than another page that is sloppy or it's a bit ad hoc. That's the first one. Consistency. And it can be a template. Maybe it's a template for some of the emails that you send out. Maybe it's a template for podcast questions that you send out or interview questions that you send out for a blog. Of course, you can tweak the template. It's not that everyone is cookie-cutter, but that you have something to start from and that it's consistent across all different touchpoints.
The second, and it goes with the first, is that it reduces time. When you have a template, you're not starting from scratch, you're not sitting at a computer looking at a screen thinking, where do I even begin with this one? It allows you a structured framework to literally work through like a checklist. Like, okay, have we done that? And it reduces time massively. And like I said at the start if you're a small business owner, chances are you might have a couple of staff, but everyone is quite busy. If you can reduce the time by having things templated, it just helps so much in the long run. Also, it is great when you are onboarding staff, even if you just work for yourself, but you're thinking in the next year or, you might hire an admin person or somebody else into the team or a copywriter.
You have a place for them to start and you have a way for them to grow and you're setting them up for success, which is such an important part of having staff. The third one is it's easy to update. If you have one template, it is easy to update as opposed to if you have 10 different ways of doing something because you had other copywriters come in, or in the instance of a product detail page, you have different pages that were put up a year ago that you wrote yourself, and then you've got a copywriter. And those are a bit different and then now you're doing it again, or you've hired somebody in-house. It can be a real mess to start with. You want to have a template that is easy to update. If something comes up where you think, we need to start adding more videos, or we've gone and got more professional shots, we need to update the template with what that looks like, you can, and you can just update once.
Rather than going, we have to update all 200 of our listings and ask skews that are on a, for example, e-commerce site. Likewise, let's say you are in a service-based business and maybe you are an interior designer or a photographer or something. You have an onboarding template for all clients to go through, which is going to save you so much time versus having to start from scratch with every single client and maybe miss a couple of quick key important questions that then you only realize you've missed them later down the track. Whereas if you have a template and it could look like a Google Form for people to fill out before they start working with you, it could look like something you have on an iPad, like a questionnaire that you go into a consultation with, and you can fill that in as you go.
And just knowing that if you've had a stressful day or something else is going on in your personal life, you won't forget the most important things you need to cover for that particular job. Super easy to update. The other thing that's good, especially if you've got a big team or you have lots of different remote people working on things, is that with one template you can have a lot of ideas. Can we put it into that as opposed to having people go, I think we should do it this way. No, I've got an idea, or I thought this, or maybe the place I worked at did it like this. You have all these different ideas, whereas if you have a template, you have a starting point and you can say, okay, that actually is a good idea.
Why don't we tweak what's in the template to include that? Or we had that on our past template and it didn't work. But you're allowed to take in lots of different people's ideas into one document or one, however, you've put it into Notion or Asana or whatever you have. You can take lots of people's ideas and implement them into one thing as opposed to what often happens in bigger companies, lots of different people doing it in their own way, it'd never be templated. And then people move on from that role and you've gotta start all over again. Lots of ideas can be put into one template.
And then the fifth one, which wraps everything up is that it reduces the risk of errors like I said before, maybe you've had a stressful time and you go out for a consultation and your mind is just not working in firing on all cylinders as they say. You're forgetting to ask a really important question. If you have that questionnaire templated or if you have your onboarding process templated, chances are you're not going to forget that part. We have a lot of our group coaching stuff templated, and Yricka, my assistant, is fantastic. She was able to then just take a whole bunch of things and we launched group coaching recently, and I'm excited to start with these people, such an amazing group. She was able to take the template and set everything up in the backend quickly. And also we didn't have errors where as we have had errors a few years ago when we started doing this because we didn't have a template. And it was like, we asked that person to send in that information, but we didn't ask the other people to send in that information and now we have to go back and it's messy and it's like, trying to keep track of who sent in what in the onboarding process. Having that template has really reduced the errors that we have seen years ago when we didn't have a templated.
Just to recap the five reasons, and of course, there are many other reasons for this, but the five reasons to start templating if you haven't already, or to improve your templates and go back. And that's the thing about templates, they should always be looked at. It's not a set-and-forget, they should always be reviewed and improved. It's like consistently, what do you call continual improvement? The five key reasons why you need to do this are number one, consistency. Number two, reduce your time. Number three, they are very easy to update. Number four, lots of people can have an idea and it can all be put into one thing. And number five, you reduce the risk of errors.
If you need help with this, this is the stuff that we go through in our coaching. We have availability, I think in May and onwards for 2023. If you're interested in that, get on over to your email and you can email us at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you in the very next episode.
