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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
Are You Ready To Automate Your Business And Scale Your Income Effortlessly?
Struggling to choose the right software system for your growing business? You're not alone. The marketplace is flooded with options that promise to solve all your problems, yet entrepreneurs consistently find themselves trapped in a frustrating cycle of subscriptions that don't work together, hidden costs that balloon over time, and technical headaches that drain both time and energy.
Annie Veblen-McCarty tackles this common entrepreneurial challenge head-on with practical wisdom gained from over 20 years of business experience. She walks through a step-by-step process for evaluating your current and future business needs before making any software decisions. The episode reveals why cobbling together "best-in-class" single-function tools often leads to integration nightmares, unexpected costs, and lost productivity. Instead, Annie makes a compelling case for thoughtfully chosen all-in-one systems that grow with your business.
Beyond features and pricing, Annie emphasizes the importance of evaluating the user experience, support availability, and implementation resources. For coaches, healers, and creative entrepreneurs specifically, she introduces Coach OS as a comprehensive, affordable solution designed with your unique business needs in mind. Whether you're just starting out or looking to streamline your existing tech stack, this episode provides the framework you need to make confident software decisions that will support your business today and five years down the road. Your future self will thank you for listening before signing up for another software subscription!
Coaches, healers, and creatives—how much money are you leaving on the table?
Coach OS is the world’s leading all-in-one software that automates your business, scales your income, and replaces all your other software for a fraction of the cost!
Grab your free trial now, at https://coachossoftware.com/
Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:I am so excited you are here Today. We are going to be talking about how to choose a business system or scaling software for your business. There are so many options out there. There are so many different choices, and I have people come to me all the time who are honestly overwhelmed by how many choices there are. They're confused. They don't know what they need. They don't even know where to begin with piecing things together. That is why I was so excited to do this episode for you.
Speaker 2:This has been so highly requested, because so many people are trying to choose what it is that they want to use. So I am going to walk you through this process and hopefully, by the end, you either maybe have something in mind that you've already been looking for, or you at least have an approach that you can take to start to narrow this down. The first thing that I have everybody do who comes to me with this question is what are all the features that you need for your business right now? Think about this as your ideal wish list. If you could have anything and everything you wanted right now, what would that include? And then maybe think about, five years out out, what are all the other things in your business that you might want to have in the future. So an example of this is maybe at this moment, you do not have online courses that people can take. However, that's something that you have been dreaming about and thinking about and want to have. So that would go on your list as well, and you can do this as two lists. You can do it as a now list and a future list, or you can do it all as one, because we are going to look at the entirety, the totality of all of these things when we start to pick the platform that we want to use. So think about all the things that you might want to have. Maybe you don't need a website right now, but you know in the long that we want to use. So think about all the things that you might want to have. Maybe you don't need a website right now, but you know in the long run you want to have a website. There's so many different features that are available that are out there. Maybe you're like I don't even know what automations are or how to begin using them, but in the future that would be amazing to be able to automate things in my business without me having to touch them, but in the future that would be amazing to be able to automate things in my business without me having to touch them. So I might not know how to use it now or how I even would use it, but I know that's something that I want in the future. So make your list. That's where we're going to start.
Speaker 2:Now that we have made our list, we now have to start to think about the choice of do we want to get little pieces of software? There are fantastic applications and softwares out there that do one thing really, really, really well. For example, we can think about scheduling tools or calendar tools, and there are so many different options out there. Right, we have Calendly, we have Acuity the list could literally go on and on. They all work great. So those are some things that you can think about.
Speaker 2:However, what I have found, both personally and with so many people who come to me asking, is that we start with one little thing that we want. So we're like I need a calendar tool and we buy the best calendar tool out there, a subscription to it, and we're using it. And then we're like, oh my gosh, and I want an email list. So then we go out and find the best email service that we can find and it does emails really, really well. And then we're like, okay, now I want to have a website, so I'm going to go find the best website host and the easiest place to build a website. And we have that. And then we come to the point where we're like oh, I would love people to be able to opt into my emails on my website.
Speaker 2:Well, these two pieces of software do not talk to each other. Maybe they do have an integration, but a lot of the time they don't. Now there are ways that we can embed an email signup form onto a website, but when these two pieces of software are not connected and integrated, a lot of the time what we end up with is we end up with having to navigate and put the actual computer programming coding from one software into another software. And so when I'm working with clients, a lot of the time that's where people are like I literally don't even know how to do this. So they've bought subscriptions to and built out things and they have their whole email list in four, five, seven, 10, 15 different softwares that they are using, and now they're at a place where they're trying to get it all to talk to each other and work together and they are running into so many roadblocks and issues and trouble and something's not working the way that they thought it was going to and the one company says that it's the other company's fault and other companies like no, it's a setup problem on their end, and they are confused and stuck and they don't know where to go for help. It can be very expensive to hire a professional to then come in and try to make it all work together or try to fix these issues or these hiccups that you are running into. So that is one drawback and I share that also from personal experience.
Speaker 2:I, at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I hopped from email marketing platform to email marketing platform over and over and over again and every single time I did that I had to move my entire email list. The email servers had to learn that I was sending from a different server than I had been before my open rates would drop. I just ran into so many different things. I also did the same with websites. I could go on and on, like so many different things, like I mentioned, calendars. So I have experienced this. Now I got to the place where I was sick and tired of trying to make different softwares talk to each other.
Speaker 2:There is a program, an app, a software called Zapier Z-A-P-I-E-R. It is amazing, like for what it is designed to do. That is designed to tie different softwares together. However, especially if you're somebody who's not as comfortable with tech, if you go into Zapier and start to try to set it up a lot of the time, that process alone can be really frustrating. So we also have to think about if these two softwares don't integrate on their own, and then I'm trying to use something like Zapier to tie them all together. Now I have another subscription. I have another place where hiccups might happen, where data is getting dropped or we just forgot to set something up properly and it's not doing what we expected it to do, and now we're back to chasing our tail trying to troubleshoot what is happening here. So I am a huge, huge proponent of all-in-one softwares for this exact reason, because it makes the process so much easier and so much smoother when we have things all together.
