Episode 93: What Can You Template in Your Small Business and Why It Can Help with Your Branding and Managing Time Better
In this quick tip episode, Fiona talks about how creating templates helps you be more efficient and effective and gives suggestions on what you can template from your systems and processes.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Creating templates
What can you template
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 93 of My Daily Business podcast.
Oh, my God, we are so close to 100 episodes. Oh, wow. Oh my goodness. I know I say this a lot on this podcast, and if you've been listening for some time, you would have heard it. Thank you so much for listening.
But yeah, if you are sitting on an idea in your business, just start like I cannot believe we're up to Episode 93 and yeah, I wish I had done this, you know, two or three years ago when I actually started the process and bought the intro track. But alas, I did it when I did it. But yeah, we're almost up to episode 100. So if you ask someone who's been listening to this and have found any of the episodes useful, I would love it so, so much, if you could just spend, you know, 10 seconds even leaving a quick review or even just hitting the stars. It really, really means a lot. It helps us get found.
And, yeah, just helps other small business owners out there hear these, you know, quick tip episodes, my longer coaching episodes and the interviews that we do with small business owners across the globe.
So today it is a quick tip episode, and that's where I tell you a tip, tool or tactic that's going to help you in your business and best of all, that you can implement immediately. So let's get stuck into today's Quick Tip episode. All right. So the tip that I'm talking about today is a tactic, and I guess you could say it's a tool as well. Yeah, it really kind of fits into all three. Oh, my goodness. Triple whammy.
It's really about helping you be more efficient and effective because it's not just about, oh, my gosh, I can get more done. It's like, what are you getting done and does that help your business?
So today I am talking about templates. This is something that if you work with me 1:1, you will know that I'm like, can we template that? Can we template that? Can we like that? And I often share my own templates with my clients. I'm like, this is what we've done.
You know, you might want to do something similar or you might want to tweak it or completely change it to suit whatever your business needs.
But templating saves so much time. And not just that, it actually really helps you build a consistent brand because it means that, you know, whatever your templating, whether it's graphics, whether it's email templates, whether it's different sequences or sales groups or anything else like that, it just means that the customer or the client, no matter where they find you, they're coming across the same information, the same visuals.
They're feeling just a really cohesive and consistent brand message that you're putting out there as your small business. Now, when I work with clients and I'm kind of like, you know, do template anything, they're a little bit either confused as to how could I template things or they do worry, especially because I work with so many just beautiful purpose-led creative business owners. They worry that it'll dilute the humanness or the humanity, I guess, of their brand.
So they'll say like, “Oh, no, you know, I don't want to be cookie cutter. I want to make sure that everyone feels that it's a personalised message.”
But what happens with that is that sometimes it can just be really inconsistent and also it's just not scalable. So if you're getting, say, a thousand, I don't know, new sign ups to a course or a thousand new members or even 100 new customers to something, say, you new e-commerce store, you just like you don't do not have time to write to every single one of those thousand people individually. And, you know, even if you did, is it the best use of your time? So what templating can do is help you scale the business. But also it means that if you bring on other people into your business, such as a virtual assistant, a copywriter or anything else, that's already kind of a foundation on which those people can work and do their job successfully.
So what you want to think about when it comes to templating is what do you do all the time? So what do you do? Like what do you find yourself sort of copying and pasting or, you know, going into Canva and cloning files or, you know, sort of suggesting to new staff as they come into your store to work like this is what we say. This is what we don't say. What's in your head, really, that needs to be documented so that the business can scale. That is often the first place of starting when it comes to templates.
Another great thing to think about when you're thinking about templating is to actually just track what you do over the course of a week and track how many times you're finding yourself going back to an old email, copying and pasting it and then putting it into a new one and kind of tweaking it. And with templates, I should say, it's not like this is the template. It's in concrete. You can always tweak it, especially when it comes to email templates. But what you want to do is have a foundation to work from. So you're not having to start from scratch each time.
