Collaboration for Growth with Monica Bishop

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

Collaboration is the name of the game. It’s the key to growth, both personally and professionally. We can connect and create way more together than separately!

I had a wonderful chat with Monica Bishop where we talked all about the importance of collaborating, using them to build your business village and how to set up your business so that you’re ready and open for these opportunities.

It’s such a fun conversation where we interviewed each other as an example of one way to collaborate, which is so meta. So if you’re wanting to grow your reach, stick around and let’s dive in!

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Attract Clients Now Facebook Group

▶ Attract Clients Now

▶ Efficiency Self-Assessment Toolkit

▶ Bundle Contributor Hub

▶ Summit Speaker Hub

Connect with me:

Website | Instagram

Watch on YouTube:

About Our Guest

Meet Monica Bishop, the visionary CEO behind Attract Clients Now—an Attraction-Based Business Strategy & Marketing Agency.

Monica is the growth solution for service-based entrepreneurs, guiding you to craft and implement strategies that yield rapid, tangible results, nurturing growth and scalability. At Attract Clients Now, our mission is simple: to build strategic solutions that align with your unique personality and goals, ensuring you build a business that you love and that loves you back.

With a deep passion for transformative solutions, Monica’s approach goes beyond just providing services; she’s committed to fostering genuine connections and supporting your journey every step of the way. At the core of our business are Rapid Results Solutions, empowering you to achieve your goals efficiently. And for those seeking ongoing support, our flexible options cater to your needs.

For those craving connection and collaborative growth opportunities, our Business Growth Collective membership offers a supportive environment for networking, collaboration, and collective business growth.

When she’s not immersed in her business, Monica finds joy in playing with her chicken, tending to her garden, riding her bike, and sharing her love for yoga through teaching.

Connect with Monica here:

Free Gift | Follow on YouTube | Join Free Facebook Group

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Intro

If you want to get your name out there, one of the best ways to do so is through collaborations. I had a wonderful chat with Monica Bishop, where we chatted about the importance of collaborating, how to use them to build your business village and how to set up your systems so that you’re open and ready for these new opportunities.

It was such a fun conversation where we interviewed each other as a form of collaboration, which is pretty meta. So, if you’re wanting to expand your reach, then stick around and tune in so that way you can be a fly on the wall to this fun conversation.

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs that like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner. It’s your time to shine so let’s get started.

About The Guest

Hey, welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. I have something special and different for you today. In this episode, you’re going to get to be the fly on the wall to a conversation that I had with Monica Bishop all about using collaborations to grow your business.

Monica is the visionary CEO behind Attract Clients Now, an attraction-based business strategy and marketing agency. She also has the Business Growth Collective, a membership offering a supportive environment for networking, collaborating, and collective business growth. But in her free time, Monica actually enjoys playing with her chickens and tending to her garden. So be sure to check out the show notes, to get all the links mentioned and to connect with Monica.

But for now, we’re going to dive into the replay of this conversation, where we actually interviewed each other and shared our own perspectives on how we use collaborations to grow our reach and our business and how you can too.

The Interview

Lucy Reyes: Welcome to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast and the Attract Clients Now Marketing Podcast. I am here with Monica Bishop and we are going to be doing something new, something exciting.

We’re going to be chatting and interviewing each other. We’re gonna try to stay on the topic of business collaboration and should have a fancy title by the time we’re done, but that is gonna be our topic for today.

So in case you’re not familiar with me, I am Lucy Reyes. I’m host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. You can follow me over on Instagram @cheerstoproductivity.

I am a Productivity Strategist and Trello Specialist. I help coaches and digital product creators maximize your efficiency by doing less but getting more done and increasing your profits along the way. I’m really excited to chat with you here and I’m going to send it over to Monica to introduce herself.

Monica Bishop: Okay, Lucy, you’re hired. So that’s like the dream of everybody is to get more done with less. So I’m Monica with the Attract Clients Now Podcast and the Attract Clients Now Marketing Secrets Facebook group.

I’m a Marketing Consultant and Strategist. I have an agency since 2019 and I just really dig helping wellness and health professionals, service and coaches just really build a business that they love and that loves them back.

I think that’s something that Lucy and I have very much in common is that I’m approaching it from the strategy side. And so we build websites and social media and really just turn your ideas and your passion into income.

And then Lucy can come behind me, Lucy on aisle 7 and clean up our mess and make things nice and neat and organized, which is absolutely not my cup of tea. So I was super excited to connect with Lucy in a Facebook group.

