Business-First Creatives: Client Experience & Systems for Service Providers

What if your virtual assistant isn't the problem? What if the reason you're struggling to delegate, hire, or grow your business has less to do with the people you're hiring and more to do with how you're running your business? Listen, I know that sounds a little harsh, but it's a conversation we need to have. In this episode, I'm joined by Lauren Glynn, a business strategist who helps entrepreneur...

What if the business that worked for you a few years ago isn’t the business that fits your life anymore? In this episode, I’m sitting down with my longtime client Nicole Hodgson to talk about what it actually looks like to evolve your business intentionally. Nicole has transitioned from therapist to family photographer to brand photographer—and through every iteration, she’s paid attention to what...

What happens when you take a little time off from your business and accidentally come back with an entirely new business model? Apparently, if you're me, you build an app, create your own CRM, and completely rethink how you serve your clients. It's time for another quarterly Biz Bestie Chat with Sabrina Gebhardt, and let's just say we had two VERY different experiences in Q3. While I spent my summ...

Y’all, the biggest revenue mistake in your business probably isn’t your pricing or your marketing. It’s what happens after the project ends. You deliver something beautiful, send the final email, and then... ghost. You feel shy about asking for a review, guilty about asking for a referral, and you assume they’ll come back when they’re ready. Here’s the thing: they won’t always. Not because the wor...

If you know you need to market your business but still find yourself staring blankly when someone asks what you actually did to market it this week, this episode is for you. Tayler Cusick Hollman is back on the podcast for a conversation about something that affects so many small business owners: we keep assuming we need more time, motivation, or willpower to finally become consistent with our mar...

What if the thing you create doesn’t have to generate leads, sell an offer, or prove its ROI? What if you’re allowed to make something simply because you freaking love it? That’s exactly what I’m talking about with my friend Julie Fried, host of The System for Everything . And unlike most of the podcast hosts I bring onto Business-First Creatives , Julie isn’t using her show as a funnel into a ser...

Profitable? Great. Sustainable? Love that. But if you hate delivering it , no system in the world is going to make you fall back in love with your business. Last episode I asked you to do a time audit. Today I've got one more ask, and it's one you should do right now, while you're in the middle of serving clients. Because if I ask you in January how you feel about your offer, you're not going to r...

Jocelyn of Scale Your Resonance wants every one of her Best Seller clients making five figures from email, and yes, that includes me. Bold goal? Absolutely. In this episode, we dig into her new app, Email Studio. She built it for herself first, but you don't need to be a Bestie to use it, because it's open to the public and she's on a mission to get 100 users in the first 100 days. It's how I'm ma...

How long does it actually take you to serve one client? Not the session. The whole thing. If you're not sure, you're not alone. When I review offers, I find the same time leak over and over. It's hiding in emails you write from scratch, proposals you rebuild for every lead, and the "quick" peeks into your CRM that you never count. This one's short, and it comes with homework. Yes, even if you're n...

What happens when you get tired of forcing your business into software that doesn’t quite work the way you want it to? Apparently, if you’re me, you accidentally spend your birthday sabbatical building your own app. In this episode, Kara Duncan is taking over the mic and interviewing me about how a few experiments with AI tools turned into the Systems Professor app—and eventually opened my eyes to...

For five and a half years, I've helped you map your client journey, get excited about what's possible, and then spend the rest of our time together bending that vision to fit inside Dubsado or HoneyBook. As of today, I'm done with that. This one's short and sweet — part behind the scenes, part building in public. My business has flipped upside down in the last year and a half, and building the Sys...

Your client just paid you hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars. And the only thing that landed in their inbox was a payment receipt and a "your contract has been signed" email. That's not onboarding. That's a transaction. I've been seeing the same three onboarding mistakes over and over inside my Experience Edit and Systems in Session client accounts, and most of y'all aren't making them on purpo...

