Hey, welcome to my podcast. This is a podcast where I'll be teaching you all the systems and strategies you need in creating your visibility so you can turn your passion for coaching into a profitable business. I'm your host, Michelle Quaid. I am a visibility coach, content and email marketing strategist, international speaker and author, as well as the founder of Elevate life coaching, that just say that I know a few things about overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles
in life and in business. I'm on a mission to be the champion that helps you to get to the top of your mountain, one courageous step at a time. Welcome to the show. Good morning. If you are new to me, I am Michelle Quaid. I am a visibility confidence coach. And I help women coaches to use the power secret power sauce of storytelling in their business to get seen, get her
and get higher. You are watching my weekly show coffee talk where I invite guests in their expert area so that they can share their inspiration, their stories, and also a lot of strategy and tips, and how you can grow your own coaching business. So welcome to the show. I don't know about you, but a lot of times people will come to me and said, Michelle, you wear so many hats in your
life. You're a clinical pharmacist, you're a coach, you're doing public speaking, you're doing writing a lot of content, and you're doing all these things. How exactly do you do it? Do you have a life? Do you ever sleep? Do you ever go out for a walk? And the answer is my friend. Yes, all of the above. I do all of them. But I couldn't have done it without the help of some technology. And now in this case, it's a technology and a virtual
assistant. Today, I'm excited because I have Miss Cathy Powell, who is a virtual assistant who specializes in simplifying onboard and off boarding process for coaches consultant and other service provider. She is a certified dub Sado a specialist, a life coach, and also an experienced officer office manager in the corporate arena. These experiences and skills have given her a unique understanding of a very complex
requirements of her clients. And I don't know about you, but when I hire when I work with someone, especially a VA who's so personal and have that they have to really understand what you're going through. The first person I would think to go to is actually someone who can truly understand what I will go into. So I'm really excited to bring Kathy and invite Kathy out here to join us. And she is told me she is going to tell us everything that you need to know about that Saito. So please join
me with a warm welcome. And if you're watching the show live, I would love and appreciate you giving me a hello or giving us a heart. And let us know that you're watching this and joining us live. Now without further ado, please join me with a warm welcome Kathy Powell.
Thanks for having me on here. This is great.
I know I'm really excited about this. Because I'm such a planner added. I keep saying that I'm a planner addict, because I like to have everything organized, clean to the point and that I can easily access things. And I think one of the things that I was struggling with, initially, when I first started out my business was I had a lot of tasks that's
on my hand. And now I have to figure out how to send my clients invoices, how to create these template, how to write a contract, all these things, you know, I could do it very easily with just one simple email. But every single client that I signed up, I feels like I have to keep repeating all these tasks. Absolutely. So when I came across your profile, I was like, Whoa, this is really cool because you have a system and you know exactly how to help others to organize their life.
So I don't want to take too much of your time. But I would love to hear how did you get into the virtual assistant space.
That's a funny, it's not a funny story. But I am a life coach. And one of the things when you become a life coach or get the training, you forget that you need to keep getting training yourself. And so I kind of went off on a different tangent and all my clients kept saying you know, you keep giving us tips on our back end things you should be a
virtual assistant. So my first thought was like a executive assistant and I really didn't want to do that because I like diving into the back end to the putting things in order the project type thing. So I decided, okay, I'm just gonna try that. And I threw it out there and immediately had seven people. And I was like, Oh my gosh, now what do I do? So I learned a lot really quickly.
And one of the things in the virtual assistant world is they kept talking about client management systems or client relationship systems, and dubsado kept coming up. And so there was Sato and several others into our research them. And what I was finding was dubsado is, is more customizable, and it's very robust, you can grow with it. So I thought, Okay, let's go with that. So I did a lot of training
in October last year. dubsado had a certification program, they started that and so I got in on that and became certified in dubsado. And I just loved dubsado So
yeah, I have so much trouble getting into dubsado. And the reason that Saito dubsado, I don't know how
accurate Fado portato, you know.
And so I had, I was struggling to get into that Saito. Because I didn't know like how to customize it. Like there's a lot of meat moving pieces of it behind the dashboard. And it was just so hard for me to navigate. And you know, I wanted to backtrack a little bit because I know there's audience where they're not really sure what is dub Sado and why do I even need one?
