Okay. I believe we are live. Just going to give it a few seconds just to make sure everything's working. I think we are. Hello everyone. Good afternoon. This is Farzana from SF digital. I'm taking the Tuesday slots. We are now UK time, five o'clock and this is our Livestream that we do daily. For those of you that are new to our channel just to let you know that you should see a comments box, and if you do have any comments or questions throughout the presentation, please do put them up there and I'll hopefully keep an eye on, on the comments as well as I'm going through the slides for you.
For the regular viewers just to let you know, this is a Google Ads free zone, so you won't see Uzair on today's presentation, but of course, if you do have any Google Ads specific questions, please do enter them again in the comments section and of course, we will pick them up later and get back to you separately.
Just to make sure we've got all the correct details for you if we need them. Okay. So today's presentation is going to be on work smarter, not harder. Actually, this title was a strapline that we actually use for our product Foto SF, going way back I think it would have been 2006, 2007 when we first launched that.
It just seemed appropriate that should actually be the same strapline that we use today for our title. So moving to our presentation, the first snag of the day. The presentation is not moving along. Okay. So just to kick-off, today in our little town of Leighton Buzzard in Southern England, Bedfordshire, we had an earthquake of a tremor. I think 3.3, 3.5, 3.6.
As the news was going out, it seemed to increase by a point every time somebody else presented the news, but we're not going to let a little earthquake interrupt our presentation. We will go on, we will power through. You can see a huge disruption. We've had a few garbage cans, some bins going over but we're still here.
So welcome to my second YouTube live. This is session number 501 of our videos and as I say, our session is on work smarter, not harder. So I've taken a quick screenshot of my typical day yesterday. There are all sorts of things going on. There were builders deliveries, the garden is being pulled up, I had to get through my child's stuff, there was some training sessions going on, my own internal team meeting that takes place every Monday, follow-up meetings with the team, some of my other duties, up and coming duties, some meetings to do with that; as you can see, a full on-schedule and don't be deceived by those white gaps.
Dare there be a white gap. That's the time when I was dealing with other things, including each of the three children, having each of their separate issues that needed dealing with, other phone calls, ad hoc material, actually getting some work done in-between. It was a full-on day and I'm sure your days are too. I'm not unique in that.
We've all got to. We all get the same 24-hours and we've all got to max those out and work, you know, to obviously to give our very best to whatever we do. So where do we sit with this? Do we give our work and our day? Do we give it time? Do we give it money or do we give it energy?
Now? I'd like you to bear with me on this one. This is not from any book. This is not some teaching that I've had. It's just how I approach my day. So time and money, we normally equate that. I don't know about you, these last few months, more than ever has taught me that you've either got one or the other.
You rarely have the luxury of both. Certainly, there have been things over these last six months that I've wanted to do. I've not had the time to have any downtime or time to get bored in lockdown, but I've not had the time to be able to do some of those pleasurable things that I could have done in if I'd had the opportunity.
Now, one thing about money, you can probably get more money, but you never get time back. So if that moment is gone, It's gone forever. But coming back to why I've thrown energy into there is because I often get asked, how do you get so much done? How do you wear so many hats? How come you're doing so many different things?
Well, first of all, I, there are many things I say yes to, and I will tackle those with great energy. We will come to that in a moment. What people often don't see are the many things I also say no to, because actually, if you know that the cost of saying yes automatically to something, is that something else that's going to have to suffer, you do actually need to prioritise what you're going to say yes too.
That would be my first tip. Learn the power of the word 'No,' and it doesn't have to be aggressive or mean in any way. It's just an opportunity that you can just pass on and say, actually at this moment in time, I don't have the bandwidth, the capacity to take this on, or certainly happily review it but for now, it wouldn't be fair for me to commit to that.
It would be better to pass that on to somebody else. That's one way of moving on from things that maybe, could be time suckers, but the energy part, when I'm waiting what to say yes to, I actually measure it in how much energy I need to give that activity or task. Because if I go at it and accept it with positivity and with a willingness to do that task, then I will automatically give it great energy.
If I give it great energy, it won't take me half as long to get it done. It's when we start to do tasks begrudgingly. Because it's a bit of a drag. Suddenly that will take you much longer to do. So that's what I say, bear with me on this one and think about yourself. Try it as an exercise next time you're in that position of whether you accept something or not, and then wholeheartedly go out and do it and you'll find that you'll probably get through them much faster.
