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What's going on? Uploading today I'm very excited for this episode to dive into all things workflow with Sarah Loretta from systems, and I've had the chance to meet Sarah. When I met her, she was showing me tools left and right, and she's just a tool adopter and implementer master. So we're going to have a lot to talk about. She was also the 10th US notion consultant, so she's been doing the workflow thing for a while, and I think it's something that's not talked about enough in terms of processes for creators, agencies, et cetera. So Sarah, I'll kick it over to you. Tell us a little bit more about your specific mastery and what it is that you're up to today with systems.

Yeah, just to talk to your point really quickly for those listening, Ramon and I got together over breakfast. What was it, like two or three weeks ago? And I just kept opening my laptop. Look at this tool, look at this tool. And I left our breakfast and I was like, oh my God. He probably thinks that I am just the most overwhelmed because I'm so tech obsessed. I've always been that person. So a little bit about my journey. I think it's interesting when we look at our careers, especially as entrepreneurs and founders, most of the time, things come full circle.

So I actually was in the nonprofit space for almost ten years and doing business development and compliance. I built my first ever database in Microsoft access and SQL and learned SQL as a 19 year old sitting as a little assistant just because I was tired of paper. I mean, this organization I worked at, we had 14 filing cabinets packed to the brim of paper documents and it just, oh, the millennial and the forward thinking person. I was like, I will drown in this role if I have to open up another freaking filing cabinet. So I was doing all that. I fell really in love with just how technology can really move companies forward. I mean, seeing this organization that was 30 years old. That was in archaic times.

By the time I left, we had just everything automated and systemized, and we went from owing the city almost 100 grand a year because reporting was wrong to being one of the top performing organizations in the city because of the work that I did. But I will say I didn't know I could freelance and do so. You know, I, like everyone else, had a blog and had kind of started YouTube. And I was like, well, I can't find another. Like, I was interviewing at all these tech companies here in Austin and they were like, you wear too many hats. You're going to be bored. We, and I couldn't get a job, and it was so frustrating. And so, like every other woman or first freelance role, I started building websites and I did branding and I did video, and I got into the other organizations in town, but I kept hitting clients who wanted a logo and they wanted all this visual stuff done, but couldn't tell me their pricing, couldn't tell me how they operated.

And within a year of working with me, they were shutting down. And for a long time, I went through this weird cycle where I was like, am I the problem? Am I the reason that these companies are failing? And what I started to recognize in conversations was, no, they needed business development. You don't need a logo. You need business development. You need workflows, and you need to understand. And this is kind of a spicy take I have, but everyone's replaceable, and it just is what it is when we are building businesses or building products, yes, we are emotionally attached to that. But at the end of the day, if you want to take a sabbatical, if you up and decide one day, hey, I'm done, I don't want to work here anymore, the company's still going to move forward and we have to build businesses with that in mind. A lot of people just don't do that.

And so I had tapped back into kind of what I had done at this nonprofit and started doing business development with clients and around the time, filmed a YouTube video of how I use notion to run my agency. I was kind of the first person to talk about having a design business and using notion for it. That video popped off. Notion came to me a couple of months later, and I then became the 10th certified notion consultant in the US. And it's 2024, and I think there's like less than 60 of us in the entire world, which is wild. But I started to see the same thing recently in the last 14 months where clients come to me they find me in the notion directory or they find me on YouTube for notion content. But notion is not the solution. And so I actually spend more time doing full tech stack reworks culture development because again, too, this remote world, this async world we live in, there's no such thing as company culture anymore.

It's slack culture. It's, oh, I guess I'm going to voice note you at two in the morning because, well, that's my time zone and that's when I work. And so I do a lot of culture development with teams. Yeah. And then I make content on the Internet and, I don't know, hang out with my dogs.

Yeah, I love your content. That's how we found you. So what does it mean, Sarah, to implement tech into a business? Are these businesses like that that had no tech? Just businesses that have tech, but they just see optimization in some areas and they don't have the time to figure that out. And what does your assessment look like when you're sort of figuring out where to implement solutions?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I get clients, honestly, from all walks of life. I kind of dump them into three buckets.

Right?