Okay, so the photo is like, it's you probably have seen CMS or client management system CSM. In his client management system is basically where like you were talking at the beginning, it just puts everything in one place, if you're sending the same email over and over, if you're sending the contract out. I know when I first started in a lot of my clients, they go find their old contract, and they make a copy of it and update little things
on it. And then they send it to one platform, or some people still send a PDF for people to sign and copy, you know, scan it back. This puts everything in one place, if you have emails that you're also, as you said, the onboarding emails, instead of having to go find where you wrote it before, and copy it and tweak it, you have all of these as templates, all of it in one place. And that way, you're not spending any time stressing or wasting time actually going and
looking where all of this is. So it saves time. And in, you know that the time in the stress of going to find all of that. So it's just all in one place.
And the potential error that can happen. I had two years where this is like early, early on, when I was still doing life coaching and mindset work. And I remember I had a new potential client who was ready to sign up and ready to start the program. And I was copy and paste. One of the Oh, like you said, the onboarding email and the contract and I there was a line in there that I forgot to change. And so that was a huge mistake. I caught it afterwards.
And the client being even notice that thank goodness, it was an embarrassing moment for me to actually sit there and wondering if this client actually saw that mistakes. Wow.
Always have a fear of or did have a fear of, you know, you go in and you type in your clients name, and then try to remember to go in and change that name to the new name.
Yeah. And so I would love to hear more about how you set up the dub Sado and what does it involve? And what are some of the things that people should know about?
In how I do it? Or would you like me to show you some things inside of dubsado?
Um, would you mind showing us something inside that say that
you would love to show you, okay? Okay, so, I'm gonna do a brief kind of briefly rundown all of these different items in the menu. And then I'm going to show you today how you can send a proposal, contract and invoice all in one all at the same time. Okay, so when you open up, you're just up Deb Sato. This is your dashboard. This just kind of gives you an overview of everything that's here. This is my training.
Training account. I'm not going to show my real clients in here so it looks like I have nothing. As a when you're in here working after you have it set up you will spend most of your time in projects. This is where each of your each of your projects that you have with your clients in here if you're coaching, you would have each coaching session, if not session, each coaching, coaching package setup in here. And all of these, these are statuses, these are
customizable. You can change these to when we do automations you can have it automatically change into what status where you're Client is at the moment. So you don't have to go back what like, what email did us in last, where was the next thing. The next thing I'm gonna skip through a lot of these for time, utilities will have your address book, the form list of things
that are out here. But the two places the projects is where you will work with everything that's in the project is in the templates, this is the key to setting everything up is here in your templates, the scheduler, we're going to look at forms, I have a couple of different coaching contracts in here, I don't have any sub agreements, you have questionnaires,
proposals and lead captures. And the difference between a lead capture and a questionnaire a lead capture is something you would put like on your website, or you would send a new prospect, a link. And this would automatically set them up inside of Deb Sato depending on the questions. The questionnaires is just gathering more information that you need from your clients.
You can also add, like those of you that are in AIPAC, you can see there's some tools that you could see in the will of life, you can add extra things in there besides the forms. And as we were talking about the canned emails, dubsado comes with a whole lot of samples for you examples that you can create your own inside of here. And so there's a few of them in here that I have created. And we will show you that here. And then you can also add, you can create
your signature in here. So when it's when dubsado is set up, it will be connected to your domain to your email. So when your clients receive emails, it comes from your email, it doesn't look like it's coming from dubsado. You can add your packages, you can add the workflows, this is where you can automate or not automate as much as you want.