Speaker 2:Now there are a ton of different all-in-one software options out there. That is part of why I had you list, make your wish list of all the things that you want in a software system now and all the things that you might be using in the next five years or in the future too. Because when we start looking at these all-in-one softwares, there are certain ones that include text messages, there are other ones. Certain ones that include text messages, there are other ones that don't include text messages. If you want to be sending text messages for your business or doing text message marketing, then we need to make sure that we are looking at all-in-one softwares or in software systems that we're going to tie together that have text message marketing. So that's part of why I had you make that list at the beginning, because this is going to help. Also, when you are looking at all-in-one softwares, we are gonna run into lots of different subscription options and a lot of the time they do have a lower option. However, where you're going in your business, maybe their pricing is tied to how many clients you have on your email list. So right now, when you're just starting your email list and just starting to build that part of it, it's very inexpensive. However, when you grow your email list to where you want it, staying on that platform suddenly becomes a huge monthly cost.
Speaker 2:There are other all-in-one softwares that in order to get certain features, in order to have those features turned on and accessible, you need to pay a higher subscription level. An example of this I know a specific software. It is a great all-in-one. However, if you wanna host courses or have a website, you have to be at their higher subscription levels and all of a sudden it goes from subscription amount that is pretty run of the mill to something that's very, very expensive for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs who are just getting started, and a lot of those entrepreneurs want to be selling their own courses or they want to have their own website. So make sure that as you start to look at different software systems, that you are taking into account how their subscription model works, what is included in all of that, and then also again, if you are not going to go the all-in-one option, if you're going to try to tie all of it together, make sure that you are understanding other kind of hidden costs there of some softwares that you might need to make things talk to each other. That is my recommendation on how to start to determine do you want an all-in-one, do you want to try to piece things together and then, when we are selecting different softwares, making sure that we are looking at what is included and not just what our cost is right now, in this very moment of where we are in our business, but what our cost might be once we implement all of these things, once we grow that email list, once we are at the place that we are going in the next five to 10 years. That is a very important thing to take into consideration.
Speaker 2:Another thing to start to think about and look at as you start to narrow your choices down, because you might end up where you're like okay, I do want an all-in-one. I have found these few all-in-ones that have all the options that I want. How do I decide between them? A big determining factor is how intuitive the interface is for you, how easy it is for you to learn. A lot of places have free trials. I highly recommend, once you've narrowed down to just a couple, go in and grab a free trial and get in there and try to build some things yourself. Look at how it's organized, look at how all the features tie together. Does it make sense to you? Is it easy to use? Is it logically laid out? Can you understand how your landing pages tie into your forms, tie into an event registration, all of those things. So go actually use it and see.
Speaker 2:Another thing to think about we also have our price implication as well. We want to look at that price and again, not just that monthly price where we are right now, the monthly price of where we are going to end up. I also want you to look at the support that is available. Is there support in the country that you are in? Is there support 24-7? Do they have a knowledge base that you can look through? Let's say you are building something at 3 am and there is no live human to talk to. Do they have some walkthroughs that really help you figure that out? How fast is the support response? So we want to be looking at all of this. What the training is. Is that training included or is that training cost extra? And who it is that will be providing that support for us? Also, who are the people using that software and doing trainings around that software? Is that somebody that it is easy for you to learn from, or is it somebody where you don't really connect with their way of teaching? Does that platform even have anybody out there training on how to set it up.
Speaker 2:Make sure that you are looking at the support options, at the knowledge-based resources, at the walkthroughs, at all of that when you are starting to make these decisions. Does it have a getting started course that paces you through? When you are literally moving to this platform or just getting started with it? What's your first step? What's your next step? What order should you do things in? Also think about, too, with these software systems. Let's say you do have a contact list. You have an email list already or a text list. Will they import that for you? Is there support in helping you move what you do have into that platform and helping you get started setting things up? So I want you to think about all of these pieces as you go to choose a software platform.
Speaker 2:Now, if you are looking for an all-in-one software platform, those of you who are my creative and spiritual entrepreneurs, those of you who are coaches, those of you who are healers I actually have my own software platform that I absolutely love. This is not saying you have to use it. There are so many amazing options out there in the marketplace, but I have designed this software platform to be an all in one that is inclusive of everything for a very affordable monthly cost, especially compared to some of the other prices out there, and it is literally set up and designed for coaches and creative entrepreneurs. It is called Coach OS, so if you do want to look into that or do the free trial just to play around with it, you can go to coachossoftwarecom and check it out, grab that free trial. Maybe you put that into the mix of one of the platforms that you are going to experiment with or take a look at. And again, if you have something that you absolutely love already and is working great for you, stick with it. Stick with it.
Speaker 2:I have found that one of the biggest expenditures of time and energy in my business was jumping softwares, was having to move my list from one thing to another, having to learn a new platform.
Speaker 2:So if you have something that you love and you were happy with, I highly recommend just staying there. Don't move unless you have a reason to move. However, again, if you are looking at different options or you're like I am just lost and I don't even know where to begin, definitely check out my Coach OS software. I can't wait to hear how things go for you with selecting your software platform or maybe you're looking at a new one. I know there are a lot of people I've talked to recently who are not happy with the one they have and they're looking for some other options to move to. So if that is you, good luck with that process. Definitely drop in the comments if you have any questions or feedback or input on your software or the process of choosing one or the process of moving from one to another. I hope you have a beautiful day and I will catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.