So we've got the freelancer who has some contractors, they're doing 150K plus a year, but they kind of fell into a tech stack and a process that some business coach or some person on the Internet told them to run their freelancer business. And what I find in that bucket is the teams that I work with, the freelancers I work with have no personality on the back end. They're just doing things because they were told that that's how you do it and it's kind of worked, but they're like, I'm not scaling. It's kind of more work. And it's so fascinating because in that bucket, I've also become the offboarding girl. Every single client I work with does not have an offboarding process. They have no way to collect testimonials or feedback. They're not doing client reviews or looking at ways to improve.

They're just in the cycle of go, go. So that's kind of the first bucket. Then we've got the teams that they've got ten ish to 50 ish employees. They've been rocking and rolling for a while, but they somehow can't scale or they don't have the right chart in order to scale. Like, I do a lot of chart work with teams, too, of why do you have six vas? We can automate some of this, and you can reduce your spend. Right. The piece of that, too, is in that bucket. A lot of times companies are either overspending on tech or not spending appropriately.

And so a great example, spending five grand a year on HubSpot when they're not even using half the features. Right? So what other platforms can we put them on? And then I have my enterprise clients who seem like they have it all together and they just want to burn it completely down. And this is where a lot of the culture comes in, is because you have this massive disconnect between the CEO and the low level assistant coming in to support projects. And there's no true line of succession, there's no communication plans. They're kind of just going through the motions, but also, no one knows what the other person does. I have that client right now where they're a team of 200 and they have assistants skipping over managers and going to the CEO in slack, and it's just complete chaos. And so within that, what we do, I have modeled my business very closely to Google Sprint models. If you guys have read sprints, that book kind of honestly changed my business and my outlook.

So I start out with a full tech audit. We have very deep dive conversations with every department of a company to say, hey, how do you work? How does marketing work compared to how does the creative team work or whatever? And then we break down a tech stack for every single department, what they need, we find where the overlaps are that an entire team can utilize a tool. Then we go into the culture piece. So what is the internal expectations of working with a remote async team versus what is the external expectations? So if you have clients, if you have customers, what are we doing to make that experience the best that it absolutely can be? A great example is like, how many clicks does it take to get an invoice paid in a contract signed? What are we doing to reduce how many emails they're getting during onboarding? Those are just some examples. And then we go into the training model and kind of this, like, who is handling this internally? Right? Because I don't do long term support. Most of the time I do for my enterprise clients, but most of the time people can't afford that on a monthly retainer, especially if they're lower level. And so I actually come in and I'm like, okay, who is going to be your tech? You, because it's not you, right? Everybody has the best intentions, but that's not what your role is. And so do we need to hire somebody that is a tech VA, is your current VA going to be promoted into an ops role.

And so I look at that and provide all the SoPs, the training videos, all that stuff, and it's usually like a 90 day to six month contract on average with me. So that's a lot of information, but I think it's important.

No, for sure. It certainly is. I mean, there's so many verticals within a business, and I want to sort of double click into a specific example that we could use here, especially in the creative or content operations. So let's say a professional who handles content for an organization is listening to this podcast. Creative operations are tricky because there's certainly, just like everything else, there's certainly things you should delegate and there's things you should not delegate.

Right.

We, Blaine and I, have been through this with the podcast. There's all this hype right now in ghostwriters, et. And, you know, it's a hit or miss. Like, sure, I understand why a ghostwriter might be needed, but if it's a person that doesn't understand anything about you and your business, you're outsourcing the one thing you should not be outsourcing, and then you're doing the operations. You should have had a reverse. You should have outsourced the operations so you can focus on the content side of things. So what are some examples, or, I guess, tips for anyone who is looking to optimize their content operations? I know this might vary, whether it's a company of one to ten employees versus 20 to 50, et cetera, but if you can just share anything there, when it comes to operations, yeah.

I'm kind of an asshole because I don't think you should just outsource. I think you need to put yourself in every role and understand exactly what it entails to get the work done. And then think about outsourcing, because I get so many people, I hear this all the time. Oh, I'm just not good at content. Oh, I'm just not good at this. And it's like, are you not good at it? Or do you not want to take the time to learn who your audience is, right. And figure out the content that they actually want and that you enjoy making? And I know that that is a very off the cusp. What's the word I'm thinking of? Just, like, perspective.