She said, “Hey, I would like to have a guest on my podcast.” And I wrote her back and I said, “I don’t really have guests on my podcast, but I’ve been following you and I think you’re, I think you’re swell.”

So we connected in the DMs and honestly, this is the first time we’ve seen each other face to face, mic to mic, and just jammed through on some DMs and thought, how cool would it be for us to collab, build a episode that works for both of our podcasts and give our clients and our audience both sides of the coin, right?

They can see the marketing secrets. They can see the outsourcing piece of things and they can see the productivity behind the scenes. And so both of us do similar things and in very different ways. We thought, Hey, why not? That’d be cool.

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, absolutely. I think it was, it was really nice when you brought up the suggestion for, Hey, what if we just get on zoom and interview each other? It was like, Yes, because me, I’m someone who’s super protective of my calendar.

And I have personally been trying to open it up a little bit more, hence like saying, Hey, let’s do some podcast swaps. Let me get on some podcasts. Let me interview. So when you suggested to me, let’s just do it together and then we both use it, I was like, yes! If we can knock out both of them in one go, like that is amazing.

And then I think it’s just a really neat and interesting new way of collaborating with someone else. And like you said, like you bring in this marketing perspective and this outsourcing and I’m behind the scenes with your systems and productivity.

Go-to collaborations to attract new clients

Lucy Reyes: So I would love to know what have been your go to business collaborations? What have you been doing to get yourself out there to get new clients? What have been those types of partnerships that you’ve really enjoyed doing?

Monica Bishop: Oh, that’s a great question. And, and by the way, everybody, we have no question list. We have no agenda. So we’re coming in here super fresh for you.

So for me, I look at collaborations in 2 different ways. I look at collaborations as doing like a joint offer, like collaborating on a bundle and we’re doing something that’s front end, facing the client, and I’ve had several of these that’s really new for me, because I tend to be the face of my business.

I’m a manifesting generator workaholic, so it’s really hard for other people to keep up with me. And then the other side of collaboration, which honestly is, I don’t see where my focus is right now, but it’s freaking beautiful to collaborate with other peers in my field.

And so, for example, what if me and you collab? And so let’s say I have a client who needs backend systems, then I’m going to refer you, or maybe we work together on it. I pay you so that she doesn’t have to onboard with you and do all that stuff.

So I have similar collaborations with people who are like specialists at copywriting, at SEO, at social media marketing and at email marketing. As an agency, I would say we’re super well rounded and good at a lot of things. I’m the Jill of all trades.

Like I can write a little bit of code. I’m a pretty good copywriter. My genius is, I love when people bring me like this crazy freaking idea. And they’re like, okay, Monica, so I have this idea. And I’m like, Ooh, and I love turning that into an offer or a program or a system or something like that. And so my love is really the strategy and I can help you through all the pieces.

But sometimes you need a specialist. You need a Lucy to set up the Trello board. You don’t want Monica to set up your Trello board. I promise. I love doing those collabs because then I can have a more robust agency without having staff, without having paid people on the payroll.

And then we get to build this community of experts that make it easy for our clients to do business with us and to do business with other people. And I think that’s a real shift of what we’re seeing in the marketplace is that We were, I won’t say we, cause it probably wasn’t me and you, people were like, you’re my competition. I’m not sending anything to you. It was very protective. Just like you saying you’re protective of your time, which is super good.

We were protective of our knowledge and our expertise. And I feel like right now I’m opening up. And so if my peer has, if you need marketing, reach out to me. It’s different from the old days of let me pick your brain for free. Now we’re. In a joint working together, building something bigger than ourselves.

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, I love that. I definitely believe and there’s plenty out there for everyone. And I have seen this notion of people still trying to protect their information and trying to be very protective of what they’re doing.

There is a shift in the market where you need to collaborate like it’s not even like you should. It’s almost like you need to if you want to reach more audiences, especially without paying ads.

And I really like everything that you said because there’s some parts where I’m like, yes, I can relate. And then there’s other parts I’m like, oh, that’s new to me. That’s another thing that I love about these conversations, especially like something like this where like you said we have no questions. We just chatted before, hey, what should we kind of like do? And then that was it.

Systems for participating in bundles and summits

Lucy Reyes: So one thing that you pointed out is the bundles and all of that. That is my forte. That is really where I have been building my collaborations and I have my systems in place for those collaborations, for participating in bundles and summits. I feel like that’s something that many people even overlook.

It’s like there’s so much back end that you have to do to even participate in collaborations like this, right? There’s still some prep work. There’s still some things like I sent you over the form earlier so that way I can have my stuff that I need.