Each step of the way. And the way I set my clients up, is most businesses have three different phases, you have your inquiry phase, they're sending you, you know, they want to know more, you're going to send them the link to your scheduler. And then you've decided if you want to if you're moving forward, and then you move into your booking phase, they are not booked, they are not your client until they have signed that invoicing contract. And then they have
different payment plans. So I'm going to go back up here into the project with dubsado, you get a free sample testing sample for today. And then you get three clients for free after that. And that's there's no time limit on that. So what I want to do today is I'm going to show you how to send the proposal, a contract and an invoice and you don't have to send all of these three. But this is just to show you one of the things that
dubsado can do. So the first thing I'm inside of this job, I inside of the project, and I want to send the proposal. So the first thing I need to do is go grab a copy of that proposal. So this is a copy. And I can look yes, this is what I want. So I'm going to I always think of it in my head old school, I'm making a copy and pulling it out of this folder. And now it's in this folder. But it doesn't affect the template at all. Now I could just send it from here. But I want to show you what just
happened. Because of the way I have the proposal set up. There's now a contract in here. And there is also an invoice has started. There's no dollar amount showing here yet, because the client will need to choose which package they want on the contract. I'm going to just show you here, you can see in here, there's no dollar amount yet either that will automatically populate. We use smart fields. So it adds the names. So it looks personalized. Everything's going to look
personalized. So I'm going to go back over here to the form and I'm going to hit send. Now an automatic email will come up with that if I wanted something different if I wanted a more personalized than just this right here. I can also do Where did I put it? This one, I've created another email. I'm going to hit send you can see that my signature and everything is there. I'm going to hit send. And then I'm pretty sure I did this. Yes. So I've hit send.
This is my training email. You can see the proposal is here. You open it up, nice clean email, you click on the button. And then you get your proposal. And in the proposal you can you can have multiple choices if you have multiple items to choose from. I'm going to select this one. Now it allows me to hit submit in next. This automatically takes me over to the contract. And I also wanted to show you do that there are places that you can build your
contract out. And here you can see the prices there.
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Inside of here, I have an extensive one, I have made it where people have to initial certain places to make sure they do read that part. As you were saying, there are certain places you definitely want them to. And so then I'm going to my name is already populated in here because I do this a lot in the dates already there. And there's a time that you as the owner of this will go back and sign you hit agree. And next and there's the invoice all of that has has played out. It's
pulled up to $800. And then they can pay now dubsado does use you can use a credit card, you can use PayPal, well PayPal stripe or square. So I'm not going to pay that right now. But then over here, as a client, you would be able you would get an email that says, Oh, I'm getting both because this is both. Okay. So this is what as a client, they would receive a link to the contract to see it as well. If we go back over here, I'm going to refresh this page inside of
dubsado. Now you can see that the contract is signed, and this form has been completed. And I was going to show something as Oh, okay. So another thing that I do we still have time, how much time do we have, we have plenty of time. Okay, I was
going really fast. I was like Okay, so a couple of other things inside of here, if your client if you're a coach, and you have a lot of forms that you'd like to send to your client ahead of time, instead of instead of putting them all in one email or you know, sending multiple emails. dubsado has a portal, that you could load up everything inside of the portal if you wanted to. And then give your client access to the
portal. So inside of the portal, and they won't have access to the portal until you give them permission, or you activated. And again, you can see everything's customizable, you can make really pretty labels, you can change the colors to match. In here, you can see that there is an open invoice. This is what your clients will see all of the emails that we have had back and forth. There's an
open invoice. You can even have multiple projects inside of here that they could choose from if you have multiple projects going with your clients, but here you can see there's, I've had aes dubsado strategies schedulers done. Once there's an open invoice, you can see the contract and this is the proposal. So at anytime the client wants to go back, they can go into their portal and find it. There's also different
ways you can set this up. If you have things that you want your client to upload to the portal. That's also possible, all of the emails, and then they can come in and update their profile if they if anything changes. So is there any questions? Are there any questions?
Well, my My mind is blown away because a lot of what I'm doing right now is through Google Drive. Oh, okay. So There's a lot of things that I'm going back and forth in storing in the Google Drive that I share with my clients. And there's just a lot of repeatable. So I'm curious though, with the dub Sado? Would it allow you to share the same file? And drop it just one time for all the clients? Like, how often do you have to upload these files that you're sharing with your clients?
You mean, if
it's that saying, I'm sharing your life with all my clients, no matter who they are, that everyone gets a wheel of life? Do I drop it every single time what does that is that document sits somewhere and I have to do it, it's just assigned it once the client on board,
you can do that as part of your onboarding. And it would be individual, you could also have that as part of your, let me see if I've got that inside of the workflow. That's phase two, I have it. Yes, inside of the workflow. This, we would add, you know, depending on how you wanted, and in this one, you can see that some of these steps, I've got an approved button, which is what I recommend all my clients at first, when we do a workflow is everything approved until they
understand it. And then we can slowly start removing that bit in here you can see Cineform wheel of life, it can do that automatically, if you have it set up in your workflow. Otherwise, you would just inside of the project. Let's see if I can do this. You could. When I send the form, I would have to go in here and I would add. And this would be something you could add to all of the there's the wheel of life. I can add that wheel of life, and then I can send it directly from here.
