[00:00:09.08] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.19] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.01] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.26] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.25] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.
[00:00:23.14] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:24.14] - Gordon
Any news that you've had happen this week for you?
[00:00:27.27] - Taylor
Audacity had an update.
[00:00:29.26] - Gordon
It did.
[00:00:30.24] - Taylor
So we use Audacity to record the audio for our podcast, and it's looked quite outdated for a long time.
[00:00:39.08] - Gordon
All the buttons were like little images that when you show them on a really high resolution screen, they just look really jaggy and horrible.
[00:00:47.08] - Taylor
And you had the old '90s, '20s, 2000s and stuff design where it's borders and drop shadows galore. And it's now a nice sleek modern UI.
[00:01:02.02] - Gordon
And it has plug-ins, which is very exciting. Anyway, thank you for that. Would you like to go first, or shall I?
[00:01:09.18] - Taylor
You can go first this week.
[00:01:11.03] - Gordon
So, this week, I would like to talk about word of mouth. Now, a lot of the shows that I do, I get through people talking to other people about something they've experienced. So in my case, it's the magic shows. And this is, for me at the moment, the only way that I am actually advertising as a magician. I used to do all sorts of things. I used to have, back in the day, Yellow Pages advert, which used to be quite good, but was also very expensive. I have tried Google Ads and I have an account set up. I've just had it switched off for the time being because I find that I'm getting enough work. I mean, I could always do with a little bit more, but I'm getting enough work without doing any advertising, which means my bottom line is obviously going to be much better because I'm not spending money out to get shows. And one of the things that I discovered a long time ago is that word of mouth for me is the best form of advertising. If I do a really good job for someone and they rave about it, I ask them for a testimonial. I ask them for feedback. It's actually what I call it, feedback. I have a system set up which allows people to give me feedback on social media, which is great. And then those social media feedback are then pulled into my website. We've spoken about this in past episodes. If you're interested in looking up and finding out about that, look up 'Drayson Design Reviews' and it will show you which episode we talked about that. And that works really well. But even better for me is that people that have seen me perform will then talk about what I did for them to other people. And when you're doing children's shows or you're doing shows with lots of adults, it's very easy to do because you've got, in a children's show for example, with 20 children, you've got 20 parents, 20 sets of parents that will ask the birthday parents, "How do we contact Gordon? How do we get hold of him?" And I do make sure that everyone goes home with my details just to help that along. I guess that's probably a form of advertising, but not one that I know that I get much from. So I always ask people, and it's very, very rare they say, "we got your details from the party bag" or "we got your details from the card that you gave us." Most of the people say, "we saw you at so-and-so's party" or "we spoke to someone and they told us about you." And something happened this week, which was quite surprising. I did a 40th birthday party last week for a client. First time I'd worked for them. It was his 40th. He's the one that booked me. And he wanted me to do a close up mix and mingle magic for about an hour. And there was about 20-ish, 25-ish adults. And then there was about 15-ish children. And then I was going to do a 45 minute show for the children. And being a children and adult entertainer is great because I get to do these sort of events. And it's not a problem for me because I'm as comfortable entertaining adults as I am entertaining children. And one of the ladies that I spoke to who had come dressed up as Alicia Silverstone, which was quite cool because it was a dress up party and a few people came dressed up. One came as Ali G, and if you're old enough to know who Ali G is, you can have a good idea of what the theme was. And this other lady came in as Alicia Silverstone. I ended up having a little chat with her afterwards, and she ran a day nursery, and she's doing, or she was doing, a summer school for people whose parents obviously worked and couldn't, therefore, take time off for the six weeks that children have for holiday. And so they go into this summer school where they can have all sorts activities. And she said, "we've got another three days to go, Monday through to Wednesday. Are you available for any of those to do a show for me?" And I said, "Yeah, give me a call." And so on Wednesday morning, I had a call, first thing, saying, "Can you come and do a show today? It's our last day." And I went, "Yeah, of course I can. Love to." Told her how much it would be. And she told me where it was, just down the road from me. So I went and did a show for 45 minutes at one o'clock on a Wednesday, which was great because it's a really quiet time for me, especially as children are starting to go back to work, going back to work, going back to school. We don't put them to work. It's very bad, bad form. But going back to school. And I did a 45 minute show, which is a show that I wasn't expecting, but had come out of, in this case, her seeing my show at another event. And so... I get that a lot with website design as well. People who've seen my work or who are asking about it from the people that have a website that I designed or a service that I offer. And word of mouth is the best form for me. It's the cheapest form. And also people rely on what other people say. And if they trust these people, it goes a long way to getting the booking rather than someone just finding me and ringing up and knowing nothing about it because they trust the person that they've spoken with. You must get this a little bit, I'm guessing, with your BNI and your website referrals.
