This is a transcript of episode 47 of the OMGrowth podcast
I’m Lanie Lamarre and today, we’re going to talk extra nerdy – nerdy squared! – because I have my pal Ashley from Do The Damn Thing and she too is an Airtable expert but she also rocks socks at automations. Look, I’m all about getting more done without being the one who does it and if that’s your vibe, too, this episode is here for all the auto-magical edu-caring.
Lanie Lamarre:
I really love everything about automations. I do have a lot of them in place, but I’m sure that I’m not using them to their full potential. And I wanna talk to you about it.
Ashley Hogrebe:
I don’t even think I’m using it to the full potential. Like it’s the sky is the limit with automations, but I’m excited to be here and nerd out with you for sure.
Lanie Lamarre:
I mean, that’s a great place to get started because the sky is the limit. So what is sort of like the low lying fruit, the baseline area that you would re and people get started with when it comes to automating all the things they do.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yeah. Great question. So the thing I see the most is people are… solopreneurs are at capacity and their first thing is like, “I need to hire a VA to do the little things I don’t wanna do anymore and take off my plate”. So checking emails or sending contracts ending follows, creating Google folders, all of those things that you start to think, “oh, I need to hire a virtual assistant for”, if you kind of take a step between that and think, “what can I automate from my plate?” And then hire, that’s a really good place to start because there’s so much that your VAs are probably doing that you don’t even know could be automated, that can absolutely be automated with like free zap. So some of the biggest things for me, when people get started are things like when a client buys from you, put them in an email sequence or send them a welcome packet or something like that. Any of those, when this very specific thing happens, then do this. You are doing it manually. That’s a really good, good place to start there.
Lanie Lamarre:
Now that you say that I realize that I do have probably more automations than I think in place, because when somebody buys from me, I get an advisory now where it’s like, “send out the thank you card”. And I also get a little alert on my phone that makes, um, like a fun money sound because it makes me feel good. And that’s an automation that has no practical use, but all the emotional feel-good use.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yeah. And that’s like, automations can help you be notified. I get a lot of slack notifications because Slack is kind of my hub for my team and I to communicate, but we have Slack chanels devoted just to notifying us when things are happening. So if someone fills out a form, if a client fills out a support ticket form that we have inside of air table – which Airtable is a whole other can of worms – but they fill it out, we get an automation in Slack that someone filled out the form. So it helps us just kind of keep an overarching eye on the business, this, and be notified versus having to like go into all of these different places and see when the updates are happening. I have a sales one too. They get, I get a text with money emojis. It’s like new sale and all of those. And it’s just like, those are fun to do.
Lanie Lamarre:
They are fun. Yeah. It puts having fun in your operations as kind of, at least for me, a big key in enjoying doing it. It’s not just always work. You can bring some sort of water cooler vibe, even if you’re a business of One.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Well, and that’s the biggest, I think misconception people have about automations is they assume on automations are stale and gonna make you feel like your business is like robotic and that your people are gonna know that they’re talking to a robot. You can infuse so much personality and personalization into automations and really infuse so much of your voice in there. So it’s not this like robotic email that’s coming through when someone books. You get to decide what the copy looks like, you get to decide what these automations do. The real magic with automations is that you don’t have to think about it every time so you create the personality framework, you turn it on and then you don’t have to send them and, and they can just happen kind of in the background.
Lanie Lamarre:
Yeah. Just cuz it has to be done, doesn’t mean it has to be done by you. And a lot of stuff related to emails is with automation, because that’s sort of where we think of first of things to automate, but there’s a lot of manual things that we all just get in the habit of doing that I think that we don’t think of implementing automations for through platforms like Zapier – zay-pee-ur, it’s za-pee-ur, isn’t it? Because it
Ashley Hogrebe:
It’s Zapier because their tagline is “Zapier makes you happier”, which I think is like their subtle dig at being like, this is how you pronounce it.
Lanie Lamarre:
And they have a bunch of free ones as well.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yep. So, so many free ones, Airtable also has integrated automations as well. Um, so with Zapier you can do, what’s called a one-step zap for free. So if this happens over here, then do this. There’s so many, I think a lot of us are still like in the Google suite domain and we’re creating Google folders for our clients. Some people create Google calendars, you can automate those. The thing I hate to hear the most is, is, “well, it only takes me a couple minutes to do it. It only takes my VA a couple minutes to do it”… like, that will kill your productivity. because you have to not only do it, you have to remember to do it and all of those things. So it just takes a couple minutes is a great kind of alarm to be like, let me go see if I can automate this and, and take that off my plate.