Like that. Okay.
Hi, I don't know about anyone in the audience. But if you're watching this and watching doing this as a replay, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But my thoughts is, how do you work with the client? Can you just set it up? nuclease.
Exactly. That is actually what I do is is we spend, we have a couple of strategy sessions, we'll do one, one big one to get a lot of things in place. Now the interesting thing is, is I also use Google Drive, I find that it's easier, because I have to log into their dubsado. And if I log into my Deb Sato, sometimes it messes things up. So I do have my clients put information inside of Google Drive, I'll
share a folder with them. And then they give me all of their information, you're already sending these emails, you already have these documents. So you just copy paste the emails in there. I have a process that I go through that everyone I have worked with, I've worked with coaches, an email marketer, LinkedIn service provider, as we walk through to create the workflow step by step, there's always things that they haven't thought of inside of a workflow. What was your question? Am I
answering your question? Oh, how I work with you? Yes, I just could, I could just keep going on about all the things there.
I don't mind you, you know, I get into the same space, right? Oh, yeah. Well, was that you? Work with you?
Yeah. So I do. I have my website pulled up here. Um, I do work for I do set up the dubsado. For my clients. I have a list of things. That's part of the full package that I do. And I usually do more than what's on there. But yes, I work I, I do it and then I teach you how to do it. And we record it and you have that recording so that you can always go back to it. In 30 days after the setup, you still have access to me to you know, if you need some
tweaks done. If you have questions, and you know, some of the questions you're going to if you need something real quick, I'm not going to hesitate to I'm not going to just say here it is I'm gone. But now they are set it up we did we do extensive training, I have found that I do training in two steps. I do the first one where we do everything manually. And then the second
step we will do it. It's semi manually as we click on all of the workflow steps so you can see how each one shows up in your box, and all of the reminders and things like that. So they get a good handle on everything and then that's what we do.
So I think my question for a lot of my ladies in the community would be I'm totally brand new to the whole whole coaching and how the whole client relations Shouldn't management system? What would be my first step that I need to know? Like, how do I how do I get started?
Get started with that client management system? Yeah. I would look up a couple of them and see what you would like you kind of can review, there's what is the one that you're using right now I forget, I'm using honey book. Okay, so honey book is a good one. And I know dubsado Those actually are the two that I looked between, there's quite a number of them. And you can do some reviews to find out what works best for you. The. And then like most of
them have free trials. So dubsado, as far as I know, has the best free trial. Because as I was showing it's three, you get three clients, including your sample, so you can go in there place everything up. And there's no time limit. That time limit bothers me when you have to seven days. Yeah. How long?
Is it gonna take me just to do the research to Yeah, so that's, that was another thing that Deb Sato is I got to do all this loading and playing in fact, this, this particular one that I'm showing you from is my training one? And then, you know, just just try them out and see which ones you like, and what fits you because dubsado is not going to be for everybody? I think it is but it's not necessarily everyone has the different different things that they will inside it there.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you brought so much values into showing you as like, where things are and what what is possible with that Sado, I would love to hear, what would be your productivity tip. For coaches, who's struggling to get everything done and everything in one place? What would be your one advice for them?
If they are? Okay, the first advice I think, would be kind of like what I do with my clients to begin with, write down everything you're doing, get a document all in one place and walk through your client journey from the minute they contact you, whether it's through, you know, social media, or your website or phone call, or referral. What are your steps? What is the first thing you do with each one of them? Do you send them a calendar link? Do you send them a
questionnaire? You know, it depends on you know, a lot of people send a questionnaire, you fill out this questionnaire, and I'll decide if I want to talk with you or not. You know, and then every little step that you do, write it all down, and you can see, you know, this is where, okay, we've we've on boarded, I send an email, I send a contract, I send another questionnaire, all of these things. Where are you sending those? How are you sending those
documents? Are you having to do you know, what are the steps, it's kind of like creating SOPs or your processes, once you see everything that you're doing one of my clients when we went through this process, and we wrote it down, and she cuz I do a lot, because you don't realize you do it all. Because you do a little here, a little there and a little there it is like, oh,
it's no big deal. But when you write it all down, and you see, and how much you're having to go and look for all of these things, that adds up, it adds up in time, it adds up in stress, it adds up in possibly putting, you know, and leaving all that extra line in there. So yeah, that would be the first thing, write it all down and see exactly what you're doing.