A booking tool is not a CRM. A project management tool is not a CRM. And the $20 to $40 a month you're trying to save by getting rid of yours might end up costing you bookings. Every single week I see someone on Threads asking if they can replace their CRM with Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace, or Squarespace. I use Notion and Airtable daily in my own business — and neither one of them would hav...

There is no all-in-one software that does everything well. Every single one of them makes you give something up. The only real question is whether you're okay with what you're giving up. This one is for the photographers. Every time I open Threads, someone is asking how to consolidate their tech stack down to one tool — fewer logins, fewer subscriptions, one connected experience for their clients....

If you're already booking the number of clients you want to work with, but it feels like you're spending so much unnecessary time behind the scenes, your systems and automations might need an update. In this episode, I sit down with Holly Birch to talk about what happened after she completely overhauled her HoneyBook workflows using automated systems. What's especially interesting about this conve...

There's only one right order to build client experience systems in. Not one right tool, not one right CRM — one right order. And I've been doing it this way with clients for five years without ever naming it out loud. Today I'm naming it. Order of Operations is my new four-phase framework inside Systems in Session, and I'm walking through all four phases in this episode — including the brand new o...

When your kid needs braces and you schedule a consultation, I think the bare minimum is to see the actual orthodontist, right? Turns out that is a bad assumption. Here's how it went ⤵️ I took Chloe to three consultations this month and in this episode I'm walking you through all three to compare the client experience and how that affected my decision to choose one. Then I want you to go figure out...

I gave three talks in three groups on three consecutive days this week, and in the last one I made an announcement I need to make here too: Systems in Session is no longer Dubsado-or-HoneyBook-pick-your-poison. I'll now build your client experience inside any of the five CRMs I actually recommend — Dubsado, HoneyBook, 17hats, Sprout Studio, or VSCO Workspace (formerly Táve). Because you were never...

What if the marketing strategy you've been treating like an optional task is actually the one thing that could create a more sustainable business? In this episode, I sit down with Kara to talk about one of my favorite topics: outsourcing your blogging. If you've been relying heavily on social media to attract leads, this conversation might completely change how you think about your marketing strat...

I got myself in a little pickle this week — three presentations, three days in a row. And the one I'm most fired up about is tomorrow's. Here's why: the number one objection I get when I start talking about automating your client experience is that you don't want it to feel automated for your clients . So in this episode I'm walking through the three kinds of systems you can build and why you get...

If you think you don’t have enough clients to need systems in your business, this episode might completely change your mind. Whether you’re balancing a business with a full-time job or running a part-time side-hustle, you don’t have less need for systems—you have less time to operate without them. In this episode, I’m chatting with my client Jess Hoffman, a Florida-based pet photographer who runs...

I recorded this one live on the last day of week two of my birthday sabbatical, and it published about ten minutes after I stopped talking. Because I spent the last seven days — on roughly four hours of sleep a night — building a custom client portal that replaced Airtable, Fillout, Notion, Google Docs, and Google Sheets in my business. What started as "let me move my AI assistants out of ChatGPT"...

Have you ever wondered why some stories feel effortless to tell while others never seem to land? In this episode, I'm sitting down with Breanna Owen to explore how Human Design can completely change the way we approach storytelling in our businesses. Instead of trying to tell every story or following someone else's content formula, we're diving into how your Human Design can help you identify the...

Most business owners think they need a dramatic transformation story to connect with their audience. In this episode, I sit down with Megan Yelaney to unpack one of the most overlooked pieces of effective marketing: your origin story. We explore why so many entrepreneurs struggle to tell their story, how to identify the version that's most relevant to your current audience, and why authenticity wi...

Hey y'all, it's Colie. I'm popping back in after two weeks of guest episodes to talk about something that's been shifting in my business — and honestly, in how I think about systems altogether. I recently noticed a real shift in who's showing up to work with me, and it sent me down a rabbit hole of rethinking how I talk about automation, personalization, and what I actually deliver for clients. Th...