So that's my personal tip as to how to get through lots of different things. Lots of people forget that you know, you I've got lots of tasks as I've just shown you. I use my teams so they are helping me and supporting my work. They are working within the business. There are systems in place, but before you can get to that point, you actually need to know what the problem actually is and unfortunately, most business owners certainly that I speak to on a more informal level, normally when they've come to us for a marketing scenario that they want some help with, whether it's Google Ads or whether it's a website build which has become necessary because of the marketing strategy that they're trying to put into place, normally the problems are outside of the marketing.
They're normally frustrated by, you know, the many tasks that also need to happen. If you are a small business owner, that the list of tasks can be overwhelming, you're having to do probably pretty much everything yourself. The first thing you need to do is actually sit down and work out what the tasks actually really are. Now, over the years, we've used spreadsheets.
That's how life first started out. We moved on to developing our own software Foto SF. In those days we were photographers and we needed to be more organised. Certainly wasn't anything out in the public domain which systemised all the jobs that a photographer need to get done. It's not just invoicing or a task list, even things like scheduling somebody's wedding day.
There was no such system out there and there's a whole load of pre-production and post-production work that also needed to happen in that job. We then developed software and we came to a point, it was around about 2016 where increasingly software was going cloud-based, the app led and so on, and it's not somewhere we wanted to put our energy.
So we chose to let that graciously finish off and do what we needed to do. Still very proud of Foto SF. It's, it served us well. We sold it in the Apple store UK. We selling it in other channels as well but we just needed to move that on. Now Foto SF came about because primarily my background being in account management for big brands in the print industry.
To me, what was logical and needed to happen on jobs and still need to happen on jobs now as a digital marketing agency. It was common sense that we needed to systemise that. Hence it's really our two backgrounds that have allowed us to progress. Here we are today, in the interim from Foto SF, we've used Basecamp, Trello, other bits and pieces, Capsule, which is more a CRM system, but now we are at Asana.
We've been using Asana, I would say probably close to three years now. But in reality, Asana had become until March this year, a glorified list. Obviously, we're all capable of making list and so we started off thinking, here we go, well, we can start making some list so we can show our jobs. This is a screenshot of our old system where we used to list every single project.
Everything's got a project number and we would have inside here. There would be lists of tasks that need to be done for each project. Basically, we had all become a little bit complacent. There were about five people on the content creation and management side i.e. these videos that we're working on now but we'd all become a little bit lazy, a little bit fed.
We're waiting for the list. We're expecting someone to tell us what our task is by moving cards or projects into our column. If we didn't see it in our column, we weren't going to touch the job so we really needed to start unlocking the real power of a tool like Asana. We then decided we had to start using Asana properly.
This meant stripping back everything we had done, use that as a lesson, a learning lesson. Now instead of setting up jobs, as you just saw a board, which again, coming from a manufacturing background, Uzair and I are both used to seeing project cards or timecards that move along aboard as they get passed from department to department. Asana it gives you that option.
Do you want to set it up as a board? You want to set it up as a list. We went for the one that felt like a natural fit for us. However, on doing our research and a little bit of training and education, it soon became apparent that using a board is not actually an industry standard. Most industries, unless there is a quirk, will tend to go with list view and so we then had to go about... is a perfect opportunity to re-evaluate the processes we've actually set up.
As we were resetting up the board and each project we were able to then go back and actually analyse. Well, this person doing this list of tasks, are they really doing these tasks or have they just become inherited and almost static, irrelevant? There was a lot of work and actually that work continues today of constantly tweaking and reallocating and re-evaluating all the processes themselves.
Of course, then, that also highlighted that actually some of our team were probably not being used to their real correct potential and we as leading the team have continually asking our team, if there is something that you could see needs to be done differently, better, let's talk. This is a two-way process. It's not a dictatorship where we decide everything that's happening and you've just got to follow it.
By having that engagement with each team member, they do feel, I would like to think they feel a part of the process and feel the value of what they are doing. We don't have a machine that is made up of big cogs and little cogs. We are all equal cogs because anyone cog missing affects the whole process so it doesn't matter if you feel that, well, my task, you know, the staff member is feeling that their task is very, very small next to the next person.
We are all vital to the process and that is something I reiterate to my team very regularly. Of course, this is what I meant by saying that until you can delegate, outsource or systemise, you cannot get to the next stage of actually recruiting staff so we have taken on over these last few weeks. I think we're up to seven now, various members of the team, all specialists in what they do, but we've walked the walk.