But the idea of like you having your own client, you recommending me, but you being still the person that I am talking to. That’s really cool. And taking the payment from that part is actually new to me. That’s something that I haven’t done yet.

And so I love this because we get to talk about these different new, new ideas, new ways of collaborations that some people probably haven’t heard about bundles or summits or there’s these other types of collaborations. So I absolutely love that.

Monica Bishop: I think that’s so cool. I was hoping you would talk about the summits and the bundles because I know that’s something you do a lot of and it’s not something I’ve done a lot of.

And so I had identified one that I really wanted to participate in and we’re really busy right now. And I’ve had a lot of stuff going on. I’m also a cyclist. And so we’ve had some bike races. Bye bye crisis. It’s me finishing, not me winning, just so you know, it’s, it’s all about finishing and I looked at this summit and I got with my team and I was like, okay, we’ve got X time, two weeks, three weeks or whatever. Can we do this?

And we all looked at it and said, No, we don’t have the capacity right now. So 1 of the things that’s on our agenda that you could probably speak to, and you may even have an offer about this is I said, okay, so we can’t participate in this one, but how can we use this person’s questions and this person’s thing? Because a lot of them are similar, right?

And go ahead and build out our systems and our processes and our about and our pictures and all the base things that you need for a summit or a bundle so that when the next one comes up, we have that core process in place. And then we just tweak it for that individual one.

How do you approach that, I guess, from an individual, your business standpoint, and maybe even how do you help clients with that? Because that’s already a big opportunity for us. I’m not going to say struggle, definitely an opportunity.

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, so I participate in them a lot. So I look at my calendar. I like to plan out my stuff first as much as I can. And then I’ll try to fit in these collaborative events.

So there’s moments where I’m taking breaks from, nope, I’m not going to participate in anything. And then there’s moments like the next two months where I’m like, you know what, I’m going to participate in a few and I spaced them out. I can see it in my calendar when I’m participating in everything.

I typically have a block for the promotional period because I really try not to overlap them because you know this is a big collaborative event. And as so I have hosted my own bundle. I have hosted my own summits. I have also participated and so it is always always always the best results when everyone does their part when everyone promotes when everyone does what they’re doing this collaboration for so I try my best to model that as well.

And so I have this calendar block of the different events. I do have a Bundle Contributor Hub and a Summit Speaker Hub with all of the different tasks breakdown of everything that you are going to need and want to do as a contributor or as a speaker because I think maybe what you realized is there is a lot that you have to do on the back end.

It may not seem like there is because you’re like, Oh, I just have to apply this. But in reality, there’s so much more that is involved. So I can give you an example in a summit you’re speaking. So you have to submit your application or your basic information. So, you know, you have to know where your brand images are. You have to know your bio. You have to sign the agreement. You have to make sure that you can meet the promotional requirements, the exclusivity agreement, like whatever. That’s just the first part.

Then you want to decide if you want to contribute to their all access pass, right? And if you say yes, it opens up the whole list of new tasks. What are you going to contribute? Do you need to duplicate the sales page? Do you need to create a coupon code? Do you need to set up new tags so that way you know where these leads are coming from?

You need a freebie to offer. You also need to submit your presentation. Now you have to create those slides. You have to record. So the list goes on and on.

Monica Bishop: I’m tired. (laughs jokingly)

Lucy Reyes: We have all of this inside of the Summit Speaker Hub. So I have it ready, and I’ll have my bio, I’ll have my picture, I’ll have certain things that I can easily just copy and paste into these forms. And then I already have the task breakdown, so I can see, is this going to need a new sales page, or am I going to use the same one?

The tasks are already broken out, so I really, really recommend just having some sort of a unique board. I use Trello. So for me it’s called a board. So just some, some holder, some hub where it has the key information that you can just copy and paste into and then know what tasks are going to come up.

You can set deadlines for it. So sometimes they’ll say this is due by this date and this is due by this date. And I personally like to give them some extra time. So I’ll set my due date to be like, okay, my due date is a week before the actual deadline. Things happen, right? Things always happen. So if I can meet that early deadline, great.

But sometimes things come up and I’m like, oh, but I gave myself some space. And I feel like one of the worst things you can do is be late on your stuff.

As a host, it, Really does create a lot more extra work on our part, a lot of stress because we’re like, oh my gosh, maybe I already created the graphics. Now I don’t know if they’re gonna turn it in. So having been on this side, it’s almost like a preach of try to get your stuff in on time.

But as a contributor, as a speaker, you want to make sure that you know that you can handle it. And you want to be able to handle things like that because they are good opportunities, like you said, so having the systems in place really does make it a lot easier to be able to participate in more of these.