Same thing with graphics. How often are you going into Canva or in design trying to find that graphic that you used for that event six months ago and replicating it rather than having a graphic suite of these are Instagram story tiles. These are Instagram post tiles in, you know, quote, cards. When we do an image, when we do text over an image, when we do a sale item. These are our graphics for presentations. These are graphic templates for, I don't know, packaging stickers, other stuff like that.
Now, after with small business owners at the start, you may not have had the budget to kind of employ a graphic designer to come up with a style guide and a suite of templates for you. And so that's where sometimes the inconsistency can start. And then we get so used to working like that that we don't even really see that it's really inefficient and sometimes ineffective as well.
So tracking yourself over a week and looking at where am I constantly kind of going back to copy something that I've done before, trying to find a file that we sent out, trying to recreate a PDF that we did, or a pitch where we kind of doing those things and could those potentially be templated?
The other thing to think about is are we doing things in the business in general that are just not effective? And one activity that you can do to kind of discover that is a start, stop, keep. I have one of these free on My Daily Business Coach website. We'll link to that. And you can find that plus a bunch of other stuff just at mydailybusinesscoach.com/freestuff. But in that starts to upkeep, which I have to shout out my friend attachés, who is the first person to introduce me to this. You really write down everything you do in the business and then you just tick. Should we start doing that? Maybe we're not doing it enough. Should we stop doing that or keep doing that? And so, again, just that exercise might uncover things that you think actually we should keep doing that. But we really need a template so that anyone in the business can, you know, create that thing.
Another thing that is really simple to template and people often don't do this. And again, this can be a big one when you scale and you start hiring other people is your social media template. So a template for social media might even just look like a response registry. So a response registry is really almost like a frequently asked questions document. So if you regularly get asked about the sizing of your items or maybe you're in the service industry and you regularly get regularly get asked, hey, do you work with, you know, X, Y, Z clients or do you work with people outside of your city or, you know, when are you next looking in people or just generic questions that you get asked a lot.
You can create a response registry which has that question and then an agreed response from the brand. So that might be something that you as the owner write up, or it could be that you've got a copywriter and they write it up and you just sort of worked up it until you're all in agreement. But it just allows, particularly when there's tricky questions that come up on social media, such as where are these clothes made or questions around. Yeah, ethical stuff. Moral stuff, who's behind the business? Just things like that. You want to, you know, not be putting so much pressure on, particularly if you're outsourcing some of your social media to, say, a virtual assistant or a junior marketing person, you want to always give them the tools to succeed in.
One of those might be a response, a response registry template, which is these are some tricky questions. Yet these are the agreed responses to say it could also be templates on social media for particular types of posts. It could be templates on social media for responding to people to kind of guide them into your email funnel. There's so many things that you can template and you don't want to again then make like ten thousand templates because that kind of negates the whole purpose. But you do want to look at how you could streamline things, what you could template to make a really consistent brand message, and then how are you going to document that stuff and get it out to your team or to the people that, you know, freelancers or other people that are working in the business? So everyone is aware of the templates.
Now, if you use certain email tools like we use front along with G suite, you can then take certain email templates and just put them in so that they're literally a click of the button and then they're there and then you can tweak them as needed.
So that is today's Quick Tip episode. Really, overall, the question to ask yourself is what can we template and to look at things that you're regularly doing again and again and again that really could become a template. And then second to that, making sure that everyone on the team is aware of those templates. Everyone agrees and is on the same page. So, again, that brand consistency really, really builds, regardless of whether someone comes into your store, whether they contact you on social media or they're getting an email from you.
Like I said before, one of those activities that you might start with is to track what you're doing each week or to do a start, stop, keep activity, both of which I have templates for. And you can find that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/freestuff. And of course, we'll link to that in the show notes and you'll find the show. I know it's over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/93. If you found this episode useful, I would love it if you could share it with a best friend. All right. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