Lanie Lamarre:
It’s so not the “doing it” that’s the problem. And I’m so glad you said that because it’s the having to think about doing it. Like I have a personal thing at home. I hate meal planning. I don’t mind cooking. I don’t mind, you know, getting the Instacart thing ready, but the actual plan out what we’re going to eat. Like that’s the actual work thinking about what has to be done to me feels like the actual work. So if you can remove that thinking part and use your thinking into something that is going to better serve you, I’m 100% on board with that. Always, always,
Ashley Hogrebe:
Totally. And you don’t wanna be in the shower thinking like I didn’t send that email to my client. like, like the shower time to be for more fun ideas, not like, uh, like, “oh my God, did I not? Did I not send that thing? Did I not do that thing?” Like you can tell this totally eliminate that kind of stress from, from your day to day.
Lanie Lamarre:
There are way better things to think about in the shower than that one folder you forgot to create. Oh my gosh. So with you the Airtable automations – I really used them a lot when I had the summit going where, when I wanted to send an email out, as soon as a certain thing was done and I checked something off, I was able to automatically send an email that I didn’t have to think about and do for each individual person. And you can populate it with some of the fields that you had in the actual, in your database that you had created. Yep. So you’re not reinventing the wheel for each speaker and you can super mega personalize everything, which I’m always for. And I think that is the trick with automations and not making it seem like it’s a robot: being able to personalize those things actually isn’t that hard to do.
Ashley Hogrebe:
No, there’s so many places you can infuse it. I use those automations a lot. I have, uh, I have ADHD and sending like call notes, follow up is very hard for me, like hopping off a call and being like, oh yeah, like, I’ll send that to you today. I won’t do it. Like it’s, it was a really big and like that loses me sales. It, it dampens the client experience. Like all of those things were really challenging for me. And now inside of Airtable, I open up a record and type in my call notes there. I type in while I’m on the call, I’m typing inside of an Airtable record and I just drop the email, send status after I’m done to send follow up email and right away without me even having to go into Gmail, I can send my follow notes to that person within seconds of the call being over. And that has eliminated so much shame as well. For me of like I’m a bad business owner, not following through on my promises of like, yeah, yeah. I’ll send you that email. And then a week later I have totally forgotten about it. So being have automations help you cut down that barrier of, of getting things done and it can just be like, get it out there, send it, and, and it’s, it’s done
Lanie Lamarre:
Anything you need to follow up on or have to remember to do something about it. There there’s usually is a way of automating, at least the remembering part of it… if not the task completely.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yeah. A hundred percent. I love, I love reminders. yeah. And even if you can’t automate the follow up of a reply, having an automation that says, “Hey, if I haven’t Received a payment from this person, text me, slack me, put a task and click up to follow up with that person.” shley Hogrebe: (08:52)
And even the creation of those reminders is, is huge.
Lanie Lamarre:
Get paid! And you have a free resource about the call note automations that you have set up, right?
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yep. So if you are interested in that, I have, so it’s a call notes Airtable template that you can download for free. And it’ll walk you through how to take your call notes inside of air table and how to set up that very easy automation. So it’s just a, when the status is ready to send, it will send through your own Gmail account. It’ll go through your sent inbox. So it looks like it’s getting sent from you, cuz it is, and it is, it’s so easy. Like hundreds of people have downloaded it and it’s just like, people are obsessed. and it’s really, I, what I find with automations, I say, they’re kind of like Pringles. It’s like, once you pop, you can’t once, like you cannot stop with them. And you’re just like, what else can I automate? What else can I do? So just kind of dipping your toe into automations is a, is a really fun, fun thing to explore.
Lanie Lamarre:
I was just gonna say that automations is one of those things. It’s like the, the… I’m gonna totally butcher this quote, but it was, but like, “creativity creates its own need to create itself”. I’m gonna edit in whatever the actual quote was, but it’s something about like “creativity begets itself” and it’s the same sort of thing where automations, oh, you, once you actually practically put one in place. Yeah. You think, oh, “I wonder if be able to…”, and then you start going down that rabbit hole of that creative way of thinking and you don’t get that unless you actually put one in place.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yep. Yeah. You just, you don’t know what’s possible until you to dive in. Like, we joked about it this at the beginning of like, “oh, we still are like, not scratching the surface of automations”, but it’s really true because I don’t even, I still can’t sometimes comprehend what’s fully possible. I’ve automated almost everything I can out of in my business. I’m a big believer in like I, as a CEO should only do CEO tasks. My team should do things. Only team people can do and robots should do everything else. So if a robot can do it, there’s no reason for me to have my team do it. Zapier is the cheapest VA you can possibly have. And I’m not about like getting rid of jobs or like automating jobs. I’m not interested in, in that narrative. But I am interested in hiring my team to do the thing, to do outreach, to do other things that just cannot be automated. Cuz there are things that we, we shouldn’t automate. Um, but, but there’s a lot we can and we should have have the robots doing that and have humans do human centered things.