Certainly the early days of, from sort of March and early April, when Uzair first gave me the delightful job of saying, "Can you take over all the video production management?" I've got enough going on because obviously, we didn't know how lockdown was going to pan out and what are, what our work commitment is going to be. I said, "Yeah, absolutely fine." However, that what that has made happen is that by being on the sharp end of every single task that I expect my team to do, I know exactly how long it takes.
I know what the systems are. We've already ironed out any bugs in the system so we're able to then recruit the staff and give them a task list. Now, ironically, using Asana to help our work. We're also using Asana to help train our staff. For example, I have a board which is for example, the content management team, there are about 11 of us now on that team.
Our job is only to deal with all the content marketing i.e. this live video that you are watching right now, this will get downloaded, transcribed, made into mini videos, re-uploaded, put onto social media, (and) put onto blog sites. There's a whole program of about 150 or so roughly tasks that up to 11 people are doing just on one video.
We're doing that on many, many videos. Hence we're at 501 today, and then of course implementation. The reason for going through the pain barrier, if you like of systemising the processes, looking at them, constantly adding those improvements is that we cannot implement a new system until we understand the process. It's really important that you've done that mapping out of your process and actually looked at then how you're going to implement, because if it's systemised, is actually much, much easier to then pass that on.
Because we have spent so much time checking the systems and making sure that everything's linking correctly, we are able to then pass that on very seamlessly. In fact, naturally being our day job, we actually make training videos for the team. We have a training library and they're very short, two, three minutes, and any member of staff can dip in, watch the training video.
If they've forgotten how to do something, they can quickly refresh their memory. They don't have to rely on necessarily going and asking me or whoever to actually explain things to them again. So we're really trying to use all of this technology to help our teams to the best possible level that we can. As I've already said, we adjust and tweak as we go along.
This is all a work in progress. I was taught a very valuable lesson, probably almost 30 years by one of my very senior bosses, which was you know, if it's commercially acceptable, it goes. So easy to procrastinate and sit back and wait for perfection but actually if it's ready to go, let it go. You can always make the adjustments as you go along.
So all of this work was going on in the background, but in the meantime, we weren't actually allowing any of our actual live work to suffer. We had to still make sure everything was going on. Today, six months on from where we started, we now have up to 11 departments of people, individuals, and multiple, sometimes working on every single video project.
So there are literally hundreds of videos on our list, and it's meant that by systemising things, we're now able to work faster, more efficiently, and in a more collaborative way, you know, letting the teal team feel engaged and take some ownership of their responsibilities and that the work that they're doing. I've got to say a big thanks to all my team members.
I won't list them individually. They have worked with us. They have listened. They've been patient. There have been so many tweaks to the system and they've done all of this in spite of their own, every single one of them, their own individual lockdown issues. Some of them are abroad. Some of them had particularly difficult circumstances and they've all, you know, threaded in and just done what we've needed to do.
Sometimes working on some, some very tight deadlines as changes have been happening so a shoutout to my team. Thank you so much for bearing with us. We've got some hard work ahead of us, but I'm sure it's going to be exciting. So today's projects, they look a bit like this. We are, as I've said, 501st video as this is a screenshot of a giant spreadsheet.
We have where every single job is listed and you can see on there that we are on 501, 8th September, and it's my topic. Going back to Asana, everything originates from a template which is again something we've now created. We didn't used to do that before and it was all very tedious to get to the next new job and on this screenshot that you're seeing, you're seeing some reds and some yellows so two different types of jobs have been colour coded.
You can see that list scrolls on forever and that's these are every single job numbers of videos just a screenshot of a small section and if we were to dive into any of those particular projects we would see a card which has been set up with various tasks allocated to different people. This is a test one without any dates in there but obviously, there would be dates allocated for tasks to be completed by.
You can see on the right-hand side there's Emily, Ruby, Maulik, myself, all different people. If you scroll down on the actual Asana you would see other individuals that all have their different sections. What's great about Asana is that yes we've got a straightforward tick here when a task is done but you've also got some great features like this one which is about approvals so for example if something is marked for approval, so Ruby needs to get this job card approved, it's set up for me to approve it, just to give it the once over and as soon as I approve it, it means the next person can then move on to their job.
It's quite a seamless process. It doesn't mean Ruby necessarily has to tell me that she has done her part, it's waiting for approval. I will see it in my own task list so it means that you can go in, check your task list, check your inbox there is an Asana inbox where people can make ad hoc comments and it means that the communication is all flowing.
I can see some comments coming up but I think they are in hand so i'm just going to carry on and I'll come back to the screen in a moment. Our videos this is just a quick screenshot of all the content that we are posting from, well, 31st of August. Right through to the 25th you will see there are two different jobs, reds and yellows going out.