[00:07:15.06] - Taylor
Yeah, a lot of the work that I get comes from word of mouth, comes from recommendations from people that I've either done work for in the past or have had someone that they know had work from me in the past. And it's interesting because I do not only B to C, I guess, if you count clients as customers, but also B to B where I do work for other agencies, other web designers and things. And I've been recommended in a lot of online communities and Facebook groups, not so much for building websites, but for doing API integrations or some custom development. And I don't have to go and ask them. People will say, "Oh, do you know anyone that does X?" And people comment, go, "Oh, talk to Taylor. He knows what he's doing." And because I'm the expert in that area, and my name gets mentioned quite a bit. So I get recommended in two different capacities by people that are in the industry. I think you've had it before where people, other magicians, other entertainers will recommend you because of whatever reason, the distance, the location, the type of work it is. And that's probably similar to me getting work from other people in the same industry.
[00:08:42.20] - Gordon
Yeah. And I actively encourage this word of mouth, as you're leaving, "if you enjoyed what I did, please tell your friends." It's a very simple phrase, but it's something that really does help your business. And you will find that you'll get more business from that. And also business that will last longer as well. So it's normally, if I'm recommended by somebody, it reinforces the first person's view of what I did because someone else has booked me, and therefore it cements the idea that I was a good decision to book because one of their friends has booked on their recommendation. And so I end up sometimes going back and seeing the same kids again and again and again, which is great because I just do different shows. But also the children know what they're getting as well. If they enjoyed one show, they're likely to enjoy the other shows. I had this during the summer when I did a park show. I had several people who came up and mentioned to me that they'd seen me before, either at the beginning of the month, because I did one at the beginning of August, one at the end of August, or previous years. And they really enjoyed it, which is why they came back to see it again. So it's sort of in that respect, it's word of mouth to themselves, isn't it? It's like "we really enjoyed it, we want to come and see it again." So is there a way in your business where you can find word of mouth that you can promote in some way to get referrals and to get people to talk about your business and your services and your products, and refer them to other people so that they can then come and buy from you. It works really well for me and I'm pretty sure it will work for all businesses. So have a think and see if there's a way that you can make it work for you.
[00:10:46.25] - Taylor
So my topic this week is workflow templates. So using Motion, something they recently released, is workflow templates. And what that means is whenever you're starting a new project, you can have a predefined workflow - in the name, I guess. But what that means is if you take a project like a website, for example, I can set up all of the stages that the project goes through, and I can set up all of the basic global tasks that need to be done in each stage. So for example, you have the onboarding stage. Then you have the research phase, the design phase, development phase, optimisation and review stage, and then the launch stage. When in a project, there is usually a lot of consistent tasks that need to be done across every single project. So for example, onboarding would be sending a meeting invite, reviewing the meeting notes, sending the invoice, the first invoice. And you can use what's called blockers to automatically progress the project. So it means that I can set tasks and stages to depend on other tasks and stages. So you can't start the review stage until you've done the onboarding, design, and development, because there's nothing to review. Same with the for example, the feedback on the design stage. You can't get feedback until you've actually designed the home page, for example.
[00:12:38.05] - Gordon
It's not called feedback anymore, though, is it?
[00:12:39.29] - Taylor
No, but you can't send a design for approval to a client until you've actually designed the home page or you've designed whatever pages.
[00:12:50.17] - Gordon
And I guess that's part of the workflow as well. As you change things in your workflow, you can change your template so that for future projects, it's all set in place for you.
[00:13:03.19] - Taylor
Exactly. And it works really well because my project manager automatically schedules the tasks for me. So it will schedule it based on the time that it will take. And if you need to put it into chunks, it will automatically do that. But it will also not put things on your schedule if you're not able to complete them. So it won't auto schedule anything that has a blocker because it can't be done. And it's been working really well. I've used it on a couple of projects where I've started going through and working through it, and it works really well because it just tells me what I need to look at next. So some of them are 'plan this stage.' So sometimes, obviously, for things like design and development, I need to plan what pages that need to be designed, what pages need to be developed, what templates need to be developed. And I have to create those tasks individually, which is why I have the first task in that stage is to plan this stage out for that specific project. And yeah, it's really nice, and it also stops me from missing certain steps, missing certain things that need to be done. So one of the big things is checking for accessibility, checking forms are working, checking any functionality are working in the review stage, checking images, anything like that. And it's very easy to miss out that step and just go straight launching. And so by having that stage there, you make sure that your processes are followed, and there's just one less thing for you to have to worry about in terms of remembering what needs to be done. And like you said, it's very much it can be changed, it can be adapted, and it can be improved on in the future and always at new times as I'm using the templates. I haven't come across other examples of or use cases I could use for this. Obviously, probably in other areas of other companies and industries, they probably have their own projects that they work on. So whether it's like a marketing campaign would have its own project and you can have a template. If you have lots of different marketing campaigns. And obviously, if you're a bigger company, that obviously makes a lot more sense. For me, I haven't found or thought of any other use cases. Do you have any thoughts or ideas?