Like I have my boards for three to four or five in the next few months already ready to go. Deadlines are set. I know what I’m going to need to do and when, and I can space my calendar accordingly.

Monica Bishop: Okay. You’re hired again. Can I hire you twice in one call? If you have any of these things that you have for sale, I would love to drop the links for my listeners and for me as well, because I’m a big picture person. And yes, I have staff to help us organize things. It’s just, even for my podcast, we use Basecamp.

And so I have step by step, what happens for, for every podcast. So it’s the same thing. Like we edit it and then we do all those things. So I think that’s so critical. And I’m usually just so fast at doing things that I just looked at. I was like, Oh, I can hold, totally pull this off.

And it was like, Oh, I can’t. And what’s so great too, for you, Lucy is like, you’re a productivity person and you’re in bundles and you’re the one that’s always early. And so that totally fits your brand too, because as a summit or a bundle, my productivity gal, guess what? She’s early. She’s got her stuff together and that’s who I want to refer out.

So I think you’re right. A lot of us get that here’s the deadline and they do it on that deadline. But how, again, as a collaboration of knowing how much work those are to put in, how can we be ahead of the game? I’m just glad that I don’t say no to a lot of things that I looked at this and I was like, no, we, we just don’t have the capacity.

How to get started with systems

Monica Bishop: What would you say the first step is for somebody like me that doesn’t have a process yet for this, but I am an agency, so I know where all my branding stuff is.

I know where all the things are, and I write pretty quickly as far as just getting organized for that first bundle. Is it to get organized first or pick one that’s got a long due date and give yourself some space?

Lucy Reyes: You could go either or. So if you have one that you already have applied to or you know that it’s coming up, you could build out your system as you’re going through the process.

So as you’re getting the form, you can say, okay, like, these are your next steps. Write out those next steps somewhere in your system. Give yourself some due dates, so you can do it that way.

Create your first system along with this first bundle. That’s how I did mine. I referenced the past ones. Once I became a host, I’m like, okay, what else do I need? Or what I want my contributors to also know? So you can build it out that way.

But it’s just like getting it started. If you don’t have a bundle coming up or a summit, I think the biggest thing that I hear from my students, clients, and members is that they feel like they have to organize everything before they even get started. And that feels so overwhelming, but you don’t need to have everything organized.

In fact, like I, I have everything organized inside of my Trello systems, but everything’s not completely, nicely, neatly organized in Google Drive or Canva. Like, yes, it’s organized to a certain extent, but the most important thing here is to know where everything is to be able to find it quickly.

So you can easily have just a board where it’s like, here’s like my essentials. Copy and paste your About Me. What is that general, like, different versions of an About Me bio that you might want to use? Here’s a link to my picture, or an attachment of my picture. Here’s my social media links. Here’s my website links. And at least you have part of the application done right there. And that’s pretty much all you need to get started.

Monica Bishop: That’s such a great tip, and that really goes back to what I teach my clients, too, about marketing, is a lot of people have this crazy idea, and all of a sudden, if it’s a new business, they want a logo and a website, and they want an LLC, and they want a this and a that, and they want all these things set up ahead of time, because they think that that’s going to make them feel confident.

And even me just asking you that question brought up those feelings of inadequacy of, oh my gosh, I’m not going to be able to get it done. And so it reminded me how I even coached my clients of, you know what, Monica, you don’t have to have all your crap together. It’s okay. And the same thing with marketing and offers.

Your goal is to sell. If you don’t sell, you don’t have a business. And that doesn’t mean we have to be creepy and slimy, but honestly, if we’re not serving people, Why, why are we here? Cause it would be way easier for me to go work at McDonald’s than to have my own business. Right. Do you know what I mean? Right. Yeah.

That made me think about those feelings that come up both for your clients and my clients too, is that they want to feel like they have all their crap together, but let me tell you, I’m not going to speak for Lucy. I don’t have all my crap together. It’s an everyday process. It’s an everyday thing.

When is the right time to find collaborations?

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, and I love that you brought up like the websites. I actually want to turn the tables around here and ask you what would you recommend for someone who is open to participating in collaborations and wanting partnerships, like what should they have on their website to let people know if anything, like or part of their branding? Are there any steps, marketing steps that you would recommend that they do to make themselves more available to attracting these opportunities?

Monica Bishop: Yes. Oh, that’s a cool question. I’ve actually never thought about that. I think you have to first really analyze where you’re at in your business, right?