On average we're anything from two to four per day. That's two to four videos per day going out on our youtube channel social media etc., and that's the kind of volume of output we're doing. This is not just you know one video when we feel like it, "Oh this week I forgot to do it!" This is all now streamlined for the team to follow.
Yes, there's flexibility in the system. We can move things if we need to but by planning and being organised, this is where we've been able to ramp up the scale and the speed at which we are working. Another great little feature within Asana is setting up recurring tasks so anything you can think of in our case we've put on invoicing, how to onboard clients, any work in progress reports, really easy to set up as you've already seen content scheduling and anything else you can think of.
If it's a boring repetitive task that needs to be done once it's ticked off for a particular day week or month and you need it to happen again you just set it up as recurring and you'll never forget a task again and you'll never forget to invoice a retainer or recurring invoicing because it will always be there.
The prompt will always be there. What else are we doing within Asana? Obviously, i've just talked very briefly on what the content management team are up to but we are replicating this systemisation across all our teams so there's the Google Ads account management team, there's the website building team for example, there's a graphic design team. There's a whole load of team building and systemisation that's still going on other areas and that's been a huge bonus during lockdown, especially for our client because when we're able to show them and actually, more importantly, behave in a systemized logical way, they have the confidence to know that their job can be trusted because we are looking after marketing campaigns for businesses and if the end-client, you know, if our client's customers are winning and getting the benefit then our clients winning.
If our are clients winning, we're winning so I see the success of our clients being our success and this is where we want to be different as a digital marketing agency. We want our clients to feel completely supported and nurtured to know that whatever situation they're bringing to us, whatever their challenge may be, we've got the systems to make sure that we're picking up on things.
It means that if the mundane is being looked after through the system, we can then focus on some of the deeper issues and and advise accordingly and act as the go-to place for advice and support. We come at 5:25 or thereabouts to the end of this session. I hope you found it useful and it really was a very potted view of how to use something like Asana and as i mentioned there are other tools out there too.
I'm just going to have a very quick look here and just see if there's anything okay. Sandy entertainments is asking, "Is there any training needed for Asana?" Not really. As i said we started off very organic. "Let's use this software, looks good," and we started to set it all up. I would say the Asana training itself is free and they have got some really brilliant resources.
You can go on and log into their webinar program. They're set up by different regions. Emir region, North America and so on. I've not needed it up till now but I think you can put in a ticket and get some one-to-one solutions if you need it. Having said that obviously there's normally a time delay and I've normally figured it out by then.
There are some training videos, there are case studies, application led studies, a whole lot of resource. There so actually you don't need to go and have any formal paid training unless you're ready for that. Okay and Sandy again, just saying that he's new to digital marketing. An exciting place to be. It doesn't matter how new you are.
Start today because the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step so we all need to make a start somewhere. You know enjoy that journey and there are just so many solutions out there so take it. I don't think there are any other questions that I've missed. Oh yeah, let me just catch this last one. (Sandy:) I'm building a personal building.
If i want to start my company with partners, how can I select them and how can we create a strong team like yours?" Okay, so the good news is Sandy, it can be done because we're doing it. The bad news is it can take a long time but hang in there. You know this has taken us 18 years of working, looking at things taking opportunities, leaving what doesn't work for the business, tweaking and adjusting as we go along.
Before you can even get to the team, this is what I say you have to walk the walk. You need to do that firewalk yourself. Otherwise, how would you know what to expect of your team and actually there is a point in every business, we are still there, we are. It doesn't mean that the teams are worry-free or stress-free.
You know there are times when we've known what we needed to do. You don't sometimes. You're just not able to do it for whatever the reason and i'll be honest, sometimes that reason can just be money. I can't afford to pay someone yet but I know i need to do that eventually. That comes with time so my advice would be is dig deep, hang in there, keep going, don't give up.
You know you've got to keep trying and keep persevering and the rewards will be there. I think i'll probably end it there so thank you, everyone, that stayed with me for this Livestream today. I really appreciate the time that you've given us and we are here every day. Uzair will be back on his regular slot tomorrow 5 p.m U.K. time If you do have any comments please do put them in the chat and of course, you can reach us on the email.
That's on the slide at the moment and of course, would really appreciate it if you are able to give us a review on Google My Business. If you want to, I'll be more than happy to hop in a one-to-one with you and just give you some advice and whatever help you may need. It's absolute pleasure and an honor to be asked to do so whenever people do.
Thank you all for listening.
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