BIG mistakes I made trying to automate all of the things in my business

(You can learn from my stoopidness 😅)

Hello and welcome to automation lessons from an idiot. This post is also available as a video, and I’ve added an audio thingie above in case you hate reading.

I’m sharing aaaall of the things I did wrong, so you can avoid them. And I've learned all of the automation stuff the hard way (the stupid way). You’re welcome!

The automation I'm talking about using here is a thing called Dubsado.

Urghhhhh, where do I begin?

OK.

Lesson #1.

Dubsado is a CRM

Lesson #2.

CRM stands for "‘client relationship manager’

…and what that means is basically when somebody gets in touch with you for work, it puts them into like a magical database.

Stuff you can see

• when they got in touch

• who they are

• what their email address is

• their favourite ice cream flavour*

*Not really. But if I wanted to have that info in there, I could.

Your CRM stores all that information. I use Dubsado, but there are loads of other ones now there's like Bloom, Honey Book, 17 hats, Studio Ninja DID I MENTION THERE ARE LOADS?

The reason I started using Dubsado was because I found out I was expecting a baby and my big goal was to set this fancy CRM up, take maternity leave, and know that my business would be magically ticking over in the background while I ignored it. I didn’t want to have to hire anybody. I just wanted the robots to look after stuff for me. Alas, it didn't really turn out that way.

So yes, I find out I'm pregnant and think, ‘oh no I can't keep doing all this admin stuff’.

All This Admin Stuff

• creating contracts

• invoices

• following up with clients

• remembering to be a good business human, while also growing a human

• answer my emails

• reassure clients that I exist and haven’t forgotten about them before the event

• repeatedly tell clients the same things until I die of boredom and go back to working in retail (just kidding but also UGHHH)

I took an online course called Dubsado Rockstar by Rae Targos (it’s a great course! I have an affiliate link here) and very quickly realised…

“OH NO. HELP. This is impossible. I don't have time for this. I'm trying to create time, not devote 8 hours a day to figuring out WTF a workflow even is.”

So anyway I get halfway through this (very good, just not great for me, a panicking 6-month pregnant easily-distracted mess) course, set some things up, and then I find a nice American lady called Cait Potter who specialises in dubsado setups.

The foundation work that I’d done in the Dubsado Rockstar course really helped me to lay out my work flows and decide on my boundaries as a business owner. I like to think Cait was really impressed with me. Ha.

Boundaries Dubsado Forced me to Implement (thanks, robots)

• when I wanted them to contact me

• what was okay

• what was not okay

• what kind of payment terms I wanted

• what information I needed from them

I felt really prepared. It was nice.

WTF is a workflow, Katie?

A workflow is **this** —> a client gets in touch, you say ‘hello lovely to hear from you I want to know more details’ and then you get the details, give them a quote and then they decide whether or not they want to work with you.

That whole paragraph up there = an initial enquiry workflow.

Your next workflow might be whatever happens after they've said ‘yes please, take my money’.

It is so helpful to think about your work in terms of workflows. Having everything laid out nicely feels very nice and streamlined. Before automation was ever in my head I'd spent a couple of years really nailing down my ways of working so that it was quite a predictable formula and I had forms to send to clients. Everything was a bit sellotaped together and DIY, so putting all of that into Dubsado felt great.

Cait was brilliant - she turned my scribbles into real life Dubsado workflows and they were SO AUTOMATIC IT WAS MAGICAL.

Enter… mistake number 1!

I thought Dubsado would just run my business for me.

I’m still so sad that this isn’t the case 😆 The robots did not live up to my very very very high expectations.

Dubsado isn’t an employee, it’s like having somebody on your team who’s helpful, keen, and organised but has absolutely ZERO common sense.

Dubsado knows it's 3 days before the event so it thinks “IT’S YOUR EVENT IN THREE DAYS I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOUR EVENT SEE YOU IN THREE DAYS”.

Whereas a human would be like, “oh we just spoke to them - it’ll be a bit weird if we send that email. Let’s wait ‘til the day before.”

The main lesson I took from this was to be more in control of the automation. You can set Dubsado to prod you, so the enthusiastic organised robot tells you things, and then you can use your human brain to do the common sense part.

With my initial setup absolutely *everything* was automatic. Once the client got in touch it was a domino chain of events, which meant there a lot of mistakes and weird wonky stuff.

Nowadays I let the robots do much less, but I do let them help me.

I created a signature to warn clients about robot-Katie. This way, they know I’m using automation for their benefit (so that everyone gets the same level of service!) Because of my current set up, I very rarely forget things, everything's all organised but this signature is also a big “please be nice to me if anything goes wrong” sign.

