Hey Reader,

I’ve been working with a coaching school for over a year now. I know that might seem a long time when it comes to systems set ups but this one has been a bumpy road due to personnel, sickness, requirements and general focus.

We had a meeting last week, and the build is edging ever closer to being finished, but I have been thinking about the first bits of contact we had and the first instances I was able to see behind the scenes in their hugely successful £500k+ pa set up.

I say set up.

Everything was being run from one Excel spreadsheet.

And I mean everything.

Emails were plotted in there, payments were manually updated in there, notes about student needs were made in there, reminders to follow up on the next cohort of this programme or another were in there.

One blue meant “follow up in August” whereas a slightly different shade of blue meant “payment is overdue”.

It had 1,000+ rows, 25+ columns, and enough color coding to make even the most enthusiastic Google Sheets user cry.

What made it all worse is that it wasn’t dynamic at all, so two people couldn’t work on it at the same time - and as the admin maestro I was working closely with had basically set up home in there, no one else was able to take any work off her.

And the problem with that was, she was the main point of contact for all of the students as well, so her inbox was overflowing with queries like “what’s my student number?” and “I can’t attend this call, can I switch to another?”

She was drowning in emails, jumping between the spreadsheet and her inbox like a human CRM, trying to decode the difference between two nearly identical shades of blue.

We’ve been working together for over a year and in that time things have come to light that have needed to be worked on so that the whole process is easier.

Things like standard responses to emails and creating naming conventions in Kajabi. Or understanding that sometimes people forget that they need to complete something and they might need reminding but who’s job is it to do that reminding?

Our approach was

1. What currently happens

2. Why does it happen that way

3. Can we make it more efficient / less labour intensive / automated.

And we are currently working on the way the team communicates with external markers, and next will be looking at how purchases of the various course are tracked and followed up.

And finally, the master sheet will be donezo. Thank goodness.

If your business is running on a spreadsheet that’s older than your laptop, let’s fix that. Book a call here.​

Speak Soon

Zx