But I think that outsourcing is so heavily shoved down people's throats, and it's like, I don't know what I need. I've been freelancing six years, and I'm finally hiring somebody for the first time because I wanted to get into the flow. And even now, thinking about content, right. All you hear online is hire an editor, hire an editor, hire an editor. Okay, well, why? Why do I need to hire an editor when really I need somebody to strategize with me? And I actually, I'm hiring a YouTube strategist right now because I'm pivoting and it's like, okay, I can do the SEO. I've learned that. But I don't want to spend my time there. So I've put in the work, and now I've recognized people do this better than me.

But I think in terms of that also, you don't always have to outsource, too. There are incredible tools out there that replace now people that you would naturally hire out. Right. If we think about cast magic, right? Hiring somebody to repurpose, you don't actually need that anymore. And like, yeah, you could, but in different ways. Right? You could use cast magic, repurpose your content, but then have somebody to engage with it online and push it in different ways, but not sitting here hiring someone to cut down a four hour video into a 30 minutes segment and hopefully they cut it the right way. Right? That's just my opinion. I don't know.

Content is a tricky one, too, because everyone's always like, more, and I'm over here like, damn. One video I filmed in 2020 still lands me a 15K client twice a year. It's all about quality. It's really not. Who's the race to the top? It's really not.

And the impact of a strategist is underrated. Right. If we talk about impact versus time invested from a person, that you could outsource something to short editing the video, et cetera, you're like, this is a really time consuming process, but what is the impact that drives compared to someone who has spent the time to analyze and see the data into what works and what doesn't and helps you find those insights faster? It's such a big impact. So you mentioned you land these clients from YouTube. How much has creating content been a factor of success for your.

Know, I have. I have creator guilt all the time because I'm like, I see the return, but I don't have the time to be consistent, to scale the return. Right. So I've been really fortunate that the first ever notion video I ever put out still gets me leads, still lands me clients. It got me the certification. Right. So I very much see the impact, but I also see the negative side of it because I get a lot of people, notion is sexy, right? It is very much a high performing keyword right now. And so it's this double edged sword of, yeah, if I did more, yeah, it'd be really good.

I just hit three K subs on YouTube, which is like wild to think about, even though I have almost 750,000 channel views and I'm in this place where I'm doing fifty K a year on my channel and I don't even have ten K subs. And so for me, I see the benefit of it. Like, dang, I could do ten times more. But at the same time, because notion is such a buzzword and a keyword, it's very hard to leave this niche now that I'm in it. And I've recognized like, oh, trying to do other content or do this does not even remotely perform the way that notion does, which is incredibly infuriating for me because I'm not just notion, right? I do other things. I'm also the first certified paper form expert, which is in the world. I'm the first one, which is really cool. So I also do paper form content.

But I think the other thing about it is I get a lot of leads from it that people are like, ooh, notion, ooh, notion, and they are so not ready for it. Right. You should not be paying a consultant. I charge about 15K for my projects, minimum. And if you have never even downloaded a template, you should not be reaching out to me. So I think content has its perks and its negatives, but you have to be able to ride the wave, and ride the wave strategically the way that you need to.

So for the people that are listening that might be curious on what specifically does a platform consultant entail and to be part of one of these programs, I think you mentioned as well when we met that you even do implementations of ClickUp.

Yeah, I do.

So what does that look like? What does it mean to be a ClickUp, for example, consultant partner? And what does that integration look like?

Yeah, I'm definitely not a ClickUp verified user whatsoever. I am doing my first official build with a team of 300 and it is very overwhelming. I kind of just fell into it. So I think this is a great example of why even if you are riding the wave of something that is trendy, you need to be tech agnostic and you need to stay up with the times. Every morning I am on product hunt with my cup of coffee, seeing what is launching, seeing what's going. I love debated tests, but not everybody's like that right. But I think when it comes to project management tools, everything is transferable. All you have to know is the little bits and bobs that make a platform what the platform is.