And heeeere’s why I needed a sign like that.

It was a nice calm Saturday morning last summer. The baby was very little - a tiny squishy newborn - and I was feeding her in the bedroom and *terrible habit* I had a cheeky little browse of my emails on my phone.

As I scanned the emails my heart just went FLEURHGHH. Oh no. There was a client in my inbox and he was absolutely furious that I’d been sending him invoice payment reminders on a Saturday morning.

Disclaimer: I was not sending invoice reminders on a Saturday morning.
We have robot-Katie to thank for that.

Unfortunately, you can't tell the robots not to work on Saturdays or Sundays.

Anyway, this man was Angry and his chain of furious emails upset me so much that I switched off Dubsado completely. I shut it all down even though I’d just recently paid £££ to have it all set up.

I didn’t want to upset clients, and I definitely didn’t want angry emails in my inbox like that while I had a tiny baby to look after.

Byeee, automation. You suck.

IT’S OVER. GOOD DAY, SIR.

And that, my friend, was a mistake.

I waited over a full year to even reconsider using Dubsado. For a while I still used it as a contact form on my website, but then I realised I was paying £30 a month for nowt, so I fully switched it off and went back to my freebie Squarespace form.

That is until Josephine Owusu gave me a pep talk/friendly kick up the bum.

I was really lucky to win a six month business strategy coaching package with Josephine and it has been amazing.

On our first call together she was looking through everything I’d written and she was like “okay what's this about the automation? It says here you paid somebody to set this up and you’re not using it? Why!?”

With Josephine’s cheering on I brain-dumped a big list of all the things that were stopping me from using Dubsado, and emailed it to Cait Potter. I was sure she’d reply with “ARE YOU STUPID? GO AWAY.”

But she actually got back to me really quickly, set up a 90 minute call and fixed everythingggg. All of it!

After that, I was able to switch all of the automation back on and this time I felt like knew what I was doing.

My mistake there was thinking it was ‘set it up and leave it forever’. Nah. You’ve got to tweak it, and keep using it so that you remember how to do the things.

I think because I had a baby in between I just forgot everything. RIP my brain cells.

The next mistake I made is a really good one.

Everything was back up and running. I'd been tweaking things, making the workflows *just* right, and we were on holiday. I was fiddling about looking at the different sections of Dubsado where I discovered this new task list I’d never noticed before. There were about 250 tasks on it and I thought ‘Ooh, I'm just going to tick all of these off to clean them up.’ I remember thinking it was taking ages, but I was determined and I clicked my way through all 250+ ticky boxes.

An evening on holiday well spent.

I woke up to 260 new emails, and the most recent one was from somebody I’d not spoken to since 2021 saying, “Hi Katie, errr why have you sent me a proposal?”

Oh.

Dearie.

Me.

I was panicking so much - I emailed my VA Emma (who told me not to panic), then I panic-messaged Cait Potter who reassured me that it couldn’t have been Dubsado’s fault because it’s not designed for mass-emailing.

Then how had I managed to send 260 emails manually without noticing?!?

Turns out that every time I ticked a box I was telling Dubsado to do an action (in this case, send a proposal to a client. Even if that client hadn’t been in touch for years. LOL.)

It was very stressful. But it’s funny now.

And also, thanks to my magical new ‘please be nice to me’ email signature, nobody was furious. Only a handful of people even replied. And one of them wanted to book me again for another job! Result! It turned into an advert. Ha!

In summary, when it works it's amazing. I send the client their beautiful proposal, they just pop their details in, sign their contract, and pay their invoice.

In minutes.

While I eat snacks lying down, or drive a tiny yellow bus all over my toddler’s squishy legs and arms (it’s a very important and serious game, ok?)

When the automation works smoothly it blows my mind. Stuff that would have taken me days or weeks of back and forth is just…done!?

It's a tool at the end of the day. And you've got to use your own human brain with the tools. I knowww, so disappointing. I thought I was going to get a brain-holiday too.

I hope this has been helpful!

I’d love to know if you’re using any automation in your business and whether you’ve found any good hacks an’ that.

Byeee for now!

x Katie

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Stuff I mention:

Here's 20% off Dubsado for your first month or year!
Just use the code KATIEDRAWS

The Good Ship Illustration - The Business Course

Dubsado Rockstar (the course by Rae Targos)

Cait Potter
There's no magic link, but please do tell Cait I sent you if you’re getting a Dubsado set up / strategy thingie and you'll get special VIP treatment!
https://caitpotter.com/

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LET’S BE INTERNET FRIENDS

Instagram: @katiedraws

The Good Ship Illustration’s Instagram: @thegoodshipillustration

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