Lanie Lamarre:
And for the humans to be doing things that fit into their own zone of genius and the things that make them shine and the things that make them wanna stay and feel, uh, stimulated in terms of the work that you are, are doing with them. Mm-hmm , those are the types of people that you wanna have working with you. And those are the types of people who are going to stay with you. And when you can automate something that is repetitive, uh, rather than hire it out, the problem with hiring it out is when they leave you that task isn’t being done and it now needs to be trained into somebody else where it’s like you trained an automation to do it once and then walk away, maybe check on it every now and then, but that’s about it.
Ashley Hogrebe:
And instead of teaching my team how to do these repetitive tasks, I’m teaching them how to think in automations and how to monitor the automation if it breaks. So that’s a, that’s a higher paid skillset than like filling out a spreadsheet like every day for 30 minutes, you know? So being able to empower your team to step into these kind of higher operation roles and like strengthen those skill sets helps helps everyone.
Lanie Lamarre:
Absolutely. In my Airtable course there’s um, somebody had put, I’d seen somebody put it together where they used some of the Airtable scripts and they did all kinds of fancy coding that would automate pulling in your data from YouTube into your air table spreadsheets. Now this is a much more advanced automat, but if you are doing these things manually, rather than doing it every single week to just pay a developer, a flat fee, to put this sort of automation in place for you, like anything you can think of within community guidelines, is probably something you’re able to put into place. It’s just a matter of thinking creatively enough and getting the right people, supporting you to do that. So you don’t have to be the subject matter expert into putting it into place. You just have to be a creative enough boss to be like, oh, I don’t need to be doing this anymore.
Ashley Hogrebe:
That’s so interesting. You say that, cuz that’s kind of where I’m at now. It was like, I’ve kind of used Zapier to its fullest capacity and developers grips API. Like all of those things I don’t know a lot about. And I don’t need to know. And sometimes I like not knowing because the no code options are so robust now. And so you don’t have to be a developer. You don’t have to know HTML, JavaScript anything because there’s amazing a software that has made it so intuitive. You start to put these things together. It’s as easy as like assembling, like building blocks together. And that’s like, that’s so cool is just, the technology has made it so easy and accessible for all of us to do this. And when you get to the highest levels, then you’re like, all right, developers like help me out.
Lanie Lamarre:
Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s money well spent. If it’s something that you or someone on your team is spending that much time doing on. Repeat where do people go to find out more about air table and automations from your brilliant mind.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yes. Um, Instagram is where I live. So we’re at do the thing underscore. The link in the bio has the freebies for the call notes template, an Airtable 101 Workshop, a lot of fun things there. Um, we love the DMs. So please, if you, if you’re listening to this, um, shoot me a DM that you heard this and we can, we can nerd out on Airtable and automations and all the things. But yeah, Instagram is the best place to find me.
Lanie Lamarre:
I wanna put it out there too, that Ashley and I met on Instagram and we met because of a mutual love in sharing our knowledge on Airtable. One of those things too, where people think, oh, I can’t talk to this person because they’re competition. I’m like, there’s not enough people talk about Airtable. I’m so glad that Ashley’s around spreading the gospel of it. Cuz I think more people should be using platforms that enable them to work smarter, see their projects in a way that that’ll cater to how they’re working and also hello, automate some of their workload. So let this also be sort of something to you, the listeners, if there’s someone that you wanna talk to go ahead and talk to them because it just gives you someone else to nerd out with.
Ashley Hogrebe:
I remember so vividly I was pacing my kitchen being like, “do I send lLanie a DM?” Because lanie was like, the Airtable queen. No one else was touching Airtable at that moment. And I was dipping my toe in and I like, I just wanna tell her that she’s inspired me and that like, will she consider me an equal or a competitor? And I just DMed her transparently. I was like, here’s how I’m feeling. I’m so nervous to say hello to you, but hello. And that was years ago and we’ve had great collaborations and friendships and conversations. Um, yeah. So if you’re collaboration over competition, for sure and reach, reach out to the people in your industry because we, we need more of it.
Lanie Lamarre:
I don’t really see it as competition. There really is room for everyone because of the way you talk about Airtable and the people who you talk about Airtable to is sort of a very different tone than how I use and people will gravitate to whatever they gravitate to. And I think a at is I think that’s great. Kay, thank you for being a guest today, Ashley.
Ashley Hogrebe:
Yay. Thank you for having me.
Show notes will include links to my signature course – Airtable Like A Boss – and there’s a whole module dedicated to automations and integrations for you to check out.
You can also check out the meeting note automation tutorial Ashley talked about with a link to that in the shownotes as well as her Instagram.
And finally, the dang quote I butchered is: “you can’t use up creativity. the more you use, the more you have” and some attribute it to Maya Angelou and some say it’s Oscar Wilde but whoever said it first, it’s still true today and the more you think with that CEO cap on, the more CEO type thoughts will come popping into that cap so I encourage you to carve out some time to get those wheels turning as to what you could be doing less of in your day-to-day operations.
If you have questions about Airtable, reach out to either Ashley or I because, you know, nerds gonna nerd, right? Baiiieeee.