[00:15:24.16] - Gordon
Well, it's anything that requires a workflow. I mean, yeah, there's lots of things. For example, when I'm taking a booking for a show, there's lots of things that I need to make sure that I do after I've taken the booking, like sort out the confirmation, make sure I set it up in OBA, make sure that I send them the invite system, make sure that I've got enough party bags for the event and so forth. And anything that is the same every time is perfect for this sort of thing.
[00:16:01.16] - Taylor
Yeah, so this is on a slightly bigger scale in terms of a project which can contain lots and lots of tasks.
[00:16:08.19] - Gordon
And take a lot longer. So many months, for example.
[00:16:12.03] - Taylor
In your case, you'd have to create a new project for every single lead/client, which probably wouldn't make sense in your use case. You would just use some Kanban system, which is how stages work as well. A Kanban system where you drag people through a pipeline, for example. But yes, I think it's a really useful tool, and the blockers are really helpful. For people that have teams, they have the ability to create roles. So you can create design roles, you can create developer roles, you can create manager roles. And then in your template, you can, some of the default tasks that you have can be assigned to a role. And so then when you're creating a new project, you assign people to those roles. So then it will automatically choose anyone. If there's five people in a role, it will choose whoever's most capable to do that task from the...
[00:17:13.07] - Gordon
Or has availability.
[00:17:13.28] - Taylor
Exactly. From their schedule, it chooses the person who has the most availability to do it, which I think is really clever. Again, it doesn't really work for me because it's just myself. But if you're working in teams, that is a great idea because then you don't have to assign it to a specific person. It's assigned to a group of people per se.
[00:17:36.14] - Gordon
And what software are you using for this?
[00:17:38.07] - Taylor
This is called UseMotion. It's like an AI scheduler project management tool so it automatically schedules your tasks on a calendar. So like time blocks your to-do list, essentially. But it does it based on the priority status, the due dates. So you can have hard deadlines or suggested deadlines. If you have something that's high importance, it's going to move your entire calendar around, reschedule, reshuffle all of the time blocks stuff around to make sure that everything fits in.
[00:18:15.02] - Gordon
So it's like having your own personal assistant that can just keep up with your project as a project manager, I guess.
[00:18:21.17] - Taylor
Exactly. And it works across all the different projects and workspaces I have. So I have workspaces for my personal stuff and at home, The Creative Tinker, Snippet Club, WP Extended, BNI. So I have workspaces for all these different things to keep tasks, etc. Separate, but then they all get added into the main calendar, which again is very nice to see.
[00:18:46.29] - Gordon
We'll put a link to that in the show notes, if that sounds like something you'd like to investigate and have a look at. You are recommending it, are you? It's a word of mouth recommendation for people who...
[00:19:00.09] - Taylor
I've used it for a couple of months now and I'm really enjoying it. It's the one I found is the easiest for me to keep up with in terms of project management tools, because it will tell me if there's overdue stuff and I don't have to go in and schedule stuff in. I can just give it a new due date if it's over due and say, actually, although this was due then, it's not a super urgent task. So I'm going to reschedule this. I'm going to say, actually, push this due date back two weeks, for example.
[00:19:31.16] - Gordon
And managing your time on a project is one of the biggest hurdles at making a profit and getting it out on time. So giving little deadlines for specific tasks is a really good thing to do. That's really good, Taylor. Anything else you want to say today?
[00:19:47.19] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:19:49.06] - Gordon
Thank you very much for watching, as always, or listening, I should say. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:19:57.17] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:20:02.12] - Gordon
And we're on all the normal podcast platforms, so you can listen to us wherever you are. Thank you for joining us. As always, we will try and be with you. I say that because it's not always possible, but we've been doing quite well recently. Try and be with you next week at 1pm on a Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm with Drayson Design.
[00:20:24.04] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:20:27.01] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:20:27.23] - Taylor
Bye.