So if you’re in that beginner, and I don’t like to put people in dollar buckets, but you’re in that bucket of you’re like, Oh crap, I’m not going to make enough money this month. Right. We’ve all been there. Then I think that you, you’re going to be better off focusing on selling your own clients and creating some business besties, as opposed to thinking about business collaboration.

Build out a network of people that are where you are, are a little bit ahead of you and really build out relationships and really get your sales to where they need to be, because things like websites, bundles, summits are really great distractions. They’re really great ways to get in front of other people.

But I think that you need to have a really firm hold on how you serve, how your process works, what transformation your client gets. You need to already know what 15 questions every single person asks. And so you’ve got a good firm hold on your own business and your own sales.

But let’s say you’re beyond that and you’re like in the, yep, I got this going on. Let’s go do this again. For me personally, I’m an introvert, but I’m a four, six manifesting generator. So I do well in groups. I’m more of a, just connect in the comments like you and I did.

I don’t have anything on my website saying I collab. And so. I think for summits, you probably would be a better fit to answer that question because you’re probably when somebody applies for your summit or applies for your bundle, you probably go sleuth them out and make sure they’re like super legit. So I’ll come back to you and answer that question.

But for me, again, I’m looking at it more peer to peer collab stuff. And for that, I don’t think that I would want something on the website, because honestly, I don’t want some rando stranger reaching out to me and saying, hey, let’s collab on a website thing. I got to know you 1st, if I’m going to, there has to be some sort of point of relationship 1st.

What summit and bundle hosts look for

However, I do some white label work and things like that. So if you get into that position, I do think you can have some info on your website from a summit and bundle standpoint. What do you like to see in someone’s branding and website because you’re definitely the expert on that. I’m just dipping my toes into that.

Lucy Reyes: That’s a great question. So personally, I have a section on my website that’s like collaborations and I just list out the types of collaborations that I’m open to, but I don’t think it’s mandatory. Like it’s not necessary. Nothing is really mandatory.

But it started because I was a blogger. So back in the day I got into the online space as a blogger with my mom blog, which still exists. But with that, I used to get so many requests to have a guest blog or to link out to some websites, so I just needed this space to be like, these are the types of collaborations I’m open to.

At the time, I was also, so I’m a blogger, so I’m looking for sponsorships with brands. And so I had that listed. And so when I opened up this business, I was like, Oh, I’ll just keep the same list. I have my list. And then at the bottom I have, I don’t accept guest posts. I don’t do links out. So it’s almost like a filter. That’s how I see that.

But when I’m looking at someone’s website, I’m not looking for that page. I’m looking at their website, their branding. Do they seem legit? Do they seem like they know what they’re talking about? Do they have somewhere where I can listen to them speak? Somewhere I can see the quality that they may bring? Do I know this person?

Like you said, the relationship piece is probably the biggest factor because then I don’t even have to look at your website because I already know you right.

Where to find biz besties

And so I would love to ask because I know especially in my audience there’s so many people who are like I have no idea where to even look for a biz bestie and even when I found mine it was through it was such a random situation that brought us together.

But even now, I know I hear people all the time, I don’t know how to even find a biz bestie. I feel like there’s so much going on in the online space where you just reach out in the comments, you just see where things go, where someone can get started with building that relationship.

But I have seen people be like, Oh, I’m looking for an accountability partner, or Oh, I want to become best biz besties with someone. But then it never seems like those actually go anywhere. It feels like those are the not, like the ways not to do it. So I would love to hear what you recommend.

Monica Bishop: Do you like me? Yes or no? Like when we were in grade school, do you like me? Yes. No. Do you want to, do you want to meet after class? Wouldn’t that be fun? Slide the note under, make sure that the teacher doesn’t see you.

I think it has to be organic for you. First off, for me, I met most of my business besties in other coaching programs. So come on folks, y’all have got to invest in yourself. Okay. We are not one man ships. And so when you’re in these coaching programs, whatever they are, these opportunities for you to learn, you’re in there with other people that want to learn the same thing.

So my suggestion is even for us introverts, go make some friends. Right? You’re not trying to pitch them what you got. Please don’t do that. That’s so awful. Go make some friends.

I’m with you, Lucy. Somebody says they want to get on a coffee chat with me, and I’m like, can we just not? I love to see people face to face, but my calendar looks like my kid got a hold of crayons. And so it is such a challenge in today’s world to get to know someone without being on the phone.

So I think you’ve got to be comfortable with yourself. So go make first, I would say utilize these coaching programs. I’ve been in programs that I do not think that I got what I signed up for and I did not get what I paid for. And we’ve all chosen the wrong program or chosen the wrong thing, but how do you make the best of it?