And so, for instance, with the ClickUp build that I'm doing, this CEO hired me kind of out of nowhere. It was my first ten K project. I landed without a sales call. It was very stressful. I never even heard of this company. And I had a ten k payment in my bank account. I thought it was fraud. And that was when I was like, oh, I'm not doing the product heist thing anymore.

I'm taking the ability to just book me off my website. So with that one, the client hired me and they just kept honing in, we hate ClickUp, we hate slack. We hate ClickUp, we hate slack. We're kind of playing with notion. So they hired me for notion. Well, I spent our 1st 60 days of the project straight researching tools, because I'm like, if they have this many employees, it's this expensive of a tech spend. I mean, God, the numbers are insane that they are paying even as enterprise customers. And so how can we kind of ease the CEO's mind, but while also trickling down the chart and making everyone's life still easy to do their job.

And so I spent 60 days just flat out just researching and having demo calls and just doing all of this work. And then for some reason I happened to go into their ClickUp account for something and I realized the whole thing was just built wrong. And so they have spent all this time and energy, and I spent all this time and energy realizing that they had the right tool all along. It just wasn't built correctly. And what's wild to me is they were paying a ClickUp specialist monthly for ad hoc support. And even I got on the phone with this guy and I was like, I don't understand how you are getting the money that you are and the build is this bad. Every call I've been on in the last six months, we find something that I didn't have access to. I mean, that's how bad the ClickUp account was.

And so in doing that, I was like, I can easily build this. Google is my friend, YouTube University. All I need to know is yes and no. What can this do? What can it do? But the biggest and hardest thing for me is content or platform switching, honestly, and remembering like, oh, I can do command blocks in notion, can't do them in ClickUp, right? I can export this in this way, but I can't do it over here. And so I actually started building out a little cheat sheet of each tool and what's possible on each. So that way I don't have to go into chat GPT and be like, how do I do this? How do I write this formula? And I can just easily, when I'm on a sales call or a strategy call verbatim, just drop and say, this platform is going to work for you, or this one isn't. Yeah, it's been fun. And I have another client that we're completely rebuilding a Google workspace, which is really fun.

I haven't played with Google workspace in a while, but yeah, notion is really about 40% of my business at this point, which is kind of wild because it's my number one lead gen, but people end up not being on it.

For sure, and it's a daunting one as well. But so is every platform, and there's a learning curve. And I'm curious, have you done projects with audio, specifically audio, media, content, workflow, implementation, organization, et cetera?

Yeah. So I've worked with a couple of people who do content like that. That's their number one lead Gen. I've worked with some podcast agencies who manage people's podcasts and all of that, building out workflows. And then there is a food influencer here in Austin. Well, I hate using the word influencer because Jane has also written like four books. She has multiple businesses. She's not just like posting cute online, right? But that's what she got known for.

So her business, she's known as Taste of. She's, she's like the OG in Austin who breaks know where to go and what to do and whatever. And she hired me last year because basically she was finally hiring a content team and needed a specific workflow to hand off every element of a production of, let's say, whether they're just going somewhere or it was a partnership. And so from ideation to scheduling what time they're going to go record at this location, scripting all of that, going into editing and audio. And Jane still handles captions and voiceovers, and so there's so many articulately finite details with her. And so we built out this full workflow. We did it in notion because she has very extensive notion account already. And basically utilizing this was right around the time notion automations dropped.

And so we built this really cool workflow that auto triggers the next person in that flow when something's marked as complete. And when I say I have noticed two to three times increase in the amount of content they're even doing now because they have this. And alongside of that, we also built this cool workflow for her to easily work with her VA to decide if partnerships are good or not, which I think is that's the pre work, right? You've got to decide how you're going to move forward and kind of building out more of a CRM that leads into this content pipeline. It was probably my favorite project that I've ever done, and I don't normally work with influencer content driven brands because I'm like, I have no idea what you all do. Make a tweet. I don't know. I don't even remotely do the amount of content that they do. And the whole production was just overwhelming, I will say, I think if people saw her back end, I think people would have a lot more respect for people who do content full time.

I really do.

