Business Workflows
What is a Business Workflow?
A business workflow is basically a series of steps that you go through to get shit done. The best way to get through the stuff you don’t like is to have a simple workflow. It goes quicker, it’s easier and it doesn’t feel too difficult.
We use workflows for most of our major processes, and here’s the thing – so do most major businesses. It’s just that entrepreneurship doesn’t come with a handbook, so often we learn our lessons the hard way.
Why do I need a workflow?
A workflow simplifies your stuff; it means that there’s a routine and rhythm to your business activities (whether they’re directly income-producing or not) and most importantly, it allows you to delegate and scale when the time comes.
Imagine you’re Santa and you create toys all year round for your big delivery date of 24th December.
If, (as Santa, obvs), you had your own way of doing everything – designing the toys and products, emailing your contacts and suppliers, marketing etc – you did it all yourself apart from a few simple tasks and didn’t have a workflow in place to make it simpler, easier or pass it off to an elf.
Let’s consider Mrs Claus; she’s got her lists, she has a system for toy design that starts in the Autumn of the year before and she trusts her elves to follow a workflow (flexibly – she’s not one to stifle creativity or a rising star). She gives her toy design team some parameters and an idea of what they need to do in which order, and away they go.
She does the same thing with blogging (yeah, you know she blogs!), and has a systematic approach to that too.
Business Workflows - Examples
OK, so if the Claus example was a bit too sexist or abstract for you, here are some of our example workflows:
Monthly:
– Decide on a theme or focus for the month (sometimes with an offer, sometimes just what our members have asked for)
– Using our amazeballs Monthly Masterplan Calendar, we create problems our theme solves, tips, ideas for blogposts etc
– We then schedule out some (but not all) of our social media posts and a couple of lives
Blogging
I tend to write the majority of the blogs (and Lesley does most of the networking lol!), so this is my workflow for writing a blogpost: (by the way, if you don’t know how to write a blog – here’s the blogging expert’s how-to)
– Using our monthly theme, I’ll do some keyword research (mainly using Ubersuggest, but we hate Neil Patel a little bit right now) and come up with SEO-friendly keywords to aim for. Our main SEO stuff is here.
– I’ll organise the blogpost before I write it, just by writing in the headings whilst the SEO stuff is fresh in my mind
– Write the blogpost (this can take 2+ days and a gallon of wine)
– Create any resources to go with it (we try to create something for most themes – cheatsheets, checklists etc)
– Create graphics in Canva* to publicise the post
– Go through the post with another tab open and see if there are any other posts that link well to it
– Publish the post
– Share it!!! People aren’t going to just randomly stumble across your blog (there are over 600 million active blogs) – you have to tell them you’ve blogged! We use Tailwind, Pinterest and our social media channels for this.
Tools
The Whole Goal
The whole, endgame style goal with a workflow is twofold:
– It doesn’t always have to be YOU who does this (do you think Oprah writes her own blogposts???)
– Even if it’s not, it’s still done in your style and to your specifications.