Like you’re in there with other people, meet those people. Two of my clients right now, I was in a coaching program with them four years ago, three years ago. Like those have been relationships that have really held up for me.

The second thing that I would say is for me, I’m a Facebooker, right? So apply to your expertise place. I love being in the comments on Facebook. Sure. I post, but when you get in the comments, you can really feel somebody’s energy.

And I think for you, where I met you, just reading your comment on that post, it just felt real. It connected with me. You were in the same place as me of, I don’t really have people on my pod, but that’d be cool. And then when we connected in DMs and neither of us were like, Yeah, let’s get on 42 calls and discuss this and we just jammed it out. I think that’s the perfect opportunity. So I think comments is a great place to do that.

Just looking for that and then refer from other people. So in my group, in the Attract Clients Now group, when I have somebody come in. I usually talk to everybody in the DMs when they’re coming in my group.

I introduce them to each other. So how can you, as the business owner, take that extra step to even introduce your friends to other friends, because then they’re going to introduce you to their friends.

But like we were talking about before we hopped on, you can’t have trust with someone who you don’t have trust with. And so one of the things that I’m going to be teaching next Wednesday, I’m doing a connecting collab pre Facebook networking event is how to build an emergency plan.

Because even though you may be my business bestie, we’re not yet, but we’re gonna be, we may meet every week and talk about our business, but how can we take that a step further? And you have a list of your clients and I have a list of my clients and maybe we even want to exchange passwords, or maybe we have a system for that.

And I know that if you text me and say, Hey, I’ve got a family emergency. I need you to handle crap this week. Then I know to email these four clients. I know to do this, this, this, and this. And I know how to help you with your business because I don’t know about you, but like I have virtual assistants, but they’re not the same level of expertise that I am.

And so one of the things that I like to do in my business is I invite my peer business besties into my group coaching program so that my clients know that person. So my friend, Lisa, is a copywriter. She’s amazing. I had her come into my group and teach copywriting.

So if I had an emergency and I was supposed to meet with Susie, I could just go, Hey, Lisa, can you go meet with Susie? They’re not going to talk about what I would talk about, but it’s going to be super valuable.

We have the right as a business. I’m getting on my tangent. Now we have the right as business owners to take a vacation, to have an emergency, and to have somebody, right, who knows how to pull the emergency switch.

And I don’t think most of us have thought about it at that level. Like, literally, who needs to be contacted, and what can your VA’s not handle that can deliver an even better experience for your clients? Because I think that’s what it’s really about.

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, absolutely. When you’re speaking, the thought, the phrase that was coming into my head is like, it takes a village to raise a child. Yes. It takes a village to raise your business. It’s the same thing.

I love to be in communities. I love to invest in myself and my program or into programs that will help me grow, but also because I get to be in the room with these people that want to learn the same thing as me.

And there’s something. It’s just a different vibe when you’re in a paid community versus a free community. I feel like when you are in a paid community and you’re connecting with them, then you know, oh, they’re serious. They’re serious about their business. They’re serious about their goals. They’re serious about these next steps, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

They’re willing versus in a free community, it almost feels like, well, we don’t know how invested you are in your business. And so you also have to be choosy with, you know, who you talk to. And it’s so much easier, kind of takes away some of that, you know, that unknown when you are in these paid communities. So I, I really, really think that that’s. That’s gold right there.

Monica Bishop: And I did an episode. It takes a village to run a business.

Lucy Reyes: Oh, yeah, you can link to that episode.

Monica Bishop: Linking to the episode in the show notes. Yeah. I think all this is really great for me. I love to create these collaborations and I love to learn from other people.

And I think that’s really the core of where we’re going in the next set of our business is remembering that. It’s okay to work with other people, allow those egos to strip away and allow those connections to happen. And it doesn’t have to be forced and you can have a business that you really love. And it’s okay.

This has really been the topic of my life lately to ask for help. What you offer, somebody comes to you and they’re like, Hey, I need help. Then you’ve got opportunities for them. To work with you, same thing with me, like asking for help. One of the great things, one of my clients said is she finally let me take over some of her marketing.

We were just coaching and she finally let me take over some. She goes, I have so much energy to create more stuff and to talk to more people. And I just have so much more flow because I hated doing that. And when you do something every day that. You’ve tried to work through the resistance. You’ve done all your life coaching crap, but you’ve done all the things to try to get past the limiting.