So I don't know, Sarah, kind of, on that note, one thing that you mentioned was kind of the overlap between VAS and all these processes you're setting up. I think earlier you alluded to seeing several instances where maybe people have way too many VAs in their workflow. So where do you see, especially with all the SaaS tools that are coming out, all the AI tools that are coming out, that take SAS one step further and start creating different sort of outputs and stuff like that? But VAs are still valuable. So what's the perfect setup? I guess between setting up a workflow that's complemented, where do vas add value? Where do tools add value? How do you think about building out processes like that?

Yeah, I mean, I can speak specifically to where I'm at in my business because my onboarding, to be totally honest with you, I don't touch onboarding. It's one click to send an email to a client after a sales call, and the entire thing is completely automated. For me, I have contracts auto generated, I have stripe payment links automated. I don't do anything once I get on the call. But then for me, where my biggest pain point is is a great example. January, I onboarded twelve clients. I have 17 active clients right now, and I'm a team of one. I do it all myself, right? So it's like, yeah, I can automate onboarding, but then when it comes to actually scheduling out when I'm going to get the work done, it's so nice to be able to have somebody as a springboard to say, hey, Sarah, like, you think you can get this done on Friday? But you're on the castmagic uploading podcast.

You're recording have. You're traveling three days next month for a, like, we need to pinpoint where things get plugged in, and that's something that AI really can't do. I think maybe in a year or two, maybe it'll transition that way. But I also think there is validity in having a warm body for things that are non repetitive, non monotonous work to be able to excel your workflow. When I was interviewing these vas, I had a couple of people ask me, well, have you ever audited your time? And I'm like, I don't even know what that means. What do you mean, audit my time? I just do the work. I don't know. And so I think bringing different perspectives, vas can definitely do that.

But I also think it's important to not just hire a va. Right. When I was putting together this job description and thinking about where do I want to take my business? I know very clearly that the person I'm hiring as a va right now, by the end of the year, will be an accounts coordinator or will know some more involved with projects. Right. And I think that's something to think about, too, is, yes, you can hire a contractor short term to just rip a band aid and do something really quick and kind of figure things out. But you should also be thinking about the longevity of your team and where you want to go and just take it step by step.

What's a good exercise for someone to evaluate themselves? I find myself in this position where I'm like, okay, I can go with a strategist. I can go with the VA in the ops. And I'm like, maybe I should need to take a step back. Write down the full job description of what each person would do over the six months. What would we expect back? And so, actually, this answer might be really helpful for me as I think through this. What is a good exercise to evaluate which direction you should go?

Yeah, I wish I had an answer, but I can tell you my experience. I've been sharing this more and more, and people are like, please make a video on this. So I think I need to. So I went through a period personally where I was firing clients more than I was launching them, and I was not happy with my client base whatsoever. Honestly, I cried a lot. There was a lot of like, hey, we're taking this to court kind of things. I went through about a year in my business where I was like, I just don't want to do this. Anymore.

And in that time, I've always done client reviews. So after the end of every project, I sit down and I look at what skills did I learn? What red flags were there in the client? Did I charge what I said I was going to? What skills did I learn? What do I want to keep exploring? So, great example, ClickUp, right? I never want to do a ClickUp build ever again. I will hire a ClickUp person if I get hired for ClickUp, right? I will bring somebody in because I'm just like, I don't want to do this. But I kept seeing red flag after red flag after red flag. And I also do EmDR therapy personally for childhood trauma and whatever. And I went to my therapist and I started talking about my business, and she said, sarah, you came here for a different reason. I respect you, I hear you, but you need to, I think, go see somebody and do talk therapy for your business. And I'm like, see a business what? Like, okay.

And so I started seeing a business therapist last summer, and we literally sat down with all of these reviews and all of my frustrations. Last summer, I made the most money I ever did, and I was horribly miserable in my business. I was like, I'm burning this shit down. I'm done. I'm out. And so I sat with this business therapist, and we looked at all of these things, and what we realized is, one, I was not working with the right people. So very specifically, like, the red flags, I am not a handholder. I am not an emotional person.