Yeah, as you're as you're describing this list, I can only imagine what my lists look like. So I'm definitely taken to take that to my heart. Sure that I starting today, I'm going to write down my process and, you know, maybe a month or two months later, once I collect those humans, I'm gonna come back to you copy as in Kathy, I'm ready.
And one thing one thing that he that as as coaches, we think, Okay, I'm supposed to get a referral or you want a testimonial, and we think we'll get to it or we don't know where to put that in foot part of any I think any of the CRMs you can you can set that up as a reminder or as part of your process. So as you're writing down your process, right, the things that you want to do that sometimes you forget. Because when you have it all in one place, everything gets done.
There's no holding it all in your head. Did I do that? What's the next step? You know, if you have 510 20 clients, that's a lot to keep in your head.
Yeah, yeah. I love the idea of having a second brain for us because our brain is not functioning as a storage, it doesn't store that much. There's a capacity of how much storage so when you when you are entrepreneur, there's a lot of tracking that you have to do and whether you love it or if you enjoy it or you hate it and you want to delegate to someone I think it really helps Having things in one place one place only, no confusion, no error whatsoever.
It creates a lot of space for more creativity to spend more time with your clients to create in your courses or whatever else you're wanting to do. Yeah.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you telling people this caveat, I love you so much. And I'm really inspired by all your work and the stuff that you do. I know virtual assistant, you know, people were like, oh, virtual assistant, what is that, but it actually save you have a lot of work to have in life. So thank you so much for coming to the show.
Oh, thank you for having me. This was fun. It is right.
Any any last words that you would like to share with the audience?
Just write it down, write it down, and really see what you're doing. Because as an entrepreneur, service provider or other, you're doing probably way more than you realize. So just write it down and see how much you're doing.
Yeah, yeah. I love that writing down. Right. Where's your website? Again,
my website is Kathy the va.com.
And here it is, I would encourage everyone to check Kathy out, her work is amazing. I've been following her. I've been stalking her for quite some time.
And I think that's so funny, because I've been stalking you. And I was telling somebody, you know, she keeps showing up on my radar, I need to contact her. And within a day of me say that out loud. You were in my inbox.
Right? We manifested each other? Yes. We I love watching you and watching your growth. And I know that you have done a lot of amazing things with dub Sado, and that word just keeps popping in my head. So when I was looking for CRM, or see client management system, I was I was really like, she's under my radar, I need to talk to her. And I know my community needs to hear from her. So I'm really glad that you're here on the show.
Thank you. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to show off whatever.
Thank you, Kathy. Thank you. I'm going to put you to the backstage everyone around I will chat with you. Once I close close their shirt show. Gina said this is the third time Kathy had popping to pop in for me. So that's that. So thank you so much. And thank you those who's watching you're watching the show. I will be putting all the links from Kathy into the episode now, so be sure to stay tuned and subscribe if you
haven't already done so. And follow me on social media by clicking the like and subscribe. Now, Gina say hello. And thank you so much for watching. And I hope you come back again next week for another episode of like coffee talk where I invite you and other guests to come and talk to you and so that you can actually get over that Wednesday hump more easily. I will see you on the next show. Hey, beautiful. Thanks for listening.
If you enjoy these podcasts and found values from this episode, I'd love for you to leave me a rating and review. Now, as a token of my appreciation. After you have left your review, I want you to take a screenshot of it and send it to me via email at Michelle at Elevate life coaching.org And I will buy your next cup of coffee, I promise. One thing that I was struggling with in my early years of business was finding the right
people to connect with. It feels like you are on this entrepreneurial journey on your own. Sometimes we all just need friends who can share our dreams and goals and who can relate to us what we're going through as we grow our business together. If you are a woman coach who is ready to grow your coaching business, and you're looking for strategies to get seeing get her
and get higher. I want to invite you to come and finally in our community on Facebook after visibility and confidence now, this is a community of heart center woman coaches who are looking to grow their coaching business by creating engaging, authentic, visible content with storytelling for their business to get more leads and attract more clients. I will see you at my next tea party. I now