How hiring the support you need can help you scale your business

But in the end, Lucy, I’m going to tell you right now, if you looked at my desk, I’m not an organized human. I have to have an organizer behind me. I said yesterday, I said, I just need somebody to be like, clean up on aisle Monica. And so for me, I’m all about, let’s pay Lucy to take care of that so that I can go do my jam. We get to do that.

Lucy Reyes: Yeah, absolutely. And something that I think some people don’t realize is having your systems built out almost acts as an assistant for you because there’s so much automation that you can build out where it just makes it so much easier.

So while you might be paying a VA, Two, three hours to get something done, you know, your systems could have taken care of half of those things, and that’s just your system, which, you know, you built it out. You don’t pay it, they work for free and you’re adding more to your profit bottom line.

So it’s having these systems is another. So outsourcing, delegating, having your systems, these are all foundations to helping you grow your business so much faster to give you that time freedom.

So you’re talking I’m like, yes, like that’s what we want to do That is the whole point. Like we want to grow a business that supports our lifestyle Yeah, not the other way around and that is something that we constantly get sucked into Especially because there’s a lot that you have to do There is a lot if it was easy everyone would be doing it, right?

So there is a lot that you have to do but you have to know You What to prioritize, how you want to spend your time, and what can you do to make it easier for yourself. Because there are ways to make things easier for yourself.

And I think that’s the part where some people don’t make the time for because, Oh, I’ll do it later. I’ll do it later. I’ll do it when I’m ready. And it’s kind of like, no, it’s like, you’re like, ah, this will actually help you.

Monica Bishop: So I think that’s so important to think about. Yes, I can go and make those things easier. And when’s the right time to do that? Because just like we talked about earlier, I have some clients who want to systemize everything before they know how the heck things work.

So one thing that I encourage my clients and you probably deal with this too, because it’s way more of a mindset. I call it shiny object syndrome. Just like I was doing earlier, I was like, Oh my gosh, Lucy, how can you help me with summits and bundles? And I had that feeling come up, that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling of, I don’t have time.

And so I got the shiny object. Lucy can fix this for me. And so I think for all of us, it’s always important when you want to buy something or when you want to invest or change or do to allow yourself in whatever your energy practices are to know why you want to do it, because if you want to do it because you’re scared or you’re afraid, or you think everybody else is doing it.

If you’re doing it out of that negative side of things, then it may not be the right time. So allow yourself to sit with those yucky feelings and start making a list. I love just having a list of, okay, I’d really like to have. A Trello board with my summit things, and then allow myself to just make notes because you need to be able to tell your provider what you need and want so that they can help you and be able to answer questions.

So allow it to be okay that. When you get into these situations where like me, I want to participate in bundles, or maybe Lucy’s wanting to do an overhaul of our SEO, or you may be wanting to do some new branding that the first thing that’s going to come up is some yucky stuff, some yucky feelings and allow that to be like, this is okay.

And take your time and be graceful with yourself to work through those because it’s still okay to outsource, but talk to that business bestie so that you’re doing it with the right intentions. Because I have so many people that come to me and go, I was scared that if I didn’t have a logo on a website that I was going to screw up.

So I hired somebody for 300 bucks to do a website and a logo, and it sucks. And can you please fix it for me? And that hurts my heart because I would rather talk to you on the front end and help you build out things and probably the same thing for Lucy.

She would tell you, you know what, you’re not ready for this yet. Do this, this, and this, and then come back to me. That’s why experts are so important and that’s why collaboration is so important.

Somebody asked me earlier to do Facebook ads and I was like, I just don’t do Facebook ads right now. I haven’t done them in two years. And so let’s get the experts involved and ask good questions. It’s okay and safe for you to ask us questions.

Lucy Reyes: Absolutely. There is something that you mentioned that stuck out to me, which was the you might not be ready for this. You might not be ready for this. So I’m actually in the middle of a presale course right now, auditing your time and auditing your systems like that is what you’re really going to need to do before you even start creating systems.

So you might be saying, Lucy, you can create these systems for me. And if we were to get on a call, I would say, hold on, Okay. What are your goals? Let’s see what you have already so we know how to move forward. What are your priorities? Let’s make sure that the systems we create for you first align with your goals.

Because if you’re someone who has so many different projects going on, so many tasks, you’re in so many communities, you’re doing so many things, funnels, collaborations, marketing on blogging, Pinterest, like all of these different things, you’re going to need so many different systems.

But you don’t need to do them all at once. You can get started, but you have to know where you are at first. You have to assess, okay, what is it that I already have, that I don’t have, that I could improve, that I’m doing great at, that you might not realize you’re doing great at.