And so if you've never hired a contractor, if you've never worked in this kind of capacity, we are not going to get along, because it's not my job to educate you that I am not your employee. It is not my job to talk to you. Twenty four seven. I am not your assistant. The other thing is, I realized with freelancers and kind of that emotional ownership of a business, I'm not emotionally attached to my business. I could shut it down tomorrow and not blink an eye. It's just a thing I'm doing, right? It's just a way I'm making money. And I just don't work well with those personalities.

So what we did is we completely shifted my audience base and who I'm saying yes to projects to, and completely changed my outlook on my business, made things better. I'm happier. So that was like, the first thing. But also in that time, I was like, God, I hate the work. I just kept saying, I'm so resentful. I love the money. I don't want to do the project. So maybe I should hire a projects assistant to come in and do notion and do these things.

And I couldn't find the right person, and it was because I didn't like the work that I was saying yes to. And so all of that kind of happened in like a 90 day span in my business. And what I realized once I shifted was I actually do love the work because I'm finally working with the right clients. And so I don't actually need to hire a project's assistant. I need somebody who can optimize my time and so I can spend more time with the clients that I love instead of feeling this constant shift and pull and sitting here going, fuck, I got to go do this project. It was due a week ago or whatever. So that's what I would say is I would honestly really have an honest conversation. Look at your skill set.

Look at where is your energy, if that's the right word. I'm so not into the earthly crap, but manifesting, I would seriously look at where are you spending the majority of your energy? Are you actually enjoying where that energy is? And if not, why is it that you're not good at the work is that it's hard for you and you are frustrated because you don't have time to do better at it and then honestly find somebody that you trust to have conversations with. I don't trust business coaches. I will never hire one ever again. You could not pay me a million dollars to work with a business coach. Business therapists, however, changed the game for me. Honestly, I wouldn't be freelancing right now if I wouldn't have done that last summer.

Yeah. So hire number one is the business therapist.

Yeah.

So my girlfriend doesn't have to hear me speak these mental debates out loud every day. But I think one of the most important things you mentioned there, I think, is, like, what gives you energy and what takes energy away. You have to just know that yourself before you even know what to delegate. It gets challenging sometimes when what you're great or good at is what also takes energy. That has happened to me sometimes where I'm like, I'm really good at that, but I don't like it. But shit, it's like the one thing I'm really good at, too. And so that's a really tough one. And I guess that's why where business therapists can come in.

Well, you know what else is really interesting? So I got coffee with a friend yesterday, and she was telling know she's expanding our team, I think she has four employees now. And she goes, I feel like we hired the right people, but I don't know, there was, like, just things that weren't right. And so she had her whole team take the Myers Briggs assessment, take, I think, the enneagram and some know, personality quiz, and she plugged them into chat GPT and said, what role, what tasks fit these personalities best? She said she just did little tiny tweaks. And her team is the best productive, smooth sailing environment that she's ever curated. And she's been in business, I think, ten years, so something to think about too. Maybe plug in if you're. I don't know. I'm an intj, so I'm natural, like leader, but I want to be left alone.

I love building relationships, but that drains me, right? I am on calls all day, every day. I love it. But it also is the most draining thing to do. So how do you build relationships and not be exhausted at the end of the day? I don't know.

I think that's a great place to start for anyone who's listening. Let's start with a team audit, take the information, plug it into chat GPT and see how to rework the roles. I love that Sarah. As we wrap up here, for anyone who's listening and wants to learn more, see your content, dive deeper into workflow, all that sort of stuff, where can we connect with you?

Yeah, so I am the Sarah Loretta on every platform. I'm very fortunate that I have a name like Sarah Loretta. It is actually my full name, which people just totally are like, what? That's so cool. I'm like, I know I picked it, but, yeah, I'm the Sarah Loretta. Twitter is honestly where I hang out. That's where all my friends are. I love Twitter with all my. And Sarah has no h, by the way.

For those listening, please spell my name correctly. And then the last thing my agency site is systems is spelled without an e because I like to make things more difficult. So systems club is where you can find templates and resources and videos and work with me one on one if you want to. And, yeah, that's where I'm at.

Sweet. Thanks so much for coming on uploading.

Thank you, Sarah.

Thanks for having me, guys.