The Design Business Show 187: Get Automated Processes with Dubsado Queen, Charlotte Isaac

Charlotte Isaac is a Business Operations Consultant who gave up her role as a corporate ops manager inside of a creative agency so that she could serve small business owners who love their people just as much as she does hers. Through her signature program, Ease Seekers Society, and her DIY Dubsado shop, Charlotte helps overwhelmed and overworked entrepreneurs build customized solutions so they can serve their clients better, automate busywork, and feel confident in their business. Blessed with a travel bug herself, Charlotte leads by example, having designed her own business in a way that allows plenty of space to enjoy life with her husband, both in their hometown of Sydney, Australia, and around the world.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

How Charlotte Became the Dubsado Queen

Charlotte talks about how she liked her corporate job but felt she wanted more freedom and flexibility in her life and knew she could help others achieve the same
How Charlotte worked with the same creative agency her whole corporate career, starting on the account management team, moving to communications, and into an operation and systems role which surprised her because that’s never where she thought she’d be
The purpose of today’s episode is for Charlotte to talk to us about Dubsado, which I’ve heard many people rave about
Charlotte shares that Dubsado is there every step, from when someone inquires about working with you through your website through your onboarding and offboarding – it helps make the process super simple
I have heard that Dubsado can be complicated on the backend, but once you get it set up, it works magic – Charlotte agrees this is a fair assessment; it makes your life easier, but for most people, it is not super intuitive, which is why some stop playing around with it
Charlotte shares how she first found out about Dubsado; the creative agency she worked for was setting up an office in Singapore where she was looking into CRMs and stumbled across Dubsado, which was still pretty new at the time but says she could tell it was special at the time
Unfortunately, at the time, Dubsado was not big enough to support a large team, but Charlotte knew it was something she wanted to play around with, so when she started her business, she had it from day one
How Charlotte kept telling and helping her clients about Dubsado but never intended to become the Dubsado person, but she knew it could help so many people – a lot of her clients and students call her the Dubsado Queen
Charlotte has been helping people get set up on Dubsado for many years and after a while, realized there is a pattern to coming up with a well-streamlined process
These days, Charlotte helps people set up Dubsado through her group program, Ease Seekers Society
Charlotte shares that most service-based businesses have 3 workflows 1) leads workflow, which is managing people coming in through your website & having a discovery call with them 2) proposal & onboarding workflow 3) offboarding
One of the hardest thing for Charlotte was owning that she is an expert, but she says that’s also why she likes helping people because it makes her own her expertise

Charlotte’s Group Program + How to Use Automated Processes

In Charlotte’s group program, Ease Seekers Society, they set up Dubsado over a 6-week timeframe; they also have live group calls a couple of times a week, have access to different trainings and all of Charlotte’s best tools and resources
In the program, you start by planning out workflows, and before getting into Dubsado, you dive deep into how you serve your clients, what’s unique about your process, and what you want to automate, and then they move into the nitty-gritty of setting up Dubsado
The series of unfortunate events that happened to Charlotte and her husband after buying their first home, but Charlotte explains why she loves Dubsado and having so many systems in her business is because everything was able to keep going without her
How a lot of people put off using systems because they don’t know where to start – Charlotte says the best thing you can do is take a step back and think about how you want your client processes to run
Charlotte walks through an example of a leads workflow for when someone fills out the contact form on your website – she suggests writing out your whole process, thinking about what you already do, so you can then think about automating those steps in your process through Dubsado
Using my very organic process for getting clients a launch system as an example, Charlotte walks through how I could use Dubsado in my business process
I talk about my process for most clients and how I like to map out their calendar, so we know where everything fits; from there, we look at where they’re at and what’s worked in the past to make a system that works for them based on how their business is set up vs. how they want their launch to look
My process is done over two half days; this allows me and my clients to ask follow-up questions – I share that during the second half-day, we focus on their creative assets
Charlotte suggests having a nice wrap-up email in my process to let clients know what it looks like going forward and recap all the stuff we went through, and Charlotte also recommends having an offboarding sequence
How having nurturing sequences for your existing clients is important because Charlotte shares you can ask them how their launch went or ask for testimonials through that sequence
In Dubsado, there is a checkbox you can check that says, ‘requires approval,’ which means when it’s time for an email to go out, Dubsado will check with you first – Charlotte says this is a great way to be able to personalize messages, push back messages or change the phrasing of a message depending on the client
I use many different applications in my business to help in different areas, but Charlotte says in Dubsado, you can do everything you might need to with a client – send out one-on-one emailing, questionnaires, proposals, contracts, invoices, you can do scheduling, etc.
Charlotte shares that Dubsado also has a client portal which is great for people who work with clients for a long time, on bigger projects, or on multiple projects
Charlotte says to not be scared of Dubsado; even though it is a big tool, there’s so much it can do, and there are so many resources to help you get started, like on Charlotte’s website
Most people end up saving around 4 hours a week when they implement Dubsado – think about what you could do with that time
Connect with Charlotte through her website and check out her free mini-course called 7 Steps to Automation which walks you through all the things you could automate to help streamline your client process