Then let’s see, okay, what are my goals? What do I actually want to achieve short term, long term, and which systems will be my priority to create first because they’re going to get me closer to my goal, right?

So if your goal is setting up your evergreen funnel, You don’t need to prioritize a system about bundles and summits, right? You need a system to help you get that evergreen funnel launched.

So it’s all about making sure that you’re aligning it all the way around. And the other thing I wanted to mention earlier was about these collaborations. As we’ve been talking, I’m getting new ideas.

And I don’t know if I’m a manifesting generator or not, but I love ideas. I have endless ideas. I love it when people come to me for ideas, but I also am always picking up new ideas with new people that I talk to that I may not have thought about otherwise because it just happens whenever you’re out talking to friendly faces and you’re having a conversation and that sparks an idea.

And so one thing that you were saying, we’ve been talking about protecting our calendars, but we still want to reach out to people. We still want to like, how do we balance it all together? And I’m like, what if we do some sort of asynchronous conversation? So we did that in the DMs, like we’re just chatting when we have time.

And now we hopped on the call, but it’s the call specifically to get something done. Right. But what about like Voxer or Telegram? That’s another way that you could have talked to somebody as a coffee chat. Let’s set up. This 30 minute blog, we’re just gonna be on Voxer, no face to face, let’s just talk.

There’s so many different ways that you can reach out and become biz besties with someone to find people to collaborate with, and even doing that in itself is gonna help you get new ideas that you may not have gotten otherwise.

Episode Wrap-Up

Lucy Reyes: But I have absolutely loved this conversation. It has been amazing to, one, get to know you better, because as we have mentioned, like, this It was totally unplanned and scripted.

There’s no questions. We just chatted for five minutes before we knew what we’re going to come on here and say. And so this was really, really fun.

Monica Bishop: I think so too. How can you, right? How can you, our audience, open up your energy? Do what work you need to do on you to let go of that ego to let go of this is mine.

When people go, I don’t want a boss. I’m like, then you probably don’t want to be in business for yourself either cause you got a lot of bosses. There’s a lot of things that go on in a business.

And so allow yourself to be open to know that it takes a village and just learn from each other as opposed to really holding on to that information.

And I think today’s collaboration has been amazing for that because you asked me the collab question and I went down one path and you’re on a completely different path. Look folks, we could be doing the same thing and we’re talking about it in different ways. So this is the way. This is so awesome.

Lucy Reyes: Absolutely. So, let’s end it with letting our audiences know where they can find us. So, for me, they can find me on Instagram at Cheers to Productivity. That’s where I hang out the most, but I’m also on LinkedIn, same place, CheerstoProductivity. So, come chat with me, send me a DM.

I have a free private podcast. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re going to love the free private podcast. And you can get that at cheerstoproductivity.com/blueprint. It is called the Blueprint to Building a Highly Efficient Online Business. So we’re going to get a little bit deeper into how to get started with systems, the mistakes to avoid and all of that goodness.

So come check me out over there. And I would love to hear that you found me through Monica’s podcast. And Monica, where can my audience. Learn more about you.

Monica Bishop: Oh yeah. I’m totally signing up for that private podcast. That’s awesome. So Monica Bishop, Attract Clients Now, all the places, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, I think I’m even on Tik TOK sometimes. It’s by accident. There is a video of my chicken knocking on the door on Tik TOK. So you may want to go check that out.

We’re building out our website right now, but it’s at attractclientsnow.com. We’ve almost got that ready. I’ve got some great freebies on how to create a lead magnet. That’s super easy. So I believe in really scaling things up and testing things really well. So you can check that out.

So please check us out at the Attract Clients Now Facebook group. That’s really the place to come find me. We have a super nice vibe. I’ll invite you in there, Lucy. We’ve got some super sweet people in there.

Lucy Reyes: Awesome. I can’t wait to join it. And that sounds amazing.

Monica Bishop: Yay. All right. Thanks everybody for joining us today. We’ll see y’all whenever we see you next on our respective podcasts. Same thing. If you found Lucy on my podcast, please let me know and feel free to reach out. Look, you need experts in your life. You need business besties in your life. You’re not a one man ship. Let’s do this together.

Lucy Reyes: Hey, hey, we’re back. And, oh my gosh, I absolutely loved listening back to that conversation. All of the links to everything we mentioned are in the show notes, and I’d love to know what you thought about this episode. It’s definitely different than what I have done and I personally loved it, but I want to hear from you.

So send me a message on Instagram or LinkedIn @cheerstoproductivity because I would love to know.