What if I told you using “cookie cutters” in your business is actually a good thing?

I’m not saying you should copy everything. Especially when it comes to your brand, your platform, your message, the core of your business. That doesn’t work. What I am saying is, in the management of your business, templating should absolutely be implemented.

More Doing

Let’s say you want to host a webinar but don’t have a topic, feel overwhelmed and want to give up before you even start. If you have a sheet of topic ideas to choose from, wouldn’t that help jump start the process? Surely you’ll be able to come up with a topic before long and you can move to the next step.

When you build a binder containing things like – overview checklist, webinar topic ideas/suggestions, list of people who can help, guest speaker solicitation email template, webinar format template, pre-webinar promotion template, post-webinar promotion template and more – you already have some place to work from. You know what you need to be doing next. The end result is more doing, less thinking.

Thinking is good and there is a time to think creatively and strategically but when it is time for execution, sometimes thinking leads to over-thinking and procrastination.

Create Products Faster

Naturally, each product you create is different based on the subject matter and the product itself. However, your product creation process can be sped up considerably when you already have a template that use for just about every product. Things such as:

• PowerPoint presentations
• eBook styles/design
• User manuals
• Audio and video style (e.g. Intro – overview – content – call to action – closing)
• Product organization. For example, if you regularly include images in your product, have an image folder for each product and put them in there. This is good for customers too, because they know what to expect.
• Transactional email copy, transactional pages copy e.g. member’s only page and member welcome pages

Outsourcing Easier, Cheaper, Faster

This is a biggie and I realized this while attempting to outsource the process of putting up a product for sale. Ideally, the process would go something like this.

1. You finish the product, artwork, compile all files
2. Add it to Dropbox
3. Your outsourcer takes it from there – uploads it to your site, sets it up in the shopping cart and adds it to your website and notifies you of task completed
4. You email your list, advertise, promote

It all sounds so easy but it won’t be if the process of adding products for sale on your website is not standard. Take a look at each of your sales pages. Can someone duplicate the post and change out the product name, copy, price, artwork and order links? Or, is the entire page so uniquely created for that one product you have to re-design the page?

If someone cannot easily duplicate the page and swap out stuff, then you will always pay more to outsource. It also takes longer. Next time you want to outsource, you will look at the entire process as troublesome, takes too long, costs too much, become “easier to do it yourself” and you end up back in square one.

Start today. When you work on your projects, be aware. Watch out for patterns. For example, if you always start your podcast with “Hello, this is ABC podcast and I’m your host Susie Q.” Record that clip and keep it on file so you or your assistant can simply drop that clip into the production for your next podcast. Do this often enough and soon you will be doing only the core things that are important to move things forward.